Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

I spent the last two weeks cleaning up the website for the Centre for Internet and Society. Check it out and let me know what you think.

“Do you read fiction?” I asked Manish.

“Huh?” he stammered. Only minutes before, I had asked if he could write Python code to generate the Fibonacci sequence, my standard test for recruits. He was trying to work that out and I was growing impatient.

“Um, yes…” he tried to answer, but I wasn’t listening. I said, “There’s a book reading at Crossword in about fifteen minutes. Let’s continue there.”

Amitav Ghosh was in town to promote his new book Sea of Poppies. I had been seeing his books on shelves for years, but hadn’t read any, being generally sceptical of Indian authors. Many years back, when each new book cost me months of savings and days of careful consideration, I had on occasion hazarded a technical book by an Indian author, and inevitably ended up bitter. For all their cover promises, the books were always fluff.

Amitav Ghosh is good, Zainab said. But Indian fiction in English? Admittedly, I hadn’t tried any. Couldn’t hurt to try, given I can afford to buy and not read a book these days.

And so that evening, I interrupted the interview and took the candidate to a book reading, asking him to think out the code and dictate it to me later. Ghosh read an excerpt from his book and discussed it with his host. I hadn’t been to a book reading before and didn’t know what to expect. When the discussions ceased and people queued up to get their books signed, I joined.

At my turn, I put two books down on the desk. Ghosh opened one and looked up expectantly, then said “Who’s it for?”

“Huh?”

Who’s it for? For myself? I was picking a copy for myself. Who could it be for?

“For Kiran,” I said.

Wait, that sounded wrong. Someone was missing. Someone who should have come first. “…and Zainab,” I hastily added. “For Kiran and Zainab,” he wrote.

And that was how I brought home my first author-signed copy and ended up apologising for it.

…

Chandrahas Choudhury was in town this evening for his new book Arzee the Dwarf. Zainab said to say hi. She knew him? Well yes, through the Mumbai blogger circuit. I joined the queue and, when my turn came, offered a reminder of our brief meeting in Manipal last year. “Of course,” he said. “Where’s Zainab? I’m going to write this out to her too.”

“To Kiran and Zainab,” he wrote.

There was going to be a post here, but my browser ate it up and I’m now too mad to be writing it again.

Some things have incredibly steep learning curves, but we struggle over them anyway, because on the other side of the curve we get our *-fu master black belt. We go through life collecting and exhibiting our belts. Every once in a while we come across someone with a belt that makes us envious, that won’t get off our minds, and yet, when it comes to facing that curve ourselves, it no longer seems worth it. Why is that?

“Wait here,” said Srinivas, and disappeared from view before I could turn around.

Behind me, vehicles honked as they approached the narrow intersection. I pushed the bike to the edge of the road, parked, and swung the backpack over to my back. Where had he gone? The building behind me looked busy. I walked over and looked up the steps into the corridor. No sign of him.

The guard rattled his cane and said “What do you want?” Something about his tone put me off. I hate it when people question the authority on which one exists as they do. I was standing on a public road where I had every right to stand. What was his problem? And where was Srinivas?

“This is a ladies hostel,” he said. “Go away from here.” I looked up again and noticed for the first time that every one of the persons entering and exiting the building was female. This was somehow supposed to be my fault? Who did he think I was, a college romeo? The backpack! Did he… oh dear… really think I was a student?

“I am thirty years old,” I wanted to say, “and married.” Why should I care that this is a ladies hostel? But damn it, he didn’t deserve to know that. What business was it of his? I had had my share of being lorded over by petty officials back in my school days. I was going to have none of it now. I was not going to be sorry for who I was just because some two bit minimum-wage guard had an inflated sense of his own importance.

Who did he think I was? My mother had been a founding principal of one of their schools, and had run it for ten years. I had grown up riding down this very road through their gates to pick her up every evening. I would park my bike in the staff parking area and walk into the principal’s office, unchecked. And now, I was the suspicious character? The gall of it!

I said nothing. How was I to compress all that into a single, coherent statement? One that said, in addition, that while I had nothing against him personally, he ought to know better than to insult someone with such impeccable credentials? That if he dared make a move, I was perfectly capable of pulling rank?

He continued glaring at me. I shrugged and walked back to the bike, pretending not to have noticed. Srinivas returned several minutes later and announced that there may be some houses in the next block. I wanted to tell him of what this place meant to me, nay, of what I meant to this place. The ego had to be soothed. But I said nothing, and we resumed our house search.

(Part of a writing practice series.)

Guillaume Marceau, who made a guest post here on how to make comparison charts, has an excellent demonstration of this technique over on his blog, charting performance against code verbosity in programming languages:

The speed, size and dependability of programming languages

If you drew the benchmark results on an XY chart you could name the four corners. The fast but verbose languages would cluster at the top left. Let’s call them system languages. The elegantly concise but sluggish languages would cluster at the bottom right. Let’s call them script languages. On the top right you would find the obsolete languages. That is, languages which have since been outclassed by newer languages, unless they offer some quirky attraction that is not captured by the data here. And finally, in the bottom left corner you would find probably nothing, since this is the space of the ideal language, the one which is at the same time fast and short and a joy to use.