Back EMF

Murder, serpentine stats, love, and loss.

The man in the yellow t-shirt was smiling. His eyes liquid as spirits, crooked. His glass shaking in his manos. It was cold and dark and stark as a deserted creek outside, with the fog hanging down. What would you do in this town? he kept asking me. I was feeling heady, nauseated, that feeling of being marooned in a crammed train wreck. I went to the tiny bed and crashed. Outside it was a box of a town. A few blocks straight, few blocks across, everything in between. Clean, labeled, systematic, like anal retentive chemistry labs. Stuck between a Walmart and a river. Between a never ending avenue and that river that curled around. In the morning you could see the sun glare down the main avenue as it strecthced out of its sleeping clothes. The morning light is always brilliant, and the wind cool, gentle, like a mother, like Joyce would say. And while all of this is honest, true, and convenient, none of it gets me going anymore. See there are two people writing this here. One that prefers chopping wood, cutting them, putting them together, looking at them like an old friend. The other one, has more of an alacrity, if you may, for pyromania. So he goes looking, for trouble. Of whatever trouble that can be found in those concrete entrapments, those muddy waters, and those god forsaken computer servers clonking like death pods.

Chapter 1 : White like Dublin

Splish splash. Birds merroing in the morning river. They say there are no predators in Jersey rivers, just predatory chemicals. Just logs and bakelite, sludge and turpentine. A man zoots past me in a candy suit and a duffel bag. “We’ve got a floaty, boy”. This is what it has come down to, can’t even walk a block in the mornings without the smell of CBD. There’s a body bobbing up and down the river. Making paddle noises in the metal water. It gets pulled to one side and then far to the another, like being pulled around by invisible little ghost children. My shoes were stuck on that wrought iron bridge, legs stiff like a tree. All these years I thought my eyesight was bad, now I could see a dead face 400 meters
away. I know not if distance works differently on water, apparently it does. “He so white boy”, yelled the man in the spastic suit, “He white like Dublin”. The sky burst with police pong pongs in a crammed minute. There were all kinds of officers, bald italians, mustachioed poles, scrawny asians, and nonchalant latino coppers with jambon y queso sandwiches in their hands. I couldn’t help but not forget his face. His mouth open, his eyes vacant, looking for someone that never came. We have all been there, some for the last time. I could not go on. I had to stutter back home. The tall man was getting his door knocked on by a woman. She had ink black oiled up hair, and she looked pissed. I put eggs on a hot pan and ate. College was desultory, tedious. In the evenings there would be rotating rainbow lights and dancing people in the living room that doubled up as a kitchen. Sometimes the noise would throw the roof out, and two bored police officers would come probing. And there would be the man in the yellow tshirt in the corner, smiling, calculating. Sometimes he would go to his room and box with the wifi. Sometimes he would start cooking at 3am, after everybody passed out from passing libations from hell down their useless throats. Sometimes he would get sober, once in a red victory, and he would end up telling everyone about what he liked to drink. And he would get wasted and start cooking at 3am again after everybody died from 12% abv sewerage.

Enough dilly dallying. About the body. It was floating like a friggin slipper. I was not surprised. It had been a tough year, a hard year. A year of getting thrushed in the guts by a stone hammer. The year of the bloodied fox. The year of blood exploding through veins, the year of new light and old blood in the eyes, forgiven but retained, of love, and for love. The year of the gent in the river. It’s hands were dry, white. When they took him out I could see him pale, like the grief of the eons, where could he be from? Up from the state? Or from the next town? They catered him into a holder and a bag, and into a car that ran away like a runaway jackal. The news came that no one knew. He had no ID, no phone ins, no lotteries, no lovers. What does it have felt like to live without love? We never lack of it, we give it sometimes so perfectly not to get back anything. Even though it is love from the old days, from the eons, a sphere of glow, with all the lights, and all the rhymes, and still it’s not enough. Such is life. I felt bad for that guy. News said he was murdered. Who could kill him, as it turns out anyone barely even knew him. I went out on a drive on that endless road. One minute sad, one minute happy. Sad by hope, happy by nihilism. And back at it again with blood rushes. I see dark clouds and the impending rain. When I close the eyes for a split second I see the vertical lines of light, crossing like the copier machine, blotting the paper-maiche red. I see Courier joints with middle aged men and taco caves with absolutely hot women, the dilapidated churches, and the empty pharmacies. Pharmacies with the snake logos they say belong to the doctors. Two snakes, two of a kind, intertwined. If one of them went swimming, what would the other do?

And where was the other snake? I would call in my friend at the office. Her name was Abi, Abigail. She had jet black hair and eyes like ruby. Not like I was attracted to her. Well of course I was. When she laughed it felt like the world was fair for a second. And when she would smile slowly her eyes would drop down. Where am I going with this, I got a murder to solve. So I call her up, she would confirm what I had observed. The scalp of the guy did indeed have dark patches. So Mercury poisoning was a possibility. But they did not produce or use that in the 200 mile vicinity. Hm. Mercury stocked in someone’s house? How was I supposed to find that now. It’s easier to find an Indian store in remote Paraguay, in the Chaco, whatever that is. The man was not made to drink or bathe in mercury, he was exposed to it, in an non industrial environment, over a prolonged period, deliberately. Whoever it was, they had the flag and the staff and the sword. They executed a heinous, heinous act with perfection. How do you find Mercury in basements? I breathe out. But the blood is now splling into my vision, although my best formulations I am not even putting down here. I decide to stretch my legs, I catch up with Abi at the mall. We drink sprite, eat bourbon chicken, we are friendly.

I go at it harder. I go into that thinking pool. The mentalists are there, so are the cranks and the shrinks. I dive, into pools of text, and I try to find a formula that fits the problem.

I head back home. The woman with the satin hair is fighting with the tall man now. They are fighting over her lost wallet. The first thing that floods my head is the man in the yellow shirt running away with it, intoxicated as a laboratory. But now that we all are here, we need to find it. We start to do a round of the places she visited. We go to Trader Joe’s. Trader Joe’s. The rich American persian bazaar. It’s a duet in a techno club, a garnish on a salt and pepper broth, a lifesaver on a sinking vessel. The cashiers don’t have it. Rich people in collared up shirts, male, female and androgynous hipster, buying Kombucha, not to mention the frozen Mexican and Indian meals. That is privilege you can’t pass, at least in this lifetime. That store does have some good things, though. We go to Marshall’s, teeming with the hood, rap songs on speakers. Friendly and angry people, all singing the same Ice T song, apparently. I don’t expect it to be here if it were even. Stores in the U.S are its museums. Its museums are too perfect, brimming with people trying to find meaning, you know what I mean? The museums have too much in them, they are too affluent, too full. It almost feels guilty even to set step into them. They are beautiful nonetheless, gorgeous, some of them make your heart sink like a stone. And the stores, and their myriad brands, with myriad variations, with the maze like attention to details to the packaging, they are a feast(and pestilence) not just to the stomach, but to the eyes. How do we find a wallet in a radius of 20 miles? Before it gets taken. Good Morning Vietnam is playing on the telly. We go to the nearest popular radio station, bribe(read donate) our way into making an announcement about an apparently cursed pink MK lying around town. It is at our house the next day. I am sure the Hollywood’s recent horror streak has helped. Thank you Annabelle. The tall man is relieved, the satin haired woman is happy, she is laughing on a video call with her mum.

The problem of the mercury addled basement. Wherever I swim, there are bodies. Not human bodies, but memories of people, memories of towns, memories of memories. All of us have those. We leave towns, people behind, only to find new. To again get our skin burnt and left out in those places. With those people. I go around that swim, that sea, of memories, of analysis, if you may. I find trees, I find cries for help, I find graphs, and I find heat maps. Heat maps. Of course. By mathematical theory, if there is one mercury container in X, there has to be at least half at X+100 miles or whatever. But if X is 0, that 100 can be anywhere, of course. For that we need statistics. But they don’t have statistics for mercury poisoning, at least nothing recent. For that we need neural networks. I am not going to enundate with irksome technicalities. But here is what I did. I took data on mercury poisoning symptoms, symptoms associated hitherto with other diseases, and I added them to a dataset of mortality rates. Then I find the strongest correlation, a mathematical score, if you may, and the area with the strongest correlation, pinpoints to some French sounding town called Dubois in Pennsylvania. Coal country. Always felt off about Pennsylvania, the ever winding country roads and the vegetation that always feels like it is hiding something. I can never understand it.

We drive into Dubois like war generals. As the day is breaking, crisp. We decide to visit the sick houses. We visit three dozen, in three days. No luck. Some of them are abandoned. Some teeming with life, with kids hooping upfront. Some morose, old people looking at cars going by, on their patios. Some have glistening art stores, with weird hostesses, and the houses turned to Airbnbs. The town mayor tells us coal miners have started to move to IT and remote jobs. And then there is 2023. But a lot of people have gone to the cities. The local CVS feels like an empty banquet hall. All in all, the town is empty as an empty heart, I will be honest. We get to one with a big truck that is dust covered. House 37. Clearly not driven for weeks. There are no responses to the knocks and doorbells. And we ask the neighbors around. They say they haven’t seen the couple in months. We call the police to intervene. They do break in to the house. To find no one. There are Mercury containers in the basement. And we hear someone running upstairs. The cop started running like he was out on a leash. He would finally catch on, and she would admit to slow poisoning the husband and letting him slip into muddied waters. Love pangs. It didn’t end there.

I head back to Jersey. I meet Abi over dinner. She says we can’t meet in person anymore. She says I am too attracted to her, it is obvious, and she feels nothing anymore. It is bit of a knotty situation, and she doesn’t want to do it. I feel like Jelly inside, no, I feel fully dead inside, and I decide to keep the pain and go at it harder. The sun is pouring it down on me from the West. I hate the sun now. I get reminded of Sonnet 17. As long as men can breathe and eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to me. It’s the love for the ages, I dare not desecrate it, again. It’s a prayer and somebody’s kingdom, for all purposes.

This is a concise version compared to the book. To be followed by Chapter 2.

The stars that sway us by, in the blue of midnight blue,

Their shine like your laughter, their edges soft, like soft peonies,

Some descend in Athenian rage, like ships on fire,

where we held each other last, in that thread, in that pain,

with the endless tears,

of the thousand friars, who wanted nothing,

but to absorb, the hurt of the thousand smears,

on the parchment rained down to a red,

and the behemoths singing red melodies,

your eyes sloshed like the fervid sea,

And I still remember your lapel pin.

Cultural curiosities, clandestine treasure trails, and seemingly cool purpose, for what else do we have.

5 years later I wake up old like a slab of cheese, in this cauldron of a Parsi house in Malabar Hills, overlooking a crescent shaped Bombay road, with old colored olden cars. Taupe and daisy, garish yellow and beige. I still call Bombay as Bombay. I am not a colonial nostalgia humanoid, I am not neck deep into Russell peter’s contrarian jest, or Suketu Mehta’s romanticism. Maybe Jeet Thayil and his headlong raves and rants about this tropical paradise of the middle-privileged. I don’t know. It’s just that I don’t want to call it Mumbai. I like to remember one place as one thing, until it morphs, wrings itself dry, and becomes something else, entirely. For a week it is humble diurnal living. I sleep at 9 pm, I wake up and I run. I eat baked potatoes with rice and curd and soak in the past few crazy years across the big pond. Then one day I am jolted out of my bed by the thoughts of the old coffee table and the old magazines and that life.  It’s both a Geographical fact and a cultural statement that Bombay is India’s Western most city. I know what you’re thinking. Bangalore has long, long roads laden with those long veggies and the crusty flowers, breathtaking. It has clean tarmac, clean buildings, glass on glass, and people in ATMs speaking of UCLA admissions on the phone. Also some darn good bakeries and some good looking women definitely from Delhi they look like. The gentrification and the start up pitches at your next table can be both a business prospect and a murder plot in progress, but at least it is not boring like a coffee place in Manhattan where all you hear around yourself is weekend plans and wedding buffet budgeting. It is definitely India’s most modern city. Western identity, I don’t know so much. Delhi, you know how it is. It has Lutyens’ Delhi, the Delhi of the Mughals, and the neo classist bureaucrats, but it still is an eyeshore, despite of the metro and the food and the ultra smart college going hipsters. It has too much history on its hands, and too much weight pulling it down from being completely free, free enough to be what it wants, a free thinking, intellectual all in all powerhouse that doesn’t care about anyone. Bombay, on the other hand, is a bustling, mad city, as Alastair Cook on his first tour. You can go out and just run on the boarwalks get your clothes fixed, eat whatever, be anyone, be anonymous. It could be Montevideo, Vina del Mar, Barcelona, Yokohama, Cape Town, or Auckland. People couldn’t care less about where are you from. It’s an individualistic society ensconced in the collective fabric of India, and it is not nearly as bad as it sounds, at least to me personally. And the one thing you can’t miss about this city is Bollywood. It’s just there. There’s no board staring at you here like soCal, but the films are everywhere. From the curry you eat for breakfast, to the weddings at midnight. It’s all prevailing, and all encompassing. It’s easy to pass Bollywood as a third earth movie industry, as a garish pink money laundering slot device, as a rundown hot gravy mesh of tomatoes and old ground meat. But it did and still captures the imagination of society and youth like midnight highs.

The turnstiles and the patios and the windows in the buildings here are so much like Miami. I really can’t tell on some mornings which is which, but they tell me it’s art deco architecture, I don’t know what that means really. I want to speak of this place as a sultry town with people that Danny Boyle said beat that statue he had in his hand at the Beverly Hills Hotel, but that has been done and read countless times before. So what am I doing here, in this behemoth of a peep mesh, sticky as a salesman in this sun, and lost as a Nebraska town. What I want to elicit, like David Foster Wallace would say, is why, why we are, the way we are. I want to excavate, no, I want to feel, in those cafes that look like museums, and the bakeries with plexiglass casings with teenagers with behemoth books on their backs, I want to feel something that’s nothing been felt before, and I want to put it down here. It’s something that seems easy, yet very complex at the same.  I want it to be about newness, about realization, about love, about something that means something.

Before that, I am famished. I go to Colaba and sit near those palm trees and have meat stuffed in breads,  and splashed down with kokum shakedowns. We do circles around town on an open-tab cab, and slowly I begin to see it as it is. As a simple proposition, if you take the economics, sociology, and the math and the emotion out of it and mash it together, you realize the city is not because of all of those, but in spite of it.

The news has been talking about Khalistan. Kashmir has never not been there. I don’t want to get to the wherewithal of it. That is not my job, strictly speaking, I am going to speak of it from where we have been. We take Bombay. This city has been of the Mauryas, the Guptas, the Cholas, the Marathas, the Portuguese, the British, and the Indians. The Indians. Yet you barely feel anything else here, for all that history, big whoop. Recently there’s been contention, there’s always been. British men with overacting thyroids and a penchant for afternoon tea have always wanted to stick it to us about being the birth fathers of the idea of India. UPSC 101 even in the least popular coaching center in Delhi says Ashoka did it, he unified and created the idea of India, 2000 years ago. And they’re right. I’ve never been to Delhi. The Mauryans gave us great roads, our emblems and advanced architecture, which is interesting, yet beyond the dope(yes) of this piece. We may come from the Persians and the Central Asians and the African Tribes that inhabited the land thousands of years ago, but our identity since time, before time, has been that of a unified people. If the British did anything, they helped us realize we do believe in this country, as Ghalib might disagree, and we love each other enough than a foreign tyranny occupying us. As I look at the meter at the cab I get a feeling it is overrunning, it couldn’t be that high. Then I realize I am in Bombay, of all places, where everything is exorbitant because the rent is exorbitant, and the rent is exorbitant because of the Bombay hotel and house rent control act of 1947 put a cap on rents, for the war veterans and freedom fighters moving there, and that stayed forever until a couple of years ago,  for vote banks, ruining everything good along the way.

I meet my PhD contact, Saba. She comes from a family of professors and bureaucrats. She has spick and span hair wound tightly by a sharp pin and round glasses and crisply ironed clothes. We shake hands and decide to wind back home and rest. I feel tired like an old man waiting for his dead pet by this point. I hit the bed and sleep and sleep, with no dreams and dead to myself. When I wake up I feel reborn.  We decide to take a hike across to Rajgarh, the old fort. It felt warm, yet haunted. Just like Target. Colorful attire, water on the tarmac, bangles until elbows, kids screaming, college field tours. They have them all. The antiquities of India, and the ancient treasures, are not really talked about as much in mass media as they are in balance sheets, and diversionary rants on primetime tv whenever they want to take the focus off things. But the thing about treasures, and lost treasures, mostly, is not just their monetary value, but of whole chapters torn off history. Just like your jewelry says a lot about you, apparently. The air near the ground is dense and heavy and cool. And it looks like it will rain in a few, just like in the old days. The Persians were here, and also the Mughals, and the British, and all the others. I talk to Saba about the intricacies of finding one of these things. “It’s hard to get to a treasure that even the people who buried it couldn’t”. I know what you’re thinking, metal detectors. But I also happen to have studied a drab science called Geology for a couple of years. “Too many false positives”, she says. “The ground is highly mineralized, Iron deposits from higher land pushed down below by rainwater into the flatter plain below the fort.” She looks to the side at the ice cream guy fighting with a man. “No one will ever find it”. Ground Mineralization, as it is called, is basically the contamination of the ground with high concentrations of metal, like Iron. So the metal detectors would always fail, as common sense. “But if this was a test for you to get into the Indian Armchair Services, how would you do it?”  … “ I don’t know but I will think about it in my room post-dinner”. From where we stood you could see the whole city from there. So much I have missed the land and the air and the long, long days under the sun. That’s for another day. We cut into dinner, the flatbreads and the sharp curries, and the open sky. Both of us are looking directly into nothingness, thinking of that lost treasure. “If you cannot find something, then you have to dig up the whole of the earth,” Saba says. “Sure”. “No, if you need something in life, you have to dig up the whole of the earth until you get it.” “ I’m sure ”.

Some things in life start to make sense only when you know you can’t have them. There were no metal detectors then? Why couldn’t the people who buried dig it out? No way they didn’t know where it was. They definitely did. Maybe it was like a cricket ball you throw into the roof that you cannot access, you know. Probably deep in terra firma and inaccessible by a landslide, as we look up into the mountains. Without further winding, we start off that useless 2004 Hyundai Sonata we had got for rent and drive to the geological survey of india office. We meet some people and get some maps, looking for underground caves and pathways and crevasses. We found there are at least a hundred. Some kilometers long. Navigating each one, given the time for clearances and manpower, and safety,  takes at least a month. We can’t afford that. Not in money or patience, but in time. We have to optimize it. Technically, if you treat it as a graph algorithm problem, the one with the highest probability of having it would be the one that is the easiest to travel. We take the width, the height, the vegetation, and the metal and moisture content et all of the routes and load them into a neural network to find a navigation matrix. Then we start walking through the top five. It takes us two months, of endless bread omelet breakfasts and reading maps over projector movies at night, but we finally get to it. There is a beep and a hue, and we ring an alarm and breathe in relief, but we do finally get to it. 300 crore worth of treasures in today’s money, hidden inside a neural network. We want to get published in the local publication, but maybe that’s for later. We don’t seek glory, we just want this money not to end as rent in an upper east side Manhattan flat paid for their sons and daughters by corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, and that is going to take some doing and scheming and writing, you know what I mean. I recall something that Saba said unless you make changes to this world, there are no changes. I think that was pretty good. I wish I could do that for love lost like forgotten time zones, and stuff, but now is not the time to do that. Now is the time to go. Like, go. Yellowknife. XXO.

Identities, Cultural Hegemony, and Subtle Affirmations over Summer and Slosh.

The sun is scorch earth like chris gayle on an antepodean summer’s night at the melbourne cricket ground, and I have been loosening up from the year that has been. Every irk passed on by human evolution and migration and genetic mutations and the resulting cultural differences, is also a 3 layered gift. Anonymity begets obvious crises of identity, but sometimes it also sets us free.

So without further del-del I begin with a white spark. And forgive me if I ever sound too proud or pompous, or self-aggrandizing, I don’t mean to be. What I mean to discuss in this post is elicit some historical facts and engender some interpretations, which seem much needed now, and because no one else will do it. Because we’re at a tipping point. Then and here and Now.

The state of odisha spans 155,000 square kilometers. I didn’t google or bing it. I know it cause lately I cannot shake it out of my head, that how can a state as big as Kerala can be so completely out of the national consciousness and attention and psyche.

I would like to start with the occupation of sri lanka by the Odia king Vijaya. We’re all aware of places where cultures collide and amalgamate. Samarkand, Jamestown, Asuncion, Istanbul. It also happened in Sri Lanka, when people from ancient Kalinga migrated and populized the emerald isle. As a result Sri Lankans today actually share at least 30 to 40 percent of their DNA markers with people from Odisha. Sinhala, in case you might not know, is an indo aryan language, despite of its close proximity to Southern India. And that is why they had an attritional relationship with the Tamils, culminating in Civil War and pandemonium. Even the Sinhala names today seem to be related to old Odia/a mix of Parkrit and Sanskrit. You see reminiscents of this relationship in Odisha, not least the Goddess Lankeshwari.

Pivoting over the clock hand to East, Odia maritime relations with Southeast Asia have had monumental impacts on the region’s cultural heritage, food, language, and traditions. Maritime trade between and southeast asia prospered during the almost 2000 years after the Kalinga war where Ashoka won, and the odia people had proven to be a resilient community, not just as a society, but as traders and sailors and bureaucrats. Ravaged by war, they wanted to migrate to far away shores to breathe and prosper, and they did more than just that. The major Odisha-exclusive festivals, like Kartik purnima, Khudurkuni Osha, Bali Yatra and what not, are in fact remnants of an once glorious, and unique Indian dichotomy. Identical festivals in Bali, Laos, Cambodia are observed at the same time.

The prince of Kalinga, which of course is the older name of Odisha, is said to have sent 20,000 odia families who went and settled in Bali. A lot of them being brahmans, the odia immigrants in bali were called Brahmana Buddha Kalinga. The Indian immigrants in Indonesia are still called Kalings. Those in Malaysia, Singapore, and elsewhere are called Klings. And the Balinese food is almost identical to Odia food, using exotic and commonplace green vegetables in Odisha. Words like Bou and Ajna(inge) speak of a clear cultural heredity.Not to speak of Balinese manuscripts written on palm leaves, like the Odia Pothis. This all information overload is not just startling, but also tragic in itself, because it is unknown and not spoken of, put into a straitjacket and tied to a rock, before being thrown into a deep bay.

Moving closer to the Indian border, to Burma, Odia literary and cultural heritage have had considerable impact out there too. Odia immigration is quite clear from the changes of names of places in Burma, such as Srikset, coming from Srikshetra, which is the dham at the Puri temple by the way. The old name of Pegu is Ussa, and there are records of it being colonized by people from Odisha. The influence on Burmese art by Odia art has been clear and conspicuous. The Odia traders even forayed into China, with the Chinese emporor Tse-Tsang receiving an autographed manuscript of the Buddhist epic Gondavyuha from the Bhoumkara king of Odisha. Huen-Tsang in gis travels mentions the major seaports of Tamralipti, paluna and pithunda, which were instrumental in the dynamic trading environment that existed.

The Sevivaya Jataka mentions a city in Andhra Pradesh on the river Telavaha which is actually Tel in modern Kalahandi in Odisha.

Moving to that tropical paradise we know as Thailand(where you get direct flights from the geographical centre of Bhubaneswar), the Srivatsa motif of Chansen in Central Thailand are in fact extremely similar to the inscriptions in Hati Gumpha(elephant caves) of Odisha. Archeological excavations have further corroborated these relations. The Odia traders also named one island as Singha pura, the land of the lion, now known as singapore. You(I) can go on and on about the architectures of the angkor wat in cambodia, and the old odia sounding names of sri lankans and the cambodians and the balinese. But for now, I think this is a good start, lest you get bored and throw that delicate device you’re reading from out on to the tarmac. Perhaps you did already. As for me, the anonymity feels amazing. Of being neither from one place nor another, yet having a sturdy grip on remembrance and reality.

Sources:

[1] :https://strangersguide.com/articles/indian-influence-in-cambodia

[2]: https://magazines.odisha.gov.in › …PDF
ORISSA AND SOUTH-EAST ASIA : RECENT PERSPECTIVE

[3] :http://www.kiips.in › research › odis…
Odisha-Indonesia Relations: A Cultural Symbiosis

[4]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44144170

[5]:https://www.sundaytimes.lk/190616/plus/so-close-yet-so-far-the-broken-link-between-odisha-and-sri-lanka-353339.html

 

Amateur deceit, the old land and no spin.

So the sun’s up outside my window like the liberation army flag in the morning. I have been getting restless lately.  Had been taking it easy for a few days, now the horses are out, the Dahlias in full bloom. I want to talk about the past, which is really all that we have along with the future, which I am not going to bet on much, especially after that thing, yeah. Present? That is just fleeting, isn’t it? This moment is gone already, as your pupils traverse this line from the last.

I find myself shuffling on that road on Bhubaneswar. What a city that was. The melting horizon as the sun set, the warmth coming off the ground, the sound of the engines, the prospect of spectacular food, and  spectacular adventure. That’s all in the past, of course. I don’t know when I will make it out there again.

I was having a hard time keeping the shiny green cover out of my mind. Shane Warne’s career in pictures was a rare collectible, and the prices on shady shoppers online were stratospheric. I got my hands on it in a book fair in Bhubaneswar around 2006, and didn’t put it down till someone took it, not to return. Leg spin is, of course, one of the finer things in Cricket, which itself is one of the finer things in life, which makes leg spin the double-barrelled rush fountain of the daily drab that is gallon milk cartons, law firm hoardings, reading off obnoxious screens, white shirts, and waiting 15 seconds on ends to cross the tarmac. Warne was someone I could, and I would skip lunch to watch him bowl. And his illustrated career was something I treasured, like a blanket deep in November.

One of my friends in college, who had it, lived at the far end of the city, not far from our college in fact. I had hated that city almost all my life, and I had hated that road, where I knew no one, and the college bus trips to the college every single day of my life. It was this one major road that went on from the center of the city for about 7 miles to one end, and it was packed as often as the public health awareness speakers blared. Though at this point, I didn’t feel anything but nostalgia, I was aware as a fox not to look for things I shouldn’t. I’ll probably get to it at some other point, or I might have already. And although I hated it back then, a lot of it because I was living there alone, (and men are by themselves in society), I absolutely loved the winters. It was a tropical, humid, paradise in itself, with flavours and spices in food to make your head scratch out of delight. And the Winters there were probably the best Winters of my life outside home. In the morning the streets would be relatively empty, and you would feel the wind on your cheeks as you rode, with Bougainvillea, the Petunias, the Phloxes, and the Cineraria on the side. As the sun would slowly keep rising through the morning, those flowers on the sidewalk would make me feel there were still blueberries in cupcakes. When I finally did the last two roundabouts and was drenched in nostalgia like a fresh tres leches, despite my best efforts, and I couldn’t help but think over things and the associated memories with that road in nine ways every minute.

My friend was just readying up for a trip himself, town called Cuttack, a twin town of Bhubaneswar of course, for a family function. He handed me the book, and I decided to go the function after he invited me. Who wouldn’t? after they have spent years away from their own family. And old friends. And that darned mutton on weekends, with the perfectly cooked rice and all sorts of carefully constructed assortments. Jesus Christ of the curry powder Gods, I could sniff it out up from soap. We passed these coastal low lying houses and the intermittent swampland, with water tunnels, the talking clouds and the inherent, lingering sense of sadness. It really does something to you, doesn’t it, the view of the horizon, the green of the land, and the flowing water in the rivers and the tunnels. The deep distant roads of Odisha have had all the answers. Ashoka lost here two thousand years ago and he ended up a changed man, and spread Buddhism all over. The people of Odisha barely change. They didn’t change then. They didn’t change much  after the British took over after the 2nd Anglo Maratha war either. They didn’t have to, with a bunch of princely states under which the kings continued to rule reporting and paying taxes to the British, although not without British supervision of course. And they haven’t changed much now. Rarely do we entertain the thought of letting go or bending even the most rivial of our cultural/ritualistic/religious practices. I don’t agree or disagree with any of those things, I don’t really have to. And it’s like no matter where I go, I am always there somewhere, or thereabout at worst, looking up at that sky in awe.

We reached at his old house time. All people dressed up in gorgeous, garish native prints. I even stopped thinking about the food for a while, I wanted to spend all the time in the world looking at the traditional garbs worn. The sarees and the kurtas, printed with chequers, stripes, dots, flowers, ashoka’s chakra and all the craft in the world. The Kataki and the Sambalpuri. The Ikat and the Bandha.Everything seemed perfect, in sense, with folk songs in the background and sips of cola. Until it didn’t. I was just about to shake the hand of one his uncles who worked an intersting investment job in one of the Government departments, when his daughter with big eyes and gremlin sticky hair came running towards us. They couldn’t find an expensive piece of jewellery, apparently, a necklace, thought to be stolen. A soon as the news broke everybody started making exasperating noises, some prepared to leave. The older women of the household started almost as if they were guilty of the theft. Me and my friend went in to take a look. It had gone missing from the safe locker inside the safe locker. Someone had seen it barely 4 days ago. By the time we finished our meals one police had come and gone. I decided to stick around Cuttack for a couple of more days at my ancestral place. I met my friend the day after in the morning. There was no evidence of wrongdoing, or malintent, the way the piece went missing. Probably it was someone from the family, who else could it be. The police could not be bothered enough.

They questioned all the people in the extented family, on and off, and that didn’t even rock the boat. I got my hands on a folded paper on the guest list, and marked out some who had left in the past week. I sat down with my pal to mark out any things of interest, and narrowed down the list initially to 3 people. One of the maternal uncles, he had lost a bunch of money in gambling, but he had a stable job, so I let that possibility go for now. Another one of the cousins was going through a divorce, so I didn’t figure he would have much use for the necklace, if he indeed was in a state of mind to take it anyways. There was one remaining family friend, a husband of a very friend of the mother, who had left a week back, a day after the celebrations began, leaving his wife back. Somebody had seen the necklace four days ago, and there was no way he could be involved. And that’s what interested me. Celebrations typically involve days families going out of the house for rituals, leaving a lot of yawning space. Someone did see it four days ago, like I have said like seven times till now, but people see things that are not there all the time anyway. Great deals, ghosts, transcdental love, et cetera. We scanned through the photos a bit of the rituals at the temple, and it seemed like he made a entry after a couple of hours it started. After a bit of an innocuous exchange with his wife and son, we realized he had his email logged into his wife’s phone. So we could see everywhere he went in the past week, believe it or not, and we could see one restaurant in particular. A bit of a tipping off to a couple of waiters here and there, and they said he had been spending a lot of time with the restaurant owner, discussing who knows what. India, is of course, a half lawless land, sometimes for good reason, and all my friend had to do was scruff up the owner with some friends of his, who confessed to taking house keys out of his dad’s pocket and putting them pack quietly when he came a few days back with the family friend. That was basically the end of it, not long after which the thief confessed to having putting a knock off before he left town. As for the disappearance of the knock off, he blackmailed a cook with his criminal reacord who was in for the event. Pity he couldn’t trust anyone with stealing it in the first place. Pity I am still writing this and not knocking on doors I  guess I should be knocking on. But then when has pity changed anything, other than sound bytes.

 

 

 

 

 


Assam, Ides of March, and the man in the mirror.

The only thing better than a book is the idea of it. Ideas are always so much better, of course. They are immune to inconveniences, slander, friction, wordlessness. Then one fine day, one fine warm day, when you get tired of ambling across that sidewalk in that city you half know, peeking across motor cars to look for that bookstore that you thought existed in this part of town, where your mother bought stacks of paperbacks and brought them home, you suddenly find yourself standing in front of it. And now this is where it all began. Where it all begins. I can see your drink shaking and your face dragging against the carpet floor already, so let me say this, a book, an imprint i.e. and the idea of itself don’t have to be two separate things. They can co-exist, kind of Heisenberg-esque. I knew it existed when I walked into that old(but extremely charming) bookstore that day, and picked up Edward Said’s Culture & Imperialism, that book where Said links colonialism and culture and back connects them to the colonial era writers and their work. And when somebody took it from me and didn’t return, it felt like flesh being torn out. So I had to go get it back.
As we were entering Bangalore, I woke up in the backseat of the car my friend was driving. I had a heavy head and a strained neck from the near perfect roads. I could remember little from my recent past, the anxious hours, the workload, the fights, the ennui. I was looking at a miniature Taj Mahal on the dashboard when it struck me, with a double down. See, it’s not the object or even the idea behind it, it’s what you make of it, and it is what it does. In ’47 we had an idea of a nation. We had these great ideals, of social, political and economic equality, of egalitarianism, of an almost utopian parliamentary democracy. Now, we succeeded at most of those high sounding things. But our failures, so big and conspicuous and uncared for, they make those successes seem like mud roads after a drizzle, melting away into a soak pit, probably worse.
Latest, in the series of cataclysmic apple picking camps by the government, or rather governments in the recent past, has been the Citizenship Amendment Bill. If accidents ever define nations, this is one nation defining whipped cream laden catastrophe. I can punch in a thousand words here and they still won’t justify or un-justify what the administration has perpetrated. That’s because I would be answering the wrong questions. The question of whether to grant citizenship to people from one sect or the other might seem very important, and it is, but the more important question is what are we doing for the and to the people who are actually affected by it? What are we doing to the bordering states like Assam those are affected by it. Civilizations rise and fall across time. But to deliberately sabotage one for extra ballots and bakelite goodwill seems out of the box outrageous. Like in Said’s book, it’s probably more spastic than a steel frame now that we’re haunted no longer by the ghosts of the British or the tyrannical white man, but by the living idea of them. The Indian identity is no longer what Neheru conceived to be, one of every man and woman being equal, but of finding glory in the inequality, and in partisanship. Speaking of Assam, it’s this glorious state, with the landscape, the rivers, the culture, the dance, and the level-headed, some of the most talented people I have met, I could not speak enough of it putting hand to keyboard in a precariously heated room. It’s a state and a people struggling for identity on their own porch. High influx of immigrants, no matter Hindus or Muslims, have rendered the Assamese at risk of being a minority in a land that’s wholly their’s, a land for which they have died multiple times, and got back up multiple times. While the rest of India has been binging on primetime tv, talking about vapid stand-up comedy acts and brandishing their own culture which to be frank makes me want to scream, the North East has been slipping and falling and holding itself together in great maturity and an ever-lasting sense of definite melancholy.
In the collective sense of Indian identity, where does the North East come up? Where does Assam come up? The residents are called all sorts of names, their history is categorically ignored, sometimes laughed at, and cast aside in whims of toxic indifference. The bigger states keep benefiting, with high FDI influx on the back of better infra which in turn was a result of being chosen by the British for their higher relative geo political significance. Rarely do tv series or movies come up, obviously, that show the provinces, that show Assam, in their true glorious colours. They say a nation is judged by how it treats its transient fragile, its outnumbered, its injured. And judging by that standard, we are a nation of cowards who can’t think of anything other than ourselves. As for the book,  and the further goings on, those are for another day’s tale. The clocks have run out of road, and I am off. So long till tomorrow, till it all makes sense.



Nostalgia, Cabs under the sun, and Trivandrum.

The psychedelia simmers in the lower tropics when the sun is out, which I love and would die for otherwise, but which somehow restrains my hedonism from going haywire on papyrus extracts, distracting me out of much needed windows. Out of the seven hundred things crossing my mind right now, there is only one of the other kind, and that is red bow restrain. I, and I hate that word more than anything in the world, I become one of those traders in the Brussels underbelly, you know what I mean? So I am awake, maybe too awake for my own liking, I don’t know, you’ll have plenty of time and snacks to judge.

Out of this night now slowly spreading out its velvet tentacles, out of the huge beams of light lighting the night sky across parabolic suspensions in the distance, out of me stuck inside this soft couch, with muscle pain and longings I am not allowed by myself to speak of, I understand there are things that deserve more attention. Irrespective of who opines what. Now, stepping up into that reality in a sentence span, I want it to be about journeys, like I always have. And I want it to about a book, synonymous with journeys. I had to get one back in heady Trivandrum, and for once, I was as interested in the backdrop as I was in the book. We were driving inside Trivandrum in a white suv of some make and model that’s not important enough. To my curiosity most of the vehicles were white, as were the clothes on people, unless they were black, of course. I remember thinking at that point how the colours people wear often symbolises their cities. Kolkata is all dull, plain colours, in stride with the strict history of austerity of the city. Bombay is all way too colorful, you can’t put a finger on it, just like the city, vibrant, and full of joie se vivre. Hyderabad is all garish, extreme colours in some quarters, and extremely plain clothing in others, reflecting a sense of devotion and anarchy, side by side.Delhi is all khakis and kurtas and things around them, tedious colours of bureaucracy. It’s unique in the sense that Delhi has come to define those colors as of deceit and nastily gnarled propagandas, unlike the other cities where things are the other way around, obviously. And the other thing I could not help but notice was that how green the city was. It was as if we were driving in the lower trenches of an ancient Asian monastery, with a damp and verdant settlement shimmering above us somewhere. There were not a lot of young people to be seen, apparently working somewhere else for foreign currency for a state with a long history of overwhelming communistic fervour. It was like the communist party was here forever. It was either them or the church or mosque goers and the guys into garudan thookkam. There were fewer moderates, and all the people at the extremeties of the spectrum had no reason to believe that fancy clothes were important. Not that I agree or disagree with any of it. The work was called The Great Speeches of Modern India, an old timer book, you might imagine. But it was actually written recently, and presented an intimate and hitherto largely unexplored window to the Indian psyche, society, and leadership over the years. It was a book I had enjoyed reading very much, especially after getting back home from the rain or while being stuck in hotel rooms in unknown towns in India. By now the medications are going overtime, and I am half perched on a dusty rug on a wooden floor in a lonesome perch, I have no clue where. I remember the day I landed at Bhubaneswar from outside the country. It was like falling back into a soft, crisp bed after years of unyielding hardship. But soon I had found the bitter memories making eye contact in the dusk with the good ones. There was the friendly heat and sweat and the undescribable twinkling lights in the distance, but I would also see us arguing and fighting underneath those, spiteful. The truth is I would take a good argument or fight any day, but maybe it was the lack of it, the lack of a botheration of a divide, that bothered me anyways. People become so unquestionably important to us sometimes, and when they leave you can’t get your head around it. It’s the inconsistency of the reality, of the algorithm, that plays with your mind, rather than it’s inefficacy. At this point I was not the least bit affected by this, but I decided to fly down to Trivandrum anyways, not just for the book, but for a change of scene.

As we were turning inside to the SEZ I could see the old Rajasthani dhaba, and man I could taste the heat in the curry still, and it made my head scratch a fair bit. I could see the sidewalks, which I never thought would finish. They went on forever. And I could definitely notice the belting sun. Even in Winter, it was so much different than anywhere else, it was like a hot, green, glittering, blinding paradise. Shireen ma’am was instructing a bunch of new joiners when I got there. She was so smart she would sometimes pick out answers or say no even before someone said something, the company knew they had a definitive talent, and they had given affirmation to the music. But she was also very subtle, and humble. You could think of it as a very Malayali quality, but although I never quite knew her that well, I sort of felt a lot of her personal qualities came from the reading and a general sense of balance that comes from being around good people. She was courteous and warm as usual when I greeted her, we talked and had coffee during her short break, and she informed me that the book was lost. She had put it in a cab in the city and left, it was gone, her whole bag. I fiddled with the idea of giving it up for a few minutes, before I decided on the inevitable. I had to go for it. I think that’s how it is in life. If you really like a woman or a book, you go after them.

There are 5,000 taxis in Trivandrum. And although I would say they make for pleasant viewing, they were not helping my cause. Why the obsessive neurosis about the book when I could get another one at the store? Let’s say it had sentimental value. Substantial sentimental value, of someone’s handwritten message on the front page. Like a gift. Like the air coming in from the Hudson on in the summer nights on to Baldwin Avenue. How the fuck do you find a cabbie in a pool of 5,000 cabs hustling around a city of more thana million? Have you ever heard of the flow theory? She had taken a cab from Ulloor to Kazhakuttam on the 22nd of October. What if I followed another cab on the same path at a similar time of the day? What if followed 3? 5? The average has to go somewhere? It had to be somewhere. Shireen ma’am reached for her shift at 2. That means the cabbie would have picked someone up from the SEZ who had finished her/his shift, which had just the one company by the way. They would have posted on the company mail had they found the bag on the back seat. So they wanted to keep it, whoever found it. I had to fish them out. Now, if they really read the book, and it was a reader’s read, it meant they were readers. And readers would never,ever not return some else’s stuff. However superfluous it might sound, I had a feeling they had to put it up for sale. And since the bag and also the cards were missing, they likely sold it hand to hand at a used bookstore. All I had to do is get a map showing all used bookstores in the city and hit the big ones in different areas. So I played along and found the book in the third store I visited. As for the person, I had to stand in the morning at the nearest company bus stop and just look at the people who were mounting, and I matched the guy with the store owner’s description, he said he had forgotten to give the bag back when I pulled him up. I wouldn’t have fucked around with him if he was a reader, I couldn’t have. Now I had to turn back to the city. Not the city of the melting beliefs, of the evenings under the purple horizons, or the perfect turnabouts or the cacophonous quiet. It was a place I had come to let go of the things I could not let go of, because of the contentment they presented along with the obvious, obvious misery. I could see it straight now, I knew it was going to be alright.

What is it with emotions? Why are we so afraid of them? Why is it that we run away from them, like the dusty sunlight that comes in through bedside windows on winter mornings. It’s an affirmation to our rivers within, and like all rivers, they take and give it back, caress and smite, devastate and bless. And you don’t have to live near a river, you can go to it and dip your toe and come back. The thing is you’re no longer two separate things once you do it, the river becomes a part of you, and you become a part of the existence of the river. You two now know each other, and therefore can’t un-know each other. When I do dare to think about the early morning dew near my parental home, the cacophony on the streets as the town warmed up, the corridors at school I walked to get a glimpse of what she was doing, her braided hair with the hairclip tucked in, the layered, colored stones of the fence I used to jump to play in the evening, I do it as an outsider, like somebody looking at me as I am taking sixty-second breaths to dive into pearl infested waters. I do occasionally find that person come up with things, good and bad, sometimes underwhelmed, sometimes overwhelmed, crawling out to the shore on his knees. However, like all meditation, the diving tells me, the other person, that it’s not about the things that get pulled out of that river, but the things that don’t, that make us whole. Just like God doesn’t lie in the temple, or in the mountains or in the surgeon’s scalpel, but in the poor man’s food, in the oxygen when the air gets thin, in the recovery of our bodies after surgeries have been done. So I don’t dive in much anymore, in fact I don’t even know if I do, I just make sure the things that hold the river together are alright. We do our thing, like old friends, on different drums.

Probing code and life choices. Capitalism and idyll and buzzing ad lib. Let there be rain.

 

The carpet was Aegean Sea. Golden medallion motifs on Tyrian Purple, hand weaved with intricate velvet. Shipped in from Otago, where the landlord’s son taught at the university in the gloriously bucolic Dunedin. The walls were paradise palm, leaves of magnolia dashed over ivory white, a throwback to an era when the night sky was there, still. After a millennia of inebriating Monday morning incense at temples, eating delicious pea curry by the street out of Organic leaf-bowls, reading newspapers in the winter sun as a recreation and waiting on forever for the BSNL modem to connect, we had a girl from the town in the valley. Probably not the first one, but she might as well be. And as much I would like to loiter in the headlong indulgence of a certain John Steinbeck, this is where the story sheds it sedate cadence and goes out of its way to go boom, like a meteor hurt, and takes over west end like the red part of Manchester on game night. She was sitting on a history of disquieting pain and an endless penchant for good programming. Sweats cold and the muted cries for help at dawn were the muses of the towns gone by, at least for now, and the road to be traded was out there under a workbench, lounging under the Pacific sun, crisp. The cab driver was an elderly white man. He did not speak any English. Each thought thought over infinitely, guarded, looked, protected, cursed.

The heels and the hues of her now distinct invincibility glided her through the sidewalk, meticulously cut hedges, the wide elevator, symmetric furniture sets, nauseating air fresheners and disingenuously drab urban utilitarian architecture into the project ODC, an all consuming concoction of human trepidation and Jungian struggles thrown into a mish and mash of highly efficient, even impressive, computer systems and apparent intellectual pursuits. An issue came waltzing in, as her anxiety had warned before hand, and before she even knew it, and by good habit, she put everything she was thinking of on the dark side of the moon and delved into the problem. It’s all the same isn’t it? Whether you bat or act or quiz or debug. You can practice all you can but when the moment comes, you just let it go and watch your brain do its thing. More or less. The program was behaving as if it was on imported produce straight from the great state of Jalisco. A not insignificant portion of the requests were throwing 500 internal server error. Logs were seen diligently and it was found out that codebases were switched while the code was imported.

Log statements were put in like IV fluids and the problem went. But, and this is where the boat sails, when a part of the instrumentation was removed, the program started behaving erratically. The error came and went, like a bunch of phase separated sine waves superimposed and clamped out and stuff. Too complicated? Think about the woman. She kept looking at it, looking at it, looking at it, the log files dancing before her, yet not revealing their colors. What would she not do to see the back side of them, and may be she would be sufficiently amazed and relieved, life affirmed, new. The sunlight was coming in through the window onto her desk now. She longed a walk. Down the elevator, cream cupcake and coffee. A look into the concrete horizon, conscientious disenchantment, more power. What was she doing here anyways, and what is all this concrete and electrical wires and the jargon trucks and complicated, convoluted writing. What happened to plain old love, and doing things as you pleased. What happened to telly with mom, to Maggi and comfy track pants and a stable future working for the government. Why this obsession rash called nepotistic altruism , this thoughtless abomination thrown in by the imperial powers of the past to make us play fetch in circles wanting super sweet gelato all the while. She had an inflamed throat for more than a week now .She hated gelato now, didn’t even have a chance to have it before the throat got bad. She put the coffee mug on the promenade and ran back. How is it that she had an infection while a lot of people who consumed a ton of that stuff did not have it? Sampras watching his feet move around flushing meadows, act of genius? Genius in rebellion.

The normal code path and the patch code had the Opcode cacher in common. After a bunch of tests, they found that identical source files were resulting in distinct sets of compiled operation codes, causing the strange behavior. A further look into the cacher, and the problem exposed itself, almost smiling with a sense of accomplishment, as she would later describe it. Multi-tenancy was the blight, with space conservation being done by the system by caching a set of operation codes, compiled, for all the set of users. That was the end of it, absolute path made its way into the whole thing, and the identical files now hashed to separate cache locations. The lead was impressed. She was done for the day. Oil in hair. Call to mom. Evening reading. Soy latte. Rapture.

Dublin, Post-modernist fixations, and coding.All while looking for a Cricket store that does not sell mobile plans.

 

The finest way to desecrate a study of jest is to overdo it. So I will put the copper pan on the slow cooker and unfold my palms on it to conjure something that is not bland, for once. When James Joyce’s Ulysses was published it was still about twenty years till the first computer came out. A throwback to an era of mass disenchantment and factionalism in colonial Ireland smarting under a state of revolution, Ulysses acts like a stylized mirror to the Freudian alleys of Joyce’s melting pot of delicious dichotomies. When you start to code as a teenager, the first thing you notice is the chaos, the blaze of the undefinable, and the seemingly trivial, which resonates Ulysses in a way it resonates Ulysses. While a work of unbridled, all encompassing genius, it’s virtually unfathomable and practically unquotable, and has more things working for it than working against it in the sea of literary referentialism. A set of perfectly good code can look incomprehensible when you finish write it, but if you have done it right, and you know that it works, then it does not matter if it does not sense to the uninitiated. The truth of the pudding is in the eating, as Dr. Sen would say.

At this juncture I would like to take the liberty of delving into everyone’s favored breakfast muse at present, the libertine mazes of Indian polity. A microcosm of sapiens and ideas myriad and incongruous, much like Joyce’s Dublin, it seems to spiral away every time Ulysses spirals in on social morality and keeping societal differences and sensibilities together. If you set a loop to decrement the count on the step-by-step veering of the Indian political system away from the civilized as the counter for Joyce’s Ulysses weaves in steps of a unit, you would get exactly zero. Speaking of mathematical analyses. A system with a million variables at play, you cannot come to think it would ultimately fail because of the bias of the programmer just for some particular functions whose ideas seem likable on the first look. A code is logic and math, and each has more to do with human consciousness than most people like to believe.You cannot run away from either when you are trying to write an effective code, and they must come together well, a lot like Joyce’s references and stylized writing in Ulysses. It must make sense here and now, and past versions and interpretations posit little value. Unlike the political system in India, stuck in a tangle of propaganda of slumber from an era gone by.

The characters and the settings in Ulysses struggle to co-exist as the novel begins, but by the time it concludes, they seem almost eerily at peace with each other. A set of code can be ill assorted and out of place in the beginning, but if you match your algorithm for your logic, and care to check for all the dark corners and loose drawers, take nothing for granted, and code with a cool mind but a warm spirit(a la Giovanni Trapattoni, Sean St Ledger, Henry and the Le Hand of God), with dexterity and joy, you can get surprisingly good balance,functionality and efficiency out of it, just like Joyce did. It can contain a thousand library calls again like the thousand references in Joyce’s work of post-modernist exemplar, but it can still be spectacular in its own way of working towards an outcome of utility and gusto. The Indian political system on the other hand, dare I say it, rewards circuitous pursuits of malice and elaborate swindling as a virtue. It is the coding embodiment of what programmers would call rancid programming- slow, not caring for feedback, incredibly biased, blaming others, reinventing the wheel all the time, and caring the least for non-functional requirements. It glorifies corruption and blatantly laughs at sects or worse, takes advantage of them, literally poles apart from Ulysses,which is so self conscious that it actually sticks these things as satire on the shamrock Irish wall. So since this the first blog entry and it’s the holidays, without going further afield I would say, as I look for lacquer for the duke cricket ball along the wine colored sea-waters of the Mid-Atlantic, let the new year and new codes be more Ulysses and less South block. Bon Appetit.

cover image source : http://www.slate.com