Idiocracy

I don't understand why people can't realize that the success of democracy, or at least the good of our country, does not lie in every Tom, Dick and Harry voting. Masses are generally dumb, popular beliefs are more often than not wrong and most Indians are too biased by religion, caste, region and issues I can't even fathom. In such a scenario I am not sure asking every idiot to go and exercise his vote, perform his 'duty', is all that intelligent.

I mean, if this creature is considered the front-runner to be the PM, there has to be something wrong with our polity. Who the hell gets a statue of him/her/it-self made holding that dangling purse. But if Kanshi Ram has a man-purse on, the ma'am might as well have one too.

This image of one of those over-rated directors in the Hindi film industry, who are respected because they have white hair in their beard and speak like a retard (thus making idiotic journalists think that there must be some deep meaning to every thing they spout) appeared to me like the best picture to capture the craziness of righteousness that asking everyone to vote in elections is, btw.

What also shocked me is the fact that 74% of Mumbai lives in slums (mentioned in the Rediff article that this pic was a part of)! I am moving there in a few weeks and the thought of being one among the elite 26% makes me feel so happy with my life. But also so sad for almost every other person I would be running into (the Maths is wrong, but I am used to being conservative in my projections).

Since I am in my wisdom-distribution mood, let me also crib about how obviously wrong Malinga's bowling action is. That Sinhalese bastard so obviously throws. Even if the Sri Lankan team is not evenly balanced (communally-speaking) on the whole, they are at least evenly balanced in terms of people who chuck. Muralitharan, who also happens to be the highest wicket-taker in Test and One-dayers, is the Tam chucker. One less injustice that Prabhakaran could crib for!

Carrier

After today, I am convinced that having a job (or 'career', for the more ambitious of you) essentially means letting a part of you die every day, every moment. That is what they pay you for - to see how thorough a butcher you are, how comprehensively you become a part of the herd.

Investment banking wins round 1.

Das Experiment - II

Am discontinuing the Cetirizine experiment. I did take 40 pills, but I ended up waking up around 11 am on Saturday. It's an ineffective medicine, though I did not get a cold despite getting wet in the torrential rainfall that Bangalore experienced Friday evening. I am not generally too sensitive, but getting wet in rain-water is a sure-shot way for me to get a bad cold and cough.

Cetirizine is not as deadly as the common Paracetamol, which I OD'd on a few years back, while home during a vacation from college. Paracetamol induces extreme acidity. I took 10 pills before going to bed at around 10pm and kept puking the whole night. By morning I couldn't even crawl from the bathroom to my bed and was puking blood. I had to bear lying down through 4 bottles of intravenous saline solution. And a very painful tube inserted through my mouth and my digestive canal into my stomach, to check if the bleeding was not from a serious wound.

It's almost like getting raped.

Since then, I do some basic research before OD-ing on medicine. If you swallow a lot of these anti-cold medicines by the way with alcohol, they give you a very long-lasting high. I am still not over the drowsiness induced by taking in 40 pills of Cetirizine along with good ol' Kingfisher Strong.

I haven't yet tried eating Iodex with bread. It's one of the more commonly known ways of getting a high. I tried doing it a few years back, but the smell was too over-powering for me to actually eat it.

Das Experiment

My close friends have got so used to me doing things that they wouldn't expect a sane person to do, that they have simply stopped reacting now.

I have this occasional urge to conduct experiments. On myself. Using medicine/medical apparatus. I have heard that pharma labs pay people for such experiments, and if you know of any such lab in Bangalore, please let me know.

Readers who have been bearing with me from the time I used to write at my previous blog might remember me writing about inserting air bubbles under the skin of my arm using a needle and a syringe. The bubble doesn't burst and keeps moving around like a small ball for quite some time. It does hurt painfully if you insert too many bubbles, but the probability of you hitting a blood vessel is very low - so it's not as potentially fatal as some experts might have us believe. Try it sometime.

In a similar exercise to reach, and maybe even surpass, the very frontiers of human knowledge, I have been involved in this simple experiment for the last two weekends. There's this anti-cold medicine called Cetirizine, which is available over the counter at most pharmacies. It's got several possible side-effects, but the effect it has on me is that it makes me sleepy. If I take more than one tablet in a day I can be counted upon to sleep at least 3-4 hours more than my normal sleeping time. Of course, one feels drowsy anyway when one has a bad bout of cold.

So, I am doing this experiment where I am trying to see what effect a higher dosage of Cetirizine has on me when I am healthier. Two weekends back, I gulped down 10 tablets on Friday night with some beer and woke up Saturday morning at around 11 (I normally get up around 7-8 even on a weekend). Last weekend I doubled the dosage and woke up at 3 in the afternoon.

By that rate if I double it further I should be up by around 11 at night tomorrow. Will post in the results of this round once I am up tomorrow evening.

Quiz and Tell

I have come across this Firefox add-on called ScribeFire that makes writing a blog-post easier. The only issue is that I am still trying to get the hang of it, and the long post I made last night got lost because I clicked on the wrong button.

Which is not too bad a thing probably, because my mood today is fairly different from what it was last night. My recent posts are indicative of the mood I have been in most of the time these last few weeks. I am sick of my work because there is no work, I am supposed to get some stuff done on my own, but I don't feel motivated enough, am bored of seeing the same people everyday, who keep cracking the same painful jokes. Even if things improve and life gets as hectic as it used to be back in July-August last year, I keep thinking if there's something else that I should be doing. It's obvious there are other things I would enjoy doing more, but I might not get paid as much as I get now, and that keeps me from thinking of other options.

Anyway, that was yesterday. Today, partly because of the amazing weather in Bangalore and partly because I finally managed to push myself to start a new project at work, I am in a much better mood.

Mood's also great because MnA keeps doing well. Without absolutely any proactive marketing from Menon or me. When we started formally last September, we had expected to mainly be doing college quizzes for a fair amount of time, till word got around and we got some corporate stuff once in a while. But, we have been luckier. It feels great to have believed that we can do this better than a lot of people around, and being proven right every time.

We just got done with a project for Public Health Foundation of India. The questions were supposed to be submitted in three stages, and we have received feedback (and money) for the first instalment only, but we seem to have done the job fine. A friend from engineering, who works at PHFI now, referred us to his colleagues when this thing came up, and we are grateful to him.

We have had a weekly quiz feature in a supplement for Hindustan Times in some cities in Punjab and Haryana for a few months now. They increased the number of cities where our quiz appears recently, so we must be doing ok.

And last evening, Menon conducted a very well-received cricket quiz for Hindustan Unilever Limited at their in-house conference in Chennai. I don't know how they came to us, but came to the right people nevertheless. From what the Quizmaster tells me, the 700-strong audience and the 25-odd chaps on the stage loved the quiz.

Here's to MnA growing and getting more interesting stuff to do!

Looking back at Dubai

After my trip to UAE last year, I had written about my experience in Dubai. I didn't like the city at all. Even apart from the heat, there are a lot of things about the place that I absolutely disliked. Like the tons of things about the city that spell out artifical in big, bold letters everywhere. I was in Dubai for just one day, spending the rest of the time in slightly better Ras-al-Khaimah, but even that one day was enough for me to realize that Dubai would be one of the last cities in the world that I would want to work and live at.

The reason I am bringing this up almost a year after the trip again is this article I came across today. Even otherwise, I have been coming across stories of how the Dubai dream has soured for a lot of expats over the last few months. And some of the stories are quite shocking. If it doesn't go down in this downturn, at least in the long run I don't think the Dubai model is sustainable. Either its debt burden, or the bigger ecological burden, would do it apart.

Of course, in the long run, nothing is sustainable, so we probably don't need to bother.

Middle Class

There's this series of rather idiotic fuel-saving ads coming on TV these days. If in my 2 hours per week TV viewing I come across these insane ads at least 5 times, it must be a whole lot painful for those of you morons who watch TV everyday.

One ad shows a woman thinking about pizzas for dinner just because she can save 20% on her gas bill. Is India's middle class so miserable that it needs to wait for a stupid INR 500 saving to have pizzas for dinner? Shocking!

There's another ad where an idiotic kid (what's with India's kids these days anyway?) says that he wants to open a cycle repair shop because fuel wouldn't be available to run vehicles when he's grown up considering the manner in which people (and his even more idiotic Ram-Kapoor-ic dad) waste fuel. If the people who made this ad had done the most basic research they would know that there will be fuel for a long long time. In fact, all petrol companies believe that technologies that would make petrol/diesel fairly redundant would come up earlier than the time when these fuels become difficult to source.