I think one of the best movies that ever came out of Hollywood was the 1968 classic — Stanley Kramer’s “Guess who’s coming for dinner”. It is a popular favourite among movie fans.  It is a movie about love, about good parenting, class differences and above all about racism. In fact it is a movie about colour-blind love to be precise. I have a favourite line in that movie. It’s the scene when the white mother tells her white husband that their white daughter is in love with a black man. And the mother played by Katherine Hepburn thus goes: “It’s not just that our color difference doesn’t matter to her.  It’s that she doesn’t seem to think there is any difference.”

That is the beauty of the golden oldies — the dialogues. They were precise and conveyed serious meaning with no trace of ambiguity. Well this is not a belated movie review. My point is that something more current but related to the issue the movie deals with.

For all practical purposes I am a black man. OK brown to be precise. Hues and shades don’t matter here. The point is I am non-white. I don’t feel inferior about it. Neither do I have a misplaced notion of being an underdog. This is just the surface. The truth a bit deeper and its quite unsettling.

I find that I am constantly reminding myself of my skin colour. I did not have this issue for 37 years in India. But in a country like the UK where the whites out-number other skin colours, I seem to think that I am a minority. Not a victim, but just a numerical minority.

It has been nearly a year since I came to this country. With absolute certainty I can assure you that neither me nor any of my family members have had any experience that suggest that our skin colour is alien in this country. Yet, I constantly judge. Every normal experience I have is evaluated by my notion of racism. I find that before a white takes a seat next to me in a bus or the tube, he or she scans for other vacant seats. When there is no other vacant seat, they unwillingly sit next to me or sometimes prefer to stand. Or so I think.

When me and my visiting Indian friends were made to wait for a bit longer in a Pizza Express outlet before our order is  taken, I refused to tip and mumbled something about the white waitress being a racist. Another day, I found myself in a new neighbourhood not very far from home while trying to catch a bus home. Two buses went by and did not stop despite my hand-signaling.  A black lady who was waiting with me said it was a bigoted neighbourhood and white drivers will not stop when they see the stop has only blacks waiting. I turned around and noticed that it was an all-black crowd at the stop. Well may be the lady was right.

I have met the sweetest white man on the street who took me on a ‘Jack-the-Ripper’ walking tour and the rudest black man in the bus elbowing me for more standing space. I have been cursed by an old white lady for looking at her weird dog for a few seconds longer and have had the most interesting conversation on Christianity with a black cab driver.

I find that racism is not about skin colour. It’s just about people and their stupid prejudices. And more importantly it’s not just about white against black. In can be as much the other way around too.  Extreme cases of race hate is easy to notice and write about. They are obvious and don’t demand a terribly intelligent mind to comprehend its existence. It is the inherent and deep-seated notion about race that worries me more.

Personally I would feel free from this mental baggage when I stop noticing the skin colour. Until then I will consider myself to be racist. It does not matter if doesn’t manifest itself in a prejudicial form.

For someone whose idea of life outside India for the first thirty six and half years of his existence restricted to occasional corporate junkets with glimpses of airports and star hotels, the last six months in London as a resident has been a completely new experience. This is my short preface to five new and unique experiences I have had and I wish to share now. I assure dear reader, that none of this is profound and you should take this more than a mere scribble in my diary at your own peril.

#1 Tube Face
The indispensable London Underground seems to have one undesirable impact on its users. I am yet to meet a smiling face in the tube. People simply don’t smile when they get 24 meters (average depth of the tube) below the ground. My rotten arrogance surfaces once in a while and I try to break this by smiling at a stranger with a hope of setting a new record in the tube. The best response I have received so far is a nod that lasts no more than a nano-second.

#2 Ear-shattering blow
An average Londoner is a perfect gentleman/lady. There cannot be two opinions about this. Why then do they blow their noses so loudly in public places is something I am yet to understand. Take this literally. When a Londoner blows his nose, he ensures that people five meters on either side hear it. The saving grace is that he/she always, always uses a tissue.

#3 Week-end frenzy
Life during weekends, starting from Friday evening goes on the fifth gear. There is a manic planning that precedes this. What am I going to do this weekend is an essential question that every self-respecting Londoner seems to be asking himself. While the average answer to this is not very creative, it is just another harmless side of the simple-minded Englishman. Get ready to see miniature barbecue stoves on the balconies of garden-less apartments like the ones I live in!

#4 Beer and ale guzzlers
This my favourite. A pint of beer bang in the middle of the day? This is a futile question only a narrow-minded (and hypocritical) Indian like me can ask. I remember being petrified of being caught by my boss every time I had a beer with lunch when I was in Delhi. God knows how many cartons of “Centre Fresh” must have covered my darker side. Here and now is my chance to lead a guiltless life. You will be the odd one if you order your lunch without the beer. Cider for the ladies.

#5 Queue crazy
Actually this my real favourite. It almost seems like my English-speaking friends love to stand in the queue. Something tells me its part of their religion. Why else would there be so many queues all over London. From smallest roadside newstand to the plushest of plush malls have innumerable queues. The queues only seem to grow as the the shops add more tills. Just draw a yellow line with the words “stand behind this line” and you will have a dozen folks ready to fall in line. Memorize this one. It will save your life some day. I once walked up to a newstand which seemed deserted to buy a pack of cigarette. The vendor gave me a cold stare and then I heard a booming hello (not greeting definitely) behind me. A solitary customer apparently was waiting in the “queue”  for the vendor to say “next please.” I almost gave up smoking that day.

(Photo by S Kalyana Ramanathan)

I could see him from my second floor balcony. He was a black man in this early 50s, wearing a thin pullover to suit the mild-warm English summer. Apart from the silver chain around his thick neck that glimmered a bit from the bright sunlight, there was nothing to suggest that the man was endowed with reasonable wealth. His grey tracks that stopped a few inches above his ankles and the worn-out black sneakers suggested this even more.  Yet something about him suggested that he was serious about his dreams.

He was sitting at the park bench opposite to the waterfront (a small man made tributary drawn from the famed Thames) and staring at the brochure he must have picked up from the Royal Quay sales office.

The sales brochure was in all-color printed on high quality art paper alluring any prospective property owner to buy a piece of dream that is built on the East-end Docklands.

He did not seem to be reading this brochure. Rather he was simply staring at the pictures. At one point I could clearly see him stroke with right thumb a particular section of the map that said where he was sitting or where his dream house was located on the map. As he turned the pages more pictures of show apartments stared at him. He wasn’t smiling. He seemed a bit afraid, may be a little nervous to be precise, almost as if his mind was oscillating between reality and possibility.

About 10 minutes later he quietly stood up and made a small semi-circle around the waterfront and measured his steps towards the sales office. What happened after that I do not know. But I would like to believe that he decided to buy a house in the Royal Quay and someday I will bump into him in the elevator and say hello. He may nod back and not give a second thought about the stranger he just met in the elevator. And I will not tell him that he once shared his dream with me and am glad he secured his future and that of his children.

All this is possible. Reports in the media suggest that prices in the UK have now fallen to March 2005 levels. After all every dark cloud has a silver lining to it. And the cup sure is half full. All this if you wish to see it…

It wasn’t clear to me why I wanted travel to Benaras for a few days - a filthy, dusty city in this hot weather? But it’s something that just had to be done. I rounded up a couple of friends and we were on our way. I didn’t expect to be bowled over by the place in any case - and so I wasn’t disappointed. Surprised, yes, that in a pilgrim town so rich, with hefty sums coming in from various sources, there is practically no infrastructure to speak of. With it’s dirty ghats and disastrous roads, it’s quite evidently a very forced exotica that cannot be understood by everyone, far less by Indians.

But all isn’t lost here. If there is something that can lift this temple town from the clutches of filth - it is the early morning boat ride along the ghats. Uncharacteristically (to be awake at 5 am) then, I left my friends peacefully sleeping and hurried down the stairs of the hotel, looking around for a boatman. Thankfully, there was one waiting right outside the door and led me down to his boat at Assi ghat. I wondered if I had stepped out too early, will my boat ride end even before the sun rose? Turns out, the timing couldn’t have been better. None of the other tourists were out yet, and there wasn’t a single person along the ghats.

The majhi rowed towards the main Dasashwamedha ghat, and we watched the faint glow in the sky illuminate the clouds. It’s only on this little boat, a safe distance from where the eye can spot the dust and grime, that Benaras looks beautiful. The ghats were perfectly peaceful, the water of the Ganges suddenly appeared cleaner, and the banks dotted with temple tops, every bit as charming as one would have imagined it to be at one time. The stillness was calming, balmy and even refreshing. A good half an hour later, everything suddenly came to life. In a matter of a minute, there were several people pottering around the banks, with a string of boats filled with tourists just like me taking pictures by the second, admiring the rising sun. But I was done, and we rowed back to Assi ghat, away from the hullabaloo.

I had probably taken all I needed from Benaras …but as a happy bonus, the same afternoon proved to be something else altogether. Perhaps it was the repeated mention of Benaras Hindu University in Hindi classes back in middle school that we found ourselves keen to visit the premises. A couple of kilometers into tree-lined roads of the university, we happened to halt in front of the Birla Vishwanath temple. I wasn’t particularly keen to go inside, but wandered into the temple grounds nevertheless in the hope of some quiet under one of the trees in the lawn. And then there was a distant, curious singing - that I followed into the temple. It wasn’t a bhajan, and quite unlike the jagran variety we are so used to in our cities. It was a raga in its pure form, and the voice singing it was wandering and light, but wondrously enchanting. On the second floor of the marble temple, we found, facing the deity, sat a blind, old man, almost a metre away from the microphone, playing the harmonium and singing effortlessly. A younger gentleman, further away, played the tabla. We sat close by with our backs against the temple pillar, closed our eyes and listened. Raga Yaman had never sounded better.

Reluctantly, we stood up to leave when he drew to a close. We gently thanked him, and told him how his voice had moved us. He was surprised, and humbled at the attention and asked us to stay for the prestigious Sankat Mochan music festival that was to begin in the city the same evening. Unfortunately, we were due to leave Benaras that evening, and promised to come another year and hear him sing again. His name was Pandit Ram Lal.

Being a sports freak has a lot of drawbacks. People tend to take you for granted as far as watching sports is concerned. And the magnitude of it hits you the most when the Indian Premier League (IPL) is on.

It’s assumed that you must be glued to your telly watching each and every ball of “the biggest sporting extravaganza”. So conversations with friends revolve around how weak the bowling attack of Rajasthan Royals is and you are expected to pitch in with your views on it.

Relatives will give - and seek your - expert opinion on what a brilliant innings Sehwag played, when the fact is you were busy watching re-runs of Friends (yes I did that a lot during the first season of IPL).

Personally, cricket in its Maggi noodles avatar is something which I am not too bothered about.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think of myself as a snob as far as cricket watching is concerned. I enjoy the occasional drama and edge of the seat stuff that T20 guarantees.

But give me a two-hour session of test cricket where 40 runs are scored but the players are fighting tooth and nail, over a three-hour slam bang cricket where the idea seems to be who can hit the ball longest out of the ground.

Of course, I can understand why the IPL remains such a huge draw. It’s fast paced, requires very little of your time (as compared to test matches or even ODIs), and most importantly for the paisa vasool audience, it’s all about having fun.

I may be an extremist but for me one of the biggest reasons of watching in any sport is to actually care about a particular team winning or losing. In the IPL, I find that majority of the time that goes out of the window.

‘Fans’ of IPL are content with enjoying the action and are somewhat indifferent towards the end result. It doesn’t matter too much if their team lost the match as long as they were guaranteed some action packed moments, something which is a staple ingredient of most IPL matches.

How can you expect enjoy any sport, where winning or losing is secondary and entertainment is primary. At least, I can’t.

As I said at the beginning of the post, being a sports fanatic has many drawbacks. And one of them is that you end up taking sports a bit more (in fact, a lot more) seriously than the rest. Fun and games are good, but sports is a serious business, at least for hardcore sports buffs. And when indifference creeps in, like in the case of IPL, it sadly fails to cut the ice.

Nokia has dropped broad hints of its intentions to enter the netbook market. Nokia’s big boss, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo in an interview with a Finnish TV admitted “we are looking very actively at this opportunity.”

What began as rumours last year has fuelled itself into a full-blown opportunity for Nokia.  The company executives do not want to miss out on a product category that is thriving and which could be a good platform for boosting uptake of its web services (that are to be launched in May-June this year). This backs up Kallasvuo’s statements made at Barcelona last month that Nokia would expand the definition of the smartphone “into categories and form factors that have not yet been explored”. But the use of an ARM-based chip will hugely disappoint Intel.

Intel’s Atom processors gave birth to the idea of netbooks by leveraging its powerful position in the PC industry. Today, the chip giant has ensured that its mobile processors remain dominant in netbooks category, even as it got tougher to break into the conventional smartphone world. Intel is investing through recession – which executives insisted would be the pattern for 2009 too– in order to emerge from the downturn with the most advanced products in key growth areas. With operators relying on mobile data for their own survival plans, netbooks with embedded 3G, Wi-Fi and/or WiMAX should certainly represent one of those growth areas, and Atom is already driving volumes at Intel, even if it is squeezing margins.

Nokia, the Finnish giant, is reportedly working on a cut-down, mobile web-optimized PC, based on the recently announced ARM multicore Sparrow processor and incorporating elements of the existing N800 internet tablet, including its Maemo-based Linux software platform.

We won’t see a Nokia netbook until early 2011, and most probably missing the first boat for netbooks. But trust Nokia to try to outdo the traditional PC makers in terms of form factor and mobility, playing to its strengths and building on the N800 experience to create a new approach, as well as capitalizing on its vast scale and logistical excellence.

According to various leaked features (found easily on the internet) of the supposed prototype, nicknamed Nokia Sparrow, include a multi-slide keyboard with different layouts, automatically revealed as the device is moved in different directions; and a multidirectional display, similar to the tilting display of the N97 smartphone.

We cannot imagine a day without our phones, right? We have observed that there is whole lot of mayhem when you drop your mobile (or better termed as your life line) into water. (Guess, it’s no big secret that we all take our phones to wash rooms, during work hours at least).  So, here are some useful tricks to help you bring back a ‘wet’ mobile phone to normalcy.

It works…I dropped a Nokia N81 in a water tub to prove my point (I know I’m mad). And it is in working condition as I write this post.

Disclaimer: Please don’t perform these stunts by your own unless you have a spare phone or a genuine wet phone. (more…)

In June this year, Electronic Arts launched Spore Creature Creator, a $10 version of its Spore game. Then, from within the application, players could share videos of their creations by clicking a button and uploading to YouTube. The idea was to get buzz going about the game before its September launch. To date, more than 160,000 videos of Spore creatures have been uploaded. The most popular of these videos has been viewed 194,000 times. EA ran a contest on YouTube, including a link to buy the game online on the contest site. This is the latest way, YouTube helps monetise your videos directly. (more…)