Bog Standard

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness ( a review)

Thu, 02 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Can fiction ever be apolitical? Probably not

Fiction is a universe distilled through the world-view of the author. Even a fairytale would be political in the things it refuses to dwell on. So would stories that most people would consider uncontroversial (Your story is about a litter of kittens following around their mother and mewing all day? What about the insects it maimed, you monster!).

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness goes out of the way to be political. This is the first book of Arundhathi Roy that I’ve read. I picked it up because I recognised her name. I should have researched a bit more, because many times throughout the read I felt like giving up. But I soldiered on (pun initially unintended, but later owned up to).

If Arundhat Roy would consider re-titling the book, I’d like to offer “A prayer of hatred for India”. In the first few chapters, I thought it was trying to take the views of the less fortunate, or rather, the less represented. But by the end (and the last scene!) I was convinced that this book is nothing but hatred for India. The soldiers are weak and corrupt, the policemen are murderers and rapists, vegetarians are tyrannical and hypocritical, but terrorists in Kashmir are kindly heroes who will avenge every injustice. The only bad terrorists are the ones who are working with the police. As far as I remember, the good-guy terrorists never kill anyone. Same with the communists, who are shown as the heroes of the common folk. Also hindu customs and festivals are depicted as harmful, but goat-sacrifice for Eid is romanticised. Arundhati never attempted to hide her biases.

Also, on a not so serious note, I really did expect there to be a “Ministry of Utmost Happiness”, but was disappointed to not find one in the book.

The book is contrarian in every way. I’m tempted to say that it was as if a Pakistani wrote the book about India (how easy of an insult and how inaccurate) but it’d not be so fixated, maybe not so hateful either. This book tries really hard to rebel.

Despite all of this, I liked the narration and the writing style. I especially liked the descriptions of people. The book contains a lot of humour. Some of it is dark. Overall the tone is very cynical. There are a lot of characters in the book, but the book focuses on Anjum, and S Tilottama. You can almost slice the book into two parts, each part focussing on one of them. Most of the book is about everything that leads up to their meeting.

The chapters about Anjum were fresh. These chapters deal with the struggles of being a transgender in a very human way. At no point did the character feel artificial. Anjum has loving families–biological and adopted. I was invested in knowing if she would get to be the real “mummy” to her child. The internal politics of the gharana and Anjum’s insecurities were a very interesting read.

I did not enjoy Tilottama’s chapters as much. We see her through the eyes of her three former lovers and also through her own. Tilottama’s arch felt forced. She felt like a character out of The Fountainhead. She exists for the sake of furthering the author’s doctrine. All the main male characters in her life fall in love with her, and it doesn’t make sense. Two of those three are stand-ins for “the establishment” and they pine for her affection till the end. The only one who gets her is a Kashmiri rebel.

Hover or tap below to read spoilers

Biplab Dasgupta is a token point of view character for the establishment. He is a self-loathing drunk who is still in love with S Tilottama even decades after never seeing her (because god-knows-why). In the end, he changes his mind about Kashmir. Like many other characters, he only exists for propaganda.

I did not enjoy the plot point of Anjum getting stuck in Godhra during the riots and getting traumatised. This was probably the only part of Anjum’s chapters that didn’t feel natural.

The same thing about having Miss Jebeen II being the chlid of rape of a well-meaning dark-skinned naxal (all three adjectives being very important). It was as if the author was running out of plot to cram propaganda.

I will give it 3.5 out of 5 because it is an above average book, but many characters and some plot points feel forced.

Yes, Mk Venu. The Bullet Train is indeed “in a way, free”

Sat, 16 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Came across an article^[0] on Facebook written by the founding editor of TheWire.in, Mk Venu. I see lots of people sharing the link on Facebook, so there’s a chance you’ll come across it too. I found the article to be intentionally misleading and hence this post.

The news is that Japan is loaning India at 0.1% interest rate payable within 50 years. This will cover 80% of the cost of the bullet train and the new track between Ahmedabad and Mumbai.

Following are some arguments from the article and my counter-arguments.

The inflation in India is expected to be higher than Japan, so Rupee will devalue against Yen in 50 years and India will pay much more in Rupees than the principal value. -> Current inflation rate in India is 3.36^[1]. In the next 50 years, it’s expected to average about 3%. This is indeed quite high compared to Japan’s. But, that’s because inflation and growth go hand in hand. The expected GDP growth rate this quarter is 7.0%. In 2020 it is expected to be about 5.7%.^[2] In 50 years we will be paying more Rupees, but that amount will most certainly be worth less. Two lakh rupees in 2017 is numerically more than One lakh was worth in 2000, but it worth a lot lesser. Japan is giving us the loan at a loss.
Japanese short term interest rates (Tokyo Inter Bank Offer Rate) is 0.06%. The interest rate offered by ten-year Japanese government bonds is 0.04%. 0.1% is very high. -> Interbank interest rate is calculated between Tokyo banks part of a union. It will obviously be much lesser. The latest MIBOR rate (equivalent of TIBOR for Mumbai banks) is 6.17%^[3]. Good luck finding a bank ready to lend you money at 6.17% in India. Japanese government bonds offer 0.04% interest rate because they don’t expect much growth. India offers 6.5% because the expectation is that investments in India would grow in value faster than 6.5% per annum. More importantly, generally, any such loan, even from other multilateral or bilateral development financing institutions, would cost between 3-7 per cent with a repayment period of 20-30 years.^[4]
What would be your priority? After all, there should be something called sequencing of expenditure in a nation as poor as ours. -> A country as poor as ours cannot afford to lose this golden opportunity especially when it comes at almost no cost to us. This project is going to generate numerous jobs. The tech-transfer from Japan will improve our railway system. The super fast train route between Ahmedabad and Mumbai is going to boost trade. The return on investment on this project is going to be a lot! Refusing this would have been equivalent to a hungry person refusing food because they don’t want to waste energy eating.

Japan is giving us such favourable terms only because it needs to compete against China and France’s High Speed Railway industries and boost its own economy. This deal is beneficial to India as well as Japan.

[0] https://thewire.in/177815/mumbai-ahmedabad-bullet-train-many-things-not-free/

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/india/inflation-cpi/forecast

[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/india/gdp-growth-annual/forecast

[3] https://www.fimmda.org/modules/content/?p=1029

[4] https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/why-india-needs-a-bullet-train-china-abe-modi-ahmedabad-mumbai-4839143/

The uploader has not made this video available in your country?

Mon, 21 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

This usually happens because the publisher doesn’t have the right to distribute the video in your country so they apply YouTube regional restrictions/country restrictions.

For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kirSofzvXN0 is available in US, but not in India.

The easiest way to get around this is to replace youtube in the url with youpak. The rest of the link remains exactly same.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0 -> https://www.youpak.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

This does not work for all videos all the time (obviously can’t expect a small company to have the means of Google). https://www.youpak.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ isn’t working for me at the time of writing this, but it has worked for me most times in the past.

Happy Browsing!

How to regenerate a Mac Developer certificate in XCode

Thu, 08 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

If you have a Developer ID account (you’ve paid Apple for the account) refer to this guide instead: Apple Guide- Maintaining Certificates

If you are a humble idiot who somehow lost the key for your Mac Developer account and your project won’t compile and you see either of the following:

Choose your project in the Project Navigator and go to the General tab. In the Signing group, check the option ‘Automatically manage signing’.

Even if it fails the first time, try again after restarting Xcode. It will arrange a new certificate for you.

I hope you found it useful. I would have saved so much time if I had found this info somewhere yesterday!

How to download YouTube videos?

Sat, 20 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

This is in no way an exhaustive list. I’m only mentioning my preferred ones.

youtube-dl

It is a simple Python script that can download videos from literally hundreds of sites including Facebook and YouTube. Just type youtube-dl followed by the video url in a terminal (command prompt) to download the video at the best quality. It lets you download complete playlists, search results, store subtitles separately, etc. Their Github page has instructions for advanced users. It is also completely free and open source. This one is my favourite.

Videoder (Android)

Play Store doesn’t allow any apps that let you download videos from YouTube. So you’ll have to install it from their website or through a third-party apk store like Aptoide. Be aware that it asks for coarse location permission.

I think that is for the ads. I don’t have a reason to think that it has any malware. Videoder also lets you download videos from many other websites.

savefrom.net

If you do not want to install any software on your machine, you can use this website to directly get download links. It lets you choose the video/audio quality of the video. But in case of really high quality videos, audio needs to be downloaded separately. It also supports a bunch of other websites. I found it very handy

There are also a few browser extensions (including savefrom.net) that will add a download video button on YouTube, but I am uncomfortable giving extensions full access to my YouTube data. Also in most cases it slows down the page load and makes the page look bad. It’s very rare that I want to store a YouTube video so I avoid installing those extensions.

Which of these is your favourite? Or do you have your own method?

The Philosophy of Commuting

Tue, 09 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been thinking a lot about my commute lately. I have been spending increasingly more time stuck in traffic-pickles since I’ve moved to Bengaluru. Yes, pickles. I don’t find anything sweet or fruity about throngs of hot smoke spewing contraptions helplessly stuck together. I’d prefer a longer commute if that meant not suffering through traffic. But rather than aggravate myself over it, I use my commute-time to get some shut-eye, listen to podcasts, and observe.

Traffic feels like a stream of vehicles and you like a boat sailing with its flow, except that the flow isn’t helping you forward and you aren’t really a boat. You’re the stream itself. Sometimes this stream splashes out of the road or moves in unexpected ways. It acts like a single entity though it’s discretely composed of those like you.

Traffic turns everything it touches into itself. Traffic is a tentacled monster.

I cycled to office yesterday. I rarely do it nowadays. When I was a regular, I’d often change my routes just for the sake of it. Now that I travel in an office bus, I don’t get a say in it. But I do appreciate the air-conditioning and the convenience to observe. When I would cycle, I would be consumed in trying to predict my immediate neighbours’ movements. Now from a safer and higher seat, my view has broadened. I’m not as concerned by vehicles right next to me as I am about the traffic further away. I’m still concerned by things around me, but the breadth has increased.

Traffic is really easy to model at the macroscale. Experts say that traffic behaves like a viscous fluid. But traffic at close is chaotic. I have a hypothesis.

Einstein won his only nobel prize in 1921 for his work on the photoelectric effect and his revolutionary suggestion of wave-particle duality. He reasoned that light must exist simultaneously as an electromagnetic wave and a stream of photons for us to account for all our observations. I believe that it is necessary to make light of traffic. Similarly I postulate that traffic exists simultaneously as a superposition of a motley of journeys and an aggregation of individual vehicles at a particular point in time.

Like a superposition of electromagnetic waves, a traffic pickle is the function of time and place. The only thing common between two journeys is that they coincide at a particular point. The journey itself is an entity and you’re just the one that experiences it.

You cannot compare your own journey to that of someone else. Their destination isn’t the same as yours nor was the route they took to reach that place. You might be heading in a different direction from them and you’d not know the purpose of their travel unless you ask. Don’t assume.

Sometimes your journey starts on rocky roads. Sometimes from small villages. Sometimes it’s raining near your home and you wear an elaborate raincoat only to find out after some traveling some distance that it wasn’t raining anywhere but your area and you’re the only one on the road with a heavy raincoat on. But do unto yourself as you do unto others. Don’t judge.

Sometimes you travel by public transport. You share a part of your journey with others. You hand the driver the control of your journey for some distance. You’re a part of something larger than yourself. There is a huge calm in that. But it works for some. It doesn’t for others.

Every commute has its own challenges. Some are faster than others. Some more interesting. Commute isn’t a race although sometimes it might feel that way.

Another way to look at traffic is through the numerous vehicles and riders that compose it. Each one is unique. Two vehicles the same model end up behaving differently after some use. I see so many of the same–activas, splendors, pulsars, jupiters–and yet they are all different when you look closely. Vehicles are powered by petrol and the attitude of the driver. Traffic is an exploration of Pointillism where each point is a painting in itself.

People value different things. Cars are more comfortable but not very maneuverable. Even the fastest car stuck in traffic has its speed dictated by that of vehicles around it. A bike, while freer than a car, isn’t a vehicle for families. But your mileage may vary. Families come in all sizes and I’ve honestly seen more happy couples on bikes than in large cars.

Each vehicle in the traffic is a story.

Traffic lends itself to a large number of potent metaphors and yet traffic itself is a great metaphor when you think about it. I have been spending increasingly more time stuck in traffic-pickles lately and I guess I’ve been thinking a lot about life.

This post has been selected by BlogAdda for it’s 13th May Spicy Saturdays list. Stoked!

Perfectionism and its debilitating burden

Mon, 08 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

The moment I finished typing the title for this post, I wanted to change it. I wanted it to be better. I knew it was possible and I knew I could feel it when I had typed it down. But I won’t. Because I know it is a trap.

I’ve been writing off and on for a long time. And yet when I sit down to write, words don’t flow onto the screen. It is an exasperating process. The critical voice inside me is always in charge. I’m always going back and re-reading everything to the point where I make no progress at all. I spend the whole time “fixing” the earlier parts.

I’ve always been meticulous, but I feel like the tendency has been growing to a point where I find it difficult to publish even a single post. I have been writing a post in the past days for longer than I’d be able to admit. It’s been a couple of weeks of me trying to finish it but I just end up polishing and re-writing paragraphs until they feel “right”. Obviously they don’t feel “right” even after the changes. I end up with polished paragraphs that don’t go well with each other. It reads like a big collection of thematic quotes. It’s like an all-star cricket team of the best bowlers and batsmen that realizes on match day that none of them can field. I wish the meticulousness didn’t come at the cost of the flow and I could write one short story per day like I always keep promising myself.

So to tell the critical voice inside me to bugger off, I’m publishing this drivel without any editing. I do still hate the title.

Purple Legacy

Sat, 25 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

An insignificant ferrous sphere covered in dirt and water being heaved and yawed around in an ocean of awe-inspiring titanic balls of nuclear explosions is the home to the whole of humanity. It should take but just a look heavenwards to realize our humble place in the universe. And yet when I look up, all I see is a plain blanket of dark purple light.

Prehistoric humans left their mark on their surroundings—among other things—as layers of soot on cave walls. Forest fires. Smelting. Agriculture. Technological progress has often only meant finding quicker ways to convert natural resources into items of human consumption with no regard to their byproducts.

Today humans are finally aware of man-made pollutants. And yet, this awareness often stops at air and water pollution. While these two have arguably the biggest effect on human health, I’m worried about a more spiritual loss.

Look up. The stars are gone. Outside of the half a dozen stars we may recognise as such, the brightest of which are actually Saturn and Jupiter, the hundreds upon hundreds of beautiful twinkling heavenly bodies are drowned out by the visual noise of headlights, streetlamps, and offices filled with people too busy to care. Streetlamps are the tentacles of development reaching out into the wilderness. This is the legacy we are leaving the future generations.

The sky is like a huge painting with its beauty only limited by our vision. And it is ever so dynamic. I used to lie on the terrace on some cool cloudless nights staring at the moon and the stars. You could see the movement even in a few minutes. It would be a completely fresh painting every time and yet you could never catch it changing. Even the most distant stars look clearer than the clearest screen we produce. I’m mesmerized by the sky every time I go to my native village.

I’m convinced that there are kids who will grow up without ever having seen more than a handful of stars. I wonder if they will still draw the dozens of white pentagrams on their adorable oil paintings like we used to. Maybe two or three. Or maybe they still would as a vestige of our experiences.

In 1994, after the Northridge earthquake when Los Angeles had a massive power outage, the local observatories were inundated with calls about the “weird-looking” night sky from concerned citizens. Turns out that this was the first time many of them had seen the Milky Way.

I consider myself fortunate to have grown up in a place (and in a time) where it was possible to gaze up at the stars. I wish more would share my fortune. It is regrettable the that city-folk have lost an experience so wonderful without ever realising it.

But we can do something about it. Drive to the country a few times a year. If you have a kid take him or her with you to see the stars. Appreciate the view. Participate in initiatives like the Earth hour. Keep the lights off when not in use. Just look up.

Chronicles of Monday

Sun, 29 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Sorry, buddy. Someone had to say it.

The working week as we know it is a recent invention. Even the concept of a universally accepted day for leisure (Sunday) is modern (and religious in origin). The pre-industrialised world had no need for a working week or even fixed working hours: peasants worked till their crops were ready and artists toiled till their hands were steady. You didn’t simply pause being the royal butt-wiper for a day because the royal butt-wipers association mandated a day of rest.

But in the past century, Monday has become the de facto first day of work throughout the world (though exceptions exist) and consequently become the target of much hatred from the (modern) peasant folk. Many a cartoon has lampooned the moon’s day and umpteen listicles have ridiculed Induvāsaram. But it really isn’t Monday’s fault. Stop going after dear Lunes!

Usually, the line of attack is that one needs to wake up early on Monday and drag one’s feet to work. Monday is boring because after a happening weekend, life is back to its routine pace. Well, routine doesn’t have to feel that bad. Fun and enjoyment can (and should) be a part of your routine. If it’s not, that’s probably because you don’t feel excited about your work.

In a competitive and resource-scarce world like ours, means of earning a living are rarely chosen for passion. Life is complicated, but it’s more than just paying the bills and going through the motions. If you hate your job on Mondays, you are not going to love your job on Tuesdays either. So it’s not really the day that you hate. It’s your job.

On an unrelated note: Thursdays are definitely the worst!

This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda

Bangalore Bandh

Mon, 01 Sep 2014 00:00:00 GMT

31st August 2014 - technically yesterday - was (technically) a bandh protesting the recent horrifying acts of violence against the girls of the city.

What such bandhs would do to dissuade any potential offenders is a matter for another day. However, there was sort of a ‘bandh’, or stoppage in the city in the morning. The traffic was markedly less on the streets. Most shops were closed. The dark clouds over the city silently passed over quietly without condensing. Maybe they were afraid of getting targeted for going about their business on a bandh day like other cities.

But Bengaluru didn’t really stop. Most IT companies were either working normally, or their employees were working from home. In this globalised world, businesses don’t stop because a city decides to take a break. This was kind of expected. What amused me, however, were the other establishments that were open.

During my afternoon walk, I noticed that the supermarket was closed… or so I thought! Shutters were drawn on all but one exit and one entry. All the vehicles were actively being transferred to behind the building for parking. The supermarket, usually bustling and busy, looked dull and closed until you entered inside! Inside, it was staffed, bright, filled with people and welcoming as always. The whole supermarket was like a teenager at a funeral.

A little further, I saw the bank. It was closed. Or was it? The shutters were drawn on the bank. A big conspicuous lock hung on the shutters that made it feel as if it were locked. If you were not careful enough, you’d miss the little opening and pass it by thinking that the bank was closed.
As I entered deeper into the residential areas, I found that most of the shops were open. The bandh seemed to have affected the shops on the main roads only. Life went on.

By evening, I saw a few more of the shut doors open. Life was back to its normal self. What I conclude from this is that Bangalore might be a lot more chilled out than other cities when it comes to work, but it seems that it’s even more chilled out when it comes to bandhs.