No leprechauns, no rain... it's all a wee bit strange.

UK Trip Log: Day 2 - Monday, 29 June, Touchdown Belfast:

Previous Entry: UK Trip Log: Day 1

Mercifully, the six hour flight is over. My friend and neighbour, Mr. Overly Friendly Drunk Irishman, has already confirmed at least one Irish stereotype. I let him go ahead of me as we disembark, mildly surprised that he can walk in a straight line after having imbibed such copious amounts of alcohol.

As expected, the immigration line for non-citizens is long and tediously boring, even more so because I am stuck behind a bunch of American high-school kids visiting Ireland for the summer. Eventually I make my way through immigration, baggage and customs (or so says a sign I pass under - no sign of a customs official anywhere nearby though).

I am really looking forward to seeing S, and it is equal parts relief and joy meeting her again. V and N look just like they did a couple of years ago, quite a mighty feat considering V had a baby in the interim.

We make our way outside and I get my first real glimpse of Ireland. It's nice and sunny and warm (well, it's not cold). I begin to wonder whether I am in the right country. I'm told there's been a heat wave the last few days and some people have even been hospitalized. If this weather is considered a heat wave, I fear I might need to be hospitalized once it gets back to 'normal'.

One thing to note for Americans going to Europe - the roads are narrow. If you like to drive an F150 with room to spare on the sides, this ain't the place for you. Knowing I am going to need to drive in the next couple of days, I grab the seat in the front and try to get used to driving on the other side of the road, trying hard to ignore the fact that the roads are barely wide enough for a Mazda 6 and that there is no divider to stop the oncoming traffic from barreling straight into you.

When we get home we are greeted by my mother in law and the cutest baby girl this side of the Atlantic. The rest of the day is spent being entertained by the Baby A. Show. In between I realize I have been designated the resident computer expert and now have the responsibility of diagnosing and fixing V's beat-up old laptop. This is the only computer they have, and their only connection to the outside world, so no pressure really.

I manage to stay up till 10:30 and not fix the machine. I know I have to sleep so that I am fresh for my US visa stamping the next day, but the damn sun's still out and it just doesn't feel late enough to sleep. What sort of freakish place have I come to?

Light or not, I feel the jet-lag starting to get a hold of me, so we decide to pack it in for the 'night'. After all, it's a big day tomorrow. I get to find out whether I am going to be let back into the US.

Dive under the rainbow, fly over the pond... Ho, what's this? Do I spy a wee Leprechaun?

UK Trip Log: Day 1 - Sunday, 28 June, Raleigh to Belfast via Newark:

Ahh... the day has finally arrived. After all the planning, booking, cancelling, searching, bidding, pricelining, kayaking, hotwiring and eurocheapoing, I am relieved that the day is finally here when I leave for our UK vacation. S has been in Ireland for 3 weeks by now, so there is the added benefit of ending my forced isolation. My friends had all been telling me to enjoy my temporary bachelorhood, but despite my best attempts, I could not find much to enjoy about being lonely and hungry all the time.

It's good that I don't believe in omens. I am woken up by a recorded message from Continental that my 2:30 flight has been cancelled and I have been booked on the 5:30 flight to Newark instead. Now normally this would be no more than a minor irritation, but knowing from first hand experience that Continental flights from RDU to Newark are always late by at least two hours every day, I know this change means I will definitely miss my connection to Belfast.

I yell into the phone, " Are you kidding me? You can't just cancel the f@#$%^& flight!"

I hear the recorded voice say a dispassionate "Thank You," followed by an even more dispassionate click.

I immediately scramble to call the customer support, who turn out to be very customer unsupportive. Apparently all other flights are full, so I can't get a seat on an earlier one. There is nothing they can do, I am told. They can un-cancel the original flight, I counter. For some reason they think this is an unreasonable solution.

So I call the friend who is dropping me off and tell him to come 3 hours early so that i can try to catch the earlier flight. I reach the airport and manage to get on the top of the waiting list for the 1230 flight.

I make my way to the gate, hoping and praying that I get the earlier flight. I am told that I will have to wait until the entire plane has boarded before they know if someone has not shown up for the flight. I feel like an expectant father pacing outside the delivery room. After what seems like an excruciatingly slow boarding process, in which time I have prepared and practised my rant about how they need to get me to Newark in time any way they can, the attendant finally delivers my boarding pass. Thankfully, I don't need to demonstrate my inadequate arguing skills. I carry the boarding pass with me like I would a newborn child (or at least how I imagine one does this sort of a thing, never actually having had the chance to do it).

The flight is uneventful and on time, a rare feat for Continental ( the latter, that is. I assume most of their flights are pretty uneventful). Having reached Newark airport seven hours before the next flight, however, I now need to figure out how to pass the rest of the time. I figure one good idea may be to spot potential terrorists. One just never knows these days. And doing it on the ground is so much easier than saving the plane from them a-la Steven Seagal, though I have no doubt I can pull that off as well if the situation arises. So I start scanning the crowd and almost immediately come upon a likely candidate. Angry scowl, stubble, brown skin (racial profiling, cry the liberals) - definitely a shady character. It takes me two minutes to realize I am staring at my own reflection in the terminal window. Hmm, scratch off FBI from the list of potential career options.

After my failed attempt at racial profiling, I decide to spend some time people-watching. Oh people, you are so weird. There is this one lady who must think she is on a reality show. She is arguing with her boyfriend on the speaker phone. Angry women scare me, so I quickly sidle past her. I take a seat. Directly in front of me is a couple in their thirties. The woman is showing the man the warts on her neck and back. People watching is not turning out to be that much fun either.

One puke-worthy hamburger, one fourth of a book and a multitude of strange people later, I finally am on board the plane. Oh, the ride is just beginning. I am in the middle seat, a location intended for the singular purpose of torturing the poor, unfortunate souls who are either too late or too stupid to book a different seat. Already seated in the window seat is a friendly Irishman. Shakes my hand, gives me his headphones (God knows why) and tells me he has been stuck at the airport for the past 24 hours. Wonderful. I sit down and make myself comfortable. A lady in her forties walks up to the aisle seat. As she is sitting down, my new Irish best friend tells her that he has been stuck at the airport for 24 hours. She brushes him off, and then brushes me off for good measure. Mr. Window Seat tells me I am a good man. As if I didn't know.

At this point Mr. Window Seat proceeds to burp three times. Of course, being a gentleman, he does excuse himself. Sulking Lady now pages the air hostess (or whatever they are called these days) and gets her seat changed. Mr. Window Seat asks me if it was anything he said. He says he has had a few wines and makes sure I know he has been at the airport since last night. I am thinking about how to move to the vacant aisle seat without offending the man, when the air hostess (steward?) ushers another man into it. The light at his original seat is broken, so he has come here so that he can read his paper. Poor sod doesn't know what he is getting into. Just to prove that point, Mr. Window Seat asks him if the previous lady changed the seat because he had had too many wines, tells him that he has been here since last night, burps a couple of times, and then excuses himself three times. Then he decides to take a toilet break, apologizing profusely for making us get up.

He comes back and gets seated, making sure he tell us how sorry he is for making us get up (again), and how nice we are. Eight times. When the dinner rolls around, her asks for two whiskeys, one water and no dinner. He plans to drink the whiskey and go to sleep he tells me. Thankfully, he really does do that. Of course, the burps continue. And he talks in his sleep. Every once in a while he wakes up and reminds me what a nice man I am, how he was at the airport for 24 hours, and how beautiful Ireland is.

After a couple of hours, I decide I really need to get some sleep despite the wine-and-whiskey-burps smelling air around me.

It's a good thing I don't believe in omens. This day does not portend well for the rest of my trip.

Dust In The Wind

I don't know any more about Google than the average consumer, which limits my knowledge to the contention that it is one of the most successful companies of this century, to go along with the paranoid opinion that they will soon take over the world. So it was no surprise that Google was named one of the most innovative companies by Business Week. The surprise was that they were number 2. Since such lists are equal parts fact, opinion and conjecture, we can assume they are as good, if not better, than the number one company in the list, Apple.

So what makes Google so good? How can a start-up become an indispensable part of the life of an average person in less than a decade? Did the patented ranking algorithm for the Google search engine hold some fantastic magical power that has by now taken hold over the human race? Doesn't seem likely.

I once read a quote from a scientist in some scientific magazine (it may have been Popular Science; does that count as a legitimate magazine to which scientists give interviews?). To paraphrase he said that most new technologies that revolutionize life for the average person are really not that new. They have either been building up incrementally in a small community of innovators or scientists, or somebody developed them long ago and shelved them after finding no worthwhile use at the time.

I believe that is true. It is not so much the technology, but how you apply it that separates the merely smart from the insanely successful. That is not to say that the Google page ranking system wasn't all new and shiny - I wouldn't know; nor is it to say that Messrs Brin and Page aren't smart. Not only are they smarter than the average bear (me), but it's not too far fetched to say that they have genius in spades. But the reason Google is successful is not that the founders were good enough to go to Stanford, but that they knew how to apply all those smarts to figure out exactly what the people wanted, and exactly what they would pay for. Google did not benefit from the slavish cultishness of Apple consumers who would do anything to push, pull or drag Apple to the top of the heap despite their ridiculous prices or obvious shortcomings. They did, however, benefit from being the outsider - a sleeker, hipper, and, even more importantly, freer alternative to Microsoft. They used the hate and mistrust people had for the giant and all-encompassing behemoth to become one themselves, and were able to maintain the love of the people all along the way. Now there's a magic trick if I ever saw one.

As if to prove the point of how Google really gets it, Yahoo!, the search engine that started it all, is now going through its death throes even as Google and Microsoft fight to take over the corpse. Yahoo got too cluttered and obese for it's own good. The home page became bloated, the mail, news and music sites were just pale imitations of others, or bought off the shelf and re-branded. There was no innovation. They either didn't 'get' what the consumer wanted, or didn't care. Google gets it. The home page is practically unchanged since inception. They don't do new stuff for the sake of doing it. In fact, the brilliance is that they know what people will want tomorrow, and they cater to that need. I remember when Google Maps came out, there was an afternoon wasted with colleagues marveling at the genius of it. What had come before from others and what we had thought of as cutting edge had been blown out of the water. Google's other apps like Earth, Sketch-up, Orkut, News, Finance all live up to that standard (let's no talk about Froogle in this space). Acquisitions like Youtube and Blogger are opportune and improve the brand instead of bloating it. Yeah, I think Google's number one in my list.

I hope they stay there and don't go the way of Apple, of creating something funky and cool and completely useless and racking up sales by convincing people they can't live without using this funky, cool and completely useless thing (yes I desire an iphone, no I can't afford the data plan, yes you can go ahead and call me sour grapes).

Live to Tell

I wonder when the obsession with getting older starts for most people. There are those lucky few who never think about it. They age without seeming to get old, get laugh lines instead of getting worry lines, and look dignified instead of stale.

I didn't think turning thirty was such a big deal. That is, I didn't think it was such a big deal until I actually turned thirty. Now it seems as if time has passed me by and that no matter how much I scramble and scrape, it will forever be out of reach. It seems as if I will never lose this feeling of having let it go without giving my all to grab it, corral it and dominate it for the rest of my life. There are so many things that I wanted to do, but never got an opportunity - or made one. And then I think, hey I'm only thirty, not sixty. I still have enough time to sing those songs, write those books, direct those movies and climb those peaks.

Then comes this gnawing realization that I'm probably no closer to achieving any of those things than I was five years ago and the added frustration of being a part of the rat race. I wasn't designed to be a 9 to 5 kind of guy. Carpe Diem they say in Latin. Well, I didn't and with each day that passes I feel more entrenched in the rat race. Age brings responsibility, and the added burden of expectation. We are expected to follow the usual road - education, job, marriage, kids, savings, retirement. And with each day that passes without carpeing the diem there are fewer exits to get off that road.

Such is the agony and ecstasy of living in the United States. Whereas in India I would have likely not even entertained thoughts of breaking from the pack, here I feel the ecstasy of limitless potential - and the agony of being an alien who is not allowed by law to reach it.

Despite the doom and gloom nature of this post, however, I am an optimist. My nature is to chip away. Chip away at a block of stone and soon there will be a beautiful sculpture. Where others see a block of stone, the sculptor sees a Madonna and child. All I have to do is chip away.


Word of the day: Stability

Pride (In the name of Love)

Recently an email I received - one of the myriad emails that are forwarded everyday to my account - stood out starkly from the rest. Forwarded emails have become so the norm these days that most don’t get more than a cursory glance. What struck me about this particular one was not something unusual, but rather a particularly vile example of an attitude that I have been noticing with increasing frequency amongst my compatriots. I will quote the email in its entirety and then try to explain why it bothered me enough to want to write about it:

I couldn't' stop making this comparison..

inches of rain in new Orleans due to hurricane katrina... 18
inches of rain in mumbai (July 27th).... 37.1

population of new orleans... 484,674
population of mumbai.... 12,622,500

deaths in new orleans within 48 hours of katrina...100
deaths in mumbai within 48hours of rain.. 37

number of people to be evacuated in new orleans...entire city
number of people evacuated in mumbai...10,000

Cases of shooting and violence in new orleans...Countless
Cases of shooting and violence in mumbai.. NONE

Time taken for US army to reach new orleans... 48hours
Time taken for Indian army and navy to reach mumbai...12hours

status 48hours later...new orleans is still waiting for relief, army and electricity
Status 48hours later..mumbai is back on its feet and is business is as usual

USA...world's most developed nation
India...JUST A DEVELOPING NATION..oopss...did i get the last fact wrong??? Or am I just being proud of being an INDIAN

It is not possible to explain with mere words how shallow some people can be, and I will not even begin to attempt that here. When I first read this email, I immediately dismissed it as so much nonsense. But even a week later it kept tugging at my mind. I finally went back and reread it to understand the swirling cloud of anger and frustration it had managed to create in me. It disturbed me that someone could find pride in comparing death tolls of tragedies of such magnitude. In one unthinking swipe of the keyboard, the person brushed aside tens of thousands of people made homeless in the Mumbai rains. Entire slums were wiped out in 48 hours. The death toll was 1000 at the end of one week. In the US, entire cities along the coastline of two states have been completely wiped out, with countless people losing all their life's possessions. This is hardly a matter for a game of one-upmanship. Had Mumbai been in the same situation as New Orleans, the magnitude of the tragedy would have been too horrifying to comprehend. A category 4 hurricane with winds upto 250 kmph hitting a city of twelve million, with its average height below sea level and surrounded by high water on three sides ... I don't think I need to do the math. As it is, the severe rains caused floods the likes of which haven’t been seen in a long time. A city built out of reclaimed land with no drainage to speak of, built in an area lashed by severe monsoons every year. It was a tragedy waiting to happen, just like the New Orleans soupbowl. The rains exacerbated the wounds of the city. Old, dilapidated buildings which seemed to cling on to that last breath forever before collapsing have all but given up hope. There have been three collapses in the last month itself. As a gleaming new city rises in its place, the old city is dying and it’s taking its poor people with it. The rains were not good to Mumbai. It is sad to think someone feels the need to twist facts to somehow feel superior, and while in itself this attitude is not unusual, it is more frustrating because this email will be forwarded mechanically by every Indian to every other Indian in their contact list and most of them will read it and feel proud without really understanding what they are feeling proud about.

And therein lies the crux of the problem. It is this overwhelming need all Indians feel to be recognised as superior to all Westerners. After 150 years of foreign rule and the socialist mind-stifling policies of Nehru and Indira Gandhi, we are at last finding our place in this world, and this attitude keeps dragging us back. As long as we feel a need to put someone else down to prove our worth, we are lying to the world and we are lying to ourselves. We are trying to win a battle that exists only in our minds. This generation - my generation - is the first one to break the shackles of our self-imposed inferiority complex and take our country through those first tentative steps towards the greatness that all Indians like to see in their motherland. But we don't need false victories in non-existent battles to do that. Today we have Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune as arguably the IT capitals of the world. We are self sustaining in almost all grain and food products. In 60 years we have gone from a country of farmers to a nuclear power. For the first time in 200 years any young Indian has not only the ability, but also the self-belief to stand up to any other person in the world and be as intelligent, articulate, productive and creative as them. There is no need for us to shrilly proclaim our superiority, because we are not superior - we are equal - and our deeds will do all the proclaiming for us. And while it's one thing to point up to the sky and see India Rising, one should always cast their eyes towards their feet and see the 500 million people whose backs one is grinding into the ground to feel as tall as the rest of the world.

Be proud to be an Indian - I am. But don't have delusions of grandeur. No, India is not a developed nation. But it is in our hands to take her there - and we won’t let her down.