Questionable Characters

Questionable Characters. That is what I called our quiz team yesterday evening.

Every fortnight a post from The Living Room (TLR) would tickle my curiosity. It spoke of the long forgotten concept of quizzing, and sexed it up by describing how it was actually done in this trendy pub in uber-trendy Hauz Khas Village (HKV for the uninitiated). So, after many months of active procrastination, I dragged a trusting MH there yesterday. The idea was to sit in the audience and figure out what the whole thing was all about, while simultaneously downing copious amounts of sangria.

What we discovered, however, was that this quiz had a key differentiator - there was no audience. So, unless you were asking the questions or serving drinks and food, you were a team! There were eight of them in all, and included amongs them were the Questionable Characters - M and I...

I would rather not dwell on the one hour that passed by, ever so slowly, after the quiz begin. For those who insist - the sangria was decent, if too fruity, the food was quite good, the airconditioning worked reasonably well. And those comet like things whooshing above our head were all the unanswered questions. All unanswered. All of them. We emerged after that hour with zero points, and since there were no negative points, we ranked eight on eight. After we struggled outside through the deluge of admirers and the torrent of congratulatory messages, I got reminded of the quizzes of yore...

Thankfully, and thoughtfully, I had neglected to tell people there about my quizzing days when I was a callow youth. Those days at IIFT, when Croak and I would rumble around Delhi's campuses in Croak's broken down scooter, with his helmet askew and our clothes stinking, looking for a college which had a quiz on and where we could inveigle our way in... Or the 72 hour festival at IMT (called Passion, what else?) where for three days and three nights we competed in one kind of quiz after another; where we were participating in so many contests that they had to change the schedule to let us participate in all of them and win everything in sight... Or my first Brand Equity win, when I was with Titan, and won my first ever trip abroad - to Bangkok and HK.... Or the second win in 1997 held in front of three thousand people and televised live, where Pratap and I decimated the competition and were awarded tickets to London to watch the Spice Girls (ugh!). And those many many qualifiers, one where I answered the winning question* just before Notts (Ramesh Natarajan) could, and I can still here is unique voice croaking out "Shit. Shit. Shit". Or when I won my third Brand Equity, in 2005, when I was 35, much after the age that quizzers have faded away and given way to the young bright sparks from the IT companies...

And then there were the little quizzes. The ones at Mount Carmel in Bangalore, where the girls would actually let this bunch of super-geeky boys in to the girls college every fortnight , and then cluster around silently listening to the mumbo-jumbo flying around from their mouths, with the boys eyes hardly noticing them... Or the Indian Meterological Quiz, which I won in my 12th standard, out of faraway Ahmedabad and actually won a microscope (to watch cloud formations closely, I guess). And how I did not buy a single TV or washing machine or microwave oven for the first 5 years of my working life; I won all of them at various quizzes...

It was a great time. Now, perhaps it is different. Brand Equity is  a soap opera. Printed quizzes are dead, effectively dismembered by Google and its ilk. Retained knowledge is no longer a competitive advantage, when there a profusion of screens with abundant search apps dumbing us down ever further.

But in TLR I saw hope, despite the drubbing. There was still an excitement around quizzing, partially fueled by the alcohol I guess, but still very much there. And the questions were great, the quiz master was super and the people were enthusiastic.

We will go there again definitely since it happens every fortnight. Oh, next time we will certainly have more ammunition with us. Perhaps persuade Croak to come along. And Nuts. And Suharsh. And maybe Notts, if he is traveling northwords. All those quizzers of yore... Perhaps call ourselves Forty Plus. It will be fun to see how we fare. We might still be last, futilely trying to grab at the questions whooshing above us, and coax our grey cells to think so laterally as they used to. We know one thing - even if we are a fifth of what we were years before, we will win those little books they give us prizes. All of them.

And if not, so what? There is always the alcohol. The food is good. The sangria is better. HKV is uber-trendy. And quizzing will win. Again.



*Question: "What in finance is the 3-6-3 principle?"
  Answer: "Borrow at 3%, lend at 6%, golf by 3PM" - from Liars Poker by Michael Lewis

No Man is an Island....

"No man is an island" is how John Donne started one of his most famous verses, centuries ago. But then he had not lived in the Millenium City.

As I spend more and more days in Gurgaon, I continue to get amazed by how the city functions - in fact even how it exists. There is no electricity: where I live electricity switches between the mains and generator power about 25 times a day, and for more than half the day we are on the 'backup'. There are no roads worth speaking of, except the highway which too continues to kill an average of at least one person a day! There is no water - the water table chart of India shows Gurgaon to be among the deepest red. The landscape reminds me of some of the old Western movies, or of some of those sci fi fantasies - deep red sun, dust clouds swirling around carrying with them the flotsam of human existence, a permanent dusty haze with not a tree in sight. Corpses of stray dogs and other animals brought down by speeding vehicles and their manic drivers following no rules litter the streets. And dotting this soul less landscape you see two signs of human existence - hundreds of tall, monolithic buildings, punctuated every now and then by a ramshackle liquor shop.

It is these buildings which interest me, and the vehicles. Because what is happening in Gurgaon is the exact reverse of what is happening in every other city in the world. Every large city is all about 'distributed facilities'. It is much like what is happening in computing. Earlier there used to be these big heavy computers, with all the processing power and intelligence lying in that box. The internet and the high speed fibre networks changed all that. Now computing power is distributed all across the world - in every intelligent device and in the vast data centres dotting the globe. What we have in every office and home is a node, connected to the vast web of intelligence  or the World Wide Web.

The same thing is happening in infrastructure. Before Edison came along, each building and factory had its own powerplant - its own source of power. Edison changed all that, and created the first grid. So there were centralised power plants, and houses and offices and factories connected to them as nodes to draw their energy from. Power utilities were born, Edison's being the first (now we know it as GE). The same was true of water - each village or cluster had its own pond, until piped water came along. The same for cooking gas. And ad infintum

This is how even traffic runs now. Earlier each vehicle was on its own - no street lighting, non-existent roads, no signals. Today in most busy roads in city centres, car lights are a safety feature more for others to see you rather than for you to see others. The street lighting is so good that night transforms to day, and the traffic signals, rules and processes guide your cars so well that an algorithm can drive them (as Google has demonstrated).

But the reverse is happening in the Millenium City. Each house and each cluster of houses runs its own power, there are mini power plants running in every 'gated community'. 'Backup' power (though now the state electricity grid, such that it may, is the backup power; the generator are the mains) is a must for a house to be bought. Each house - gated or otherwise - now needs its own 'pond' or water  storage. Pesky little five thousand litre tankers (mobile ponds) rumble along the unpaved roads from house to house, selling a commodity for which citizens have already paid taxes for. And now most gated complexes, including mine, have cooking gas storage too.

The same thing is happening to traffic. Each car has become an island, generating its own illumination, responsible for its own safety and for finding the best path it can drive on. Street lights exist only as road dividing pillars, for vehicles with no lights to crash into. Each car is a fortress, with its own illumination, alarm, baseball bat and lumpen driver.

And yet the city continues to thrive - property prices double every 3 years while all other facilities halve in the same time. What worries me is how long this can continue. How long will we continue going in the path opposite to what every other city has chosen - not by choice, but by necessity. The bell is tolling, and as John Donne closes  the same poem:

Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.