Snow, a reckless driver and two months

This blog started sometime in January and I have completed now in March. Hopefully you won’t notice the break in the middle… Happy 2010. Enjoy!

I am starting this blog at 3 in the morning. It has been snowing for a while today. Went out for a walk in the snow. It was a very very nice experience. A hot coffee sent me to heaven. And here, I am back at home.

I have a few topics in my mind which I wanted to talk about. And today, I got the proper introduction I was looking for, on my way back home. This place is pretty much covered in snow. Some people are excited to see snow, others aren’t. That’s because it snows here once a year, if you are lucky. It is cold, but it doesn’t snow often. So, most people who drive here are not used to driving in snow. So you see people driving cars without having removed the snow from the top, which is quite dangerous. That was a surprising thing I noticed, however today night was a little more serious. A guy driving an SUV, talking on his cell phone, skids while trying to stop for a red signal, and stops in the middle of the intersection. He knew the red signal was coming on. Nope, this guy wouldn’t just care. If he tried to stop sincerely and missed, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. Even then, he is stopping an SUV which is bigger than everything here, and frankly, has nothing sporty about it. And this great soul doesn’t think it is necessary for him to actually stop talking on the phone even then. Nope. And why am I concerned? Because I was trying to cross the road and luckily didn’t assume that he had brains. Talking about brainy people…

There’s been a nice little drama going on here regarding NBC, a television channel. I won’t go into the details of the whole drama, but this is basically what happened. The network had two people who wanted to host the same legendary comedy show, The Tonight Show. One of them, Jay Leno, was hosting it for the last two decades, and has been hugely successful. The other is a younger upstart, Conan O’Brien who might be the future. So the channel decided to go with the younger one, and pushed the older one elsewhere. Now both the shows were doing badly, so they decided to bring the old one back. The younger one didn’t like it, and he got 40 million dollars (i.e. the rest of his contract) and he is going to leave the channel, for another one which will give him the same time slot there. The older one is getting back his show. The way it has been portrayed here is that the younger one is being kicked out. And people stood in rain outside the channel’s headquarters to protest his expulsion. And he thinks he is a victim, and is milking it to the max. I mean, come on!!!!! How dumb can people be ... This is a country with an un-employment rate of 15%. Walmart, the cheapest store in town, is shedding jobs by the thousands because people don’t have the money to buy stuff even at their bargain basement prices! And of all the things to worry about, the biggest thing to do apparently is to show sympathy to a comedian who has made 32.5 million dollars, for the rest of his contract! Pardon me if I am wrong, but how dumb can people get. I mean, he didn’t like the spot he was given by the channel, so he quit. Isn’t this like any other job? And for god sakes, he is making more money than 99% of the American population will ever make. Leno on the other hand is being blamed for “kicking out” Conan. I am sorry. How is that wrong? Leno wanted his show back. NBC wanted Leno more than Conan. Simple. Why can’t people accept that?

The next topic I want to talk about is something which has even more people hooked on. Telangana. One fine day, one guy goes on a fast-unto-death, and students are “agitated”, and start burning down buses they haven’t paid for? They start damaging property they don’t own? I have a question here. If you are upset about anything in your house, do you go and torch your neighbour’s house? No. Because then you would be jailed. However, in this case, the students were apparently “emotionally upset”. Frankly, I don’t know how they can get emotionally upset about someone who hid from public view after elections because he couldn’t face his own party men, but then, even if they did get emotionally upset, why should they be allowed to torch the buses? Is this straight out vandalism? These are students who are studying to get a Bachelors or a Masters degree. Granted, it is in arts, and not a technical field. But still, if this is the emotional state of these people, that they would erupt so violently when something “aggravates” their minds, then shouldn’t they be in rehab? I keep “quoting” the words because I don’t believe in any of these explanations. I agree that there may have been some discrimination in the way the funds were allocated. But I guess the more important question here why this is happening now. If this was close to an election, it would be legitimate but it is not. At the end of the day, all these students who are actually damaging public property end up being corrupt politicians, or corrupt government workers. I don’t think Microsoft would like to hire a student who has “I torched Bus No 3K during Telangana agitations in 2010” as one of his extra-curricular achievements. I am so grouchy about this whole thing is because it’s basically a set of people with money funding others, for their own benefit. And the rest 99% of the population pays a price for it. The more I see democracies in action, I realize that it is not the perfect solution. It needs to be tweaked so that when combined with capitalism, it doesn’t end up servicing the top-end of the population. Talking about Telangana, and Hyderabad…

There is company called Notion Ink, which released a tablet called Adam. It is based in Hyderabad, started by a handful of IITians and MBA grads. They trained students from a local engineering college, BVRIT, to write the software for the applications running on the tablet. In a matter of a few months, they learnt themselves and educated the students how to write applications on Google’s Android. They did this because, as a startup, they couldn’t afford to pay the going price for professionals in the area (1 lakh a month for an Android developer). The tablet is priced lower than Apple’s tablet, the iPad and has more features. Granted that it may not “look” as polished, or have a picture of half-eaten fruit on the back, I think this is a bigger achievement than the rave here about the iPad. This might look very Hyderabadi of me to bring up this tablet, but I am taking this as an example to prove a point. Even in this era of online news, there is still a hierarchy in terms of which news gets covered. I admire the iPad for what it is. A bigger iPhone , without the phone functionality. Its running a basic operating system for its size, in a strictly environment, by a company which thinks apps with explicit content are not in the “right taste”. I know how the system works, with the advertising money and market muscle, but I just wish that there was a way in which companies like Notion Ink are given the publicity they desperately need to come up. I don’t believe that the products from a big brand company should be called awesome even before people have seen it. Did I tell you that Notion Ink was showed to the world well before the iPad? I believe that the best products will only come out when you have a lot of companies in the same field, fighting for market share. Not when you declare the verdict and bombard people with marketing 24 hours a day regarding one arguably sub-standard product, from first look. I am sure most people would agree that, for all the hype and speculation, the iPad was a dud of epic proportions.

To round up, I prefer Leno to Conan… I would like to see Andhra Pradesh as a unified state for purely sentimental reasons, or in the worst case, Hyderabad should become a UT by itself, with Naidu as its CEO. And I am hoping that the Paradise restaurant is not damaged in all this agitation stuff. Hyderabad wouldn’t be the same without its biryani. I have an iPod Touch and I love it. I am not likely to buy an iPad, because I am not impressed by it.

This is my longest blog so far. If you read it till here, thanks for your patience. Hope you liked it. Before I finish, a disclaimer. I have nothing against Conan’s supporters who were standing in the rain (as long as I don’t have to do anything like that), the Telangana agitators (but please don’t destroy the buses that we pay taxes for, and frankly, you don’t) and Apple fans (I know quite a few of you, and Apple did a great job with the iPhone and the iPods).