The functional illiteracy called Geography

Years ago, when I moved out of India, I was amazed to find that most conversations in the western world always begin with the weather, something that we never encounter in the subcontinent. If I were to say this now in India - Looks like it is going to rain today, the most compassionate remark I can hope to get is - Are you crazy ? Of course it will rain - it is monsoon now ! And there's good reason to it too. Unlike in the west, weather is totally predictable in India. During summer it is hot, during winter it is pleasant (cold in northern parts), during monsoon it rains. There you go. As simple as it comes. 

The obvious reason for weather to be a hot conversational material (despite the numerous weather apps in the smartphones that people checked N times a day) is because it works as a wonderfully polite, safe, universally approved, social-awkwardness substitute. Elevators, Subway trains, birthday parties,weddings, B-DUBS, you name it. Any imaginable awkward conversation can be handled effortlessly by progressively suggesting weather alternatives - starting off with a mild excitement, transcending to a reticent amusement, or a disinterested observation, moving on to an affable annoyance before finally settling down on explicit bitching. It works - always. 

Extending this thought, I have been consciously trying to experiment with geography as a possible conversational substitute for weather. Over the years, here are a few of the priceless nuggets that came up during the conversation, those which I managed to remember or document. I have tried to present them verbatim to retain their natural conversational flair.

Wait! Korea isn't an island ? I'd always thought it was.

Yeah. Too bad.

I need to take a vacation in the Andamans. That'd be cool. The Arabian sea, I've heard is beautiful. 

You mean the Bay of Bengal, right ?

Same difference.

Really? Hmm. What is the capital of Assam?

Guwahati.

Nope. Its Dispur. 

Dude! You cant make stuff up. There's even an IIT there !

Japan to the United States is a long flight. 

Why ?

What why ? They are at the far end of the maps - that's why.

Which direction does the moon rise?

West, of course. Wait - that's opposite to the Sun right ?

So, if I need to get to Alaska, I have to catch a flight or take a ship right ?

Or you could drive. 

How? Isn't Alaska north-west of Canada ?

Yup. But Canada has roads too.

In the month of January, watching a game of cricket played between South Africa and India..

Why does the commentator keep talking about summer season games? Isn't that like another 5 months away. Brr...rrrr...

If I go across Antarctica, I should reach the Arctic circle right ? No ?

Do you know how many states India has now ?

Now, now. You're just getting political.

You know, the Musi river flows right beside Osmania campus..

He he ! Yeah., right.

The spread of South Indian culture northwards would have happened if not for the Vindhya ranges..

I dont think so. I remember reading that Agasthya had pushed those mountains back into the earth a long long time ago.

Malaysians are good badminton players.

Of course, they come from the Chinese sub-continent.

You mean, south-east asian

No, no. Chinese.

You know, India is divided roughly into two halves by the tropic of cancer.
The tropic of what ?

There are many more, but despite being free, online acreage is to be used judiciously. Jokes aside - the one thing that I want you to remember as a take-away is the value of questioning information that were fed into us as facts. Sun rising in the east is a fact - very few questioned, why? Fewer still, understood. True to the fact that humanity evolves and solves bigger and smarter problems, it remains to ponder what we traded off. A common example is the use of GPS navigators, an epitome of human innovation - replacing human directional skills. Good? Bad ? Your call. 

May our kids be able to spell Geography.

Wabash Wisdom

At a fortunate moment of indecision, I decided to go all the way to Udupi, a restaurant 50 miles away from my dear WestLala, lured by the prospect of gobbling idlis and vadas (yes, you read the verbs right). As an after-effect of the above decision, I was forced to go for a jog in order to fit myself into my T-shirts again. In a certain sense, I'm happy that I decided to jog, since jogging along the northern parts of Wabash Heritage trail was one of my to-do things at West Lafayette. Just in case you are wondering, yes, I'm still looking for the second item in that list.  But let that be. For, as a fall out of my expedition today, I learnt many a thing that I'm postulating here as the dozen pearls of jogging wisdom. 


I learnt 

• that Rajinikanth is right, as always. He once said "vazhkai oru vattam da" (roughly translates to 'circle of life')
• that it takes at least 7 miles of running for your stomach to feel normal after hogging 11 medu vadas.
• that less traversed under-the-bridge pathways are a popular destination for men with OAB, no matter what country you are in.
• that 'The Road not taken' is an inspired poetry is a lie. Robert Frost had once taken a stroll along the N. 9th Street, Lafayette.
• that all roads in West Lafayette lead to the Happy Hollow park.
• why India does not compete in track and field events - we are just not meant to be athletes.
• It is final.  The winner in the category "best music track for inspired running" is Bhag bhag DK Bose. Sanjay Subrahmanyan's Upacaharamu cheseva comes a distant second.
• that fitness Apps in iPhone are not to be trusted for predicting distances. Ever. 
• what Jenny meant when she said "Run Forrest, run."
• that it is a good idea to take bath after running 9 miles . Apparently you turn into an effective rodent repellent after 7 miles.
• deer in west lafayette is not a fable. I saw two by the US-52.
• the meaning of life

Glossary:

WestLala - a rhyming pet name for West Lafayette, influenced by hours of watching innumerable tamizh songs with completely worthless lyrics.  
Bhag bhag DK Bose - hindi equivalent for encouraging a certain gentleman who goes by the name of D.K.Bose, to run. Really. Even Mr.Aamir Khan said so.
Upacaharamu cheseva - a carnatic composition by Saint Thyagaraja in the raga Bhairavi.
Rajinikanth - "      " intentionally left blank, undefined - the inventors of Boson particle at CERN are still working on this
Medu vadas - fried salted spiced lentil donuts. Salt - no sweet,.
US-52 - a very popular and landmark destination connecting the historic towns of Lafayette and West Lafayette across the might Wabash. All visitors of the Walmart definitely pass by this historic location.

A note to the posterity - this is the route that I ran today. May you find peace and prosperity and enough oil to light your lamps!

 
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2brnt2b is the question!

It is when you need to concentrate the most does your mind play all the tricks up it's sleeve and more often than not, the mind emerges the winner. Most of my writing is an artifact of such moments, but I'll let that be since that is definitely not the theme of my write-up today. I have always advocated that 'annoyance' is a perfect example of an intangible creation of our own mind, something that you can completely avoid. And yet, I infallibly fall for it every single time. But enough said about the mind, which I know is a product of my own contradictions. The anguished linguaphile in me had to seek solace by writing his agony targeted towards everyone and none in particular. It would be nothing short of being perfectly idiotic to fight for a lost cause, especially when the entire world is against you. But I'll stand up now and dish out a piece of my mind  to the world  in which mutilation of languages is considered fashionable.

Today, I was woken up by the muddled hooting of my phone on receiving a text message which said "tst" which was followed by another which said "txt d msg". And there it was - annoyance on two counts. The first being the most obvious - someone apparently chose me as the lucky person for his random testing of the new features of his/her phone. To explain this in terms of the butterfly effect, a few days ago the 'half-bitten fruit' folks released a new version of their iOS (to be pronounced ayyos), the impact which I had to bear now with some random person's experimental text messages. Following the two minute silence spent ruminating over my ill-luck was a half-an-hour nostalgia session recounting the undergrad days when free text messaging had been in vogue. Back then, it was the bread-and-butter communication strategy for students for a variety of recreational* purposes. The second reason for my annoyance was the content of the message - not the semantics but its syntax. The blatant non-availability of vowels in the message was just the icing that the cake needed.

That brings me to my chosen theme of the day - spelling. I can possibly understand the intent of robbing the words off its heart, if you were sending a Morse coded message hundred years ago when every alphabet communicated (or perhaps spoken too) was costing you money. Or if you were effecting a will endowing your million rupee property to an orphanage right before your very last breath^. Or if you were preparing** for an examination. But even the gentleman in me just cannot accept an email missing the vowels in a professional setting like requesting an appointment or writing to someone whom you do not know personally.

Very recently, an update appeared on my Facebook notifications; a comment that read thus "gr8,u 2 cum... pls du sumthn awsum dis wknd 4 dat." How in the sweet heaven do you guys even manage to do that! Every single word in there was perfectly misspelt! It has become fashionable to spell 'date' as 'd8' and 'time' as 'tym'. "To be or not to be" becomes "2 b r nt 2 b", "awesome" becomes "ossum" and "right" becomes "rite". And then there is "Choooo chweet" that pops up in all diabetic conversations between couples. And this list is endless. To misspell a word has sadly become a measure of cuteness in writing. If you end up spelling "do" as "du", I really think you should rather spend more time in middle school than on social networking. 

While there is one faction who splendidly mutilate the spelling by truncation, there is the other group who believe in perpetual repetition of an alphabet as a perfect equivalent for punctuation. So apparently, the length of grunting encoded using 'r'  in a "grrrrrrrrr" or the depth of disappointment in a "booooooooo" is a perfectly acceptable measure of your emotion. To say 'cooooool' is super cool and 'beautifullllllll' becomes extra-beautiful. On a similar note, the level of excitement in a "Superrrrrrr" or the measure of awe in a "Woooooooooow" is totally justified too. Sometimes, the length of repetition is so appalling that I often suspect their keyboard could possibly be the miscreant.

To all those who take pride in writing such sentences - Yes, I do appreciate your exceptional ability to comprehend sentences encrypted using phonetics and without vowels. But words are spelled in a language in a certain way for a reason - please let them be.

End of rant.

* includes SOS calls and soul-searching
** if you know what that means
^ if you don't understand this, you really need to watch more Hindi/Tamizh/Telugu movies. Don't look for Kannada, apparently even Google is not able to find any such thing called kannada movie.

The holy dip in the trough

 Owing to the state of shock that beheld the moment, I was caught frozen adoring my mobile phone which at that precise moment was undergoing ablution in the deep-dish Sambar container that our household covets as a piece of priceless possession. The LCD screen provided by Sony Ericsson was ever so refulgent from underneath the translucent liquid that topped it. And no, my cellular phone definitely wasn't an ingredient in the new recipe for Sambar that I was trying out. How it came about to be in this bedraggled position is a story that expresses as much mystery as any typical Tamil or Telugu movie would and so I have benevolently decided to spare my readers of that trouble. In an instinctive reaction, I matrix-pulled the phone out of the container though it was now the phone's turn to get frozen, but irradiate all the same. All the electronics-common-sense that my brain had managed to understand and index through the past decade was swept away by the puerile joy on seeing the phone alive despite the debacle it just underwent.

Murphy and the other genuine laws of physics were not so benevolent though. Fighting my initial adolescent euphoria, I had to try flip the lid down to see if that augured well with the phone. And there it was - the deadly flicker of death, like the sparks of a dying candle, the phone showed a final flare of its former glory before shutting itself off. Damn! I need to get a new phone now. But such kindness was deemed unwarranted to me.  The phone came back to life when I restarted it, but took an enormous amount of time to become operational. And that has been the problem ever since - it has become an obstinate child that needs to be entreated with tenderness, fortitude and oppressiveness all at the same time. It requires careful and delicate touches required of an eye surgeon to make it respond to the charger, an aeon before it responds to an key press or a flip and an equal amount of time to make it stop from any of the random action that it choses to take on receiving an impulse.

The pinnacle of my misery is when someone calls me - the phone keeps ringing despite my earnest attempts to keep it quiet. No amount of pacification helps - neither attempting to take the call nor drop it seemed to work with my phone. It couldn't have chosen a more opportune moment to embarrass me than at the birthday party of a friend with a room full of people pristinely talking and exchanging pleasantries. The volume of its ringing mutated from a mild purr to an ominous hooting proportionately attracting as much audience with every passing moment. I changed colors faster than a chameleon - from white to yellow to pink to purple to blue to green. And then, there had to be this brilliant suggestion from one among the audience while I was trying my best to convince the onlookers about my incapacity to deal with my phone - "Why don't you try silencing it?". Oh, yeah! Thanks! Like I didn't think of that.

But there are somethings that the phone started doing excellently, sometimes a tad too steadfastly. Alarm, for instance exerted itself beyond its expectations to wake not only me, but also my room-mate whose threw me a few fiery glances powerful enough to cook my breakfast. At that moment, I realized how much I missed my previous room-mate who used to promptly set alarm in his mobile phone and benevolently slipped it underneath my pillow when I am fast asleep. And then there is the MegaPixel camera which I had been once so proud of that no longer wants to turn itself on and the music player which I had grown to love as a soulful companion that has departed never to arrive again. Such dolor forced me to endure the ordeal of looking for a new mobile phone which I assure you is no easy task requiring all the financial tact and wizardry that one could conjure. My provider has this strange policy of extending step-motherly treatment to its existing customers while treating new customers lucratively. It actually took me a few minutes to digest the fact that a new connection would be less expensive than upgrading the existing connection. Take a bow for customer loyalty!

And so, here I am writing the woeful story of how I ended up with a punch-holed wallet and a semi-mortified phone that isn't open to any deal anylonger. On the brighter side, I'll be gifting myself with a new phone absolving myself of all the crime that I had committed and all the trials undergone as a result. Just the fairy tale end that was required to bid adieu to the decade!


Have a great year ahead folks!!