Children show a mirror to us

I was watching a video of Palki Sharma’s on YouTube. My daughter, 8 years old, looked at me and said, “You are always watching videos of this woman.”

Then she pointed at the first video on the recommendation list and said, “videos of this woman and this man. You are always watching their videos.” The video she pointed at was one of Richard Murphy’s.

Children show a mirror to us, in which we can see our own habits, tastes, and loyalties (among others).

The impact of delayed payments on CIBIL score

HSBC Bank is a bank I try to avoid as much as possible because their tech systems are buggy, and their stance arrogant. I came to this conclusion after their systems wrongly flagged my accounts twice, once in 2021 and again a different account in 2022.

I had closed an HSBC credit card in 2006. HSBC Bank lost track of some details about this card and started reporting this card as delinquent in 2021. For 15 years, they had forgotten about this card. In 2020, they even issued me a new credit card. But in 2021, they randomly decided that I hadn’t been paying my credit card bill for 15 years. This was purely because of HSBC Bank’s incompetence in record-keeping, but they pushed the blame onto me because they could. Incompetent, dishonest, and immoral: quite a combination.

I was naive back then, and I decided to pay the bank their ransom to mark this card as paid. I really should have complained to the RBI and shouldn’t have paid them a paisa. But I was ignorant, and just paid my way out of this headache.

But this so-called “delinquency” has been in my credit report ever since, and naturally, it was pulling my credit score down.

Back in September 2023, 2 years after I paid HSBC the ransom, my CIBIL credit score went from around 730 to around 760. A jump of 30 points right around the time when this “delinquency” was just over 2 years old. Now, in September 2024, the score has gone up by another 30 points since the “delinquency” is now more than 3 years old.

In fact, the report now shows that I have been paying my dues on time 100% of the time.

Why am I writing about this?

I am writing this post because I can now see that CIBIL only looks at repayment history of the past 3 years. It’s also nice to finally get a score that I deserve. I am amused, and I am sharing it with others. That’s pretty much it.

If your credit score is affected by something negative like this, be hopeful that eventually the negative remarks will stop impacting your score. But be aware that credit reporting agencies can change the rules at any time. They may change 3 years to 5 years (or 2 years) if that suits them. The score bump may not stay at 30 points per year—it may increase or decrease.

Credit reporting is a practice by lenders for lenders. They don’t care much about borrowers. I always recommend people to ignore credit scores and focus on what’s in their control. (I regularly review my credit report to see if there are unexpected entries there. But I don’t care too much about the score per se. Worrying about things not in our control is unproductive.)

Money is fungible, but many of us don’t appreciate that

Quoting a Bits about Money article on credit card rewards:

Money is fungible, money is fungible, money is fungible, but many people don’t actually orient their lives as if this were true, and so the financial industry meets them where they are and then charges them for the privilege.

This is so very true. I learnt this through experience, after paying interest to a bank for no good reason.

I had some unexpected expenses a few years back. I had assets I could sell, but I didn’t want to sell them. I was too emotionally attached to be able to sell them. I decided I’d pledge some of my debt mutual funds and get a loan. My bank happily took the debt fund units as collateral and issued me a loan. I was paying over 8% interest on the loan while the collateral, the debt fund units, were appreciating roughly by 5%. It took me many months to realise that I was paying my bank for the “privilege” of holding on to a low yielding asset.

‘Money going down the drain’ by Rainbow International CC BY 2.0

It was easy once I realised my foolishness. I sold off the debt funds and closed the loan.

It makes no sense to pay a bank only to hold onto some assets. It is even less sensible if the asset in question appreciates more slowly than the cost of the loan.

Ice creams are fun!

You like a certain pillow and a blanket in your house. They are your favourites. You bring them to the living room and put them on the floor when you watch TV. Because why not? They are your favourites after all.

You suddenly remember the 4 ice creams that are kept in the freezer. The freezer is a bit too high, but you can move your brother’s study desk and stand on it to reach the freezer; no big deal. You take the entire box with 4 ice creams and bring them to the living room. Did you close the freezer? Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t. But you’re too thrilled to worry about that now.

You take all 4 ice creams out and spread them on your favourite pillow. They are all different colours and you’re amused looking at them. But ice creams are tasty too. You eat them all in random order. Take one bite from this, and immediately get attracted by the other one, so one bite from that.

You don’t have the appetite to finish eating 1 ice cream, let alone 4. The ice creams are all meting. So you do the next best thing anyone can do: play with them. Spread the molten ice creams everywhere on the floor, on your favourite bedsheet, on your favourite pillow, on your clothes, everywhere on your body. It’s all super fun. The coldness and the gooey texture of the ice creams add to the fun.

When the ice creams are all fully molten and spread everywhere, not much is left to play with. You leave the place and go somewhere else and start a new game because you’re creative enough to invent a dozen new games everyday.

If you’re my daughter Anjana, this is something you’d casually do on a weekday afternoon. She’s probably thinking now, “Whether you eat them or play with them, ice creams are always fun!”

The missing piece

When I moved to Bengaluru last year, I decided that I wouldn’t buy a car. When Uber and Ola taxis are available within a few minutes, having to pay for car maintenance seemed unnecessary to me. We got by without a car for the past year, and we were mostly fine. There were times when the need for an own car was felt more than other times, but I stood by my decision to not buy a car.

Last month Bengaluru went under a full lockdown for a week. There was an urgent need to see a doctor, but no taxis were available. Many auto drivers refused to take us too, fearing that they’ll be stopped by cops. After a bit of a hassle and a lot of stressful minutes, a kind person agreed to lend us his scooter. It wasn’t an ideal choice for that day, but it was far better than not making the appointment. It was then that I decided to buy a car.

I started enquiring as soon as the lockdown was lifted and got my car delivered yesterday. Since morning, I have been kinda looking for reasons to go out 😁. In the evening I decided that we’ll all go out to get some ice cream. I called Corner House, my favourite ice cream joint, and asked them if they allowed people to dine in. The answer was negative, but that wasn’t unexpected. We decided to drive down anyway and bring the ice cream home. Buying through Swiggy would have saved us time and money for sure. But the real goal was spending some quality time in the new car, so we went out.

After spending one and a half hour outside home, it was good to be back home. I felt refreshed. I think being stuck at home had made me unhappy and the little bit of “outside time” had made me happier. Spending time outside is likely the missing piece in my life in these “stay at home” days. With a car accessible 24×7, I think I’ll find ways to spend enough time outside and remain happy.

•••

This is also making me think about jail time as a punishment. Being locked up in a jail for even 6 months can be very painful. Spending years of your life in a jail is super sad. When I was younger, I used to think that punishing with 1 year or 2 years jail time was nothing. Anything less than 10 years seemed like an “easy punishment” to me. But now I see how even a few months can be really tough.

My first fall off a bicycle in years

I take Stevens Creek Trail while cycling to work. Taking the trail is safer and easier than riding on the roads because motorcycles and cars are not allowed on the trail. But there’s one part where the trail is significantly less safe: when getting off of it near Google office. The trail is elevated and is about 10 feet above the ground around it. To get off the trail, I have to climb down this steep, irregular descent.

Usually this is fine; I am used to rough trails like this from my childhood. But today was different. I waited about 15 seconds at the top yielding to another cyclist on the ground. By this time, there was another cyclist behind me, waiting for me to move. I became nervous about blocking someone else’s way. As soon as the cyclist on the ground was out of my way, I hurried down the descent and ended up falling off.

This is my first fall in California. I’m a bit embarrassed because I know how to take this descent correctly. Should be more careful in the future. :)

Skipping lines is for jerks

It’s been raining this week, so I have been driving to work since yesterday. Driving to work means I need to take the Shoreline Boulevard exit from 101N freeway. Turning right after the exit takes you to Google offices, while turning left takes you away from Google. Naturally, there’s a very long line on the right turn lanes while left turn lanes are almost empty.

When coming to work this morning, I thought I would turn left from the exit and then take a U turn after so I don’t have to wait on Shoreline exit. I had passed about half of the line on right-hand side lanes when I spotted a gap in the line. I squeezed in and started waiting in there. That’s when I realised I was being a jerk. Everyone in the line has joined at the end and moved forward slowly. Jumping the line and joining in the middle is impolite. We won’t do that where people stand on the line — they’ll give us a dirty look and quite possibly ask us to join the line from the end. But because they cannot do anything when everyone is sitting inside a car, it doesn’t suddenly become okay to not follow etiquette.

I felt bad enough to leave the right turn lane and go with my original plan. I took a left, took a U turn, and got to work. Maybe it took me a bit longer, but I don’t feel like a jerk. That’s a good thing.

Driving on the freeways

I have always considered driving on the highways easier than driving in the streets. There’s a lot of space for yourself and a lot less possibilities for a collision. Every time people expressed their view that driving on the freeways in the US was a little dangerous, I refused to accept it. What happened yesterday and today has made me think again.

I was on a ramp connecting CA-85N to US-101N. The ramp was mostly empty, and I was driving at around 50mph. There was a Honda Accord to my right just ahead of me. I wasn’t paying much attention to my own lane because I was busy looking at the fine details of the Accord’s body. Only after a second or so I saw that my lane had completely stopped with cars queueing up. I stepped on the brake and thank god my car stopped without colliding into the car before me.

On the same road today, (US-101N) I was merging onto the right-most lane so I could take the next exit. Traffic was moving at around 30mph or so. In the one second I turned my head to look at my blind spot, the lane had completely stopped and there was hardly a second for me to stop. I jammed the brake again, and my car stopped just at the right time.

It’s crazy how unpredictable traffic on freeways is!

Tests and scores

When my friends used to fear and despise tests and exams in school, I wasn’t so negative about tests. Most likely because I had no issues excelling in those tests. After years of going through tests, one day I realised something. Tests are tools for evaluating one’s own progress. Fussing about grades and ranks is besides the point. The main benefit of taking a test is that when the results come out you would know if you have learned well enough. (This is assuming you believe what the test measures is important.)

I had a similar revelation again today. I have been doing vision training exercises for the past few weeks. Vision training computer program gives you a series of challenges and gives you a score for each challenge based on how well you tackled it. These challenges are designed in such a way that they stretch your eyes’ focusing muscles increasing the efficiency of your eyes. Once you score above a certain threshold in a challenge, you are taken to the next level where the challenge gets a little harder.

At some point, pride took over and I got too fixated on the score. All I had in mind when sitting for the training was that I should score above the threshold and move to next level. By blindly focusing on getting to higher levels, I failed to notice what the vision training was meant to accomplish: to train your eyes to perform well in different scenarios. Like how physical exercises train your body to do well in different scenarios.

In hindsight this is obvious, but I didn’t know this was a mistake I was making. My mad attempts to push through the levels in the training programme actually made it harder for me to make any progress. Once I knew what’s the essence of the training, I could consciously focus on what my eyes were doing rather than the score I’d be earning. I did the training the “right way” today. Though I didn’t score enough to move to the next level, I am confident I am on the right track.

Local discount

I walk through Darling Harbour to work everyday.  I’d often stop at Harbourside mall to grab something to eat or a cup of coffee.  It’s been a routine for almost two years now.  Today, as I was walking towards Gloria Jeans, a shop on the way attracted my attention with the sign “Best cappuccino in Darling Harbour”.  I thought I’d try their coffee today.  After ordering my flat white, I noticed that the price wasn’t exactly cheap.  It was $4.80 here, while it’d cost me only $4 in Gloria Jeans, or $3.5 in the shop right next to my home.

I like clearing out my wallet of all coins, and today I had $4.90 in coins in my wallet.  I paid $4.80 in coins, and the shopkeeper asked me, “Do you work here, sir?”.  “No, I work in Pyrmont.  I live in the city, so I walk through this way”, was my response.  He gave 80 cents back and told me that locals get a discount in all shops in the mall.  He said, “When you buy something in this mall, tell them you work here and get a discount.  Even if you’re just walking through, you are eligible.”

You have no idea how pleased I am!

Lying

I was going to an Indian restaurant for dinner.  I was very happy on the streets as I was walking.  I really liked the buildings of London... they were beautiful.  I was making plans that I would live in Europe for a few years.  I can travel around all of Europe.

I reached the place I was going to, and bought myself some biryani.  The food wasn’t great.  I kept complaining inside my head about the food, and at one point I posted a mean comment on Google+ about the food I was eating.  I remember very well, I was laughing when I posted it.

Then two employees of the restaurant asked me independently if the food was good.  To the first person, I said “it’s okay”.  I said the same to the second person, but this person wasn’t happy with my answer.  He then asked “are you liking the biryani, is it good?” looking for a more definitive answer.  I really didn’t want to talk about the food.  It was a done deal; I had eaten more than half of it already.  If I complained now, they would want to “fix” the problem, and that would only mean more delays.  I didn’t want to return the food either.  So I said “yes, yes” only to make him go away.

That was it.  I couldn’t face the restaurant staff any more.  I felt as if I had disrespected them for no reason.  I was feeling very bad on the way back.  I thought I was feeling bad because of that mean comment I posted about the food on Google+.  I took my phone and immediately deleted that post... that felt like the “right thing” because I had started believing that the food wasn’t all that bad, and only I was overreacting.

After coming home, when I think about it now, I think it’s the lie that has made me feel so bad.  In my view, lying is a deep form of disrespect.  I think I still haven’t forgiven myself for having disrespected the restaurant staff.

Wavy waters

I was thinking about the dreams I had of living with IS and my dreams of travelling all over India when Janaki interrupted me to ask what I was thinking.  We were sitting in Thanjavoor Periya Kovil, a temple I had fancied ever since I learned about it as a child.  Periyal Kovil in Tamil means Big Temple.  The name itself was intriguing and made me wonder how big the temple actually was.  I didn’t even know which god the temple was for — it didn’t matter — I just liked the temple for its name.

I had married Janaki the previous week.  I wasn’t very excited about the marriage itself, and even less excited about my new wife.  My mind was preoccupied with lost dreams.  I had always thought IS and I would be living like the young couples they show in movies... the couples that are so happy that you want to be like them.  I’d dream that I would be driving my car in a highway with IS sitting next to me and we’ll be talking, singing aloud, stopping to take pictures, staying in random hotels, and having fun travelling around.  For two days after the wedding I didn’t feel anything, but as relatives left and the reality set in, I felt more and more miserable.

I don’t even remember what I told Janaki then at the temple.  Probably it didn’t matter what I said; maybe she was just making an attempt to start a conversation.  When two people new to each other are sitting together, silence can be intimidating.  Once they have remained silent for a while, breaking that silence can be even more intimidating.  But Janaki was willing to break the silence; she took the first step to make our relationship work, when I was actively resisting every minute of my new life.

Once we started living by ourselves in Madurai, I had to face the reality, and being resigned to everything was not a practical option anymore.  Slowly we defined our relationship and defined our own unwritten protocols.  I learned to ask her to help me with things.  If I felt like coffee, I’d ask her to make one.  I’d have preferred to make it myself, but she’d feel bad for reasons I couldn’t comprehend.  After a while, asking her to make coffee was not only convenient, but it even started feeling natural.

The real change happened on our first vacation after I had just bought my car.  We took the car and visited my father and her parents, and went to Periya Kovil.  That was the first temple Janaki and I had gone to by ourselves, so she was sentimentally attached to it.  Her face when we were sitting in the temple — content with the life she was living — is still in my eyes.  While walking back to our car she held my hand tightly and walked along like a kid with her father... entirely positive about life... or maybe thinking nothing about life and just happy to be holding my hand.  I didn’t feel as happy as she did, but I was at peace nonetheless.

Next year I wanted to drive down to Visakhapatnam, which Janaki wasn’t very keen of.  She didn’t really enjoy sitting in a car all day and staring at roads.  I had always loved roads, and I was always dreaming of being on the road driving my own car with someone I really, really like.  Neither of us wanted to compromise on our plans for the vacation, so we had no vacation that year.  Janaki was disappointed, but she truly believed that it was all my fault.  That was the first blow our marriage sustained.  What was lost in that bitterness was lost forever... like a fallen tooth that never grew again.

Next year I planned the vacation entirely based on Janaki’s preferences.  The places we went to and the things we did were sure fun, but I couldn’t be genuinely happy about being there and doing them.  When you’re faking a smile, when you’re pretending to be happy, it shows, and it hardly ever makes the people around you happy.  My dissatisfaction ruined Janaki’s happiness, and that year’s vacation ended up even more bitter than the one that didn’t happen the previous year.

Life went on like a vessel on wavy water.  Eventually I realised life is so volatile that judging your future based on your present is always wrong.  But I learned that way too late, after our relationship was irreparably broken and we had to separate.  Janaki had become too adamant and unyielding and all my attempts to reconnect failed.

I haven’t taken a vacation this year, but I don’t want to travel alone anymore.  I sometimes want to start my life all over again... but I don’t have the energy or courage for that.  Marriage has turned my life upside down.  But certain things never change.  Not a day goes by without me thinking that life would have been joyous if only I had married IS.

--
Thanks to Sumitra for inspiration.  Thanks to Nags for inspiration as well as for proofreading the draft of this post.

The cooking saga begins

After starving for a few weekend days with absolutely nothing to eat[*], I gave in and ordered a microwave.  The oven got delivered yesterday, so on the way back from work, I bought some eggs and some milk for making coffee.  I had no idea what I'd do with the egg, but if at all I am cooking something, I wanted it to be egg.

I woke up late today, as it's usual for a Saturday, and made myself an instant coffee using the microwave.  Was wasting time on the web till 11.30 when I actually felt like some food.  With eggs and a microwave at my disposal, I decided to use the simple recipe I found on wikihow.

With almost nothing to add to eggs (apart from salt, which I remembered to buy yesterday) the eggs were a bit bland.  Well, actually it was too salty, but it'd have been nicer and better-looking if I had had some onions and green chillies.

Cooking is sure some work, but it's a lot easier than going out only to eat.  I guess I'll cook my breakfast over weekends going forward, mainly because it's simpler and I don't enjoy starving anyway :)

Now that the hunger god is pacified, I should go buy some essentials to make future cooking experience better :)

[*] I always have candies, ice creams, and some Indian snacks at home, but I don't eat them when I am hungry.  They are to eat when I am bored :)

Story of a failed software project

This happened in my second year MCA.  Through some friends, Mr TM got to know of me, and he said that one of his relatives wanted to computerise his business.  He proposed that he will take care of everything and I'd just write code.  He could write code himself, of course, but he didn't have the time for it.  So I agreed.  By this time I had had some bad experiences with MS Access, so I suggested that we'd use MS SQL Server as the database.  But TM wanted Access.  I agreed to that.  It was his project anyway.

Another thing TM was particular about, apart from using Access, was that we shouldn't be using any modern reporting solution.  All reporting tools used Windows' GDI to print the report on paper.  "We must do the DOS-style printing so that printing is really really fast", he said, though he wasn't sure if that was even possible.  I knew in theory how that could be done from a Win32 program, and this was a good opportunity to verify if my guess was correct.  So I agreed happily.

I defined my own reporting language and wrote a simple reporting system in Visual Basic.  The reporting system would generate plain text reports, which I'd just write to PRN file.  Worked like a charm.  (Later, this reporting language grew to include bold text, right-, center-, and left-aligned text, page breaks, cumulative totals, and all such funky features.  Even today, thinking about that system makes me feel good about myself.)

When it was mostly done, I showed him the working program and the reports.  He was happy with the way report was generated and printed.  He asked me how I'd done that.  I showed him the report definition .rpt files and the report generator code.  He didn't bother to see the code.  Only feedback he had was that having individual .rpt files was bad because you lose one file and your program stops working.  I had a solution for that too.  I baked in all .rpt files into the .exe as resources so the program effectively needed only one .exe file to run.  Again, he only wanted to know if I had fixed the problem; he didn't care how I fixed it.

He took a few days to use the app and see how it worked.  He called me and set up a meeting. He showed a few bugs he had found.  Then he gave the big news: the customer wanted to be able to keep some records "hidden" so that they don't have to pay taxes for all the money they were making.  But having anything in the UI that suggests that some records might be hidden was not acceptable.  Plus, the entire app needed to understand hidden records.  Search, reports, etc. should or should not include hidden records depending on which mode the system was in.  Effectively, there'd be two reports: one for the customer and one for the government.  Requirement itself was fair, but the timing was not.  I had to change the entire app to understand "white" records and "black" records.

It took a while, but I changed the app throughout to make it work.  After a few more days of testing, the customer test drove the app for a few hours.  That uncovered a number of flaws in the system that invalidated some fundamental assumptions the app was built on.  TM asked me to make changes again.  Without those changes there was no way the customer could use it, so we had no way other than changing the app to fit the new requirements.  It went on like this for a while, with random changes suggested to every part of the system.

With all these ad hoc changes, the code was becoming worse day by day and the number of bugs kept increasing.  What we thought would be a 2 weeks project was not complete after 3 months.  I love coding so much, so I don't usually fix my price before starting the work.  I hadn't talked about money to TM either.  One day I asked him how much he'd pay me.  He agreed to pay some 20% of what I had in mind.  (He even paid me a part of it then, I think.)  I told him that the actual work had been several times more than what we initially thought and demanded more.  His response was that he can't get a penny from the customer before the program goes live and he can only charge what he'd agreed to before starting the work.

I wasn't happy.  I told him that I can't work anymore and I came off.  I really don't think TM could have understood the code and fixed bugs.  The project might have been abandoned soon after I had left.  He probably didn't get any money from the customer either.

Thinking about it now, I think TM's fault was that he didn't know what PM-ing was, and did a sloppy job of it.  My fault, as a coder, was to trust the PM too much.  Even when I hesitated to do certain things -- like coding some mother of all hacks -- TM encouraged me to do it.  I think it was because he didn't understand the risks involved.  I never bothered to make him understand either.  (There's a reason for that: most people like TM look at how polite I am and conclude that I don't know what I'm doing.  Even when I say doing something may not be right, they'll "encourage" me like "oh not a problem, don't worry, go ahead".  One other person I have worked with knew I was good and he always respected my judgement.  Not coincidentally, all projects I worked with him made it to production.)

Yellow everywhere

I have heard, and I believe, that we see only what we want to see.  Today I had a first-hand experience of the same.  A friend had shared Thomas Leuthard's book on street photography on Google+.  I take pictures now and then, but I am no photography enthusiast.  Nevertheless I am reading the book very very slowly.

One advice from the book is to train your eyes to see things on streets.  Thomas advises you to pick one colour -- any colour -- and try to see that colour throughout a day.  I tried that today.  I randomly chose red.  Suddenly it was red everywhere all around me!  I could see so much red that I thought I should pick a different colour.  So I told myself that I would see yellow.  Now I started seeing yellow everywhere, as much as there was red.  It's amazing how I don't see any of these colours when I don't want to see.

This exercise gave me a new experience, but my mind said this was just another variant of two different ideas I already have.  I could rationalise and see this experience as a proof to those ideas.  But I suspect that it's just my mind playing games with me and making me see only what I already know.  Maybe knowledge is, like everything else, both an asset and a liability.

T-Mobile and me

I go to a T-Mobile store to buy a prepaid SIM card.  I look at the options they have, and choose a plan that only gives data connectivity with no voice calls or text messages.  A few days later, I need to make voice calls.  I look around their web site, but there's no way to add voice support on the phone.  So I go to the store again and ask them to add voice support to my phone.  "Oh that's not possible.  Do you want to buy a new SIM?"

Annoyed, but left with no other option, I buy a new SIM with $10 credit for voice calls.  When I put the SIM on the phone, it won't connect to the Internet.  The storekeeper had said that I can get a "day pass" data connectivity by paying around a dollar and a half.  I have already paid $10, so they should deduct from that credit for the day pass, right?  Turns out they won't do that either.  I have to buy it separately.

So I open T-Mobile's web site, and there's no link or option that would let me buy that damned day pass.  I would have to go to the shop again tomorrow to buy it.

I'm glad I don't live in the US.

That Medak ride

It happened in 2008 I think.  I was going to Medak with a few friends.  It was a one-day bike ride.  We had three bikes in total, and I was on Chenthil's bullet I was using then.  Ajay missed a turn and he was going fast on a wrong road.  We called him and Aditya, who was his pillion rider, but they didn't answer the phone.  Maybe they didn't notice the call.

We decided one of us would chase and and stop them.  I took the bullet and was pushing it like I never usually do... going at around 85 or 90 when a bus and a truck are very close by.  This was after the bullet's breakdown incident, so I knew riding it fast wasn't the safest thing to do, especially with a pillion rider with me.  At one point I stopped the bike and asked Jhinuk (who was on the pillion with me) to send them a text message asking them to return.  She sent a message and then called them too, so that they notice the vibration of the call.

In a few minutes we got a call from Aditya saying they were turning back.  Even now, when I think about it, I am happy that I didn't do anything stupid like pushing the bike to 100+ kmph.  Speed kills.  Especially on a lousy bike like the bullet.

Colours

Really really really long time back, when there weren't many people on earth, there lived two men.  I don't know their names, but let's call them Ganesan and Murugan.  When electromagnetic ration (aka light) with a certain frequency between 540 and 610 THz passed through Ganesan's eyes, he saw a shade of this color: .  However, for the same radiation Murugan saw a shade of .  Likewise, Ganesan saw the light of a certain frequency between 610 and 670 THz as  but Murugan saw the same light as .

Ganesan saw plants and leaves in , and seas and sky in .  Murugan saw plants and leaves in  and seas and sky in .  They spoke to each other about how there's something visually similar between sea and sky and between leaves and plants.  They decided to call that similarity "colour".  They decided that they would call the "colour of leaves" green and the "colour of sky" blue.  Keeping that as the starting point, they identified and named plenty of other colours.  But never could they know that one person's green was another person's blue.

What does this mean?

It was an accident.  For the 3rd time in Hyderabad, someone rear-ended my bike.  This time the scene was a little messier.  My bike hit the car ahead of me after it was rear-ended.  A glass piece broke in the car.

The deal here is that I fell on the ground so it was obvious to the car guy that I must have been the one who hit him.  The guy who helped me get up was the one who hit me, it seems.  I knew it only after he told me that.  He helped me get off the road so I'm pretty sure he didn't lose his balance after he hit me.

Now, the car guy says I and the other motorcyclist should pay him for the damage.  He was asking us a few thousand rupees, which neither of us were willing to pay.  So we went to the police, who made me pay him 1500.  (I don't know how much the other guy paid.)
When I handed my share to the car guy, he started arguing with me that I was paying a lot lesser than I owe.  He started telling me how generous he has been: "You both together pay me 4.8k, and I, who doesn't have to take any responsibility whatsoever, will pay the remaining 1k from my pocket."

My opinion is that since this is an accident everyone takes equal responsibility, like grown ups.  So I told him he has as much responsibility as I do.  He didn't like that.  Anyway, I digress.

The other biker told the police officer that he is earning only 6k per month so he cannot pay pretty much anything for the loss.  I thought about it.  What if the biker had decided to take off after the accident?  I would have told this car guy that it wasn't my fault, but being the dumb thing unreasonable man he is he wouldn't have believed me.  I would have thrown the money on his face and walked away.

The biker, like a responsible adult stayed on the accident spot even though he could have simply gone off and no one would have known anything.  He was harassed by the police and he had to pay money for the loss.  Why did he do that?  Police, who should have filed a case and made the insurance companies pay for the loss threatened this guy and made him pay from his pocket.  I didn't have the balls to talk to the police and tell them to involve insurance companies in the scene.

Maybe life is not a courtroom.  Maybe you cannot accuse only one party for what happens.  Maybe there's no point in talking about right and wrong.  But what does the incident today mean?  What am I to write on my notebook about this incident?  Only thing I can say is that it was not very pleasant.

The story of my running behind a bitch

I woke up late this morning and didn't go anywhere out till evening.  By around 5 in the evening, out of an inexplicable urge I left my house.  Unlike my usual self, I took a rickshaw.  Went to City Center and and had potato wedges and coffee at McDonalds.  I got out and started walking back home.

A little distance after crossing Mehdipatnam bus stand, I saw a (female) dog running in the opposite direction.  It went past me 2 metres, turned around, and started following me.  At a safe 0.5 to 1 metre distance the dog was now following me.  Every now and then it would come close to me so that I'd notice it.  It kept on coming with me till the Food World signal, which is about a kilometre from the bus stand.  I knew the dog is looking for food, and I didn't want to go without giving it anything.  I mean, it had followed me for a kilometre!  But there was a problem.

There were no shops on the side of the road we were in.  I had to cross the road to find anything to feed the dog.  I was pretty sure the dog won't cross the road with me.  So I decided that I would cross the road and see if the dog was still in sight.  If I could see it I'd buy something for it; otherwise I'd just go home.  So, I crossed the road -- which took longer than I would have liked -- and looked back.  The dog had stayed behind like I had thought.  It had moved a bit, but it was still there and I could see it.  So I went ahead and bought a pack of some cheap biscuit.  I crossed the road again to get back to the dog.

The dog had moved further and now it was a good 50 metres away from me.  "Well, I have bought the biscuits already, now I have no choice but to follow the dog," I told myself and started walking towards it.  The dog was moving slowly towards the bus stand, i.e. the direction opposite to my house.  I would have walked for about 45 seconds when I noticed these three lads walking before me.  One of them decided to amuse himself by throwing a stone at the dog I was chasing.  The stone didn't hit the dog, but the dog started running fast to save itself from being attacked.

"Oh shit," I said to myself and started walking fast.  The dog was very far now -- maybe 150 metres away from me, and it was running!  I started to walk fast, but I couldn't keep up with the running dog.  By the time I was near it, the dog had reached the bus stand already!  I was only a metre away from the dog, and I had to make it pay attention to me.  I threw a biscuit at it.  Scared, the dog moved away.  It stopped some 3 metres from me and stared at me to see what I was up to.  I took another biscuit and offered it.  It came near me cautiously and ate the biscuit off my hand.  Then I showed her the biscuit that I had thrown first.  She ate that too.  After it had eaten two biscuits, I unwrapped and kept the whole pack down on the floor.  It started eating, and I started walking back home.  This is what I had in mind then... "Bitch... it made me walk two extra kilometres!" :)