I remember reading Zen and the Art of Motor­cycle Mainte­nance by Robert Pirsig a while ago and reflecting on the nature of Quality as described by the author. Although the ideas described by Pirsig in his medita­tive narra­tive weren’t exactly novel, he did paint a layer of clarity over the things we see in day-to-day life, like a lens that magni­fies some parts of a specimen and brings to the fore an aspect that simply wasn’t noticed before, even as it stared us in the face.

But today, I was travel­ling around the streets of Mumbai, and it got me thinking about what sets nations apart from each other, especially the tenuous distinc­tion between the devel­oping and the devel­oped nations. The distinc­tion most certainly isn’t techno­log­ical — from consumer products to manufac­turing techniques, India has every­thing it needs to be on par with any other nation. In the cases where it doesn’t, there is a penalty of economic cost — we simply have to pay a little extra to get the same benefits. Alter­na­tively, the distinc­tion could be economic, but that expla­na­tion doesn’t fit either. While there are plenty of people in India below the poverty-line, there are plenty of rich people as well. But being rich doesn’t make life any easier in India, unless you are so rich that you can liter­ally pay someone to live your life for you.

To take a simple example, imagine that you need to get a new passport, and it takes several hours and several visits to the passport office to overcome bureau­cratic hurdles and get the job done. There are no missing pieces that prevent this system from functioning equally well in devel­oping as well as devel­oped nations. Except that you would expect this system to work better in a devel­oped nation, gener­ally speaking.

Or to consider another example, if it takes forty-five minutes to commute one mile in suburban Mumbai simply because the traffic is terrible (because traffic rules are not spelt out properly and seldom followed), whom do you blame? If that commute is impor­tant to you, it doesn’t matter how rich you are, such comforts cannot be easily bought. Again, the traffic is not terrible because of poverty, or lack of educa­tion, or limited access to technology.

What is missing is something that can be very accurately, if vaguely, described by the term Quality. Look around and you will see people not willing to make an effort to put in their best work, doing a shoddy job simply because everyone else does. They are surrounded by others who accept this situa­tion and get on with their lives as if it didn’t matter. The accep­tance breeds indif­fer­ence, completing the circle.

In many ways, this idea is scarier than the naïve assump­tion that gener­ating more indus­trial and agricul­tural output will magically trans­form the country into the ideal we cherish in our dreams. It is the people themselves who need to change in some hitherto undefined fashion; simply demanding more resources, more technology or more money does not help in this regard.

Somewhere along the way, we started writing down numbers in spread­sheets and ledgers, and lost track of what is really impor­tant to us.

I’m still in the last decade, depending on where you are. The current day in Seattle, WA, USA is the 31^st of December 2009. In most other places of the world, year 2010 has arrived already.

A lot of people are celebrating the arrival of the New Year. But with all that has gone by and all that is to come, I don’t really see the point in making a fuss about a single point in time, or even an hour or a day for that matter. It means nothing, nothing at all.

Another day goes by — another brick in the wall of eternity.

Last night’s install­ment of dreams was partic­u­larly enter­taining. I had a dream, then woke up and realized it was a dream. I fell sleep again, had another dream and then woke up once again. Then I really woke up and realized that my earlier wakeful­ness was merely another dream. Still following?

Inter­est­ingly, all of those dreams had a connected plot.

Now that we have all these algorithms that try to detect if comments left on a blog are made by bots imper­son­ating humans, I wonder if they’re sophis­ti­cated enough to detect humans emulating bots.…

When I get the time, I’m going to perform an exper­i­ment, the anti-Turing test of sorts. I’m going to leave comments on various sites that sound like bots, but are, in fact, me. (I’m mostly human, by the way.) The goal of the exper­i­ment would be to get them marked as spam. Of course, the crucial thing is that these should be comments relevant to the post, not real spam.

This Daylight Saving Time phenom­enon is occur­ring so frequently I am almost getting bored talking about it. I’m sure you’re already bored hearing me talk about it. Turn a corner and poof! — the time’s changed again.

The funny thing is, I woke up this morning and had to hunt for evidence that the time had changed from PDT to PST last night.

I guess it’s technology catching up with social stupidity. Almost any clock that has a microchip is now capable of automat­i­cally adjusting to the jump in time with no manual inter­ven­tion. The excep­tions, of course, are the clocks that don’t store your time-zone.

So here’s what I found this morning.

Clocks that show the correct time:

• Computers (all desktops and laptops)
• Digital alarm clock
• Cell phone

Clocks that do not show the correct time:

• Microwave (stores only the time, not the date)
• Camera (stores the date, but not the time-zone)
• Pager (stores the date, but not the time-zone)

Perhaps I should have at least one good analog clock hanging on the wall to maintain my sanity.

Reading Zen and the Art of Motor­cycle Mainte­nance by Robert Pirsig, I came across this passage that reminded me of some ideas I’ve had in the past. At the very least, it gives us a refresh­ingly different view of something we may never have thought about before:

“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confi­dence in. No one is fanat­i­cally shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it is going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanat­i­cally dedicated to polit­ical or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.”

GeoCi­ties, Yahoo’s free web-hosting service, is shutting down tomorrow, October 26^th 2009. To celebrate commem­o­rate this event, the xkcd homepage has been completely redesigned.

It’s unfor­tu­nate that these services that were consid­ered so exciting ten years ago are now fading into the sunset with few people even noticing that they’re gone.

Now they tell me I can choose to view either a “News Feed” or a “Live Feed”. What are these, and why should I care? Why should I spend fifteen minutes of my time figuring it out when I have so many better things to do, like checking my blog stats or writing what you’re reading right now?

Facebook UI designers, whoever you are, weren’t you taught that giving your users choice is a no-no? Especially when there’s no “Help” link next to it to let us figure out what that choice means? And Facebook UI devel­opers, why does my homepage default to “News Feed” each time I open it?

And why has my life started revolving around Facebook so much that it makes me sick? *cough… cough.. splutter*

To tell you the truth, I don’t like phone, cable and Internet service providers. With that confes­sion, I join the elite club of a several million across the globe who share the same sentiment.

I doubt if you could come across any person who is not an employee at AT&T, Verizon or Comcast and actually likes the company. (That’s not to say the employees actually like the place, of course). Think about it — when was the last time you heard anyone say nice things about these guys? At worst, you hear “I hate those f!@#$%”…at best you hear…“Meh, they’re okay.”

I guess the main problem with these behemoths is that they don’t really care what people think. Look at their billing policies. Anytime you deviate from the usual course of making phone calls and paying your bills (or using the Internet and paying your bills) they will charge you for it in every way possible, and they will also try not to tell you about it. For instance, when I bought an iPhone from an AT&T store, they tacked on an “$18 upgrade fee” that they didn’t bother to tell me about. I found out about it when my last bill shot up, and I dug into the details to find out why. The “upgrade” in the “$18 upgrade fee” is question­able — I bought the phone and paid for it, I got a brand new contract with them and I subscribed to their data plan: they should be thanking me rather than charging me. But even that is besides the point — charging customers ridicu­lously is greed, but not telling them about it before­hand is pure indif­fer­ence borne out of the knowl­edge that they can get away with it.

If that example didn’t convince you, then I’ll add that Comcast just increased the Internet rates — without bothering to tell me of course. Again, I found out by noticing that the bill amount had increased, after which I discov­ered the little box on the bill explaining that I would have to pay more. Nice.

In some ways, I think the culture of “your bill is $$$ + taxes + tips” has something to do with this state of affairs. That “+ taxes + tips” can be a real bitch, and everyone is used to not knowing how much they’re paying for stuff. I would rather go back to the good ol’ MRP (Maximum Retail Price) system present in the land of my forefathers.

I’m sitting here at home at the end of a Sunday doing nothing, listening to Glen Hansard’s Falling Slowly and I feel oddly satis­fied, as if I could lay claim to being the happiest person in the world in this one moment. There’s that feeling in the air that you get when you’re on a swing in the playground and you’re gradu­ally slowing down to a stop on the way up.

It’s all very irrational; I don’t under­stand it.