It was my birthday earlier this week. Thanks to all of you guys who sent in birthday wishes and left comments. Apologies to those who tried to call me and couldn’t reach me. I was out in the middle of the Jungle somewhere in interior Kerala fighting bloodsucking monsters (leeches). Really. And for those of you that forgot – Don’t worry. I’m going to forget your birthday too, so we’re even.

And, it seems I got some 100 Happy birthday scraps on Orkut! I didn’t even know I knew so many people

Anyway, this Birthday was not-so-happy for me.

Weeks before my birthday, I was wondering what gift the wife will get me. I was really scared that she’ll get me tickets to some movie like Aaja Nachle and say “Surprise!“, and I’ll have to sit through 3 hours of torture again.

So instead, I told her that there was this nice cute little phone that I wanted, and she could gift it to me. I saved her all the effort and thought of thinking up a nice gift for me, so I was really happy. She seemed to be OK with it too.

Unfortunately, I forgot to tell her how much that phone cost.

As planned, I went to the Nokia store and picked up my favorite phone – The latest Nokia N95! I returned home excited, eager to show the wife the present she got me

Me: “Hey Look! My new phone!”
Wife: “That’s nice. What all can it do?”
Me: “It has a GPS, 5MP camera, video recording, text-to-speech…..”
Wife: “Sounds fancy. How much does it cost?”
Me: “Rs 33,000.00″
Wife: “WHAT?!?!?!?”
Me: “Oh, did I forget to tell you that?”
Wife: “You spend 33 thousand on a phone?”
Me: “But it has video games on it!”
Wife: “Is that thing more expensive than my wedding ring?”
Me: “Ah! But does your wedding ring come with stereo-sound with MP3 ringtones? I don’t THINK SO! Muhahahahahahaha“

As you can imagine, the conversation went all downhill from there. My phone survived a near-death experience that the wife handed out, and then I survived another one. Anyway, the summary is that the wife refused to pay for the phone.

Now I’m in a weird situation: I have a birthday gift that no one has bought me.

And so, I’ve come up with an idea. I will sell advertising space on my phone to whoever pays up some money. You can have your custom logo stuck on the phone, or send me a 10×10 image that I will put together with other sponsors and put it as my wallpaper. Charming Chitradeep has already committed Rs. 350. Send me a mail at gift@pointlesswanderings.com to take up this wonderful advertising opportunity.

This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Don’t miss it. Send me a mail NOW!

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Hey folks. I am out on a mini vacation, so no blog posts for now. But will be back on saturday, enjoy!

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Back in school, we had ‘Computer Science’ as a subject and even had a lab. We were expected to learn programming in the lab, but I spent most of the lab time playing games like ‘Prince of Persia‘ and ‘Dangerous Dave‘. The teacher in charge of the lab didn’t like it one bit, and had threatened to flunk me several times.

At the end of the year, we had to do a ‘Computer Science Project’ to prove we learned something during the year. Someone decided to do a project on the solar system, some others decided to make a database project for storing student records – Everyone of them on their way to becoming software engineers.

I decided I wanted to write a video game.

Me: “Ma’am, I’m going to write a video game – I’m going to write a program that plays ‘Tic Tac Toe’!”
Teacher: “Your program will play Tic Tac Toe against me? That sounds like a dumb project.”
Me: “No ma’am: I’m going to use Artificial Intelligence in my program. You won’t be able to win against it.”

Have I told you guys that I had a very big mouth? I had absolutely no idea just what the hell Artificial Intelligence was, but that didn’t stop me from loudly declaring that my program could not be beaten.

Teacher: “Really? OK. If your program can defeat me, you’ll pass.”

At this point, most people would try to research the problem to see if such a program was even possible. But I decided to take the high road. My program would cheat to win.

I wrote up this program that would put the ‘X’s in two boxes simultaneously if it was about to be defeated. And of course, it would let the user put only one “O” at a time. Oh, it was brilliant!

And so, the day of the final exam came and we were lined up to show our programs. The teacher walked up to my computer and said “Ready? Remember, Only if your program doesn’t loose, you pass.”

I started up my program. The game came up and the teacher started playing. The teacher chose ‘O’s and the computer was playing with ‘X’s. Soon, she had the program cornered. The board looked like this with the computer to place an ‘X’.

O |   | X

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X |   |

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O |   | O

The teacher was probably snickering to herself. She thought she had two possible winning positions, and she was going to beat my program. But before she could realize this and say something, the computer came back and put 2 Xs simultaneously. Now the board looked like this:

O |   | X

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X | X |

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O | X | O

The teacher was shaken for a minute. She couldn’t figure out what was going on. She thought she had misread the earlier board or missed something! She stared at me, trying to see if I had pressed a key or somehow changed something, but I was standing away with my hands behind me. I couldn’t have done anything. She definitely suspected I had cheated, but the thought that the program was cheating didn’t cross her mind.

She grunted, placed an ‘O’ at the top, and the program came back and placed the remaining ‘X’ and declared that it had beaten the teacher! It even played victory music through the speaker. The crowd in the lab cheered and the teacher walked away disgruntled, still trying to wrap her head around how she could have lost to a computer program! Was it smarter than her?

She eventually did pass me, but I don’t think she ever figured out what exactly happened that day in the lab.

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As you readers probably know, Sanjay Leela Bansali stole 3 hours of my life and some thousand rupees of my money. And I want my money back. I’ve been thinking of how I’d go about doing this. I thought I’ll wait at a traffic signal and pounce on him when he drives by. But that sounds very sneaky and criminal, and I don’t want to do bad things.

And so, I decided to do the honorable thing – I’m going to send him a SPAM email with a scam. Here’s my draft mail that I’m thinking I’ll send him

Dear Mr. Sanjay Neela Bansali,

I are Ram Mohan Bihari, a big fan of your movies, Sirji. I am watching all of them. When you are making Saawariya, everyone in our Village (under banyan tree) is telling it is a blue movie. I am getting excited and taking all my wild monkeys to see blue film. But it is not usual type of blue movie, but it is good. My wild monkeys are enjoying seeing your wild monkeys dance. I think they are liking the movie.

I am loving my wild monkeys very much. I am living in tribal Chattisgad, and I am training wild monkeys to dance for daily money. I am very much liking your movie because I am thinking you are doing the same. Even more is that my wild monkeys are liking your blue movie so much that they are jumping up and down. I am wanting to bring my wild monkeys to Mumbai to seeing your movie in big many plex.

But I am poor and I am needing monies to bring my monkeys. Will you, Sirji, sending me Rs. 1000 to me so I am coming to Mumbai? I am very big fan of your movies and I am hoping you are not disappointing me. Please Sirji, do it for my monkeys. I am seeing you are very fond of them, so please sending my Rs. 1000 and I am coming.

Thank you Sirji,
Ram Bihari

Do you think my scam will work? Do have any other ideas I can try to get my money back?

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We share our planet with lots of weird species like nerds and geeks. As normal humans, we should make some effort to reach out to these folks so that we may understand their language and their culture. And so, to promote harmony with the nerds, I have managed to establish contact with one of them. To protect the identity of this Alien, we have to call him by his secret name, “Archisman Dhatra“. The following is an interview I conducted with Archisman.

Me: Hello Sir. Before we start, let me say that you look remarkably human. Do nerds always take the human form so as to not cause panic among regular human beings?
Archisman: “Please call me by my proper name: geek. Not nerd. There is subtle difference between a geek and a nerd and calling us nerds is a disgrace to our great forefathers. It has been statistically proven that geeks have 31.18% more chance of getting a date than nerds. I like to keep my chances optimal. But I am still single. I wonder why. Anyway, I digress.

Coming back to the point: Yes our goal is to try and not standout like a lone Lisp programmer in a JavaScript convention, but to blend in the way C blends into C++. This way, we can observe and study humans without causing too many compiler warnings, because, as our good old friend Atif would say, “The geeks will inherit the Earth.”

Me: My sources tell me that you got the 2nd Rank in 12th standard. That is 100% worse than 1st Rank. Is that a criminal offense punishable by death on your planet?
Archisman: Worse than that. We get a lifetime of community service on your planet, which explains why I am here. Painstakingly, we educate you masses about our alien culture so that you do not resist when we will take over your primitive society. So much for one small mistake!

Me: Us normal humans sleep with books under the pillow to make the knowledge from the book diffuse into our brains. What do the nerds do? Is it necessary to keep the book open for optimal transfer?
Archisman: This is where you kids go wrong. Reading a book is the process of aligning neurons in your cerebrum for knowledge persistence, and it is very essential to open the book before you start. Also, knowledge is power and

In other words, knowledge is basically forcing yourself to read lengths of boring text wasting your time. But remember that the lack of knowledge could be disastrous (You may recall your ‘I read Russian literature‘ incident) and the only way to amass this knowledge is to actually open and read the book.
But sometimes, when this is not possible, we just read the summary of a book and act as if we read the whole book. This works because it is impossible for a normal mortal to tell the difference.

Me: One last question. My sources tell me you are known as the super-nerd. Are you friends with super-man? You seem to be from the same planet.
Archisman: Pretty much. But unlike him I prefer to wear my underpants inside as a means of camouflage. This is aligned with the C-in-C++ principle that I mentioned before.

Me: Thank you, Sir for taking the time to talk to us normal human beings. We are glad to make contact with the geeks and hopefully we can live peacefully together.
Archisman: Thank you. And we’re going to take over your planet soon, so the peace thing might not work out.

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I come home one day, to find the wife in a very pensive mood.

Me: “What happened? What are you so deeply thinking about?“
Wife: “I think we should go watch Saawariya again.“

I feel a sudden pain shooting through my heart. My brain cringes with the horrifying memories of those 3 hours spent watching the movie already.
Me: “*GASP*…I…I….I think I’m having a heart attack!“

Wife: “Drama Queen! Anyway, I have this feeling that I didn’t understand the movie. I didn’t ‘get it‘, you know what I mean?“
Me: “There’s nothing to ‘get‘ in the movie. Even I didn’t ‘get‘ it“
Wife: “That’s not surprising. The movie was targeted at a certain audience.“
Me: “What is that supposed to mean?“
Wife: “All I’m saying is that you need to expand your horizons a little bit. Learn how to appreciate art“
Me: “My horizon is too wide already. I’m starting to think about mailing Sanjay Leela Bansali a copy of his own movie. Looks like he forgot to watch it himself.“
Wife: “Anyway, we haven’t watched a movie all week.“
Me: “That is a GOOD THING!“
Wife: “You know what? You’re pretending to hate the movie, but your subconscious liked the movie so much that you can’t stop talking about it.“
Me: “I’m not talking about that stupid Saawariya movie.“
Wife: “See, you did it again!“
Me: “Oh! Wait a minute…My suconciousness wants to say something….I…SLEPT…THROUGH…THE…MOVIE…“
Wife: “Very funny. Oh, by the way, we’re going to watch the movie ‘Goal‘ on Sunday“
Me: “Why?“
Wife: “To help you connect with your inner self.“
Me: “My inner self is well connected, thank you. 8Mbps Broadband, too! If my inner self watches this movie, then it’ll probably disconnect from me.“
Wife: “You owe it to me.”
Me: “My inner self will need to see a psychiatrist if it watches the movie.“
Wife: “Oh by the way, you’re paying for the movie. Thanks a ton!“
Me: “NO I’M NOT!“
Wife: “Oh, I’d check your credit card statement. I think you might find something interesting there.“
Me: “AAaarrrrghhhhhhh…“

So, it turns out, that not only have I lost 3 hours of my life that are not coming back, but apparently I ‘volunteered‘ to pay for the movie tickets! Sanjay Leela Bansali has taken my time and money too! I WANT THEM BACK! DO YOU HEAR ME SANJAY LEELA BANSALI?

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As you already know, I’m trying to found a new religion called Adityaism. It’s currently in beta, but I’ll let you know when it launches so that you can join! Anyway, I’ve been working on a theme-song for it, and here it is!

The Song of Adityaism

What is wrong with this world, so sad and angry and blue,
On Airtel Customer Care, why is it so difficult to get through?
Watching Saas-Bahu serials is like a bad dream,
Do I really need to buy men’s fairness cream?

But don’t you worry, religion 2.0 is here,
Embrace Adityaism, it’ll drive away all fear!
It’s great, a ticket to heaven is not conditional,
Taking a bath everyday is also optional!

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