Ajith Nair

As I write this, Karnal Singh, JCP, Delhi Police has had his second round of press conference, detailing the complex web of SIMI and Indian Mujahideen, time and again to an inattentive, misbehaved, mike thrusting media. The core perpetrators of most recent blasts have been the same people. A good number of them have been accounted for, the rest are at large. Meanwhile opinion among the public and experts are rife about root causes of terrorism. Many have talked about the marginalization of the minority, the ineffective policing of states and the failure of our intelligence network. Some analyses have been commendable and state the truth, with ample support. Others have been emotional diatribes, scathing but hollow. On the solution side, it’s been a repeat of the most popular POTA equivalent which enables arrest without evidence and trial. As someone said, it might only lead to Idgahs in jails and nothing else. As with most other areas, India’s ability to analyze far surpasses its solut...

There are some examples that I have seen recently that tell me that the journey towards a service oriented economy is not mere lip service. Let me start with what is or rather was the biggest point of pain in my life, the Internet connection, rather the lack of it most times. Like most white collar Indians, the predilection for anything multi national is a given. So I preferred Hathway over Tata Indicom, Satyam or even the sloth MTNL. Let me summarise my experience succinctly, Hathway delighted me on only one count, shutting up when I asked them to, over an inebriated, frustrated phone conversation. Repeated line drops, non collection of payment cheques (also implying no payment avenues except home collection of cheques), adhoc disconnections, adhoc disconnections (the former meaning purposive, the latter meaning vagaries of the connectivity). So I had a black cable emerging like an umbilical cord from my laptop but then the baby was long dead. With a heavy heart and an unjustly light ...

An FM channel which plays great Hindi classics was living up to its track record by playing melancholic Mukesh. The cab driver, instantly, switched to the latest Om Shanti Om number and let it stay. I tried to thinking about the last time I had heard a sad song in a new movie release, it was futile. Not that I am a Bollywood buff, but my First Day First Show friends struggled too. In fact, we struggled to name many recent tragedies, except ones like Himesh Reshammiya who are quite tragic, whether in movies or not. The age of melancholy and self pity is out. Looks like the age of celebration, fanfare, and ostentation is here to stay, not just in the movies. We seem to celebrate everything as if it were the last time we’d do it. T20 victory to kid’s birthday parties, Sensex booms to Shahrukh’s six pack. The event becomes irrelevant in the light of the celebration. Celebrity marriages are more about who’s attending, who’s performing, hardly about who’s wedding. The other day’s T20 match ...

My mom has a grouse that am not creative with picking gifts. All I can do is pick up Ganesha idols. What she can’t understand is... what do you do when ¾ th of most novelty stores nowadays have Ganesha in various forms and substance. Among all our Gods, Ganpati seems to be the one who has managed to find a relevant role in every generation. In the first quarter of this century, the tusker was used by Lokmanya Tilak to aggregate the masses around Mandals, which would also serve to foster unity and patriotic values. It seemed to work. Later on the mill workers of Mumbai used Ganesha as a show of strength and solidarity in the wake of capitalist pressures. Pandals spawned in every mill compound and the event became annualized. There also was much pomp and revelry around it. About 13 years ago, Ganesha shocked the hell out of everyone by drinking milk. Amul and Aarey did good business as the pot bellied God had his fill. This relaunched the age of miracles and was quite a paradox to the ag...

There is voyeur’s delight stuff on Sony every night. It’s called Big Boss. I happen to belong to the set who doesn’t watch this one. Set might be an ambitious term considering that everyone around seems to watch. Lunch time conversations in office are around who got knocked off, who cried, who’s dating whom and so on. I managed to see parts of it last Friday at a friend’s place. Based on his description of the plot and my observations of the sham, I figured out that the whole idea sounds a bit like what happens to Indian cricket all the time. Like In both, everyone’s in perpetual fear of getting knocked off/ dropped. (Especially when we go on tours to places like SA) There is a lot of popular sentiment around who should get knocked off and why. There is hardly consensus. There is gamesmanship in both. Cricketers are forever nominating who in their team deserves to be dropped. The one who gets dropped always gets to know who wanted him dropped (leaked email landing on national daily’s d...

If you think this is about the futile attempts to find Osama, sorry, have better things to write about. Alternately if you thought this is about the attempt to find vegetated faces then read on, you might just find something worthwhile. My first encounter with beards occurred at the age of three. The first feared person, someone who my parents used to scare me into obeying things, had a beard. He used to stay in the vicinity and looked like he could gobble up anybody with his thick beard. As fear gave way to adolescent curiosity, the need for a moustache was prime but the fascination with the beard only grew. Especially at saloons when hirsute uncles around with thick moustaches and dense beards used to look much more in control that a meek me sitting in a corner. My admiration for the genuine care that went into the beard only grew with each visit. There was an art attached to it and sadly enough I didn’t even have the raw material. After a lot of prayer and puberty, a thin moustache ...

I had the opportunity to visit some of the bigger Indian cities recently. Earlier visits to different cities were marked by a mix of anticipation, uncertainty, curiosity and a lot of advice on what to do and where to shop and so on and so forth. There was an unwritten rule with most people that I know that you pickup something unique from the city- either as souvenir or as consumable. So with Delhi it could be the Petha, with Kolkata the Sandesh, down south you could actually carry back some fresh brewed coffee and so on. Got a fresh slightly different and disturbing perspective this time. The rate at which most Indian cities are growing is min boggling (sorry that’s not disturbing!). Now you don’t need to get to the city from the airport, the city probably has already come to you. Except Mumbai where anything can be constructed almost anywhere anyone likes, the other cities had airports in the outskirts. The journey from the airport to the city used to be a build up of sorts. Bigger s...

I was at a senior colleague’s place today for lunch. The spread was a sumptuous south Indian fare, ranging from rasam vadai to bisibella bath, various kinds of dosa made to order. So while I helped myself to repeat helpings of sambar and bisi bella bath, I wondered how this North Indian friend of mine could manage such lovely fare, his wife too is from the North. A polite enquiry disguised in the form of a compliment let Anna out of the bag. Apparently the whole lunch was outsourced. So there u had this team of Tamils led by Anna who had made his kitchen theirs for the last three hours or so. They had come prepared, with the large tava which could do multiple dosas at any time, the atta, all the condiments to sprinkle and the works. My friend and his wife could rest and chat with everyone who’d come, with attention to the kitchen being required off and on. Which brings me to the whole thought that’s been haunting me ever since. Whenever we had guests over mom was in the kitchen doing t...

Interesting conicidence or is there more to it.....The above two trend lines represent Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The graphs are self explanatory I guess...

This is my first discovery on Google Trend. The above graph shows search trends for 'SEX" as made by India. My observations 1. We've hit a new high in 2006,check out the peak in the beginning of the year, wonder why. Was the beginning of 2006 the so called Tipping Point (too early to say) 2. There is something flawed in Google'scaling, check out the distances between successive years in the first graph 3. What causes that distinct peak in October I wonder (seen in both 2004 and 2005), is it a month of revival, festivity, joy etc etc 4. At an absolute level the number of searches seem to be largely constant..... 5. Check out hows search for sex and probably sex itself is a weekend phenomenon More interesting trends tomorrow....

List A: John Mc Enroe, Diego Maradona, Brian Lara, Shane Warne, Zinedine Zidane, Gary Kasparov List B: Pete Sampras, Rahul Dravid, Vishwanathan Anand, Michael Schumacher, Sachin tendulkar Genius has two sides to it. And both are equally marvellous. There is the refined genius which follows rules, adheres to systems and is the ideal role model. Then there is the maverick who in some ways is unpredictable, bohemian and brash but is an eqully good master as his saner counterpart. The root cause of how a genius turns out is probably a function of genetics and social conditioning both. Disturbed childhoods, trumatic experiences and a host of other factors might move a conventional genius into being a maverick.