Random Ramblings

I am currently enjoying the winter break at my cousin brother's house. I'll return home next week and start working on my research again. In the meantime, the weather is excellent - warm and sunny and it makes me feel guilty and frustrated to waste these days indoors. We plan to go somewhere tomorrow, but the weather report says tomorrow there will be rain and snow.

While I have been sitting indoors, I have been working on a long post on New York City that will be published soon. I am working on a Tagore translation too. I edited and uploaded photos and videos from our Christmas trip to Rockefeller Center and the skiing trip to Campgaw Mountain for family members back in India. I did not attempt to learn skiing. In case anyone thinks I chickened out let me say that the official reason is that I did not have waterproof pants and gloves required for skiing and I am sticking to it. I made my first snowman (rather, a "snow-girl") for my three-year old nephew and it is not as easy as it seems. The one that I made was only about a foot high.

I am taking piano lessons from my nephew and hope to be able to play simple tunes soon. On the photography front, I am about to start a photoblog but can't decide on a name. Also, I intend to upgrade my Flickr account to a "pro" account, but have been putting off spending the money. I will probably do both of these things on 1st January.

I will end this post with a good news that I keep forgetting to write about. A couple of months ago, the president of my university chose a photo taken by me for his holiday greeting card (with my permission, of course, and not like what the Todis did). I was acknowledged as the photographer inside and a few copies of the finished card were given to me. At the beginning of this month the president sent the greeting to all faculty members, and although I knew of this beforehand, it felt really good to see a photo taken by me on the professors' desks and pinned along with the Christmas decorations in the library. Here's what it looks like:

I wish all my readers a very happy new year in advance. See you next year!

Season's Greetings

Two years ago, I wrote a post called "Merry Christmas" on this day. After coming to the USA, I learnt that "Merry Christmas" is a politically incorrect form of greeting. Here I have to say "Season's Greetings" or "Happy Holidays" to avoid offending anyone. I must say that if saying "Merry Christmas" offends anyone then they are the most intolerant creatures on this planet.

Anyway, let's not discuss the intolerant. When I wrote a few months ago that I was hoping that my first Christmas in the US would be a white Christmas, everyone around told me that it usually didn't snow before January. Yet, due to the snowstorm on last Friday this Christmas is as close to a white Christmas as one is likely to see in these parts. Our lawn is still covered in snow and although the roads and sidewalks are cleared, snow is still piled high on the sides. Most of the roofs have some snow and the park near our house is completely covered under a white blanket.
I went to see Christmas decoration at the Rockefeller Center on Tuesday. It was very beautiful, but the crowd was also beyond my imagination. Crowds seem surprising these days, ever since I left India. The cold was bitter but the sight of the huge lighted snowflakes, the angels and the Christmas tree with the nine foot crystal star at the top was worth all the trouble. I also visited some stores to buy gifts. Strangely, the queues at the counters did not seem to reflect the economic crisis; if they did, I wonder what the queues are like in other years. The stores didn't look too good though: one garment store was going out of business and they were selling off everything including fixtures, mannequins and furniture at throwaway prices.

Not much to write about now... My cousin brother and sister-in-law arrived from Ithaca today and we all gathered at my other cousin's house in Edison where we will spend the week having fun. Family get-togethers: that's what Christmas has meant for me since my childhood days. I will always miss my immediate family here in the US, but this is the best family get together that we could have.

So although I did not listen to LPs sitting in front of the fireplace, I did have a lovely Christmas. I hope yours were great too!

It's a Magical World

A winter storm blew across northeast US this weekend causing over 650 flight cancellations from the three New York City airtports alone on Friday. I was in my college when the snowstorm started and within no time there was several inches of snow. Since I was free in the afternoon I went to see what New York City looked like in a blizzard and saw how messy snow can be, and also faced sleet for the first time. Later I came to my cousin's house in Edison to spend the weekend. As I type this, everything outside the window is white and more snow is piling up. But my blog post is not about the snow. It is about something which I photographed this morning.

When the snow had stopped for some time this morning, I had gone to the garden to take photos of the snow-covered neighbourhood. A small Japanese maple tree in the garden seemed to be very wet and there were droplets of water hanging from the tips of its bare branches. I did not find this unusual since it was raining occasionally. I tried to get some macro shots of these droplets that showed the neighbourhood's inverted image, and then I discovered two things: firstly, the droplets were not as clear as water should be, and secondly, they were not falling down if I touched the branches. They were frozen solid - droplets of ice.

I decided  to take a closer look and fetched the 50 mm lens of my SLR since the weather was pretty dry now. When a normal camera lens is inverted, it acts as a macro lens, and so I used my digital camera to shoot these tiny icicles through the inverted SLR lens. The drops had trapped air bubbles within, and the combined effect of the vintage Pentax lens and the Carl-Zeiss lens on my Sony produced results that were beyond my wildest dreams. I'm sharing the photos below: click on them to get an enlarged view.

Shooting at -4 degrees Celsius is not easy, especially when you are balanced precariously on the hardened snow holding a lens in one hand and a camera in the other. Anyone who has ever taken out a metal ice tray from the freezer and held it for some time will know what my hands were feeling like: it's that exact same feeling. Moreover, the light was so low that most of my shots got blurred. The camera batteries died after every few shots and had to be warmed again. However, looking at these shots in the laptop later was worth all the trouble.

I'll end the post with what Calvin said to Hobbes in the last Calvin and  Hobbes strip on such a snow covered day. "It's a magical world, Hobbes, ol' buddy… Let's go exploring!" he said. The same can be said about macro photography of the natural world. It's really a magical world, and I wish I had the time and money to go exploring it properly.

White Blog Post

On Tuesday (16th December) I had an examination in the evening and it was snowing lightly when I walked to the examination hall from my lab at six. Over the last couple of weeks or so, I have become accustomed to light snow flurries and this one didn't feel much different. When I came out of the hall at 9:00 pm, however, I stopped dead in my tracks. The world was covered in several inches of white snow. Everything I saw was white. Students were throwing snow balls at each other.

I took out my camera and took soome pictures. Later when I walked back from the station to my house in the snow I called home and shared my excitement with my parents and sister. Everything looked much brighter than other nights because of the high reflectivity of the snow covered ground. I even went to the park early on Wednesday morning to take photos.

I do not have too many words to describe my feelings. This is primarily because seeing and feeling snow for the first time is such a different experience that it is very difficult to describe. It is also difficult for me to write because I was forced to stay indoors and study most of this time as I had another examination on Wednesday. Maybe some other day I can write about what playing with snow feels like, or how to build a snowman. For now, I will only share some photos of my surroundings and let my camera do the talking.

My university campus

Some chairs and tables in my university

My neighbours' house, photographed from my window at night.

Branch Brook Park, early morning of the 17th.

The melting of the snow can look very beautiful too!

The Newark Light Rail station at Branch Brook Park.

More photos are available here and also these in a larger size, so if you liked these and wish to see more, you can pay a visit.

Some Computers in My Life

This Thursday I received the shipment containing my new Dell laptop. So this is the first blog post that I am typing out on a computer bought with my own money. But before I say what my new computer is like, let me put down some thoughts and memories that came flooding back to my mind as I started my new computer for the first time.

Incident #1 (June 1996): Me and my sister found it difficult to pass the time as we waited for the arrival of our first home computer at our house in Allahabad. My father’s company had decided to install a desktop computer at our house for his official work. It was an 80486 machine with a 66MHz processor, 20 MB RAM, 420 MB hard disk, a primitive CD-ROM drive and a sound card and speakers. Nobody in my father’s office had seen a multimedia machine before. I distinctly remember one of his colleagues saying, “20 MB RAM? That’s a waste! What will you do with that much of RAM?” Before you laugh, remember, the best desktops of the day had just 8MB of RAM, at least in India. But that Compaq Presario CDS 720 was probably my favourite computer. I can never forget the hours of fun that I had browsing Encarta, listening to music, drawing on paintbrush, coding in QBASIC and Turbo C++ and playing those old games on MS DOS and Windows 3.1. Movies on DVD? The Internet? Who had heard of those things then?

Incident #2 (November 2003): I was in my third year at IIIT Calcutta and had decided to buy a new computer as the old second-hand Pentium that I was using for programming wasn’t sufficient anymore. My father was paying for it, and I did a lot of market research before finalizing a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 machine with a 40 GB hard disk. All of my friends’ PCs had 128 MB of RAM now. Some of our older lab PCs still had 64MB. But I thought, “I have seen the benchmark grow from 20MB to 128 MB. I’ll plan in advance and get 256 MB of RAM.” And that was that, until I added another 256 MB to that computer to speed it up last year and replaced the 40 GB disk with an 80 GB one. The OS? The one and only Windows XP was the most obvious choice for such a high-end PC, since Windows 98 was obsolete, and Windows 2000 was the “poor man’s XP” anyway.

Incident #3 (Mid-2006): I was working in Hyderabad in an IT company and as a vendor to Microsoft. They were about to release this new OS called Windows Longhorn, which had been renamed to Vista. Some of my friends were actually designing Vista components and doing beta testing. They said this new OS was so heavy that its minimum requirement was 512 MB of RAM. It didn’t run properly on 512 MB though, and the best of their computers with 1 GB of RAM were the ones which handled Vista efficiently. That was the first time I heard of 1 GB RAM on desktops. Later in 2007 our own office desktops were upgraded to 1 GB RAM machines. 160 GB hard drives were becoming common. Intel’s Dual Core processors were considered state-of-the-art.

The present (December 2008): My new Dell laptop has an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz processor, 3 GB of RAM, a 320 GB hard disk and runs Windows Vista. I am a little sad because I felt 4 GB RAM was becoming a little too costly for me and went for 3 GB instead. I am also concerned about my hard disk space; I have seen how quickly my 80 GB disk filled up. 320 GB is just four times that amount. How long can it last? Terabyte external hard disks are available here; maybe I will get one sometime later. And to think that the computers in my school that were responsible for creating the love of computer science that I have today had 640 KB of RAM and no hard disk!

I suddenly feel I have been around for too long.

"Take it or Leave it"

Here is the latest news from the Indian IT industry.

Stir after Wipro asks techies to join BPO

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Kolkata: They were aware of the slowdown, but none thought it would sting so soon. Assured employment as project engineers by Wipro in 2007, these budding engineers didn’t know their careers would go into free fall.
Hundreds of students from different engineering colleges staged a dharna in front of the Wipro SEZ area in Sector V on Saturday morning after the company asked them to join its BPO shop at half the salary they had been offered initially. At the dharna, the students were waving copies of the company’s revised letter, which they got a few days ago.
“As project engineers, we are supposed to get Rs2.75-3.25 lakh a year, while as a BPO employee, this has been reduced to Rs1.2-1.6 lakh annually. We will be demoted to a BPO staffer. We’re aware of the meltdown, but are not willing to compromise on job profile,” said Gourab Saha, from JIS Engineering College, Kalyani.
According to students, the company had given them offer letters to join as project engineers after campus interviews in 2007. They were promised jobs in February 2009 after they passed out of college.
In a letter to the selected candidates on November 25, Wipro management invited them to join the BPO division in Kolkata. “You would be aware of the current economic environment across all industries including the IT sector. IT analysts and experts claim this scenario is likely to prevail for a while. We have looked at various options to absorb you without much delay,” the letter says. The nature of job is that of a “technical helpdesk engineer” instead of “project engineer” as promised earlier.
After getting the letter, confused students rushed to the Wipro office on Thursday to meet HR officials. The meeting was futile. Company officials allegedly took a take-it-or-leave -it stand and said they were not going to consider the cases of those unwilling to join the BPO.
Students then staged the dharna in front of Wipro office on Saturday expecting the Wipro management to take a flexible stand. Many among the agitators were ready to work for a reduced salary, but not in the BPO division. “We told HR that we are ready to accept a reduced pay structure. But the company should give us the designation offered initially,” pleaded Saikat Chakravorty, a student from Institute of Technology and Marine Engineering.
The agitators are ready to wait another six months. They pleaded with the company not to cancel their appointments if they did not join the BPO. “At present, it is mandatory to join the BPO, otherwise they will strike off our names. During Saturday’s meeting, we told them we were willing to wait a few months to join as engineers,” said Sayantan Mukherjee, a student from Bengal Institute of Technology, who went to talk to Sonal Bharadwaj, regional HR head of Wipro. “Bharadwaj gave us a patient hearing but didn’t promise anything. We’ve been asked to get in touch with HR by December 2,” said Sayantan.
Wipro Technologies vice-president Pradeep Bahirwani said: “Due to current business scenario we estimate delays in joining dates of some batches of recruits. We are providing them an option of a role in our BPO division. The objective is to let engineering graduates commence work without delay.”

Almost three years ago when I had started this blog, I wrote this post on a problem of the Indian IT industry. I'm sure not many people read my blog at the time. Then after all these years, I came across this news report. The events reported are a direct result of the problem I wrote about, and I feel compelled to write something more about it. When I left the IT industry to come back to academics, I had decided I would refrain from writing cribbing posts exposing the bad side of the Industry. However, I think it is my duty to warn the engineering students of our country planning to go into a company like Wipro, Infosys, TCS or Satyam: most of them do not know what they are getting into. I do, because I have been there. I will just share some of the things that I saw during my three years in the IT industry.

• The freepool: This is a group of people who have no work to do at the moment. Most engineering students who hear about it ask me delightedly, "Do they pay you in full in the freepool? If they do, then why, it's the most wonderful job in the world!" Let me tell everyone that it is not. I know of people who spent one full year in the freepool after being recruited. This is bad due to several reasons.

1. Firstly, after about the first month of enjoyment, the frustration that sets in is enough to cause psychiatric problems. Just imagine: you have to come and sit at a desk in your office for 9.5 hours every day and you have nothing to do other than reading junk mails, forwarding more junk mails and browsing websites. Even most of the popular websites are blocked in these companies. People either just go crazy and remain stressed and irritated all the time or try to develop hobbies like blogging and digital photography. Sometimes they come in, record their attendance and then go out and watch a movie and come back (believe me, I have done it more than once), but how many movies can you watch? What's worse, in some companies you have to come in night shifts to do this sitting-at-your-desk thing as they do not have enough cubicles/computers during the day. To put it mildly, it is hell.
2. Secondly, people forget everything they learnt in college during this time. Even writing simple programs seems difficult after a few months. On paper, the companies do arrange trainings for these people. Now what does a training look like? A person blabbering about some topic while 15 people connect remotely to his slideshow via the network and listen to him via VOIP. Sometimes the network connection breaks for someone: nobody cares. Sometimes the voice isn't clear enough. Nobody cares. I once asked for a face to face training and my manager (I could write volumes about this particular manager and the nonsense that he speaks, but this post is about more serious issues) responded, "In this current competitive environment, the focus has shifted to increased productivity, and we cannot afford to have a face to face training. You need to augment your learning curve by our e-learning courses." Fine, you think. Why not stop cribbing and try to make the most of these trainings? I thought the same way. So after some sessions on Siebel Analytics, I asked the management for the software so that I may practise hands on what I learnt. Only then it became evident that I cannot have the software as it was licensed for project use. It is the same with any licensed software. So we are supposed to learn the theory via phone and do the practical mentally. Yet we cannot say we don't know that software when we are asked to work on it suddenly after six months. "You have been trained, haven't you?" the managers ask.
   
3. Finally, let's say an economic crisis hits after the one year you spent in the freepool and they start laying off people. You are going to be among the first targets because the company does not even know your capabilities. Soon, you will be on the streets looking for a job, but you have already forgotten many of the things you learnt in college. Finally you get a call for an interview. One of the inevitable questions is, "What are the projects that you have worked on for the last one year in your previous company?" I will not bother about the details of what the reaction might be if you say you were in the freepool. I will just state one unwritten rule followed in the industry, "If someone is on the freepool, that means they are incompetent." This same rule is followed even in the same company that kept you in the freepool for no fault of yours. No prizes for guessing whether you'll get the job.

• Unplanned recruitment: The same companies that are asking recruits to join some inferior post at half salaries now or deferring their joining date were recruiting like crazy a year ago. Without naming any company or person, I would like to quote what an HR manager of one company told the people going for recruitment at the engineering colleges. "Our current strength is 1200 and we want to touch 4000 by March 2008," she said, "Recruit as many as you can, even if they can't answer much at the interviews." Everyone working there knew that there was no work for those many people, and none was likely to come. Everyone, except the HR people (most of the HR people are incompetent by definition). If anything, the economy was becoming worse. And now, after that figure has been reached, they finally realize that they bit off more than they can chew. What Wipro did can be seen in the news story above. The other companies are doing similar things too. Yet, a year ago, they were offering never-heard-of starting salaries to engineers out of college. Actually the salary offered to campus recruits in my company was higher than the salary that I and my batchmates were getting after working for three years. You didn't need to be an MBA to predict that this wasn't sustainable. In fact, I have a strong suspicion that these policies were framed by MBAs. After the Wall Street meltdown, everyone knows what they are capable of.

• Inferior quality of work: Believe me: 90% of the work done at any major Indian IT services company is, to put it in American slang, Micky Mouse. That means they are insultingly simple tasks which can be performed by a bunch of high school kids. Thinking is actively discouraged. Creativity is sneered at. Challenging problems are avoided. Every project, every resource (which means the employees) and every action is evaluated on one criteria: the profit of the company. Which is perfectly fair, as long as they don't use brilliant students as pawns. Do the engineers of our country really want to work in these sweatshops where sometimes people have to work 24x7 just because the company wants to save money by keeping a resource in India and paying him an Indian salary but making him work at onsite timings? Many people join the IT industry for the onsite opportunity dream. Be careful, with the increase in the number of resources, going to onsite is a matter of chance now, and the chances are getting slimmer every day.

• Unnecessary expenditure: They don't have money for face to face trainings. They do not have money to give pay hikes to the existing employees. Yet, the amount of money and time they spend on unplanned and unnecessary activity is awe-inspiring. Let's take a real life example that I saw: suppose there are ten people in your project and there are no vacant seats nearby to take more. You know twenty more are coming within a month out of which five are due to arrive in a week. What will you do? If I were the manager, I would move to a room where all 30 can be seated. Not the real managers. They will move the whole team to a place where there is just enough place for 15 people. After a month, they will again move to a place where all thirty can be accommodated which is actually the initial location of the team with another team moved away. The amount of bureaucratic hassle for implementing these two changes would be monumental. Tens of emails would go back and forth, the IT department would be bowed down with machine movement requests and at least one workday would be lost for each movement. But, as I said earlier, thinking is prohibited there; innovative solutions frowned upon. The company is so short of money that when one of my teammates lost the support mobile phone, he was told to buy one for the company by our manager (I wonder who pocketed the insurance money). Yet just look at the money they waste on unplanned activity!

• Lies: Maybe that's the industry norm. Maybe the managers lie in every company, in every sector. Yet it never failed to surprise me how our manager could lie with a straight face about upcoming projects, requirements, budget constraints and other nonsense. He even had figures ready. Again, maybe profit matters most. But when one shoves a campus recruit into a dead technology project after keeping him in the freepool for six months saying "This is the hottest thing in the market. This is the best thing to happen to your career," maybe its time we looked at our ethical values and redefined good business practices. I can go on and on, but let me just say that right from the person who comes for the pre-placement talk in the college, to the person who takes your exit interview the day you leave the job, and everyone that you meet in between, are glib liars. There are a few honest exceptions, but they are few and far between.
  

These companies impose bonds on the recruits so that they cannot leave within a year without paying hefty amounts. Usually the students are too happy to get the job and they oblige. Now the companies are on backfoot. That is evident from the kind of offer that Wipro Technologies has given to the campus recruits. With due respect to the BPO employees, I feel no engineering graduate should opt for the BPO job offer at half the salary. Remeber, once you go in, you go into the BPO. Do not believe anyone who says you'll get into the technologies wing once times are better. Such a thing does not happen. I feel the time has come for the companies to give their pound of flesh. These students should collectively sue the company, in this case Wipro Technologies and surely they can get a better deal than what they are being offered now.

"Take it or leave it," they say. It's time we made the management of these IT companies face the same choices regarding their jobs and salaries.

(Any comments talking about any specific company by name, or phishing about the company that I worked for will be deleted. If you know me personally, you know the name of the company. Keep quiet. If you don't know me personally, well, I'm not going to name my ex-employers.)

Moments in Manhattan

Life goes on.

However upset I claim to be about the happenings in Mumbai, I had my preplanned enjoyment schedule for the Thanksgiving weekend and I could not let that go awry just because (as the Maharashtra Deputy CM put it) some small things had happened in big places. So on Saturday morning, I was on my way to downtown Manhattan to meet Anyesha-di and Shubhamoy-da, the blogger couple from Maryland. I had been looking forward to meeting them ever since I started blogging and reading blogs, and particularly since I came to this country. So when Anyesha-di had told me last week that they were visiting New York over the weekend with her sister Abhigya, I had instantly decided to meet up. In fact they are the first people whom I came to know through their blogs and then met in real life.

No matter how many times I visit the World Trade Center site, the look of that vacant block of sky saddens me every time. On Saturday, when I came out from the subway at WTC, I felt the same familiar feeling, and instantly, my mind also wandered to south Mumbai. South Mumbai has a vague similarity to lower Manhattan geographically, and also in importance. A narrow piece of land surrounded by water on three sides with lots of offices and tourist attractions. And as I crossed the road and looked up at the large building in front of me, I found myself looking at the Millennium Hilton Hotel. I have walked by this hotel dozens of times, yet when I looked at it today I thought of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai. I quickly brushed off the thought, however, and went and met my new friends. Together, we walked down the Broadway to Wall Street, took the bull by its horns and other parts of its anatomy, and then walked to Battery Park to catch the Staten Island Ferry. The day was moderately cold, but we still went and stood on the rear deck to enjoy the view of Lady Liberty and the Manhattan skyline. The seagulls left Manhattan with us and flew behind us, fishing in the troubled waters in our wake. The pigeons were lazier and they decided to make the trip from Manhattan to Staten Island sitting on the deck.

We got a fairly close look at the Statue of Liberty, and I saw the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge for the first time. As we moved into deeper waters, we saw ships anchored in the sea. I was enjoying myself immensely taking photos of seagulls and other things when suddenly I remembered that a Pakistani ship that was anchored offshore from Mumbai like this served as the mother ship for the terrorists. It will be an exaggeration if I say I stopped enjoying myself after that, but that thought kept coming back to my mind again and again.

As soon as we landed at Staten Island, we ran out into the waiting area and ran back onto the returning ferry to make the trip back to Manhattan. Good sense prevailed this time though, and I stayed indoors, peering through the glass windows and discussing James Bond with Abhigya. Once in Manhattan, we walked along the South Street Seaport right up to the Brooklyn Bridge and City Hall Park. There, after trying to play with the squirrels for some time, we boarded the subway and went straight to the Grand Central Station.

I had passed in front of Grand Central on 42^nd Street and Park Avenue several times, but I had never gone inside. As we came up into the main station from the subway level, I was struck speechless with the jaw-dropping architectural beauty of the station. There were ornate sculptures on the walls and the ceilings, there were antique wall clocks in every direction and even simple objects like letter boxes were fit to be displayed in a museum. There was a huge food court where Shubhamoy-da hosted a fine Chinese lunch. The four of us wrestled for space on a tiny wobbly table probably meant for one and then ate some of the food, wasted some more, and dropped the rest on our clothes before letting go.

We resumed our tour of the station after lunch. The central hall of the Grand Central is simply amazing. It has this sky-high ceiling with the signs of the zodiac painted on it with real lights in place of the stars. Then there are huge windows on all sides and large staircases, and a beautiful clock atop the information booth in the middle. This is the same clock that had got stuck on Melman the giraffe’s head in the movie Madagascar. Anyway, none of us were in danger of such a predicament as we were more down-to-earth. We also visited the shopping area with the lovely hanging lights and saw a large Christmas tree which was covered with flat screen TVs displaying kaleidoscopic patterns from top to bottom. Apart from the slightly disturbing parallel that my mind kept drawing between the Grand Central Station and the Mumbai CST station, my first trip inside this station was very enjoyable.

It was getting dark outside by this time, and we came out and walked down the 42^nd Street to Bryant Park. I was surprised to see Bryant Park full of temporary shops selling all kinds of fancy stuff. One shop had “SABON” written in bold letters. Whatever language that was, we knew it meant soap. Abhigya discovered that a man was distributing free samples of “sabon” outside this shop and came to inform us. As a result, I and Anyesha-di got free soap samples. The man ran out of soap just as Abhigya went to claim her share. Then we watched people trying to skate on the ice-skating rink nearby. Then we watched the maintenance guys shoo the skaters out of the rink. Then we watched them come out on a special vehicle and smoothen the ice. Then we realized that we were watching too much of useless things and proceeded to walk towards Times Square.

Times Square was our final destination for travelling together. At Times Square, I said goodbye to Shubhamoy-da, Anyesha-di and Abhigya and headed for the Penn Station while they went the other way. I had to return home in Edison. They had more sight-seeing to do.

The day, although it seemed to pass very quickly, was a truly memorable one for me. Firstly, I had spent most of the previous day listening to the news from Mumbai and getting more and more frustrated. Saturday was a welcome break from that depressing schedule. Secondly, I had a chance to travel to and photograph several places in New York that I had not seen yet. And finally, for some reason, I usually find myself short of like-minded people. On this Saturday I made three friends whose tastes and opinions I found to be very similar to mine. This was the biggest gift for me.

And so, although the day seemed like one fleeting moment, it was actually a really joyful experience for me.

Black Friday

As I type this, the TV is beaming out pictures of commandos dropping out of helicopters onto locations in the heart of Mumbai, of smoke and flames billowing out of probably the most beautiful hotel that I have ever seen amidst reports from various governments giving a body count of how many of their citizens have been killed. It is hard to believe all this is happening in India and not the Middle East. Of course, this is punctuated by the best deals for buying the cheapest products this season.

I was wondering why the Americans call a day of happiness, when they do most of their shopping before the festive season, "Black Friday". I don't care anymore. I know what I will remember the rest of my life when I hear the words "Thanksgiving" and "Black Friday".

My thoughts are incoherent right now. I was not in South Mumbai like a celebrity blogger when this happened, nor do I have the superb writing skills of another celebrity blogger to properly explain my feelings of anger, sadness and frustration that I feel right now. However, there is one thought that crossed my mind as I watched the TV reports call this "India's 9/11".

This is my request to the news channels: please don't call this India's 9/11. You are insulting all the martyrs of 9/11 and making a laughing stock out of India. The 9/11 attacks sparked off the war in Afghanistan. It removed the Taliban rule and forced Bin Laden to flee (I know that's not exactly success, but... whatever). Irritated as I was with President Bush's comment that "Either you are with us, or you are against us," I could not help admiring the US government for showing the world what happens to people who mess with their country.

Now we will show the world how we treat people who mess with our country. India in a peace loving country: we believe in Gandhi. If someone attacks Mumbai, we will turn another city on to them. Our Prime Minister will probably visit the country behind these attacks on a bus or train, and try to establish loving relations with them. If we feel very angry, we will probably cancel our next cricket series with that country. And yes, we will condemn the attacks in the strongest terms. Already the Intelligence Bureau has confirmed that this is a terrorist attack (it's quite amazing how fast they can find out things these days!). When all we need is a good old fashioned war, we will be doing everything other than just that. I am no expert, but it does make me wonder why we pour out all that money on our defense budget every year if we don't have the guts to go out and fight.

Did US intelligence cooperate with the Afghan intelligence agency (if such a thing existed) after 9/11? I never heard that they did! However, reports just in say that the chief of Pakistan's intelligence agency ISI is coming to Mumbai for cooperating with India in combating terror. Now that's what I call good news. That just shows how committed Pakistan is towards eradicating terrorism. Of course, things are not going too well with our poor neighbour: the news channels here in the US and even some government agencies have already started accusing Pakistan directly for the attacks (an ex-FBI man actually said "That's hogwash!" on TV on hearing the news that Pakistan has no information of the attackers' mother ship leaving Karachi). But I'm sure our government will not be swayed by these facts. India is the land of Gandhi. We take pride in the fact that we have never attacked a country in recorded history, and surely we cannot let that nice fact get destroyed now by a rash decision.

All that is fine with me. I do not expect anything else. I only have one request.

Please do not call this India's 9/11. It is not. Not until we have something like the Afghan war following it. 9/11 was a decisive incident in the history of the world. The Mumbai attack is just the latest one among the hundreds of insignificant attacks on India over the last 60 years. Let it remain that way.

Fall

First the air became chilly. Then the days became shorter. The wind whistled in the trees all day long. Then the trees blushed a deep red before shedding their covering, and soon all roads, lawns and fields were covered with tonnes of dried up leaves. This is fall.

Back in India, I had seen wallpapers and calendar photos of trees in fall. I knew the leaves were going to turn red and drop. However, I had no idea of the magnitude or the extent of the phenomenon. What started as a few reddish clumps randomly scattered among the vast covers of green on the hillsides when I visited Niagara at the end of August gradually grew and engulfed all vegetation in sight from big oaks to tiny creepers.

I live close to a large county park, the oldest in the US. I was very interested to see how fall comes in the park. As if to oblige me, a few maples near my house coloured up first and the best among all trees in the park. They turned orange, and one of them bright yellow. Soon, they started shedding their leaves and the whole world was a mess of raining leaves. The government tried to clean up, but they couldn't catch up with Nature. When we look at a large tree, we do not realize how many leaves that tree has. However, when all those leaves are spread over the ground beneath, the quantity seems overwhelming.

I won't say the park offered breathtaking fall colour viewing because I have seen photos of the same phenomenon in upstate New York, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania or even some places in New Jersey. However, whatever there was, was more than enough for me. I took a few walks through the park in the near zero temperature in early mornings to take photographs. The grass and the fallen leaves would be covered with ice crystals and frozen dewdrops.

Just as the best performance in a show is saved for the last, a week ago, after many of the trees in the park had become brown, the large tree in our garden changed colour. It turned the brightest red one can imagine that dazzled the eye in the early morning sunlight.


I wrote the above part last week and paused, thinking of a suitable ending. Good thing I did, because otherwise I would have had to write a second post on Fall. I was yet to see the grand finale of this amazing show.

By the end of the last week, the weather turned rainy and windy, and the weekend could be best described as gloomy and bleak. During this weather the trees, as if in a final attempt to protect mother earth from the weather, simply dropped all their leaves overnight! As I type this, the sidewalks are covered with several layers of leaves. So are the fields and the lawns. Most of the trees around me now have shed all their leaves. Some have a few still clinging, reminding me of one of my favourite stories of all time. Some, of course, are late as usual and are still catching up with the rest.

It's amazing how perfectly Nature's clock runs. Today, after the wind and the rains cleaned up the trees and the skies became clear again, the first snowflakes of the season arrived. They were too light and too few to be termed a snowfall, but they were noticeable and brought the news about things to come. I was in my room when I saw the snowflakes fall. I had never seen snow in my life, so I ran and opened the window and stretched my arms outside. The snowflakes melted almost before they touched any surface, and soon the sun annihilated them. But I'm still very much excited and I am dying to see the first proper snowfall of my life.

Fall was breathtaking. I hope winter will be even more so.

Something to learn from the US?

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that in 1963. Yet forty-five years later, as Americans go to elect their forty-fourth president on Tuesday, the biggest factor influencing people's choice seems to be the colour of Barack Obama's skin. It seems very very strange to see the most powerful democracy in the world forget everything about the candidates' policies or their past records and concentrate primarily on race. While in India, I had a misconception that "black" was a politically incorrect word to refer to people. Well, that, as I said, was a misconception. All the magazines and TV channels here are conducting pre-poll surveys like "What percentage of white women over thirty will vote for Obama?" or "How many black voters will vote for McCain?" Time Magazine even ran a cover showing Obama's face painted white.

I am new to this country and in no way competent to understand the nuances of American politics and the policies of the different parties. I personally have no idea who is better for USA (or for the world) - John McCain or Barack Obama. But considering the fact that US is the most powerful nation on earth, there must be some logic in the way voters choose the most powerful person of that nation. I have never seen any prime ministerial candidate's race or caste or religion become the major issue in an Indian election (BJP tried that against Sonia Gandhi last time, but they lost). Since America is successful, maybe it's time we took a page out of their book and decided our next prime minister based on his/her race or caste or religion rather than the party agenda.

By the surveys here it seems Obama is going to win after all, but that's only because of the economic crisis. Before that, it was assumed that Obama was going to lose because of racism, and McCain may even make it now. This post is not about supporting one candidate over the other - I don't have the knowledge needed for that. This post is meant to make people ponder about how progressive America really is, and if we Indians should backtrack on our paths and become a little 'less progressive' about equality of people. Maybe racism has its good points after all, because the citizens of the most powerful country in the world can't all be stupid!

New York City at night - A photoblog

As India is celebrating the festival of lights, I am busy working on my presentations and projects. However, since I haven't updated my blog in a while, I thought of writing a photo post about this immense city next to which I live. Although many parts of this city are dark and gloomy, many other parts are lit up as if it is Diwali every night.

As I wrote earlier here, I spent the evening of the 15th roaming around Times Square and saw a musical. Before the musical started, I had to finish my dinner. My sister-in-law had bought me a lovely Chinese dinner - I only needed to sit down somewhere and finish it off. So I walked towards Bryant Park on 42nd Street. One of the things that I love about New York is the presence of parks where there are chairs and tables for people to sit and eat, or just relax. I had my dinner, found a water fountain where I could have a drink, and in the process, found these two photos of two of the erstwhile tallest buildings in the world. Both are somewhat dark, but that is the best I could manage without camera shake.


The Chrysler building, seen in the second photo here, was one of the two buildings that were competing for the post of the world's tallest building in the late 1920s. The other one was the 40 Wall Street tower in downtown. The architects of these two buildings were former partners now pitted against each other. Finally, Chrysler Building announced its height and 40 Wall Street topped that height. After the construction of 40 Wall Street was over, a door opened on top of the Chrysler Building and a spire came out and fixed itself on top, taking the total height of the building to more than its rival's. And so, the Chrysler building won the race and became the tallest building in the world, until the Empire State Building was completed 18 months later. Although the Empire State Building is still the tallest building in New York City (after the WTC Towers fell), there are so many skyscrapers around it that it is often invisible from a few blocks away.

Coming back to my evening in New York, I reached Times Square soon and started clicking away like crazy. People all over the world are familiar with the glowing advertisement signs at Times Square. There are neon signs, LED signs and now giant LCD displays as well. The NASDAQ sign is probably the best known permanent advertisement there, other prominent ones being Coca Cola, Chevrolet, Yahoo, Budweiser, Samsung, LG, JVC, Virgin, Kodak, Toshiba, Panasonic, TDK and HSBC. There are also huge posters for the movies and musicals like the one in the photo here. However, walking around looking upward is not very safe in New York City. Apart from the danger from traffic and people who might steal your stuff, there is often an added danger of stepping into a puddle. Yes, believe it or not, New York City like our very own beloved Kolkata is built on a swampy low lying area and the municipality here has to pump water out every minute to keep the city dry. It is said that if the human race were to die suddenly, New York city would get submerged within a couple of days. So even at a place like Times Square, one has to step very carefully after a shower. Here is a photo that I took on a rainy evening like tonight almost a month ago.

The evening of the 15th was, however, dry. I walked around the Times Square on the Broadway, taking innumerable pictures of everything between the 42nd and 45th Streets. The roads leading away from the Times Square are quite busy all the time. This is the theatre district and the major musicals are going on here. Apart from that, there are other attractions as well. Take 42nd Street west of Broadway for example (picture below). It contains Madame Tussaud's and the Ripley's Believe it or Not "Odditorium" among other things. After I had taken sufficient photographs, I proceeded towards the Minskoff Theatre where our student representative was waiting with the ticket. On the way I found some Bangladeshi tourists and tried to get my photo taken by one of them using my camera. He managed to shake the camera so much that I had to discard those shots.
The view from the second floor of the theater was amazing. I found myself looking down at Times Square. I particularly found people crossing the street an interesting subject. When there were one or two people they would wait for the light to turn green. However when a sufficiently large crowd had gathered, they became impatient and unruly and often crossed the road even when the signal said 'STOP'. Here finally I managed to get my photo taken by someone.

I will not write about the show as I did that already. As I came out of the Minskoff Theatre after the show, I was unable to understand for a moment whether I was in New York City or had gone back to Hooghly by some magic. A row of cycle rickshaws had gathered in front of the theatre and they were ringing their bells and honking their old fashioned rubber-bulb horns to attract passengers. I always get surprised when I see these rickshaws here - they seem so out of place among these expensive cars. Going by the price of any human-provided service here, a ride on a rickshaw would be pretty expensive too.















As I crossed the street to the other side of Broadway, I found this horse-drawn carriage on the side of the road. This again reminded me of Kolkata. You can see such carriages in front of Victoria Memorial. The only difference is that the horses here are much larger and healthier. This particular one in the photo is standing in front of the ToysRus store at Times Square. This is one of the largest toy stores in the world. If you enlarge the photo and look closely, you can see a giant ferris wheel inside the store.
But it was getting late and I, like Cinderella, had to return to Newark Penn Station by 12:30 as the last train left around that time. So I took some of these photos of Times Square (below) holding a starburst filter in front of my camera and left.
Americans are obsessed with moving advertisements. Each one of those lights are moving in some way or other. As an aside, I would like to mention another strange thing I saw in New York: animated wall advertisements in the subway. Somewhere along the PATH route to 33rd Street, there are these glowing pictures on the tunnel walls. They are stationary pictures the size of train windows, but like the pages of a flip-book they seem to move when seen in rapid succession. So when the viewer is inside a rapidly moving train, he sees a moving advertisement on the outside wall. Anyway, I felt this write-up on Times Square would be incomplete without a moving image of the place, so I shot this video with my digital camera to go with my post. Unfortunately, the video quality was set to 'standard' instead of 'fine' and so it is not very sharp. However, that's all I have at the moment and I think it can convey the nature of the place. Try to watch it in 'high quality'. One point to note if you have your speakers on, is how the bell of cycle rickshaws dominates the soundtrack!

I think that's all I can write at the moment as it is getting late. I started writing this last night, then fell asleep on my laptop, and finished it this morning. It is still cloudy and windy outside and I must get ready to go to the university in this weather. There are more night photos of New York here, so if you liked the ones here, you can go and see more.

The Lion King - The Broadway Musical

“Anything can be shown in an animated movie;” I thought before I went to see the Broadway musical version of Disney’s Lion King on the 15^th of October. “They can never come up to the movie fans’ expectations by a play.” In the next few hours, I was going to be proved wrong repeatedly.

The movie version starts with a sunrise and an African chant, and as the animals marched towards the Pride Rock to see the newborn lion prince Simba, the animators weaved pure magic on screen with the lights and colours and birds flying over rivers that reflected the sun (see video above). That movie would have been my favourite animated movie even if I had never seen another scene of it. I was naturally skeptical of an onstage rendition of this magical moment, especially after I saw the stage at the Minskoff Theatre. It seemed too small to convey the grandeur of the scene to about a thousand people.

Then the lights went off and the show started, and I realized that the size of the stage didn’t matter. They were going to use the whole theatre as their stage.

Over the next two hours and forty-five minutes, I forgot where I was, or what I was witnessing. As the giraffes and zebras and antelopes flocked onto the stage, and the elephants and rhinos and birds joined them walking out through the aisles of the theatre, pride rock slowly rose out of the stage. See the video below. Naturally photography and videography is prohibited in the theatre but I found this stuff on Youtube. It seems to be a legal professionally done recording, probably for some TV publicity programme. Particularly watch the movements of the giraffes, the zebras and the cheetah.

But then, human beings rarely learn from their mistakes, and it was only natural that I would expect them to fail to recreate the onscreen sorcery in various other scenes, like the songs “I just can’t wait to be king”, “Be prepared” and “Hakuna Matata”, the scary elephant graveyard scene, Simba’s meeting with his dead father, and most of all, the wildebeest stampede scene. I won’t say how they were done – you may get something if you search Youtube. I will only say that each of these scenes was done wonderfully. At virtually the blink of an eyelid the stage would transform from Scar’s cave to an elephant graveyard full of hyenas, to grasslands with a star-studded sky, to a gorge full of stampeding wildebeests, to Rafiki’s baobab tree with Simba’s picture on it, to Timon and Pumba’s lair with exotic plants and insects. Sometimes the actors performed so close to each other that a collision seemed imminent, but nobody ever missed a step. They have been doing this for the last ten years and of course, mistakes were out of the question.

Although whatever I write is insufficient to describe the show, I feel a special mention needs to be made of the puppeteer-actors who played Timon and Zazu, and the three hyenas of Scar. They operated their puppets so smoothly that I felt they simply vanished from stage and the puppet only remained. It’s a strange feeling; a fully grown man is roaming around the stage holding onto a puppet bird beak-synching it to his dialogues, and most of the time you don’t look at the man at all! Your eyes automatically get dragged to the bird alone. It is the same way for Timon and the three hyenas, and also for all the other animals that made brief appearances on stage. You know there’s a man inside (or even on the outside in case of Timon and Zazu), yet you see only the animal that they are representing. The child actors representing Simba and Naala were perfectly natural in their act, and I also liked the actor playing Scar very much. He has an amazing voice and dialogue delivery style that makes the character come alive.

Most of the cast was African, and the whole musical was Africa themed with African chants and songs in African languages featuring prominently. The music also had an African quality to it which was very refreshing. I wondered how they would start the play back after the intermission – usually at movie theatres people keep returning to their seats after the movie starts and that could be very distracting to the actors here. To overcome this problem, they did something very clever: at the end of the intermission, with the lights still on, they started on an African song and dance which was performed throughout the auditorium. Performers with bird-puppets at the end of poles whirled them overhead and the music was very engaging. It had nothing to do with the story, however. Its purpose was to make people return to their seats thinking the show had started, before the onstage actors could start the real show.

All good things come to an end, and so did this amazing play. After the curtain fell on the final scene, it was raised once more and all the actors came and lined up on stage, with their masks off. We gave them a standing ovation. They definitely deserved it. But as the applause died down and the crowd streamed out of the theatre, I was thinking of the people who were behind this. Who designed the elephant graveyard, the hyena suits, the wildebeest stampede? Those faceless people were the real heroes of this performance, the ones that transformed an onstage play into a fairyland storytelling. They maybe well known in their own circle, but they remain unknown to the general public. Maybe that is the way real artists work, be it the sculptors of Kumortuli or the art directors of Disney Studios, away from fame and publicity. Probably that is why they can deliver such quality work year after year.

I also thought something else: Why can’t we have such musicals in Kolkata?

A special day

This comics depicts quite well how this day started... and if I'm to believe PhD Comics, it's going to be like this for the next few years.
By the way, that would also explain why I have not written any blogs this last week.

A Thief and A Murderer

Remember Ashok Todi? The guy who became (in)famous last September by having his son-in-law Rizwanoor Rahaman murdered? Well, it seems he also sells underwear when he is not murdering people or having them threatened by the police, and the name of his company (Lux Hosiery Industries Ltd) is actually a copy of one of the best known soap brands in the world ("Lux" has a meaning in Latin, but it would be an insult to Ashok Todi to think that he knows Latin and prefers "meaning" to plagiarism). A quick search on Google will show that this company also ran into trouble for an obscene advertisement which was eventually banned from airing on TV. In short, the man and his company have aways been on the wrong side of the law.


In keeping with this tradition, this September Lux Cozi Innerwear has created a hoarding and put it up all over Kolkata (and probably other places in West Bengal) on the occasion of Durga Puja with a stolen photo. The hoarding (see photo above) is basically a collage of different images with a "kashphool" photo as the background below, and the photographer who took that kashphool photo is none other than yours truly (See photo below). I was never told about this, of course. I came to know about this today thanks to my photographer friend Mandar who also photographed the hoarding. Incidentally, this is the same photo that New Jersey based Sreeshti.org used for their Puja website last week. I brushed it aside as a funny coincidence in my previous blog post because they were not using it for some commercial purpose. Here, however, things are different. A company has stolen my photo and is using it for an advertisement without even bothering to inform me, let alone pay me for it. This is a punishable offense.


On second thoughts, murder, or forcing one into suicide, is a punishable offense too. If the man can go free with that, he will certainly survive my copyright infringement charge.

I may not.

With friends like the Police Commissioner of Kolkata (who fought with the media and redefined the role of the police force when asked why the police officers were threatening Rizwanoor), I'm sure Ashok Todi can prove that I sold him that photo for a few thousand rupees. He may even produce some SMS messages from my mobile to him requesting him to use my photo for his underwear advertisement. He seems to have a knack for such things. Besides, my being here in the US will not help matters. I can't fly to India to appear before a Kolkata judge twice a month.

So I'm doing the only thing that I can do - write a blog post about this thief and murderer, and hoping that the Goddess gives him his due. After all, which dignified lady would like her portrait pasted on a stolen picture in an underwear advertisement?

Curious Coincidences

The other day as I was standing at the rounded windows of my attic room, I suddenly noticed something written in white on the outside brick sill of the window. On close inspection, I found the letters "J-o-y" written in thick white lettering on the brick (see photo). Unless I have been sleepwalking and sleep-painting and procuring paints and stuff in my sleep as well, it was written by someone much before I came to this house, probably by the person who painted the windows white. As none of the other current inmates of the house have any idea about my nickname, they couldn't have done it to surprise me. Whoever did it, I must say it is one of the most amazing coincidences that I have come across in my life.
Another strange coincidence concerning me occurred last week. A local Bengali association in New Jersey called Sreeshti created a webpage dedicated to Durga Puja 2008. On visiting this site, I found a "kash phool" photo on their homepage which was actually taken by me! Now I'm not really thinking on the lines of suing them for copyright infringement (at least not at the moment, as I am quite grateful to them for streaming "Mahishasur Mardini" from their site at 4:00 a.m. on the Mahalaya day) but I would have felt better had they asked for my permission before using the image. However, what seems strange to me is that out of the hundreds of images available on the Internet, they chose to use the one photo that is taken by a person currently staying in New Jersey!
And while we are at it, it also seems no less a coincidence that only last Thursday I was collecting information about the Disney's musicals on the Broadway, wondering when I can accumulate enough wealth to go see the Broadway Musical version of "The Lion King", my all-time favourite Disney animated movie. On Friday, I get this mail stating that the Graduate Students' Association in our university is selling tickets to the students for The Lion King at a fraction of their original price, and the show is due on... hold your breath... 15th October! Well, in case you didn't get it, the "hold your breath" bit was because it is my birthday on the 15th. "The Lion King" has been running for the last ten years and several reviewers say it is the most spectacular show on Broadway ever. It sure seems my first birthday in the United States will be a memorable one.

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And since Durga Puja starts here tomorrow, I wish all my readers a very happy Durga Puja 2008. I'll be back after the Puja here with more posts.