In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones This movie is best known for the small appearance Shahrukh Khan made in it. It happens to be the first movie in which he ever acted. It also happens to be written by the famous Arundhati Roy probably based on her experience in architecture school. Annie is the nickname of a guy named Anand Grover who has been flunking his final year for four years. "Giving it those ones" is probably (90s?) Delhi college slang for something that remains unexplained to me (see the Hinglish section at this page http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?206041). He hardly seems to be some spunky rebel. He does maintain a hen coop in his hostel room and dreams of planting 120000 miles of fruit trees alongside the 60000 miles of train tracks across the country. The other students - unshaven, un-showered, in need of a haircut - reminded me of college life. And the farcical nature that the education system in India sometimes has. The rest of the plot wasn't all that interesting.
I was at the cable customer service center, waiting to be called after having taken a number and a seat. I was there to return some equipment left behind after my roommate moved. I assumed it would take me a couple of minutes and I would be in and out of there in five minutes. Well, the actual transaction probably took less than two minutes, but I probably had to stay there for twenty minutes. At one point, they even locked the doors and asked us to not let anyone in (it was closing time).
There was a bunch of people there - an old gentleman returning some equipment that he brought in in an amazon.com shipment box, a thirty-something biker dude (I discovered his bikerness this while leaving) who made several dmv jokes while waiting did a little jig when someone's phone rang with an elaborate ringtone, the guy with an elaborate ringtone on his phone, a bored guy and a girl who asked someone on the phone if you could die of insomnia and a bunch of other restless and agitated people.
The weirdest people, though, were these two people - a woman and a man - sitting apart from each other. They did not look like there knew each other. Now, every now and then, the woman would gesticulate wildly with her hands in sign language looking at the guy. The guy would just stare at her blankly. And then, when she was done and not looking in his direction, he would make his set of angry gestures - which looked nothing like sign language. It seemed like there was a loud fight going on between two strangers - only without words. And then, after a few minutes, a number was announced. The both got up and approached the counter - together! From what I could see from a distance, the woman appeared to be talking to the woman on the counter and the guy was standing next to her. No sign language involved. I had no idea what had just happened there.
I then tried looking up Google to see if someone else had the same problem. No luck finding a solution there. Then I was struck by a great idea. I looked up the necessary keystrokes, required to change the resolution, on my laptop (right click -> r -> ctrl-shift-tab -> tab -> tab -> few left and right keys -> Enter). I then tried those steps on the desktop and voila! It worked!
****
In other news I went to a Gamestop store to buy a 6 (almost 7) year old game to play with on a (5 year old) desktop that my roommate left behind when he left my apartment. I think the salesgirl at the store must have majored in "How to talk to nerdy guys" :)
The book I do not come to you by chance chronicles the life of one such scammer - how an average Nigerian guy turn into a fraudster. The plot is no work of art by any stretch of imagination - it almost reminded me of the Hindi movies from the 70s and 80s where the protagonist is forced into a life of crime by a cruel society (zaalim samaaj!) which doesn't value education and honesty. The book is somewhat predictable but makes for good light reading, but one thing special about it is the glimpse it provides into Nigerian society.
Interestingly, a lot of the details about Nigerian society struck me as very similar to Indian society, although in some cases it resembles India of 20 years ago. A few examples:
The protagonist's father insists that Nigeria is a "land of milk and honey" but it's just that the "milk is in bottles and honey is in jars". I have heard people expressing similar sentiments in India. Then there are things like the firm belief in education, value of respect over dirty money, grueling entrance exams and importance of influence over qualification in getting jobs. There is the wide disparity between the cities and the rural areas, between the rich and the poor, the pathetic conditions of public infrastructure, rich corrupt politicians etc. There is also the extra fondness for the english language which acts as a class divide which is again evident in the way people overindulge in newly acquired riches.
All in all, a good read and an indicator that cultures aren't as different as we think they are.
- Music:Kothibro - Ayub Ogada
If this is true then recent statistics tell us quite a lot. For in 1980 the comparative figures for handgun deaths within a number of countries were as follows: Japan, 48; Great Britain, 8; Canada, 52; Israel, 58 Sweden, 21; West Germany, 42; United states, 10,728.
Even taking account of the population differences the conclusion is quite obvious: either the American male is in deperate need of psychosexual therapy. Or something is very, very wrong with US laws on gun control. The two women who left Vancouver for Seattle late that morning were counting on the latter conclusion as being the correct answer. At 4:20 that same afternnon they stopped at the Douglas Border Crossing to reenter Canada. As a matter of routine Canada Customs searches every fiftieth car. Theirs was number fifty. So that was how, both in the trunk and under the back seat, a rather surprised Customs Officer found fity-two loaded Smith and Wesson .38s purchased that day in Seattle.
As the slogan goes; You can't rape a .38.
This, too, from Headhunter
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"80 percent of success is just showing up" — Woody Allen
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Kissinger, Gorbachev, Zbignew Brzezinski, Bill Gates Senior were recently (a few months ago now) guests on Charlie Rose. The youngest of them is probably 80+.
To live in this city, you learn to like rain.
Funny how sometimes you retain information from the unlikeliest of sources. I was in eleventh (or twelfth?) grade when I asked a friend if he had anything interesting to read. He lent me this book called Headhunter (Michael Slade) which was an account of the Royal Candian Mounted Police hunting down a serial killer in Vancouver. The passage above is how the story begins (after the first chapter which is more of a prologue). People who live in the pacific northwest would agree that the same passage could be written about the other two big cities in this region -- Seattle and Portland.
I must have been in fifth grade when I was doing a map (marking cities and lakes and rivers and mountains) of North America. One of the items was listed as "Vancouver (Canada)". I did not know what Vancouver was; and, seeing Canada in parenthesis, I assumed they meant Canada (even though I had a feeling that couldn't be right). Later, my sister laughed and told me it was a city. Many many years later, when I knew Vancouver was a city in Canada, and a few summers after I found out that it rained there all the time, a friend of mine was interning at Starbucks in Seattle. "That is where they started.", he told me, and "It rains here all the time.". "Just like Vancouver - makes sense", I thought.
Almost exactly an year ago, I was on the phone with a prospective employer. I already had a tentative offer (in Boston!) so I wasn't taking the phone call seriously. I was on IM with a friend, planning to go to a 5 o'clock show of The Dark Knight. The interview went well and ended just in time for me to get to the movie in time. The rain was pouring down. I got wet just walking across the parking lot. A couple of weeks later, I was in Portland interviewing for the job. It rained the whole day, almost exactly like the day I had been in Seattle, on another interview.
I never went to Boston. I went to the town that was almost Boston.
In this city, it often rains. Geography demands it. ... To live in this city, you learn to like rain
I started this post a few months ago. I had to fetch my old harddrive to retrieve what I'd already written. Which works out well, because I get to use the "Almost exactly an year ago" reference (actually a year and 2 days ago).
- Mood:
amused - Music:Come on Home - Franz Ferdinand (on pandora.com)
Robin from Co Kerry, Ireland "I love this form of cricket, so many great batsmen looking like waiters in a bouncy castle trying to hold a tray of glasses when they bat. Love the way you also make fun of the Aussies despite losing to Holland. I wonder if you guys will ever learn not to gloat until you do something yourselves worth shouting about like avoiding an Ashes whitewash."
Simon in the TMS inbox "Doesn't Robin (5/6th over) realise that for us to gloat at any Aussie failure is one of our basic human rights as Englishmen? What we do ourselves has no bearing on the matter at all. In fact it's remarkably similar to the Irish attitude to any English failure..."
Paul in Lancs in the TMS inbox "As both determined neo-Kantian and utter pedant, I feel I must dispute Simon's claim that gloating about Australian failure is one of our 'basic human rights as Englishmen'. Such a statement flies in the face of the Categorcial Imperative formulation: 'Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law', in that you cannot validly have a human right solely for one part of the human race. This applies even when the 'objects' of such a right is Australians, who did not exist in the modern (Euro-centric) sense when Kant was alive. I accept that, had they been, he may have done things differently."
TrickieDickie, Hollywood, in the TMS inbox "I agree, you are an utter pedant. Kant was familiar with the concept of schadenfreude (see his Lectures on Ethics) and whilst he felt it was a cruel and inhumane emotional response, I'm sure he would have found it hard not to raise a wry smile when the Aussies were ignominiously dumped out of this tournament."
TrickieDickie, Hollywood, in the TMS inbox "You're right, he did. Do you remember when Playaway devoted a whole show to existentialism and the pointlessness of the human condition? Seems a propos, as we sit staring at large squares of canvas, waiting for another dead rubber to begin. Honestly, Test matches in May and now pointless Twenty20 games in June. What are the (dis)organisers putting in their tea?"
Paul in Lancs in the TMS inbox "Trickiedickie - I think, then, we are broadly in agreement on the specificity of schadenfreude when it comes to the Aussies. The Australian cricket team, has by virtue of its dominance imbued with arrogance, completely altered the whole face of moral philosophy as we knew it, and created a new epistemological framework for the social sciences. Ricky Ponting should rest easy in Leicester. His work is done."
Most license plates here in Oregon are 3 numbers followed by 3 alphabets. I don't know how these numbers are generated but they don't seem to be you usual machine-generated random permutations. I have seen license plates ending in EAT, DRY or a bunch of other combinations that sound like common words or acronyms. The one that takes the cake, though, is eax (though not remarkable to who has never looked at x86 assembly code). The other day, I was driving and pointed out to my friend that the license plate of the car ahead us ended in eax. It took him a while to get the reference -- by that time the car had turned right and we were at the next stop light and guess what the license plate of the car now ahead of us was - another eax!. Not only that, I glanced to the left and there was a car with a license plate ending in ebx! If only there was a mov in the leftmost lane :)
***
I do not remember much from 1988. Except that one day in class we were pretty excited after writing that day's date - 8/8/88. What I do remember is that the presidents of both India and Pakistan had names starting with the letter j/z - Jia-ul Haq and Jail Singh. While Gyani Jail Singh might or might not have represented all things good and beautiful, Jia-ul Haq certianly, even then, represented all things evil. After all, he was the president of Pakistan! I do remember his death then, in a plane crash, was much like the killing of Ravana. Good over evil.
I recently read a book called A case of exploding mangoes which takes a satirical and very funny take on the episode. The narrator is a Pakistani armyman and describes the incidents leading up to the plane crash in which killed Jia-ul haq and the American ambassador plus others.
- Mood:
sleepy - Music:DeSi-RaDiO.com
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Why do "immigrant" authors have to write about "loss and alienation" all the time? Even when the actual immigrants were their parents? Although, sometimes their experiences can be funny. For example, I heard this bit on an NPR story
Everyone spoke Urdu, everyone was Muslim, everyone ate Indian food, and for a long time my son thought that that was India. He would tell people all the time, 'I've been to India! We've gone to India; I just was there last weekend!' And I would tell him, 'No, that was actually Minnesota!' And you can tell from his perspective how insular it is."
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What would happen if France had a black president? His new motto would be Liberté, égalité and booté!
That's from last weekend's Saturday Night Live. That guy is good - incroyablé!
- Mood:
hungry - Music:Editors - Munich
While only 6.2% undergrads come from the outside US, the number of non-resident aliens in Master's and Ph.D. degrees is roughly 56% - which is not really surprising. Also, while only 12% undergrads are females, they form about 21% of the master's and phd students.
Another interesting stat is that 55.8% of master's degrees are awarded by schools ranked 37 or lower (and 66% by schools ranked 25 and below).
Link: http://www.cra.org/statistics/
- Mood:
okay - Music:Charlie Rose
Born to an absent Egyptian immigrant father and an irresponsible Irish American mother, Ahmad is another one of those inner city kids who have little direction in their lives. So he latches on to his absent father's identity - adopting his last name in favour of his mother's and even his(?) muslim faith. His world view seems to have been moulded by his Imam, whom he visits regularly for his religious lessons. He spurns a college education ("bad philosophy and bad literature.) and questions the "Western religion of freedom" :
"I see to walk the Straight Path," Ahmad admits. "In this country, it is not easy. There are too many paths, too much selling of many useless things. They brag of freedom, but freedom to no purpose becomes a kind of prison."
"She is a victim of the American religion of freedom, freedom above all, though freedom to do what and to what purpose is left up in the air."
Updike clearly sees it as a "Us versus Them" conundrum, yet it is sometimes interesting how much the two sides agree on. Similar to the radical views on American freedom above,some of the "Us" voices have the following to say:
"Even out vaunted freedom is nothing much to be proud of, with the Commies out of the running; it just makes it easier for terrorists to move about, renting airplanes and vans and settings up Web sites."
"If there's anything wrong with this country -- and I'm not saying there is, compared to any other, France and Norway included -- is we have too many rights and not enough duties. Well, when the Arab League takes over the country, people'll learn what duties are."
Both sides have a pretty gloomy view of the world they live in. Jack Levy, Ahmad's guidance counselor, and his wife Beth (some of the "Us" voices) yearn for the time gone by; times had once "loving parents innermost and a moralistic popular culture outermost, with lots of advice between." to "children who seem to have no flesh-and-blood parents". On the other hand, the "Them" voices of Ahmad and his Imam see America as a materialistic, hedonist and Godless society whose total obsession with "this life" appears arrogant to them.
Another occasion when Updike makes an interesting comparison is when he talks about George Washington and the Revolutionary War:
"The was Georgie. He learned to take what came, to fight guerilla-style. .... He was the Ho Chi Minh of his day. We were like Hamas. We were Al-Qaida"
Ahmad's paradoxical journey makes for a very interesting read : It is at the same time very bewildering - his faith, his absolute conviction and yet the path he takes appears predictable, even natural. I'll wrap up with a passage from the book that sums it up nicely:
"All I'm saying is that kids like Ahmad need to have something they don't get from society any more. Society doesn't let them be innocent any more. The crazy Arabs are right -- hedonism, nihilism, that's all we offer. Listen to the lyrics of these rock and rap stars -- just kids themselves, with smart agents. Kids have to make more decisions then they used to, because adults can't tell tem what to do. We don't know what to do, we don't have the answers we used to; we just futz along, trying not to think. Nobody accpets responsibility , so the kids, some of the kids, take it on. Even at a dump like Central High, where the demographics are stacked against the whole school population, you see it -- this wish to do right, to be good, to sign up for something -- the Army, the marching band, the gang, the choir, the student council, the Boy Scouts even"
- Music:Bob Dylan - Like a Rolling Stone
- Music:Santana - The Ultimate Collection - Mirage
In the case of Ahmad, however, it is arguable that an American high school student, even one of Ahmad’s intelligence and principled views, would possess so sophisticated a grasp of the world and (English) language as Updike seeks to impute to him.
Well, if Updike was susceptible to such errors, we might have to cut the likes of Arvind Adiga and Vikas Swaroop some slack.
**countries with 5 or more graduates
Cavite: A movie on which Aamir was said to be based.
Tanya Roberts: Bond girl in the 1985 movie A view to a kill
Tanya Roberts: Donna's mom in That 70s Show
Sam Adams: beer
Sam Adams: bear
Usually when people talk of science fiction they mean Asimov and Clarke and future and/or space etc. I never thought of Michael Crichton as a science fiction writer although now that I think of it there was definitely a lot of science and a lot of fiction in his works.
As far as the movie is considered, I thought this was a case of very good adaptation. The movie remains faithful to the book (except some minor changes) and and the things that it leaves out are well suited in the book but would have been tedious in the movie. For example, the book is structured around chaos theory. The mathematician Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum) studies the park and predicts that the island would eventually go out of control. The book is divided into "iterations" demonstrating how complex unpredictable structures emerge out of simple structures. There are some very interesting explanations about chaos theory, genome sequencing and even programming.
A situation in the book that I found really interesting was when they discover that the animals must be reproducing but they aren't sure. The program that searches for the animals appears to report the correct number. Then they discover that the program stops when the number of animals it is searching for is reached. It assumes that only error condition is when there are missing animals and not extra animals - it is a very believable bug. Also quite interesting is the way the mathematician Malcolm deduces that the animals are breeding - the height distribution is a normal distribution and not a tri-modal distribution you would expect given that there are three batches produced at different times.
Lastly, Nedry, the programmer, played by "Newman" -- His backstory is that he was made to make changes late into the program and wasn't being paid to do so - enough to make any programmer mad!
- Music:Seinfeld
In my experience, movies based on books rarely live up to the promise of the book. But as I started reading Q&A by Vikas Swarup while comparing it to Slumdog Millionaire I found it hard to unequivocally decide which was better - the book or the movie. So I decided to do it the quantitative way!. I wanted to compare the two and assign points as I went along. Eventually I gave up because it turned into a no contest.
First of all we have the issue to of language/medium. I am okay with everyone talking in English because that is the language of the movie (and the book), but the movie is inconsistent with it's usage of language. It is as if the director couldn't make up his movie whether he wanted to use Hindi or not. In the book, this problem is not there but there is another, more serious, problem. The author dumps on the narrator thoughts and experiences that he could possibly have never have had. I don't have the book with me right now and I read it a few weeks ago, so I do not have an example, but if you have read The White Tiger or A Fine Balance you would know what I am talking about.
Book: 0 Movie: 0
In the book, the show is called Who Will Win a Billion or W3B. The protagonist wins the jackpot before even the first episode is aired. The producers don't have the revenue to afford a billion rupee prize until the first eight months. They offer the commissioner of police a cut of 10% (of what?) to prove the protagonist guilty. The police have a confession almost signed before a young female lawyer mysteriously appears and rescues our guy.
I thought that the book was more irreverent and cynical (a prize of a billion! the biggest prize ever!) and the producers have a more credible motive of denying the prize.
Book: 1 Movie: 0
The first question in the book concerns Armaan Ali (and not Amitabh Bachchan) who is the next big superstar in the tradition of Amitabh Bachchan or Shahrukh Khan. It is the hero's friend (not brother Salim) who is a devoted fan of the film star, not the hero himself. The whole episode is quite silly in the book but handled pretty well in the movie.
Book: 0 Movie: 1
In the book, the protagonist is abandoned at a church. He is adopted by a Christian family but his adopted mother runs away and his adopted father returns him to the church where he grows up without realizing the difference between father and Father. The church undergoes the danger of being attacked for "conversions" so the boy is renamed Ram Mohammed Thomas (after a brief debate over the merits of names Ram Thomas and Mohammed Thomas)
The movie turns him into a Muslim boy orphaned by rioting Hindus. More dramatic but I like the book version (even though the book character sounds like Anthony Gonsalves).
Book: 1 Movie: 0
At some point the stories in the movie and the book start to diverge. A point to note here is that, unlike the movie, in the book the order of the questions does not chronologically align with the incidents of the protagonists life. Thus, the narration jumps back and forth making you do the guesswork to fill the gaps between the different story fragments. I find is hard to understand why the director would throw out this interesting non-linear narration in favour of the straight line and predictable story line in the movie.
Book: 1 Movie: 0
In the book I kept waiting for Latika to show up. There happens to be a girl on the train though who Thomas rescues from a dacoit but she is quickly forgotten. There is no mention of the three musketeers. Should the movie lose a point for being too lovey-dovey? Was Danny Boyle attempting a "Bollywood" take on the story here? Not so sure here.
Book: ? Movie: ?
Okay, so after a point, the book loses it completely. No point bothering with the scores because halfway through the story, the book becomes too *fantastic* using too many coincidences and doesn't even pretend to be realistic. Given that the movie itself is fantasy-like, you have to imagine how worse the book would be.
( Just for the record, I sketch the storyline of the book from here on.Collapse )
- Music:Norah Jones - Come away with me
I recently read Netherland - a novel by Jospeh O'Neill. It is a great read and, at the same time, hard to categorize because it touches so many themes. One review (I think in New York Times) starts off comparing it to 9/11 novels; in another review it's described as "an Indian novel that happens to be written by an Irishman". It is the story of a banker who moves from London to New York with his wife and kid where the couple begin to drift apart. The wife moves back to London leaving him alone to brood over his life and what it means. During this time he discovers cricket -the game he played as a child - being played by a bunch of (mostly) West Indian and South Asian immigrants. He also meets a guy called Chuck Ramkissoon who is described by reviewers as a "Gatsby-like" figure.
The book is simultaneously funny, insightful, informative (unless you know a lot about birds of Trinidad etc), melancholic and overwhelming. Consider the following excerpts:
Even I had heard of Faruk, author of Wandering in the Light and other money-spinning multimedia mumbo jumbo about staving off death and disease by accepting our oneness with the cosmos.
"The Wild West", Schulz said thoughtfully as he wandered off to absorb the view from atop a nearby boulder. I saw that each of my other companeros had likewise assumed a solitary station on the ridge, so that the four of us stood in a row and squinted into the desert like existentialist gunslingers. It was undoubtedly a moment of reckoning, a rare and altogether golden opportunity for a Milwaukeean or Hollander of conscience to consider certain awesome drifts of history or geology and philosophy, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one to feel lessened by the immensity of the undertaking and by the poverty of the associations one brought to bear on the instant, which in my case included recollections, for the first time in years, of Lucky Luke, the cartoon-strip cowboy who often rode among the buttes and drew a pistol faster than his own shadow. It briefly entranced me, that remembered seminal image, on the back cover of all the Lucky Luke books, of the yellow-shirted, white-hatted cowboy plugging a hole in the belly of his dark counterpart. To gun down one's shadow ... The exploit struck me, chewing mutton under the sun, as possessing a tantalizing metaphysical significance; and it isn't an overstatement, I believe, to say that this train of thought, though of course inconclusive and soon reduced to nothing more than nostalgia for the adventure books of my childhood, offered me sanctuary: for where else, outside of reverie's holy space, was I to find it? "
Sometimes when you read a book you wonder how much of it derives from the author's own life experiences. A few days ago, I was watching Charlie Rose interviewing a german author Bernhard Schlink (writer of The Reader). Schlink said that all novels are autobiographical, for, how can you write about that which you have not experienced. In the novel Netherland, the narrator Hans has a lot in common with the author. E.g. the narrator grows up in Holland and lives in England before moving to New York city where, at some point, he stays at the Chelsea Hotel. The author's prior job as a food reviewer and his review of C L R James' book also make their way into the novel. Now these are superficial details but it makes you wonder about some of the more personal life experiences - how much are they from the author's own experiences or the people around him and how comfortable he or the people around him are with what goes into the book to be read by possibly millions of people.
- Mood:
awake
Sports is fun when there are great moments like the two fourth innings chases from India and South Africa. Not so much when India decided to shut shop on the last day in Mohali. For a team aspiring to be called the number one team in the world, this was a pathetic display of a fear of losing. A team that feels that it should hold the top spot should display confidence like Australia at its best (remember the 99 aus-sa tie?). Also, if they had no intention for going for a win and wanted a draw, why did they even declare? They could just have enjoyed batting for the rest of the day.
*
Quote from TV news: "Are the ski resorts close to opening?"
Frieda Pinto (Latika from Slumdog Millionaire) was on The Tonight Show (with Jay Leno) last night. She seemed to be a little nervous but carried it off quite well. She was talkative, funny and looked great. Definitely not the car crash that Aishwarya Rai was on Letterman.
*
On the Big Bang Theory show yesterday, Sheldon likens Ashwarya Rai to a poor man's Madhuri Dixit and then says to Raj, "Clearly you know nothing about Indian cinema". The goof there was that when Sheldon points to the TV and says "Isn't that Aishwarya Rai?", the song playing was from Kaho Na Pyaar Hai.
*
Quote from Scarface: "Nothing exceeds like excess".
- Mood:
bored - Music:OPB
I haven't ever really found a place that I call home
I never stick around quite long enough to make it
I apologize once again I'm not in love
But it's not as if I mind
That your heart ain't exactly breaking
It's just a thought, only a thought
But if my life is for rent and I don't learn to buy
Well I deserve nothing more than I get
'Cause nothing I have is truly mine
- Mood:
loved - Music:Dido - Life for Rent
At lunch time, I go out to get something from the car. When I try to lock it using the little button on the door nothing happens. I have to lock it with the key. I come back thinking that the car is falling apart. First the scratch then this.
It's evening and I am ready to go home. As I get into the car, it occurs to me that the button on the passenger side door might still work. I try that. Nope, not working. I sigh and turn the ignition. No lights come up. Nothing. Oops battery is gone. The car is really falling apart. But wait! The button is battery operated. So that is probably still alright. But why is the battery out? It was alright in the morning. Face hits palm. Remember the fog in the morning. I must have left the lights on in the hurry. Sure enough the light switch is on. I switch it back. Sigh again.
I call AAA. Wait for the guy to come and give me a jumpstart (It occurred to me after calling AAA that I could have asked someone in the parking lot). About 40 minutes later the guy arrives. The car starts. I ask him if there's somewhere nearby where I could get the battery charged. He tells me that most places would be closed at the time but suggests a place nearby that might still be open. I leave work, pick up my friend and get to the battery place. It's closed. At this point I'm considering leaving the car there overnight. Yes I'm dumb enough not to know whether the battery gets charged when the car is running. I call a friend and ask him this. He recommends that I drive around and let the car run for some time which will charge the battery enough to get it started the next time. I drive home and drop my friend. I think I should let the car run a little more. I drive around aimlessly for about a minute. I start hearing (or imagining) all kinds of weird sounds. I think I should better drive back. I park the car at the apartment parking lot but let the engine be on for a bit. I get out of the car and close the door. Oops! I have locked myself out. Remember the little lock button? Well, I had toggled it a fair bit to test that it was indeed related to the battery and it was set to the "lock" position when I get out. Well, maybe the passenger side door is unlocked - was the the rattling sound I heard? Nope. locked as well as it can be. Wait there's a spare key in my laptop bag. Aargh, there's the laptop bag inside the car. A little bit of backstory - the rear door window in my car was defective. The window used to slide down as the cable that connects the motor and the glass had broken. I had secured it using superglue but that didn't hold it too well. If it was still held by superglue I might have tried to pull it down. But no, a week ago I went and had the mechanic put in a nut to hold up the glass permanently.
I call AAA. They send a locksmith. I have never seen anyone do anything as fast as the locksmith is in getting the door open. I switch off the engine, lock the car and take the spare key into the house.
- Music:Abhimaan
Kapil Dev ponders why the feud of the 'leagues' should continue in India
Dear Kapil Dev,
If BMW were Board for Control of Cars in India, would they let Mercedes open shop?
Cynically yours,
prasun
- Music:Best Of Dire Straits & Mark Knopfler - Sultans Of Swing
