On Wednesday morning, I got off the bus at a truck-stop. I was on my way to Sendhwa, and from there to Sakad, a tiny village in southern Madhya Pradesh.

At the truck-stop, after gulping down some very hot (and very sweet) chai and vada-pav, I waited for the next leg of the journey. Forty five minutes later, I clambered on to an over-crowded bus. I was partly convinced by the persuasive conductor who job it was to scream every imaginable destination. Thirty Rupees and at least as many stops later, I was at Sendhwa.
( sakad )

Rules for Game #27:
1. Think up an animal. A giraffe for example.
2. Pick a part of the body. The neck, perhaps.
3. Pointing out to the other person, exclaim "Your neck is there no, it's like a giraffe's neck!"
4. Laugh like it's the funniest thing you've heard all decade. Guffaw holding your tummy. Roll on the floor, thumping it with your fist.
5. It's now the other person's turn. He thinks up an animal, and a body part.
6. He then screams out "Your mouth is there no, it's like a hippopotamus's mouth!"
7. Tackle the other person down to the floor, laughing for a whole 3 minutes. If you run out of it, substitute fake laughter for the real deal.
8. Go to step 1. Repeat until Mum kicks the two of you out of the house for destroying her afternoon nap.

Ages: 2+

Skills learnt:
1. Names of animals.
2. Names of the parts of the body.
3. The fine art of insulting your opponent, and the much more controversial, "never back down from a fight" policy.

(Inset picture: At the Zoo. We'd decided to make faces at the camera. He cleverly backed out at the last moment to give his "I'm with stupid" grin.)

I quit.

I joined Yahoo! before I formally finished college. Two months into the job, I remember walking into Venkat's office (we were less than fifty of us then, so everything invariably involved talking to the CEO). "I need to take tomorrow off", I told him "I have to give my finals". He had grinned and wished me luck.

Yahoo! was an incredible place to work. The first six months seemed to be just nights. Nights crammed with mad coding and pizza and 'rap-crap' and sugary sodas and movies and java-city. It was difficult to comprehend why people would want to pay you for things that you wanted to do anyway. Nine months into my first job, much to my disbelief, they thought that they had to up the stakes: after a sweaty afternoon at the Year End Party, football in hand, I went to collect the 'best employee award' for that year - the Yahoo! Ratna.

Shortly after that, I moved teams to work under Anand Ramani (who, by the way folks, if ever you get a chance to work with, drop everything ... everything .. and jump on boat). The team was innocuously (and rather euphemistically) named the 'Yahoo Image Search offensive content reduction group'. It was only later that I realized what the work entailed: making presentations to the company with pornography splattered all over your slides.

Well, to be honest, you also had to have come up with a algorithms to automatically find these images from the database of images we had (so that they could be flagged as 'not safe'). In hindsight though, the algorithms weren't the hard part. The hard part was tactfully explaining the patent you'd filed to beaming (and later concerned) relatives.

Two years ago I moved to the States to continue working for Yahoo from San Francisco. Two weeks ago, I quit. Having very little to do, I sold the little furniture I had, packed my belongings, and decided to drive across the country.

I called up the Yeti to tell him that I was going to leave the country and ask him if he wanted to come with me. His exact words were "Ok. Oh ok!". Then I rung up JJ to ask her the same. Her exact words were "Oh ok! Ok."
( more )

image credit: Thomas Hawk (CC license)
The Bay bridge, one the prettiest bridges, is one of San Francisco's most recognised landmarks. It's lit up every evening.

Five years ago, did you think you'd be where you are today?

Last evening, after struggling through a year of self-imposed renunciation, I came home to a giant gift from Santa. As you walk past him, this is what catches your eye at first.

Image credit: chitra chaaya

Now I don't usually post YouTube videos, but really, this is what I imagine bc to be like.

[
Edit: video removed from YouTube :(
Either way, here it is http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/995561/
]

I like my Internet. It's a fun place to be - mine's somehow got this new-agey, citrusy feel to it. However, as one flits from link to link, flirting with blog-poets, sites detailing the lamentable tale of two girls who had just one cup between them, and other such pleasures, ever so often, one comes across the nefarious Password Nanny Sites - sites which insist on some rather entangled set of rules and conventions for their passwords. Rules that promise you unassailability with their version of the online chastity belt.

Needless to say, dissolute as you are, chastity belts annoy you.

First, because they dictate how precious your account is to you. No, I don't need an unbreakable-by-NASA password for my BlockBuster video-rental site. What are you going to do?* Break into my account and send me a scaaaaary movie? Wooo.
And second, because of the arbitrariness of the rules they foist on you. I looked the other way when they made it mandatory to include upper-case letters in my password. I pretended that it was normal when they then said it was imperative to have digits. I defended that it was only polite to provide my mother's age, the number of moles my dog had, and my views on whether Kashmir really belongs to India when they demanded it as answers to 'security questions'. But when they caught up with the new fad of forcing me to adopt special characters - the #s, the &s and the !!s - in my password, I decided that it was time for me to lift my arm parallel to the ground, face my palm vertically at them, and say 'STOP!'.

For now, I'm going to prove to you with my amazing mathematical skills, that you stupid method for 'improving security' is stupid.

Let's say your current password is a mere 8 characters long, each chosen from the set of lower-case letters, upper-case letters and digits. This means that there are 62^8 (26+26+10=62) possible combinations for potential passwords. For the non-computer-sciency of you, this means that, at worst, ScaryMovieSender will have to try 62^8 passwords until, eventually, he gets yours right. Since us manly computer-science people think that 218,340,105,584,896 is a smallish number, we introduce ways to create more possible combinations. Rumor has it that we shall continue on this quest, of decreasing the chances of someone breaking our password until the odds are about the same as that of the average software engineer's chances of fornicating before an arranged marriage.

Either way, one way to increase the number of possible combinations is to increase the number of characters you can compose your password from. Ok, let's do it then: even if you have me believe that anyone not suffering from self-inflicted epilepsy would choose '>' as one of the characters in their password, and we include all 30-something special characters to the base-set, the cardinality of the base-set increases to 92. This means that the total number of possible combinations is now at 92^8.

So, it's 92^8 vs. 62^8.

Staggering improvement, you might say. "Staggering my ass!", I would respond, and then quickly wish I hadn't said it. See, that's an increase of 92^8 / 62^8 times, which deceivingly is just a mere 24 times increase in the total number of combinations. I use the word 'mere', because in contrast, increasing the size of your password by one character increases the number of possibilities by 62 times.

That means that going from the password 'toofew' to 'toomany' is going to fetch you far more 'protection' than being forced to include special characters in your password.

So, pl3ase st0p m@k1ng m3 typ3 my p@55w0rd$ like this. Let those characters be where they truly belong - in speech bubbles of Asterix and PERL code. Instead, let me choose my passwords on my own terms: I hear 'RedshoeBlueshoePasswordu' is a good one. It's apparently got the added advantage that it's in Kannada.

For the curious among you, here's a list of my previous passwords.

* SubodhSir shamed me into retracting that statement on 8/19. He now knows the status of my car-loan, what I scored in third-grade History exams, and oh .. my social security number.
Moral of the story - never piss off a guy who knows more Windows than you know Math.

Ok, y'all forced me.

I thought throwing my icy, oh-no-you-didn't-look contemptuously at you would have scarred you into mending your ways. I was mistaken, dear reader. Apparently, I have to pen an entry called Elevator Etiquette for Everyone Ever, listing rules which cavemen had mastered shortly after they discovered the need to go upstairs. So here goes, people. Listen up. On how to go up.

Rule-1: Do not make small talk with me, Steve. Yeah. 'Steve'. No one else does it, Steve. Not Rahul. Not Carlos. Not Enrique. Not !xobile. Just all you Steves. In any case, even when I say "Yeah! Isn't it?" in reply to your "What a lovely day! It's like 80 degrees today", I'm lying, Steve.
First, because I have no idea how much 80 degrees is in Celsius. I'm not standing there with a vacuous look, mumbling "cee equals eff minus thirty-two into...", while you pretend to be Einstein.
And second, because I think a 'lovely' day is one when it's cloudy, and just a little chilly. With a hint of the impending monsoons. We've taken several helpings of melanin at the buffet, thankyouverymuch - we don't crave for the Sun like your white ass does.

( Rule-2 )

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If you've ever read my blog, you know that I've frequently been given to the latter option, rambling pointlessly on in fifteen thousand word blog-posts hidden behind lj-cuts.

But, as Obama would say, "It's time for Change".

So instead of the usual ostentatious, maudlin writing style, I thought I'd just post photos, to tell you what happened in the gore that was my fight.

( omgpicherz!!!11! )

The weekend chaperoned in a beautiful surprise: she bought me one of these - my first pair of Dark Dark black boxing shoes.

You are born for a reason.

Stand up boy! The death of those before you, by tragic necessity, has thrust upon you the fiery torch. Summon those demons from the black abyss of human courage inside you, summon the will that you shall not be left down below. Know this: history will belong to you. Make them write about you. Make his children look longingly at you, wishing they were yours instead.

Stand up boy! You're alone here - no woman, no gold, no cloud will go to battle with you. You're no son's father, no lover's support, no king's pawn. Unfettered, undiscovered and untouched - you alone carry the fire on which the pinnacle of future human endeavor depends.

Stand up boy! For you are the prince. Greatness awaits you. Dispel those repugnant notions of mediocrity that pragmatism demands, and rip apart the gossamer black-iron moral links that tie you down. Stand atop the mountain with your arms spread out, arch your back, fill your lungs with bitter cold air, and scream out to the world that you have arrived.

Stand up boy! Hold your head up high.
The World is yours to conquer.

The infrequency of rape stupifies me.

As a girl, you'll never be able to comprehend what a boy goes through when he hits puberty - to conceive the devil that captures his soul engulfing his entire being in a potent raw physical drive, tightening its grip, tightening him under his skin, like a zipper forced against the will of the bag it holds - unless... unless you could, perhaps remember what you go through, in those few moments, when you're up against the wall with your man, the faintest suspicion of his aftershave curling in as he moves closer and closer, streaking your hair with his red finger-tips, his stubble brushing against your cheek and his chest accidentally making the slightest contact with the tips of your nipples - your pulse races and your heart pounds and your toes curl inward within those hot sweaty tight shoes, and your red red red lips wait wet in anticipation for his, and your head tilts ever so slightly to the right and your eyes shut as you hear his warm breath move up your neck, as everything - as everything zones out.

Now imagine that - that zone - not for the mere 20 seconds that you do, but for twelve minutes, or twenty-five or forty.

It happens to him and me and him and every man who doesn't know you, every time he sees you walk past at dinner, at the canteen, when you sit next to him in class, while it rains and you sit huddled under the caving roof of the bus-stand, and when you walk past his house down the alley where the street light just went out the other day - his brain flushes an overdose of adrenaline through his veins, colouring his blood like a drop of red diffusing in sparkling, clear water - his muscles constrict, and his vision blurs as everything but the outline of your body melts out into a yellow haze, his heart-beat accelerates and his hands tremble with the excitement that only euphoria can provide as he pins you hard against the wall and bites your lower lip, pushing you into him tighter and tighter until there's not an physical inch between the two bodies and the wall, puncturing your lip until the air is heavy with the smell of warm blood as it spurts out of your lip at first and then trickles down his chin, until there's intense pain or pleasure in that contorted face of yours, until the tips of his fingers match your outstretched hands, as you scream and you scream and you scream in the black black black cobbled street that no one watches.

And then, he's sentenced.

I was cleaning up over the weekend, and came across this - my first love story. Written when I was in ninth or tenth grade if I remember right.

True to my style, it's overly dramatic. But then, hey, maybe life *was* more dramatic then. You know how when you're a kid, when everything's worth crying for or laughing at. And then, how you 'grow up', and it becomes less so. And how life begins to lose all sense of drama, until it becomes cool to pretend you've seen it all.

But wait, I digress. Here, is the piece. Unedited and unabridged.

( I want you back )

Ok, ok, since enough of you'll have bugged me, here's a pic of the brat.

High fashion - matching blue booties

( one more behind cut )