Counterproductive Technology

Not very long ago, I was at Kanjur Marg station in the queue to buy a local train ticket. I was not in a hurry but, I was feeling a little impatient standing in the same line with lot of people who are in a great hurry. And some 15 minutes later, it was my turn and as most people must have experienced, there is a 50 year old clerk (who is never in a hurry!), reacting as if he has seen the keyboard for the first time in his life and he has been reacting the same way since 1992!

It is the closest you can get to study how cavemen would have reacted had they found a yellow (formerly white) keyboard in a deserted cave. He types carefully searching for each alphabet on the keyboard and then presses the print command and then the loud dot matrix printer takes over. Sometime between the clerk pressing the print button and the printer printing my ticket, I decided to make a compilation of instances where installing/upgrading technology has made the process slower and inefficient. So here is the list.

1. Railway tickets: According to my rough estimate, manually giving out tickets in a local station clears the queue about two and a half times faster than the "computerized" ticket vending. In fact, many local stations open their manual ticket counter during rush hours. But I am sure that the computerized ticket vending helps in accounting and other back office processes.

2. The automatic semi-touch free dustbin I have seen in France: This is absolute oxymoron. First of all, how can anything be semi-touch? You either touch it or you don’t! Second of all who wants to semi-touch a dustbin? It has an automatic lid that opens automatically when you keep your hand over it. Good enough, but the moron part of it is that the lid does not close automatically! We have to stoop to press the “close” button on the dustbin once we are done. I wanted to see if there was some sort of a timeout mechanism after which the lid automatically closes, I waited for 2 minutes but it did not close.

3. Ultra slim TVs: What difference does it make whether the TV is one inch thick or one fourth of an inch thick when the TV hangs on a wall and we sit least five or six feet away from it?


4. Wireless keyboard and mouse for a desktop: The writing is pretty much on the wall that it is a waste. Not only do they run out of battery once in two weeks to piss the user off, there is a good chance that they will be misplaced or lost. I think the cluttering wires are easier to manage.

5. Texting with a touch phone: Texting just got crappier with the advent of iphones and other alleged “iPhone killers”


Things that need special mention
1. Widows Vista: old favorite
2. Any iPhone apps that give GPS directions: not a big thing in India yet
3. Google wave: email reinvented so that you cannot check it in a cyber café near you.
4. Laptop steering wheel desk: You can now tweet your way to hell.



This list is in no way comprehensive, please add stuff if you can think of something.

New Year Post

P.S: Happy New Year

IIT education goes to the dogs!

I have always feared that with the way the congress govt. is systematically screwing up with the IITs, the IIT education is going to the dogs. But I never thought the day would come this soon.


A file photo of a professor teaching a dog in IIT Delhi

Thanks to Kashyap for the image :)

P.S: found more on youtube :)

PCL: The Politically Correct Dinner

INRIA (Rennes, France) had quite a vibrant culture. To celebrate the ethnic and cultural diversity within the institute, they have this annual International Food Festival during the summer. The idea is simple; everyone brings a considerable amount of homemade food, whatever is unique to their culture and they have a grand buffet.

The buffet looked gorgeous and smelled great. French, Italian, Spanish, Mexican, Chinese, Thai and Indian cuisines neatly arranged with little foot notes about the dish itself and who made it. The unfortunate thing(for me) was that there were only two vegetarian dishes in the whole of the buffet! One was a vegetarian Galette and the other was Sambar and Papad!

I tried the Galette which is basically mashed potato and cheese rolled inside a (non-crispy) dosa kind of a thing. It was completely tasteless by Indian standards. So, I was eating it with ketchup when a colleague pointed out that it is considered rude to eat any homemade dish with ketchup. (It turned out that the French gentleman happened to be the one who brought the dish!) I apologized and settled with Sambar and Papad (so much for the “International” Food Fest!).

The next day, the same colleague got me a dabba of vegetarian food cooked by his wife especially for me because he felt sorry for me. I thanked him and his wife for the wonderful gesture and we sat for lunch. The vegetarian “dish” which his wife “cooked” happened to be boiled rice with freshly cut fruits in it. Yes you read it right, yucky sticky globular Vietnamese rice with strawberries, grapes, slices of apple, pineapple and banana thrown in it. (I couldn’t even get any yogurt or ketchup this time because of what happened the previous day!) I would rate it as the second most uncomfortable meal I ever had so far! I couldn't find the right image so I "cooked" it up in photoshop ;) Also please suggest a more universal name than the telugu-standard Bangala Bow-bow for this dish.

P.S: I had a roll with the desserts in the International Food Festival :)