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.

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

Let’s talk about Tor

Teleread recently covered how the New Hampshire Public Library turned its Tor Relay back on, despite warnings from local law enforcement that although the router itself isn’t illegal, it will likely be used for illegal purposes. The article points out that Tor is an important service because, keeping aside the negatives that come from total anonymity, it provides political dissidents a way to bypass censorship. This is important for the growth of democracy in all countries around the world.

There is, of course, the other side – that Tor is used by a wide variety of undesirables who use it for nefarious purposes using the blanket cover of anonymity as a defense against possible government intervention. In that sense, Tor is kind of like torrents. You can download every open-source Linux distro ever created using torrents, but most people are probably just downloading pirated content off it. Continue reading →

8 years of blogging

I missed a rather important anniversary over the weekend. I just noticed that WordPress wished me a few days ago for being with them since 8 years. Of course, I’ve been writing since long before that, but most of my writing was read only by my family and the greatest achievement of my writing then was when my parents published my writing in a small book which they presented to me on my birthday. With blogging, I was still being read mostly by my family, but online and I had a sense of achievement in that I was hitting publish every time I completed a blog post, thereby putting it out there for everyone to read, if they so chose to.

My earliest blog is on wordpress.com here. I have tried a variety of platforms over time but WordPress just seems to be the right one for me. Of course, I left that blog some years ago and came to nitinkhanna.com (by way of blog.nitinkhanna.com) and self-hosted WordPress. But all that matters is that on-and-off, here-and-there, I was writing and I was publishing. I seem to have been able to average a post per month or so, though please don’t hold me to that standard (my last post here was more than a month ago and I’ve not had much to write in that intermediate time). But I am proud that I have a cumulative 1,37,361 words published on my blog (with some 66 posts sitting in drafts) Continue reading →

The Secret History of Blah

Let us begin.

The world is full of interesting things. Wonderful creations that change your lives, make it easier to reach for the stars or talk to your loved ones. There are countless people toiling away in garages, labs, offices, and corners of public spaces, working on their masterpiece. They will soon release their creation into the world and you will wonder, “how was that even made? What was the process of the creation of this marvelous thing?” Continue reading →

A note about rain

I was not able to sleep properly a few weeks ago. It was weird. I felt sleepy, but my normal routine of keeping my eyes closed and clearing my head of all thoughts didn’t help. I began to feel restless. So I looked towards other means that could calm me and lull me into a deep peaceful sleep. The pitter-patter of raindrops is a soothing sound that always helps me. I tend to associate rain with the idea of a sleepy summer afternoon, where I tend to drowse off regardless of what I’m doing.

I turned to my phone and looked up the rain sounds apps. I have 3 such apps installed on my phone right now. My favorites – Thunderspace and rainymood are not on my phone right now. Instead of downloading them and wasting precious sleeping time, I decided to give the other ones a go. The latest one, “Raining – relax yourself“, has a few presets – Summer rain, Dripping rain, Forest rain and Rain on window. I like the sound of rain on a window but it’s not exactly my favorite. I tried all the presets but didn’t like any of them. Remind me to delete that and make some room for Thunderspace. Continue reading →

कुक्कुराणां वनं

Every once in a while, we ask ourselves, “Why the heck did I ever waste my time on that?” Two of the prime candidates for that question for our generation are Calculus and Sanskrit. Two years of Calculus and two years of Sanskrit seem to be too much of a waste to me.

Now, the first, even I understand. I know no one who uses Calculus. I’ve not used it once since I got out of Engineering and even in there, most of the work purported to be done by hand was deftly dealt with by my calculator. But the latter, well, is more of a mystery. There’s a peep every now and then about Sanskrit. It’s in the news either because the German government is doing too much for it or because the Indian government is doing too little. Either because someone discovers some long-lost formula in those dusty tomes that seems to prove that all math and science in the world was first developed by Bharat or because somewhere or another, I find reference of oddities and extremities that I didn’t know about our motherland (I enjoy wikisurfing far too much). Continue reading →

“Which way to Svoboda?”

I was reading a BBC news report of how, recently, pro-Russian sites are popping up in the Czech web sphere, which could allude to some serious USSR-style propaganda. The article referenced the 1968 Prague Spring, which was when the then Czechoslovakia government tried to establish reforms which would lead to freedoms to the press and private sector, the division of Czechoslovakia into Czech Republic and Slovakia and a general upliftment of the people who were suffering cruelly under the rule of the Soviet Bloc. Needless to say, Soviet Russia didn’t take kindly to this and, along with their friends of the Warsaw Pact (Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and East Germany) attacked Czechoslovakia to take back control.

Of course, they won. Even with the way things were under the USSR, they had tanks, weaponry and manpower and Czechoslovakia had, well, a leader who told his people not to resist. But resist they did. Without the necessary means to win the war, they resisted in the only other noble way – confound the heck out of the enemy. In the most peaceful way, road and street signs across the country were painted over or removed so as to completely confuse the incoming force.

The result was hilarious. Supposedly, one could see troops stopped in rural areas trying to study maps and making sense of how every village they’d visited was called either Dubček or Svoboda (which means freedom). Road signs were painted over, except those that led to Moscow. The result of that was that an invading force from Poland spent a day roaming around before being routed out of the country, empty-handed.

Now, these reports come from Wikipedia and further from two separate sources, but I’d say you should take them with a grain of salt regarding their veracity. However, the point to understand is that in those days, it was possible to confound an incoming force by the sheer ingenuity of changing your road signs and hiding all the maps. Of course, today’s military will simply whip out their iPhones and tell you where to invade next. But this episode lends importance to the idea that with the accumulation of power so dependent on finding your enemy, it is important to also control the means of finding the enemy in the first place. This is obviously the reason why countries like Russia, China and India as well as the EU are working to create their own version of the GPS system (which, mind you, is owned by the US Government).

Clearly, in tomorrow’s war, one of the first efforts will be to either block the enemy’s signals, thereby preventing them from finding our accurate locations. The other, more radical one, would be to try to shoot down their navigation satellites, a scenario that has given birth to more science fiction movies than we care to admit.

But, going back to that wondrous time when people still had to use maps and ask for directions from locals, I must say that it is remarkable that someone thought of the simple idea that perhaps one way of stalling the enemy is to paint over the signs which will tell them how to get to the capital. That’s your trivia for the day.

Word of the Day: illiberalism

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, illiberalism, quite simply, is the lack of liberal values. But that begs the question, what is liberalism? Is it the ability of a community to be forward thinking and self-critical? Is it the incessant forward march of a government without caring for the social, political and emotive values of its peoples? Or is it the protection of the freedom of expression of an author writing about a sensitive topic with the backdrop of a community to which he does not belong? Hindustan Times certainly believes in the last definition.

First, it shows that it is not only the sangh parivar or Islamic organisations that are at the forefront of such illiberalism.

Source: Liberal values are being trampled upon in Tamil Nadu

The issue at hand is that the author Puliyur Murugesan wrote a book, Balachandran Enra Peyarum Enakkundu (I am also known as Balachandran), about the life and troubles of a transgender, who is sexually harassed throughout life and faces an upward battle of identity. The protagonist belongs to the Gounder community and by now, you would have guessed where this is going.

The Gounder community decided to take offence to this ‘insult’ to their people and instead of rationally sitting down with the writer and asking for edits to the story or a total redaction, decided that the better course of action would be to abduct the author and brutally beat him up in the middle of nowhere. To add insult to literal injury, the police has filed a case against the author for provoking a riot, writing and circulating obscene content, selling a book containing defamatory matter, intentional provocation of breach of peace and causing fear or alarm to public. Wonderful, isn’t it?

HT, in their laconic article, asked an interesting question – why is it that only current authors face the brunt of such injustice? Why do authors such as Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, the acclaimed author of Devdas, who “had made uncharitable remarks about some non-Bengali Brahmin clans”, not face such public ridicule and outrage? Perhaps, if it were in fashion, political parties and illiberal communities will also start attacking famous people from India’s history books. Oh wait, they already do!

A response to NYTimes’ OpEd on Religion in India

The New York Times has published a Christmas OpEd piece (yesterday online and today in print) that talks about religious intolerance in India and how ‘hindu militants’ are forcing conversions of Muslims and Christians and has blamed our PM, Narendra Modi for not doing enough to stop this and other attacks.

Initially, I wanted to write a long and deeply researched rebuke of this kind of hypocrisy, but I’d rather let a picture say a thousand words –

Continue reading →

Real people don’t fit them

I love Jessica Hagy‘s site Indexed. It’s funny, published weekdays and is almost always spot on.

But, I found a problem with today’s post –

Jessica’s “Real People don’t fit them”

I don’t think you can portray a groups vs individuals analysis on a graph. So, I fixed it in my own way. Hope you like it and hope you check out her website. It’s pretty cool!

My version –

Of course, Hagy’s Indexed is for fun and not to be taken as seriously as I have. But hey, when you see something wrong on the Internet, you fix it, right?