Existential Me

My favourite browser has just helped me overcome the Javascript envy that I was secretly nursing for a long time now (after the Javascript browser wars began): it was lagging behind in the speed benchmarks that mattered, viz., Sunspider (and more recently, Google’s V8 Benchmark suite). No longer is this the case as this brand new version beats even the venerable Chrome on my machine (and presumably on other computers as well). See for yourself:

• Sunspider results for Opera 10.50
• V8 results for Opera 10.50 (will post a screenshot shortly)
• Sunspider results for Google Chrome 4.0.266 (developer stream)
• V8 results for Google Chrome 4.0.266 (developer stream) (will post a screenshot shortly)

I saw this

on the Google search results page today. Notice what’s unusual?

No? There are two l’s instead of just one. What was even more weird was this:

Again, did you notice the options on the left? I’ve seen this in the list of features introduced through Google Experimental, but on the main search results page? Something’s definitely cooking!

What’s up Google?

Update: This is what was up. Thanks to a well-informed reader for the heads up.

A couple of paragraphs that I came across in Arthur Hailey’s “Final Diagnosis”.

[An obstetrician reflects on the little ones in a hospital's nursery:] These, he thought, were the normal, healthy animals who had won, for the moment, their battle for existence and in a few days more would go outward and onward into the waiting world. Their destinations were the home, the school, the strife of living, the competition for fame and possessions. Among these were some who would taste success and suffer failure; who, barring casualty, would enjoy youth, accept middle age, and grow old sadly. These were those for whom more powerful and glossier automobiles would be designed, in whose service aircraft would wing faster and farther, whose every whim and appetite would be wooed by others of their kind with wares to market. These were some who would face the unknown future, most with misgiving, many bravely, a few craven. Some here, perhaps, might breach the barriers of outer space; others with the gift of tonues might move their fellow men to anger or despair. Most, within twenty years, would fulfil their physical maturity, obeying, but never understanding, the same primeval craving to copulate which had sown their seed and brought them, mewling, puking, here. But for now these were the victors – the born and urgent. Their first and gratest barrier was down, the other battles yet to come.

[One of the protagonists eyes his son who was born prematurely and who has been kept in an incubator.] Once more het let his eyes stray back to the tiny figure. For the first time the thought occurred to him: This is my son, my own, a part of my life. Suddenly, he was consumed by a sense of overwhelming love for this fragile morself, fighting his lonely battle inside the warm little box below. He had an absurd impulse to shout through the glass: You’re not alone, son; I’ve come to help. He wanted to run to the incubator and say: These are my hands; take them for your strength. Here are my lungs; use them and let me breathe for you. Only don’t give up, son; don’t give up! There’s so much ahead, so much we can do together – if only you’ll live! Listen to me, and hold on!This is your father and I love you.

Happy Birthday in advance SP! May your life be full of pleasant surprises; may the sounds of laughter always fill your life. God bless!

Love.

You know, it rained today, here at Pune. The October heat had been punishing in its intensity so far, and the respite given by the rain gods was quite welcome. Just as it began pouring, I went downstairs to unlock my bike and leave it out in the rain, so it could get washed. I got drenched in the process of course, but then, being with you for two years has not been a period devoid of learning.

I have learnt to appreciate the beauty of rains in this city – the intensity, the aftermath, everything. I have only heard you describe your love of the rain – how, contrary to a lot of others’ feelings for it, you actually enjoy watching the downpour; how, instead of making you feel depressed by its gloominess, it actually enlivened you – so much so that once you went out with your niece and danced in the rain, but I can visualise your happy laughter. I am not similarly talented in the department of dancing, having, as I do, two left feet, but if I could, I would have because I actually celebrated the rain today – the first time in a long, long time.

For you, I hope that, wherever you are, you are blessed with a man who understands and cherishes you, and a warm home. Of course, having your home located in a beautiful area, with someone indulging you everyday with your morning cup of “chai”, newspapers, furniture with upholstery matching the house’s decor – these would be nice too. I hope you’re really, really happy, and get everything you wish for, because you deserve nothing less than that.

Occasional, torrential rains shouldn’t hurt either.

I suppose it’s okay to make this post as long as I don’t disclose names and identify individuals. With that, let me go on.

He is simply unable to get on with his life. Sure, he goes to work and doesn’t skip his daily and week-end routine, but I can see that his heart is simply not in it, except when he plays badminton with me. Otherwise, his face has that look which is all too readable to anyone who cares to notice. To wit, he has become a zombie.

I’ve stopped trying to tell him that she has now gone beyond his reach – you can’t inform a man who already knows; you don’t need to tell a fish which is out of water that it’s going to die – it knows instinctively, but it can’t stop thrashing all the same.

I can see him suffering silently. Sometimes, he sets off on his new bike and vanishes for an hour, but when he comes back, it’s evident that he has gone on his “pilgrimage” – a visit to the places they used to frequent, and also her last places of residence. I’ve never seen him cry, and but for the tear stains, I wouldn’t have known he was even capable of crying.

Sometimes, I point out to him that his “pilgrimage” does not seem to be helping him at all; that it only seems to deepen his pain. But he doesn’t seem to listen, or maybe he feels that his pain is atonement for the grave mistake he’d committed. To him, she was the one, and the memory of how he’d let her go after her heart-breaking entreaties was painful to him beyond words.

I try not to judge him. After all, who can say what’s the right thing – right and wrong are extremely subjective even otherwise, and more so in these cases. Especially when a man who has never cried since he passed out of school sobs in front of you, you don’t want to be caught judging because his remorse is genuine, even if in vain.

As he was coming out of the mall, he saw her. He did a double-take to confirm that his eyes had not deceived him. Before he could take a good second look, she had turned away and was now walking down the steps. Then, as is the wont of many women in that city, she took out a long piece of cloth from her bag and proceeded to cover her face from the nose down – a process, he sadly noted, that did not go well with his desire to make visual confirmation. Even as he was staring at her dumbly, she turned, looked at him, probably noted something terribly wrong with his open stare, and turned away quickly. He realised that he was doing something that was not only stupid, but could potentially earn him a slap from a total stranger. He collected his senses and began to walk rapidly towards her. As he neared her, however, a strange fear gripped him: what would he say to her? After all, he had done her a terrible injustice in the past. He thought to himself, “Maybe he could simply say, ‘S?’ and the rest of the conversation would follow spontaneously.” Damn it, her gait appeared familiar, and so did her profile! Yet, he was so nervous that he simply walked past her instead of stopping to confirm his doubt.

He walked up to his bike, started it, and turned it once more in the direction he’d seen her walking. There, there she went! He quickly went past her again, and stopped a hundred feet in front so as to not appear to be a stalker, having made up his mind to talk to her, come what may. But just as she came beside the bike and he prepared himself to accost her, a truck went past, drowning out his voice. Damn! He started the bike again, noticed her talking to an autorickshaw driver, hoped that she would ride in it (so he would be able to follow discreetly), saw her resume her walking, and moved towards her. This time, he stopped directly in front of her, lifted the visor of his helmet up, and asked tentatively, “S?” “Sorry?”, came the reply. “Are you S?” he asked again, in what later seemed to him a very stupid manner. “No,” she said, her hand going toward the cloth that half-covered her face. He mumbled an apology, was now sure it was not her (the voice was a dead give-away, he could recognize it anywhere), and sped off on the bike. Maybe she thought he was a road-side Romeo looking for a blind date; no matter, he had made sure he didn’t miss an opportunity to talk to S.

His thoughts then turned to S. How was she? Was she happy? Did she think of him at times as he did of her many times in a day? As was usual in recent times, he felt a lump in his throat, a tightening of the muscles near the temples, and the beginning of a throbbing sensation that he knew would eventually result in a headache. And subsequent feelings of guilt and shame.

Dear SP,

I owe you an apology: I had taken a decision which involved you without giving you, or myself for that matter, the consideration that was due. Would I that I could change my decision as easily as I had changed my mind! Now, however, things have reached a point where they are irreversible, and I know your word of honour is as unshakable as the strength of my decisions were fickle.

Apologies are merely words, sometimes backed my sincere emotions, that rarely have the power to undo things that were done in a moment of anger, thoughtlessness, grief. Then why do I write this? It is with the hope that you’ll read these lines sometime in the future when the scars that I have caused you have either disappeared completely, or have at least ceased to give you any more pain.

You remarked more than once that I didn’t have the guts to stand up for what I wanted. You also said that my “slow approach” would cost me something very valuable. You were right on both counts. I should have given them a chance to see how happy things would have been, and how easily they would have been able to cope with changes. I should have had more faith in myself and you. Now, when things have gone out of my hands, I realise the value of things that are no longer mine.

Sometimes, just sometimes, apologies can reopen doors, and people are given another chance to redeem themselves. I will remain hopeful that such a chance comes my way.

Love.

At times, I take things too seriously – as happened recently when I tried to sell my laptop. Within hours of my putting it for sale on ebay, somebody by the name Niraj Jain had purchased it, and I was thrilled. So far so good. What you wouldn’t have expected me to do, however, is the little bit of sleuthing that I did last night, stretching into the wee hours of the morning.

I unearthed what would have been a perfect crime but for a tad bit of oversight – the e-mail ID from Western Union was not quite from Western Union (www.westernunion.com), but from Westernunion-paymentonlines.com. But for the disturbing nugget of doubt about this e-mail ID, I’d have taken their bait hook, line and sinker. On hindsight, it turned out to be a good thing that I had purchased some talk time on Skype – it helped me call up Western Union’s customer care, and when I asked them to run this e-mail ID through their systems, they came up with zilch.

Yet another dead give-away was the telephone numbers. The buyer had given me a telephone number for contact, and so had “Western Union” in their e-mail, along with the name of a person in their “customer service department” – Russel Simmons. The remarkable thing was these numbers were more or less identical except for one or two digits. When I tried dialling the buyer’s number through Skype, sure enough, the call couldn’t go through. One of my UK friends was on-line, and I sought his help. He tried and reported that it was a private line – that is, the line itself was owned by the called party or something like that – and that it would cost a great deal of money to simply make a call to it.

There’s more. Another e-mail, this one purporting to be from Swift Courier International, which informed me that though they have a demand draft for Rs.52,000 in place, it would be on hold until I gave them the airway bill number for the shipment of the laptop. “This would ensure that while your money is on its way, the buyer’s laptop is on its way too, thus preventing any fraud”. How ingenious, and totally credible! That part of the fraud came unravelled too when I called up the customer care department of the *original* Swift Courier International (yes, it does exist and is head-quartered in the UK – the same country where the buyer claimed he was currently staying), and they couldn’t recognize the “reference number” that was given in the e-mail.

The icing on the cake (or the final nail in the coffin, whichever way you choose to look at it) was the domain name (westernunion-paymentonlines.com) itself – it was a “personal address” on MSN, whatever that means (see attached screenshot). The domain name for the Swift Courier’s e-mail was msn.com too, and when I checked the headers of both e-mails, sure enough, Hotmail servers were involved!!

I shudder to think of the loss I’d have had to suffer had I not seen through things when I did. The whole scheme was incredibly well-organised and I doubt if someone less alert (and less knowledgeable about domain names, etc.) would have even seen doubted this till it was too late.

Just to make things clear, eBay is a wonderful place to buy and sell items, especially when you can’t afford advertisements in your local newspaper. Unfortunately for us, the Niraj Jains of this world are far too cunning and prepared, and unless you stumble on to something like I did, the chances are you’re likely to get swindled big time.

Moral of the story: eBay advises buyers and sellers to avoid on-line payment systems like Western Union, and I am beginning to see why. When scam artists (yes, they have made it a fine art) go to such great lengths to make the whole thing look so credible – even including a shipping address in Nigeria – it does make sense to use eBay’s own payment mechanism, and / or on-line bank transfers.

And never, *ever*, ship out anything unless you’ve got the money safely in your hands. Unless, of course, you have so much of the stuff that you don’t mind losing some. In that case, my phone number is …. and you can call me any time of the day or night to relieve your monetary burden

P.S. Yet another moral of the story: If you’re in India, want to talk often to your friends who are staying abroad, and don’t want to go out of your home looking for a VoIP phone booth – and you wouldn’t want to, I guarantee you, at 1:30 a.m. – get yourself some talk time on Skype. Take my word for it, it comes in handy.

I was reading this article recently and was going through the reactions of the readers. I didn’t exactly do a count, but it did strike me that people are about evenly divided between condemning the fine and accepting it.

The real question, it seems to me, is not whether kissing in public is to be allowed or not; the more pertinent question is, who decides what’s decent in a public place? I would think that the decision about decency would be made by individuals, and not anyone claiming to be enforcers of the law. If you’re in a public place with your partner, and there are no “impressionable” (in your judgment) young ones (or old ones, for that matter) around, then go right ahead and do your thing, as long as it is love that drives you to do so. Don’t do it out of a feeling of defiance, to prove that you don’t care what others think; to show your parents and others who controls your life.

The reason I even have to add the clause about impressionable young (or old) people around is that in India, kissing, holding hands, etc. are simply not acceptable to many people. I suppose there was a time when the same situation existed many decades ago in England and other countries in Europe. And I’m equally sure that the first couple to have kissed in public would have raised a lot of eyebrows. But now, the people over there have gotten to a point where such things are common, and may cause embarrassment only if there is an old person around. Especially one who is staring!

We’re still a young country in the post-British era, and we’re experimenting with societal changes now. Yes, it’s going to be painful for some of us to accept certain things, and everyone is welcome to express his / her opinion for and against the topic, but in the absence of a consensus, penalising such public displays of affection seems not only crude and totalitarian, but also irrational.