Sanctuary Of Random Keystrokes

I recently got an Android phone. One of the apps that I enjoy playing with on it is ‘Google Goggles’. You take a photo with the phone’s camera and then Google Goggles fires a search to get you more information about the thing you just clicked. It’s often eerily accurate.

Facebook allows your photos to be tagged by others. It’s only a matter of time that they plug in face recognition. iPhoto does it, Picassa does it, I see no reason why Facebook won’t (if it doesn’t already).

So you take a photo, use something like Google Goggles for Facebook, and voilá you have (depending on the user’s privacy settings) details of the person you clicked!

It isn’t called Facebook for nothing.

The ICC T20 Women’s World Cup officially kicks off tomorrow. The problem is – and I risk sounding politically incorrect here – no one cares. I’ve not met a single woman who knows or cares about the women’s cricket teams. It might be flimsy to base my assumption on that small anecdotal sample, but given that I don’t see the media scamper for rights to women’s cricket, surely there cannot be much interest? I am not saying that cricket should be a male bastion but simply pointing out that a separate tournament with just gender as the differentiator cannot be sustained. What we probably need then is tennis’ equivalent of mixed-doubles?

What would become of our civilization if suddenly, electricity, gunpowder, gasoline and steam engines stopped working? Dies The Fire imagines such a world and forces you to think about how dependent we are today on things that were unimaginable just a few hundred years ago.

Sadly the book runs out of things to say around the half way mark. You are thus forced to endure such minutiae as what sort of food the American protagonists fantasize about in a world where farming the old-fashioned way is the only way to put bread on your table. Then there are detailed descriptions of the Celtic Wiccan rituals; and yes, the food consumed there. Repetitive battle scenes where finer points of using longbows, broadswords, bucklers, targes and other medieval weaponry are illuminated all while explaining how difficult it is to fight when operating under the medieval gear of chain mails, hauberks, visors, vambraces and other assorted wearables.

This seems to be a standard strategy of American fantasy authors for beefing up their works to the level of thickness that is deemed respectable for books of this genre. Take notes from history books and encyclopedias and somehow weave the details into the story. I wouldn’t mind it so much if the story kept moving or if I were living on Venus – for a day of mine there would last 200 Earth days. I am probably being harsh here. But then what do you expect from someone who is ploughing through the 10th book of the Jordan’s Wheel of Time series?

I’ll leave you to reflect on this gem here:

Quite often there was something useful in places like that. Not food, of course, but aspirin, sterile bandages, condoms, toilet paper – newspaper left stains, they’d discovered, and twists of grass could leave you itching for days.

Frankly, in a post apocalyptic world, I would have taken to washing (or since we are talking high fantasy here – laving) by now.

From the 4th floor balcony of my (old) office at Kasturba Road, you could see Chinnaswamy Stadium. About 5-6 times a year they would turn the stadium lights on. Ususally for a day and night ODI but more often than not for testing. I am talking pre-IPL/pre-T20 days of just three years ago here and I already sound like someone’s grandpa reminiscing about a bygone era. I’d marvel at how bright the floodlights were and how they would make the clouds overhead look luminescent but that 4th floor balcony is about as close as I went to the stadium. Cricket matches were meant to be watched on TV. The unruly scenes I had witnessed at the only rock concert I had attended at Palace Grounds had made me even more wary of crowded places. Why rub shoulders with the hoi polloi when you can watch the cricket in the comfort of your home – a cup of hot tea in one hand, the TV remote in other – looking like a minor Indian deity. In short, I kept my distance – like a sailor who is thankful for a lighthouse but must keep his safe distance from it.

Then India won the T20 World Cup in 2007 and ushered IPL in. I watched from a distance again. Sure I was intrigued, even interested in this new phenomena but cricket still remained something you watched at your home. The first IPL opener happened in Bangalore and I watched the opening ceremony from a Barista at Indiranagar (from home to a cafeteria, some progress eh?) and chased the rest of the match on Cricinfo at home. Quite a few matches followed the opener – a good many of them in Bangalore but I never wavered in my home over stadium approach. The second IPL was in South Africa so the question of catching a game live never arose. By this time however, everyone seemed to have watched a match at stadium. Friends; who knew about as much about IPL as Chirs Gayle knows about synthesizing Buckminsterfullerene, had been to at least one IPL match. Even my wife, who doesn’t get too involved with cricketing matters, had somehow managed to tick this one item off her list.

This year I was determined to make amends. But sometimes there is a sea to be waded between being determined about something and actually accomplishing it. What caused me to set sail was my manager’s generous offer of two free corporate tickets to the Bangalore – Rajasthan match. There was also the promise of being able to watch two all-time greats – Anil Kumble and Shane Warne – lead their teams. Some of my fears about crowd management and basic facilities at the stadium had been allayed by this article by George Binoy at Cricinfo. Still, years of inhibitions are not all that easy to let go of. The ship was cruising but it still carried a considerable cargo of scepticism.