Bangalore Pickpocket Racket - a possible thwarting experience

After hearing the tales of two of my team mates losing smart phones while alighting from/getting into the crowded alley of Volvo buses, today, I witnessed and probably thwarted an attempt, but couldn't really do justice. This is for all those Bangaloreans out there to mind your pockets in Volvos, especially when you are busy getting in or getting out. And what I'm explaining here is exactly how my colleague probably lost his week-old Samsung Galaxy Note II, a couple of months back. This is something I witnessed yesterday (July 8, 2013), at around 10.30 AM.

It was a 500c towards ITPL and the standing/luggage area of the Volvo bus was unnecessarily crowded, especially given that the entire space above (between the seats) was sparse, where I was standing. As the bus crossed Graphite India and as people started to get down, it was obvious that people were struggling to get out. Two guys (X and Y, let's say) were standing as you get down the two stairs in the volvo and were throttling the passageway. I was not very clear about their intentions at first. My eyes then went to a guy who got down in SAP bus stop and was searching for something in all his pockets to no avail, possibly a mobile phone. It might be my over caution, I thought. But when I turned my attention back into the bus, I was amazed. The entire luggage area near the door was filled with people cramping themselves for space and I was the only one standing in the aisle of about 15 ft long. To me it looked like someone was stopping people to come up the aisle.

Just then, one of the guys (say J), so far seated got up to alight in the iGate stop. While the stop was yet to come, he was struggling to get past X-Y throttle and was in obvious fear, for not able to get down at his stop. At this time, my gaze lowered casually and to my surprise, the hands of X fondling outside of the left trouser pocket of J, as if a dog is sniffing for bombs. It was just a few seconds and I knew what was happening. But I was too confused as to what to do, and when the hands of X was going towards the top of pocket, I knew he is probably going to hit his prey. Impulsively, I moved forward pretending as if I was going to get down and gave a thudding kick on X's legs. He jerked a bit and took his right hand off J's pocket.

By this time J got down to safety, but I was left with nothing against X, or rather I had my kick on X against me.  X probably realized that I have found what was happening and with a meak smile came up the stairs and said "Aapka pair lag gaya zor se" and moved towards the seats. I was dumbfounded that I couldn't really point finger at him for anything. I was trying to think fast on what to do, for I had nothing against this guy now, and quickly decided to take a pic and opened my mobile. I don't know if he realized what I was doing or if Y signaled him about my camera, X immediately started doing all sorts of antics of using his hands to comb his hair with his face always buried behind his hands. After a few seconds of attempts, I could only take a partial photo of him (deliberately blurred the rest of the part of the photo):

I gave up on X, and turned back as my bus stop approached, and saw that Y was firmly looking at me. I quickly took my mobile again, but Y was ready for it and quickly ducked his head into the crowd and started to look away. My confusion was growing in all this and my bus stop too came and I got down in a helpless way.

I don't know if I should have done anything better, for I did see what was happening, but given that I had no evidence against them, I was clueless then and all I could do is write this.

Be aware of your pockets when you alight buses and also when you get into buses, where it is equally easy to throttle you and fly away with your priced possession in quick time. One way to avoid the problem is to put your smartphone into the bag before getting down, but this is likely to be unsuitable for many. Another way would be to keep your hand firmly inside the trouser pocket where your phone is and use the other hand for balancing while you move through the crowd. You can also keep an eye on the Volvo stairs for such X-Ys throttling the stairs of volvo buses and probably catch them in act.

Share it with your fellow Bangalore friends and let them be aware.

The Joy of watching a flow

Back in 2006, I was roaming around in North Kerala and was exploring a not much known Chandragiri fort (Kasargod District). The fort is peculiarly in the middle of a rural hamlet camouflaged by the farms around, but at an elevation. The fort had almost nothing on its top (as expected), but the view from the top was wonderful, especially, the serenely flowing Chandragiri river joining the Arabian Sea. While the Konkan dwellers may think it as nothing special, that was the first time I was seeing a river joining the sea. It was the end of a journey by disappearing in the endless sea. And very similar to the end of a human being who will be lost forever in the organic cycle that Nature has set in place on Earth.

During my years of roaming, the one thing that never tired me is the joy of watching the river flow. Whether it is the trickles from the rocks or the hum of the stream; whether it is the noise of a waterfall or the calmness in the valleys, the river shows inimitable characteristics. In the popular film song "Nadhiye! Nadhiye!" in the movie Rhythm, Vairamuthu poetically captures the similarities between a river and a female.

Poetically or not, the abstract way of looking at life of a man seems to be no different from that of a river. In the early days, man hardly gets to move around, just like the river barely manages to flow at its mouth. It is really funny that we can essentially divert the entire flow of the mighty river (say Cauvery) into a waterbottle, (that is, in Talacauvery), which by the time it reaches the sea is thousands of feet wide.

Not just the birth and death, but a river's flow can be analogically looked even further with that of humans. The brash youth of humans in their teenage is captured as the wild nature of streams wading through the rocky surfaces. It is also when the river takes giant leaps in the form of waterfall, and the time when man starts making big strides in life. During his/her youth humans go through myriad of mood swings aptly captured by that of rivers too.

Cauvery joins its tributary Aarkavaty in Sangama in Karnataka, both running wild. Just a couple of kilometers further, this new couple gets squeezed by the rocks around through a narrow patch of just a few feet, in a place named Mekedatu. The force of water here is just unimaginable: a wild river, which was a few hundred feet wide, gets squeezed to a couple of feet. No doubt this is a popular picnic spot. However, during a visit there, me and my friends went further into the woods beyond Mekedatu to find an extremely different mood of Cauvery, where it had widened so much that the flow was almost noiseless. The case is no different for most rivers, for instance, the Niagara. After the river falls beautifully and noisily posing for thousands of cameras, it calms down within a few hundred feet in stark contrast to the commotion sometime back with hardly anyone taking notice.

A calm Niagara

While early life is time for opportunities, there are times when a decision early in life may well determine the eventual destiny of one's life, landing you virtually on the opposite side of the world. Deep into the Bridger-Teton National forest in Wyoming, USA, an apparently innocuous stream forks into two. The baffling thing about this fork in North Two Ocean Creek is that, one of them goes east to meet the Atlantic ocean and the other to the Pacific thousands of miles apart.

A small slip and you will be thousands of miles apart. Source: Internet

When two individuals decide to spend their rest of life together, especially when they don't know much about each other, it takes a while. On some cases, this can take really long. In a similar way, two mighty rivers joining together may take some time to really come to terms. When the dark blue Rio Negro runs in the muddy brown amazon near Manaus in Brazil, for more than 50 kms they look like two different rivers running in parallel.

Google map of Negro and Amazon joining

And there are many rivers in Konkan/Malabar region which flows only a few kilometers before joining the Sea and it is like the short lived lives of some greats. While watching the end of Chandragiri river, I was thinking of how wonderful it would be to watch the entire stretch of a river. Not just for the joy of watching, but also it would give an amazing perspective about how humans have dependent heavily on these natural beauty. I decided I would try that, possibly on Kaveri, the life line of many people: those who depend on its water, and the politicians who depend on the problem. From Talacauvery to Poompuhar, it goes through a myriad of places and joins some mighty rivers like Kabini and Bhavani, and it will be an interesting aspect to understand how it really enables the living of thousands.

I haven't done much yet on this. Anyone game for w(h)et(t)ing the appetite ?

Let us start looking up

I was sitting under the pristinely clear night in a small farm house near Korategere. The small group of people who had gathered, aged anywhere between 7 to 70, were enthusiastically looking up the sky with awe. With almost no light in the viscinity (except for the small light inside the farm house), it was an ideal setting to witness a rare celestial event: Total Lunar Eclipse. I was lucky that a friend who was part of Bangalore Astronomical Society (BAS), asked me join him for a lunar eclipse gazing trip on December 10.

It has been a long time, except for the one-night star gazing trip to Vangani during my IITB tenure, I had been hardly in touch with my childhood passion and couldn't say No. Korategere is about 100 kms from Bangalore, on the way to the fort town of Madhugiri. The farm house was in a small village off Korategere, Doddamallyanapalya, and was located far away from the city lights.

Sitting on the rocky surface covered with tall grass, I saw the moonlight been slowly gobbled by an unknown shadow. A lot of cameras, some fitted with telescopes were busy clicking the celestial marvel. I decided to put to rest the camera and binocular I had been using and sat down on the grass to immerse myself in the world around. I felt the same way as our ancients, who too would have looked up to these celestial events with similar awe. The setting I was in would have been no different than in those days, and they surely wouldn't have dull reasons like watching TV. But their perception of the events were far different from ours.

The Vikings thought that the dreaded wolf was eating away the moon. The Pomo Indians of California feared the bear was swallowing the round milky ball. The Chinese thought that the dragon was swallowing it. And our own ancestors called that the Ashura Rahu was gobbling up Chandra. While the stories may be different, the thin fine line that connects them is easily visible: it always is attributed to their dreaded enemies. Wolves were the Scandinavian vikings' fiercest enemies. Even today, California has enough of problems with the human-blackbear altercations. China always feared dragons (real or imaginary) and in Indian mythology the enemy of the mythological heroes are almost always portrayed as an Asura.

A chuckle came out of me when some of these thoughts went through my head, for some kids who were in our group, knew the precise scientific reasons behind the eclipse. While that knowledge is acquired rather than experienced, our ancestors didn't have much choice but to wait, watch and guess. Just sitting in the dark and looking at the strange happening, I can't think of anything better than the ancients did. Today with all the repository of knowledge available, we have even gone to the extent of ridiculing our ancestors like: "They thought the world was flat".

It is no doubt that the sky has impacted human's intellectual evolution profoundly over a period of time. Whether it is subjugation in the form of superstitions or the observations and propositions which broke the superstitions; Whether it is the belief of how they control our daily lives, or how we today explore to see if life exist over there; Whether it is where the Gods roam and keep a watch on us, or it is where the satellites roam and spy us.

It is no wonder why most of science enthusiastic kids' in our times, had their future ambition of becoming an astronaut (or cosmonaut). The friend from BAS, Keerthi, who organized the trip, mentioned during our discussion about how it is very difficult today to impress upon kids about astronomy. He shared his experience on how, during star gazing shows, kids were more interested in the laser beam or the computer software used, rather than the infinity that lies ahead of them. It is not the kids' fault, for today, given the explosion of things around us, scientific curiosity has lots of avenues with shorter 'time to understanding' and astronomy will be tough to project. But given the very important skills of patience and dedication that astronomy teaches, it is important for the next generation to appreciate.

During our trip, a kid suddenly was excited shouting, "Look, that star is moving so fast, how is it possible?". "It is not a star, but a man-made satellite orbiting earth and the light you see is that reflected from its solar panels", remarked a thoughtful head. The reasoning apart, the kid had found, during a careful observation that something different from his understanding is happening. The excitement in the kid's words told how much joy a small learning, after prolonged observation can bring.

It tells how much looking up to the sky matters a lot.

The way of search for real knowledge

As I was departing from hometown last weekend, I walked past the busy streets of the area which I had roamed around as a schoolboy. There is a small shop in the junction of two streets, hardly 4 feet by 10 feet, which I used to visit numerous times on my father's bicycle. It was 'Abu Circulating Library', a private lending library, a concept today having such flashy makeup like 'Justbooks clc'. I was not so privileged to lease a lot of books then, but Abu was a very kind man and used to allow me to read books standing there. The people who come there were unique and Abu had the knack of finding second hand books for them, on varying topics from science to fiction to philosophy. It was one of those wonderfully unique places in a small town where people go for their quest of knowledge.

Till the time Soviet Union collapsed, the wonderful soviet science books will find its way through to Tamilnadu. A number of pre-1990 books from Mir, Radhuga, Progress publishers bringing out with wonderful popular science books at nothing of a price. Books for Rs.5/- might seem odd, but given the soviet rouble troubles then, the distributors, New Century Book House (NCBH) surely would have got a good deal. Whenever I visit relatives in any town in Tamilnadu, I make it a point to visit NCBH and pick a 'Mir dwarf' or two. While I don't claim to have read much of these books, there was always effort required when we had to search for the right place to get our knowledge.

Those days were past, so I thought.

For today, everything is available at our finger tips, literally, given the smartphone explosion. Our knowledge base is just a few clicks or a google search away. Every person seems to be walking with a library, with the availability of thousands of books and articles that are spread across the Internet. Any question you ask a person, he is able to tell in just a few seconds and automatic knowledge comes when people read feeds on social networking sites like facebooks or email forwards from friends. But quite recently the trends that are setting in is pushing us back a few years and is asking for the same keenness and quest for knowledge.

The data available in the Internet has grown so much that the Search companies have been required to 'customize' the results before we see them. Our friends circle in social networking has grown so much that Facebook and others will 'customize' what feeds to we get to read. These were aptly described by Eli Pariser in this TED talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOTPz7KnwIA

While this may seem not so relevant, the trend is not. The customized search can throw results which may look completely relevant but at the same time could be grossly wrong. For instance, if we are used to read everything from blogs, then a google search may customize results for us showing a lot of blog results for a topic, say, "alien ship lands in IITB gymkhana". It could all be ramblings of hundreds of us based on our dreams and hallucinations, but this may even convince us. Or take the recent out pour of emotions and science that are thrown on the Mullaiperiyar dam issue, with both Kerala and Tamilnadu sides pitching in to prove their case with varying degrees of emotion twisted scientific facts: all in blogs. Friends share blog article links through facebook and by putting arguments in 'nice' way, a lot of imagination becomes fact.

You may laugh at aliens or may not want to worry about such social issues, but in today's short attention span mentality, people would believe anything if put in a believable way. Take this case: recently a friend of mine cribbed about how the HR group had sent a 'motivation' mail to hundreds and thousands of employees, based on a nicely cooked up story of eagle reincarnation. It was just a regular forward and without making any attempt to verify the contents, it was sent with all sorts of 'confidentiality' impositions to the employees. The way the narration was done, the terms used, all can make people to believe that it is actually science and that the whole eagle story is true. Alas, just a google search will give a hoax slayer link in the first page and can blow you away (if you care to click it). And this we are talking about in one of the brightest set of people living in this country.

I'm not taking a pessimistic look here at the explosion of data available, but only pointing out to the necessary care we should take to be alert. While the situation is not yet as daunting as I'm trying to project, it is invariably going to go as the Internet keeps growing. Like in those olden days, quest for true knowledge will remain to be for those who are really keen and ready to go the extra mile. It may not take a few days or even hours like in those days, but it will definitely take some minutes, which will be too much for the short attention span of few seconds that we are developing.

FDI in retail: my confused view

I would like those who better understand economics to clear my perspective below, which seems to be grossly against the idea of FDI in retail.

I'm not going to argue from a socialist perspective. Also I want to keep the emotions away of small family trades disappearing and all that.

Any new business initiative or something which claims to be of that nature shall be looked at as:

1. cost of the products sold : What consumers get

2. Generation of Jobs/loss of job : Socio-economic benefit of the region

3. Cost of procuring products: What producers get

4. Impact on the region: long term impacts on nature and lifestyle

I feel that FDI in retail fails when counted against these factors (from my perspective).

1. Surely, the cost factor is something everyone bets and it likely might come through. But that is not without the side-effects on the factor 4.

2. I think the 1 crore jobs is a mighty pipe dream. The retail outlets can open only in 51 cities in the country. So, if 100 new malls are opened in every city, so 5000 outlets. If each of them employ directly 60 people (sales boy/girl, managers, maintenance, security etc) and indirectly 40 people (transportation, middlemen etc.), then we get 5 lakh jobs. The funny part is we are not at all counting the jobs that are indirectly lost due to this and also those parts which need not be new jobs (like the middlemen). I may be wrong in analysing things, but the data of 1% of the country will get jobs because of this FDI is something I just can't find a way to believe even 10%.

3. The biggest claim is that farmers will get a better deal. I doubt so. I don't think the new retailers will go anywhere beyond the existing middlemen who form the bridge between farmers and retailers. The simple reason could be that a large number of farmers are small and the retailers won't make all the efforts to go and do business with every small farmer. So the middlemen now have the benefit of buying bulk and can further coerce the price for the farmers.

While I wish I'm proved wrong, but the farmers may actually get a raw deal in this case.

Ethically, no corporates care for farmers. Did those who promoted Bt cotton in Vidharbha cared for them ? Those who now promote corn for ethanol (for US consumption) across India care for their sustainability ? So expecting that retailers will go and directly deal with farmers because of serving them is nonsense.

Technology can help in this (Agro-advisory systems like mKrishi), but that will take quite sometime in the country. But in the event of the big retailers get the go, the only way forward is to push technology to reduce the middlemen encroachments.

4. Energy consumption for storage, transportation by the retailer. Similar consumption by the consumer in traveling to and storing the bulk bought items (they are cost effective only when bought bulk).

New jobs can be created only if the retail business adds more value than just being middlemen. The only value-addition they can do is to make the consumers to buy more than what they need (which already malls are doing). It is unsustainable even in the US and for a country like ours, it is unimaginable.

Other 'good' sides to FDI:

1. The small traders mostly cheat the government: They don't give bills and probably don't pay much taxes.

2. The job sector will get organized: Child labour in small retail outlets will disappear. Also the need for literacy will be reinforced by an organized work sector.

These and similar reasons may be correct as the disadvantage of existing retail system. But for me, these are things that as a nation we have failed to solve. And instead of solving them sustainably, we are trying to use an unknown tool which doesn't anyway guarantee anything.

And I've not yet counted on the history of FDI in retail in developing countries (Brazil, Thailand) or the possibility of India becoming a dumping ground for chinese products (which Walmart readily dumps in its stores).

For a lame mind like mine, it looks nothing more than a distraction creator from a political perspective and capital accumulation to smaller groups (from economic perspective). But I would like you to correct if there is something wrong.

Public transport blues

PS: This is not a rant about daily public transport commuting in Bangalore.

A couple of weeks back I went on my random roaming after a long time, to Tumkur (~70km from Blore). The cost of an ordinary KSRTC fare from Bangalore to Tumkur was Rs.51. It was not the high cost, for the public transport cost has been steadily going up in Bangalore, but the comparison that stuck me.

Ordinary Bus ticket cost for 5 people ~ Rs.250

Diesel usage for a normal car for 70 km ~ 5 liters => 5x50 ~ Rs.250

(I have not counted other charges, including the car cost/rent)

KSRTC has a linear scale of costing and I don't expect that the cost to go down as the distance increases. So what we see is a kind of dangerous trend of discouraging the use of public transport even on cost grounds (most of other grounds like comfort, time keeping, availability etc. have largely been put to the garbage long ago). I understand KSRTC/BMTC make profits, all right (the only public transport system in India, as they claim), but at what cost ? Would it cost as much if the corruption that starts as low as BMTC conductors is stopped ?

I get the memories of the times in Belleville, Canada, where my friends will hire a car every weekend and make the wheels cover thousands of kilometers, for meager percentage of cost if we were to use the public transport system. I kept myself busy on my bicycle there and never dared to use their public transport system, though I really wanted to try out. The fear that our country is moving in that direction is strange. Though I perceive the reasons for these two trends as different (in the West the oil cost is kept low due to supply/demand and public transport cost high due to both supply/demand and oil lobby).

I roamed around almost all of south karnataka relying on these very KSRTC buses (and might continue to do so), but as a public transport fan, I see this trend really disturbing. But just next door, the cost of road transport in TN is opposite. The government subsidies it and they run at loss, alright, but isn't Rs.20 for the same distance of 70 km a bit too low compared to Rs.50 ?

PS: Please do point out flaws in my point of view, if you find any.

The transportation ...

A clumsy piece of writing :)

The world around me moved steady,

Not too slowly for me to lose

Interest and let my thoughts drift,

Not too fast for me to lose

Sight of details of the around.

Mother Earth seem to be in a slumber,

Neither was I making any noise

To wake her and disturb her peace,

Nor was I giving her any disrespect,

Of putting my feet on her head.

There was a wave of steady breeze around,

No need to cover me to cut its force,

Nor was I too slow not to feel it,

My hair raises up to embrace the breeze,

And my body gets to feel a jeez.

When I get such a great feel,

I know I'm on my bicycle ..

Not even once ?

The world around is going aground,
As I trudge through the thickets around,
My droopy eyes search for the one,
With knowing there might be none,
Same results through the last few years,
That I have to return with dreary eyes.

Started a few years ago all this,
When I got into the realm of bliss,
With the chances of striking gold,
I was sure of staying calm and bold,
For all the imagination and movies seen,
I was sure to find my life's sheen.

Things around me grew increasingly cold,
As my life in here grew more old,
The empty feeling of going back,
Without being one among the pack,
Not of those who are hitched or ditched,
But of those who have been witched.

When claims of sightings come along,
I start wondering where do I belong,
Lakeside or hillside I go everywhere,
But it all seems to take nowhere,
All you see is the warning boards,
And the empty words of security guards.

When a friend gets a chance and goes hi-fi,
I have nothing to do but pacify,
That I will be one of them soon,
And that day I will be over the moon,
But now the time has come to a close,
I feel like shouting in high voice:

"Hey stupid Panther, where are you?"


For all the passing out junta who are leaving the campus without this big
accomplishment in IIT Bombay: Spot a Panther.