in a dream

The jeans that never was

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When I was in school, I’m guessing in the 5th or 6th standard, there was the case of this lost jeans, a case I could never really figure out. And I don’t know why that bloody event comes to my mind now, when I hardly care about the jeans I wear.

What happened (or not happened) is that my parents had bought me a jeans. And it was a really weird-ass coloured jeans – something like an algae green mixed with blue or something, grotesque in short. Actually, I don’t even remember the colour as much as I do this incident. But I know, for sure, that the colour was fucking weird. Like even in those juvenile days, who the fuck wore an algae colored jeans, I must have thought!

Now, my parents have always been very sensitive to my choice. Either they know I’ll like something they want to buy for me or they don’t. When they do, they buy that something and when they don’t they don’t buy that something because I don’t use that something if I don’t like that something. These choice-paradigms have led to far too many ego-centric tug-of-wars/tugs-of-war. And they happen till date (I’m 27 now!) and I love them for that.

Back to the jeans, I recollect in my memory that I hadn’t liked the jeans initially. So off went the jeans into the darkest corners of the kapaat (cupboard in Marathi), away from my sight. And I had forgotten about the jeans for a long time, I remember. But then, sometime later, I changed my mind towards that colour. Maybe because I saw someone else flaunt that jeans or maybe because I overheard my parents discussing whom to pass over the jeans to since I wouldn’t be interested in wearing their hand-picked, love-emboldened jeans and my brother was too young to be wearing jeans at all. Both reasons seem plausible if I am to believe that I have myself figured out, which I haven’t.

And then, I decided to come out at my parents and tell them that I wanted that new jeans. That I wanted to accept that lovingly bought gift. My parents (mostly mom, the one with whom I had these stupid discussions) denied everything I just told you in the previous paragraphs.

They denied the jeans’ existence. They denied my rejection of the colour. They denied any discussion. To persuade me into believing that there was never any such incident, they asked me to describe the jeans. When I did, they assured me that they would have never bought such a stupid jeans for me. Forget that, they hadn’t even discussed anything remotely close to passing over the jeans to some cousin after my refusal to accept. I was asked to search the kapaat, and the divan-bed. Obviously, I couldn’t find anything. And sometimes when I have recollected that incident, I have tried extracting the truth from my parents.

Today, I remember this incident with much less doubt. I have long accepted that maybe it was just a bad dream, and that maybe I was too small to understand the concept of a bad dream. Maybe woke up from my dream and just chose to extend the dream into reality. The last time I thought about this incident must have been when I was with my previous employer in Gurgaon.

It’s not for nothing that we cherish the childhood and wish those days came back. The days when you could get away with stupid shit like that. The days when you could hold your parents responsible for your mistakes, and continue to live your life. When you didn’t care if you were being fanatic about something or just plain dumb. Those were the days when you had zero liability – not even to yourself. Your conscience was the one part in your mind which urged you to push your mom for ice-cream on the way to school. Most of all, those were the days which your parents made special for you no matter how big an arse you must have been.

Image credit: http://www.inadreammovie.com/

via Topin10.com

The social media vortex…

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… sucks the concentration out of you and infuses you with as much procrastinating elements. Not that you don’t enjoy the social interactions. Those friends, those profile pictures, those wedding albums, those torrential downloads, those interesting videos on YouTube, those rude yet funny tweets, those song recommendations by a friend, those Oscar nominated movies, those recently pirated TV shows. But to what end?

How many times have you just begun studying, reading, or working on a particular task but ended up on Twitter or Facebook or the-social-forum-next-door? Well, I started writing this post the moment I realized that I had ended up watching a video, on YouTube, which was recommended to me after I had watched a video posted/RTed by someone I follow on Twitter, which was opened to check the ‘recommended accounts’ by Twitter’s auto-generated, algorithm-following, account mailed to me on my Blackberry, which I had opened to switch it to silent mode just so that I won’t be disturbed while studying. Fuck, I’m starting my studies now.

What is common sense after all?

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Common sense is a form of seventh sense supposed to be ubiquitous, acquired at birth, and/or requiring, at the very least, nominal form of nurture for development. However, too often, we come across people using phrases such as ‘Use your common sense’, ‘Common sense is not so common after all’, and ‘Your opinion just killed common sense’. If common sense is what it is supposed to be, why do we come across folks who don’t seem to possess it!

If I came from a region on Earth which is perpetually tormented by the Sun with such horrendous intensity that I never had to ‘heat’ anything. If that region on Earth had such an abundance of edible, natural resources that I never had to process any item to satisfy my intake. Let’s just assume that I never have known what ‘cool’ is! I guess if you burnt a matchbox stick in front of me, I would not avoid touching it, would I? So doesn’t that mean I haven’t got what would be common sense to you?

Likewise, it’d be OK to be ignorant of the forces of balance which guide us to jump and land on two feet, but it’s common sense to know how not to fall. It’d be OK to be unschooled of the equation of a straight line but it’s common sense to be able to draw a straight line. Is it OK for a non-electronics guy to not know that the power symbol has its own sweet little origin story? Depends, doesn’t it! What the fuck is common sense then?!

This is what I think. Common sense is that line between being ignorant and being unscientifically knowledgeable; especially, knowledgeable to the point where validation is deemed unnecessary. I added the ‘unscientifically’ for a reason. Let’s talk about it later.

To break it down to rules, common sense is nothing but a set of rules which have been coached in to you since a time you don’t remember. It is a set of emotional, physical, mechanical. mathematical, geographical, or say-what-you-will phenomena, you knew were true. Or phenomena, which you have accepted to be true. Rather, phenomena which you are never going to have to verify. Ever. You just know.

Usually, it takes the form of collective observations amassed over time based on real-life experiences to which you get exposed to. They don’t necessarily apply to another human being. They are your observations. Stuff that you know will hold true when it happens a second time, but to you. Stuff like, if you are driving in the right lane then it might be common sense that you’re going to turn right on the next turn. Well, this won’t hold true if you are driving in Gurgaon. Here, you have free will. Nobody obstructs with your free will. Common sense obeys the driver’s rules in this part of the country, not the other way around. Anyway.

But, the wonderful part here is that common sense by itself can never be wrong and hence can never be right either. This, I say from an audience point of view. As I mentioned earlier, it is an acquired sense of perception of things just as an acquired sense of opinion, which may or may not have been influenced. To quote from NYTimes’s review of ‘Everything is obvious once you know the answer’:

Watts’s point is that however well we understand the parts, we do not thereby acquire a complete understanding of the whole. This is one of the big reasons that common sense is unreliable. We are prone to think in terms of individual actors whose doings set predictable chains of events in motion. But social systems can acquire properties that don’t easily jibe with this kind of common sense — through processes like self-­reinforcing cascades, in which outcomes feedback upon themselves, or nonlinear dynamics, in which small changes in input can lead to large changes in output.

This leads us to the ‘unscientific’ part of my definition. Certainly, you can use common sense to guide you through your chores. Like not dropping that ceramic coffee cup on the floor. But not for deciding that you have to revolve the car steering wheel clockwise to turn it right. When doing so, you’d have to check if there is an oncoming vehicle on your right lest you wish to dent his car. Another example:

If we drop a match on a forest floor, we cannot predict whether the result will be a conflagration or a campfire just by knowing a lot about matches. The outcome much depends on what is going on nearby: how dry is the terrain, how dense is the forest, how fast is the wind? When the right conditions for a fire exist, any spark will set it off; but when they do not, no spark will suffice.

Rightly so, common sense is not inherently consistent. Two people performing a similar action based on their respective common senses may arrive at two completely different outcomes. Common sense is ambiguous because, unlike a scientific experiment which can be performed n-times by following the same procedure under similar environments, common sense can’t be bound by procedures. Hence, common sense is also unverifiable. Essentially, a better common sense is a wise judgement developed through the right experiences over a period of time through your mistakes/knowledge/actions. And just as, there is always a decision or opinion better than yours, there is always a common sense better than yours. An article by HBSWK applies a similar concept to explain leadership skills requiring decision-making.

So maybe the next time you have to use your common sense, you might as well back it up with as many experiences as possible without failing to take into consideration those external factors whose effect on your decision might deem your common sense a screw up!

Stop whining and buy that phone already

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For about three decades now, PCs or Macs were the machines which took care of personal computing. That is where all the advances were, and that is where majority of the sales were. Come 2007 and the world saw the revival of the mobile revolution in the form of a highly disruptive handheld product, the iPhone. Much of what the mobile industry does today revolves around the basic architecture set by the iPhone.

Today, mobile technology is leaps and bounds beyond what we can imagine. I think the consumer is no more the driver of technological innovation in the mobile industry. It is competition within the industry! The battle is definitely for a majority stake in the market share, but the intent is to stay ahead of the competition irrespective of what the consumer wants. A perfect example is the video below.

It’s not that the people shown in the video represent a majority, but the video does drive down the idea that consumer is no more the king. We no more choose what is best for us. We choose whatever is the best of the lot available. We were just settling down with those Snapdragon S4 Pros and Qualcomm just announced the new 800, and 600 series of processors. So did Nvidia (Tegra 4 aka Wayne) and so did Samsung (Exynos Octa). It’s not like the S4 Pros were showing any lag on the Lumia 920s, 8Xs and the S3s. It’s just their way of saying – wait, there’s more we can do. We are spoiled for choice these days.

When we go to buy a phone, let’s say a smart-phone, we have a horde of devices available for What the hell!consideration. How do we decide what is best for us? I have seen friends discuss their smartphones’ processing speeds, the screen sizes, or the RAMs. In the end, none of them seem to utilize those ‘powers’ in a way which justifies the capabilities of their phones. Yes, there are the power-users but then that is a limited lot if you ask me. So what went wrong?

The Expectations

Today, a phone is more than just a phone. For one, it is an on-the-go social networking tool, for the other, it is an internet surfing cum reading device, or a gaming device and for another, it is a live music streaming device. Irrespective of the usage, the smart-phone has been positioned as a central hub in our lives.

We expect every phone to be a miracle. Doesn’t matter who the manufacturer is. Incremental changes in hardware don’t interest us anymore. We rate those lower than previous, because of a huge expectations’ drive. The entire consumer mentality has come to expect that given a year of development, a manufacturer would be treading on the edge of a cliff if their next phone didn’t bring, to market, features worthy of at least a year’s exclusivity. And what’s more, we get asphyxiated if a new smart-phone is not launched at an over-the-top event. What happened that shaped our minds into raising the benchmarks so high? Two words – Steve Jobs.

I consider myself a tech-enthusiast. And, I was as amazed as you were when the late Steve Jobs gave that ground-breaking iPhone presentation and maybe when he unveiled a couple of other Apple products. It was like – THIS. IS. THE. THING. MAN! But, if you think about it, in some ways, Steve Jobs defined what you needed from a smart-phone, from your iPhone. He almost dumbed us down. (I admire Steve Jobs, but all I mean to say is that he was ‘the influencer’, for better or worse).

Lack of needs analysis

Another reason we generally end up with more than what we needed is that we never think of what we needed in the first place. We choose to stay ahead of people we know in terms of which smart-phone we have and what its specifications are, not in terms of what we did with that phone.

There is nothing wrong in that. But, then there’s nothing wrong in accepting that either. How many people out there think of their usage ahead of the phone’s specifications when we buy one? Agreed that, when we buy a phone, we are investing for at least 2 years and that we don’t want to be holding a legacy device one year down the line. But then there is always that buffer we need to put between known features we invest in and features we don’t know we may need in the future. So, my phone should fit somewhere between such that I don’t become a loser in the months to come.

Anyways, let’s just wrap up and say be happy that the last 5-6 years have been amazing for the tech world. There have been products, competitors, patent litigations, acquisitions, and so on, on the business end. Then there was foul-mouthing, ego tussles, fan-boys, and so on, on the emotional end. But the consumer, us, has benefited from all that. No doubts! There was a time when products were first invented for the big corps or for research purposes, and then stripped down for the mass market. Now, products are invented straight up for the consumer. That is a great thing for us.

So while you finish reading this article I hope that there has been some perspective added. If not, then never mind. Just go and splash some cash on the costliest, biggest and smartest of the smartphones.

And while you’re at it, I guess I’ll just wait for THE NEXT BIG THING!

Thoughts on internet privacy

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Bruce Schneier, a technologist and leading author on security issues was quoted saying ”What the system defines as normal is what a child is quickly going to think is normal, and he’ll build his life around it”.

There is a huge chunk of internet users who show outrage on the manner in which companies save user information to create a customized, central, one-stop social product for everyone. These companies don’t steal information. They are smart, in the context of privacy, at making users agree to sharing information with the companies. The user agrees to the privacy policies and willingly shares information with companies such as social networking sites. Most of us don’t have a problem sharing information; and I agree, we shouldn’t have a problem with that. However, we should be aware of the extents to which our personal information is being used, distributed or even shared without our knowledge. The outrage over privacy doesn’t only include social networking sites. It includes a horde of different services right from file-sharing websites, banking-related websites, and even your local broadband service provider.

Facebook got it all figured out in social networking but, it almost went disastrously wrong before the Lane vs Facebook lawsuit. In 2009, the FTC warned Facebook to change its privacy practices when the FTC noted that Facebook was publicly posting posts which were meant to be ‘friends only’. Facebook was also charged with sharing user information with advertisers without notifying individual users; without the user’s consent that is. Since then, Facebook has hired a team of privacy officers. They’ve even submitted to ‘privacy audits’ for the next 20 years. They reformed their privacy policies and today we all seem so much more comfortable to share on Facebook. But, just two days ago, the FTC was urged to probe whether Facebook is violating privacy settlement. Plus, the 19 year-old Zuckerberg was smart enough to IM his way through users’ privacy concerns; in his long-forgotten chat, Zuckerberg calls users of Facebook ‘dumb fucks’.

Google, on the other hand, started with a ‘Do no Evil‘ motto. Then there were a few setbacks with the now defunct Google Wave and Google Buzz. There was some major competition to Google from Facebook. Then came Google Plus and the coherence to the Google account linked products. It was then that Google decided to refresh their privacy policies across all products; a unified policy for all products linked to a Google account. We also remember when Google was accused of collecting user information viz. emails, passwords, etc. while the Google Street View team was cruising the streets of the world. Google was also accused of overriding cookie settings in Safari for the purposes of ads tracking.

Just take a look at the number of times FTC is found accusing Google and Facebook with privacy charges.

So, we begin to realize that everything in user privacy has got to with the personal privacy policies of the tech companies. Come to think of it, it is very difficult for us to understand the privacy policies of each website we visit. And accepting privacy policy terms of a social network does not call for ethical use of the information shared on that platform. In fact, it may be just the opposite.

Most applications don’t use user provided data for unethical purposes. Think of the way Google has changed over the years. Do you think that there exists anything called a ‘standard’ Google search engine? No. The Google algorithm has been updated and refined over the years to cater to people individually. When I search for Greece, the Google first page lists out articles and news related to holiday destinations in that country (just the first page). When my girlfriend searches for Africa, she is provided updates about the economic position of the Euro-zone, specifically articles and news related to Greece; she being the well-read between the two of us. At first, such customizable search results seem like a good feature on search engines. But, beyond the ‘WTF line’, they seem creepy. Google searches which are performed without a user login should return neutral, unadulterated results. But, I don’t think that is the case. Not with me at least.

So where is all this leading us to? Well, nothing really. The Obama administration recently announced an interest in passing the ‘Privacy Bill of Rights’. Many more such privacy bills are being floated across countries to address people’s concerns over information sharing and the recent surge in data brokers. Jeff Chester of the Centre for Digital Democracy believes that it is actually the Europeans who shall be driving the privacy policy debate. His thoughts quoted below from the BBC website:

“In Europe, privacy is enshrined as a civil right, based on the experience that happened in Europe with Hitler and with communism, and you have embedded important civil safeguards around privacy that places the system in balance between the citizen and the corporate sphere and the government,”

“In the US, while privacy is a form of a right, it is in fact the free market which determines most of the policies when it comes to the internet.”

Internet privacy is a problem that it ubiquitously deep rooted, whereas its awareness and negative implications are equally unknown to the common user. Heck, I don’t mind sharing information with my friends or even allowing applications to store my personal information. But, as long as this activity takes place in the realms of my consent and for my benefit, I have no objection. After all, I have allowed the application to share and/or store my information. However, if sharing or selling my personal information is being undertaken without my consent, then I do have a problem. And in this age of mobile computing, location-based applications and turn-by-turn recommendations, so should you!

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