Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

Maneesh on Twitter is having a hard time understanding how I could manage humour while stuck in a fire. I had posted:

A Corner House treat to whoever gets a picture of me looking out of the window. Seriously, people, there’s no need to panic. Bad for you. #

My colleagues prayed. I didn’t. I was a skeptic when I entered my teens and a confirmed atheist when I left them.

I prefer to call myself a humanist now. I believe that humankind created God to explain the mystery of one’s own existence. God represents all that is unknown and inexplicable. The domain of God has receded with each new scientific advancement. We have gone from the vengeful gods of natural forces to a single capitalized God, representing the human notions of love, mercy and justice, in both the Dharmic and Abrahamic traditions. What was once an Act of God is now mere probability theory. And yet, God won’t go away, because there will always be an unknown, and we fear the unknown.

What was to be our fate, trapped in that building? Was the fire moving towards us? Would we be rescued? Who knew? That is why we pray, to seek Faith as relief from uncertainty. Our tools of prayer have changed with time. A ghee lamp used to be mandatory, but a pulsing LED on your car dashboard is now a good enough substitute. Caught in a pinch like we were, our tool of prayer was the mobile phone. We called anyone we could, asking them to pray for us as per the traditions we had been raised in.

My tradition, atheism, has disconnected me from the traditions of my parents. I can not pray the same way. As far as I was concerned, we were trapped and helpless, and could only be saved by the people outside.

That tweet, then, was my prayer.

When someone jumps out of a high-rise window to escape a fire, it doesn’t happen like in the movies. The fall doesn’t proceed in slow motion. There’s no drama, no close-up of the jumper’s face as they go through their emotions. One moment they are hurtling through the air, the next they are a shabby lump on the ground. You might as well have thrown out a sack of clothes. There’s no time for any sort of emotional response in the onlooker.

Douglas Adams delivered the most sage bits of advice over thirty years ago:

1. Don’t Panic
2. Knowing where one’s towel is

When the fire alarm went off at about 4 PM yesterday, nobody budged. We knew the drill. Someone would come knocking on the door, demanding that we keep with the program and get out. We’d reluctantly pack up stuff and lock the door on the way out, because fire drills are such a perfect opportunity for theft. Nobody wanted to be bothered with this. That is, until we saw smoke out of the window.

“Run!” demanded Sashi. “Don’t pack, just run.” Then we saw smoke coming in the front door. Thick, black, stinging smoke. And then it was coming in through the restrooms and the pantry, and leaking in from the ceiling. We were trapped. The fire was right outside and all we could do was shut the doors and stay in. Outside, black clouds billowed from floors above. Spectators had started to gather.

There was neither heat nor visible flame. We didn’t know where the fire was, but it sure seemed to be above us. Smoke continued to seep in. Anjan ran to the restroom and wetted his handkerchief. Getting the idea, I did too with my cycling hand-towel, then passed it on and ran rounds for the others, wetting their kerchiefs. The restroom got harder to enter with each round. I had to breathe deep, open the door, open tap, wet the kerchief, close tap, step out, close the door, and breathe out. One early breath and I’d be choking. Breathing outside air through the wet cloth made it bearable.

Being thus forced to the windows, we turned outwards to look down on the growing crowd. Someone jumped from the floor above. Someone else too. Bizarrely, this was like watching a high voltage action movie in immersive 3D, except we may not be going home at the end of it.

Or you could look at it as a giant fumigation operation. Smoke the building out and watch the humans flee through any exit available, however high off the ground it is.

What does one do at a time like this? Sashi called her husband. Anjan called his wife, produced a string of beads from somewhere, and proceed to sit in a corner and chant. Sanjay called his mother, carefully explained that we were stuck in a burning building, and asked if she could perform a puja for us, and no, this was not a joke call. Sangeetha, I don’t know what she did. As an asthmatic, she was at high risk of asphyxiation. Seetharaman had the worst time of all. As a single father, he had to explain to his very young daughter that this may be a goodbye.

I didn’t call anyone. I didn’t want to set off panic. I stayed by the window, watching the crowd below, the fire brigades trying to make their way through, the men assembling mattresses and a cloth net for additional jumpers. We were going to be rescued and would be going home shortly. There was no need to panic.

Except, something was missing. Where was the documentation? So I took out my phone and posted:

Carlton Towers is burning and six of us are trapped inside. The fire’s above but there’s smoke everywhere. Saw people jump to their death. #

Then I took a picture of the crowd and posted that too:

http://ping.fm/p/DIQQv - Fire at Carlton Towers #

I had no idea what I was setting off when I did this. Friends started to call almost immediately. The typical conversation went like this:

“Hi”
“Hi”
“Umm, are you all right?”
“I’m stuck inside a burning building.”
“You are… inside?”
“Yes, I’m inside, trapped, and it’s burning.”
“Umm, can I do anything to help?”
“No, it’s okay, I’ll be fine.”

By the time I hung up on one, another would be on call waiting, asking too if they could do anything to help. I could no longer post pictures or text. Seriously, people, if you’re not at the site of the emergency, don’t call. Your concern is appreciated, but by blocking all channels during those precious minutes, you’re being a hindrance. I posted a request:

Don’t call me folks, you can’t help. Will keep posting. #

It went mostly unheeded. People called anyway. Bala from DNA made the first press call. And now that it had hit the news, it was time to call family. I called Zainab first and asked her to tell mom, and to tell her to please not panic. Another person jumped and collapsed.

The firemen meanwhile had assembled a ladder and were attempting to scale up the other end of the building. The ladder went up to the fourth, while I could see many hands waving from the fifth, our floor. They were tossing a rope up for someone to catch. Elsewhere, men were bringing in a bamboo ladder. The men with the cloth net caught two jumpers, who were quickly whisked away to a waiting ambulance. (Apparently, one died.) Then they started to put in place a ladder directly below us. A ladder rescue, it was going to be. We waited. We continued hollering for attention, actually. The ladder was taking forever.

A Corner House treat to whoever gets a picture of me looking out of the window. Seriously, people, there’s no need to panic. Bad for you. #

And then there was a knock on the door. A fireman was outside. The smoke had cleared sufficiently for us to walk down the stairs. I quickly unplugged my desktop, grabbed my gear and stuffed as much as I could into my pockets. Seetha switched off the UPS. There had been no power since before the fire started, but we didn’t want to be the cause of another mishap, what with all the soot flying around. I went out last to watch for anyone stumbling ahead of me. We passed a small fire on the fourth floor and exited on the first, walked across the roof of the ground floor and down the B wing stairs. The firemen had blocked entry to the ground floor of our building. It was still sputtering.

As we walked across, I noticed another rescue operation in progress on the inner side of the building and stopped to watch. Someone had let down a fire hose from the roof and folks were swinging down one at a time. The staff of the restaurant downstairs were also there. They said it was suspected to be an electric fire. I posted:

http://ping.fm/p/7gxrg - Heard it’s not a fire, just an electric short-circuit. Only smoke (itself quite dangerous). #

Pavanaja called to say a local TV channel wanted to interview me. I accepted and went on the air explaining what I had seen in my broken Kannada. They wanted to know how many people were on the floor and what sort of companies they were. I had no idea, so I made guesses from what I remembered of the directory downstairs. Deepa Kurup from The Hindu was next, followed by a series of publications and channels that I can no longer remember. I was on the phone almost continuously for the next hour.

The crowd outside had swelled to cut off all transportation:

http://ping.fm/p/jCEPJ - Massive crowd outside. This must have choked traffic for kilometres around. #

Sashi’s husband, a senior executive at Dell, arranged for a medical check-up at Dell’s campus up the road. The doctor gave me a clean chit. Blood pressure normal, breathing normal, just a lot of soot in my nose and hopefully not in my lungs.

We settled into a conference room to let our nerves settle. NDTV called next, and attending to this, I have to say, was a mistake. They tried to keep me on line for as long as they could while they interviewed the fire chief and others, asking me what I thought of the arrangements. I eventually got fed up, told them politely I had to talk to my family too, and hung up. (The clip is only 3 minutes, but the call went on for over twenty.) My phone said I had sixteen missed calls and several more messages waiting. One was from CNN-IBN, who ended up reading out my tweets. I was in no mood to return calls or do any more interviews, so I posted:

Cycling home. Won’t take calls. Please feel free to use my pictures as needed. #

The very helpful folks at Dell insisted that I take a cab home. They had booked a large car so I could fit the cycle in it. I insisted on cycling home. They didn’t think it was appropriate after facing this sort of trauma. I pointed out that I wasn’t the least bit traumatised and the doctor had confirmed. They relented, and I cycled home to parents who had been unable to watch television until then, fearing the worst.

Calls and messages continued to pour in late at night, and again this morning, thanks to the newspaper coverage.

All this media attention is being a lot more stressful than the fire itself. #

Requests for interviews continue as I type this, forcing me to switch off.

Turned down two phone calls requesting in-person interviews. Switching off phone for today. Will be on Twitter though. #

What is the point of an interview? It sells advertising for the interviewer, but will it do anything at all to improve fire safety? Will it make up for the disruption caused to the lives of the affected?

Last evening I sat across a physicist and a mathematician and watched them discuss clusterings of Wikipedia editors based on edit behaviour. Snatches of familiar but meaningless phrases hit my ears. Markov chains. Undirected graphs. Distances. Eventually the physicist squealed in delight and said she had won a bet with the mathematician. I nodded. Then they said “computationally expensive” and I took my cue and pointed out that for an extended period of revision history, one could take a given revision and consider that editor’s other edits only within a small window rather than across the entire period. That would cut clutter from the dataset and allow long term analysis. We only need to agree on what the window’s size should be. We could even come up with a way to identify a pair of editors responding to each other, as against working independently to contribute new material or clean up a page.

And thereby having said something intelligent, I sat back and watched their faces again, slipping back into incomprehension. We parted agreeing to keep in touch on the new ideas, but I’m at a loss to tell you exactly what the new ideas are. Their math makes no sense to me, for I’m an outsider: the chap butting his way into a discipline claiming to have some solutions, but with no understanding of the fundamentals.

The previous day I had a most fascinating conversation with one of the presenters at WikiWars, the significance of whose insight was again wasted on me. He talked of Edward Said and Satyajit Ray, of the latter’s biography on Wikipedia, the trouble with too many of the citations referring to a single biographer, and of how that could be understood in the context of Said’s work. He recommends Said’s Culture and Imperialism. I can feel the warmth from a dim bulb glowing somewhere.

He asked about me. I said I’ve spent the last few years in the rural development space. “Fooled around,” is more like it, for I went into the space armed with claims of pioneering web development experience and programming prowess, and found the most intense technical task they had was to install an operating system, open a web browser, point it at a government website, and explain to all parties concerned whose fault it was that the page wasn’t loading. Day-to-day life revolved around the size of the cash float, which investor was willing to fund it, scheduling meetings with the ISP for CEO-to-CEO face-offs on how a screenshot of our bandwidth consumption was insufficient, and visiting the very abrasive government bureaucrat to assure him that I did indeed have top-notch programmers working full time to bring him his daily report. Stick some Python in there to make it all better, will ya?

Which is why when I met the geeky young man working towards a PhD in agriculture, you will understand why I begged him to recommend a book that explained all this. There has to be some intelligence in this chaos, but I’m too much of an outsider to spot it.

I’m a programmer, I keep telling myself. I write code. Good code. Fast code. All these people waving their arms and speaking a strange dialect of English need me because, on the internet, code talks like nothing else. I can sit cluelessly around them, bewildered even, knowing that in the end someone will turn to me and ask if I can help.

Conversations move on. An hour later, at another location, the physicist says she’s working on a doctoral thesis. I say that nearly everyone in my life has a PhD or is working on one. I would have been too, if it wasn’t such a long, circuitous route. How am I going to justify trekking all the way through undergrad at this age just to get to the interesting bits? In academia, I’m the ultimate outsider. I’ve never been through any of their systems, turn up as this chap that no one is quite sure how to engage with, and yet have gained entry to more than one of their circuits and even published papers. The geek hat does carry one far.

The geek hat is also suspected. Bangalore’s ruined by the techies, they wail. I’ve been to endless meetings on problems that wouldn’t exist if they used Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, or something as trivial, except the Mozilla Foundation isn’t making an offer to fund a major e-governance project. I keep my mouth shut. People in the habit of routinely shooting at feet will eventually shoot their own, and then they won’t turn up at the next meeting. Suspicion of techies and the biases behind their ideas carries all the way into the realm of the bizarre. At a music concert one evening, this dear old lady, proud of her daughter who wrote for an advertising supplement, didn’t ask what I did. She didn’t want bad news. She simply said “don’t tell me you’re a techie.” A friend jumped to my defence, pointing to the camera and explaining that I was a photographer. I played along, for revealing that you’re a techie generally tends to make life more expensive in these parts, and I was foraying into yet another new discipline. A few years have passed and I’ve clicked much. Today I no longer wield a camera but still wear the geek hat.

At dinner last, the wikipedian from Taiwan made conversation. He had helped launch a minority language Wikipedia that the official system of language Wikipedias wouldn’t recognise and had successfully lobbied for its inclusion. He wanted to interview me for the wikipedians back home. As a local Wikipedia editor, how did I relate to the English language Wikipedia? But wait, me representing the local editors? With just a hundred odd edits on my account when the local chapter had editors with 50,000+ edits? I made the call to another (real) Wikipedian asking if he was in the neighbourhood. He suggested I go ahead anyway since I was a valid rep.

Later still, the Taiwanese wikipedian asked that fatal question: “So, what do you do?” I responded with the one-liner I reserve for such occasions. “I’m a programmer, I write code.” He pointed at my shirt. “You work for Yahoo?” No, I said, “that’s just a conference t-shirt.” I then attempted a weak explanation of my rural development stint.

The truth is, in the eleven plus years of my working life I’ve never worked at a software house, have never attended a computer class, and have no certifications. I wrote code through the ’90s, code and little else, telling everyone I was going to be a “software developer” when I grew up, and ultimately falling out of the academic system. But when it came to going to work, did I do the expected thing and join a software house? No, sir, I went into print publishing. What one does first sets the template, and this one sure did. I’ve put my foot into all manner of disciplines other than computer science, playing the saviour who produces the code, but bearing no certifications. I could afford it because I had put in my 10,000 hours already. After that much exposure, learning becomes automatic and incremental. I haven’t looked at a technology guide book in over a decade because I don’t need to. The book on my bedside today is on law. The one below it on film studies.

An increasingly ragged hat

My expeditions into new disciplines have gotten deeper and longer over the years, but they’ve also taken me farther away from the primary identity I’ve defined for myself. The last major piece of code I wrote was in 2002. Everything since has been relatively minor scripting. My open source code contribution track record is astonishingly sparse. I’ve gained proficiency at just one new programming language in the ’00s, down from five in the ’90s. I regularly encounter bewildering new technical constructs these days. It’s bad enough to feel like retirement.

I’m slowly, but surely, being ejected from the one discipline I considered myself an insider at. What’s one to do?

I suppose this is the part where life gets really interesting.

Long time, no post. So much to say, but where’s the time to write with all this activity? Remind me to post on:

• What it cost me to take a year off,
• What I’ve been reading through these months,
• What I did with the time and how I ended up doing each, and
• What I’m up to now, back here in the land of the gainfully employed.

The view from my new office window.

“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.

“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.)