Gharwal Diaries -2
27th October 2010. Night. Around 2200 hours. Khirsu.
The jeep fell silent after a rancorous cough. My ears are still ringing. The forest rest house (FRH) was tucked away atop an incline. 1800 m above sea level. The crickets and the eight of us are the only ones making noise. The chowkidhar turned up after yelling for him for five minutes. Harish Negi. He told us his name.
The Forest Rest House, built in 1913, has a solemn ambiance. The cream-yellow, angry walls stared at us. ‘1913?’ I thought. ‘There must be ghosts here.’
28th October 2010. Early morning. Khirsu. FRH Compound
It is cold. Too fucking cold. I step out. The Himalayan range stared back at me. Snow clad, regal, and absolutely breath-taking. In the backyard garden of a house, I spotted activity. Black-lored tits. More...
A Married Man’s Angst
Back in 2003, while waiting for an auto to go to the Koyambedu bus station, my brother blurted out all of a sudden, “They think something is wrong with you… you know? You are 30 and still not married?” Of course! My brother was being very polite: once an elderly gentleman, on a train, asked me, ‘So are you married?’ I said ‘No.’ He frowned and said, ‘Go to a doctor. You should never let these things prolong.’
There’s another pattern that I have noticed. Suddenly, Venguttu mama and Suresh mama are prowling around, trying to spot unmarried boys and girls. These guys, well over 50 now, have become self-proclaimed matchmakers. They do it for free too! It’s like “So why should we be alone in the misery? Bitch?” It’s sadistic. Until you’re married they just won’t stop hounding More...
Wanted: imagination when hiring talent
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 is 2010?
Now that’s just getting to your gate. The experience is, subtly put, fucking irritating. If I somehow managed to enter your hallowed precinct, your staffing team, sure as hell, ups the ante. “Be seated. I’ll call More...
Demystifying Fitts’s law
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 is not so much about focus groups, surveys, and collected opinion. Design is about your brain. Continue reading “Demystifying Fitts’s law” »