Engayging Life

I started three books last night. Entirely unlike me, I will admit. Not because I don't like reading, but because I don't have the kind of time I would have like to have had to devote to it. I have a gruelling full-time job, I'm a part-time musician, I live by myself for all practical purposes, I'm in a demanding relationship, and I live in Mumbai, which means I spend about 3 to 4 hours in commute every day. But that's not what this post is about. It is about the three books that I have started yesterday.

What were they? Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson, and The Giver by Lois Lowry. How these books arrived in my consciousness is interesting.

My friend/colleague/book-clubber forwarded a TED talk by Dan Gilbert to me and J. I usually do not warm up to such video shares. First, because I rarely find myself in a situation, when I initially check the thread/conversation, where I can comfortably watch and comprehend what I'm seeing. Poor connectivity, environmental distractions, etc., you see. Second--come on, admit it. Who wants to hear another talk about the elusive "happiness"?

Anyway, I watched this talk--I was at my apartment late in the night when I checked and I immediately watched the video. Mr. Gilbert was not only persuasive in terms of his argument about how happiness is relative and difficult to attain, he was funny and had interesting references. Hence, I decided to download a sample on my Kindle. I was hooked and I bought the book immediately. I am now past the second chapter and it remains interesting.

Clive Thompson's book about technology changing our minds and the way we communicate was inspired by, ahem, another talk. This time, I was at the talk that Mr. Thompson gave at the plenary address at the Council of Science Editor's Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. The talk about the Future of Thought, and I, along with some other conference attendees thought this speech was the best at the conference.

IMO, @pomeranian99 stole the show with the plenary "The Future Of Thought", and many agree with me! https://t.co/EDYfHXoMzY

— Krishna Kumar V. (@krishna_kumar_v) May 18, 2015

Even in the talk, Clive was able to successfully demystify the notion that the changes in the way we communicate--the reliance of texting, social media, spending time online--which are generally considered bad for you, are not bad at all. We are thinking differently and that's fine. We are getting more information, which is benefiting us. He stresses on the "ambient information" from "weak ties" as the most useful information that you will get for your day-to-day life.

In other words, you will probably be more benefited from random status updates of your casual social acquaintances more than the in-depth discussions that you have with your spouse. Pretty cool, eh? If you want to find out more, please get the book. It's a smooth and fast-paced read.

Plus, Twitter now makes reading books on topics like these by being cool like this:

@pomeranian99 Just started reading your book. Thanks for making me feel better about living in a metropolis. :-)

— Krishna Kumar V. (@krishna_kumar_v) June 11, 2015

@krishna_kumar_v Aha, glad you like it! And yes, reading Glaeser's work made me feel better about living in cities, and being online, heh.

— Clive Thompson (@pomeranian99) June 11, 2015

We all need to feel better about being online. Such interaction between the author and the reader is proof. :-) https://t.co/SNiYW2f1e7

— Krishna Kumar V. (@krishna_kumar_v) June 11, 2015

The third book, the Lois Lowry classic, is the book of the month this month in the book club. I came to know about it around the time the movie was released. The concept is fascinating, and is one of the more plausible dystopias that you can expect to be reality soon. Plus, the writing is crisp and fast paced. I'm so glad we chose this book for the young-adult fiction category.

(PS: I realized that fiction tends to make me sleepy (because of I'm perpetually tired and sleep deprived) whereas non-fiction does not. This is probably the fourth neuroscience-related book that I've picked up in the last year or so.)

Just watched "Into The Storm." Pretty sure that the actual apocalypse will be a tornado apocalypse.
— Krishna Kumar V. (@krishna_kumar_v) August 11, 2014

It turns out that #GuardiansOfTheGalaxy is not as visually spectacular as #IntoTheStorm. I enjoyed the latter better.
— Krishna Kumar V. (@krishna_kumar_v) August 11, 2014

Once you are a blogger, you will always remain one. Agree?

Who are bloggers anyway? Individuals who want their words and thoughts rants to be read, appreciated, and commented on. Although this trend has been significantly dampened by the vicious onslaught of social networking platforms, some bloggers like me remain rather resilient.

Ever since I have been more active here and on Neverlast, I have restarted thinking in terms of who I encounter in my daily life will like what I post. This is what I tweeted earlier.

When you have been blogging for awhile, everyone around you becomes a potential reader.
— Kris Bass (@bass_man_1979) July 26, 2014

Although its quite obvious that everyone is promoting their content/themselves in some way or the other, I feel a tad ashamed. Am I being shallow? Does every blogger think this way? I would love to know your answers.

The last time I changed my blog template, I guess I was in a darker place in my life. I'm not saying that I've come out of it but I see slivers of neutrality in the way I perceive the world. So this afternoon, I was out doing strange things—strange considering that it was a Sunday where I had planned to stay in my apartment, be a hermit, and do my things (i.e., watch sport, read books, work on my guitar-playing skills, and watch TV series).

I took a shower and walked out the door for letting my maid get some time to tidy up my apartment. The only must-do thing on my list was get a strip of an antidepressant medication that I was having trouble getting. I placed a call to the pharmacy to find out that they still haven't received supplies from the company.

I didn't know what to do. I could have come back up to my apartment and sort of crawl into the bed with my Kindle or something. But I didn't. I went to the coffee shop across the road instead and read the book that I was reading, sipping two cups of americano. Strange. Americano has been by go-to-coffee for a few weeks now, after a coffee machine was installed at the office.

Being the state that I am in, I was very distracted. I went about reading like an ADD-affected individual*. Checking my phone every few seconds, zoning out to the two streams of conversations going on in the shop, and reading a few sentences of the book. I was very conscious of how distracted I was.

I must have checked my Twitter feed and something triggered the memory of a blog post in here. The post** is titled My "With Him, I'd Like To Have Sex" (WHILTHS) list". The triggers were two: a tweet from my friend about her Book-et list and my sudden remembrance of an actor from Stargate SG1 who I was horny for.

Do you have a Book-et List? http://t.co/PWCitGgwJr
— Affy K (@hitchhikeress) July 19, 2014

The result was an instantaneous tweet.

I have to add a lot of men to my "With Him, I'd Like To Have Sex" list on http://t.co/09JXSL5I9k
— Kris Bass (@bass_man_1979) July 20, 2014

After doing a couple of other things—getting a shave and doing my groceries listening to a podcast—I came back home all excited and got on my laptop. I looked at my blog. The template that I have been using for a couple of years looked stale and sort of wannabe. I was impatient and I instinctively went for this design. I hope I would like it a couple of weeks from now.

Plus, I have a few ideas for posts. After this is done, I'll start writing them. :)

*I may be an ADD-affected individual, you know.
**Coincidentally enough, this post was posted almost exactly 10 years ago - July 10th, 2004. :-O

As someone correctly pointed out, Amul spotted trends in India long before Twitter existed.(/via @imsabbah) It did it again. With Kolaveri Di. Hats off, I say!

Most sane Indians don’t hate Pakistan. And vice versa. They like each other and the others’ nations. This is especially true in social media.

I have some Twitter friends from Pakistan who seem to be so different from the stereotypical image being portrayed on various platforms about Pakistan and it’s citizens. They, in turn, accept those from India.

I have always believed that if a group of Pakistanis and Indians were locked together in a room, they will come to terms with each other just like any other random samples of population would.

The Pakistani authorities, however, seem to be trying tarnish their own country’s image. For example, the recent news about a new telecom regulation banning ‘offensive’ words and phrases in SMS messages.

Although, I have read somewhere that the rule is not going to be implemented, the stereotypes will in be further strengthened.

Those who are sane, however, will still continue to ridicule such ‘crazy’ rules hampering freedom of speech/expression.

So, I was on my way to work and there was a TOI front-page ad about the new smartphones that Nokia was launching. One was a touchscreen model, the other was a candy bar model, and the third one – well, it deserves to be mentioned – called X7 seemed like a touchscreen model made when the designer at Nokia had a really, really bad day.

The X7 has the strangest design that I have seen. The corners are chipped off in an unnatural fashion – remember that Nokia always believed in curves? - and the phone is thicker at the top and bottom. All the three models were running the new Symbian OS – Symbian Anna.

My immediate reaction was “Yuck,” and I posted it on Twitter. This was yesterday.

Later on, I got a tweet from @WOMWorldNokia saying that maybe I have jumped to an early conclusion and I might actually like X7 once I get my hands on it. They also asked me if I wanted to test drive one. I said I wouldn’t mind – Symbian Anna was worth it, I thought.

Today, I had the most pleasant interaction with a guy called Paul (from somewhere in the UK) over e-mail and finally I have agreed to test drive an X7 for 2 weeks. They will ship me the phone in some time. I’m really looking forward to testing it.

Now, the one thing that I want to say is that I was pleasantly surprised at the professional way guys at @WOMWorldNokia respond to criticism and convert Nokia haters into potential users. Kudos to them! :) Watch out for my full review of Nokia X7 later!

Unfortunately, it’s the same shit all over again. Television, newspapers, rants, opinions… wait a minute, there is something different this time around. And that is Twitter! With Twitter, you get access to the thoughts of free-thinking individuals which are, trust me, far better than the farce the put on TV these days.

Yes, Mumbai’s resilience needs to be sent back to the cupboard. But if you want to some sane opinion on issues such as this, as well as cricket, from an intelligent Mallu, of course, here’s what you have to follow – @prempanicker on Twitter.

The whole world has been talking about and I have been dying to get into it. I finally did that today. And I was impressed. Google+, the latest and the best effort by the search engine giant, to enter into the social networking space.

It’s a clean interface and I’m still getting used to dragging people into Circles. I haven’t tried hangouts yet. The news feed is primarily geeky stuff related to Google+ itself. Compared to FaceBook, they have got privacy up front. That way, they have succeeded.

But it’s still grossly underpopulated and undertested. Will it be compatible with FaceBook and Twitter. Would we need to update Google+ separately (the others have integration features). Only, time will tell.

Until then, ummm… I don’t know, I might give it the same attention as I give to Twitter and Facebook.

I mean, are you guys serious? You don’t want to develop your teeny-weeny brains? What the fuck? You don’t care about being funny and getting to know the truth from around the world? If not for all of the above, aren’t you tired of FaceBook yet? Come on, give me a break. Get yourself together and sign up for the coolest thing on the world at this very moment. Why? Because it might not be so in a few more days. You will get to know why. Very soon. Very very soon.

All this is inspired by the wonderful tag #AapChutiyeHain.

http://twitter.com/#!/bass_man_1979/status/82654344331268096

Last week sometime, I tweeted something funny about Arindam Choudhary and IIPM. I was getting tired listening to him in the promotional advertisements for the Sunday Indian as well as those really lame IIPM advertisements. My tweet went like this: “I think IIPM would get more global exposure if someone kills Arindam Choudhary.” My usual Mallu sarcasm was kicking in. I got even a ‘like’ on the FB cross-posting for the same tweet.

Yesterday, I got an e-mail from the all India dean of IIPM. He kindly requested me to consider deleting the tweet because he thought it was offensive and detailed physical harm for Arindam Choudhary. He was very polite and courteous. I considered the situation for a bit and agreed to delete the tweet. From my point of view, the message was already conveyed to those who mattered to me. More importantly, I had vented my frustration. So today, I deleted the tweet.

The tweet has been deleted but the story is immortalized here.

I have been wondering about this particular hashtag (#embee) for quite some time now. I couldn't find the answer for the question even on a Google search. Finally, I asked Twitter and it came up with immediate answers. Apparently, a clever, innovative Indian is the person behind it. His name is Mihir S. Bijur. Here's the post on his blog explaining what it stands for.

I have two of everything. Well, almost. I have two e-mail accounts, to FB accounts, and two Twitter accounts. On FaceBook, especially, I have a little game going on between the two accounts (Krishna Kumar Venkitachalam and Kris Bass, who are in complicated relationship). Yesterday, I had this idea of tweeting two contrasting, almost contradictory, versions of the same tweet.

I had three such tweets:

• Krishna: So many people to love and so little time to do it...
• Kris: So many people to make love to and so little time to do it...
  
  
• Krishna: Playfulness is so much more fun when some romance is involved.
• Kris: Romance is so much more fun when some playfulness is involved.
  
  
• Krishna: I wish I could feel attracted to men as much as they feel attracted to me.
• Kris: I wish men would feel attracted to me as much as I feel attracted to them.

I enjoyed doing this and hope to do more in the future.

There was a time, a couple or years or so back, when I had a good time at parties -- especially gay parties. Of course, after coming to Mumbai, I was initiated to GB parties by a friend -- who himself is a surgeon, but is closeted. I had some acquaintances to talk to and things to talk about -- about my career as a surgeon, about my aspirations as a musician, about my wonderful relationship with Vinokur etc.

Things have changed much since then. In the last few parties or so, I have had the worst experiences of my life. I would stumble in, usually with a heartful of expectations, and find no one interesting. Soon, I'd be drinking down drinks while checking out stuff on the internet on my mobile. There might even be good cricket/football matches that I had left at home, the scores of which I would be checking furiously. No one would come talk to me -- of course, I wouldn't find anybody interesting to talk to too.

Occassionally, there would be a familiar face in the crowd, someone that I knew but wasn't close enough to hold a conversation with. I would usually go up to them and greet them and whine about the boring party. If there people who I knew better, I'd want to strike up a conversation with them, but they would need to cater to his other friends sooner than later. Finally, I'd be all alone with my mobile phone.

People have asked on occasions whom I was messaging. Of course, when I was in a relationship with Vinokur, I'd have been communicating with him in one way or the other. But now, I have no specific person to communicate with. So I'd be spending time on Twitter and FaceBook.

So what has changed? I have grown old, I have thrown away my surgical career, I've put on weight and grown hair all over, I have fallen out of my 'unbreakable' relationship with Vinokur, I am cagey with my mind full of insecurities, and my social phobia. But more importantly, is it a case of me changing as a person? From being a converted extrovert back to an introvert?

I don't know, but parties aren't my kinda thing anymore! Give me loneliness, give me internet, give me sport on television. I'm happy that way. Oh, I'm game for one-on-one dates still.

This is going to be a really small blog post. Something that would keep up with the spirit of Twitter. A few months back, I really caught on to Twitter -- like a house on fire. There were many reasons. But the main reason was the need to employ impromptu, ingenious ways to frame concise text messages to pull in contexts from anything ranging from pop-culture to mathematics. This is amply demonstrated in this link to a Twitter search page which gives you the results for the hashtag #cgawkerissoedgy.

Now, you will need to understand a little bit of the background:

• cgawker, or @cgawker in Twitter, is a funny guy on Twitter with an edgy sense of humor
• Hashtags (#) are used to refer to a particular topic on Twitter. A hashtag is a way to unite global Tweets around some particular topic. Basically, these are tags that that help those who seek similar content discover your Tweets. Read more about it here, here, and here.
• #cgawkerissoedgy was a hashtag invented by his followers on Twitter to refer to his humor. It reads "cgawker is so edgy."
  

Go through the list of entries in there. Decide for yourself. Isn't Twitter the coolest? More importantly, aren't @cgawker and his friends the coolest?

I have been procrastinating far too long. For close to two years, I hadn’t doodled with the design layout on my blog. But I knew that my blog needed a facelift. Things have changed and we all know it, and it’s time to accept the reality—Twitter has invaded my life as much as as that any intelligent adult’s.

Presenting to you (drum roll) the new Engayging Life look. Nothing big really! The single right column look has given way to a more modern two-column look (one on each column). This was done primarily to facilitate the seamless integration of my Twitter life to my blog.

I have two Twitter accounts—one for Peter Parker and another for Spidey. You can read my tweets and keep up with me and what I have been upto on the left-hand column now. You can also follow me by clicking on the links below. The rest of the stuff remains pretty much the same.

Love it or hate it, please let me know it.

So many things to write about, but so little time. That's the story of my life. In a nutshell, however, I can catalog it here. Here goes...

• I'm back to being up and down. I'm going through a change of medications (antidepressants/antipsychotics/mood stabilizers etc.), perhaps I'll soon reach a stable baseline.
• Twitter is back into my life. I'm tweeting more than ever. If you are a horny gay male bird wanting to mate with me, follow me or my alter-ego Krishna.
• I'm watching plays and hanging out with friends more often.
• I've finally started having my own mini bar at home. I have started out with whisky (Royal Stag), vodka (Sminnoff classic) and beer (Kingfisher Blue). If you are hunky enough, funny enough, or hung enough, please saunter into my apartment after informing me - you might just have the quiet drink of your life.
• I have decided to not move out of my present apartment. That, ufortunately will happen next year. Or so it seems now.
• I'm planning to join a gym! Yeah, I need to get my waist from the present 31 to past 29!
• I've planning to buy an iPod. I want a gigantic storage space for music/videos/movies. iPod Classic?
• I'm making plans to upgrade (in the next 6 months or so) my existing phone (Sony Ericsson P1i) into something even better! I am looking for QWERTY smartphones preferably with huge touch screens preferably on the Android platform. The options that I'm currently considering are as follows:
  
  
  
  • Motorola Milestone (or Droid)
  • BlackBerry Curve 8520/BlackBerry Bold 9000
  • SE Aspen/SE Xperia Mini Pro
  • LG GW 620
  • Others? (Please suggest)