I don’t usually write blogs.
I certainly don’t crib or make fun of fellow human beings, publicly.
So what really grinds my gears here?

Nothing really My bored self couldn’t say ‘no’ to Anuj’s “Dude! You gotta write about this one on my blog“.

So, the motif of this post is an accidental discovery made by me sitting in the confinements of a cybercafé in downtown Kolhapur. Yeah, the birthplace of those famous-but-i-have-no-frikkin-idea-how footwear. So tacky and uncomfortable that I could never get my feet to wear a pair for one hour straight.

Anyway, let’s come back to the cybercafé where I was going to search something in Google. I clicked in the search box to start typing and popped open the dropdown menu with past searches stored in the browser cache.

My eyes and smile grew wider as I moved down the list, till I reached this absolutely breathtaking set of queries. I have seen a lot of bizarre stuff; I have seen a lot of crazy stuff; Heck, I’ve even seen MBAs actually doing some meaningful work. But I swear to the flying spaghetti monster, I had never ever seen anything as phenomenal as this:

Yes! I had to pick my jaws up from the floor too!

Mosquito Net! Really???

Our hero was probably looking for fishnet clad females.
He must have seen the photographs or videos somewhere, and must be enamored by it. No surprises there. When I saw something similar in my childhood days, I liked it too! I can distinctly remember spotting those pages, presumably torn from a magazine, thrown on that deserted road over a which my 13 odd yrs old past self was biking nonchalantly. That  sudden visual stimulus prodded my brains hard enough to make my bicycle do a  5-0 in 0 seconds. “Holy cow!”; “What is it that she’s wearing?”;  “This thing is so cool!”; “Is it really what I think it is?”; “Oh my!”; “Why oh why would anyone throw these gems on the road like this?”, were few of the many thoughts that flashed across my titillated mind.
No, I didn’t pick up and stash those pictures. That happened later. and it was a completely different set of pictures, outside the scope of this article.

Now I wonder if I would have done something similar back then if I had the luxury of having Google at my command. The imagery was fascinating, I must admit. But I’m not sure if I was driven enough.

So there are many things that go to this dude’s credit. You just have to give it to him!
A – He’s got taste. An evolved one at that!
B – He’s a fighter. A go-getter! He seeks, fails, and tries again.
C – He’s creative! I couldn’t have come up with something like this. Could you?

It was Google’s job to better its algorithms to understand the need of this youth. Our man did his best. Not his fault.

I’m not taking any credit away from Google though. It’s awesome! But like all the know-it-all smarty-pants it does have fun with you once in a while. Which brings us to my other discoveries that fateful evening. A lot of queries followed this pattern:

Aishwarya hot and necked
Rakhi Sawant hot and necked
Mallika hot and necked

This is huge! Did he really wanna see these women necking?
Why would he need to go to a cybercafé to see necking when they show it on TV all the time. This age old technique has been depicting both love and rape on Indian silverscreen forever.
Not too difficult to guess what would have happened. This one probably wanted to see Rakhi au natural or, probably in his words, ‘neced’ or ‘neked’. And Google threw a googlie: “Did you mean necked?”
In a blink this dude must have gone, “Oh! Yes, exactly… yes yes. That’s what I meant.“  Google must have sniggered while this gullible juvenile browsed through the almost similar results thrown at him anyway.

You too have done this to the naive kids, haven’t you? You insensitive scumbag.

Before I conclude this post, I can’t help but wonder how my english literature professor would have interpreted the mosquito-net phenomenon.I can almost hear his words: “The author is a clever satirist. At display is his snide acerbic wit with carnal overtones. He brings the reader’s attention to the fact that most models these days have assets which qualify as ‘mosquito bites’. Therefore he cleverly weaves his metaphorical mosquito net and tells Google exactly what he does not want to see. Hence he craftily coveys his fancy of the ample curves of the feminine form.”

Hail mosquito-nets!

- Anupam

A couple of things made me write this post:

First is this video by George Carlin, and the other is… well, cyclists. And specifically the kind of self righteous cyclists who think that cycling to work is not only cool and green, but also saves the planet. I’m not talking about those who have to cycle to work as they can’t afford any costlier vehicle, just those who can, but still cycle to work.

On Indian roads, people drive all sorts of vehicles in a single lane: cars, trucks, motorcycles, scooters, and of course cycles. Simple laws of traffic engineering (or a little common sense) tell us that in a lane, the slowest moving vehicle governs the overall speed in that lane. What do you think is the slowest moving vehicle then? Not only the cyclists decrease the overall speed in the lane, they also increase the overall chaos. Because the traffic is moving at a ridiculous speed because of the cyclists, the other vehicles are burning more fuel than they could have.

Add to this, I’ve never seen a cyclist stop at a traffic signal which doesn’t have a free left turn. The left is ALWAYS free for them. They have an awesome way of dealing with these signals. Just get off the cycle, become a pedestrian carrying a cycle, walk a few steps, get back on the devil and there you go. Because cycles are not motored vehicles, no traffic rules apply to them (I think), I’ve never seen a cyclewala getting a challan.

Talking about safety, it’s the most unsafe vehicle in my opinion. Cyclists seldom wear helmets (if they do, it’s more fancy than safe). Plus, because they consider themselves both motorcyclists and pedestrians, causes a lot of nuisance. For example, when they’re riding on their footpath (which every cyclist proudly does, and hates motorcyclists for it) causes confusion on the footpath and rage in the pedestrians. Also, when the slow moving cyclists (even when he rides the cycle like it’s stolen) rides on the main road, causes rage amongst the motorists. And a lot of road rage is not a good thing, definitely not safe.

If there’s anything worse than one cyclist on road, it’s two cyclist buddies. I can bet my life that 90% of the times these two cyclists would be traveling together, almost hand in hand. And they’ll do it till death (or their ways) do them apart. Such a scenario is almost unseen for any other kind of vehicle.

I know that in Mumbai, heaven exists at a place called Marine Drive. Not because it’s home to the rich and the influential, but that road is heavenly because cycling is BANNED there.

Just now a colleague of mine showed me an orkut profile of some random ass guy, and I  had to blog about it! No, it’s not one of those ‘I want frandship blah blah’, or some stupid album. It’s a guy who was genuinely confused when orkut asked to fill in his details for the sake of completion.

And he chose to write about his favourite cuisines as well

And I suppose he assumed he was being asked about his ‘cousins’.

I think I’ll have to start another blog if want to capture a lot of stupid people on orkut, and their online profiles

If you think that orkut is the only social networking platform that cannot count, think again!

We’ve all had problems with orkut’s calculations gone wrong with number of friends, scraps, posts in communities. It’s a common error you get when you see when you check a community thread with number of posts, say ‘14′, but when you click through, you get only 11.

But facebook has gone a step ahead and has started messing up with dates. You can actually write a wall post in future as well

I went to a person’s profile to wish him ‘happy budday’, but guess what… people had already wished him ‘tomorrow’ and he had replied to them as well. I thought it would be some kind of problem due to time-zone difference, but he’s from India as well, so my theory had to just bite dust then and there.

p.s.: Yes, the birthday dude’s nickname is ‘mausi’.

And yes, wishing people ‘tomorrow’ for their birthday is another thing that really grinds my gears.

Google is supposed to be the best when it comes to targeted advertising. And as orkut is another product from google, ads on it aren’t supposed to be that off the mark either.

Now, I don’t know where in my orkut profile have I mentioned anything for which I deserve an ad like this one:

Actually forget the targeting, how are these kind of ads even allowed on google?!