Wednesday 27 July 2011

Guruji Answers MAGLs

Guruji,
Why do Gadget magazines carry pictures of scantily clad women?
Good question. I wish Guruji could answer this metaphysical query like the Super Computer which took aeons to calculate the answer “42” in response to the question ‘what is the meaning of life/Universe/Everything?’ (If you have read Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy”, you’ll know what I mean). Scientific studies suggest that increasing desire for gadgets as age creeps on is proportionately set off by a decrease in libido, which the MAGL (Middle Aged Gadget Lover) is loath to admit. The display of pictures of pretty babes is often a sad reminder of lost youth and recompense to eternal virility. Don’t be surprised if the Missus bans the display of Gadget magazines in the living room lest unsuspecting guests are led to believe that she has married a sex fiend. If you are really an honest to God MAGL with no pretensions, you ought to cut out the pictures of bikini clad babes from the magazines and donate them to your teenage son.

Dear Guruji,
My interest in internet porn has reached its’ nadir. Do you suggest Viagra?
Priya Shishya…It is but the natural step in the progression of things that the Good Lord has ordained. Welcome to middle age. But help is at hand. You can delude friends into thinking that you are still a testosterone filled male. You can download old issues of Penthouse/ Playboy and demonstrate them to everyone on your ipad or Android Tablet in ePub or PDF format. You can brandish your Apps and games with sexual innuendo. When no one is looking, you can watch Satsang Pravachans in Morning TV and pray to God Almighty for swift, painless death.
Dear Sir,
Android or Apple? Which way to go?
This is but one brief historical interlude in the evolution of the gadget world. This debate is often compared to the great intellectual/civilizational debates like church vs reformists, atheists vs Jews, Islam vs the rest, Buddhism vs the Hindu Clergy etc etc. The discerning MAGL can find the answer to this question in a dozen different ways. Android it is, if you have the time to experiment. Guruji recommends Apple, if you want a smooth interface. But the iPhone 4 is indecently priced in the third world where all the gadget-spirituality resides and hence I would advise that you experiment with a good Android phone. It has everything except the super smooth, buttery interface of an iphone. Tool around a while and you shall find the answers you seek. If you are already a Blackberry user, don’t migrate unless you have a strong reason to do so. Android still hasn’t got it right with tablets. If you are really itching to own a tablet, ipad is the way to go. A year from now, things might turn out differently.
Whatever platform you use, Guruji advises that you carry chargers with you. I kid you not. Keep one near the bedside, in study, at office, in travel bag. All the smart asses who made the smart phones exponentially better each year hadn’t reckoned on the slow, glacial pace of growth of energy storage technology.

Dear Middle Aged Wacko,
Could you suggest interesting Apps for lovers of the liquid of eternal Life? I mean booze?
From your question I get a sense of the fond attachment you hold for the bottle of distilled grain, which has brought joy to mankind and ruin to the house-wife-kind. There are thousands of apps of cocktail mixes, bartender’s guides and other such trivia out there in the cyber world. In the rare event of your being sober enough to spend quality time before the screen, you could brush up on such knowledge, instead of hitting the bottle at an early hour of the day. I also propose that you shouldn’t be masquerading as a MAGL; instead join AA (Alcoholics Anonymous)

Sadguru Pranam,
I own an Ipod Touch, Iphone, iPod Classic and iPad. Is it worth going for the iMac and Macbook pro as well and make the Apple collection complete?
Not unless you have started praying to the Living God, Param Poojya Guru Sri Steve Jobsji instead of Maryada Purushottam Sriramji, the warrior-God of ancient gadgets like Bows, Arrows and Turbocharged Monkeys. If you think your home ought to look like a holy Shrine of Apple Inc and you are sworn to dedicating a decent portion of your annual income and light many candles to the Saint of Cupertino, go ahead and do it. But Guruji advises readers to make informed choices and control your destiny. If it is Apple’s time time now, Android can’t be far behind. Who knows? Symbian might make a comeback next year.
Namaste Guruji,
My wife has left me for another guy. She said she can’t stand my gadget fetish. What should I do?
Are you prone to fondling your gadgets with paternal affection when no one is looking? Do you wake up in the night and check your mail in the Blackberry? Do you chill out on Friday nights with nerds from the gadget world?  No wonder she left you. But worry not. Help is at hand. It is a good time to go out and celebrate. To get over this spectre of gloom, I suggest you walk into the nearest electronics store and buy that little something that you always wanted to own. Isn’t it wonderful? A high maintenance liability has just upped and left? Leaving you with all the time in the world with your darlings? Cheerio.

Tuesday 19 July 2011

The Shrinking Left

I plead guilty. For the handful of readers of this blog who look to kill time with inanities, my disappearance from these pages has been sudden and without warning. Many things have happened in the meantime. I read several interesting books. Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing, Novels of Deborah Crombie’s Gemma James/ Duncan Kincaid series that I hadn’t read before and also Battle for Bittora by Anuja Chauhan. Yes, I am an unabashed admirer of women writers and woe befall  V S Naipaul who thinks that women don’t cut ice as writers…..
                 Then there were agitations against corruption. I always thought that the general incompetence of Babus is a much bigger scourge than corruption. And there came Mumbai bomb blasts and the outcry over it. But the subject closer to my heart is the ouster of the left governments from two states. The final frontier of the Left has been breached in Bengal. In Kerala, we saw the Left making a serious attempt at comeback by practising old fashioned bourgeois methods of leader worship- An attempt that almost succeeded.
                    Should we rejoice? Now that the lumpen cadre will no more hold industrialization to ransom? Now those administrative changes will not emanate from all powerful local area committees of the party? Now that head load workers need not be paid for tucking up their lungis and desist from working? Now that organized sector Trade Unions might think twice (hopefully) about bringing life to a halt? Now that people like us (PLUs) have come to power?
      I fear that the space that the Left had occupied will soon be cornered by Yoga gurus, environmentalists, NGOs, Maoist sympathizers and sundry writers. Many of them have no ear to the ground. The left frittered away its’ constituency by taking positions which are largely impractical and dictated by mass appeal. They did not foresee the need for change in a networked world. They got cornered into segments like organized sector trade unions which were a vested interest by themselves. They became oblivious to the changes wrought by free trade, internet and aspirations of the educated class. In the eighties, the Left had variously fought against computerization, private sector’s entry into professional education, introduction of Plus Two system in High Schools. On every one of these ideas, they had organized agitations, road blocks, Hartals and Dharnas, only to swallow their words much later. Left can outsmart any political party in the sloganeering department. In the early years, they had implemented game changers like Land reforms and education reforms. Years in power had made them sloganeers without a clear action plan for implementation. New world, experimental  ideas like decentralisation and village level planning which are pursued by some of their leaders are met with protests from within their ranks. The traditional apparatchiks of the party have managed to run the show with grassroots support from a rapidly shrinking constituency. The last straw was a desperate attempt to run a campaign on the basis of an individual in typical US Presidential election style. With that, the slide from mass based politics to individualized bourgeois politics was complete.    
       The scourge of identity politics is gathering steam in our country and it soon threatens to snowball into unmanageable proportions. Gujjars block roads, Jats fight for reservation, Telengana and Gorkhaland ask for separate states. Kashmir asks for independence. The Left in India is an idea, a perspective to understand why these identities gather steam and convert their sense of deprivation into agitations that threaten to render our country into an ungovernable mess. And the vacation of the political space by the Left might restrict our understanding of these issues. The idea of Left is a potent force to fight communalism and identity politics, which is difficult to replicate under the umbrella of Yoga teachers- even if they count bearded Muslims among their followers. It still contains the seeds of an idea that helps us understand reality in a country with explosive diversity.
    No, I don’t celebrate the demise of the Left. I wish the Left would transform into an idea in tune with our times. I wish they would play a key role in the evolution of a fourth world where local governments hold the key to development and amelioration of poverty. I wish they would fight the rapid commercialization of education. I wish they would resist the pillaging of our environment by construction and consumerism. I wish they would expand the shrinking space for informed debate on communalism, filled with hysterical TV anchors and internet vigilantes. I think it is not too late to dirty their hands yet again- to take up the cause of a large number of unorganized sector employees and to bring them the benefits of social security. I think it is not too late to bring the fruits of explosive development to those construction workers who find refuge under the flyovers. The Left can move on from being a party with legacy harking back to Soviet communes and Cultural Revolution of Chairman Mao. The Indian Left can cultivate itself as a uniquely Indian movement that seeks to merge the multiple identities behind common deprivation and seek innovative solutions within our democratic polity- instead of perceiving imagined threats of a bygone era and organizing bandhs and hartals at the drop of a hat. Good Luck…