The days of technological yore

Today, for some reason, i started reminiscing about a time not too long ago, when gadgets were not so popular. It must have been 10 years ago at most, but now it feels like an eternity has passed. I couldn't help but notice the stark contrast, or call it rapid progress, that we have made.

Lets flashback to - the days of technological yore

I remember my junior college days when music was the only entertainment during those long train journeys. There were no MP3 players then, all we had was the humble little walk-man and countless audio cassettes. We also had the FM radio, for times when the walk-man battery was too low to play cassettes. My Aiwa walkman cost me 1800rs back then, and that too was expensive for a student. Then came along the disc-man which only a few rich students could shell out 5-7k for.

Piracy too was different back then. Audio cassettes used to cost 150rs, and to save some cash we used to buy blank tapes and record over them by borrowing the original cassettes from friends. Normal and high speed dubbing were the only advanced options we had.

Cellphones were almost non-existent then, we used to actually remember land-line numbers. A few kids started to get cellphones, but the call rates were still too high @ 3-5rs for an outgoing call. The guy with the latest nokia 3310 which cost rs 5500 and had snake II was the most popular guy in class. The first person to get a phone with a colored screen became a celebrity overnight. Sending ringtones from the composer of the old nokia phones was the cool thing to do in our spare time.

Owning a computer was considered a luxury. My first computer cost 45 grand, for just a pentium 3 with 64mb ram and windows 98. But back then, it was the best one money could by and it could run all the latest games (NFS 3 anyone?).

The internet was still largely inaccessible, and we learnt how to connect using a dial up connection and register for an email address in the school computer lab. Cyber cafes were plenty, and used to charge 20bucks an hour. They had many kids flocking to them, some who used to carry 3 1/2 " floppy disks to carry their precious data home. Then came the cheaper dial-up connections, with the modems that made weird sounds, which we could only use late in the night so that the phone line remained available during the day. Downloading a song used to take half an hour then. Kids these days will never know what a dial up modem sounds like.

Digital cameras were not available back then, and we used to carry around those old film cameras, which could only click 36 precious pictures on a single roll of film. We had to wait 3 days to get the pictures developed, and sharing it meant carrying the album around, or actually sharing the negatives. The Digital cameras arrived soon, with astronomical price tags and sensors in the range of 2-3 megapixels. Kids these days will never know that cameras also came with a rewind button.

Let's get back to the present now -

Walk-mans and disc-mans are almost non existant, the MP3 player is also a dying breed, and almost all music is stored on phones. Piracy now means downloading not just songs, but also movies off the internet and transferring it to the phone, all this in a matter of minutes.

Everyone has a cellphone now, even a 10year old school going kid has a cellphone. It's a pity they will never have to remember a phone number or call their friends on the land-line wondering what to say if their parents answer the phone.

Owning a laptop/desktop become a necessity, and almost every household has one with a broadband connection that's always on. The kids these days don't have to worry about high phone bills for using the internet. Writing this post made me feel old, but when i think about it, we have made a lot of progress in the past 10 years. At this rate, it may not be too long before we have flying cars .

solitude

Ever had the feeling of being in a crowd but still being alone? or being alone but wishing you were in a crowd? Solitude can be a funny thing. There are times when you may want it and there are times when it's the last thing you want, but whenvever you get it, or whenever you are forced to face it, it can be your best companion, revealing things to you that you never knew existed. It's a friend that teaches you things about yourself that you would have never figured out otherwise. A friend that helps you better understand your thoughts and decide whats the best way to act on them, or even convince yourself that its better to not act on them. When you want it, there can be no greater pleasure than being alone and away from the crowd. be it sitting in a room alone, listening to your favourite music while there's chaos all around, or heading to an unknown destination by yourself on a lonely highway in the night, it's pure bliss at that moment. but when you dont want it, it can be your worst enemy by forcing you to get into an intervention with yourself and getting you to analyze the decisions you have made and the actions that you have taken or should have taken. It can also get you face to face with the harsh truth that you knew, but never wanted to accept. Either way, it's the best way to get to know yourself better and anyone who hasn't experienced it yet, really should.

facebook etiquette - the unwritten rules

As many of you may already know, i have been spending a lot of time on facebook lately. Most of you think that i am just killing away precious time, but on the contrary, I have been working on a complex research about the unwritten rules of facebook. After reading this, some of you will be shocked to see how most of them are blatantly flouted, and some of you may even realize that you yourself have broken many of these rules, but fear not, because it's not too late to change your erroneous ways. Now that you understand the purpose of this post, you can go on to read the much awaited rules.

1) Thou shall not like thy own status: This is the most common mistake that the uninitiated make. Liking your own status is the real world equivalent of laughing at your own bad joke which no one else gets. The situation gets even worse if you like your own status and no one else comments or likes it after that. It would leave you feeling like a stage performer who takes a bow after a performance that they thought was good, only to realize that the audience had left a long time back.

2) Thou shalt not be the first person to comment on thy status: Commenting on your own status is perfectly fine, but being the first person to comment on your status is not. The reason no one else commented on your status is probably because it just wasn't interesting enough. In this case, commenting on it yourself is probably the most pathetic thing you could do. In real world terms, it's best to walk away and not look back. Forget that it ever happened. However, there is an exception to this rule. If you later relaize that your status update could be misinterpreted in a way that would embarass you or the people trying to comment, then you should be the first person to comment and correct it, or better yet, delete it.

3) Thou shall not post a message that makes sense only to one person in your friends list: This behavior is normally observed in people whose relationship status is not single. While it might seem "cute" to you and the person the message was intended for, in the real world, this is almost similar to public display of affection. For lack of a better term, I will henceforth refer to this is FBA (facebook display of affection). This gets even worse if the person your message was dedicated to does not even have a facebook account.

4) Thou shall not post more than one status update per day: This rule might seem a little harsh at first, but let me explain it. Note that i said one status update per day. you are allowed to post multiple links, multiple photos, or multiple videos. But posting more than one status update per day should be avoided. Any experienced facebook user would know that there are times when the ideas keep flowing and you are tempted to post, and then there are dry spells also known as "facebookers block". Like the rule above, this rule has exceptions too. If the update you just thought of is time sensitive (makes sense only at the particular time) and could be out of context if delayed, then it is ok to post it. These updates will henceforth be called "perishable" status updates. If the new update is really really good and you are sure it will crack people up, then too you may post it on the same day. However, if it is a "non-perishable" update, then it makes sense to make a note of it somewhere, and save it for one of those days when you suffer from facebookers block.

5) Thou shall not tag themselves in their own pictures: So facebook added a feature of tagging people in pictures, and it also does half the work for you by identifying faces in the pictures, but that does not mean you tag yourself in the pictures that you have uploaded. Tagging is necessary only when the pictures reside in someone else's profile and may not be seen by people who are not common friends. The tagging feature although fun, must be used judiciously.

6) Thou shall not post updates of a live sporting event every few minutes: While posting updates of a match might seem "cool", the underlying reason is most often to show others that you are watching the game. That can be acheived by a single status update which could be as simple as "I am watching the xyz game". Posting updates every few minutes is completely unnecessary and after a while it gets plain irritating. We get it that you are watching the game, and most of us are watching the game too. That's no reason for you to post your version of the commentary on facebook. Posting the updates also makes others wonder if you go running to your computer everytime someone scores or something big happens. This also violates rule #4.

That's all i have for now, if this post manages to educate even one person about proper facebook etiquette, my job is done. I may have missed a few points here, so if you have any rules that you think need to be added to this list, please do post a comment.

The height of laziness?

Which invention do you think symbolizes mans ever increasing effort in the quest towards laziness? If you ask me, it has to be the bluetooth hands-free set. Read on to find out why

A few decades ago when there were no phones, man had to travel a lot to pass on a message to his fellow men. Those were the days when Phidippides was considered a hero and everyone had six pack abs. But then, somewhere in a dark corner of a room sat Alexander Graham Bell who was unhappy with the all the attention given to the so called messengers. He wanted to put an end to their glory and claim some fame for himself, so he invented the telephone. Now man did not have to run to pass on a message, instead all one had to do was walk to the nearest telephone and dial a number. This was a big step towards bringing the world closer together, and co-incidentally it was also a major contributor to obesity.

While the popularity of the telephone grew, so did the laziness within. Pretty soon man was complaining about having to get off his chair to walk to the telephone just to make or answer a phone call. That's when Teri Pall saw an opportunity to rise to glory by inventing the chordless phone. The chordless phone was an instant hit, now man could sit in his chair watching his favorite movie and not have to get up when the damn phone rang. Things were going well and man was happy for a while.

Although man didn't have to go outdoors for making a phone call, there was still the need to go out to get the groceries and stuff. On one such outing, A couple of men forgot what groceries they had to pick up and they had to search for a public phone to call up home to check. This left them unhappy, searching for a public phone meant walking about on the streets and waiting in line to use the phone, too much effort.

As time passed, this discontent grew until one man thought he could take mans laziness to the next level. This man was none other than Martin Cooper, the inventor of the cell phone. With the invention of the cellphone, all the forgetful men who used to go grocery shopping were happy, they could now call up home anytime to confirm what they had to buy. This joy went on for a while and man got even more lazier and obese.

We now had the landline phones, the chordless phones, the cellular phones, but that wasn't enough. In a couple of years, as the people grew even more lazier and fatter, some of them started to find it difficult to fit their hand in their pocket to take out their cellphones. This caused a lot of irritation and discontent and it called for another ingenious invention, the invention to which this post is dedicated to, it is none other than the bluetoth handsfree set. Man no longer had to go through the trouble of taking out his cellphone and dialing a number, with voice dialing and the likes, that little plastic ear piece did all the work now. This is why i think that the bluetooth hands free is the invention that symbolizes mans inclination towards laziness. Even today man is unhappy with the bluetooth handsfree, A sure sign of their unhappiness can be seen with all the hype given to abstract topics like telepathy. Given our progress so far, the days of telepathy don't seem too far off.

Visiting cards - do we need them?

The other day while snooping around in the office, i noticed a friends visiting card at his desk and it got me thinking. I've been working for 2 1/2 years now and i haven't felt the need of a visiting card. No its not because i don't want people visiting me, but i don't see any practical purpose of a visiting card for someone whose job profile involves sitting at a desk for 9 hours a day. Its not like we regularly bump into CEOs of multinational companies while carrying out our daily chores and get the opportunity to talk them into outsourcing their work to our company by exchanging visiting cards.

My current role belongs to that lower half of the hierarchy where we take pride in hating our job, not trying to get more business by distributing visiting cards. Most of the people I know use visiting cards as a mere status symbol. They distribute it to their friends, use it to note down numbers, give their own number or as scrap paper for quick notes. Companies should do the environment a favor and save paper by providing visiting cards only to those with senior management positions or marketing roles.

close encounters of the 3rd kind

Let me start this post with a little prologue. A couple of months ago, me and my college friends decided to go for an afternoon movie. Once the movie was done, we started the usual hunt for a decent pub where we can spend some time. We found this place called "soda", which is right next to poptates. It was early in the evening so the place was empty. The food was good, the beer was cheap, their selection of music was good, infact, it was too good to be true. Something was definitly amiss here. That's when we took a look at their menu. they had a so called "Aphoridite menu" with names so explicit that i'll let the picture do the talking.It took sometime, but after a while we thought that this was just a marketing gimmick so we didn't bother much. We were pleasantly surprised when they said there's a discount of 40% during the early evening hours, so we ordered a couple of pitchers more and had a good time there, enjoying the 80's music that the DJ was playing. With all the beer, we didn't notice that the place was filling up with guys. The guy at the counter also told us about this membership scheme where we could always avail this discount, we agreed on hearing the word discount. The 2nd clue that this was no ordinary pub came from the membership card.

After reading the "man's club" part, we assumed it to mean something like a real man's club where they serve good drinks and where people can enjoy their drunken arguments. We were in high spirits and we were enjoying the music so we didn't pay much heed to this clue either.

After registering for their membership card, we got a lot of sms alerts from them about special offers, some weird ones which offered a discount for wearing a white shirt, that too during monsoon. We joked around saying it could be a wet tshirt competition.

Now lets fast forward to 4 months later. Today we decided to give that place another shot, hoping it would be normal. Today seemed to be some karaoke night, with a guy singing along to some songs of the 80's. There was something weird about that guy too, for starters he was surrounded by women, not the kind of women you would see hanging around a straight guy. The door man also seemed to be well groomed and polite, something that you would not find in your average guy.

We were a little late so the place was full, we were asked to wait near the bar stools at the DJ console. we ordered a pitcher there, but we got a table before it came. Once we were seated, we asked the waiter to get our beer to the table instead, and here is the conversation that followed.

Us: we ordered a pitcher near the DJ console, can you get it here?
Waiter: (with a weird grin on his face) you ordered the DJ?
Us: what? no no.. we ordered a beer

Once again we tried to justify it by trying to pass it off as the waiters weird sense of humor. The next clue that this was a weird place was when the karaoke guy started singing "believe" by cher and his group of girls started cheering for him. We also noticed that the walls were covered in graffiti. On a closer inspection we found that the graffiti also contained phone numbers of guys looking for other guys. We then looked around and found the room full of guys, there was not a single girl in sight. The karaoke guy was now singing "you can run you can hide but you can't escape my love" by Enrique. We were getting uncomfortable now, even the beer had a pink tinge to it. We had to get out of that place as soon as we could. the 3 of us gulped down that pitcher of beer within 5 minutes and called for the bill. Getting the bill took another 10 minutes which we spent restlessly looking around and analyzing the choice of music by the DJ, who was now paying Robbie williams rock dj, also a gay song. We paid the bill quickly, grabbed our belongings and tried to get the hell out of there.

I tried opening the door, but it wasn't opening, my friend then said "push it harder" i turned back and said to him "that's not something you should say at a place like this" he retorted with a "fuck you" i turned back again and said, "that's something you should definitely not say at a place like this" luckily the door opened and we were out. we then shifted our base to poptates which was next to it. Higher prices be dammed, at least poptates isn't gay, and it had people of the fairer sex too.

Ride on.. travel well

Saying goodbye is not something i am extremely fond of, in fact I try to avoid it wherever possible or i make jokes to liven up the mood. However, this time I will not be hesitant in penning down a few words since it's for a close friend. The friend I refer to is none other than my trusty discover 135. Yes, I am selling off my bike for a new one, but the new bike is not the purpose of this post, this is a goodbye post for my discover. As i was riding along the city roads today evening, I realized that i just have a few more days to spend with her and just like a grand finale of a TV series, all the memories and experiences that we shared together came rushing back and took me on a journey back in time to when i first got her, 2 years ago.

I remember the day like it was yesterday, the joy of owning my first bike knew no bounds. The first thing i used to do every morning was look out the window and make sure she was fine. I religiously followed the service manual and made sure that every tantrum she threw was taken care of. I remembered the day i caused a scene on the road by yelling my lungs out at the cyclist who cut me off, making her skid on the hard concrete road. And i also remember the very next morning when i brought a can of black paint to cover up the scratches she had suffered after that incident.

It was because of my discover that i was introduced to the world of touring. She was by my side on my first long ride to the hills where i was more nervous than she was. It was because of her that I took an interest in photography. She did live up to her name and helped me discover the beauty of nature that lies in the remote areas of maharashtra, goa and gujrat. From the plains, to the hills, to the beaches, she never let me down, even if it meant making the most of every drop of fuel while riding in reserve through a forest in the middle of nowhere looking for a petrol pump, or riding alone through a lonely highway in the darkness of the night with not another soul in sight. Together we have traveled a total distance of 23,000 km but sadly this is where the journey ends. I sincerely hope the next owner would take good care of her and let her ride into the wind. As a tribute, I have created a collection of photographs from our various trips together.

When she was new

From my favourite shots

On the way to malvan

From my favourite shots

At Tarkarli beach

From my favourite shots

On the hills of lavasa

From my favourite shots

After an offroading session at tungareshwar

From Trek to chinchoti falls and tungareshwar

On the way to goa

From Ride to goa

At malshej ghat

From Ride to malshej

At panhala

From ride to panhala

At Saputara

From ride to saputara

At Mulshi lake - tamhini ghat

From ride to tamhni ghat

At Naneghat

From Trek to naneghat

At Amboli

From Ride to amboli

At Mahabaleshwar

From my favourite shots

As i sit here typing this, the time is soon approaching when I have to bid her goodbye forever. All the pampering that i had given her over the years paid of and in return she gave me no trouble at all no matter how had i pushed her. Heres wishing her a safe journey ahead.

Using a few words from roger waters, I'd like to conclude this post by saying -

Ride on you crazy diamond!!