Air Pollution And The Pond Of Milk

There is a Akbar-Birbal story in which the Emperor gets a huge pond constructed and then orders each citizen to pour a potful of milk in the pond during the night so that it gets full of milk by next morning.  In the morning the pond is found full of water.  Birbal explains that each subject thought that all the others will be obediently pouring milk and a potful of water from him will make little difference! As we shall see, today this story has been made to stand on its head.

Air pollution in our cities and villages remains hopelessly high perenially.  I feel the main reason is burning of garbage in the cities and of stalks of harvested crops in the villages.  Swachchh Bharat notwithstanding, all the blah-blah is about not littering and not about the final disposal of all kinds of waste.  Yet, most of the time there are a few islands of greenery in each city where one can breathe comparatively easily.  Lohia park in Lucknow is one such spot in my city.  However since past couple of days, post Dipawali, the air in the park is drenched in the smell of firework and garbage fumes.  And, you will agree, that jogging with a mask will not only be difficult but ridiculous too.  No need to highlight how bad the air elsewhere is.

A news channel illustrated the air quality post Dipawali by telling us that it is like a room filled with the smoke from 465 cigarettes!  Smokers are now countering the propaganda against smoking by pointing out how much worse can it be if you make it 475 instead of 465?  Just a rise of little over 2%!  And this 2% is pleasurable unlike the remaining 98 percent.  Similarly staunch proponents of muscular Hinduism point out that burning of crackers hardly adds significantly to the already murderous levels of pollution.

If our story were to be retold in today's terms, it would again be a pond full of water, but now for a different reason.  Now everyone thinks that all the others will be pouring water only and a potful of milk from him will make little difference.  If everyone is polluting to his heart's content, how do my cigarettes or crackers make a difference.

So dear readers, here is my Vetaal prashn!  I gave up smoking 11 years ago.  Is the time ripe to resume?

Festivals: Floodgates To Goodwishes!

If there are so many people in a gathering and everyone shakes everyone else's hands, how many handshakes are there in all?  Thus goes the famous riddle that most of us have come across when learning the Arithmetic Series.  A good thing about handshakes is that whether you take the lead and shake the other person's hands or the other seizes the lead, once the hands are shaken you are done.  Goodwishes are more demanding.  When one person has taken the lead, the other must reciprocate.  Thus, the answer to the riddle mentioned in the beginning, would have to be doubled if it was goodwishes instead of handshakes!

Again, while while you can shake hands only with an individual, you can greet people individually, or in groups - small and large, regional and national, local and global, friends and colleagues, family and acquaintances et al.  Of course any individual is quite likely to figure in more than one of your groups and so each one gets greeted multiple times by the same individual and feels obliged to respond as many times.  Add to this the multiplicity of channels, greeting in person, greeting through a voice call, greetings through SMS, Whatsapp, Facebook, Google+ and what have you.  The multiplication factor for the answer to the original riddle goes up by a few orders of magnitude! Luckily cards are going out of vogue and that means one fewer channel.

If you are already nodding your head in agreement, it shows that you have experienced firsthand the deluge caused by festivals that open the floodgates for pent up goodwishes.  If the goodwishes were to materialize, the world would be instantly turned into something vastly superior to heavens of our imagination.  But instead what happens is this.  Subscriptions to special rate SMS packs are suspended, voice calls get dropped, the broadband bandwidth gets choked and photos, animations, and videos clog the storage space on your electronic communication device.

There does exist a solution to this overload.  It is inspired by banks who have hugely simplified interbank transactions by promoting credit push in place of debit pull.  The proposed solution will replace push with pull instead.  This would drastically reduce the number of greetings by limiting it to just the number of persons who wish to greet each other.  And it is simple!  Let there be a greetings registry.  All greeters must register here.  Now if one wishes to greet others on a particular occasion, he can put his greeting on the site.  The site will not push it to anyone.  Instead whoever so wants, will have to pull it.  So I log into the registry, and ask for Dipawali greeting from my friend X.  If he has posted a greeting, the greeting is personalized with my registered name and shown to me.  Those who post greetings can also be given the facility of a associating a negative list (to deny greetings to a few chosen people) or a positive list (if the greeting is meant only for a single persons or a few persons.)

One problem with this suggestion is that bosses, wives, and OGFs (Opposite Gender Friends) may feel offended if the greeting addresses them with just their registered names unqualified by any superlatives.  Hopefully they can take it in their stride.

And so, dear readers, pending creation of this registry, I dedicate this post to each one of you and wish you a very Happy Dipawali and a New Year filled with joy, prosperity and good health.  (This is in addition to my SMS, Whatsapp, FB and Google+ greetings!)  The fact that you have read this post is reciprocation enough.

Yippee! I Got Myself A Dumb Phone!!

I love smartphones. Who won't love something that has both brains and beauty and is slim to boot. Like all beautiful things, smartphones too have high maintenance requirements. And. like all slim things, smartphones have high metabolism.  They consume lots of expensive data just to keep themselves updated.  And their zero tolerance for any bulge means either frequent access to the mains or providing a power bank to keep them company.  The bulky powerbank accentuates their slim looks by juxtaposition.

Further like all beautiful things, smartphones are quite fragile.  You drop your smartphone and, more likely than not, a load drops off your pocket for restoration of its beauty, if it is still possible.  They also cause envy and hence are very prone to loss.  Then some smartphones are so classy that they refuse to take more than one SIM.  And for most of us in India, one SIM is just not enough.

 This is the familiar backdrop against which I decided to buy a dumb phone which can perform the basic functions without frequent charging and can also provide peace of mind because of lower chances of loss and low cost of replacement.

So I got myself a Nokia 130 DS.  DS is just double SIM.  It is an absolutely basic phone with usual frills - FM radio, MP3 player, torch, clock, calculator, calendar et al.  It can also take a 32GB SD card.  Accessing this card through your PC is pretty straightforward and that turns it into a storage device too.  It weighs very little, is small enough to be hidden in an adult sized palm and the battery lasts about a week with normal use!  The only wireless connectivity option it provides is Bluetooth for connecting to headphones / speakers.  No mobile data or Wifi and, hence, no Internet.  The price is sub 2K.

With this new addition to my gadstock (on the lines of livestock and deadstock,)  I now use my smartphone for data based applications and the dumb one for conventional uses within its capabilities.  This, unfortunately, also means having two numbers and discouraging your contacts from using the data number for voice calls.  But, then, these days clever apps make voice too ride on data. Of course, you can always tote both the phones.  Then there is the question of your tablet and your laptop, not to speak of non-portable devices.  But let us not complicate issues by taking that up now.

PS: My smartphone has a Power Saving Mode and an Ultra Power Saving mode. The first makes it a little less intelligent and diligent and the other takes it pretty close to a dumb phone!

I Am In Lucknow And The Smile Is Waning

I live in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh (UP) state in India.  This historical city is famous for its Chikankari (embroidery handwork), monuments from the British era and the era of Nawabs, fine cuisine and superb etiquette.  All these, especially the last two, are believed to be capable of making the face of any visitor light up with joy: And hence the adage "मुस्कुराइए कि आप लखनऊ में हैं!"  It translates to "Now that you are in Lucknow, smile!"

While the city takes pains to keep the ageing monuments in good repairs, little is being done to prevent erosion of its fine etiquettes and the accompanying moral fabric.  Things seem to have gone so far that business entities, especially those of online variety, are reluctant to do business with the residents and accord to them common courtesies accorded to a group of good customers.  I will give some examples from my own experience that bear this out.

I am an Airtel customer and my relationship with them is strong in so much as I subscribe to all their services, DTH, Broadband and LL as well as a mobile connection.  And so their response came as a shock to me when I contacted their customer care for activating international roaming (IR) on my phone.  They said, quite categorically, that this service is not provided to customers in UP (East) circle!  It is interesting to note that those in the UP (West) circle do not face this ignominy!

Then, again, while enquiring with airlines operating on the Delhi-Lucknow sector, I found out that passengers coming in to Delhi from an international sector and proposing to travel on the D-L domestic sector were not allowed any additional baggage allowance.  Though, such additional allowance was given by some airlines on such sectors as Delhi-Raipur!  Yet another case of discrimination!

The latest affront comes from Amazon (India.)  I used their app to order a Moto g plus phone with protective cover and screen guard.  The latter two, of course, are low value items while the phone is priced at INR 15K.  While the latter articles were okayed in my order, a message said that the first item could not be shipped to my PIN code.  I tried other PIN codes in Lucknow and even in Faizabad but in vain.  Correspndence with their customer care suggests that Amazon has stopped delivering high value merchandise in whole of eastern UP!  Amazon being the exclusive dealer for this phone I now have to give up my plan to purchase this phone!

I feel deeply hurt by these incidents and am wondering why are commercial entities are viewing the residents of this state as such unreliable and irresponsible louts?  I would also like to check with our state government and political leaders if they have any plans to check this loss of face and the waning smile.