Quite often, what we mistake for our earliest memories are in fact our fathers’ first camcorder outings. So I won’t claim this as my own, but I do remember seeing, at least, a home video of a man known to my family as simply… the Swami.

The Swami, which is an honorific title, is a holy man who tours the world, staying for a few days at a time in Hindu homes. Since the South Asian Diaspora is amongst the furthest flung, the Swami is a very well travelled man.

In the home video he is shown praying in the flat above my parents’ corner shop in Newport, Shropshire. Not his most glamourous gig, I imagine, but for us – my two sisters and I – he was an exotic visitor in our otherwise suburban lives.

In what is a particularly uncomfortable scene for me the Swami reaches down from his seat on the sofa to where we children are sat, at his feet, and strokes my head, like I were the cat to his Bond villain. Instead of purring, I stifle a laugh for what felt like an hour, but what the video reveals to have been only a few minutes.

For us, it was the highlight of the Swami’s visit. We recounted the story to each other (though we were all there), each time its telling more exaggerated. “It was like I was his bowling ball!” I’d say, not realising how creepy that sounded.

***

When he returned, years later, we were in our teens and had moved house. As he climbed our driveway, I noticed a pair of Nike Air Jordans peeking out from underneath his orange robes. He looked up at the new house, much bigger than the last, a symbol of my parents’ success, and declared it bad luck.

“Its shape,” he said. “Is like the open mouth of a roaring lion.”

I came out to help him with his bags, paused and looked up at the house as if it were a Magic Eye illusion. Maybe the lion would appear if I moved up close, fixed my eyes and stepped slowly back, I thought. But, however I looked at it, it was a new build, detached house with a separate garage joined by a granny annexe extension.

Once inside, he found our house more to his liking. Furniture draped in tarpaulin, at his request, so that when he sat he wouldn’t come into contact with the seat. Water too, on his arrival, was poured into his mouth so that the glass didn’t touch his lips. He plugged in his mobile phone to charge (it was the first I’d ever seen) and announced his final request – that he stay in my bedroom. As the youngest, he said, my room would be untouched by carnal desires. Good luck with that, buddy, I thought.

That evening, as we gathered in the lounge for a prayer session, we resumed our original positions: children (and mere mortals) to the floor, Swami perched on the covered sofa. This time, when he reached down to stroke my head, he found himself tangled in sticky spikes.

“Any questions?” he asked when we were done. “Anything you like.”

It was quiet. I guess we thought if we asked any questions we’d only have to sit there, stifling laughter, for even longer. But it was awkward, so I raised my hand and scanned the room, looking for inspiration, my eyes landing on a painting of the avatar Krishna, in typical pose, playing a flute and dancing with women. Topless women, I’ll add.

“Mr Swami?” I said.

“Swami,” he corrected me.

“Swami, why’s the Lord Krishna always surrounded by women?” I asked. I was fifteen, bear in mind, and if I could just have his secret…

“Sandeep,” he said. “You mustn’t ask questions of your religion. OK?”

OK. So his question, as to whether we had any questions, was a rhetorical question?

I was glad when he left. And as I helped him with his bags I thought that for a Swami, “free from all the senses”, he sure had a lot of shit with him. Checking for his mobile phone, a dance I’d soon learn myself, he was on his way, off to chide more children and put them off the religion their parents so wanted them to embrace.

***

I was reminded of all of this when I went home for Diwali last weekend. It was a similar scene: the family gathered in the lounge for a prayer session on the Saturday evening, except we all sat on the floor this time. And perhaps because this made me feel like we were on the same level, I interrupted the prayer to ask why we didn’t say it in English.

“I mean, no-one understands this,” I said. I hadn’t wanted to start a revolution, but the debate my question had sparked was turning into one.

“Can’t you be a Hindu without speaking Hindi?” my sister asked.

“Yeah, why’s the religion and the language so tied up?”

You can see that our line of questioning had matured since the Swami’s visit, but even still it was upsetting mum. She finished the prayer, put away her books and went to the kitchen.

The Swami

The next day, as I was packing to return to London, I came across a magazine in my old room. Though the Swami wasn’t with us this Diwali he’d found his way onto the cover of Hinduism Today, which had pronounced him, “Hindu of the Year”. I wondered how he’d earned the title. Fluent in Hindi? Unquestioning? Looking at the cover, he had a lot of bindis. Maybe that helped. I took a photo of the magazine and put away my camera. I’d been teaching myself photography and Diwali this year had turned into an ethnographic study.

In the car on the way to the railway station I apologised to my mum for upsetting her the night before.

“That’s okay, son,” she said. “It just upset me, I suppose, that you’re willing to teach yourself photography, but you seem uninterested in your own religion.”

It didn’t feel like my religion, I wanted to say. And the fact that I asked questions meant that I was interested.

But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want an argument before I left, and I didn’t really want a revolution. I’d had a great weekend, and I knew that when I got home and processed the photos I’d have the evidence in my hands. You just can’t say that about religion.

“Mum,” I said, as I got out of the car. “Why is Krishna always surrounded by topless women?”

My mum wound-up the car window and started the engine. I guess you can’t say that either.

Adjusting its strap, I thought to myself that it was time to lose some weight. The hips don’t lie, as they say, and neither do the scales. As I stood on them, the needle swung wildly to the right and I watched as my toes slowly disappeared beneath the girth of my belly.

What was next to vanish? I shuddered (and wobbled a little bit) at the thought. And how did I let myself go?

I’ve been working from home for about four years. And while there are advantages, like not having to commute, it does completely negate the need to exercise. When I was living in Shrewsbury, at least, I’d walk to meetings. Then I moved to London, where I lived in Kilburn, where you had to move quickly or else get mugged. But now that I’m in Hackney with Brooky Wook I don’t even have to travel to see her. She comes home after work to find me sprawled on the sofa, deep in a bag of crisps, like an actual coach potato.

But standing on the scales, as I was, eating crisps, I realised that if I couldn’t change my diet I was going to have to do some exercise. And while I might not be tightening my belt, I am tightening the purse strings, so I worked out that buying a Wii Fit was cheaper than buying a good pair of running shoes. Not only that, but it would overcome any awkwardness I’d feel at running with the Olympic hopefuls in Victoria Park. Plus, if there’s anything that’s going to get me into exercise it’s technology, right?

So now, when Brooky Wook comes home, she finds me off the couch, out of that crisp packet and onto the Balance Board, swinging my hips around an imaginary hula-hoop, punching the shit out of thin air or hitting the negligible slopes of our front room. I don’t know if she’s any less disturbed.

But, while I might look more ‘bunny boiler’ than ‘gym bunny’, I am actually losing weight! 4 lbs, to be precise. And I’ve got Brooky Wook involved too. The healthy competition has me determined to reach my ideal weight even quicker. Unfortunately that competition has already closed. The Wii Fit tells Brooker that according to her BMI if she gets any thinner she’ll be dangerously underweight. So, soon I’ll have the added challenge of trying to lose the pounds while my girlfriend tries to gain them.

Stepping off the Balance Board tonight however it looks like I’ve beaten her at her own game, having gained the 4 lbs that I had just yesterday lost. It makes me wonder how heavy my clothes are! Maybe tomorrow, when she comes home, she’ll find me naked atop the Board, lunging at the TV – not necessarily fitter, but having lost weight, all the same. And at least I won’t need to buy new trousers.

• Wii Fit

I spend most of my time at my computer. And now that I have push email on my phone, it’s like I’m carrying around a baby monitor, constantly listening out for the gurgling of an inbox or the wailing of an unread RSS reader.

So it felt very strange indeed to shut down my computer, as I did last week, and sit at a desktop not cluttered with icons and folders but with pens and pencils and actual paper. I thought I’d revisit an old pastime by drawing a relatively new one – my guitar. I’d taken it up when I last eschewed technology, albeit not through choice, when our Internet connection went down at University. (I taught myself how to play ‘I Can’t Live (If Living Is Without You)’ whilst waiting to be reconnected.)

And – do you know what? – it was pretty good! So I signed myself up for a life drawing drop-in session in Islington. “To draw,” as I kept telling people. “Not to model!” Like anyone thought that was the case. But it wasn’t until I got there that I realised how strange it was – not to be in a room with naked strangers (if anything, it was probably the best way to wean me off the Internet), but to be in a room with strangers altogether…

I work from home and for myself; I rarely have meetings with people I haven’t Googled; and I’ve been with my girlfriend long enough to know all of her friends and for her to know all of mine. And yet there I was, in a room full of strangers, two of them completely undressed, not knowing a single soul.

For the most part it didn’t matter. We sat there, scribbling away, trying not to look directly at the penis, as if it were the sun peeking out from a solar eclipse. Occasionally someone would hold up a pencil as if they were trying to block it out completely. But it was quiet and everyone got on with it.

But then the tutor called for a break. ‘Oh no!’ I thought. ‘Chit-chat’. Thinking I could bypass the whole ordeal, I skipped out to the bathroom and stayed as long as I could without appearing to have an actual medical problem. But by the time I got back the students had paired up exactly. There must have been an odd number of attendees – and I was that odd number.
The tutor announced that we had ten minutes left of our break.
‘How long is this break?!’ I thought. I tried to fill it by alternately looking at my own sketches, which made me feel conceited; by looking at other people’s, which made me feel nosy; or by looking at the models, who were now draped in sarongs, sipping coffee. That made me feel more like a pervert than when they were naked. And so I realised that I had no choice but to make conversation.

“That’s an interesting pen,” I heard one student remark to another. It was my way in, I thought. I’d mention the pen.
“Yeah, you squeeze it to control the flow of ink,” replied the other. They were both student age of the conventional sense. Student students.
“That’s an interesting pen!” I interjected. It was only when they turned to face me that I realised how close we were all sitting. We nearly bumped noses. There was no way I couldn’t have overheard their conversation.
“Yeah,” she went on, looking bemused. “You, er, squeeze it.”
“Okay, that’s time!” shouted the tutor, signalling the end of the break. I wasn’t sure whether I was relieved that the agony of breaktime was over or disappointed that I hadn’t moved beyond pen chat to redeem myself as a conversational virtuoso. I didn’t get another chance. In fact, “that’s an interesting pen,” was the only thing I said all night. And – do you know what? – it wasn’t even an interesting pen. It was a ball-point.

And, I think, there are two ways of dealing with mysteries; that is, dealing with that which we don’t understand. You can, like the great mystery solvers – Holmes, Marple, Fletcher, Creek – attempt to unravel them. Or you can fear them, run and hide. Or really go for it – galvanise your fear into a pitchfork and torch-waving angry mob. Well, I don’t much like crowds, so I’m going up the Jonathan Creek route with this one. And I’m taking a paddle.

I spent the early part of this weekend politely batting comments from a techno-sceptic on a number of topics, from records versus MP3s to e-book readers versus paperbacks. And I’ll discuss them here, even though I don’t think they’re really versus debates.

But I think there’s a word for the kind of person with whom I was debating and that’s a prosophobe – someone who is afraid of progress. You could say that she was a luddite, a term that has come to mean an opponent of technological progress. It comes from the social movement of 19th century workmen, who destroyed laboursaving machinery and stood against the Industrial Revolution. But since the debate ended with her gently pulling out her iPod nano and not by flinging it across the floor in protest, I don’t think that would be quite fair.

To be fair would be to say that even the luddites would find it difficult to stick to their principles in the 21st century. My prosophobic friend mourned the death of vinyl, but pulled an iPod out of her bag; she derided the Twittersphere in a Facebook status update; and I imagine she wants to take London off the Google Map over this Street View controversy.

As a luddite might realise, that’s a lot to smash up. But a cure for what scares you, as a prosophobe, is to realise not that the new replaces the old but that it lives alongside it. Take, for example, the e-book reader versus the paperback debate.
“It’s just ridiculous,” she said. “What will people put on their shelves?”
“Well, books.” I said. “You can have both.”

Books are, as Stephen Fry reminds us, themselves a technology and one that many called, at their advent, the work of the devil. “They only went and taught people how to make e-book readers, didn’t they?” I said.

As Fry puts it, “You don’t throw away your books when you buy a computer. You keep both. The beauty of living in the present day is you don’t abandon the past. The past co-exists.”

And the future is forged by the curious, not by the fearful. The greatest mystery solvers weren’t Holmes, Marple, Fletcher or even Creek. They were Darwin, Edison, Curie, Obama. And, if they were around today, I reckon, they’d be on Twitter. Obama is.

And, I shouldn’t say this in the same breath, so am I! Follow me at: twitter.com/sansharma

The answer is, we’re all subjects of Internet memes – a sort of web 2.0 inside joke, a catchphrase or concept that’s spread quickly from person to person via the Internet.

The movie, Snakes on a Plane, inspired a raft of parodies, songs and fan fiction; YouTube made a reluctant star of the ‘Star Wars kid’ (now, sadly, under psychiatric care “for an indefinite amount of time“); and the recent surprise (though not undeserving) recipient of this year’s Best Act Ever MTV award, Rick Astley, was the subject of a phenomenon called Rickrolling, whereby web surfers were tricked into watching the 1987 music video, “Never Gonna Give You Up”.

Similarly, users of the social networking website, Facebook, might be mildly irritated to click the status updates of their friends, which are beginning to lead to my website. Mine changed last week to “San Sharma is sansharma.com”; it was followed by similar URL-toting updates from my girlfriend and now two of her colleagues. In the nicest way possible (and in a way that won’t alarm my girlfriend), I’m viral! And my web statistics are beginning to show. Facebook is the top referrer, followed by Google, where one visitor found me with the query “massage parlours shropshire” (I’m on page 8 of the results, which says more about said visitor’s appetite than it does my website).

Let’s hope I don’t befall the same fate as other Internet memettes (though I’d rather a Best Act Ever award than a lifetime of psychiatric care). On that note, I’ll leave you with my favourite of the memes, viewed an estimated 1 billion times – ladies and gentlemen, the Star Wars Kid.

And it very nearly didn’t.

I’ve switched domain registrants and web hosts so many times over the last few years that I found myself in an infinite loop, unable to remember usernames, passwords or even the companies with whom I’d parted cash. Once I did, I began working behind-the-scenes, tinkering with code and little bits of script, which had all the appeal and terror of stepping off a Disneyland ride and seeing how all the Animatronics work. Now that it’s done, I hope you’ll find that version 2.0 has more to offer, including the full archive of my blog (and new posts!), my portfolio, including my books, and a growing audio and video page.

I’ve pulled the lever, I’m hopping back on my carriage and I hope you’ll join me for the ride. Don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed and add me up on Twitter. And drop me a line, by visiting my contact page.

Lots of love,

So, why the silent treatment?

Well, since I last wrote, back in April, I seem to have found myself in love’s death-grip. I was already struggling to update the blog when I met Brooky Wook and then embarked on a relationship completely at odds with the legacy of this website: healthy, functional, romantic. For what is essentially a catalogue of my dating failures, is being lucky in love the final nail in what was already the dusty coffin of my personal blog?

Don’t worry, dear readers, there’s room for one more in this coffin made for two. I won’t be cracking open its lid anytime soon and clambering six feet up to a spring meadow of bunny rabbits and love hearts. Being in a relationship brings with it a whole new set of social faux pas, one of which I’m reminded this week, as Brooky Wook prepares to meet my family for the first time.

I was in a similar position last weekend, having been invited to her grandad’s 87th birthday lunch in Canterbury. Her dad picked us up from the train station and drove us to the Wook household, where I nervously approached the front door, opened quite suddenly by a man waving what appeared to be a walking stick in the air. This did not calm my nerves. Instead, they rattled with the bag of gifts that Brooky Wook and I had bought her grandad. I pushed them towards the man’s free hand like I was popping a flower in the nose of a gun. I smiled, wished him a Happy Birthday and watched as both stick and face dropped.

“It’s not my birthday,” he said. “I’m [Brooky Wook's] uncle.”
“Ah,” I said, taking a closer look at the man I’d mistaken for an 87 year old grandfather – tall, fortysomething, with only a hint of grey in his full head of hair. “I know that! …But it was your birthday recently, right?”
“Yes. In January.”
“Well,” I said, easing the gifts back from his hand. “Happy… belated birthday!”

I stepped inside and saw Grandfather Wook, behind thick, bottle-top glasses, being helped from his rocking chair by two grandchildren and a walking stick more traditional than that held in his son’s hand. Uncle Wook, I learned, had just returned from Kenya, and the stick was a cattle herding staff, used by the Maasai tribe. I imagine he’d thought of using it for a different purpose that day.

But as I left with Brooky-Wook I realised that I hadn’t buried social faux pas when I found love. It may be a many splendored thing, lift us up where we belong, be all that we need, but it doesn’t free us from the awkwardness that has been the legacy of this blog since 2004. If anything, it makes it worse.

Accepting Brooky Wook’s invitation, I thought, might make my turn – inviting her to my ex-girlfriend’s house for dinner – a little easier (on me, I imagine, not so much on her). So I said, ‘yes,’ and rode that Overground, somewhat reluctantly, to the scary, north-east corner of zone 2.

Call me an old curmudgeon, but the idea of painting, of making things, dressing up in old, jumble-sale clothes and competing for prizes, all of which was promised by its Facebook event description, made me want to stay home, wash my hair, catch up on my junk mail correspondence – anything to avoid the kind of interaction with strangers that sounded about as fun as being mugged.

I saw a guy at a comedy night, right here in West Hampstead, whose entire set consisted of a conversation with an audience member, about as engaging as being collared by a high street charity collector. By the end of it, he looked about ready to hand over his Direct Debit details, just so that he could go on with his life.

“The comedy’s not amazing,” Brooky Wook said, as we took our seats. “But the atmosphere’s great.” The atmosphere was pretty tense, from where I was sitting. I was terrified of being picked by the compère, Tom Bell, whose sprightly androgyny reminded me of a theme park animal trainer, who once plucked me from a crowd of otherwise happy holiday makers to perform with what wasn’t the real Lassie but what looked good enough to pass.

I was 10 years old, and arrived with my family just before show time, managing to squeeze onto the front row of the ‘Animal Actors on Location’ attraction at Universal Studios Florida. I was aware that because of my proximity to the stage and the ease with which I could get there and back with minimum interruption to the crowd, I had the highest chance of being picked by the animal trainer. I was as terrified of him as I was of the dog, so I did my best to catch neither pair of eyes. But I guess they both smelled my fear and, before I knew it, I was on the stage, shaking Lassie’s paw to my obvious embarrassment. (Why can’t dogs smell that?)

But here, in the basement of Ryan’s Bar, the front row was the only row. I took it with a big swig of my drink and finally relaxed into my seat. If Universal Studios wasn’t such a ‘dry’ theme park, I might have had a better experience. But last night, at ‘Captain Dude and the Dude Patrol’, I had a surprisingly good time.

Bell made for an excellent compère, as comfortable on stage as he was in the massive “sleeping bag-come-coat” he picked out for himself from the jumble-sale. His comedy partner, Ed Weeks, was late, but no less funny. His punishment from Bell was the accusation of racism, eliciting a chorus of boos from the crowd, triggered by a hand signal designed by Bell in Weeks’ absence.

Pippa Evans put in a good turn, acting alongside Bell in episode two of ‘Plaice Invaders’, the completely improvised soap opera set in a fish & chip shop in space. All of this, set to a soundtrack of the worst charity shop vinyl Bell could find and all the laughter we, in our crowd of 15, could muster.

“If you like finding furniture on the street,” the Facebook event description went on, “you’ll love Dude Patrol.” I do and I did. But unlike stumbling across a broken wicker chair or a discarded coffee table, there was nothing wooden about these dudes. It’s a comedy night worth checking out, if you live in the area. I might just make that one and and a half hour journey back out there, next month.

In the last month, she’s joined both networks, muddled them up in her head and failed in her attempts to stay relevant by referring to each as MyFace. (I had to stop her from inviting friends to meet there. It was a conversation I never wanted to have with my sister.)

Just as Suman’s getting to know Facebook (and her friends in a more intimate way than she imagined), I’m trying to distance myself from the social network that’s costing UK business over £130m a day and 233 million hours of ‘lost time’ every month.

I’ll be running for the hills when it rolls out its new instant messaging feature in the next couple of weeks. It’s hitting some networks and the reviews are pretty good, but Facebook’s already given me a second inbox to battle, not to mention another Wall to climb, and I’m terrified that I’ll never keep up with friends, nor will I want to know that they’re getting a sandwich, packing for their holidays or being surprised at the result of a football match, reality TV show or STD test.

It’s hard enough trying to sneak onto Facebook without someone noticing that you haven’t replied to their message (”oh, I haven’t checked,” doesn’t really work). Now its new chat features promise to bring back into fashion a certain keyboard shortcut dance I used to perform when avoiding friends on instant messengers. (If I log on and then off immediately, you’ll know what just happened…)

It’s not too late for my sister, Suman – she’s not yet hooked. However, by making Facebook a more real time experience, its developers are hoping session length will go through the roof. But it might just be the poke that pushes users, like me, over the edge.

I entertain by picking brains
Sell my soul by dropping names
I don’t like those, my god, what’s that?
Oh, it’s full of nasty habits when the bitch gets back

‘The Bitch Is Back’, Elton John

I’m back on the blogosphere, guys, riding it all the way to your web browser, like an excited child on a space hopper. And what better way to return – out of breath – than with an Elton John lyric. (That should put to bed those ‘gay’ rumours.) Expect more brain-picking, name-dropping, gender-bending nastiness soon.

If, like Elton John suggests, there are bad habits, one might be going AWOL. I do apologise for that. And now that I’m back from my little sabbatical, let me explain.

I’ve been going through a period of change. Yes readers, puberty has hit me like a tonne of hairy bricks. Not only that, but after three years of working as Creative Director of Redbrick Enterprises Ltd., and on it’s flagship product, Enterprise Nation, I’ve left to go freelance. The decision came about after a series of escalating threats led to my departure.

“Right,” I said. “I’m going to leave!”
“Leave then,” said managing director, Emma Jones.
“Okay, I’m leaving.”
“Go!”
“I’m going.” This went on for some time.
“On the count of three,” I think I might have said. “1… 2… 2 and a half… 2 and three quarters…” Until, all of a sudden, I’d gone!

I’m still doing some work for Enterprise Nation – and everything’s fine! – but I’m designing, writing and presenting for other companies too. You should expect this blog to change somewhat as well. Its focus is going to shift to pop culture, technology and business. But don’t be surprised to find sprinklings of the old personal stuff. Inappropriate stuff, if anything.

Old habits, as they say, die hard. Nasty habits reincarnate.

So, welcome back to my blog, if you’ve been here before. If it’s your first time, subscribe to my RSS feed, so you don’t miss my updates, which I’m going to try and make more often. In the meantime, enjoy this video from the original “bitch”. It’s Elton John, with a pole-dancing Pamela Anderson, and a performance that I think really captures the essence of this blog: the roaring crowd, the sex appeal, the fat guy at the keyboard…

The Bitch Is Back, Elton John