Misc – Page 6 – Random Ramblings

Who moved the personal websites and why do we need to revive them?

It was circa 1998, and with my first ever internet connection, Satyam online, I was surfing the net at snail’s pace. I stumbled on a web hosting site called angelfire.com.

They were giving away free web hosting space for single page websites for people wanting to publish personal web sites.

I came across a six year old from Sweden who had published a picture of her doll house with a short note about herself. Could not find that site , she would be a young lady by now. The pic above shows another six year old rocking on his personal web site.

I asked myself , if a six year old could do it, why not me. I registered my first domain name Sibha.com for free and published my first web page at angelfire.com. 50 percent of the screen space was covered by advertisements and I had a domain name and hosting space for free! Cost of paid hosting was quite prohibitive, not to mention the cost of hardware and networking connectivity.

It was almost thirty years ago and yet today we hardly see any personal web sites. Who killed the interest ?

Firstly, those were the days when there were no smart-phones and applications like Facebook and WhatsApp were beyond any imagination. The first web application on social media, as I know was Orkut by Google in 2004.

So, personal website was the only way one shared photos on public. The net connectivity was not good enough for sharing videos.

Of course email groups were the conduits for sharing gossips and net gyan. So, it made a lot of sense for anyone; individual or a commercial venture to have a website to communicate with the public. HTML language and web site designing were taught in schools, though as always HTML was taught in Indian schools by teachers who had no idea of computers and it was just another set of questions and answers.

After the dot com bubble burst in the early 2000, and with the advent of smartphones and dumb apps, emails and web sites were solely for business . The death knell to personal websites was sounded loud and clear.

Why do we need to revive it ?

Today we have a plethora of media to convey to the rest of the world what you had for breakfast and what gifts you got for your birthday . The vocabulary of a netizen is restricted to like, forward , upload, emojis and stickers.

The art of writing a good email or creating an art work with 0s and 1s is hardly rewarded. Just pick up something from the net and keep forwarding it to all your friends, frenemies and their uncles and aunts.

For young people, particularly, a website would foster creativity while instagram or whatsapp makes people Zombies. New terms have come up like sexting and drunken texting , in this age of instant gratification. When I write a blog , I look for a quiet place and for texting and forwarding memes, the noisier the place , better it is.

Whatever, while Smartphones with their apps cannot be wished away, they do have their place, it is time we revive the kind of media that calls for deliberate creative writing (not texting) or art work.

Any company or a professional who wants to showcase her products or ideas would require a website, not whatsapp or facebook.

Other big changes which have occurred over the years is the falling price of web hosting and ease of web designing. Today you can host a site at one third of the money you spend on mobile bills. You can put up a site and maintain it without writing a single line of code.

Here’s a brief howto defined in Four Steps on how to approach the issue if you ever want a site of your own.

Step 1. Decide on the right name and a domain name for your site. It could be personal like ‘anuwrites.online’ or a business-like url printsolutions.com .

Step 2. Goto any of the hosting sites which would do the name registration . Some links are https://in.godaddy.com/ , https://www.bigrock.in/ . Register your domain name for one year, two years or as you wish. Sample pricing per year is as under

Step 3 . Find a place to host your site. Basically these companies provide the servers to serve your web pages to the public. Here again the rates are very reasonable besides the links given in step 2 there are many who claim to provide discount hosting , eg https://hostripples.in/

Step 4 . Now that you have an address for your place on the net , you have a place to store the contents in the form of 0s and 1s, you can start the design and construction. For personal web sites , it would be total fun to design your own site, particularly if you have time to waste on whatsapp and facebook arguing with strangers or fishing for likes from the whole world . If you are a busy person or if you want a professional designer, just use justdial or google your way to find a web designer.

Cheers !

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How I met Chess

I saw Chess for the first time when I was around six, at a neighbour’s place, during a summer vacation. It was another board game, but unlike droughts or ludo, it had so many different ‘characters’ queen, king, horse, elephant, camel and what not ? Each piece was different in the way it moved … Continue reading “How I met Chess”

My brother, two years elder to me, and I were so excited about the ‘new’ game that we had to try it out at home. Like a ‘Dhayakkattam’ (or Chaupad as it is called in the North) we drew the board on the floor. Since every piece was different we had to make card board pieces with names written on top like king ,queen etc. We just knew how they moved and nothing else. Most of the board games had a start point and a finish point . This board had neither. So we assumed that the aim was to just go about killing the pieces of the opponent left and right and whosoever had some piece left on the board won. We played all afternoon with these rudimentary rules , but thoroughly enjoyed it.

When appa came home from office we were still at it moving the pieces about chasing, killing , threatening and parrying. He thought it was another of those nameless, spontaneously improvised games that kids play, until we told him proudly that we were playing ‘Chess’. He didn’t say anything, then. But the next day when he came home he had brought real Chessboard and Chessmen. As he took out the packet, when asked what it was, I remember him telling in his characteristic way “ vazaikkai bajji “ (Some eatable) . I can still recall the sight and smell of the new plastic set.

The rest of the vacation was just chess ,chess and chess. Our neighborhood kids were not much interested, one reason being that we beat them hollow from the first day. So most of the time we played against each other. In the evening, when appa came home, we took turns to play with him. Before long we started beating him . On Sundays he got books from the public library to learn the theory systematically.

The books were in English , so appa had to read . As a matter of fact , I learnt chess notations before I could read English. It was so fascinating . I particularly remember one game by Adolf Anderson that changed our outlook towards chess forever.

It is also called the immortal game. (Anderssen,A – Kieseritzky,L London 1851)

We always played to kill as many of the pieces of the opponent and bigger the kill , better it was. Here was a game in which Black has all his pieces, Major and Minor, intact while white is left with just two Knights and a Bishop. Yet it was the three lowly minor pieces that checkmates the Black King and none of his own Maharathis (Warriors) are able to come to the defence of Black King.

Chess meant tactics, Chess meant strategy Chess meant winning the game even while losing the pieces.

Then I remember following the Boris Spassky – Bobby Fischer World Championship Match , through Newspapers. The Hindu used to give a four column coverage on the Sports page with Manual Aaron, India’s first International Master covering the event.

When I was nine, I joined a boarding school where boys played more of Football, Hockey and Kabbadi rather than chess or Carom Board. After Joining the NDA and later Army , I drifted further and further away from the world of Chess, though I always had a chess set with me , even in field area.

Now after retirement, thanks to on-line chess, I get to play quality chess whenever I want to. It is like a great home-coming to pleasures of Chess.

Here’s the whole game “The Immortal game”

Aadhaar Card and I

There is much talk, or should we say, heated arguments, in the Social media about Aadhaar card and how it impinges on privacy of citizens. By and large , the elite are disturbed by loss of privacy while the vast majority of the unwashed masses couldn’t care less one way or the other, about the … Continue reading “Aadhaar Card and I”

There would definitely be some genuine people who like Henry Thoreau believed that any govt can only be detrimental to individual freedom . Those interested in his philosophy can check out “Walden Pond”. It’s something like, “I want nothing from the govt,except to be left alone”. That is understandable. people can find a secluded spot and live with Nature ;No Taxes, No identity and all the privacy you want and more viz, Solitude.

In my opinion, most people who oppose Aadhar , simply want their income and expenditure hidden from the Govt and general public unless they want to disclose something. How else can you explain a person giving minute to minute report of every meal and every event on every social media under a name like ‘cool_cat’ or ‘nameless’ , and yet claiming to be “a very private person” when it comes to getting Aadhaar Card issued?

When I first heard about Aadhar Card and Nandan Nilekeni’s Project , I could never have imagined the opposition to the venture. Identity cards were already ubiquitous. People in the corporate world , wear their cards proudly, with a fancy ribbon, during entire period of working hours, if not 24 x 7. Then you have Passport,Driving license, PAN Card,Voter ID and so on, none of which prompted this kind of threat to privacy as Aadhaar does now.

As an army man, for a long time I had had no card other than the Identity Card issued by the army. It did not have address or phone number and it was not to be photocopied or handed to anyone even temporarily. I had nothing by way of proof of identity or proof of address for anything like opening a bank account. Particularly in the south, it was so difficult to explain that I had no documents at all like telephone bill, electricity bill, Ration Card or Seshan card(Voter Identity Card). Not that we had free electricity just that the electricity charges were directly recovered by our paying authority at Pune, based on reports sent by MES.(Military Engineer Service) , irrespective of where we were stationed.

So, how did we get about in the civvies street ? we had a certificate made by the Battalion about where we lived and worked. Since it had a heading like “To Whomsoever it may concern”, It was generally referred to by soldiers and sailors simply as “whomsoever”. It could be used as “Ek whomsoever chahiye, bank account kholna hai” As for the family members of a soldier, it was even more difficult to provide any kind of proof of their existence.

Coming back to the time when the aadhar card was introduced, we were thrilled. We trooped down to the designated place, where all faujis,serving and retired gathered along with their families to put our thumb impressions.

When the card finally materialized, it was a great day. Though the photo on the card was anything but flattering, it was a card accepted in the civvies street. The magical 12 digits gave us an address proof and identity proof. At last we had something other than “Whomsoever”.

Is variety the curse of life ?

Variety is the spice of life , is a much abused cliché . It starts with food, goes on to clothes and touches every aspect of life. A random google search throws up this explanation Diversity makes life interesting, as in Jim dates a different girl every week—variety is the spice of life, he … Continue reading “Is variety the curse of life ?”

Variety is the spice of life , is a much abused cliché .

It starts with food, goes on to clothes and touches every aspect of life.

A random google search throws up this explanation

Diversity makes life interesting, as in Jim dates a different girl every week—variety is the spice of life, he claims.

After all “Polygamy is the opposite of monotony”

Of course there is no mention of Mary seeking the spice of life.

What does it mean in day to day life ? Variety in cuisine has come to mean changing your dietary preference every day from Mughlai to South Indian, Continental to Thai and so on. Why do you need so much variety; to break the monotony of course. My question is don’t we need a staple diet to build up monotony in the first place. How else can you break the monotony ?

Secondly, no two experiences are the same as any experience depends on both the subject and the object .

When you listen to the same music , over and over, you either get hooked on to it or move away from it. No music worth listening to, leaves the listener unaffected. So the next time you listen to the same music, the experience is so different, and when you listen to a kind of music for over 25-30 years, it becomes a unique experience by itself.

Kolaveri kind of Music comes and goes, but MS kind of music goes on forever. Firstly , it is not monotony as every time you listen, the experience is more intense, and even if it is so, why should I want to break this heavenly monotony.

Cuisine is one area where spice plays a major role. Here again, if you ask anyone hooked to the delicacy called curd rice with lemon pickle, he or she would swear that it is not the same experience but every time it tastes better and better.

These days it is fashionable to serve a variety of cuisine in a single meal. The other day, we attended a wedding lunch at a five star hotel and as per norms, there was a lavish spread covering recipes from every region across continents. The diners are not happy with the taste of one region, but help themselves to a micro portion of every dish that looks appetizing. It is not uncommon to have Manchurian, chicken tikka , noodles and dosa punctuated by Thai soup and Chocolate soufflé

The next day many complained of stomach upset and with so many dishes, it was indeed difficult to identify the culprit. My own reading is that it was the random order of consuming a random combination of dishes that did it.

In the pre-refrigerator days, the left over, from the day meal could be carried over for the evening, but any food unconsumed in the evening meal had to be given away. I remember the typical call of the beggars who would regularly make their rounds at night to collect these left overs. The housewives also kept aside some food for these people. These alms seekers mostly ended up with small portions of all kinds of food in their bowls, much like what we find on the plates of variety seekers in a five star hotel.

So much for variety.

Running commentaries and Media Coverage on Rush for Cash

I remember the first running commentary I heard of India – West Indies Test series in 1966. Those days it was not just a novelty, but pure magic to be able to follow live, an event taking place thousands of miles away. But these commentaries, then, were reserved mainly for sports events. Today every event … Continue reading “Running commentaries and Media Coverage on Rush for Cash”

I remember the first running commentary I heard of India – West Indies Test series in 1966. Those days it was not just a novelty, but pure magic to be able to follow live, an event taking place thousands of miles away. But these commentaries, then, were reserved mainly for sports events. Today every event or even a non-event is telecast live with tadka or embellishments.

Anyone who is a regular spectator of football, tennis or cricket matches would vouch that watching an event live is so different from watching it on TV. What is a cricket match without the crowd hollering for ‘fours’ and ‘sixes’ in unison or what is a tennis match that doesn’t give you a neck pain following the ball from side to side. There is something very unreal in lying on a couch with a packet of chips watching the players sweat it out.

I remember the high altitude posts like Siachin where satellite TV had just made its appearance. MTV Grind used to be a popular show among soldiers and officers alike. What can be more unreal than men clad in layers and layers of warm clothing gawking at the almost naked men and women basking in the sun. These soldiers would not have seen any female form clothed or otherwise and exposed parts of their own bodies for months.

Seeing the media coverage on the current issues that is how I feel, far removed , disconnected and disoriented. We are subjected to day long tale-commentary on #rushforcash. If some rabble rouser goes hysterical, media personnel are not far behind. Once in a while I go out to the town, to see for myself, the situation on ground. Being from a semi rural town, I can hardly connect the real life situation I see, to the TV news running all day.

I think the best coverage from Ground Zero , on the subject was done by Rajdeep Sardesai on India Today. His coverage from various banks followed by his coverage of the Parliament is nicely summed up in his tweet .(hail twitter for the word restriction)

Whichever way you throw a fat cat , it always lands on its feet, sometimes crushing some hardworking ants under its feet , further softening the landing. Yeh Hai India. Yeh hai Dunia.

Cartoon : Courtesy: https://twitter.com/hashtag/StraightLines?src=hash

The Other Train Journey in SA

Anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the life of mahatma Gandhi would be familiar with the story of Gandhiji being unceremoniously thrown out from a First Class Compartment in South Africa. To quote Louis Fischer, ………….The incident occurred at At Maritzburg, the capital of Natal, in 1893.Gandhi could have returned to the train … Continue reading “The Other Train Journey in SA”

Anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the life of mahatma Gandhi would be familiar with the story of Gandhiji being unceremoniously thrown out from a First Class Compartment in South Africa.

To quote Louis Fischer,

………….The incident occurred at At Maritzburg, the capital of Natal, in 1893.Gandhi could have returned to the train and found a place in the third class car. But he chose to remain in the station waiting room. It was cold in the mountains. His overcoat was in his luggage which the railway people were holding; afraid to be insulted again, he did not ask for it. All night long, he sat and shivered, and brooded. ….. That bitter night at Maritzburg the germ of social protest was born in Gandhi. …………….

From an ordinary lawyer, the transformation to an extraordinary world leader had started.

What is lesser known is the other journey that transformed Gandhi’s life and indirectly India’s destiny was another rail journey Gandhiji undertook in 1904.

During the period from 1893 to 1904, Gandhiji continued to practice as a lawyer at Johannesburg. He took up all kinds of issues affecting the Indian Community in South Africa , through every available forum, for redressal, but he was essentially a successful Indian lawyer.

In 1903, Gandhi had helped to start a weekly magazine called Indian Opinion. The paper was in difficulties, and to cope with them at first hand Gandhi took a trip to Durban where the magazine was published. By then he had found a close friend in Henry S. L. Polak, a London born Jew who totally involved himself in the Indians’ cause in Transvaal. Polak saw him off at the station and gave him a book to read for the long journey. It was John Ruskin’s Unto This Last.

As Gandhiji himself says in ‘My Experiments with Truth”

“It gripped me. Johannesburg to Durban was a twenty-four hours’ journey. The train reached there in the evening. I could not get any sleep that night. I determined to change my life in accordance with the ideals of the book,” Gandhi wrote.

“I believe that I discovered some of my deepest convictions in this great book,” he wrote, adding the work “captured me and made me transform my life.”

Again to quote Louis Fischer,

……..Those books appealed to him most which were closest to his concept of life and, where they deviated, he brought them closer by interpreting them. ‘It was a habit with me’. Gandhi once wrote, ‘to forget what I did not like and to carry out in practice whatever I liked.’……..

At the end of the journey , he was fully convinced of the course of action he should take. He wrote a long letter to his elder brother to be relieved of the financial commitments to his family. It was his brother who had sent him to London to study law. He bought a piece of land to establish an Ashram. It was called Phoenix farm. The rail journey took place in Oct 1904 and in Nov 1904, Phoenix farm was born.

It took him another year to completely close down his establishment at Johannesburg , but thereafter , he never looked back. In South Africa it was Phoenix Farm and later Tolstoy Farm. Back in India it was Sabarmati Ashram and later Warda Ashram that became the hub of Indian freedom Struggle.

Gandhiji had a wonderful faculty of translating into practice anything that appealed to his intellect. Some of the changes he had made in his life were as prompt as they were radical.

He did not preach but just practiced what appealed to him . When asked by a someone as to what was his message to the world , he could simply say,

My life is my message

A Town Called Mhow

How often have I been asked ? A south Indian, how come you have settled down at Mhow? I have no clear answers . But every time I hear such a question, it triggers a series of thoughts on the uniqueness of Mhow. As a fauji I have been through 23 different places … Continue reading “A Town Called Mhow”

As a fauji I have been through 23 different places of posting , generally referred to as a military station or a cantonment. Many fellow-rovers would agree with me that most of the people , toy with the idea of settling down in their place of posting, some time or the other . It could be the Nilgiris, a Punjabi might fall in love with or Pithoragarh (google map please!) that might entice a South Indian. But these places are known for the short tourist seasons , and the ideas for taking roots at such places are also seasonal… In Pithoragarh if you go through one winter , the salubrious climate in Summer is spoilt with this thought “If summer is here , can winter be far behind ?, .. run before it sets in” . It would be John Keats reverse-quoted (a word I just coined) .

So it goes, one place good only for summer, another good only for winter, too far North or too far South, East or west , too much rain or too little rain, concrete jungle or too remote a place and it goes on… Now let us look at Mhow. It is like the story of Narasimhavatar of Vishnu…. neither too warm or too cold, neither too North or too South, neither urban nor rural, neither a cantonment nor a civil area…well , on which ever axis you consider, it falls right in the middle ! It Includes some dubious considerations; neither are people too law abiding nor too lawless !

Any account of Mhow is not complete without a mention of Mhow-bazaar. The Main street is almost as if custom made for the fauji ladies ! Walking across just half a km, they can find fancy gowns, dresses , suits, leather jackets, leather boots, or beautiful curtains , paintings, wood carvings and such stuff for their drawing room , ingredients to exercise all their culinary skills in Chinese and Continental dishes (poor husbands !). Mhow tailors , historically , have been catering for the Rajas and aristocrats during British India and later to the army personnel posted all over the country in the Independent India. I for one have always got my uniforms made at Mhow, wherever I was posted; did I say 23 stations ?

Whats so great about a market and tailors? It is the ambiance that strikes. Whether it is the people moving about in the narrow streets and lanes of the town, or the shop keepers sitting at their desk on a summer afternoon, there is a sense of timelessness. Many shops actually shut down from two to four for the afternoon siesta. The bhoras are always smiling with the ‘koi dikkat nahin’ attitude. I bought curtain rods for my house, my measurements turned out to be wrong and I went back for exchanging them , not with much hope. As it happened , fresh piecees were cut to the revised size with a ‘Koi dikkat nahin’ smile.

My wife had been lugging around an old Sumit mixer grinder , absolutely functional but one crucial knob missing. The machine was so obsolete no spares were available anywhere. That was before we reached Mhow. A 10 ft by 12 ft shop with a know-all , do-all owner, with a ‘koi dikkat nahin ‘ attitude found the right solution in no time . It is not just the jugaad for repairing stuff , they can also produce such stuff found only in elite stores. I was looking for a ‘quiche tray’ and the same shop-keeper produced it seemingly out of nowhere. (I had only recently learnt the word ‘quiche’ but as a shop-keeper of Main street , Mhow he was fully aware of the the contraption as an essential need of a fauji mem-saab.)

An ancient defence service officers institute coupled with modern libraries, gymnasiums , tennis and squash courts, an olympic size swimming pool, a sprawling golf course and most importantly the ambiance of Mhow-bazaar has made this place truly a haven for a retired fauji.

A Tale of two Chiefs

It was circa 1990, during the address to officers by the COAS at DSSC Wellington, one infantry officer had the temerity to suggest that something be done about providing better opportunities to infantry officers for nomination to attend DSSC Course at Wellington. He further explained that the Staff Course had become so important for … Continue reading “A Tale of two Chiefs”

Well, the Chief went ballistic; some raw nerve had been touched. He himself was a gunner and an air op officer . When he took over as the Chief, a leading National daily , had wondered as to how a battle hardened Force like the Indian Army had thrown up a Chief without any battle experience. The General was known for his strategic thinking rather than for soldiering. Mandal Commission was the then rage, across the country. He thundered, “I do not want mandalization in Army, we cannot have a quota system for infantry” . After a long, seemingly never ending diatribe he declared “ we have a fair system and anyone can reach the higher ranks”

Recently, in circa 2015, the present Chief, during his visit to Mhow, addressed the officers in the Station. In the course of his talk, he disclosed, “……. I am a Non-psc officer , and I have reached where I am through sheer soldiering. We do have a fair system in the Army …..”

He happens to be the first non-psc Chief. Well, we have come a full circle.

Travelling Light

Continued from Fauji and his Baggage In addition to all that contraptions and devices to see one through any latitude from 10 degree N to 35 degree N, one has to plan for the transportation of all the flora and fauna that an army man’s family falls in love with. Then you have a an … Continue reading “Travelling Light”

Continued from Fauji and his Baggage

In addition to all that contraptions and devices to see one through any latitude from 10 degree N to 35 degree N, one has to plan for the transportation of all the flora and fauna that an army man’s family falls in love with.

Then you have a an archaic rule that a govt servant cannot have two quarters on his name, at the same time, for a period of more than 10 days If the move is say, from Coimbatore to Pithoragarh, that makes it a little like a photographer trying to cover both the start and finish of a 100M dash.

In any case , most of the time you don’t have to worry about such situation , as it takes at least six months before you get a large enough accommodation to open all the packages.Yet some remained in packed condition for years. May be for this reason everything is packed in heavy Steel and wooden boxes.

One often hears , “..a two bed room house is more than enough for us, but what about our baggage and the empty boxes ?” I have seen a family of four huddled in a drawing room and one bed room while rest of the space including the second bed room and verandas on either side were stacked with boxes.

There is a popular formula for the number of boxes required; 2n +2 where n is the number of years of service. So, you start with two and add two boxes a year and end up with between 65-70 at the time of retirement.This is a very conservative estimate and people do reach three figures.

I myself stopped adding on to my tally , when it was around 25, somewhere in the mid-way through my long service.

I was moving from the North East to Chennai and I had decided to take a truck with part load. With plywood loaded it had weight but not volume. The truck driver was also carrying some new refrigerators from the show room. As my 5 year old fridge was being loaded packed in a heavy wooden box made of pine wood and being placed next to the brand new refrigerators in their original card board packages, it was a eureka moment for me.

It suddenly dawned on me that all goods, however fragile, however new, however costly, are transported across the length and breadth of the country in cardboard boxes and gunny bags, till the time they become proud possessions of an army man.

Yet, it took two more transfers before I relieved the fridge of its body armour, though I stopped buying any more new boxes. Since then I have kept my faith in the original card board packing and that trust has never been betrayed. If cardboard was good enough for white goods, then why not for clothes , books, kitchenware etc ? Now, having disposed off the few steel boxes I had, I feel a lot lighter and better.