Delhi's water for free

The new Delhi government, keeping its poll promise has announced 20KL of free water a month to each household with a metered connection. Use a litre more than this, and you'll be charged for the entire amount of water consumed. i.e. 20001 litres. This scheme is likely to be a disaster. And one needn't wait long to see the effects.

The scheme heavily penalizes usage beyond the 20KL. So there is a huge incentive to 'officially' use just below 20KL every month.

What could happen is:

• Spurt in (requests for) metered connections.
• Large scale tampering of meters.
• Households monitoring their water consumption closely, and stopping each month and just below 20KL. They would then depend on alternative sources for their remaining consumption. This could be water tankers, or bore-wells (don't know if they exist in Delhi).
• Connections which currently use well below 20KL per month, could start selling their surplus free water in the black market.
• Large number of complaints about faulty meters.
• Increased number of outages and disruptions in water supply. Delays in fixing them.

It would be interesting to see the distribution of water consumption across connections before and after this scheme. While before could most likely be a normal curve, the distribution with this scheme would likely peak just below 20KL with it falling sharply to 0 on either side. It would pick up again at values > 30KL.

PS: Just had a look at my water bill. It must be a really large household to reach even close to 20KL per month.

Of Gods and Men

The requirements for the genesis of a religion

• Blind adoring fans. E

• Drastic fall in intelligence levels when talking about object of worship. E

• Animosity towards anyone who disagrees or criticizes. Ad Hominem attacks. E

• The feeling that everyone else shares the same devotion.

• Seeing meaningless patterns and co-incidences in words and numbers related to the 'diety'. E

• A place of worship, perhaps with a statue inside. E

• The need to prove that he / she is superior in all respects. Quoting numerous and twisted statistics / tales to do so. E

• Trying to outdo each other in proving allegiance. Often going over the top to do so. Bending rules in the process. E

• Ascribing miracles to idol <pending>

Perhaps in a few years, we'll hear of a little girl miraculously cured of blindness, after sleeping with a Sachin poster on her wall. And then we'll have all the ingredients.

Indian colonization of English

Once upon a long ago, the English colonized India. With our frequent hartals, strikes & fasts-to-death, they finally got fed up and left.

But we weren't done with them yet. We have been working surreptitiously to take-over their language. With assistance from many other fellow ex-colonies. While the Americans set about ruining the spellings, the Indians worked on new meanings and extensions. And we're not satisfied with just adding new words such as Hartal, Satyagraha, Padayatra etc. We want to twist around original words as well. Hopefully the rest of the world will soon join us.

Some eg:

Revert: Not established yet inspite of frequent use, but will in the near future mean 'To respond or reply to.'
Prepone: Clearly a more logical antonym than 'advance'.
Thrice: If you can have twice, then why say 'three times'?
And Triple is more cogent than 'treble'. You already have triplets and triple jump anyway. And it's easier to 'triplicate' something than reproducing threefold. Soon we'll start working on Fourple. The 'e' at the end to be pronounced as 'ay'. Quadruple is too difficult to spell.

In the pipeline, some other terms we plan to introduce to the RotW.
Wheatish complexion for the Northies, and Ricish (Brown variety) for the Southies.
Victims of Eve teasing still face a lot of tension in their efforts to get some redressal of the same.
Passing out would not require the services of an allopath.
Even Tolkien uses sister-sons, so why not cousin brothers?
BHK will be a standard in all accomodation classifieds.

Now, am off to read some non-veg jokes that a batchmate forwarded. Meanwhile entertain yourself referring to these dictionaries. Or this blog

Where're you off to?

In most of the Anglo Saxon regions the standard exchange when passing an acquaintance on the street (or elsewhere) is to wish the person a Good [time of the day]. With greater familiarity, this might be followed by "How are you?". Keeping in mind that this is a greeting, and not a question, the expected response is along the lines of "Fine. How are you?". Past this you can safely pass, and get on with your lives.

In the Gelf, the greeting goes, Good {time of day} (or alternatively, Peace on You), followed immediately by "How are You?". And without waiting for response or catching breath, continue with "How's your family? How're your children? How're your wives? How're your goats?......"
Response would be something like, "Bright {time of the day}, I am fine, praise the lord. The kids are fine, praise the lord. The wives are fine, praise the lord. The goats are well fed, praise the lord...." And then you shoot the same set of questions back.
This could easily take a few minutes. This protocol is followed for phone conversations as well, before entering the purpose of call. And the telcos have made a killing out of this, with the mean talk time per call about 5 minutes longer than the international average.

In many parts of India, apparently the method of greeting a passing neighbour or colleague is to say, "Where are you going?". Note: Say, not ask. You're not expected to precisely answer this. Unless the questioner is you aunt, in which case, she probably wants to know. The expected response is to vaguely wave your hand in the direction you are moving, and say "Just, there." And smile, and move on.

Battling Corruption

If you have government, you'll have opportunities for corruption. One way to fight this is to have more stringent laws. Anna Hazare & gang have taken this route. And they seem to have got a lot of mileage as well. But this route is fraught with dangers. Laws always lead to unintended consequences, which could easily open up new opportunities to play the system.

Another option is to have lesser government. Smaller government. Reduce the role of government in everyday life. And leave it to the market to fill in. This reduces opportunities for corruption.

We can have both tougher laws and smaller govt. But if just one, I'd prefer the latter.

Not quite the Golden Gate

Signs of Progress

 A Wi-Fi enabled bus-stop in Calicut, Kerala

Austerity - Indian style

Digest this. A couple of Indian Central Govt. Ministers, whose personal wealth run into crores, have been asked to stop spending their own money on accommodation, and waste spend the taxpayers' instead.

And I thought you had to spend your way out of the recession? Your own money, not the taxpayers'. Those who can, should be allowed to spend on their wants. This keeps money circulating in the economy.

So what is the new plan? Shun 5-star hotels and run them out of business? And then maybe airlines as well, by sticking to trains? Ministers have already been asked to use Economy Class when flying. Some have objected to this. Sharad Pawar claims that he doesn't fit into an Economy seat. Other ministers such as Farooq Abdulla have also stated their dislike for the cattle class. Pranab Mukherjee has been lambasted for publicly "advising" his colleagues to cut spending. And funnily he himself doesn't seem to be observing this in his planned jaunt to Cyprus

Of course, being economical when it comes to government expenditure is quite welcome. Apparently a lot of policemen have already been relieved from useless security cover duties. But asking all govt officials to use Air India is clearly not saving the taxpayers anything. Air India should be sold off, and the likes of Kingfisher & Jet allowed to fill its space.

Suddenly everyone seems to be on Krishna's & Tharoor's backs - showing them how their colleagues are very thrifty in spending public money. Poor rich fellows:(

A Holistic soothsayer!

During my teenage years, I had a fascination for all pseudo-sciences. Turned out that this was normal - most of my peers shared these interests.

1st read up Linda Goodman's Sun Signs. And started categorizing people by their DoB. Augmented this with Indian star signs. So now everyone was mapped on to a 2D matrix. And then added palmistry to the repertoire. Didn't really believe all this, though it didn't stop me from trying it out on every possible subject.

Later got hooked into Graphology after seeing a TV programme on it. Bought 3 books on it. Now this was more interesting for 2 reasons.
1 - It appeared scientific.
2 - Unlike the zodiac, very few were familiar with this. So it hasn't been widely ridiculed yet. And I could easily pretend to the local expert in school.

Finally added Kinesics to this list. And turned into an integrated cold reader. Took a few years to realize that this was all Bovine Scat.

After this I had taken to debunking practitioners of such arts. Usually they would be specialists in only one of the forms.

Sunita Menon seems to be a generalist. Her calling card reads 'Clairvoyant, healer, counsellor, psychic, guide, philosopher and mentor'. She's most famous however as a Tarot Card reader. As part of the independence day celebrations, the Indian Embassy in Muscat started of with a talk by this celebrity psychic. Celebrity status clearly enhanced by the likes of Karan Johar & Ekta Kapoor being her regular clients. In Kapoor's dud Krishna Cottage, the seance played by Rati Agnihotri is named Sunita Menon.


The widely covered tamasha at the embassy was billed as the "Exotic Indian Science of Tarot Reading". This appears flawed on many fronts. Tarots are not of Indian Origin. They came up in continental Europe merely as a game. Later when it spread to the British Isles, it started getting used for divination. Hence the references in the Harry Potter series, and probably the most famous - Solitaire in Live & Let Die.

I guess it can be called 'exotic' in the sense that it is 'foreign' to this part of the world. And it's as much 'Science' as 'Intelligent Design'.

Her show seemed to have impressed the audience, going by the newspaper reports. Keeping with her ilk, she doesn't appear to have definitely forecast anything during her talk, despite numerous queries. The only prediction that is not completely vague is when she said that the US would take another 10 months to come out of the economic depression, Europe even further, and India & the Middle East have already started coming out. Waiting to see if this happens. Though it'll be difficult to define what exactly needs to happen to certify that the depression is over.

Like everyone and their uncle, she claims to have forecast the market crash as far as 2 years ago. If she knew so clearly, why didn't she go short, and make some serious money out of her forecasting abilities?

Dial 419

In the 1920s many people apparently got letters for a prisoner incarcerated under a false identity in Spain. The writer sought help to get him released and promised a share of large riches in return. Known then as the Spanish Prisoner Con, this has morphed into different forms, and refuses to die.

Nigeria has of course taken over as the hotbed for such schemes. But amazed that there are still people who fall for this. This man feels ashamed that the perpetrator comes from his land, sullying his name as well. And I feel embarrassed that the victim is from my land:(

Worldy Wise

Amazing how much print is wasted on horoscopes, zodiac, star forecasts and such. The Times of Oman Thursday supplement dated Jan 15 2009 has a 14 page feature on star forecasts for 2009, for all humanity. 14 pages of vague drivel, predicting the year ahead for 6 billion people.

Normally quite difficult to evaluate the accuracy. For one, it is all ambiguous. And second, no body remembers this one year on; especially if the prediction did not come true. In the very unlikely event of something predicted actually happening, the proponents would be blowing their trumpets all over the place. And the billions of false predictions easily get brushed aside.

However once in a while we are able to pin down these fraudsters. A case in point is the forecast for 2008 by a Muscat based astrologer that appeared in the ToO Thursday magazine dated Jan 24-30 2008.
A few gems from the article.

Opening para - "Prospects appear bright for the world in general for the year 2008. The beginning of the year falls under the star of 'moon' and in the sign of 'Virgo' indicating material prosperity and luxuries."
[Pervez Musharraf] will continue to be president of Pakistan successfully in 2008.
[Hillary Clinton] shows success to US presidency 2008
[George W Bush] Failing health will trouble him
[Sonia Gandhi] Sickness will persist in the year.
[Bal Thackeray] the family feud in politics (with nephew) will come to an end.
[Gordon Brown] will have favourable results in elections, success and also public opinion will be in his favour.
[Lakshmi Mittal] 2008 will bring success in all endeavours. Only he lost $16 billion this year.
[Rahul Gandhi] Marriage is also on the cards for him.
Shahrukh Khan will enter politics.
[Sunjay Dutt] will have successful films to his credit. All three movies of his in 2008 flopped.
Atal Behari Vajpayee will be honoured with the highest award of the nation.
[Sensex] would not be a surprise if it touches 25000.

Read the full article for a good laugh.