Skip to main content

Let There Be Noise

Not withstanding the media’s  (TOI in particular) constant attempt to force Halloween down my throat, I have decided again to write about the festival which indeed is part of the Indian tradition – Diwali. Some may criticize me for being uncool, but I guess Delhi need not be any more cold than it already is.
 
I grew up in an era when SRK-ization of India was happening. Come Diwali and we were inundated by “Say No To Crackers” campaigns which told us horror stories about how crackers led to loss of someone’s limb/life. We were made to believe that one night of cracker bursting led to more deaths than the number of causalities in road accidents everyday. They employed all tricks of the trade to keep us off the fireworks – environment being the oft cited reason. Apparently, it was good for us to plant saplings on the roadside (which will eventually wither away in two days due to lack of care) as it would help in reducing the pollution “others” will create on Diwali night. The fact that it was a total waste of money, time and the saplings (which could have been planted somewhere else) was of little concern to anyone. I too jumped onto this bandwagon with élan and have regretted it since then.
 
The few moments of joy that interspersed this monotonous campaign were when someone burst a cracker within the school campus. A loud boom and the expression on the faces of the students changed to like someone on Prozac. Teachers would make disdainful faces and look at us with disgust. Bag searches would be conducted for traces of any leftover crackers. Students would be cajoled, threatened for information on the culprit. “We won’t punish the entire class if you told us who was behind this”- yeah, like we would. Most of the time, the teachers returned empty-handed. We were seasoned pros in this interrogation business!  Winking smile
 
It made me sad when a few days back I read about a school suspending the entire class for an innocent moment of fun bursting crackers while not taking any action against a molester teacher till media highlighted the incident. As the corrupt and undisciplined Delhi wraps up its buildings in Chinese electric bulbs, I would ask everyone to let children be children. While you should exercise all the due precautions while bursting crackers, hell don’t say no to them!
 
Be safe and sound this Diwali.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Integrating React with SonarQube using Azure DevOps Pipelines

In the world of automation, code quality is of paramount importance. SonarQube and Azure DevOps are two tools which solve this problem in a continuous and automated way. They play well for a majority of languages and frameworks. However, to make the integration work for React applications still remains a challenge. In this post we will explore how we can integrate a React application to SonarQube using Azure DevOps pipelines to continuously build and assess code quality. Creating the React Application Let's start at the beginning. We will use npx to create a Typescript based React app. Why Typescript? I find it easier to work and more maintainable owing to its strongly-typed behavior. You can very well follow this guide for jsx based applications too. We will use the fantastic Create-React-App (CRA) tool to create a React application called ' sonar-azuredevops-app '. > npx create-react-app sonar-azuredevops-app --template typescript Once the project creation is done, we

Use AI to build your house!

When a new housing society emerges, residents inevitably create chat groups to connect and share information using various chat apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. In India, Telegram seems to be the favorite as it provides generous group limits, admin tools, among other features. These virtual communities become treasure troves of invaluable insights. But whatever app you use, there is always a problem of finding the right information at right time. Sure, the apps have a "Search" button, but they are pretty much limited to keyword search and are useless when you have to search through thousands of messages. I found myself in this situation when it was my turn to start on an interior design project for my home. Despite being part of a vibrant Telegram group, where countless residents had shared their experiences with various interior designers and companies, I struggled to unearth the pearls of wisdom buried within the chat's depths. I remembered that I could take advantage o

Vaastu Shastra

There are certain tasks that the Indian society expects a person to fulfill - get a good job, get married at a certain age, buy a house, buy a car, have kids etc. So it would seem natural to you that after getting married I have started looking around for a house to buy. It isn't so. My hunt for a house began with a trip to the mall to buy a sofa set. It should not come as a surprise that I like movies. I have watched hundreds of movies and now that I have means at my disposal I started to improve my movie viewing experience. With TV and audio system out of the way, a comfy couch was all that was needed. So I dragged my wife with me to the mall and started evaluating the over-priced sofas. We hopped and jumped on a lot of them and when the dust finally settled, my heart was with a sofa that was also a recliner, rocking chair, had foot support, was made of high quality dead skin... err leather - the complete package! It also came with a hefty price tag. We came back home to di