Gaurav has outed Michael as being a CIA agent. Of course, I knew this all along, but I couldn’t figure out which department he was in, till I met him on Saturday. The answer came to me suddenly, just when a heated discussion on cricket was going on. “Psychological warfare!” I whispered to Michael and the look of alarm on his face told me all that I needed to know. Chetan (sitting between me and Michael) also heard it, of course, and he interpreted it to mean that cricket was psychological warfare. But Michael understood, and I understood that he understood, and he understood that I understood that he understood.

Of course, now we were both on our guard.

Which would it be? The Indian buffet at Aditi or the cake which he’d so thoughtfully brought for me?

Of course, it wasn’t death I was afraid of. CIA doesn’t do assassinations anymore. While it is not quite banned, the procedure to get the required approvals is too cumbersome. Their current modus operandi is to release the Agent Nanobot into your bloodstream and it affects your brain, leading to subtle changes. You might lose crucial bits of your memory. You might even suddenly start using American spelling, lose your sense of humor or alternately, go into transportations of delight for no good reason. The old-fashioned precautions against imbibing Agent Nano – making sure that everyone else had the same stuff – is useless. This nanobots are triggered only when they receive a signal from their master. I and Michael could imbibe the same stuff and only I would feel the effects, because he could transmit the trigger only to my bots.

I noticed that he went ahead of me to get his lunch. I quickly followed and watched his every step. He did nothing. My food was untainted as far as I could guess. A surreptitious scan revealed no Agent Nanobot. Then I cut a cake and scanned that too before I ate it. No Nanobot, but Michael was smiling his supercilious smile. “Agents are dangerous, but analysts are worse.” was his mysterious statement.

“So you are an analyst. Big deal!” I snorted. “Yeah, you are right in more ways than you can imagine.” was his reply.

To be continued…

I left this as a comment on Shivam’s post on the blog HTOHL. I just thought I’d repeat it here. You need to read that post to get the context.
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Now we have two witnesses who will swear to the indisputable fact that I am not pompous or arrogant! In fact, I am the nicest person you’ve (n)ever met, as was proved beyond all reasonable doubt in the DC bloggers’ meet on 11th March 2006 on my 0x1Fth birthday.

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I just remembered that I am in line to host the next blog mela. Here’s the announcement. Leave your nominations as comments to this post. Here are the rules:

1. Nominate the post, not the whole blog.
2. You can nominate your post too, if you wish.
3. The post should be about India, or should be by an Indian, by whatever definition you choose
4. Personal posts can be nominated, but may not be accepted unless I like them very much. Other type of posts will be accepted unless there is strong reason not to.
5. The post should be dated between 3th and 9th March 2006, both days inclusive, in your time zone. The mela will be up on 10th March.

In 1998, New York and New Jersey fought a lawsuit over a point so bizarre that I doubt you’ll find anything like it even in a story from Hindu mythology.

New York city is located at a somewhat strange place, practically surrounded by other states. I dug into history and learnt that this came about because James, the then Duke of York (after whom the city and state were named) gave the west bank of the Hudson to a couple of his friends to colonise, while keeping the east bank for himself to set up a city. Naturally, this meant that when the city became too big, the most logical place to spill over was New Jersey. In a more intelligently designed world, Jersey city would be part of New York city. But they are in different states in this crazy world.
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Dilip D’Souza started collecting all those things that offended various sentiments of various religions some time back. Worthwhile exercise, for which I have no productive contribution to make, unfortunately. But I do have a bad joke to make about the first case. It seems that some Sikhs got offended because Mandira Bedi affectionately named her dog “Sardar Ruginder Singh Bedi”.

My only question is, did any dog get offended when the Sardars named their kids Bunty, Monty, Tommy etc.?

(Yes, joke has been rehashed… But its been some time and it is worth repeating. )

I’m in the US on a business visa. Under the terms of the visa, I cannot do any actual work here. I can hold meetings, train people and get trained, etc. but I can’t do any actual work. I am pretty sure that FBI agents (or whoever is in charge of these things) visit my blog every day (Hi!), and are at this very moment wondering why on earth I have not posted for so many days. “What could he be doing? Is he by some chance working?” So this post is just to assure them that though I’ve been absurdly busy in meetings and stuff, I’ve not actually been working.

Now, I also have a B2 visa, (B1 and B2 are normally given together) which allows me to roam around as a tourist. Unfortunately the snow and cold have ensured that I haven’t done much touristing. But I do hope to travel to DC on 11th March to meet other bloggers. I am particularly looking forward to meeting Michael, Chetan and Greatbong. Of course, I’ve made clear my inability to participate in any coup attempt on the American government, as I am pretty sure that doing so would violate the terms of my visa. In fact, when I was landing at Newark, they gave me a card which asked “Do you plan to enter the United States to carry out a violent insurgency against the government?” I answered “No”, signed it and gave it to the INS official. So I guess if I now try to overthrow the American government, I will be commiting perjury, which, to the best of my knowledge, is illegal in the United States.

There was an English King in 1842. Who?

Hint: I have phrased this question very carefully.

One of the things I like about the Americans is their insistence on using the right tools for the job. Take this post by Michael for example. It is “typically American” of him to wonder about why those workmen weren’t using better tools.

This is not to say that all Americans will do it or that no Indian will do it. But I know from personal experience that if I have to suggest some weird workaround to a client, an Indian client will accept it while an American client will not, except under a lot of protest. It is also true that Indians have much less appreciation of software usability than Americans.

I have many theories why this is so, all of them half-formed, so I haven’t made up my mind. It could be economics – designing stuff well is capital intensive. Why do it when adding two people will do the job? It could be culture – people don’t care, or think that it is not worth caring. It could be culture – designing things to make them easy to use requires, either that the designer actually uses the product, or that there is a feedback loop from the user to designer. In a hierarchical society, this loop is not closed. It could be structural – closing the feedback loop requires a well-designed organization. For example, designing sidewalks that people can actually walk on is an easy engineering problem, but a difficult political problem. The latter requires a well-designed government, which means taking the design problem one step higher.

Anyway, I will have more on that some other day. The reason I started off on this topic is to give an example of design which only an American could have thought of.
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I am sorry that I have to report that there has been no change in the deplorable state of America’s showers since I reported the problem more than a year back. It has been a daily ordeal for me to get into the shower, direct the water towards the bathtub, start the hot and cold taps, adjust both so that the water is neither scalding hot nor freezing cold and then direct the stream towards the shower. No man ought to be subject to such indignity, especially before he has had his coffee. Continue reading →

I don’t know if it is legal to burn the American flag in India. Even if it is not currently illegal, the Indian government can certainly pass a law banning the burning of the American flag. It can do so, even though nominally the right to free expression is protected by the Indian constitution, there are so many exceptions to that right that in India, a “constitutional right” is a meaningless concept. There is, for example, an exception for “Friendly relations with foreign countries” under which the Indian government can ban the burning of American flags in India. It is, of course, illegal to burn the Indian flag in India.

But the point is, it is legal to burn the American flag in the United States. It is legal, because their constitution recognizes that right. Because it is written in the constitution, no government, federal, state or city, can pass a law banning flag-burning. They’d have to pass a constitutional amendment just to make flag-burning illegal. In fact, it was tried and it has consistently failed to pass.
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Busy with a job-change and stuff. Will be busy for some more time, till I get stuff into shape and stuff.

I shall be in New Jersey from 10 Feb 2006 for a month or so. Anyone in New Jersey? Leave a comment.

So what has been happening in the Indian Blogosphere when I wasn’t paying attention? Ah, yes, there has been the start of an exciting new blog that has rather pompously set out to educate us on How the Other Half Lives.

A commendable initiative, but the posts are too long to read. I am too hardhearted and too busy making money to go through them. I’ve fully read only one post, this famous post by Dilip, that seems to have generated the maximum acrimony and the most comments. My only thought is, whatever possessed him to include Airport employees in “the other half”? How rich must the rest of the country be if someone drawing a Central government payscale qualifies as part of the “bottom half” of the population? Is this a tacit claim by him that poverty has become history in India?