This one’s for Cutima, who renounced her grandmotherly place in Chandana’s home, and has been in deep meditation at an undisclosed location in the Himalayas since May 2004.

The biggest challenge is really in thinking of you as a cat.

As she and I proceeded down the road I was still hesitant to call a courtship, exchanging stories from completed childhoods to teething adulthoods, you were, it seemed, her only constant companion. You were walking her down a lifelong aisle to hand over to me. And I had your expectations to live up to as well. Your trademark mewing interjections during her Sunday evening conversations with me, I must ask – were they of approval?

I’m sure you heard how I sullied your good name by dragging it into a bank heist story to score points with my girl. It worked wonders for me, but I never really heard what you thought of it. Could that be the distance I perceived between us the only time we met?

Or was that because I had sneaked into the house and kissed her before your very eyes?

Either way, I’m not sure retreating in a huff to a life of penance and meditation was the right response.

I was in your neck of the woods last week, but I don’t really need to stop by to catch up, now, do I? You left her in good hands - mine, in case it had to be said. We’re happy. She’s happy. She denies it at times, but I know it.

I never really told you this, but you were once my inspiration. She told me you were the only person in the world who could wake her up at 3 in the morning and still get a smile and a hug out of her. I wanted to be the second, and many years later, I finally was. I’m not sure you and I will agree on what she means by a smile at that hour, but the hug there is absolutely no doubting.

In 1990, my bus fare was 60 paisa one way. So two packets containing, between them, a wholesome rupee and twenty paisa was all I had to work with. I was 7 years old, with neither the need for more money, nor the ability to manage it. Twenty years later, I may routinely spend over a thousand times as much in a single day, and get questionably greater value out of it. In truth, this is the only evidence I have ever had that inflation is real.

For reasons that still escape me, my school bus took a different route in the morning and evening, of which only one passed home. So every morning, I rode the public 10P route to school and every evening, I took the school bus back. Even our school hired its buses from the public road transport corporation, so while the equipment was the same both ways, the experience was wildly different.

Still in single-digit years, I was exempt from the age and trouser-length politics of the school bus that I would later discover and rather gloriously fail my stint in. Entitlement to the last row was highly overrated, as was the daredevilry of a whole ride from the footboard. But I digress. At my age, every evening ride home was essentially the same.

The morning ride, however, could mean different people and different experiences – to the extent that I could discern them anyway.

The packed bus fare system hadn’t failed yet. But one day, inevitably, it did. Digging around my left pocket, all that turned up was the previous day’s tickets. The conductor informed me, needlessly curtly, of the rather imminent threat of being thrown out.

It was at this point, that an elderly man – large eyed, bald but white remaining haired, white moustached, white shirted, brown lardbucket trousered, and brown Snoopy clutch pursed – stepped in to the rescue, cheerfully and wordlessly assuring me this would be the least of my worries in the life ahead. My fare paid, I was back to being on my uneventful way to school.

I don’t remember the exact face any more but I have more recently assigned him that of a professor at IIT Madras who I don’t know even by name – just, cyclically, as the guy who looks like the man with the Snoopy purse.

Not many weeks later, it was the Snoopy purse man’s turn to forget his fare – I’m having trouble imagining his system involved his mother packing it for him and packing him off with a hug or a kiss, but I wish, for his sake, that it was pleasant. I watched, silently, as he bore the routine humiliation, and got off the bus. His eyes may have met mine during this time.

Dear man with the Snoopy purse. I thank you for bailing me out. I apologise I couldn’t return the favour. I mourn the near certain loss, disrepair or disposal of the Snoopy purse that, two decades on, is the only perfectly preserved image in this memory. I still feel your pain, inflation adjusted.

Most of all, though, in a life where adulthood is the end of a gradual and deliberate lowering of rigid but well-intentioned guards our parents send us out into the world with, you were the first thing I unlearned about strangers. Thank you.

There is not a stirring subject in sight.

The wind has been caught in an awkward moment of pointlessness writing nothing of significance on the grass. A path leading from nowhere to nowhere has tired of pondering its purpose.

The night has tired of eternal day.

Life thrives on the other side of a green hill in Sonoma, California. An unseen artist watches his sky blue paint dry. An invisible child stares on at unyielding white. A shiny red car dashes across the slopes unheard. Shadows move with their owners, out of habit.

There is no beholder in sight.

The wind scribbles messages in vain, perhaps turning a windmill or two to grab attention. Roads are built, eroded, relaid and repainted. Paths are made, trails are blazed and broken.

The stage has tired of an absent audience.

What kind of angst could so inspire 500 million creations, communications, crimes, songs, hopes, egos, souls, lives and livings a day? Of constancy under surveillance? Of unnoticed change?

Of being sucked, without choice, into a camera on a day Charles O’Rear saw fit? Of needing to be right-clicked on to be put out of this misery?

Bliss. If only we knew.

I gather it isn't perfectly clear from the piece, so if you couldn't guess what it was about, this should help: http://bit.ly/3vkPKU.

Something About Burning Bright (May 2005)
Something About Burning Bright – Part Two (July 2005)

Also, as many of you know, my entries tend to be insufferably long, so if you want a quick summary, reading list and call to action, scroll right down to the bottom. Thanks!

In 2005, while I was in the US and, to the best of my recollection, unaware of the surprisingly voluminous coverage of Sariska Zero (the local extinction of tigers from the Sariska reserve in Rajasthan) back home, I had casually set the 2010-2015 timeframe for the extinction of the tiger in the wild in India, and lamented somewhat my own bad luck where managing to see one was concerned.

I guess it’s to someone’s credit or my calculations’ discredit that it’s 2010, and the tiger isn’t extinct, and heck, Chandana and I saw not one, but a family of five (a tigress and her four sub-adult cubs). Three times in four safaris. It may sound rosy as hell, but wait for it. Qualifications abound.

Chandana and I love the Hyderabad Zoo, and we’ve made two trips in two years of being married (I’d made 4 previous trips in my childhood in Hyderabad). In spite of the unfavourable mentions it finds in Part One, I must concede it remains one of the better zoos in the country. To be sure, if you’re content making the jump from seeing a tiger pacing inside a cage to seeing a tiger pacing on the edge of an acre (or several acres if you take the tiger safari) of thickly wooded enclosure just outside the cage, it will satisfy you and your pretensions as a wildlife photographer immensely.

I’ve managed to see them amazingly up close at the zoo, including, most recently, the biggest tiger I’ve ever seen, swimming in the moat, no more than 10-12 feet away and hauling himself out of the water, coat shimmering and all. It was priceless.

Make no mistake, watching a tiger anywhere evokes an instant silence of respect and admiration. But watching one in the wild is really, really, really, really, and I can’t stress this enough, really something else.

In a word, I’d put it down to temperament. The captive tiger’s eyes give away the agitation it feels inside – of a subdued spirit dependent on humans for its existence and propagation, of instinct struggling to find its roots. The wild tiger’s eyes have no malice – you look into them and they look right back, with only peace and trust. The wild tiger’s eyes are the eyes of a host - they say Sit down, make yourself at home, smoke a pipe with me. I know nobody smokes pipes any more, but if, like me, you’ve heard Jim Corbett’s words about the tiger being a “large hearted gentleman with boundless courage,” and assigned it the image of John Bull, you’d hear it speak the same anachronistic words in your head too.

To let a little more cat out of the bag, we just got back from a trip to Pench National Park on the Maharashtra-Madhya Pradesh border. But back to the build-up.

In May 2009, Chandana and I tried our luck at Kabini, near Mysore, named for the river that flows through the Nagarahole National Park. On our first safari, we managed to see some wild dogs feasting on a fresh kill. On the second, we reached the very edge of the core area of the forest, near a waterhole where, just minutes ago, we’d seen deer run in panic. On the other side of a fence thickly grown over, we could hear a tiger’s low purr and the sound as the thighbone of its kill snapped. But we couldn’t see it.

I’d still consider that a tremendously successful trip – foremost for the company we had, of a former cricketer turned wildlife conservationist, writer and eco-tourism pioneer and of a Zimbabwean ranger with decades of experience in the African Bush, without doubt the most interesting people we’ve ever met; and as an important afterthought, our new found perspective. No longer were we seeing the forest for the tiger. We wanted to see the tiger for the forest.

Here commenced our mission to be to every major Tiger reserve in the country. The motivation wouldn’t be to see the tiger, but to see the land it roams, the forest it scares into submission and stirs out of silence, the ecosystem it sustains, and the food chain it sits atop, the deer and langur it spurs into periodic conference, the alarm calls, the pug marks, the territorial scratches on trees. Seeing the tiger would just be a bonus. Managing to see one wouldn’t mean the mission had ended. Because seeing one in Bandhavgarh isn’t the same as seeing one in Corbett. And not seeing one in Kabini isn’t the same as not seeing one in Ranthambhore.

To demonstrate our commitment to the cause, let me just say that we even plan to visit the Nagarjunasagar-Srisailam Tiger Reserve about 250 km from Hyderabad, the utter futility of which wouldn’t be lost on even the thickest of tiger tourists.

In December 2009, quite by chance, we saw the excellent documentary, Tiger – Spy in the Jungle, on TV. We were quite certain what we were looking at was Kabini until the end credits rolled and the location mentioned was Pench National Park. At once, we knew this was where our Republic Day weekend was going to be spent.

In the days leading up to the trip, I read up extensively on the current tiger situation in the country. This article from Tehelka makes the usual points about the ageing and underpaid forest staff, their outdated weapons, and the temptations of colluding with the poachers. But the real gem I stumbled upon was Aditya Singh’s blog, whose entire content from 2005-2009 I consumed in a single afternoon.

Now, as the owner of a lodge at Ranthambhore, Aditya’s interests may easily be questioned (as they often are), but the points he makes, in this article for Sanctuary Magazine, for tourism as the best watchdog we have are extremely compelling. Until this time, I believed the core-buffer strategy on which all parks are operated was ideal as it gave the tiger its inviolate space. However, it is in this core that monitoring by the Forest Department (which has exclusive access to the area) is weakest and illegal grazing and poaching most prevalent.

Sure, till date, nothing saddens me more than seeing a photo of a tiger crossing a path with twenty jeeps surrounding it. But perhaps it is a small price to pay. Quite conveniently, therefore, I approached our trip feeling less guilty about my presence there as a tourist in a jeep.

On one specific tourism practice, though, I was undecided, and still am. It’s called, quite unfortunately, a tiger show, and happens in Kanha and Pench (I’m told it’s been discontinued in Bandhavgarh). I don’t believe it happens in any parks outside Madhya Pradesh.

The way it works is that every morning, the forest staff set out on domesticated elephant back to track a tiger or two that are historically more tourist-friendly (these are typically females, or sub-adult cubs which stay within a small area while their mother hunts). They’re usually successful in finding at least one and follow it till it sits down. Once a tiger sits down in the daytime, it usually tends to stay there for several hours, and so the tourists in the park converge on the nearest motorable part of the forest and are taken in batches on elephant back to see it for a few minutes at otherwise impossibly close range.

Now, a couple of things to consider. Even though there are no wild elephants in the Central Indian forests, for some reason, as established by the unmanned domesticated-elephant-camera crew of Spy in the Jungle at Pench, the tigers in these parts are not threatened by them and allow them to get very close. However, by the guides’ own admission, the tigers do sometimes get just a little intimidated at being followed (or surrounded, though not closely) by 4-5 elephants and sit down out of fear.

After a few hours, the tigers are ready to move, and at this point, the tiger show ends. Again, some argue that sometimes, this is prevented by keeping the tiger constantly surrounded by elephants till it’s time for the morning safaris to end.

The main advantage is that, for a tourist, the chances of seeing a tiger are much much higher than on a normal safari that keeps to the designated motor paths, not to mention how close you can get to a tiger on elephant back. The reason tigers are so hard to spot in the forest is simply that if they’re even a little away from the motor path, they’re practically invisible with that brilliant camouflage of theirs. Further, the roads cover a pretty small part of the forest, so the static probability of finding a tiger nearby is extremely low. This is only partly offset by the fact that tigers like walking on the softer earth on these paths as it doesn’t hurt their paws.

So, if at a given time, it is most likely that the tigers are in the interior and the only way to get to the interior is on elephant back, this must be the best arrangement there is, from the tourist standpoint. And believe me, as a consequence, few tourists are complaining.

On the other hand, some do think the whole sighting is staged, or at least a little artificial (calling this a tiger show certainly doesn’t help matters) and, therefore, feel a little cheated. However, the alternative, namely a totally providential sighting, is either too improbable or too seasonal (summer evenings near waterholes) and definitely much noisier an affair, what with all the jeeps and loudmouth tourists.

This blog post, apart from discussing tiger shows at length, adds to the mix the interesting view that since the tigers in tiger shows are almost always sitting or sleeping, the photographic opportunities are less interesting, because there’s quite no subject like a moving tiger.

A small number is concerned about the potential cruelty of keeping the tiger in one place against its will. This really is the biggest criticism, when it is voiced, and frankly, impossible to defend.

At any other time, I would have been dead against this practice. But now, with the tiger on the brink of extinction, I strongly believe that the more people there are in India that have seen a tiger in the wild, the more instant recruits we have to the cause of their protection. I still can’t go all out to endorse it - something always seems wrong about it in hindsight, but while you’re experiencing it, those considerations tend to become subordinate to the beauty of what you have the privilege of beholding.

Of course, the thrill of stopping the jeep, killing the engine, and calculating the direction in which the tiger is moving from the origin and intensity of the alarm calls has no substitute. The first of our four safaris at Pench was an evening safari, and since there’s no tiger show in the evening, sitting and waiting when you hear alarm calls is really the only option. I enjoyed this part of the experience tremendously. But in most cases, as in ours, that thrill is eventually met with little success.

In the following three morning safaris, though, we found the same guides were less motivated to do any earnest tracking since a tiger show is more or less guaranteed (we saw them on all three days). For most tourists, simply seeing a tiger is enough, all other thrills and considerations be damned. There even are cases when tourists with 3-4 day reservations cut short their trips after they sight a tiger on Day 1, as if they had come there to check an item off someone else’s bucket list.

At the most fundamental level, the concept of a tiger show bothers me. However, in three tiger shows, we saw the family of tigers at unbelievably close quarters, in vastly different situations; and what has already been evidenced as a huge love for tigers grew a thousand fold.

Allow me to introduce the family. The tigress, called Collarwali for the radio collar some researchers fitted her with, is one of the cubs featured in Spy in the Jungle. She has three male and one female sub-adult cubs (about a year and a half old, so they’re almost full grown now). They will soon start to hunt on their own and leave their mother, but for now they tend to stay together in one place in the morning while their mother goes out to hunt.

On the first day we saw three male cubs in a relatively thin part of the forest, one sitting calmly in one place while the other two bounded around like giant kittens, mock fighting and playing.

On the second day, we saw all four cubs sitting in dense undergrowth. They were impossible to spot in the viewfinder of my camera, so I’d just point the camera where I knew they were and click, hoping they’d appear in the photo. There even were times when I couldn’t see them with my naked eye from just 10 feet away. That camouflage has to be seen to be believed. We were at one point only 6-8 feet away from one of them. That was the closest we got to a tiger on the trip.

Day three was the best sighting by far. For the first time in 8 years, a tiger show was happening on the distant Kala Pahad, a relatively inaccessible (except to 4x4s, which, luckily, we had – some other jeeps weren’t so lucky) and very picturesque hilltop. Collarwali and two of her cubs were lying right at the edge of a ridge covered in bamboo trees. An inhumanly steep descent and steep ascent by the elephant (who won a tonne of respect from us that day) took us to the spot. Just a few metres away was a fresh kill, a sambar deer.

There’s no other way to put this – the trip to Pench changed our lives, and we owe it to three tiger shows. Sure, we could have tried our luck with 4 evening safaris and the fleeting glimpse we may or may not have had of the tiger family (almost all sightings in Pench are of this family) crossing the path may or may not have felt worth more than three shows put together.

But instead of waiting potentially another year for 10 safaris before the 11th gave us our first really providential glimpse of a wild tiger, I’m glad I got to be touched now, to re-admit the tiger into my life, with renewed importance. Besides, we’re far from through with our mission. Bandhavgarh’s the next stop, and over there, providential is the only way to go.

For a whole day after we returned to Hyderabad, we were unable to think straight. We were re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, so to speak. Something about the forest and the tiger sightings had deeply affected us. Every night that we were in Pench after the first sighting, before I fell asleep I saw tigers in my mind’s eye with a new found clarity – like they had at last acquired a third dimension after years of being images on TV (and even IMAX) screens.

This was my truest existential crisis, if ever I’ve had one. And by some coincidence, this was the same time that Aircel started to run its Save Our Tigers campaign.

We hit Landmark and stocked up on a bunch of wildlife fiction and books about the tiger. Particularly enlightening was Valmik Thapar’s The Last Tiger: Struggling for Survival.

Faith in the Government and Project Tiger was the earliest casualty from most of my reading, and this book certainly flogs that dead horse a great deal, but to me the greatest value in anything I read is realised through the opinion it forces me to revisit. With Aditya Singh’s blog, it was about the role of tourism. With this book, among many things, it was whether humans and tigers can and should co-exist – the central issue in the debate over the Tribal Forest Rights Act.

Sunita Narain and Valmik Thapar don’t seem to see eye to eye on this (the book details a number of rather underhand things she has done to sideline him). Personally, I’m on Valmik’s side on this one, but you’ve got to wonder, who can you really trust any more? You can find her seemingly balanced view on the matter in this article for Business Standard.

Now I can’t and won’t get much more into what the book discusses, but would really urge anyone who feels strongly about this issue to read it. Most handy, though, is the list below [reproduced verbatim from the book, I’m positive Valmik won’t mind]:

Why do Tigers Die at the Hands of Poachers and Others?

1. as revenge against livestock kills;
2. by accident as poachers try for ungulates;
3. by intent and for commerce be it skin or bones;
4. orchestrated by mining mafias or those who want protected areas denotified and habitats destroyed.

The day I finished the book, I finally visited Aircel’s Save our Tigers website. Frankly, I was a little underwhelmed. Now, to be sure, I don’t hold Aircel or any other corporate to the highest standards of moral, ethical or social responsibility, but really, it’s about time people moved beyond the viral. Facebook and Twitter and whatnot are great, make no mistake, but please, oh please, give people a basis to form an opinion before asking them to spread the word. Putting up just three newspaper articles in your Be Informed section just doesn’t make the cut.

Summary and Reading List

For my part, as I begin to wind up this entry, I want to quickly mention a few subjects on which I would like you to form concrete opinions (along with relevant links that already appear in this post). Then please go ahead and spread the word whichever way you please.

1. The role of tourism in tiger conservation (Aditya Singh’s blog, particularly this post)
2. Pros and Cons of the Tiger Show (this blog post)
3. Tiger-Human conflict and the Tribal Bill (Valmik Thapar’s book, and Sunita Narain’s article)

Other links:

1. Article from Tehelka
2. Tiger – Spy in the Jungle
3. Aircel’s Save our Tigers campaign

Call to Action

After returning from Pench, I have strongly felt that the best way to do your bit for the tiger is to go see one in the wild so that you can discover, through the experience, what you’re willing to do for it. Like I said earlier in this very post, the more people there are in India that have seen a tiger in the wild, the more instant recruits we have to the cause of their protection.

Just as this idea occurred to me, I was pleasantly surprised to see Valmik Thapar mention in his book that after seeing the smile on Dr. Manmohan Singh’s face when he returned from his first tiger sighting at Ranthambhore, he instantly knew that something had touched the man inside. Valmik then casually suggests that it should be compulsory for all Prime Ministers and Chief Ministers to see a tiger in the wild so that they start to feel for it.

To that end, over the next few days, I want to lay the foundation for something along the lines of a Go See a Tiger in the Wild campaign. Anybody who wants to help, please drop me a line.

Finally, and quite strangely, to end this post, I want to choose the same words that I chose five years ago:

A lot of kids, somehow, manage to come up with the same boast about how their fathers once fought a tiger bare-handed and hang one of its claws around their necks. I guess that’s what makes them kids. While I shall strongly discourage my kids from making such claims about my bravery, I feel it’s my duty to protect the right of other kids to be able to tell that tale about their fathers rather than about their grandfathers. And their children about their fathers too. And it is my duty to protect the right of my children to hear it. And of my children’s children.

And of course, I’d defeat the cause if I didn’t stress the importance of that tale remaining a tale, at least in the interest of tiger claws staying where they belong – on the tiger.

Two Fridays ago, as Chandana and I were all set for a great weekend break in Kabini, with the additional bonus of briefly seeing Ravi in Bangalore for the first time in a year and a half since our wedding, an email with this ominous subject made its way to my inbox.

About Amol? About anyone, in my experience, has only gone as far as announcing that the person had been fired, or a relative of theirs had been hospitalised. But I don’t work with Amol or even live in the same country. The last I’d heard of him was that he was also at Penn State with Jawm.

I already knew, by elimination, what this would have to mean, but gluttons for evidence that we all are, I read on in disbelief. As some of us had probably heard, Amol Mupid had died in an accident three weeks earlier.

I immediately called Jawm, but it was news to him as well.

Amol wasn’t the first guy I knew from IITM who had died way too soon. Only a few months ago, Yarlagadda Sidhartha, a junior I remember well by face, had been found dead in Spain under mysterious circumstances. I had very few memories of him, though. I know for certain that we’d spoken. I remembered his voice, a polo shirt that is in my mind an undecided shade of green, black floaters, the way he walked, and the way he pedalled his bicycle. It was a total of maybe 5 seconds of memory footage. It upset me tremendously, but eventually, I moved on.

Amol was my batchmate and was in my hostel. I remember him a lot lot more. For the greater part of Friday, random memories of Amol kept springing to mind, each making me sadder.

There’s one reason very dear to me that I will never forget Amol Mupid. It is Right Now, the Godavari Hostel Nite 2004 video, that I had personally shot and edited, working with every single one of us seniors. I’ve seen it hundreds of times in the 5 years since I graduated. As I recollect it, the 3rd wing had been, without doubt, the most exciting bunch to shoot, and towering above them all in enthusiasm, was Amol Mupid.

I’m not just saying this now, but of the numerous clips that made up the film, I believe the most loved by people in our batch is the one around 4:58 where Amol is seen counting Shiwam’s ribs, and then shrugging in an extremely endearing smile after, curiously, stopping at five. The text reads right now thin men serve science.

As I replayed the video that day, I realised Amol was all over the place: heartily cheering Refugee’s goal (more appropriately, Patro’s miss) around 1:10, and duelling with Conda before throwing an interceding Saurabh onto a sleeping Bimari/Doma around 4:10.

I visited Amol’s Orkut scrapbook and saw a couple of RIPs, preceded, heartbreakingly, by someone who says Hi dude, whr r u??? Waiting for ur call since a long time, pls call me back...

I thought of leaving my own, but I didn’t know him well enough to say what I felt in just a line or two. I saw some of his photos. He looked pretty much the same.

I checked his Facebook profile as well, but that didn’t seem to reflect his demise in any visible way. A few hours later, Facebook suggested him as a friend. I thought of accepting, but couldn’t.

Somewhere in between, I remembered Amol’s middle name is Jitendra. Amol Jitendra Mupid. Wasn’t he also called Killer? In fact he was. The cartoon of him in the Godav Magazine suddenly came to mind – spiky hair and round eyes and all. He’s saying Kill! Kill! Ashish (Chair) is saying Burn! Burn! The context escapes me.

Amol had a voice fit for heavy metal. And an unforgettably unrestrained laugh. I seem to remember both of us talking at the mess over filter coffee, though I don’t know about what. Considering he was in his workshop uniform, it would have to have been in our first year. The single strap of his bag is slung diagonally across his chest, and he’s pouring the coffee from the tumbler into the bowl.

His voice. I seem to remember finding a specific use for it. What was it? Why do I remember it so well?

Did I ever borrow a CS textbook from Amol to prepare for my AGRE? Did he borrow one from the library for me? I have no way of knowing if I owed him that little bit extra. I hope I did.

And then I remember. Mupid’s voice. First year, Hostel Nite freshie play. A slightly unimaginative plot around our various seniors and where they are 20 years on, well into marriages with kids and even the odd infidelity. We needed someone to be Abhijit Datta, the much loathed hostel sports captain and rightly condemned traitor in some institute election episode.

Incidentally, in our story, 20 years later, Datta had yet to escape from the clutching hold of his Naval Architecture degree, and was still Datta the sailor man! You may have laughed if you saw it. In real life, though, Datta left Godav and IITM the very next semester. He’s hardly been missed.

We needed someone to imitate his famed death call to freshies in our initial one month of ragging – the words of which I’m happy to omit here. And we hit upon Mupid, who was gold.

Two weeks later, I’m convinced that’s all I remember of Amol, and I’m now finally ready to speak to him.

Amol Jitendra Mupid. I barely knew you beyond these memories. I didn’t know your dreams and your fears, what you had made of your past and what you were making of your future. I don’t know what plans have been cut short by your untimely death, and that actually makes me much sadder than if I could have had a concrete measure of its cruelty and injustice .

Your Orkut profile says you were committed. My heart especially goes out to whoever she is, her relationship to you as yet unlegitimised by society, yet her mourning, doubtless, as strong as that of the parents and sister you’ve left behind.

Equally, you’ve left behind some excellent and dedicated friends who’re working hard to help your family in whatever way they can.

I don’t know what plans our batch has for a reunion and who may or may not attend, but where I may not have thought about it before, if I do attend one, I will sorely miss meeting you.

Thanks for that smile and that laugh and that voice. And that book, maybe? And for counting only to five.

Any change we wish to see can only be achieved by aggregate. And, most of all, you only know you’re dreaming big enough when you are willing to place the results of your effort beyond the limits of your own lifetime.

For every do-gooder that ever attempted to take on the biggest problems that infect our society, we have a cached reply: It’s always been this way. You can’t change a whole nation’s mindset. Of course, it does nothing to deter the more resolute, so they go out against the tide and learn for themselves, returning, if alive, unwittingly brainwashed from the bludgeoning, recruited for life for the cynics’ cause.

It is my belief that most people who want to make a real difference fail because they start out with too much good in mind. For whatever reason, the wisdom of starting out small is lost on a whole generation. Perhaps because the appreciation of succeeding small is lost on the one immediately before it.

There are all sorts of problems that drive us up a wall on a daily basis – some a lot more than others. What makes some of them more attractive is that they weren’t always this way, and therefore, are perhaps easier to solve.

Let’s take, for instance, driving on the wrong side of the road. I know every urban Indian takes some sort of perverse pride in his or her own city being the bad traffic capital, so it should come as no surprise that I come bearing Hyderabad’s flag, waving it strongly, and outshouting the “Come to Bangalore da”s and other equivalents.

In my own unbiased assessment, though, prevalent as it may be in all big cities, Hyderabad really takes wrong side driving to another level. My bigger point, however, is that things weren’t always this way, and we’ve all seen them go from bad to worse in our own lifetimes, heck, adulthoods even.

If there’s one thing in India that’s slower to change than the laws, it’s perhaps the textbooks. So just as I learnt in Class 1 Social Studies in 1988 that “Keep to the left is the rule of the road,” I’m sure children today continue to be taught to parrot the same words in the same dragging chorus. When they’re old enough to notice the disconnect, they can say it was always like that in their lifetime, but we don’t have the excuse.

Keep to the left was indeed the rule of the road. And I’ve seen it gradually degenerate into an apologetic recommendation.

If I were to put dates to it, I’d say the year 2002 was stage 1 – when the change was met with Surprise. By 2004, we were at the Condoning stage, rationalising the misdeeds of others by citing virtually absent gaps in the median, but rarely imitating them. Stage 3 came in 2006 – Complicity – accommodating and aiding people driving on the wrong side, getting out of their way passively, but still not imitating on a large scale. Stage 4 was Conversion, large-scale, irretrievable crossing over to the other camp and collectively discovering the high of ill gotten convenience. We were here by 2007.

Stage 5 is the goddamn point of no return, and I’m sad to say I finally saw it happen in late 2008. Legitimisation. I saw a cop regulating wrong side traffic along with all the others, stopping them as he let the other platoons pass in turn, and then signalling the idiots to carry on again.

This issue has been the singular focus of my shamefully irregular conversations with the Traffic Police since 2007. I pointed out from the very beginning that this isn’t a specifically recognised offence and never got anything more than a helpless smile. Sure there is the ever vague dangerous/rash and negligent driving offence, but the line between negligent and deliberate has long been crossed, and unfortunately, this bad habit isn’t turning out to be quite as dangerous for the idiots who have it as it really should.

The ancient Motor Vehicles Act of 1988, which still applies today, clearly couldn’t have foreseen that the most fundamental rule would one day be stood on its head. So, in all fairness, I don’t blame the lawmakers.

The most I’ve been able to do so far about this is make my displeasure known in as uncivilised a gesture as the offenders deserve. Let’s just say I’m empowered by the finger, but increasingly, I’m aware, this solution doesn’t scale, and neither do the violent daydreams that play out in my head.

The newspaper this morning carried a glimmer of hope.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Soon-traffic-violations-to-invite-hefty-fines/articleshow/4325835.cms

If the article is to be believed, a major revision to the Motor Vehicles Act is on the cards. Though I'm not thrilled about its very short-term motivation, namely, to smooth Delhi traffic for the Commonwealth Games, I guess any change at all is welcome.

Clearly, they have got a couple of things right: they want to crack down on driving with a cellphone very seriously (if I were them, I would add some more emphasis on those idiots on bikes courting spondylitis with their hands-free-but-not-face-free cellphone driving); and fine amounts are being made high enough to be a serious deterrent. For now I'm going to ignore that the higher the fine, the more attractive the lower bribe looks. We're talking specifically about framing the law right now, so I'd like to avoid descending into the usual debate about its enforcement or lack thereof.

I'm serious about petitioning the right people in Delhi to update the list of recognised traffic offences to include some of the more modern additions  to the Idiots’ canon. Off the top of my head, I have:

1. Driving on the wrong side of the road, obviously.
2. Blocking the free left turn lane at an intersection (a cause that Sameer Mehta took up in 2007 with some success, more impact, and even more awareness).

I welcome suggestions from anyone reading this entry. Keep in mind, these need to be tangible and provable offences even in the chaos of urban Indian traffic, not just something transplanted from some other country that you wish was a law in India as well.

Another valid point the article raises is that speed limits are ridiculously low, and something seriously needs to be done about this. I'd mentioned this several times to the Police but never got an answer that satisfied me. For example, the posted speed limit on the Old Bombay Highway is 30, on the new Outer Ring Road is 40, and further away from home, on the new Bangalore-Madras highway is 50. On these roads, I consider the safe top speeds to be, respectively, 70, 120 and 100. Your opinions may vary, but either way, you're likely to think the posted speed limit is at least half of what it really should be.

Irrespective of how well these laws are enforced, I really believe we need to give them the opportunity to become laws in the first place. So if you’d like to help, or know someone else who would, pass on the word.

For my part, I promise that if this effort ever takes the form of an email forward or one of those insufferable online petitions or Orkut communities or anything on Facebook that you can become a fan of, it wouldn’t have been my idea.

As for the textbooks, I guess by making the recommendation a rule again, we save them the trouble of changing at all.

Update: After a prolonged internet search, which makes me look like quite the fool for not having discovered it on earlier attempts, I found that driving on the wrong side is in fact covered by the Act. To be precise, MVA 119/177 stipulates a Rs. 100 fine. The larger part of my rant is now moot, but I guess there is still some point to identifying newer offences that need to be included in the act. Further, given how popular the practice has become now, it needs to be among the 20 or so main offences that are printed on the reverse of traffic challans and that the cops are specifically instructed to crack down on.

For a couple of months now, since Microsoft’s transport coordinators, in their new overzealous adherence to old schedules, cranked the lever all the way up to Needlessly Rigid, there have been no stops on demand on the morning shuttle routes. What this means is that even after I’ve walked the usual half kilometre to the Road #3 Banjara Hills main road, I’m still another half kilometre away from either of the nearest stops.

I could walk downhill and meet the bus at Nagarjuna Circle at 8:34 or I could hitch a ride uphill and meet it at the Masjid at 8:37. That’s not the choice I’m referring to, though. I’ve been an uphill guy for a while now, simply for the extra few minutes it buys me.

Every morning, I must very precisely mime my way into a short distance lift. To the whizzing two-wheeler on a good wide road pre-rush hour, that gives me just under a second of eye contact.

The thing in India is (speaking from several frustrating experiences at Gajendra Circle, IIT Madras and elsewhere), rather than just drive on, those without the slightest intention of giving you a lift will politely and untruthfully mime back that they’re turning left or right and so can’t help you. In my case, the ride I’m looking for is so short that it doesn’t matter if or where they’re turning – my stop will come first anyway. So in that little time, I have to establish that I’m just looking to be dropped around the corner. How to mime this isn’t the challenge I’m referring to either.

The trouble begins after some kind chap actually stops. In a glance that lasts under a quarter of a second, I have to profile him by an uncountable crowd of parameters to pick one of three languages in which to speak to him. And I hasten to add, without offending him.

It’s a dilemma that is, I like to think, quite uniquely Hyderabadi. For here, we have two local languages that are actually perfectly equally prevalent with no bad blood between them. In case you were wondering, Hindi/Urdu is certainly more a local language in Hyderabad than a national link that we tolerate for the convenience of the out-of-towners. And then there is English, the language of prestige.

I don’t need to explain where offence enters the picture, but a little story may help. My cousin Hemanth got married last weekend, and Amma helped arrange for our family friend Jaywant Naidu, an accomplished Hindustani classical Hawaiian guitarist, to perform at his wedding reception on Sunday. When the performance was done,  Amma walked up to the sound mixer, a fair, bearded, elderly gentleman, who unlike the rest of the ensemble, didn’t seem headed towards the buffet, and asked him in her well rehearsed nawabi Hyderabadi Urdu accent, if he’d like to have his dinner.

Calmly, but with much purpose in his eyes, he replied in the clipped British-Indian accent, presumably of a 1950s boarding school education in Panchgani, “I’ll be waiting for my boss, thank you very much. Once he arrives, we’ll all eat together.”

It was, as a sentiment, distinctly servile, or at least accepting of hierarchy, and not very unlike any member of his sound-mixing fraternity. But if there was any ego his situation would afford him, it would be to establish that any presumption that placed the English language beyond him was, well, misplaced.

With embarrassment, the subject and the language were changed.

So where was I? Quarter-second, three languages. And I pick one.

If you must know, these are as many things as I’ve known myself to randomly evaluate in the process:

Nature of two-wheeler, tucked or untucked shirt, trousers or jeans, presence of ID card lanyard, nature of backpack/briefcase/bag, nature of spectacle frames, existence of facial hair, trim of beard, trim of moustache, religious headgear, North Indian tilak/South Indian bottu or vibudhi, colour of hair dye, paan stains on teeth, complexion, eye lining.

I’m sure there’re more that I can’t immediately recollect. Either way, it is a complex decision tree, and I’ve been politically incorrect enough in listing the parameters in a way that doesn’t particularly conceal what they might indicate, so I’m not risking too much by explaining the process any further.

My point, though, is simply to attempt to acknowledge and formalise that there is a method to class profiling, and no matter how little any of us younger generation types may truly care about a person’s religion or caste or economic background when we interact with them, we are nonetheless class-aware.

Even 5 years ago, I’d have said I wasn’t proud of how I accomplished this very accurate classification at all, far less on a daily basis. Now, of course, I’m a man of the world, (and of India, more to the point), and realise there’s no shame in recognising external differences as long as you’re sound in your mind about which side of the door of judgement to leave them on.

The reason I’m reflecting enough upon this to write about it today, 20 months since my last blog entry, is that for the first time, earlier this week, I did it wrong. It wasn’t a hideous misjudgement with terrible consequences – what’s the worst that could happen here after all? I chose to speak to the guy in English, but he replied to me in Telugu. I then immediately switched to Telugu and got on.

When I had to get off and told him again in Telugu to pull over to the left, he pulled over. As he left, he reprimanded me, “Telugosthe Telugulo maatlaadachchukadaa?” (If you know Telugu you could have spoken in Telugu, right?), and sped off.

This far, I’ve found that the only way you could offend someone is if they knew English whereas you had pegged them as the vernacular type and they were sensitive about it. Through my little failure and the little scolding it supposedly warranted, in this moment I suddenly became conscious of the fact that I’d been class profiling people the last few months. And I just had to write about it, bar set by 20 months of silence be damned.

Oh, and by the way, if the first line didn’t make it plain, among the many things I did in the last 20 months was get married a little over a year ago! Her name is Chandana, and she’s the best thing about my life.

For the numerous oblique and cryptic references on this blog that she’s patiently been the subject of for over 5 years, the very least I can do now is the blogospheric equivalent of holding her hand and shouting from the rooftops, “This is my wife, my mirror and window, my meaning and purpose, my reason and faith, and everything the world could aspire to hold, and I’m crazy as hell in love with her!”

Consider it done.

Given the many many hours I have spent organising and tagging my collection (manually at first and using a bulk tag editor later), I used to think I was intimately familiar with the ID3v2 format. But something got me thinking a while back, and when I finally crossed the threshold and was consumed enough by the thought to just shut up, wake up, and look up the standard, I was rather pleasantly surprised to see what a narrow window of the format all our media players and jukebox programs and bulk tag editors expose.

Indeed, in the interest of keeping things simple, most programs concern themselves with the obvious Track Number, Title, Album, Artist, and provide the standard interfaces to get to the more obscure, like Genre, Year, Album Art, Lyrics, Sampling Rate, Bitrate - stuff on the basis of which users seldom organise their music. I would have much preferred giving Rating and Play Count (that modern programs, taking a cue from iPod+iTunes, shove in my face by default) a miss. This is owing to a historic personal revulsion at the culture that overpersonalises, and then overquantifies personal popularity. It's the reason I never use the My Documents folder or any of its derivatives, and the reason I categorically disable My Recent Documents. The much needed dropping of My in Windows Vista has made me only slightly friendlier, but I still don't use them; and as if to preserve the zero sum, the introduction of ratings for all media files in Vista has made me swear off the details view altogether. But as usual, I digress. I must mention the Rating and Play Count here only because I discovered they are actually stored in the ID3 tag, and not separately in the program's library structure the way iTunes stores its downloaded album art.

Moving on, the starting point for my thinking about all this was that though it suits me perfectly, a collection that can be organised and more importantly navigated only by artist, title and album, must be woefully inconvenient, especially to the vast majority of Indians who listen primarily to film music. Sure, Title and Album are fairly obvious. But how does one quickly select songs sung by Mohd. Rafi or Yesudas or composed by Salil Chaudhry or Ilaiyaraja or written by Majrooh Sultanpuri or Vairamuthu? I've so far only exposed the contention of playback singer, composer and lyricist for the Artist field. I'm sure people make their personal choices, often between playback singer and composer (let's face it, lyricists are rather neglected in comparison), or otherwise crowd the Artist or Title field with as much information as they may want to be able to later search for (in the process, they seriously break the usefulness of sorting by either of these fields). But consider the kind of additional knowledge that participants of Antakshari-type shows may be expected to have of each song: the actors it was picturised on, the director of the film, the mood of the song (I know I'm taking this rather far). How could one include all such information in the ID3 tag?

Further, consider that those who listen to classical music may care for more than just the artist: In both Hindustani and Carnatic music, the raag(am) is absolutely key information. Taal(am) may matter to some listeners. Accompanying artists may matter to some others. Composer is especially important in Carnatic music, though subordinate to performing artist and barely a contender for the Artist field. How would the ID3 tag include all this information too?

Filled with these questions, I sought to find out how truly global the ID3 standard inherently was, or otherwise at least how extensible it was. I was pleased to find, as I had mentioned earlier, that it is a remarkably well thought out format, and is capable of storing a wealth of information. Many of the so called frames readily step up to cover some of the things I've raised here. But not all. And that fact alone does expose a distinct western bias in the specification of the standard, for many of the western Antakshari-equivalent trivia fields find a place in the format. However, considering that, like all good formats, it has its share of private or reserved fields for future use, I suspect it already is sufficiently capable of being global.

What that might take is identifying and standardising a mapping of (localised names of) fields of interest in each genre to frames declared or reserved in the ID3 standard. This would be so applications can decide which core frames to show by default for each genre, and by what name. Of course, since ID3v2, we're no longer bound to the genres specified in ID3v1.1, which means we're free to define our own. So that's another piece of standardisation to get right!

I'm not out to provide complete answers just as yet, but I foresee I might pursue this at another time, perhaps by joining the ID3 developer group. For now, though, I want to share a link to the ID3 v2.3.0 Standard, and especially Section 4: Declared ID3v2 Frames.

Give this a good reading and join me in marvelling at how nearly complete it is - from accounting for covers and remixes to a rather comprehensive set of frames for people involved; from the live recorded western classical music-friendly separation of tags for Section, Title, and Subtitle or Description Refinement, all the way to audio level information, Playlist Delay and the various event timing codes.

Then think of some gaps that remain. I found it rather irritating, for instance, that the frame for Key, which our raag(am) could easily have piggybacked on, is restricted to 3 characters, as that is all it takes to specify it in western classical music. So we either define a new frame or come up with airport-codesque 3-letter abbreviations for all our known raag(am)s. You may notice that the BPM frame could well have lent itself to taal(am), except that it is a numerical string. The standard does not specify a string length limit but I presume the numericalness of the string must somehow be enforced, making this unsuitable for the purpose. As for the ambitious list of extra Antakshari-friendly fields for film music, I'm sure we can dig into the extensibility of the standard.

I think there is tremendous potential in the idea of extending the ID3 standard and developing the idea of genre pages along the lines of character code pages. Internationalisation efforts in the last decade or more have made the world a far more equal place. Music, being very nearly as diverse the world over as language, couldn't be too far down in the laundry list now, could it?

I'll waste no words bemoaning how little notice we take of all the design and engineering ingenuity that surrounds us every minute of every day, especially that which involves moving parts. Instead, I'll make an example in my own life of the wonder that it may take no more than a hand assembled lock past its prime to unlock.

As an aside, I instinctively presumed this lock may have been made in Aligarh, UP. This is because in all the scattered memories I have of Sheel and Link padlocks from my childhood and Alba locks (very specifically!) in IITM, somewhere in the details of 7-lever, 6-lever and 5-lever is also the consistent appearance of the inscribed text, Aligarh (U.P.), parentheses and all. I just checked on the net, and yes, there is an unnatural concentration of lock-makers in Aligarh. Why, even the All India Lock Manufacturers Association is based there! Some other time, I'm going to research the history of that fact a bit. As for the actual door lock I'm speaking of, I have no way of telling if it was made in Aligarh or not. Maybe their expertise is only in padlocks, which, given their greater popularity in India, is enough reason to base the whole association there! Who's to know?

The problem wasn't with the lock itself, but with the bolt above it that's supposed to spring into the hole in the door frame by itself when the door shuts, and retract when  the latch turns. That, of course, is simple enough, and it was no challenge to set that right. However,  when I opened the whole assembly, the lock mechanism caught my eye and I was rather surprised to see how differently it works from how I had imagined.

In moments when I had half-heartedly pondered the working of locks in the past, I arrived at some intuitive approximation to what I now more formally know are called pin and tumbler locks where pins line up on a shear line to allow the cam to turn. I also know now that I had not earlier accounted for the extra pin (or extra two, if there is a master key) that sits above (or below, and I shall get to that in a minute) each pin to prevent turning when there is no key or when there is a key that just lets all pins fall below (or above) the shear line or one that pushes up (or down) all pins over the shear line. It will help to see this howstuffworks page (and the rest in the series) to get an idea of what I'm talking about. Having seen this page, the difference between the orientation of locks in the US and India struck me, and I'm quick to add the parenthetical alternative now when I describe it. The howstuffworks page, understandably, assumes the key is inserted with the notches facing up, as in the US. What I've added in speaks for the locks in India.

The problem with those moments of pondering, of course, was that I allowed myself to be satisfied with one explanation and never thought again about the rich variety of locks we have. The lever based padlocks that are common in India are actually pretty different (as of course, are the keys) and the one inside my door lock was lever based as well. There doesn't appear to be a howstuffworks page on these locks, so I urge everyone reading this to go off on the journey of discovery for themselves and join me in my realm of the micro-incrementally enlightened. I certainly have no intention of spoiling it for you.

With that near-spiritual awakening now behind me, I sought to learn as much about the different locks I have seen as I can - beginning with those most confounding combination locks that I have only seen for real in the US in locker rooms (and in movies and the like on safes). I'm embarrassed to say I had no clue, until now, how to even use those things, far less how they worked. I always thought they were like miniature egg timers. I never asked. It's odd enough being the locker-room-cultural misfit that kept a towel on. I had no intention of adding ignorance about the locks to that!

How many of you remember the program Surabhi (made and co-hosted by Siddharth Kak) from many many years ago, telecast Sunday nights on Doordarshan? This was the program that made Renuka Shahane a household name, that was (along with Girish Karnad's Turning Point) the paragon of wholesome educational Doordarshan programming that almost everyone has forgotten once existed. It was probably the first TV programme to have computer generated animation in the opening sequence (of a scene of a temple and a classical dancer which the camera panned and dollied happily about!). And it was the program that is single-handedly responsible for the introduction of the competition postcard, although the fad is itself more than dead now.

For those too young to know, there was a time TV programmes (starting with Surabhi in the early 90's) had little quizzes or lucky draws, where the audience were supposed to snail-mail their entries on a postcard. This started to seriously hurt the postal service, which at the time sold yellow postcards at a heavily subsidised 15 paise each, primarily for the rural poor. To counter its abuse by people clearly rich enough to own a TV set, the blue 2-rupee competition postcard was introduced. All TV programmes were instructed to insist that entries be sent only on these blue postcards. Needless to say, there is now email and specially overcharged SMS serving the same purpose.

Back to Surabhi. Every week, at the end of the show, there was a question that related somehow to the features shown. The features themselves were usually on the arts or crafts or cultures of some little corner of India, and made for an excellent (like you wouldn't believe) one hour. After the week's question was asked, the postcards with correct answers to the previous week's question were put in a huge pile on the floor and a few lucky winners would be drawn by the two hosts as well as by some kids who were brought on the show just for this purpose (and subjected to the usual What's your name beta? Which class are you studying in? and the like). Most of the postcards were yellow, as I believe Surabhi had just about gone off air when the competition postcard was introduced. Some of the senders had been clever enough to decorate their postcards to catch the kids' attention.

So much for that whole prologue. What I'm getting to is the one time there was no big pile. There was one episode in which the previous week's question received precisely one correct answer. The question, relating, doubtless, to some ancient local craft, involved Siddharth Kak holding a fancy old handmade (and rather exquisite looking) lock and asking how it was supposed to be unlocked. Even in the absence of the explicit barring of so and so and their family and friends from participation, the entire nation had coughed up precisely one person who knew. I still remember the incredibly neat diagram that was on the back of the winning postcard. This was just the guy who knew how to unlock it. It scares me to think of the designer.

This was strangely appropriate, as I happen to personally regard cryptography and network security to be among the most significant mathematically grounded and intellectually stimulating fields of study in Computer Science. Evidently, then, security with moving parts is just as much the reserve of the brightest minds around.

At the end of it all I feel so very enriched by the collective ingenuity of civilisations of the world. I see the roots of our current non-moving-parts engineering wisdom in what they made with moving parts (and no less wisdom by any means) hundreds of years ago. I know this thing with locks is not a fascination that will die any time soon. Neither will it, I assure you, be subverted into non-constructive lock-picking!

It works! And it isn't half bad!

For those who've been keeping track, this is the second thing I've changed about my website or blog on account of working at Microsoft. I don't usually consider myself under any sort of moral compulsion to eat the dog food, drink the kool-aid, or just plain self-host in my personal life. But today, though I had earlier resisted the change even when I saw a rather compelling need to depart from managing my blog entirely from the browser, curiosity got the better of me, and here I finally am, embracing a product that I'm happy to say Microsoft got right.

If you're wondering, the first time was when I migrated search within my website over to Windows Live Search. Other than the bonus of allowing me to search just my site, rather than the whole domain (consequently my brother's site as well) as I was forced to with Google, I find it perfectly equivalent for the rather modest purpose I give it.

Windows Live Writer is the desktop blogging software that, to me, captures perfectly where Microsoft is today: straddling the comfort of its place on the desktop and the uncertainty of its place on the web. In beta, and rightly so, for that's where we are, on the transition to a new balance.

I'll say no more today, for I'm scarcely even in alpha myself, where finding a voice in the technical blogosphere is concerned, but having stuck my head out even this one time, I'm hoping I'll find the inclination, or at least an obligation, to return.