Writer’s block- solution is to write crap.

There is surely something called writers block. And when it’s coupled with lack of sleep and boredom, it’s a killer. When that goes with a pile of work waiting to be written, corrected and to be re-referenced, it’s definitely a murder. My brain is dead even before it wakes up. Why can’t I just watch movies and do nothing productive- a.k.a do something of my choice, checking tech reviews, fiddling with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and testing the new phone etc? Or why can’t I just be cooking nice food and eating it happily. Or why can’t I go on a shopping spree to buy things for a new home? Or even better, why can I just go fix my motor bike and go on for a long carefree drive? Or why can’t I fix the electric bike with a mobile charger? Or even better why can’t I go to my better half’s home and help her mom with cooking?

No you can’t do any of this because you have a block.

So I decided to settle myself to a simpler way to kill the writer’s block- write crap. Where to write it  -oh sure- why do we have a blog – where I don’t have to worry about what others think or spelling or grammar and all that stuff.

So here it goes.

Let me start with my phones:

photo: http://www.gsmarena.com

I have been a lover of smart-phones since I first ever was suggested an E50 from Nokia. Nothing great or stylish, but I realised the joy of multitasking. But before I could buy it, E51 came into market convincing me that it’s better than the E50. For the first time I told myself, you actually bought a phone for 12500!!! It’s just a phone but it costs Rs.12500. Something like 1000 bucks per square cm.

There were many things you could do with a phone like that- Google search for a location, while you are on your way heading there, get the number from the page and call them to verify exactly where you had to go. Suits a person who was born with poor planning skills. Google maps and email on your go. Push mail to help reduce waiting time. Word documents can be viewed in case someone decides to write a mail with a word document.  Not a bad camera. All was well, sturdy till I lost it one day- not surprisingly in an auto. Tried ringing it all day but one picked it up. End of story. Part 1.

photo: http://www.gsmarena.com

Decided to buy a second one- E52, pretty happy with E51’s performance and the hope that Nokia would do something even better with the next one. Hmmm. Disappointment. Big size screen, but frequent hang-ups. Better camera but some loose connection in it that the camera app does not open at all. For almost six months every Nokia service center said, “sir but we don’t provide any service for Nokia phones that are not bought in India.”  Did they mean you go to Singapore to fix a phone’s camera? I chose to do what everyone in my country does- get cheated but keep your head high- never utter a word about it anywhere because if you do so, you will be laughed upon for being so stupid.

One day I accidentally figured a way to make the 3.1 MP camera work. Drop it on the floor. Later I perfected it; drop from about a metre high in a way so that the right top edge of the phone hits the floor. Then restart the phone. Camera will work till it gets a slight jerk again. I still remember the happiness when I figured out the camera actually started working – so happy that I took pictures of the farmers union leader at Sambalpur in front of me, multiple times to show my happiness. He was happy as well. 🙂

Also remember my friends making fun of me when I launch my phone downwards multiple times to get my smashing angle right. Again a year later tragedy struck.  The phone went missing from my motor cycle pouch one fine night when I was rushing to pick up a friend from Yeshwantpur station. I tried searching with the bike’s head lights through the dug up road with no luck. Same story- tried ringing up but got switched off in half an hour. Someone smart got my smart-phone. 😦  end of part 2.

Then experimentation started. Bought a Samsung Corby for its touch screen but later hated it because it did not even have a music player which can make play lists and it was not really a smart-phone. After three months, sold the phone off for half price.

Tried hanging around with a few basic phones  like the stupidest of all cheap phones- Micromax x100 and a Samsung guru. By then android and touch screen was almost everywhere I could see. Well, open source. Hmmm. So it must be cheaper to buy a smart-phone nowadays eh? Logic said it should but market decided otherwise. Unable to really assess what kind of hardware was required to push the android OS, and a bit too touchy about being completely dependent on the touch screen, I got squarely cheated with the mobile vendor Univercell and Motorola which has just started manufacturing from Indian soil in a factory near Madras.

When I was considering the phone in the shop, I told myself, I am a bit of a geek, managed to tinker with the E51 and 52, so I can manage this android for at least a couple of years. Bought Motorola XT 311  fire for 9500 bucks on a EMI in Univercell in Madras. The other options in Sangeetha, Mobile store, Poorvika were like HTC cha cha, Sony Xperia mini etc which were all above 15000 then. 9500 sounded like a good buy. Oddly only Univercell seemed to have this phone from Motorola. And till today they are the only ones who sell it. Sounds like a deal to screw consumers isn’t it? Wish I had known.

The phone was a heavy for its size with an odd shape. Keypads were designed like the blackberry but they were very difficult to type. If I had ever ran that phone with all those apps they had loaded in the home screens, I am sure it would crawl for even opening a dialler. I thought, Allright it’s a slow phone- its not unmanageable. I kept the software slick. Installed fewer apps, un-installed Skype, Nimbuzz, Opera, Face book etc.

It was still slow. Worse still, it started off its new habit of restarting in the middle of phone calls and I would not even know that the line is dead till I heard that irritating welcome tone. It restarted in the middle of Google maps while I am navigating someone. And if I wear my headphone with audio it will sound well, but if it’s a phone call, then the voice will be heard like someone’s throat is being throttled. Surely something was wrong with my piece. Besides, androids had their history of poor battery backup- nowhere close to my e51 or 52 smart-phones which would last for at least two days.

Found the only available Motorola in Bangalore near Navrang Theater in Rajaji Nagar. They took my piece and took more than a month to get back. No, actually they never got back- it was me who kept calling them every week. Once they said we had given it back to the company and I can call Motorola to speed it up. A few calls to Motorola later I was finally told that’s it’s been repaired. To my surprise I received a new handset (with the old battery and the back cover).  Ah! it wasn’t that bad after all I just happened to have a faulty piece.

Went about doing everything again, sms backup, email configuration, themes, music, photos and all.

All was well for a few weeks, and then the first auto restart happened in the middle of a phone call. And the 3 month story repeated itself again.

In less than six months, the phone had been replaced once and still not respite from auto restarts or bad audio on earphone. Additionally the emails which were push mails were loading real slow and were not dependable when I wanted to show it to the ticket examiner in trains. Imagine, we try to cut down on paper and show the e-ticket and the circle of refreshment would go on infinitely, prompting someone to revoke the rule that everyone should get a paper ticket. End of part 3.

Tired, I set out to look at better phones. Also understood what would be a hardware required to run a decent android OS. But those decent phones which could open an already downloaded push mail in a second or two with an android OS were selling at least 23,000. Hmm, my naïve logic that android would push down phone prices was sadly busted.

Samsung kept releasing phone from Rs.8000 to Rs.29000 in the galaxy series. People  who bought the lower end phones were suffering at both  the things they expected a phone to do-  unreliable  battery as well as slow processing- actually even losing on what they surely had with old mobile phones- speed of processing.

HTC flunked for a while that year with no great phones. Motorola was absent in the market apart from some high end phone with unjustifiable prices like 35000 and around. Samsung was killing the market with galaxy and its galaxy note. Sony was continuing on its music legacy in xperia.

Last month, I suddenly chanced upon a phone by LAVA.  It was named like some fairy tale creature- Xolo x900 but with Intel’s processor. It had the basics of what I wanted. A very fast processing- just like an old school phone would have had, good email apps with a still Ginger bread OS. (Because another upgrade would require better hardware – like your windows PC would magically become unbearably slow once a new version of windows was available in market)  It also had what I did not look for. A nice 8mp camera with HD video and a good graphic processor with high res screen.

Bought it for Rs.22,000 ( on a 6 month loan) reminding myself that I never would fear experimenting. So far, I know it heats up a bit in random situations… I know the phone looks like a homemade bomb unit’s circuit when you open the back cover. But it seems to do its job without complaining. It may not have a great battery but it’s at least got the basics decent.  Let’s see how it goes.

In the next post i will tell you about my shoes. 😉

Changing Chief Ministers of State governments: A wrong Shortcut

Mr. Yeddurappa has been minting money, helping the mining mafia Reddy Brothers to sell illegal iron ore, took money in form of kick backs and donations to his family run trust and caused a loss of 16,000 cr to the Exchequer. He is under tremendous pressure to quit and appoint another member of the cabinet or a senior party leader as the Chief Minister of Karnataka.

Ashok Chavan apart from the many corruption cases that might have happened and are still happening during his tenure, had got directly involved in the Adarsh housing societyScam in Mumbai, where his relatives seem to have been allotted apartments from the building which stood on the land earmarked for the families of Kargil Martyrs. Shortly after the expose, Ashok Chavan quit as the Chief Minister of Maharashtra and Mr. Prithivi Raj Chavan an MP from Maharashtra and the Union Minister of Science and Technology became the new Chief Minister of Maharashtra.

Rosaiah Was appointed after the unfortunate sudden death of Y S Rajashekara Reddy and had been the CM of Andhra Pradesh for a more than a year. With the rise of Jagan Mohan reddy (son of YSR) as a strong opponent to the appointment of Rosaiah and his various stunts like the odarpu yatra and resignation of his MP post, Mr. Kiran Kumar Reddy is now the chief minister, a measure seen as appealing to the influential Reddy community.

One thing that is obvious is that there has been a change of power in these state governments in the past one year. The reasons have been allegations of corruption and expose of incriminating evidence to indicate the chief minister has been involved in corrpution and to balance grimy internal politics for the other one.

Yeddyurappa is still the CM while this was posted seems to have said that he holds the popular mandate of the People and so he won’t quit.

However there is another thing in common: these changes have not happened by a legal and constitutional process- they were not forced by an interim High Court verdict or an executive decision by the Governor. They decisions not even forced by a popular mass uprising among the public that provided them the mandate to get into power. They were taken by the central committees of two national parties, among a group of people not all of them directly elected by the public in question here, and forced by immense media pressure, which directed more pressure to these ‘central’ committees.

Here is a couple of things I am worried about:

A Change in the highest order of leadership of a state can happen- not because of a court, not by a decision passed by the parliament of the nation, not by the powers of the executive vested in the president by the honourable constitution of this country but by mere media pressure directed at the a group of individuals who had no connection whatsoever to the public who (albeit indirectly) have elected the leader.

I am worried at the rate at which federalism is squandered as well. There was an era of central governments using the Art. 356 to dissolve state assemblies with absolute impunity. Though this has become unpopular now, any methods of central decision making for drastic changes in a state government would remind every one in the country – that we are never for real federalism or any support to the idea of devolving more powers to states.

Corrpution can be tackled only by empowering independent authorities who have financial, legislative support of law enforcement agencies which are not under the control of the state governments. A Lokayukta at the state and a lok pal at the centre with more powers than mere recommendations can work wonders. Removing a head of the state does nothing to stop corruption does not even discourage it.

What needs to be realised soon is that this is not really a good example of fighting corrpution and is just a convenience of a quick victory for a the Delhi centric sensational media groups and the some national campaign groups who believe in more centralised campaigning to achieve quick shortcuts to win campaigns and claim a fame for them.

You represent me?

wow, look at the news now. there has never been such a strong religious connect to the civil society. Baba Ramdev is on a fast from today, shorlty after a momentous fast by Anna Hazare, who  confused everyone by supporting Mr. Narendra Modi. 

Excuse me- everyone out there!   You representing me?   dont even dream.   I am not a Hindu. I am not even religious.  I dont practice yoga neither can I understand the rhetorical Hindi you speak.  I am not a Brahmin and I might eat cows if i feel like it. I am not interested in religion.  I am as much affected by corruption as you are. I am disgusted by it. But because you go ahead and hold a meek, corrupt government to ransom  in a magnificent pandal in delhi – that does not make you my representative. I am not the civil society you talk about.

I want religion to die. I want religion to be lynched, roasted alive its bones charred into ashes in public. I want hinduism, christianity and islam and all the dozen other worst narcotic addictions to confine its influence to the walls of the house, church,mosque  or whatever but not one inch out of it.

 I want people to stop thinking religion and government together; caste and intelligence together; dark skin and regressiveness together; fair skin and trustworthiness together; tucked shirts, shoes and presentable nature together;  A fairskin, clean shave, corporate job and ‘good boy for my daughter’ together; suits, mercedes benz, reid & taylor suits, 24 carat gold pen and progressive thought together; saving environment and switching A/C’s together;  fair skin woman in mini skirts at the market place being teased and  ‘she deserved it’ together; transvestites and public rejection together; nurses, teachers with women together; CEO’s, CFO’s, bank managers, ministers, collectors and men together;  Lieutenant colonels, Genrals, Majors and macho men together;  respect and surnames together; pandits and progress together, dalits and outcasts together….

Apart from all this i also want government and development, equality, liberty, honesty, public service together like you.

but do we agree with each other?