A short story!

“Heard that you are going home” winked Prakash, “yeah, yeah” I smiled. Prakash is my roommate and I have been bugging him about my plan to go home for Deepavali since I booked my tickets two months ago. “Have a good holiday” he said climbing into Rickshaw. “I will” I said, waving him a good bye.

I couldn’t sleep the whole night; I was high on the dangerous cocktail of excitement and anticipation. That was long night, lesson learnt that day was counting seconds wouldn’t make them tumble faster!

My parents constructed a brand new house and the ‘Gruha Prevesam’ is on the next day of Deepavali. I couldn’t wait to see our new house and also I haven’t spent Deepavali in so many years with my family.

As soon as we entered Andhra Pradesh it was raining like hell. Everything was flooded, and the train was going dead slow. At last we reached Vijayawada, The 24 hours of journey to Vijayawada was like 24 eons (apologies to all the poets). As soon as we entered the station, there was an announcement that the train wouldn’t go further as the tracks are flooded. “Shit” I screamed aloud, took my bag and ran to the STD booth. There was almost a roit there, guys fighting over the turn to call their families, babies were screaming, women sitting on the bags and children sleeping in their laps. There was chaos all over, a mob almost broke the enquiry counter’s window glass, and police constables were using Latis without any consideration. I quickly got out of the melee.

I didn’t what to do, there was no place to sit, it was raining heavily and everything was wet, I got completely drenched too. Suddenly a sharp pain went thru my stomach, I haven’t eaten anything since last night. All I could find was two bananas for 20 bucks and bottle of ‘clean’ water for 15 bucks. I found a small dry place and was eating my bananas, then I heard couple of porters talking among themselves that there is passenger train leaving now and would go as far as its possible. Without even thinking for a moment, I ran towards the moving train and got into it.

The train was totally empty, not very surprising as there was no announcement made about this train on the public address system. The whole compartment was drenched. I walked up and down the train looking for a dry spot. I saw few people huddling in the dry corners. At last I found an unoccupied dry spot and collapsed there. I haven’t called my folks and informed them about my whereabouts, they must be getting really worried. I promised myself that at the next station I would call them.

I peered through the window, it was poring outside, and all the fields were at least in knee-deep water. The train became dead slow as it started crossing a bridge. I haven’t seen the water level so high. The water was almost touching the bridge! It was so dark outside but it was noon already, if it were a normal day sun would have been at the nadir and would be frying people’s scalps. He is now resting peacefully somewhere behind these black walls of water laden clouds. I don’t know when I slipped into the sleep mode.

When I woke the train was standing in a small station. No one was in the compartment. I looked at my watch its almost three in the afternoon. I jumped out of the train and ran as fast as I could into the stationmaster’s hut. There were 10-15 people talking among themselves in hushed tones. I asked them what happened. “The bridge on the river 10-15 kms ahead washed away derailing a goods train” said on them, who I guess works for the railways, judging by his uniform. “We missed the flash flood by ten minutes or so” added his colleague somberly. “Good heavens” I collapsed on to a damp wooden bench.

The engine driver walked in and everyone mobbed him for the latest news. He didn’t have any. The stationmaster who was talking on his phone loudly, cradled it hard and announced that another bridge we just crossed has been washed out. “We are stuck here” someone stated the obvious. I started looking around and started wondering about this home of mine for God only knows how long!

I should let my folks know about this situation. “Is there a phone around which I use?” I asked no one in particular. No one answered; everyone was busy in accessing his or her own situations. I looked around soliciting an answer. “There is a public phone in the market,” answered a girl sitting in the corner of the room who I haven’t noticed earlier. “It will be closed for sure,” piped in a boy sitting next to her, must be her little brother. “I will give it a shot,” I said thinking how to venture into the sheet of rain.

“Use this” the girl said giving me a big polythene bag tore on one side. “We are coming too,” the boy said getting into one of these improvised raincoats. We started wading thru the knee deep red water mixed with all sorts of garbage, we were totally wet instantly, and only my hair was dry.

“Where are you going?” I asked the girl. “Home” her brother replied. “In this village?” I enquired, “No” the girl said. We live in a village 15 km away she continued with her eyes fixed on the red muddy water. Her hair was tightly combed into a neat braid. “Hoping to cath a bus? I asked, she nodded “yes” pushing back an unruly strand of hair falling on her face. The flow in which we were walking became strong, I guess some canal somewhere breached its bank and it started flowing on the road. By now I have lost all my hopes, I was pretty sure that the public phone wouldn’t be working. We reached the market and the whole market was empty. “That’s the shop where the phone is” the kid pointed me towards the shop whose shutters were shut tight.

My sprits are down the drain now, My train cant move now, the village I am in is slowly getting flooded and the sky is literally falling down. "The rain god is not happy" I said aloud, both sister and brother give me a weird look. "My name is Anand, I introduced myself to no one in particular. The flow started to get stronger, both of them were holding each other strongly. Suddenly I missed my family, I suddenly felt need a tether too at this hour. Hope I had my dad to make decisions for me, my mum to be concerned about me and my sister to stand besides me. "I am Balu and this is Jyothi, the boy said looking at his sister as if looking for approval.

I smiled in acknowledgment and looked in Jyothi's eyes, they were deep and was something mysterious about them. Jyothi must be not more than 17 or 18 years old and balu barely 10.

It is almost dark now and officially I don't have destination. I don't have an idea why was wading through this twenty cm of water with these strangers in this flooded village. "Is your village bigger than this village?" I asked Balu, Jyothi doesn't seem to much interested in talking to me. She must be concerned about me tagging along. "No, in fact its smaller than this village and we don't have a long distance phone either", smart kid answered my next question too. "I will walk back to station then" I said looking at those eyes again, hoping for reaction. if there was any, it didn't show in those deep eyes. I smiled at Balu and turned around.

"There may be a bus to Ongole from my village" Jyothi said still looking at the murky water. "Good" I couldn't control my excitement, if i get to ongole it would not very difficult to get home. I can be home for Deepavali after all. "Thats our bus" Balu screamed. It was a big Van sitting like a wet duck in a almost a flooded square. there were about five people sitting in the van. We may about fifty feet from the bus, suddenly the driver cranked the engine, sudden shiver ran through my spine and I guess in my fellow travelers' too, we spontaneously ran towards the bus screaming at top our lungs, as i was running the plastic bag covering my head flew away. The driver saw us and waved at us to run faster. We get into the bus and the driver started driving through this big poll of water, now the tough job of differentiating between road and a river.

to be cont....

How important is user interface design?
Disclaimer I am a software engineer as a scuttle fish is a brain surgeon.
I got my ibook on Friday. After lot of bungling on my part, the dispatch lady at Fedex and not cooperating/unhelpful friends, it was a week late. I had my baby in my hands on 26th. I like it a lot. MacOS 10, which runs on ibook is a fine piece of work. It has everything what you expect from a good operating system.
Robustness of Unixes
Usefulness of a good interface (an oxymoron?)
MS Windoze vanishes in puff of shame in front of MacOS. Everything is well organized, and meticulously maintained.

Now this begs a question, how important is a user interface (UI)? Is it really useful to have a neatly polished and clean interface if your underlying code is cool? Let me paraphrase the question, do we need profs, who teach kids ONLY to write cool Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs)?

I will ask you all (probably its me who will read this, if I am lucky, my dog ‘lucky’ will read it in its dreams. Hello ‘lucky’!) a simple question. Have you used all the trappings you get with your VCR/DVD player? If yes you don’t suffer from the blinking “12:00” disorder, which we all normal folk suffer from.

I have read a good write-up on UIs, if you all haven’t read this wonderful essay “In the Beginning was the Command Line” by Neal Stephenson, please read it. It is available on the net for free as in ‘French fries’. He has more informed opinion on this subject rather than the stink I have.

If you still reading this, I really pity you. I will make it easy for you, all I am saying is if your underlying code is good and you take enough trouble to make it easy for the users to use it, it is good enough. You don’t need to get PhD in user interface to design an interface for you.

I once took part in this study where a couple of students are studying the usability of this user interface. The idea of the whole study is measure the time taken to navigate the menu. Is this correct measure of usability? I would say the correct measure how well u could use all the functionalities of the given program?

I guess, if I were a user interface designer I will have this big poster in my cubicle saying “No more blinking 12:00”

Where does marketing end and brainwashing begin?

Have any of you people stopped for a second and looked around, and noticed how much are we bombarded by this marketing radiation? If you switch on the TV you see this mum winning the vacuuming contest (btw why don’t they show guys vacuuming?) the smelly guy and his deodorant (why are the guys always smelly?). The drive to the mountains here in Calgary is littered by the roadside advertisements saying how beautiful these mountains are and how better I will enjoy them if I stay in a resort (thank you sir for breaking this to me). The moment you get online u get bombarded by this ‘beat the monkey pop-up’ and other uncountable annoying ones.
Are humans this gullible? Can we brainwashed so easily? Is this what they teach those marketing types in those B schools? To hit us continuously till we all wave our heads in unison and follow our marketing overlords to the checkout counters?
Gentle people, for a second imagine the world without advertisements, no one telling us what to wear, how to smell and what to eat. It would so peaceful and serene as if watching a little girl chasing a pigeon (I know they don’t match, too cheesy). When I was growing up in India, India was still I dark ages, soviet Russia was torchbearer for us and we followed them blindly to oblivion. There were no advertisements, heck we didn’t need them, ‘cause we didn’t have any choice. We didn’t need to chew gum to be cool, wear a certain brand of underwear to be friends of Ryan and Betty (or Ram and Rizwana) and eat the crapola of uncle Donald. Utopia! Not even in dreams now my friends. We are now floating in this ether of marketing radiation and there is no ESCAPE! Sooner are later our evolutionary mecanhism will kick and babies will be immune to this harmfull brainwashing.
I am pretty sure that the marketing overlords will soon figure out that we have grown immune to this bombardment and would figure out new ways to ‘zombify’ us.
Following are my predictions
1.Targeted advertising
Walwart will tag everything we buy and will know which brand of toilet paper you use in winter and will sell you that toilet paper, like what Google is doing right now.
2.Making watching advertisements compulsory
Locking the remote-controls so that we can’t browse around when the advertisements come on. May be they will even schakle your legs so that you cant walk of to the loo to take a leak, no sir no leak when we are brainwashing you.
3.Mindwaves
I also call these thought placement devises. Someone was commenting on Slashdot the other day about these and said something like in these lines “suppose if you are walking by McDonalds and suddenly you have this craving for a big juicy Mac and without any thoughts, even if you are a vegetarian, you would go on a burger rampage’.

That’s it folks, we are loosing the war of choice, we don’t really have the freedom, and I bet nobody is hating it (remember we don’t have it). In this consumerist society ironically consumer is no more the King, or even id he is the king he can be easily bamboozled. I fully buy into this theory of the King can still rule even if he is an uber-idiot after the recent US election.