Mayank's Blog

My three year old daughter today asked me if I would take her to the mall. This would normally have been an ordinary request but these are extraordinary times. I had to say no. She bargained - What if she wore a mask? To escape the situation, I had to put the blame entirely on Narendra Modi. 😉 When I see someone coming towards me on the road When would we go back to normal? This is a question on everyone's mind. But how do you define normal? Let's examine this objectively. The current lock down cannot last forever. Sooner or later it will have to be lifted for people to earn livelihoods. It may be lifted in phases but don't expect schools, malls, or places of social gathering to be opened up anytime soon. Any potential vaccine is still forever  12-18 months away. Even if a vaccine is invented quicker than that, production, distribution and finally vaccination itself would take years. People would keep falling sick due to COVID-19 and dying and there is nothing we can do to...

"Hez!". If you were in Hyderabad for the opening of first IKEA store in India, you would be forgiven for thinking that it's a religious chant for followers of a religion who are trampling over themselves for getting into their place of worship. Except they were visitors to the new IKEA store. For the past few days, the news had been carrying multitude of articles related to IKEA opening. The marketing by IKEA team only hyped the situation. Since I was looking to buy a bed, I made the unfortunate decision of going to the IKEA store for a quick in-n-out shopping with my wife on my way to office. The first red flag should have been when we couldn't get parking at 10 am in the morning of a weekday and were asked to park at one of external parking locations. The IKEA folks were kind enough to handout a map of the same. We were asked to park near ITC Kohenur. From that location, like every well organized pilgrimage, there was a shuttle service to IKEA after eve...

According to a study , it takes only 10% of the population to remain committed to an idea for it to become majority opinion. In India, we have for so long believed that the minority needs to be protected from the majority that we are now unable to see the majority being reduced to second-class citizens in their own country. India has a long history of minority appeasement or more correctly that of pseudo-secularism. Indian politicians from the Nehru-era believe in doling out gifts to Muslims at the cost of majority Hindu population. A shining example of this is the Shah Bano case in which the Indian parliament overturned the decision of the court to grant alimony to protect the so-called Muslim personal laws. In recent years, this appeasement has increased to nauseating proportions. In December 2012, the Samajwadi Party government in Uttar Pradesh launched a scheme to give Rs. 30,000 to 10th pass girls for further studies or marriage. But this scheme only applied to Muslim gi...

Much sewage has flown under the Yamuna bridge since Modi announced the demonetization of 500 and 1000 rupee notes. After the announcement, people thronged to banks and ATMs as if a new Sunny Leone movie had been released. People experienced things which they had never experienced before - like withdrawing cash using cheque and getting beaten up by the family members of their estranged lover . Wonderful times. This demonetization has also left the country deeply divided. On one hand there are Modi Bhakts for whom Modi is a reincarnation of Lord Vishnu and on other there are AAPtards for whom everything is a scam. There is nothing in between these two extreme positions. Even the media is going berserk. If you watch Zee News, you would believe that Ram Rajya has been established in India while NDTV will tell you that situation is equivalent to Mad Max:Fury Road. As Immortan Joe said in Mad Max, so is Modi telling us "Do not, my friends, become addicted to water   cash . It will...

I am sure many of you must have by now read the New York Times article which paints a very unflattering account of Amazon and the way it treats its workers. Examples are cited where a worker was given low performance ratings because she missed work as she was suffering from cancer. In another instance, a worker was asked to go on a business trip just a day after suffering a miscarriage. There are many others instances cited in the article. While these are horrible stories, I am not here to criticize Amazon. Thing is, that these are the practices followed by nearly every organization. Every company exists to earn profit and they want to squeeze as much out of their resources to maximize it. This is also true of Indian IT industry. In general, the work done by the Indian IT industry is monotonous, not innovative and something which their "onsite" counterparts will prefer not to do. Indians are ready to take these up at much lower wages and thus work comes here. Even wit...

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...

Legends and WikiLeaks have it that the supposedly future Prime Minister of India will discuss about the greatest dangers facing the country with the US ambassador. He did and made the observation that “Hindu terror“ is the biggest threat to this country. Not Lashkar-e-Toiba, not Jamat-ul-Dawa, not even Naxalites, but Hindu terror. The perpetrators of 26/11 attacks are bewildered and are crying foul. They had spent so much time, energy and money in devising and implementing this whole plan and now entire credit is being taken away from them. Not fair. Rahul Gandhi, the Baba of Indian politics (about whom some crazy people say that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth), had earlier equated SIMI with RSS . Its only fair to equate SIMI, which has engaged in mindless violence and is now banned by the government, with RSS, which fought for India’s independence and has produced leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L. K. Advani. That this equation might be an attack at the base of only...

I never thought that I would be writing on this topic. Its a no-brainer why governments across the world are pissed at WikiLeaks. And I naively assumed that every ordinary citizen would automatically see the potential benefits of WikiLeaks. My belief was cemented by the presence of 600,000+ fans of WikiLeaks on Facebook.  But I have come across people and watched shows on TV which basically debate whether WikiLeaks has done a good thing  by leaking the embassy cables or whether they are essentially an anarchist. Some people have argued that it leads to an erosion of privacy as the cables are private conversations between two individuals. The leaks are nothing but voyeurism on WikiLeaks part which may even lead to deaths of human rights activists across the world. Another argument that is put forth is that WikiLeaks is specifically targeting United States as all the cables are US embassy cables and not of any other country. While all these are good arguments, I will try to show...

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. ...

It is a stormy night. A flash of lightning shows an old dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere. Thunder rumbles across the sky as the pretty blonde girl inside the dark house looks terrified. Suddenly there is a knock at the door. She picks up an axe and with trembling hands, opens the door. Just then the lightning flashes again and in that flash,  looking at the visitor,  the girl's face turns ashen-white. "Uski safai meri safai se behtaar kaise? Rin Supreme apnao..." I switch off the TV and bang the remote on the bed in frustration. Yet another commercial break. Despite the fact that we all hate advertisements (except may be when someone posts a hilarious video of one on a social-networking site and we choose   to see it), ads are present everywhere. From TV, internet, newspapers to billboards, everyone is asking us to buy something. The unbearable part is when they appear out of nowhere just when we least expect them to be. In case of TV or internet, there are m...

The other day I was at my friend's house discussing the flavor of the season - The Commonwealth Games mess. My friend was getting animated and brought on the topic of falling of the false ceiling. His grandfather, a typical Haryanavi tau , who was listening intently to our discussion suddenly spoke, "What's a false ceiling?" On hearing our  explanation , he was shocked, "Why would anyone use such flimsy materials to construct ceilings! They ought to fall down. In our days, houses built with solid stones would last for centuries unlike the apartments you live in."  His comments made my memories flood back to the days when my grandfather would proudly show us his decades old Usha ceiling fan. "Not once has it been to a mechanic's shop and still working fine as new." As if to support him, the fan would merrily continue on its slow-motion journey. Another thing that my grandfather was very proud of was his Godrej almirah. It was so heavy that it ...

Roll over wheel, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is now the Facebook's humble "Like" button. The creators of this button would never have thought that it would lead to such mind-boggling revenue and precious data generation for Facebook. Nor would they have thought that it would be used for anything else other than showing your approval for somebody's status message or link. The Like button now encompasses all the colors of emotions; love, jealousy, anger, frustration; you name it. There are various websites urging you to "Like A Like" completely oblivious of Shakespeare turning in his grave on hearing this. The Like button enables you to deconstruct a person's entire psyche if you go through his/her likes. It has served as tool for flattery (in case of your boss) or impressing (a boy/girl).  Some likes are philosophical - "I want my lyf 2 b a book so dat i can tear those pages whch i dnt want". Never mind the fact that no on...

In the backdrop of US arm-twisting India on the Dow issue , it becomes extremely important that the government remains much more careful while passing the Nuclear Liability bill. Alas, this is not the case. Manmohan Singh and Co. seem determined to sell Indian lives at throwaway prices for benefit of US companies. India has an ambitious and indigenous nuclear power program to achieve the goal of 20,000 MW electricity produced by nuclear energy by 2020 which will be further increased to 60,000 MW by 2032. Thus India will produce 25 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants by 2050. To meet these projections, India would need a major FDI in nuclear energy. This would be provided by US companies like  General Electric and Westinghouse by way of supplying and building the nuclear power plants while the operator will be government controlled Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited ( NPCIL ). All over the world, the Nuclear Liability bill (or its variati...

Now that the FIFA World Cup is over, I finally summoned up the courage to write this article. If it offends sentiments of any of my readers, let me be clear, I was not talking about you. ;) "Who are you supporting - Spain or Netherlands?", I was inundated by numerous chat messages when I logged into my laptop on the eve of the FIFA World Cup finals. I had a tough time convincing my friends that I was not supporting anyone (gasp!) and that I do not even watch football (more gasp!). My only knowledge of football is at most limited to Paul, the octopus or  Larissa Riquelme promise . Before you fall off your chair unconscious by my brazen honesty, I will explain you my reasons. I was not born in any of these two countries (or for that matter any nation playing in the world cup) and also I have never visited them even once. I do not identify with their culture, food or language. I don't have any friends or family in those two countries. This makes it kind of hard for me to h...

When I came across this poster for a new Hindi movie, the title of the movie confused me. Now I know that ‘Luv’ is clearly misspelt, but ‘Storys’ got me thinking. It took me over a minute to clarify my doubt. This brings me to the point - what were the producers/directors thinking when the named this movie? Is normal, correctly spelt English just not cool enough? Or were they having a space crunch trying to fit in all the words in 160 characters? This SMSing of English leaves me baffled as it just not stops here but has percolated into our schools and offices. We all know about email signatures – the “Thanks & Regards” ones which no one really means but writes anyways. It is just standard practice. But there is a senior manager in my office who abbreviates ‘Regards’ with just ‘R’. Now if you don’t have the courtesy to even type out the entire word, then why insult the recipient of your mail with that letter ‘R’. It’s like saying “Oh! I don’t really regard you but I am going to mak...

Have you ever got your ears, nose or throat examined through a दूरबीन (Telescope)? The more important question is whether you want to see a doctor who claims to do exactly the same! I had the pleasure of meeting such a doctor whose clinic proudly proclaimed the following: Looking at the poster, I was surprised as well as disturbed to know how little we know about our national language. Oh wait a minute, Hindi is not our national language but the official language. There is no national language of India. No wonder, we have people displaying such gems in their mastery of the language.

China, China... Yes, Google. Hacking our servers? No, Google. Telling a lie? No, Google. Show us logs of the Golden Shield Project . Ha! Ha! Ha! (If you are reading this, you are most probably not in China.) When I first read the news of Google taking a new approach to China , I was full of cynicism. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. It seemed like a PR strategy from Google. When Google decided to enter China , was it in a Rip Van Winkle's dream? Suddenly after 4 years it woke up and realised oh no, its not Switzerland, its China! But my doubts were "filtered" away when I researched it; through Google of course.

" Uska religion mere religion se jyada secular kaise! ", may well be the new punch line for ads for religions. Scientology, the religion practiced and promoted by the likes of Tom Cruise, has already started advertising itself. Soon other religions will follow suit resulting in an all-out war (like the Cola war) with each religion calling other names. Christianity may even throw in some free goodies for those convert, " Become a Christian and get a chance to touch the Pope! ( Warning : You are allowed to only touch the Pope. He should not be knocked down .) ". If you are wondering how dare I say such things, all this is courtesy the recent HC decision to allow individuals to criticize religions .

While going through the e-paper of TOI today, I came across an article about another Indian death in Australia. I promptly opened up the TOI website  for more information. Instead I was greeted by an ad for Tata's new car. It kept telling me about the car's "amazing" features. Finally after 10 odd seconds, fed up with my lack of interest, it took me to the news site. There a headline screamed, " Australian Deputy PM justifies the attacks on Indians ". Enraged, I dragged my mouse cursor on to the headline in the hope that I would click it. Instead an ad came up, asking me to "Do the new", whatever that is supposed to mean. After wasting another 5 seconds and thoroughly irritated by the TOI people, I was able to click on the link. And what lay beneath was surprising to say the least. What the Australian Deputy PM had said was,

India-Sri Lanka 5th ODI cricket match happening in Ferozshah Kotla grounds in New Delhi was about to be cancelled due to the poor quality of pitch, after nearly 25 overs of play. Players, umpires, match refree, and other officials were having a conference in the middle of the ground. Among them was a man clad in white kurta-pajama , complete with a Gandhi topi and a pot belly. If you haven't guessed it already, he was a neta . He did not have a clue about what was going on but was there just for cheap publicity. I was revulsed at the sight of him; not quite sure what irritated me more - the game being cancelled or his presence. However, on hindsight I pondered whether politicians deserve the hatred that they get?