Nitin Khanna

I was once described as a philosopher programmer. I think I'd like to describe myself as a lifelong student.

[Book Review][Book Notes] A Room of One’s Own

I read this book, over the course of a month and a half, starting on July 1st and finishing it on August 13th, 2016. I read it because of the Bechdel test. I wanted to know the background of that idea. Woolf, unaware of the webcomic she would inspire almost a century later, gave a couple of lectures which are transcribed and expanded upon in this book.

I did not read the foreword of the book, for forewords are for and by editors. People do not need to know how to decipher the hidden meaning between the lines in order to enjoy prose. I dived directly into Woolf’s thoughts on the subject and her winding arrival at the conclusions presented in the book. There are things I agree with and things I slightly disagree with. My notes will say as much.

These notes are presented here, more for me, than for you. I want a record of the things I read and the thoughts I… thought… while reading this book. I hope to come back to this page often and review and revise my thoughts and notes.

A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf

“And thus by degrees was lit, halfway down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse.”

Woolf notes a very curious thing – that food is rarely ever mentioned by novelists. She believes that luncheons and dinners are not just for the witty things said, or the interactions the characters experience. So she challenges that norm by describing the food she had at a particular lunch and the effects it had on her. But she had an ulterior motive to it – she wanted to show the almost pedestrian food women’s colleges had in her time, so as to show that even something as important as lunch is rationed and poorer than it would be for a men’s college.

p.11

“Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction.”

Oh, such a wonderful line, and so true. This book is technically marked as fiction (even though it is an essay and is thus non-fiction). Yet almost everything in it is fact, which makes it all the more wonderful. It reminds me of The Mezzanine, a book by Nicholson Baker, where he painstakingly describes a lunch break. That book too, is fiction, but it is almost entirely based on facts, which makes it a strange and wonderful read.

p.16

“All was dim, yet intense too, as if the scarf which the dusk had flung over the garden were torn asunder by star or sword.”

A lot of my notes are just about wonderful imagery.

p.17

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

Ah, another maxim.

p.18

(How to describe gossip)

p.19

“We burst out in scorn at the reprehensible poverty of our sex.”

That is the centrality of Woolf’s issue with the current state of affairs regarding women. They are indeed poor. Once the woman was pushed into the kitchen and the home, there was no need for them to have money of their own. Man became the provider of goods and money and that was where women lost so much power and control. It’s coming back, slowly.

p.21

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p.23

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p.24

“Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor?”

p.25

“London was like a workshop. London was like a machine.”

p.26

“… the aloe that flowers once in a hundred years would flower twice before I could set pen to paper.”

She’s talking about how long it would take her to read all the books written by men about women. Indeed, men are obsessed with writing about women, mainly to prove them wrong.

p.27

“les femmes sont extrêmes, elles sont meilleures ou pires que hommes”

translation – women are extreme, they are better or worse than men
Oddly, it is true. Hell hath no fury than a woman scorned. Yet, when women are better, they are infinitely better than men, as is proven often by the Indian school system.

p.29

“Had he been laughed at, to adopt the Freudian theory, in his cradle by a pretty girl?”

p.31

astrachan
Noun
  1. a fur of young lambs, with lustrous, closely curled wool, from Astrakhan.

p.31

“They had been written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth.”

All those books written by men about women are worthless to a woman trying to study women because they are colored by the resentment those men have towards women.

p.32

On this page, Woolf feels angry towards the men psychoanalyzing and expounding on women. She feels that their constant categorizing of women as inferior is wrong and hurtful. So she rejects their theories outright and says that their books are worthless to her.

This should be our response to Western attacks on Indian religions and mythology. Ignore them and forge your own. If the framework to be followed has been defined by them, so be it. But instead of trying to explain their flaws, simply make your own assertions and let those stand the scrutiny of people. Add a new voice, instead of parroting their claims and then defending against them.

p.32

This page has a wonderful description of how Woolf sees the anger of men and we can see her anger rising in response to that anger. This is the face of feminism as we see it today. It is just anger, legitimate anger. But it is seen as anger. It is not seen as the just response that it is to the anger of men towards women. Why have men been angry with women for so long? Do they want no progress for women? Do they never want to see a woman have the morals of a man? Even that question puts women in the light of men and so, is wrongly put forth.

p.33

“The professors…were angry.”

p.33

“When I read what he wrote about women I thought, not of what he was saying, but of himself.”

This is the key to what Rajiv Malhotra does and he is criticized even for that. Why should he not psychoanalyze the psychoanalysts of Indian culture? What gives them the right to do so but doesn’t allow him to do the same?

p.34

“Yet he was angry. I knew that he was angry by this token.”

p.34

“Life is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle.”

p.34

“There is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination.”

p.35

“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

p.35

“…was not merely the cry if wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself.”

That is what men are most afraid of when a woman stands up for herself – that they will be suppressed by the simple act of her trying to define herself.

p.35

“And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority…over other people. “

This is the perfect example of how the British felt that they had the right to rule over the rest of the world. Frankly, raising this feeling in a people is very important for a country.

p.35

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An unintended consequence of feminism may well be that boys will actually mature, instead of growing up to be manboys who are mollycoddled by their wives as much as they are by their mothers. From this passage, it would seem that Woolf is trying to show how feeble men really are. They are emotional wrecks just waiting to happen. Well, bring about a culture of equality and men will have to learn to fend for themselves emotionally, maybe even learn to share their feelings with other men.

p.36

“How is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?”

Man’s dominion over his home is as much a definition of himself as how he operates in public.

p.36

“Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are driven by instincts which are not within their control.”

That is a shame and a blessing. Fools like Trump can easily control them for their means and men like Gandhi can rouse them into rebellion for the greater good. Can not a body of people each think for themselves? Not often. Man is a social animal, true, but an animal nonetheless. Animals think in packs and often, one animal’s flaws take the entire pack down a path of destruction.

p.38

“Moreover, in a hundred years, women will have ceased to be the protected sex.

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.”

This is an interesting passage, for its predictions. Let’s see if they come true. Supposing this was written around 1927 (copyrighted 1929), the due date is 2027 and already, most of what Woolf writes about has been achieved by women.

p.40

“Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history.”

Such a sad plight – being the centerpiece of a magnificent story, but flung to the side as soon as a man arrives on the scene.

p.43

photo4
This passage right here is what inspires me. It is not just the Elizabethian woman who faces this dire situation – that in which she does not record in her diary, or write poems and plays, or describe her house – it is also the everyman of almost every generation. My father and brother and mother and wife, none of them have a diary of their own. No means do they have of passing on any knowledge of their existence to our children. Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram are not going to be around forever and they do not suffice as records of our existence. We need more. We need to fall back on the traditional ways of recording our lives and we need to find new ways of telling our tales to our future generations. That is the only way that some time in the future someone, somewhere will have our names on their lips when they want to refer to our lives. That stranger is very important to me.

p.45

“Mary Russell Mitford”

What enmity did Woolf have to this woman?

p.45

“Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.”

People sure have never liked cats!

p.46

“Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?”

Beautiful use of hyphens.

p.48

“Ce chien est à moi”

Translation – this dog is mine
Men wants to own everything, want their name on everything.

p.50

“The chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of – Pericles”

Why is it that being talked of is as negative thing a thing as any? Why must men assume that if a woman is famous, she must be famous for the wrong reasons? Why do men assume that women are always pure and worthy and need to be hidden behind curtains? I’m watching a TV show nowadays with the missus – Criminal Minds. The protagonists work for the FBI and go around catching serial killers, child abductors and rapists. Almost always, if the villain of the episode is a woman – which is rarely the case – a solid reason is given for the woman to turn to crime – a lost child, a rape, a vicious trauma. Men, however, seem to want to kill and rape and destroy for no good reason. They are supposedly of the mindset to want to do these things. That is a rather wrong thing to assume.

p.50

“Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them.”

p.50

“To write a work of genius is almost always a feat if
prodigious difficulty.”

Ah, so true.

p.51

“The indifference of the world which…men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility. “

A genius man faces indifference, a genius woman, hostility. Almost as if the public asks, “Why must this man be smarter than us?” and then, “How dare this woman be smarter than us?”

p.52

“And happily in this age of biography the two pictures often do complete each other, so that we are able to interpret the opinions of great men not only by what they say, but by what they do. “

Is Woolf suggesting that Mr. Oscar Browning is having an illegitimate affair with a boy?

p.53

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That is the sad thing about bad things said by people about others – someone else down the line tends to use those words for their own purpose. Something I was reading recently, though I don’t remember the source – words are a weak source of information, because the person who writes them is not there to defend their meaning somewhere along the line. I think this was Socrates, critiquing writing as a means of knowledge transfer.

p.54

“Her mind must have been strained and her vitality lowered by the need of opposing this, of disproving that.”

This happens even to this day and age. Actresses in India are asked to defend themselves in strong roles, or asked to comment upon someone else’s criticism of their art. The answer, ‘I have no comment’ is not accepted and reporters hound them for a comment. Why should a woman have to defend a good role? Why should an actor have to defend any role? Why is the answer, ‘let my art speak for itself’, not enough?

p.55

“Unfortunately, it is precisely the men or women of genius who mind most what is said of them. Remember Keats. Remember the words he had cut on his tombstone.”

What did Keats have on his tombstone?
Answer – “Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water.”

p.56

“Florence Nightingale shrieked aloud in her agony. “

p.56

This page is an excellent example of how a writer can copy down an entire work of some other author and thus have it live on, both in the original and in this form, so that if for some reason the former may be destroyed, the latter can bear witness for future generations of this wonderful writing.

p.59

“The adulation of the toadies”

p.60

“Mrs. Behn was a middle class woman with all the plebeian virtues of humour, vitality and courage;”

p.63

“Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.”

If you get it for free, you don’t appreciate it enough. Money gives it a stature, a dignity.

p.65

“This, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle class woman began to write.”

p.65

“Earn five hundred a year by your wits.”

This, more than anything, is Woolf’s appeal to women, according to my reading of this book – do not wait for someone to open that door for you. Go forth and push it yourself. Do not wait for an aunt to give you an inheritance. Earn that wage from your craft and you will suddenly have the freedom to be who you want to be.

p.66

“To Jane Austen there was something discreditable in writing Pride and Prejudice.”

p.67

“She will write of herself where she should write of her characters.”

Woolf says that Charlotte Bronte wrote too much of herself in Jane Eyre instead of writing more about the character. This would be because Charlotte’s frustration with her life and its limitations would drive her to ‘write in rage’. It is important for the author to divest completely of their frustrations and issues and start afresh with their characters, because those characters are completely different people from the author and must be treated as such. Good writing advice.

p.69

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Excellent commentary about how we perceive novels as readers

p.71

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p.71

“what holds them together in these rarest instances of survival (I was thinking of War and Peace) is something that one calls integrity, though it has nothing to do with paying one’s bills or behaving honorably in an emergency. What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth.”

p.72

“They wrote as women write, not as men write.”

p.74

“It was a flaw in the center that had rotted them. She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.”

p.74

“It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure. “

p.76

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

Universities are funny places. They had odd rules in
Woolf’s time, such as – women were not allowed into libraries without permission.

p.76

“Habit facilitates success”

Now there’s a good quote!

p.76

“Sedulous
Slovenly”

Nice words.

p.76

“Freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art.”

p.77

“A book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built into arcades and domes. “

p.77

“But these are difficult questions which lie in the
twilight of the future. I must leave them, if only because they stimulate me to wander from my subject into trackless forests where I shall be lost and, very likely, devoured by wild beasts.”

p.77

“There are Jane Harrison’s books on Greek archaeology; Vernon Lee’s books on aesthetics; Gertrude Bell’s books on Persia.”

p.79

“It seems to be her first book, but one must read it as if it were the last volume in a fairly long series… For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”

p.80

“…because novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand…”

Anodyne means painkiller.

p.80

“For while Jane Austen breaks from melody to melody as Mozart from song to song, to read this writing was like being out at sea in an open boat.”

Woolf is not kind to this woman author, and why should she be? If the expectation is to write with as much greatness as Austen, why should the average be tolerated?

p.81

We finally reach the discussion of the Bechdel test.

p.82

“This is not so true of the nineteenth-century novelists, of course. Woman becomes much more various and complicated there. Indeed it was the desire to write about women perhaps that led men by degrees to abandon the poetic drama which, with its violence, could make so little use of them, and to devise the novel as a more fitting receptacle.”

I’ve never read any reasoning for a particular form of writing, any history of how and why a form of writing arose. But it is an interesting subject. Why, after all, are all our books still not great poetry? What spurred the invention of so many other forms of writing? I’ve never thought of that!

p.83

“The poet was forced to be passionate or bitter, unless indeed he chose to “hate women,” which meant more often than not that he was unattractive to them.”

Some class A behavioral analysis here, a la Criminal Minds.

p.84

“”Highly developed”-“infinitely intricate”-such are undeniably terms of praise, and to praise one’s own sex is always suspect, often silly; moreover, in this case, how could one justify it? One could not go to the map and say Columbus discovered America and Columbus was a woman; or take an apple and remark, Newton discovcred the laws of gravitation and Newton was a woman; or look into the sky and say aeroplanes are flying overhead and aeroplanes were invented by women. There is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women. There are no yard measures, neatly divided into the fractions of an inch, that one can lay against the qualities of a good mother or the devotion of a daughter, or the fidelity of a sister, or the capacity of a housekeeper. “

That is no longer the case, thanks in part to Woolf. After all, women are leading in so many fields today.

p.85

“…and there would follow, even in the simplest talk, such a natural difference of opinion that the dried ideas in him would be fertilized anew; and the sight of her creating in a different medium from his own would so quicken his creative power that insensibly his sterile mind would begin to plot again, and he would find the phrase or the scene which was lacking when he put on his hat to visit her.”

A change of pace and a conversation with someone with different cares in the world can do wonders to refresh your mind.

p.86

“Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is, and if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater service to humanity;”

Would Woolf be happy with the number of sexes we acknowledge today?

p.88

“It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only?”

p.88

“For all the dinners cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children set to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie.”

That is what is truly sad about human life. It passes by without any record.

p.89

“Be truthful, one would say, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting. “

Some more amazing writing advice.

p.91

There is a thinking here that Woolf believed in – that there is a collective consciousness which somehow improves as generations go by. She proposes to give Mary Carmichael another hundred years and she may well be a poet. I believe Woolf was both right and wrong here. She was wrong in that there is no collective brain to women or men or anyone else. The works of today’s authors are littered with terrible art, just as it is littered with amazing gems. Just like that, I’m sure there is at least one of Plato’s contemporaries who we do not know the name of because he did not write as well, and thus was not worth mentioning.

So Woolf was wrong in thinking that women in latter centuries would just write better – genius is not an arithmetic progression.

However, she was right too. She was right because the same issues and worries which affected the moods and writings of women in her era are not the same in this era. Women of today know nothing of suffragette, for example. They are beyond that and that will reflect in their writing. At the same time, there is still a long way to go. So today’s women talk about new struggles and pay equality and other things which color their lenses.

p.94

“One has a profound, if irrational, instinct in favor of the theory that the Union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness.

Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous.

He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.”

p.98

“Is that a tree? No, it is a woman. But… She has not a bone in her body, I thought, watching Phoebe, for that was her name, coming across the beach. Then Alan got up and the shadow of Alan at once obliterated Phoebe. For Alan had views and Phoebe was quenched in the flood of his views. And then Alan, I thought, has passions; and here I page after page very fast, feeling the crisis was approaching, and so it was.”

Clearly, the male-only mind has a problem – that of writing only about oneself. The hallmark of good writing is the ability to think and describe more than just yourself.

p.100

“…but when one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life. “

p.101

“They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.”

The problem with writers who do not try to understand and use their other side is that half the readership cannot absorb the writing as it should be.

p.102

“All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that happy age, before Miss Davies and Miss Clough were born, when the writer used both sides of his mind equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so was Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoi. In our time Proust was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of a woman.”

p.103

“Even so, the very first sentence that I would write here, I said, crossing over to the writing-table and taking up the page headed Women and Fiction, is that it is fatal for any one who writes to think of their sex.It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.”

p.104

“”This great book,” “this worthless book,” the same book is called by both names. Praise and blame alike mean nothing.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”

p.106

atropos
Noun
  1. the Greek goddess of fate who cuts the thread of life

p.107

“We may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into the intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.”

p.107

“That Is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have
had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress
on money and a room of one’s own.”

p.108

“There runs through these comments and discussions the conviction that good books are desirable and that good writers, even if they show every variety of human depravity, are still good human beings. “

p.109

“…every speech must end with a peroration. “

peroration
Noun
  1. a flowery and highly rhetorical oration
  2. (rhetoric) the concluding section of an oration; “he summarized his main points in his peroration”

p.110

“…the streets and squares and forests of the glove swarming with black and white and coffee-colored inhabitants…”

p.112

“… If we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality…”

p.113

“…and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.”

p.114

How to make GIFs of sites using WayBackMachine

So… I like following fivethirtyeight’s interesting 2016 Election Prediction page. It shows the ups and downs and the general mood of the election. I’ve been staring at it for so long that I wanted to collect the daily changes and make a nice GIF. I know the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine collects archives of popular websites, so I went there and found that the Election Prediction page is on there too.

So, I started looking for ways to make a GIF from the WayBack machine. There were some node and ruby scripts and applications which didn’t really work. But then I landed on waybacklapse. Its developer – Kyle Purdon – works for bitly and has built two versions of waybacklapse. The older one is python, node, imagemagick and then some. The newer one is python3 and docker. Eww. I followed the steps of the tutorial for the older version, with a few notable exceptions –

  1. The tutorial is for OS X and is a little dated. What I have on hand is an Ubuntu 15.04 VM, so I went ahead and used apt-get install instead of brew
  2. The tut tells you to use the command “git checkout -t v1.1.0”, but it should be “git checkout -b v1.1.0”. Technically v1.1.0 is a tag, not a branch, but I didn’t know that and just used -b, which worked, so why mess with a good thing, amiright?
  3. You need to have node installed, but not the new node. Install old node with “apt-get install nodejs-legacy” and use the command “nodejs app.js” when you’re running screenshot-as-a-service
  4. The tut doesn’t mention that you need to actually *run* screenshot-as-a-service. I went to the github page for the service and found out that I need to run the above “nodejs app.js” command in order to run a server on the localhost. Technically, waybacklapse has code in it to warn you that the server isn’t running. But that didn’t work so well for me.
  5. The user prompts for waybacklapse only allow for monthly or yearly snapshots. But fivethirtyeight has only been running the site for about 3 months, with daily updates, so those didn’t make sense to me. I wanted to get all the changes. So, after installing waybacklapse with pip, I went ahead and modified the code inside /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/waybacklapse/waybacklapse.py with one small change to get all the screenshots instead of just monthly or yearly ones –
    1. In the create_payload function, I commented out the collapse variable as follows –

[gist https://gist.github.com/nitinthewiz/260780defd28739c50c05e1c1f83df53]

All was well and good, but not really. Turns out, screenshot-as-a-service pulls a screenshot of the entire page, not just above the fold. Which is great, and not so much. I was looking at a GIF that was way too long to be palatable. So, I needed a way to extracts parts of the screenshots so I could make a nice, clean and small-ish GIF. Luckily, waybacklapse made me install imagemagick. So I looked around and made the following script.

[gist https://gist.github.com/nitinthewiz/d6bebb2e1dc3b39df0dee915f3de0cbc]

It must sit inside the screenshot folder. It parses through the screenshots and converts them into smaller versions of themselves. Finally, I found the command inside waybacklapse which creates the GIF. I modified it a bit and used it to recreate the GIF.

convert -delay 30 /root/fivethirtyeight/2016081011081470853418/final-*.png /root/fivethirtyeight/2016081011081470853418/timelapse/2016electionforecastss.gif

Now, I could go about changing waybacklapse and submitting the code to the author, but he’s moved on to docker and in-house solutions for the dependencies, so I doubt it’ll be a benefit to anyone. Instead, I’ll just leave these notes here so I can reference them in the future. If they helped you, shout out in the comments section. Oh, and I’ll leave you with the GIF I made. –

FiveThirtyEight's Election Forecast in a GIF

No Waze

So, I gave Waze a try after being a Google Maps user for a long time. I had enjoyed using Waze way back in 2012, when I drove all over California trusting this app.

But this time, it chose to disappoint. Routes keep changing arbitrarily. When I let Waze decide the route, more often than not, it picks some convoluted route with a lot of loops for no good reason. When I ask it to compute routes again, it straightens up and gives me the right route. Worst of all – when I noticed a mistake on the map, I submitted it. But instead of a streamlined process, I got contacted by another Wazer (probably a map editor) who asked me some more details about the business, and had never heard nor bothered to google for the business. I was told that Google Maps is not a valid source of information because Waze policy says no copyrighted information may be used to correct the map. (That seems like an OK policy.) Eventually, though, the map edit was accepted as is. Perhaps the user trusted me or perhaps they did their due diligence. However, a week later and the map edit has still not appeared on Waze. So much for that bureaucracy.

Waze has also been showing me ads for nearby businesses as soon as I stop at a traffic light or slow down. I don’t actually blame them for this. It could just be a tactic by Google to force people to just skip over to Google Maps.

All in all, I think my little Waze experiment is over. Time to go back to Google Maps, which keeps improving on a daily basis, by hook or by crook.

p.s. The last straw came just yesterday, when I sent my wife a message from the Waze app, to inform her of my ETA. The app asked me to pick out the contact and showed me her name and phone number. Normally, such a notification would be an SMS with a link. Uber does it like that, Lyft does it like that and frankly, that makes the most sense – the other person gets a link, opens it and can track you in their browser. But Waze noticed that my wife had the Waze app installed, so they decided to send her a notification inside the app. She doesn’t have notifications turned on for Waze. Why would she? No one needs random notifications from a low-usage app. So, she never even received the ETA link. This failure from Waze is a UX issue which they should resolve. They don’t need to re-invent the wheel. Just use the same SMS notification services that every other app in the world uses and get it over with. Since they chose to do it in this half-baked, non-thought-out manner, I think it’s high time I part with the service.

Photo by oniitamo

Do you know what bliss is?

Do you know what bliss is?
It’s waking up at 6:30 in the morning,
With your whole world sleeping next to you,
Her hair rustling in the wind of the electric fan,
The Sun peeping through the blinders,
Trying to pry your eyes open,
That, there, is bliss.

Soon, the Sun passes you over,
Adding you to the naughty list,
Of lazy people.
But your lover still sleeps
And you daren’t wake her,
For you love that solemn expression on her face,
And all you want is for that fleeting moment to remain,
Before the bustle of the morning begins.

Marriage

I woke up sweating three days ago. I had been having a very intense morning dream, in which I was constantly repeating to myself the following words – “I’m getting married.”

“I’m getting married!”

“I’m getting married!!”

“I’m getting married!!”

The idea had slowly percolated through my conscious to my subconscious and finally reached my dream state. I am now fully, mind, body, and soul, aware that I am getting married to Jahanvi, the love of my life.

I’ve tried to write this post about twelve times now. I’ve written something funny, sarcastic, philosophical, and even a treatise on bachelorhood as a gateway to marriage. But every time I wrote, I felt as if something or the other was missing. Deleted, revised, edited, no draft seemed to come close to the idea and tradition that is marriage. 

But when I woke up three days ago, I knew I had the instruction that I needed to begin. The final key to the puzzle, though, came a little later. When panditji sat me down yesterday with relatives, old and new, he explained what was happening here. As the mantra washed over me, the real import of this ceremony came to mind. The idea that this is a prayer, which talks about our lifetimes, which begs the blessings of everyone who surrounds us, and which includes the creation of bonds which we forge with our own hearts and minds, spoke to me of the strength of this undertaking. 

Up until it was only about the preparation of the marriage, or when I was with relatives who joked about life before and after marriage, and the effect of marriage on people, I felt closer to my community and to the power that those family ties hold. But as the venue and the occasion changed, I felt the power of the ties that I, with every offering, was creating myself. 

Marriage means in terms of the coming together of two people, two families, and two communities. But what it means to the people at the center of it is the coming together of two souls. That bond, which creates something glorious together, is what I’m feeling since the ceremonies started and which I’ll keep feeling for the rest of my life, because while I’ve seen Jahanvi as my beloved till now, I have now seen her as my self. 

How to read today

I just read Lipi Mehta’s article on TheReader about her habit of reading and how it disappeared.

I faced a similar situation at one point in my life when I realized that I’ve stopped reading. I used to read a few books a year, at least but of late I’d struggled with even one. This is the advice I gave to myself and to Lipi as a comment on the site –

So many of us began our lives as readers and then slowed or stopped. I got the mantle of “William Shakespeare III” in 9th class for my habit of writing, which to me is nothing more than an extension of my habit of reading. The phrase, “you read a lot”, has stuck with me throughout my life.

But just like you, I don’t read as much any more. I moved on to the Internet a long time ago and things just seem to go along. Here and there, I’d read a book. Then I was gifted an iPad and I thought, “this is it; now I’ll read a lot!” That didn’t happen.

Of late, I’ve discovered something – if I can pick up a book with a good font and just devote every evening to it, I’ll get through it. I read James Michener’s Poland like that recently. It was just me and the book every evening after work. It irritated everyone around me, but I stuck to it and did finish it. I tried to do the same for “Bullet or the Ballot Box”, a book about the recent history of Nepal. But I had to return the library copy. I then realized that I must move on to eBooks. I found the ebook and did the same thing I did for Poland, this time on my phone. I got through the book and made extensive notes too.

Now, I’ve decided to tackle “War and Peace”. It’s a massive book. I know this not by the size of the book in my hand, but the number of chapters iBooks lists in the index. But I’m toiling through it, one line at a time. I read whenever I get the chance – travelling in the bus, waiting for someone or something, a few pages before I sleep.

I know I’ll get through this book too. It’ll be disjointed and broken. The experience will not be as character-building as the books in our childhood were – we used to read voraciously, swallowing ideas and notions whole. Now, it’ll be a miracle to just get through the book.

But here’s my suggestion to you – load up a book on your phone. Find eBooks or borrow them. Just don’t make the mistake of loading up a library. Make it one book at a time and read as much as you can, as often as you can. Suddenly, you’ll realize that you’d have gone through most of the book and the plot will be able to climax. That’s when you’ll thank yourself for taking this advice!

Cheers!
Nitin

Chivalry isn’t dead yet.

It was raining in Seattle yesterday. Not the usual Seattle rain – dreary, tired and barely wetting. This was real rain caused by a storm that is passing through the state. The rain was loud, wet and forceful. I went to Safeway last night after work, hoping to get some groceries and head home to play Fallout 4. I imagined it would be like any other time that I’ve done groceries and walked home – I buy the food, pack it in bags, haul everything in my hands and take a nice, thirty minute hike.

I was wrong. I saw the rain before I got out of the store. I was aware of it. What I was not aware of was that paper gets wet in rain. Seattle implemented paper bags for groceries a long time ago. So no grocery store inside the city is allowed to bag your groceries in plastic. Instead, they bag them in thick paper bags, which seem almost indestructible. That is, until paper meets water.

I should have remembered this. It’s a basic fact. But I didn’t think much of it and started walking. I was smart enough to separate the food into three bags, to reduce the weight and possibility of tearing. I told myself that if the weight turned out to be too much or if one of the bags tore, I could always get a cab home. I was also smart enough to hold the bags in one hand while I cowered under my umbrella for the duration of the walk. I was not smart enough to realize that doing so meant that the paper was now getting wet. I had gone a full block before my fingers strained. So I stopped, changed hands and moved on. Another block later, the fingers of my other hand strained under the weight. I eyed a nice, open garage nearby and moved into the dry shelter. It was well-lit and cool. That helped soothe my senses. I also placed the bags on the dry floor, hoping that my fingers would recover quickly. After a minute or two, I decided to head back out and so I picked everything up and got ready to move. I walked two steps out of the garage and the middle bag gave way. The straps had come off. I labored to bring the bags and myself back to the safety and dryness of the garage. Once there, I assessed the damage. The rain had temporarily subsided and I could easily pick up the bags in my arms and walk the rest of the way. But then I decided that this was enough.

I fired up the Uber app and found my location. When I hit the ‘call an Uber’ button, the service reminded me that the fare was two point four times the usual rate, due to high demand in the area. I opened the Lyft app and it said the hike was one point five times. I was about to hit the request button when I noticed that the app said “one point five times over the usual amount”. In other words, more expensive than the Uber rate. I went back to Uber and guiltily hit accept. At least they have more drivers. To add salt to my wounds, the Uber app asked me to explicitly enter the numbers two and four into the app to make sure that I understand the higher cost. I entered them and asked for a ride. One quickly found me and was not too far either. I tracked as the car slowly found its way to me. Just as the car reached the road I was on, I got a call from the driver, a lady, asking me where I was standing. I directed her to me and told her to stop as I brought my baggage with me. She waited as I rushed in the now-light rain towards the car, with the three bags held precariously between my hands. I pried the door open with my fingers and tried to shove everything, and myself inside. In the process, the second bag gave way. and the contents spilled on the road. I apologized to her profusely, first for my tardiness and then for making her car wet with the bags. She asked me to make sure I was safely seated and when I was, she moved the car onwards. She asked me to confirm my name and destination, as is customary for all drivers of such services.

Almost immediately, I started apologizing, half to myself, for the foolish decisions I took today. She heard me out and asked me not to admonish myself, because it would be of no gain. I didn’t relent, as I wanted to pacify my own hurt ego and I said as much to her. She simply stated that mistakes happen by everyone and the important thing is that I found a solution to my problem and acted on it. Since the solution was working in my favor, I didn’t need to apologize for anything. After a few minutes of driving, she found an empty spot on the side of the road and got out. I watched as she went to the back of the car and take out a sturdy grocery bag. She came back to her seat and handed it to me. She switched on the lights inside the car and, shifting into gear, told me to tell her when I was done moving the now discrete contents into the bag, Sir.

That’s when I registered the accent – it was British with a hint of something else. I busied myself with the goods while I listened carefully, trying to ascertain her origins. She told me that while the ride was a short one, she still wanted me to listen to good music of my choice. She offered a selection – jazz, classical, country, folk and a few others I didn’t bother listening to. I asked her to put anything she liked. She said that my interests were more important here and so her choice did not matter. I asked for classical. She countered, asking if I wanted New York metropolitan symphony or the New York opera. I asked for symphony and she got on with setting the channel. She set the volume to a medium high, so that it engulfed the car, and asked me if I wanted it lower. Over the course of the car ride, I asked her to lower it to a conversational level.

I then asked me where she was from. She answered, Jamaica. “Oh,” thought I, quizzing myself about the history of Jamaica and how long did the British rule there, since they most certainly did. I could not come up with an answer, so I moved on to other questions. I asked her if she was polite by nature or was it something she saw as a professional courtesy. She said she didn’t quite understand the question. She’d been extremely polite and respectful throughout the ride, something I don’t often see in Uber drivers. Of course, I don’t get talked back at in any such ride, but the level of respect and regard she displayed is not something I see every day either. I certainly don’t get called Sir in my taxi. I explained this to her, in not so many words and she simply responded that she treats others with the same respect that she expects them to treat her with. What a delightful answer!

Finally, we reached my building’s doors. She parked and told me that she’s waiting right there for me to come back and return her bag to her. As a social contract, I left my backpack there and told her I’d be back to pick it up. I rushed back home, in the process of which, my third and final bag also gave way and so I shifted everything into her bag before I got home. I unlocked, dumped everything on the table and rushed back. Mind you, I didn’t know if she was still charging me for the ride and the expense was two point four times, so it was prudent that I rush back. I got there, knocked on her window and returned her bag to her, folded neatly to consume the least space. I thanked her for her excellent service, Madam, which brought a smile to her face and I took out my backpack from the back. In doing so, I started cleaning out the bits of my paper bags and the water drops I had left in the back seat. She told me that she’d do it, but seeing the best in people often brings out the best in you, and I told her that since I’d made the mess, I was the one who had to clean it.

I thanked her once again and walked back to my building. The interaction was a short, but fruitful one. She came and rescued me at the moment when I needed it, though for a price. She displayed kindness and respect where none was needed or deserved. A lesser person might have scowled or laughed in my face. She displayed a deep-seated professionalism which was more nature than habit. You know what? Chivalry isn’t dead yet. It has just moved on to better people.

Photo by irinaraquel

Oh, how the rich have fallen.

I was recently walking through the Space Needle area in the evening. It was raining and it was dark, so there was barely anyone on the streets. I walked by the Collections Cafe, which sits in the shadow of the landmark. It was closed for business, but a section inside the cafe was lit up. As I walked, I peeked into the glass structure to see the source of the light and I saw a rather interesting scene.

 

The cafe was closed to the general public, but it seemed like a small private party was being held inside. A few guests, about fourteen or so, were sitting around a long table, dressed in their finest dresses and suits. All of them were old, white and invariably rich, as I could observe from their tailored coats and glittering jewelry. There were two waiters, a man and a woman, dressed in all black, at either end of the table, hurriedly rushing to serve wine to everyone at the table. I could see food laid out along the walls and on the table. It seemed like a feast, not enough to feed an army, but just enough to satisfy the patrons’ appetites. There was a head butler, dressed in an elegant coattails, which splendidly showcased his ample stomach, supposedly a sign of a man who knows his fine foods, standing at the center of the table, bobbing like a penguin and facing the guests and the glass wall beyond which I stood. I watched for a fleeting moment as he regaled the patrons with a funny anecdote, waving his hands with flourishes as though to explain that the event he was describing was actually fun. The people at the table laughed at the appropriate time when his tale came to an end, a hearty laugh, which made me think that the narrative might actually be humorous. He laughed along with them, having succeeded in his duty of entertaining the guests, while his assistants took care of the minor details. I‘m sure that for the guests, the food was only secondary to the privilege of being there.

 

Oh, how the rich have fallen.

 

I’m struggling through Tolstoy’s War and Peace right now and since I’ve just started, Tolstoy has been entertaining me with tales of how the elite of Moscow and St. Petersburg have wonderful parties and dinners, with scores of guests and hundreds of waitstaff, butlers, bellmen, maids and chauffeurs at their service. Even at the simplest of dinners, where the people at the table are no more than an old Prince, his daughter, son and his wife and an in-residence architect, there are footmen behind each guest, moving chairs and serving wine and clearing dishes and bringing the next course. There are chefs and butlers and a head butler to lead them, there are maids bringing the food out and serfs simply waiting about for instructions. The story is from another age, when there was plenty of labor, and power rested not in CEOs but in Princes and Dukes and Counts and Barons and allegiance was sworn for life. Those days, the common folk lived poorly and even the moderately rich had luxuries beyond imagination. It was a life of comfort for those who were the haves, and a life of hardship for those who were the have-nots.

 

That is not the case any more. Whether it is because of a loss of cheap labor or that the kind of power that the rich command has moved from political to just financial, or whether it is because serfdom has been abolished and one must pay for services rendered, which, as it turns out, is an expensive proposition once one begins to calculate it, the result is the same – the rich do not enjoy the same luxuries and prestige as they once did. That fleeting glimpse of that dinner scene told me as much.

 

The tables have not turned yet. But are slowly arcing. The high and mighty even have to move their own chairs today! Oh, how the rich have fallen!

 

Photo by rutlo

Word of the day: Russophobia

Ever since I read the novel Poland by James Michener, I’ve been interested in Poland and its neighbors. Thus, I follow a few organizations which often talk about Poland, one of which is the Center for Eastern Studies(OSW) based in Warsaw. They run an online publication which explains what‘s been going on in Eastern Europe in detail. Today, I can across a Point of View article on their site which talks about Russophobia, which is the political and information strategy used by Russia to make its residents believe that the Western world hates/fears/wants to destroy Russia. All well and good. They run a propaganda machine and we understand that.

Reading the paper, I came across this quote, found in footnote 11 on page 16 of the PDF document –

He regrets that the “ungrateful” Ukrainians are dismantling monuments to Lenin, “to whom, after all, they owe the awakening of Ukrainian national consciousness.”

‘He’ is a former head of a Russian intelligence analytic group. The words above echoed in my mind and connected the dots with another topic I’ve read about today. What could I be thinking of while reading those words? Well, here‘s the quote –

“Those involved in this ludicrous case should recognize that the British Crown Jewels is precisely the right place for the Koh-i-Noor diamond to reside, in grateful recognition for over three centuries of British involvement in India, which led to the modernization, development, protection, agrarian advance, linguistic unification and ultimately the democratization of the sub-continent.”

Who said that? Historian Andrew Roberts, in regards to the latest case by an Indian group, asking for the return of the crown jewel, Koh-i-noor, of which they believe India is the rightful owner. Andrew Roberts, of course, disagrees.

Notice the similarity in the statements? The oppressive power, having trampled, abused, stripped of all riches and domineered over the oppressed nation, then assumes a state of victim-hood and faux-chivalry. “We gave you education, liberty, civilization and nationality, and this is how you repay us?”

Frankly, this ugly act is ill-suited to super-powers. They are aware of their transgressions and should accept their role in enslaving the masses of their colonies instead of acting like hurt Starfleet officers thwarted in their attempts to uplift the masses of an alien civilization.

The fact of the matter is that the Prime Directive has only been a myth of science fiction and history has always shown that the greater power will only suppress the lesser, no matter how much their historians wax eloquent about the noble goals with which these super-powers stepped on foreign soil. At the end of the day, this propagandist Russophobia and this false British victim-hood isn’t fooling anyone.

 

unpublished, unwritten, unprocessed.

I think a lot, mostly about random things. There’s a few stories or articles always knocking around in my head at all times, such as this one which I’m writing right now.

Most of these ideas come in three out of four categories –

  1. unpublished
  2. unwritten and
  3. unprocessed.

I’ve got a drafts folder filled to the brim with written stuff that passed it’s time-frame without me hitting publish. I do that out of laziness and because I keep thinking that I want to edit, correct, rewrite. Bah. I hate that habit. It works fine for fiction, because that’s timeless. But anything else, mostly stuff I write for my blog, I should just hit publish and get it out in any form.

Then there are the unwritten ones. These are mostly stories, which I keep dreaming up ways to write. In my mind, I’ve got an open novel, a novella, a collection of short stories and some random stories just knocking around, trying to get out. I wonder when I’ll find the time/inclination to write them. Maybe I’ll use NaNoWriMo to get some of those on paper*.

Then there are the unprocessed things – fleeting thoughts I’ve had which came and went or ideas I remember today but are gone by the time tomorrow becomes current. I hate those ideas for slipping away, because I feel like a gold miner who let a huge chunk of gold wash away with the mud. Some of them come back and start troubling me again, but most of them are lost between my synapses, never to be thought of again.

Finally, there are those rare ones which are processed, written and published too. Those gems are the ones I’m most proud of you. I love having more and more of those, though I keep fooling myself that unwritten and unpublished are good enough too.

I wish upon you, oh reader, that you have the most of the fourth category of whatever your art is. I wish upon myself the same.

Cheers!

Nitin