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!!”

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.

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

Of a Higher Life.

Sometimes it feels as if we are each destined for greatness. But life, relationships and circumstance forces us to settle into mediocrity. There is no greater tragedy than the human soul. It suffers because it cannot soar. It slices itself into pieces for the sake of others’ happiness. It suppresses its laborious spirit to do menial work which doesn’t change the world or carry one’s name into the future.

What will the future remember us as? Just another set of numbers? Ten million lived in that city. Seven billion were alive in 2015. Two million used Facebook every day of 2017. Six hundred worked in that company on that date. What is the point of living like a number? Where is the infinity which is we promised ourselves when we came to this life? Even the daughter of a refugee dreams of a life in which more than a few dozen know her name. Why, then, do those of us who have it in our hands to let go of this world, which will breed nothing other than more of us, always choose to let this pitiful existence bleed us dry? Why do we settle for the nothingness that defines the majority of us? Why is each one of us not a gem? Is the human race nothing but a few geniuses dispersed amidst the 99.7% who are nothing more than monkeys with keyboards?

We are never solving cancer with our day-to-day work. Nor are we exploring the farthest reaches of human knowledge with every step. Much like clerks copying notes for more important personnel, a majority of us in the workforce are simply providing services for the benefit of others. Our personal motto is nonexistent and the companies we work for are nothing more than money-making machines. Why? Why is there just one champion of the human spirit in each generation? Why is everything you do every day not the stuff of legends? We live in the most prosperous of times. Yet our acts are nothing but selfish attempts at elongating our present instead of forcing the future to remember our existence.

We’ve seen that cities come and go, empires rise and fall, humanity picks up the pieces and moves on. Can you truthfully say that if today is doomsday, those who pick up the pieces will pick up your name as one of those who changed humanity? Will they teach your life to their children as a lesson in the eternity of the human spirit?

In other words, as of today, are you a part of the infinity or the infinitesimal?

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.