Tea - a short essay

Who had ever thought that Tea would be a meet in the pantry and the Coffee/Tea machine would do the job, at the press of a button? I had, seriously, never even had slightest of idea of a life – that makes you dead before you die.

Tea was a concept – wherein we would stand in front of the fire, and let ‘the sugar and tea and milk and water’ boil for minutes. And there was a time, when cups were a sign of social well being. (Remember, La Opala!). So the families (the middle class, in this context) would buy the best cups what they could, as per their gross salary structure. And occasionally, the neighboring ‘aunties ‘would take times out of their lives to talk about the newly purchased cups.  “Mrs. Dubey, achcha cup hai”. So actually it mattered. My family never had so much money that we would buy the best of the porcelain cups available in the market. But we somehow, had enough to present our social ‘status’ (now replaced by ‘facebook’ statuses) in an ‘okay’ cup.

I remember how my mother and my sister would decide, discussing those trivial details – colors, phool and patti, about the dead cups which is so important in India’s context. Tea wakes us up, tea drives us, and tea is what we serve to guests:  to friends as well as foes. Tea is a synonym for United States of India. I generally used to have 3 teas in a day. I have never been able to decide on the taste, till date. Is it all that good? Does it actually keep you awake? I was never bothered. I still am not bothered.

What I knew was – my mother is about to serve love to me. And that we would all – my family – sit together, for at least 30 minutes and that very idea delighted me to the core. In the journey of life, I lost my father, some ten years back. What I still remember is his words, that he would share with me – in those Tea sessions – just him and me alone. I give credit to him, for the goodness I have. Remember your parents never teach you anything bad, ever!

My father, I loved him so much, perhaps!

How quickly time changed – I would say, it was a nuclear explosion and the word is a ‘flash’. I am a professional now. I work with a multinational firm. I have tea more than thrice for sure, everyday!  It’s not the taste, but the moments, I still enjoy. It gives me an opportunity to go out, into an open world, which is great. The cups are not porcelain anymore; they are made of paper, generally.  It is easy to dispose them. So are the people around, the professionals. We do not have any strings attached. Pantry is static – people they come and go. People are machines now.

Coming to my family – we are three people now at three different places. We still have tea, but not together. This is the life, I created for myself. I am not sure about your story. The paths that we have taken are so irreversible.

I feel like crying. The only missing element in my cup of tea is ‘Love’ ( that humans deserved more than anything).

PS: Let’s meet for a cup of tea.

Everything looks bright and beautiful after the rain: The Hen

There is a heaven down south - It is called Kovalam, the beach!

One of the Infinity - from the lost series

My Friend,
as we walk,
together,
forever,
i shall cherish
every bit
of you..
until i go
effete.
i shall love you..
pure,calm,placid
at times..
restless,desperate
and unspoken sometimes..
but..nevertheless
feelings shall
never die..

i give up..
i hold you no more..
but still i hold
you in my mind.
and that my heart
shall always find..
a corner for you..

Black at times,
white at times,
soaked at times..
liberated at times..
constricted sometimes..


i do my part..
i seek no response..
i seek nothing..
no more..
but still i love..
Worst has failed..
light,truth has failed..
but i continue..
My journey..
i see no left..
i see no right..
only the axis..
that leads me..
to you..
and that i reverie..
one day..
i find you all
aligned..
to me.

Once upon a time..

Hope

I go the distance,
I just go the distance
to just find myself a few words
to describe how I felt
When I met you last.

I travel the slow time
I travel with all the pain
The time flows at its own pace
and not mine -
just to see you again.

I count the stars
I count them all
Just to make myself believe
I will find you beside me
once and for all.

What are you thinking Mr. Surfer, Google knows it all!!

It’s been a lot of struggle in this muggy weather to calm myself and write anything that might interest you.I am an internet guy, unlike my roommate who is a TV guy, and of late I made a few interesting observations while I was surfing my favorite sites – Google, Facebook. Now I have been thinking to represent all the facts, mind you - facts, but have been failing so far, miserably.

It was just 8 a.m. when I actually woke up, thinking that it's already 10. Such harsh is the combination of brightly lit mighty sun and the salty sea. It took me some time, to gather myself and get up. Now precisely I could have stayed in the bed or since, already awake, I could have gone to brush my teeth. I chose against such boring ideas and hopped on to my computer table.

Social networking - the art of modern networking, is more about knowing people over facebook, Orkut, twitter, Linkedin, Google Buzz etc. Yes. That's how it is. Even though you meet them at your workplace or sometimes even at home, like your roommate. You understand their moods through their status messages and smileys that follow them.

I typed the url - www.facebook.com and logged in to see what's up with my friends. There was nothing much to see. No major updates. Over bored, I just happened to look at the right corner (that’s facebook's area of dollars/revenue) - Ads, both texts based and pictorial. I love reading ads of any kind. I was stuck by this ad: "The Kama rub”:She's hot. She's sassy. She needs some help with the foam. Grab the sponge, give her a rub down. Hey, and make sure not to miss a spot.

There were two more ads. All these ads suggested that Indian girls are commodities and they you can buy them if you are willing to. It was just too early to make any conclusions. I refreshed the page and there you go - I had another set of ads, very similar in nature.

So why do we have such ads, in a country where we consider cows as holy (and not holy cow) and we pray goddesses? Do they just put it like that and believe that the element of sleaze or sexuality would pull in people to these sites. Answer is not so simple. Let's try to explore.

Next, I turned to Google - the noun that changed to verb. Google is God, some people quote. The estimated market value of Google is 200 billion dollars. It's acquiring new companies every day. It's offering free emails, free docs, free maps, free social networking, free browsers, and free internet.

Google also launched their own phone - Nexus One apart from the OS Android that it developed for mobile devices. The next plan of Google is to use Android on TV sets and integrate web and television. Why does Google want to do so many things when it just started as a search engine? Let's explore further!

The free services that Google offers come at a price. The critics call it a privacy breach. They claim that Google reads our mails to generate context based ads. Say your mail talks about marriage - the right hand side of the browser will have ads from shaadi.com or any other matrimonial site. Google is doing a business. They are running thousands of servers through the revenues that these ads generate. And still they make a tremendous amount of profit. Google became so mighty that it scared many other competitors and this eventually led to an all out war. Yahoo is already struggling but it's still holding on. Microsoft wants to end the domination of Google. But the major competitor of Google, when it comes to ad revenues is the newer social networking sites - facebook, twitter, MySpace, etc. And to counter them, Google came up with products like Buzz, Wave and the ageing Orkut in a new flavor.

So the ads that we saw earn money for facebook. But, why such contents and pictures? Let's walk further ahead.

The worldwide web (www) was a black and white photograph until newer web programming and scripting languages made web application look like a desktop one.The web is faster than ever before. Thanks to technologies like AJAX and JavaScript libraries like JQuery. Google, as has always been, was really quick to ponder and do some experiment here. The first major change that came to the Google homepage was called Google Suggest. Type in a few words at the Google search textbox and it fetch you 10 possible phrases that you might be interested in searching. Amazing and godly, it really feels that Google can read our mind.

So the other day I wanted to search the song - 'How deep is your love?' by Bee Gees. When I typed "How", the first suggestion Google gave me was - ' How to get pregnant?’!! It was funny and it made me laugh. So I did a few random experiments. Katrina yielded - ' Katrina Kaif Blue films' and the name Riya fetched - ' riya sen mms, riya sen blue film’. Also I observed that only by typing "How" - Google also suggested that I may be looking for phrases like “How to hack orkut account" or "how to hack Gmail password". At the very same time, my friend who lives in the US was online. I asked him to type the same thing - "How" and let me know the result. The result was - “How to tie a tie". So I just changed my extension to see what Google predicts for UK. The Google UK threw "Howdens" as the first result. The results were not absolutely clean for them either. It had the phrase "How to get pregnant”, but pretty much down the order! Then I fiddled with the name "Katrina" and the US and UK results were pretty clean and people do not want to see her blue film over there. All the results are below:

Google India - "How"

Google India - "Riy"

Google India - "Kat"

Google US - "How"

Google UK - "How"

Google US - "Katrina"

Google UK - "Katrina"

So why is ‘Google God’ and facebook (the two major web giants) trying to prove that Indians think filthy? Are we all perverts? Why Google suggested different results for different country?

Google does read the data from the usage pattern of users for coming up with such results. Google throws the most searched term first and it's country specific. When we use maps, Google reads our location to give local results relevant to where you are! So we give the information to Google which it eventually throws back at us.

So definitely, more people want to see Katrina and Riya Sen completely undressed here. I guess Indians are more curious than anybody else out there. This may be attributed to the fact that we come from the land of Kamasutra. Does that entitle Babas to run brothels and Law enforcers to molest minors? Google just reads us (breach of privacy, but God sees everything). Google runs its shop through the ads that it creates reading these patterns. But it shamelessly represents the reflections of our mind – through suggest.

What facebook represented in their pictorial ads was what Google suggested (which was eventually what we suggested to Google)! Facebook has definitely a similar mechanism to read us. That’s why they are at war. It’s all about money, honey! Google in their ads represent similar things that sell. Google just reflects what we think, what we do, what we write, where we go – as we eventually land on its network every day (for mails, maps, blogging, searching, buzzing, etc).

Banning Fashion TV or censoring films won’t help. Google, the God,suggests otherwise.What is rooted inside us cannot be withered by scratching the surface. Let's just take a deep dive and resurface. That's how UK and the US evolved. We are developing and experimenting. Someday, we will see different ads in a newer India.

PS: This post is not intended to hurt any sentiments. It’s purely how I feel and there are no figures to support what I wrote.

Activity: Try typing 'Why' in Google.co.in and also compare the results with the US.