• Stories from Chittoor

    Cops slapping boys and girls in a park in Meerut might sound amazing to most of you. But given my experiences, it does seem normal to me. It is probably much worse in smaller towns. I grew up in a small town called Chittoor. And here are the stories related to the cops there. When I was a kid, my uncles used the lines ‘if you don’t eat we’ll hand over you to the cops’ or ‘the cops are coming, get to bed, now!’ Right ...

  • The Perfect Love Letter - 4

    Apologies for the delay in bringing the concluding parts of this story to you. If you haven't read the earlier parts, please do so before you proceed further. I don't think it matters but I'll anyway warn you: this is a long ass post.Continued from Part 1Part 2Part 3It was 31 December and I was walking on Bazaar street in Greamspet. I was there not because I had any business there but because I didn’t know what e...

  • Grandmaster Muniyandi-2 - The Queen's Gambit

    [Contd from part 1]Ravi cleared his throat, took a deep breath, coughed and said "Pleased to meet you. It is a privilege to meet you." He found it difficult to not stare at the wonderful contours her t-shirt made. Just when he was about to thank god, Muniyandi appeared on the scene from nowhere and said "Hello madam, come tomorrow for autographs, sir is tired now."Ravi felt like a whore in the church. 'Thank you...

  • Looking Back at Television

    In early 80s, when I was 9 or so. Lakshmiah Naidu - the rich man of the Pagadamanu Street, Chittoor - bought a TV. Along with the other kids, we used to flock his house. They accommodated us for the first few days, but after the crowd became unmanageable, they shut the door on us. And left the window open. So, there was fierce competition among the kids for the window space so much so that I used to literally hang...

  • The logistics of an Indian wedding

    It is never simple. Never easy. You don't control it. You become a mere player. The strings are pulled by a council of family members headed by the parents, the grand parents and the rest. Take for example my engagement: We (she and I) wanted it to be a simple affair. We just wanted to get engaged for the kick of it; she wanted to go around telling people and showing off her ring, and I wanted her to be happy....

  • Grandmaster Muniyandi: The Sham-Sac (concluding part)

    [Continued from Part 1 and Part 2]Young people, especially those that are heartbroken, are a showy lot. Ravi was no different. His world knew that he was, to use the archaic term, ‘licked’. Or as boys in Chittoor called it, ‘she gave him haath’. Like all rejected lovers, Ravi went into a stage of sleeplessness, lack-interest-in-life-ness, and solitude. He tried talking to her but the city girl was brutal: she would n...

  • RIP Michael Jackson

    It was raining and we were scurrying for cover in VGP Golden Beach. It was 1989. I refused to budge. They were playing Thriller. That was the first time I heard MJ. I was transfixed. "What music is this?" I asked someone and they laughed at me. "That's Michael Jackson, stupid!" Now, I was a small town boy and we didn't get any 'western music' records. When I walked into the music store on Church street in Chittoor,...

  • The Tailors of Chittoor Part 1

    Winter was just around the corner and my folks finally agreed to get me full pants (or trousers as they are known now). My dad found it inconceivable that an 8th standard kid should be wearing trousers.'I wore half pants in PUC!' He exclaimed every time I raised the topic. I am sure your dad wore loin-cloth in college I used to think. Almost all the boys (but for Koya I think) had graduated to trousers. The peer...

  • Aandal Part 2

    Read the first part It was a Sunday afternoon and Aandal was squatting outside our grand ma's. She was telling my granny about this mentally challenged kid in one of the homes on Alwarpet street. She was talking about how that kid was always screaming for food. "Maami andha payyan eppo paaru bun kaapi bun kaapi nu Katheenu irukkum" (that kid screams bun n coffee bun n coffee all the time). So Suren started imitating...

  • Part 2: Stories from Chittoor

    Read the earlier episodeI was in 12th standard I guess when this happened. We went for a night show that day. The movie was dubbed from Malayalam to Telugu and was a cop-basher. I slept off a few minutes after the second half started. The lights came on signaling the end of the movie. Ramesh, Imthiyaz, and I stepped out of Raghava, the movie hall. We lit a smoke and shared it. None of the auto guys were ready to...

  • Don't wait for the can

    When I was 13 I wanted to learn swimming. And in Chittoor the only way to do that was through the irrigation wells that fed the paddy, sugar cane crops. I set out to a field near my home, along with my friends (read: swimmers). I had my tummy in knots and was all nerves as I peered down from the top of the well to the blue-green translucent water. A small turtle lay nestled at the bed of the well, lazily flapping...

  • The End of the Revolution

    A look at the news should tell you how the so called Maoists have embarked on a highway to self-destruction. No, I don't know enough about their philosophy or why they took up arms struggle. Not because I don't care. Because it doesn't make sense. It probably did until the economic reforms started in the early 90s I don't know. Probably. But now, it doesn't make sense to blow up rail tracks and kill cops. And...

  • The Dubai Return - II

    Read Part-one firstThe tenement went into a tizzy of excitement, bitching, and gossip. 'Mari is bringing gold biscuits in cartons.' 'Mari is going to buy the tenement and build a palace.' 'Mari was fired. He is coming back for good.' 'The Dubai police caught Mari with a lord Ganesha picture. They threatened to chop his limbs if he did not leave the country. Mari chose his limbs.' And so on. Mari's family became the...

  • Aandal

    You knew Aandal was in the vicinity when the atrocious stench of her chewing tobacco (called Panneer Pugailai in Tamil) assaulted your nose. It'd normally be early in the morning, around eight, when she would turn up to perform her duties as our maid. No one really knew how she ended up in the neighbourhood. When we moved to Chennai, mom was on the lookout for a maid and she hired the services of Aandal who was...

  • Partha Sarathi MBA

    "I am an MBA." He announced and laughed revealing his yellow teeth. He was standing in a corner, nursing a 90 of cheap whisky along with some beer. The veins were pronounced on his hands. He pulled the sleeves of his once off-white shirt yet again; it was an involuntary, nervous reaction I guess. I offered him a smoke. "I normally smoke Marlboro sir, but today I'll smoke my own Wills. Sorry eh?" He said. I shrugged...

  • Monkey Business

    Oh no, it is not what you think. No Mr.Symonds, I am not getting cute here. This is a true story:This happened when I was in seventh class. We had just moved back to Chittoor from Chennai. It was a pleasant evening and our neighbor was calling his pigs home. That haunting 'aaaa aaaa och!' We had rented a portion of a house. The landlady lived in the other portion. The house had a small iron gate which led you to the...

  • The Price You Gotta Pay

    It was five in the morning. It was a balmy October day and the trees stood still. The town of Chittoor was pregnant with expectation. Chiranjeevi's Raakshasudu was releasing that day. The Chiru fans' association had arranged for a special show. Quite a few people I knew were going for the special show. I wished I knew someone that would get me inside MSR movie hall for that show but I wasn't lucky. But, that didn't...

  • Water Melons, Mangoes, and early morning school

    The heat in Indore is unbearable. You don't perspire too much here like in Chennai so the heat sticks within and your pee turns yellow and it burns! This time of the year back in Chittoor when I was in school; I used to get up early in the morning to attend school at 7:45 a.m. The little flower convent would function between 7:45 a.m. and 1:45 p.m. in the summers. That meant we had a 'breakfast' break during which...

  • The Tailors of Chittoor Part 2

    Continued from Part 1:Diwali was on November 2nd. They were dismantling the huge shelter, at the entrance of our colony, they'd built for the Dasarra festivities. Strangely, the weather was cold. It was seven in the morning. I was walking down to the entrance where I had to catch a town-bus to school. The cold air caressed my legs. Balaji Tailors were open early that day. On an impulse, I walked into the shop and...

  • Stories from Chennai

    I always saw Chennai in Yellow. It could be the harsh sun. Or probably the bright colored Sambar with a wild, turmeric fragrance. The Chennai in early 80s was a different world. There were no high-rise apartment complexes. Barring the LIC building on Mount road, which was the tallest in Chennai, there were no distinguished tall structures. We lived in a small lane off Seethammal road in Alwarpet. A few hundred...

  • Dichhaa

    On my way to work this morning, I spotted a bunch of kids training for Karate in a neighborhood park. The middle aged, lanky master was shouting those Karate shouts and the kids responded in a thunderous chorus, moving their limbs as if they were slicing some invisible butter. And, a thought struck me: what if one of these kids, when they grow up and become software professionals, is confronted by a Bangalore auto...

  • Circus Monkeys

    The other day, at this get together, we bumped into this family of three: mama, papa, and this noisy, little she-devil. Her folks, as soon as they were introduced to new people, unleashed that little devil on unsuspecting people that were busy making faces and making strange noises as they tried to befriend that little devil. 'Go on, sing a song for uncle, come on now.' The mother would prod the kid. The dad would...

  • My Fridge Story

    I got myself a 235ltr Electrolux-Kelvinator Fridge last night! Here's a related story. When I was a kid I was bowled over by Fridges; I come from South-India which suffers from an intense tropical climate. I know only hot, hotter and hottest. So, I was a natural sucker for anything that had anything to do with cold: snow, Air-conditioners, Fridges, winters, fog... You name it. Until I was ten I had never seen a...

Wanted: imagination when hiring talent

Jul 15th

Posted by Suman Kumar in culture

3 comments

Dear Indian software company, I didn’t want to write this, but you forced me to this. I am stunned at that apathy and lack of imagination in the way you try to hire talent. When you want a guy to come for an interview, the least you could do is, giving him parking space. That’s fine, I can live without parking space. But you claim you are ‘going green’ and yet, you insist on ‘a printed copy of your resume’ ‘printed copy of this e-mail’… My small brain can’t fathom how that is exactly ‘going green’ Did you realize this More >

Demystifying Fitts’s law

Jun 26th

Posted by Suman Kumar in usability

No comments

Fitts’s law states that acquiring a target is a function of the size of the target and the distance between the pointer and the target. In other words, bigger, closer the better. If you have anything to do with user-experience design you would have come across this ‘law’. What most practioners of UX design probably don’t know is this: why are bigger, closer targets easy to acquire? The probable answer lies elsewhere, in neurology. A few years back I stumbled upon Dr. V.S. Ramachandran’s BBC Reith lecture. It was a defining moment for me: it suddenly dawned on me that design More >

Kabini: Wilder Waters – 1

May 20th

Posted by Suman Kumar in stories

No comments

The tusker charged at our jeep. Initially I thought ‘mock charge, ha ha’ and started clicking away on my Nikon D90. And then it struck to me that only the ‘aunties’, female elephants that take care of the babies, mock. This tusker meant what he was trying to do: smash us to pieces. Our driver, an experienced, expert hand, from the Jungle Lodges Kabini team reversed and was all set to turn around and scoot when the tusker abruptly gave up his charge. So our driver chose to hang around. A red wattled lap wing shrieked and flew over us. More >

Stories from Chennai

May 14th

Posted by Suman Kumar in stories

No comments

I always saw Chennai in Yellow. It could be the harsh sun. Or probably the bright colored Sambar with a wild, turmeric fragrance. The Chennai in early 80s was a different world. There were no high-rise apartment complexes. Barring the LIC building on Mount road, which was the tallest in Chennai, there were no distinguished tall structures. We lived in a small lane off Seethammal road in Alwarpet. A few hundred families existed there: crammed into a lane whose tail end was abruptly blocked by a concrete wall, which separate an old bungalow and our miserable lane. An ancient Mango More >

The End of the Revolution

Mar 9th

Posted by Suman Kumar in childhood

No comments

A look at the news should tell you how the so called Maoists have embarked on a highway to self-destruction. No, I don’t know enough about their philosophy or why they took up arms struggle. Not because I don’t care. Because it doesn’t make sense. It probably did until the economic reforms started in the early 90s I don’t know. Probably. But now, it doesn’t make sense to blow up rail tracks and kill cops. And civilians. When I was a school kid in Chittoor, in the early 80s, I was mesmerized by the ‘Annalu’ (as they were referred to in More >

Yak Pad 2.0

Mar 9th

Posted by Suman Kumar in blogs

3 comments

After much procrastination, here it is. The Yakpad 2.0 (beta). Runs on WordPress. Also, I’ve merged all my blogs into this one (tech writing blog, usability blog). This is a work in progress children.

Spanish biriyani

Nov 7th

Posted by Suman Kumar in Uncategorized

6 comments

Ha!

Make your own jokes!

Nov 6th

Posted by Suman Kumar in Uncategorized

3 comments

I read it as 'Gloria's jeans now open.'

Jet Airways sends me someone’s ticket

Oct 22nd

Posted by Suman Kumar in general

4 comments

I have no idea why I got this mail from Jet Airways. I looked at the ticket and under ‘E-mail’ it was someone else. It was not even Gmail. You know the story of the ‘dot’ in Gmail. So either the customer that booked the ticket gave a secondary mail id and made a mistake. Or, Jet screwed up. I am inclined to believe the latter to be true. Here’s a screen grab. I have blurred all private information. WTF is going on? Someone tell me please!

Pug on a bike

Oct 15th

Posted by Suman Kumar in Uncategorized

1 comment

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