If the mafia get into the software business...

I was into this Godfather thing once again last week. I watched the first two movies again! I like the third movie a lot but I hate to watch it because it spoils my mood for a full day and this is not the time for a bad mood(It's mood indigo time). I am not sure if the mafia still controls a lot of American drug and casino businesses like they used to, but I am sure their options are only decreasing. The mafia never made it into the huge Internet market.

I started to imagine what it is like being an online Godfather. The first thing would be to make really complicated, absolutely useless, UN-uninstallable software and distribute it for free. For legal reasons, we specify that the software is UN-uninstallable in the terms and conditions(no one reads them anyways). When unsuspecting users install it in their comp, it eats the resources of their computer and they have to pay me to get that software removed from their computers. Now, that's a million dollar idea!

In one round of distribution, I'll wreck havoc in the virtual world and soon, all the big corporations will start paying me insurance against such virtual attacks(which the media fancily dubs as an Ettack). Obviously people will steal my million dollar idea and start to abuse it (It's the Internet; people steal stuff all the time). Then I will be under the moral obligation to protect my clients who pay insurance against similar Ettacks from my duplicates. So, I will start a company which specializes in making anti-Ettack software and install it in all my client computers. Then I will network with all my competitors and enemies, make them offers they can't refuse and merge them into my ever expanding "family". That is how I will become the first ever Internet Godfather. All you Internet underlings shall hereby respect, fear and love me as Don g2 Corleone" ! :p



The theme was zindagi ek safar hai suhana. Clearly I suck and not just with the paint brush :D

How I plan to change the world

I always believed running was the most boring activity to do as an exercise. I have been running almost daily for 2 weeks now and trust me it is not the most boring thing. You wondering what’s more boring? Playing tennis without a partner is more boring. You hit the ball against the wall, it bounces back, then you hit it again and again until you hit it wrong and it flies over the wall. Then you breathe profanities under your breath, go fetch the ball, repeat the process. I tried it one day and I felt like a dog trying to train itself. Imagine a dog that has a ball and a pack of biscuits. Instead of eating the biscuits and sleeping under a shade, the dog kicks the ball somewhere, fetches it back and then eats one biscuit and repeats the process. Only Vodafone pups are that stupid! So I decided I am better off running.

One good thing about running is that you get to listen to music while you do that but the downside is that you can’t sing along. Here’s an interesting thing I observed while I was running the other evening. I was listening to this iron maiden number and I could totally get the lyrics! I’ve listened to the song a lot of times before but I couldn’t make sense of the lyrics but when I was gasping and panting for breath, I could make sense of every syllable. The whole song seemed to be in slow motion; at a much slower tempo than it was when I am not running.

This prompted me to do some research on the way the human mind perceives time. My kind of research is rather unconventional. I think of a really simple theory that answers all the questions. Then I search the internet to find any results or literature that contradicts my theory. If they do, then I adopt that theory, else I am in for yet another Nobel.

OK back to my theory, I think the rate at which we perceive time is indirectly proportional to our metabolism rate. That is why I found the song easier to decipher. The whole human body functions at a greater pace and as a result the reaction times are lesser. Just imagine the implications of this; if we can somehow make a drug (with no serious side effects) that increases our metabolism, we can have as much as 40 hours a day. The social implications of this theory could be huge. Just imagine a world where people cannot use the “I-don’t-have-the-time-for-it” excuse anymore!

However, there is a little loophole in the whole process i.e. all the series of experiments being done are based on the assumption that I do not have any super natural powers and we cannot rule that out. Unfortunately I cannot find any test subjects (read friends at IIT willing to collaborate with me in my research), so the world will have to wait a little while before I permanently alter the course of history (Or maybe I am just watching too much big bang theory!)



A rapid sketch of "The Godfather". Took just around 10 minutes. Looks much better on paper.

The Gods are winking

The Gods winked at Mumbai on Dec 1st, 2008 after a very very depressing week of loss and sorrow. The Jupiter, the Venus and the Moon formed a smiley in the sky. That's the way it looked in Mumbai. I don't know how it was for the rest of the world.



P.S: I clicked the pic ";)"

Seinfeld already said that

A couple of weeks back…

Its 9:30 in the morning, less than five hours to go to the exam and almost half the syllabus left uncovered, my phone starts playing the departed sound track softly at first gradually increasing the volume making it more and more irritating to the point that I start searching for the phone on my bed like a blind man searching for his pennies that just slipped out of his hand. Once I find it, my hand involuntarily goes to the snooze button and 2 hours later my ex-roommate wakes me up! Too late!

I sat and pondered about the snooze alarm. The snooze-alarm to me is the ultimate triumph for the marketing world. Just think of it, they advertise that their product doesn’t do what it is supposed to do and also concede that they cannot really do anything about it and that surprisingly, helps them sell more of those! I found the observation quite funny and jotted it down in my diary (the last few pages of my DBIS notebook) that night. I have had this habit of jotting down funny thoughts and random ideas as soon as I get them for quite some time now. The very next day I was watching this episode of Seinfeld I which Jerry Seinfeld while doing his 2 minute comedy routine at the beginning pretty much said the same things about the snooze alarm that I wrote down in my diary the previous night! I realized that I had already watched that episode a long time back and completely forgot about it. And when the snooze-alarm thing happened, the same things came into my head and I completely believed that they were my original lines. One more classic case of my brain trying to fool me and it successfully did! You know these brains of ours… it’s like we can’t trust them anymore.

This coincidence somehow affected me a great deal. Every time I thought of or said something there is an irritating high-pitched voice singing in my head in a teasing tone– “Seinfeld already said that, Seinfeld already said that”. So I made a mental note to blog about this and then I realized that even this Seinfeld-already-said-that singing is inspired from a Southpark episode which in turn was inspired from Simpsons and the recursion never ends! Even Seinfeld jots down his ideas as soon as they come to his mind! I read that in his autobiography. That was the boiling point, my brain was like- Holy Crap! Nothing in my world is original…
Apparently my brain works in a way that is different from others. Every time I hear something funny, I make a mental note of it and also process a list of possible realistic scenarios where I can use a line like that and have a database kind of a thingy in my thought process (ten seasons of F.R.I.E.N.D.S, nine seasons of Seinfeld plus hundreds of movies in three languages- that’s a massive database!). If I realize that I have a line that I haven’t used for quite some time now, I force the conversation in a direction where I can use that! (I don’t do this anymore). After a long seeking-for-answers analysis, I have made my peace with my brain. After all creativity is the art of hiding your sources ;)


P.S: "Reasonably" good advertising ;)