Inspired by Goli Golani we bought a mosquito net tent.
Me: Kavin you need to bury the net under the mattress from all four sides. So when the mosquitoes say "hamne tumhein charon taraf se gher liya hai" we say "ya bro but you can't come any further because net charon taraf se sealed hai 😎".
Kavin: (walks off with an "I'm not paid enough to deal with your dad jokes" expression.)
Some of the graphs I'm making for work look like accidental art.
Also, this is my twentieth anniversary of using RRDTool.
(These are the temperatures of the third core of a set of Intel Celeron J4125 processors over the course of the day. We run all our computers for 24+ hours at full load before shipping them. In Goa we don't have to enclose them in a chamber because it's always warm and humid here. The computers are all running Folding@Home. Even the dum dum UHD 600 GPU in the J4125 can do protein folding for science.)
I don't understand. Long term, how will partitioning the global market change anything?
India buys most of its oil from Arabian countries and Africa. Now more of that oil will go to 'Murica and Europe. Europe will stop buying Russian oil, which will flow south to China and India.
I don't think that Russian oil can just literally flow south, because there aren't any pipelines. Net net the globe will burn more oil in transporting oil all over the place so that some nations can preserve their caste system about which nations' oil they will drink.
Manmohan used to buy oil from Iran. Modi became pals with Trump and stopped buying from them. Now Biden doesn't like Modi, so Modi has decided to ♥ Putin instead. Does that mean we can buy cheap Iranian oil again?
Hum was the rare Indian movie that depicted corruption in the Indian Army.
I'm talking about corruption in the purchase of supplies. And corruption by army-men, not by bureaucrats and politicians at the at the MoD level.
Right now, just looking at the some of the videos coming out of Ukraine, I see what an underprepared army looks like. Much of the videos on both sides are propaganda, but some of them are just genuine videos of badly made and shoddily maintained equipment, and very poorly trained and oriented soldiers. Some soldiers are cold and underfed even as they arrive in Ukraine.
I don't know what the state of our army is in terms of feeding, clothing and training its men. The truth is that we like to believe our army is in order, without really demanding any evidence of that. But we do know that when it comes to equipment, we are far behind. The army has regularly complained about being underfunded. And I also often hear from other entrepreneurs how they paid off an officer to get their payment cleared.
Which is scary. Now my own firm sells regularly to the armed forces, in very small quantities, for different requirements. We have never come across any corruption. No demand of bribes ever. But we also come across unscrupulous dealers who want to secure large orders for us without any tender or testing, because they have a "setting".
The truth is that armed forces purchasing has much lower oversight for corruption than regular government purchasing. And its not like the public can just file an RTI and get info.
Anyway. You don't think about war. You assume war will never happen. But when you see other people fighting, and then people dying like chicken because their armies were not well prepared, you think of your own preparedness. Nobody deserves to die on the frontlines because an officer took a bribe when buying components.
One of the reasons the USSR collapsed was the sheer amount of corruption and bullying in daily life. And that didn't really go away when the USSR converted into "democratic" Russia. Our own ordinance system is modelled after the Russians, where we manufacture much of our ordinance ourselves without using private entities. Any time the government is both the buyer and the seller, quality goes for a toss and protocols and specifications exist only on paper.
Just a random chain of thoughts in my head after seeing needless death. Who will save us from our own greed if war comes.
I'm out for a WWF walk at Salim Ali Bird Sanctuary. Half the walk is about mangroves and shore plants, and is being conducted by a botany professor.
I've hung out with various kinds of nerds, but never a plant nerd. This guy is intense. Someone asked what the holes in the ground are, and he said "Those must be crabs. I don't know anything about crabs. My speciality is plants."
He has repeated the "my speciality" line dozens of times by now. A real nerd 👍🏽
Funny how colonial nations keep banning The Anarchist Cookbook, but social media is currently flooded with advice for Ukrainians on how to counter tanks and build explosives at home.
It's like they want to flood the world with combat information when they're not involved in conflict, but want that knowledge to evaporate when their own boots are on the ground again.
Social media is flooded with messages from Ukranians about how they support their army, are joining the army, or devising other ways to fight back the Russian invasion on their country.
Over the last few years, China has made repeated land grabs in India, and I did nothing. We did nothing. The leadership and the citizens just stood back and watched our army get battered and then retreat.
Maybe that was our Crimea. Maybe when an emboldened China invades full scale, our blood too will boil.
Trying not to glorify war, but also looking at the Ukrainians with sorrow and pride and learning from them.
The vegans and omnivores were right. Vegetarianism is a huge fraud.
50% of cattle at birth are male. In order to sustain milk production, male calves are killed off within days of birth. I've myself spoken about how cruel veal is.
In states like UP, where it is now illegal to kill cattle (and dangerous to even process/dispose cattle carcasses), male calves are growing into bulls and roaming freely.
Gaushalas, assuming they are even adequate and functional (ha ha), only cater to cows. Bulls and male calves have nowhere to go but the fields of poor farmers, and cause violence in the streets.
So if you are vegetarian (consume dairy but do not consume meat) and are also against the slaughter of cows, you are not offering a solution. You are only propagating a problem that largely does not affect you, and disproportionately impacts the poor. (And I am not even considering the financial impact of the ban on cattle sale on marginal farmers.)
And how exactly do we vegetarians consider ourselves "superior" to those who are consuming beef? Per the 2019 livestock census, India had 14.5cr female cattle and 4.7cr male cattle. 10cr male calves were less because they had been killed at birth so we can consume milk. We are creating the veal of male calves when we consume milk/dairy, whether we admit it or not. And when we further demand and achieve a ban on cattle slaughter, those छुटवा male calves simply become a living problem for poor farmers. Not to mention how incredibly hard it would be for 10cr unwanted large domestic animals to live ferally.
[Rearing bulls is a huge passion in Goa. They are taken out for walks every evening. These beasts are huge and powerful. Can't imagine living among stray bulls.]
After Russia eating up Ukraine, many commentators are saying it will be China eating Taiwan next.
I know hardly anyone from Ukraine, but I have many Taiwanese friends, have visited the country, and do business with them. I would hate to see Taiwan subjugated to China. And it won't even have titular democracy like HK has. It will probably end up as a colony of China. Terrible news.
If you thought the semiconductor shortage and the disruption it caused to global production was bad, see what happens when China starts exerting control over TSMC and Foxconn. There is no free enterprise in China - anything that grows too big, powerful or successful falls under the government's authoritarian control.
So yeah, all those large American factories (Apple, HP, Dell) run in China by Taiwanese companies will suddenly fall under Chinese control.
The world will just stand and watch like they are doing in Ukraine. Biden's sanctions don't bother the oligarchy. And Trump is actually celebrating what Putin has done.
[Covid hasn't even ended and now this. Evil got no chill.]
India has thousands of living languages. We usually sort/sequence languages by number of speakers. Instead, this guy skimmed off the top 120 languages and flattened out the list, to get this.
Kavin: What? 120? There must be like 10 languages and the rest are just derivatives?
Me: Not derivatives, but sister languages. Like Haryanvi... when they speak do you really know what they are speaking?
Kavin: No, not really (laughs).
Languages are beautiful. And so is data.
[That green is all what we call "North East" India. If this is the linguistic diversity (each with >10K speakers), imagine the cultural diversity. I've been to the Don Bosco institute in Shillong a few times, but that also seems to just be scratching the surface here.]
Wondering if someone can lend us a DSLR camera in Gurgaon/Delhi for two to four weeks. We will use it to make videos.
(This is for work, so we can pay a rental fees, or buy you a thank you gift. Someone joined the marketing team in Gurgaon, and the work camera is with me in Goa.)
Also, turns out iPhone cameras are the best thing when it comes to video. Better than even DSLR. Anyway, what would we gareeb Android users know. If you have a use (fairly recent but not the very latest) iPhone that you'd like to sell, please DM me.
Hello everyone. I am glad to inform you that we successfully closed round 1 of our funding earlier this week, and have begun work on round 2.
One-third of our investors are PhDs, and all of them are very accomplished people. Do consider joining us in our journey, as we expand product development and manufacturing in Gurgaon and Goa. Our goal is to become one of the largest domestic manufacturers of IT and electronics products, while focusing on those that are underserved by traditional IT products.
(Took us quite a while to figure out the entire fundraise process. The finance world is even more confounded and jargon-heavy than engineering. Besides, the MCA, RBI and IT department, all get involved even if you raise a little bit of capital. So yeah, figured all that out, and also assembled a team that gets all of this done.)
Less and less brahmin men are sporting the choti/shikha. Less and less Ashraf men are sporting a beard.
More and more Muslim women are wearing the hijab. More and more Hindu women want to wear the chura.
People are celebrating the Muslim girls who are standing up to hecklers, defending their right to wear what they want.
I would rather celebrate those women who refuse to carry the burden of religion on their heads and arms.
(In urban offices, it is increasingly difficult to tell the religion of a man. But it is quite easy to tell the religion of a woman.
Somehow even the feminists don't see that as an issue. So obsessed are they with freedom of choice, that they refuse to see that this so called choice is being coerced.)
Because of pointless social media arguments, I had to go down the rabbit hole of reading Quranic verses to prove that Muhammad never demanded that Muslim women wear the Hijab.
Muhammad was one of the first law givers of the world. For someone living in the seventh century AD in Arabia, he was a very very reasonable man. (Nevertheless, a lot of what is in the Quran is controversial, just like most other religious books like the Bible.) It is really unfortunate, therefore, when his followers twist his words to invent things he never said.
Muhammad never used the word Hijab. Or Burqa. He taught people modesty. First, he told both men and women, separately, to "cast down their looks". That might seem preachy in the 21st century, but honestly, I would gladly have hoardings all over Goa even today, telling tourists to "cast down their looks" instead of ogling at others on beaches and otherwise.
Then he told people to cover/guard their private parts when not with family. For women he included the bosom. Again, perfectly decent advice, even for modern times.
He also told women to cover their ornaments, and ensure they are neither seen nor heard. So yeah, if you are wealthy, do not show off your wealth. Not a bad idea at all.
He then told women to wear an outer garment when stepping out, particularly when in a foreign land, in order to prevent sexual harassment. So, he is telling Muslim men to lower their gaze. And then suggesting to women that "it is convenient", if you are around non Muslim men (who won't listen to me and lower their gaze), that you cover yourself up to prevent being harassed.
Very sensible advice.
The Hadiths further recommend that women wear the khimar (headscarf, can be interpreted as the hijab) while praying. Covering the head while praying is common practice in many religions.
So anyway, no matter how much you research on the terms Quran and Hijab, nothing much comes up. All this covering up of women business is an Arabic practice that predates Muhammad. Oppressing women is a modern Arabic project that has nothing to do with religion. Of course religious sanction is invented for it, just like religious sanction was invented for not allowing Saudi Arabian women to drive.
Goa was a mess from Mapusa to Panjim today. I would never even have imagined that Goa has these many cops. Everywhere I went today, there was bandobast and roadblocks. What a rotten day to be running around doing paperwork.
By the looks of it, it was somebody pathetically scared for his life. Perhaps someone with lots of bad karma, anticipating it to backfire any time now.
I purchased a boAt Stone 1000 Bluetooth speaker. Saw Rudolph use it, loved the sound (at that price point), bought it. Great product. Portable and handy.
It is Made in China. Their website claims that their products are Made in India, but their largest selling speaker is made in China. It says so on the box.
They closed March 2020 with a revenue of ₹700cr, and a PAT of ₹50cr. But they can't make a product as simple as a battery operated Bluetooth speaker in India.
(Their website also does not mention any e-waste information. No way to send them back a used product. This is in violation of Indian law, of course. They signed up for e-waste recycling only 4 months ago, well after a ₹700cr turnover. Five years too late.)
Time was, when India had a marketing challenge. We used to talk about a lack of management skills and colleges. Amul was an awesome model of how we had a product (dairy), and then someone (Dr. Kurien) came along and figured out how to package and market it.
Now we have a bunch of companies that make nothing. Design nothing. Just fly down to China, pick and choose some products, slap their logo on, and market the living shit out of it.
Before liberalisation, and well after it, India had at least half a dozen monitor manufacturers. We made lakhs of monitors in India. Last week I came to know that the last domestic monitor manufacturing facility stands in Pondicherry. It assembles monitors for 20 different brands.
That's it. One factory. Making something as simple and straightforward as monitors. Arguably, making monitors is simpler than making speakers, because you don't have to worry about frequency response or battery life.
I don't know where we went wrong, for manufacturing to be so completely wiped out from our land. I am sure it wasn't one mistake - it was a series of missteps. But I can sure as hell say that what happened to American manufacturing is happening in India. There is venture capitalist dollar chasing the next unicorn that can market some new crap to young Indians. And avoiding manufacturing like the plague, and encouraging outsourcing, is just one of the many toxic traits of VC dollar.
Candidates upset with the Railways recruitment process, destroyed railways property. They set a train on fire.
And this is how they proved their eligibility to work for the Railways? This is the respect they showed for the assets of their prospective employer?
And then they have the gall to ask help from the farming community. In an year long protest, show one act of violence that the farmers committed. They only removed barricades from roads with force. How are you equating it to burning trains?
The candidates have destroyed their own cause. There is a difference between protesting, and having a sense of entitlement.
This is an old video, of a five year old coordinating with the police because her father is too breathless to speak.
This isn't just possible; this should be expected of a five year old. If your five year old kid is spoonfed, is not toilet trained, or her school teacher expects you to be present all through her online kindergarten class, then you're doing it wrong.
Make your children independent, people. 99% of the world's kids are independent. Its only we urban Indians who turn our kids into losers by overparenting them.
Also, cut that shit out about telling parents they aren't doing enough for their kids. Most parents are doing enough; often, they're doing more than they can. Parenting is about being available for our kids - emotionally and physically. But we don't need to become our children's servants.
Just remembered that I once told an artist after a theatre performance at the Alliance Francaise Bangalore, "Congratulations, you were thoroughly disgusting and repulsive."
He had just finished a solo act where he had brilliantly performed the role of an abusive pedophile cop. Even though he appreciated the "complement", in hindsight I feel it could have been better worded.
Sometimes I feel that I've always been slightly off my rocker.
I miss watching theatre. Alliance. Miller's Street. Rangashankara. And North Bangalore. The most fun I've ever had, the most carefree I've ever been.
Me to myself, lying awake at night: I'm getting old. I need to walk into a recording studio at 3am in the night and sing something in a single take that people will remember long after I'm gone.
But, oh wait, I can't sing. Anyway, I just need to convince people that I need a joyous cremation like IZ's. Then I can die in peace.
(I mean, just scrub to 2:40 in the video. Once you've witnessed that, contemplating death is easy.)
Glass. Windows. From my ICU bed I looked, over the suffering body of the elderly army officer, through the mildly dirty glass windows of the hospital, at the tree growing outside, and the birds busily moving about on it.
They kept me alive. The birds. The ward girls. The nurses. The infernal BiPAP. The doctors. The drips filled with drugs poured out of glass vials.
Jauhar. Sati. We are always trying to prove these were brave, voluntary acts. They never were. And no other culture ever found them necessary. Human life seems to have had very little value in India.
"Oh ok, if so, for the CI, do you need real value or undervalue? Many of our customers will put it undervalue in order to lower the tax"
Why does this keep happening to us? Every single new vendor in China or the far east asks us this. They say all Indian importers insist on undervaluing invoices.
But how does this work? If there is a ₹2,000 item that one undervalues to ₹1,000 and imports. Then at the time of import you pay 18% GST or ₹180, instead of ₹360. So you "saved" ₹180. But did you? Because when you sell the item, and you will sell it for more than ₹2,000. So if you sell at ₹3,000, you collect ₹480 as GST on the sale, take credit for the ₹180 you already paid at the time of import, and deposit ₹360 with the government. Right? Right? So how does undervaluing help? You could have paid ₹360 at the time of import and then paid ₹180 at the time of sale and you'd still pay the same amount of GST. What are these people doing?
And how do they reconcile their bill of entries with their TTs? How come the RBI and ED aren't breathing down their necks?
Why am I annoyed? Because I'm sick of the Chinese telling me that all Indians are unethical and undervalue imports. The last people I need telling me that Indians are unethical are the Chinese. (Yes, that's racist, but I'm not being racist, I'm being patriotic. They are the same thing; same same but different.)
Most people who are in the business of self development or success training or whatever they call it, also happen to be people who haven't been successful in life. Either they themselves don't consider themselves successful, or by societal norms they haven't achieved anything much given where they started, or they are financially struggling.
Very strange indeed. Its like being treated by a pulmonologist who is himself coughing badly all the time. Sure, the empathy to your situation is there, but clearly the cure has already eluded this doctor.
[Edit: Prime example of how I shoot my mouth sometimes. I was ranting about group "success" coaching - an activity that targets lower middle class office workers and rural unemployed youth. I wasn't talking about professional counsellors or coaches, who usually do an excellent job of helping people define their own parameters of "success". In group coaching, they sell the idea that monetary wealth and job title are the only measures of success. They also teach you that you are not successful because you at not motivated, you are not working hard enough. The reality is that in a capitalist, casteist society like India, it is social structures, your lack of command over English, and you not being a part of gated professional networks, that is holding you back.]
But I look at parents every day who helicopter around their kids and I wonder why.
Let them get dirty. And then teach them how to clean their own clothes instead of cleaning up after them all the time.
Tackle your own anxieties and fears when they walk or cycle outside. Yes, it'll be more work for you if they get hurt. But that's just life. We can't enclose everyone at home for fear of injury.
Our job as parents is not to police our kids or be their cleaners. Be available for them but don't let them become dependent on you - for their material or their emotional needs.
(Doesn't apply to reasonable precautions and self isolation to prevent Covid, obviously).
I have a tremendous bias for skin colour and body fat that I can't seem to get over when doing photography.
Which is why I stick to birds. Birds don't complain if their skin colour looks darker in my pictures than it appears to the naked eye in sunlight.
The lens is always picking up unshapely parts of the human body. I delete such "embarrassing" pics, even before the subject can come and complain to me. And I'm learning new terms like cellulite, because apparently people are learning about their cellulite from my pics.
Animals are so much easier. It takes me months between photographing people and sharing their pics with them. I just sit around wondering what to keep and what to delete. Too much brain work.
All children born in 2007 or before are eligible for Covid vaccination in India. This is what the CoWin website says, "All beneficiaries aged 15 years and above (birth year 2007 or earlier) can register for vaccination."
The government has been saying that all children aged 15 years or above are eligible. This would mean that, as on date, all children born on or before 15 Jan 2007 are eligible. But that is not the ground reality. Even children born on 31 Dec 2007, who are currently aged 14 years and 15 days, are eligible as per the policy on the CoWin website. Ever since Nilay told me this two days ago, I have corroborated this with multiple news sources and now the CoWin website itself.
Yesterday's train accident is unfortunate. But here are some statistics to show just how much better the Indian Railways has gotten at safety. The accident rate has almost consistently fallen, and the fall is steeper if you factor in accidents per passenger kilometre.
Speaking of which - the accident rate of the Indian Railways is about 0.1 accidents per million passenger kilometres, and 20 deaths per billion passenger km. The EU has 2 deaths per billion rail passenger km.
The railways are the only long term sustainable mode of transport. They are non polluting, economic, safe, green and a huge return on investment. If the government keeps investing, in another decade or two we will surpass the EU in rail safety.
I'm always eager to celebrate TN's social development success. But these statistics need to be taken with a pinch of salt. Just because someone subscribes to a patchy 4G connection doesn't mean they have reliable or useful internet. Airtel and Jio rural coverage is poor, and BSNL service is unreliable. Caste atrocities have risen since Covid started - something widely reported.
There is soooo much more work to be done in undoing 2,500 years of brahminic discrimination, that we cannot give the DMK even a minute of rest.
Random guy: Anthony Menezes from Calangute has sent this for you.
Me: I'm sorry but I don't know Anthony.
Him: He will be standing for election this year.
Me: (incredulously) Can he do that?
Him: (a tired "you must be new here" expression on his face) I just need your name and number.
I took it. I don't know why. I have no use for it, and I will not be bribed. Heck, I don't even have a Goa voter ID yet. But Pigeon makes these with pride in India, and I'll support them.
At least AAP was giving away make believe train tickets. Which party is Anthony from? Can't even find him online.
The statistics in the last para are very interesting.
https://geographicinsights.iq.harvard.edu/IndiaVaccine says 80% of Mumbai is fully vaccinated. Then who is in the oxygen beds? Children, who the government won't vaccinate?
It would be very nice to see age demographics of those oxygenated.
There are two kinds of victims of human trafficking in India. Those who are bought and sold virtually, without consent, on shady apps. And those who are bought and sold in reality, without consent, in the shady areas of town.
Guess which victim gets more attention? Both from the public and from law enforcement.
21 year old accused become young, poor victim of circumstances when they are educated and of the right caste. Underage boys are treated as hardened criminals when poor, uneducated or of the wrong religion.
Seek education at any expense in this country. Do whatever it takes to get educated. Once you are educated, once you are organised, only then your victimhood is recognised. And then even your crimes may be ignored.
