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Rant

Why do NRIs and PIOs become pricks?

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This article is about how my friends became NRIs and PIOs and went from decent people to being the biggest pricks ever. To start off with, some definitions:

NRI – Non-Resident Indian. Basically an Indian living abroad while still holding Indian citizenship. Prick Level 1.

PIO – Person of Indian Origin. Basically a person born an Indian citizenship, who has since taken up citizenship in another country. Prick Level 2.

I have already written about NRIs in general, this post is specifically how my friends turned into pricks once they moved abroad.

Prick 1

I have written about Prick 1 before. Even though our relationship was strained after he failed to get me into a Ponzi scheme, we used to text frequently and were friendly. Then came the big Australia PR exodus and he left to live in Australia and cut off more or less all contact with me. We still kept in touch, but it was one-sided. He replies to my texts, but has never contacted me on his own, not once in the last 10 years. But at least he replies, which is more than I can say about the next one.

Prick 2

Prick 2 and I used to be colleagues and really good friends. We frequently met outside work and our families knew each other well. We shared details of our personal lives with each other. Then came the big Australia PR exodus and he left to live in Australia and cut off more or less all contact with me. But unlike Prick 1, Prick 2 went one step further and refused to even respond to my messages. He does read messages, just doesn’t bother to reply. One day, out of the blue, I received a call from him saying that he’s in Delhi and if I wanted the honour of meeting him, I would have to come over within the next hour or lose the opportunity. What “friend”, calls someone to meet on the last day of their trip within a 1 hour time slot?

But still not the biggest prick in this list.

Also, Prick 1 and Prick 2 were friends with each other in India, too, now both live in Sydney but avoid each other at all costs.

Prick 3

To be honest, Prick 3 was a prick from the day he was born (Probably because he was from Chandigarh), but his prickliness touched new heights once he moved to Australia (I see a pattern here). He was my senior and a roommate in college and we lost touch afterwards. I made an effort to re-establish contact in recent years. Unfortunately, soon, he planned a trip to Bangkok and asked to meet. From the second I met him, his behaviour was grotesque. Below are some gem dialogues I got to hear

  1. Scurvy I know you live in Thailand and that is nice and all, but you must make an effort to move to a developed country. There’s no comparison.
  2. I worked on Wall Street for many years. You know, like in the movies.
  3. This club in Bangkok weren’t letting us in, till we flashed our AU/US passports and at that point they fell on our feet.
  4. I hate it when people call me Indian. I am Australian, not Indian.
  5. There’s going to be rain tonight and I am afraid my pools may overflow (Proceeds to call wife to drain the pool many times).
  6. You know I have 2 houses in Sydney.
  7. You know I have 3 cars. One of them is 2-seater.
  8. Ew, your locality feels like Pune.

Prick 4

Prick 4 is still a good friend of mine. But he is kind of a prick now. Prick 4 moved to UK many years ago and although he was not as bad as Prick 1 or 2 or 3, we sort of lost touch. This was till the day Prick 4 and his wife (who is also our friend) received their UK citizenships. That was the only time in many years he contacted me on his own ad had a proper conversation. He also claims not to remember much of his life in India including our time spent together.

Of course, not everyone changes this way. For every Prick, there are the decent ones who also live abroad and don’t have all the attitude in the world.

Recently I got to thinking why some NRIs and PIOs become pricks. Why do some Indians change so drastically once they leave the country? I can think of the following reasons:

  1. Rising from a life in a garbage dump to living in a developed country overwhelms them so much, they lose their minds.
  2. They like showing off their lifestyle to others and get a dopamine hit when people acknowledge it.
  3. They went to show that they are better than others (especially the people still “stuck” in India).
Rant

The Photo Sharing Conundrum

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To give you a bit of background on where this is coming from: I was into photography in the 2010s. To the point where I had a camera, multiple lenses and more assorted kit. Eventually I sold all of it, but I still like taking pictures today. This article is about how I struggled with photo sharing on the internet, especially recently. A timeline below, interspersed with completely unrelated photos:

Phase 1: 2004 to Oct 2023 : Flickr

blurred shimmering lights in cafe at night
Photo by ROMAN ODINTSOV on Pexels.com

As long as I remember, I have been a loyal user of Flickr. At first, I used to use it as a service to backup and store my photos and share them with family. With the advent of more private cloud storage services, I moved that function to OneDrive and eventually iClown. Still, I kept my Flickr around to share photos publicly.

For most of these 2 decades, I paid for a Flickr Pro membership, too. Although in the initial days it was not required, I paid to support the service and get rid of advertisements. Eventually, they put a 1000 photo limit for free accounts & I was forced to go Pro. Overall though, Flickr has been good to me. It has consistently surfaced my photos in search results and they have been used on almost hundred websites including Wikipedia.

Last year, I started to question why I was paying for this service. It is not like I was earning anything from sharing my photos, they were openly licensed to anyone who wanted to use them. So I decided to take the drastic step of moving away from Flickr.

Phase 2: Oct 2023 to Oct 2023 : Photo Blog

close up photo of mining rig
Photo by panumas nikhomkhai on Pexels.com

I decided to make my own photo blog and host my photos on it. I chose WordPress as my platform because of how ubiquitous it is. As you may know, WordPress natively is not a photo sharing CMS, but there are plugins that can help. I decided to move away from the album format of Flickr and post my photos as part of posts.

I spent a lot of time sifting through my photos and narrowing them down to 2200 photos I deemed worthy of the blog.

It took me 6-7 hours of work everyday for a week to finally put everything up. Time consuming tasks include:

  1. Setting the correct Title and Description for each photo
  2. Setting the correct Caption and Alt Text for each photo
  3. Geotagging photos where location information was missing
  4. Writing posts about the photos
  5. Renaming files
  6. Adjusting the posts for good SEO

And then I made the mistake of restoring a backup for my web hosting (Not knowing it restores all websites) and lost everything.

Phase 3: Oct 2023 to Nov 2023 : Flickr Part 2

person holding lighter
Photo by Kobe – on Pexels.com

Devastated at having lost my blog because of one erroneous click, I decided I couldn’t go through with doing all that one more time and went back to Flickr. Of course, I had deleted my account already, so had to start from scratch.

It took me 6-7 hours everyday for a week to get everything posted on Flickr. Time consuming tasks include:

  1. Setting the correct Title and Description for each photo
  2. Geotagging photos where location information was missing
  3. Sorting photos into albums
  4. Adding photos into groups for visibility

It was nice while it lasted, but within a few weeks, I started to miss my photo blog. Two factors (in de ja vu format) led me to the next steps

  1. Why am I paying for a Flickr Pro subscription when I am not earning anything from it?
  2. Why am I relying on a 3rd party service when I can have my own photo blog.

So I went ahead and deleted my Flickr account, yet again.

Phase 4: Nov 2023 to December 2023 : Photo Blog Part 2

data codes through eyeglasses
Photo by Kevin Ku on Pexels.com

I spent a lot of time sifting through my photos and narrowing them down to 2200 photos I deemed worthy of the blog.

It took me 6-7 hours of work everyday for a week to finally put everything up. Time consuming things include

  1. Setting the correct Title and Description for each photo
  2. Setting the correct Caption and Alt Text for each photo
  3. Geotagging photos where location information was missing
  4. Writing posts about the photos
  5. Renaming files
  6. Adjusting the posts for good SEO

Then I had to go back and ask the people who has previously subscribed to my blog to subscribe again. Embarrassing as fuck. The honeymoon period lasted all of 2 weeks.

Eventually, I began to notice that the traffic on my photo blog was not as per my expectations. Eventually, I found out that search engines were not indexing my photos. In fact, Bing straight up blocked my domain. I request an appeal but it was denied.

After consulting with the wise people of Reddit, I came to the conclusion that WordPress is not good for photo SEO and nothing could beat Flickr when it came to indexing photos on search engines.

So I deleted my blog, yet again.

Phase 5: January 2024 to January 2024 : Flickr Part 3

row of shiny candles near glass wall
Photo by Erkam Hayta on Pexels.com

On my third Flickr account, it took me 6-7 hours everyday for a week to get everything posted on Flickr. Time consuming tasks include:

  1. Setting the correct Title and Description for each photo
  2. Geotagging photos where location information was missing
  3. Sorting photos into albums
  4. Adding photos into groups for visibility

Voila! I had to wait a few weeks, but eventually my photos began to appear on search engines again.

It was nice while it lasted, but within a few weeks, I started getting disillusioned with Flickr. Two factors led me to the next steps

  1. Why am I paying for a Flickr Pro subscription when Iam not earning anything from it?
  2. Why am I relying on a 3rd party service when I can have my own photo blog.

So I went ahead and deleted my Flickr account, yet again.

Phase 6: April 2024 to May 2024 : Piwigo

Free computer server room image

This time I decided that I won’t use WordPress for my photo sharing, so did a lot of research and narrowed it down to Lychee and Piwigo. I couldn’t get Lychee installed, so decided to go with Piwigo. I immediately ran across a few problems

  1. The interface was dated and the theme selection was limited
  2. There was no SEO to speak of, even with plugins
  3. Like all Open Source software (But unlike WordPress), it required a lot of tinkering in PHP to get it to work correctly .

Thankfully, I didn’t waste time posting 2200 photos, rather posted just 2 albums to see how they perform.

After waiting for a few weeks, I realised that my photos weren’t appearing on search engines and decided to scrap it.

Phase 7: May 2024 to May 2024 : Unsplash

man people art girl
Photo by Sohail Nawaz on Pexels.com

Someone on Reddit recommended me Unsplash so I decided to use it. Again, thankfully, I only uploaded 2 albums. Unsplash is a beast when it comes to surfacing photos. I was receiving likes within minutes and had up to 100 downloads in 48 hours for 20 photos.

Unsplash seemed like a dopamine dream come true, until I read their licensing. Long story short, Unsplash lets anyone do whatever they want with your photos without requiring attribution. I may have been OK with it, till I read horror stories from photographers about their photos being used on other platforms, while being attributed to someone else. This was a deal breaker for me, so I deleted my Unsplash account.

Phase 8: May 2024 to June 2024 : Wikimedia Commons

SpaceCube_2
SpaceCube_2 by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC-BY 2.0

By this time, I was dead tired of doing the same things over and over again, so I decided to take a step back and list down what I wanted and what I didn’t want:

  1. I did not want to earn money from my photos.
  2. I did not want to the dopamine fix of likes and comments.
  3. I did not want to share personal photos and did not want an image storage platform.
  4. I did not want to pay for hosting my photos.
  5. I did want my photos to be indexed by search engines.
  6. I did want my photos to be used freely by others, but with attribution.

When. I thought long and hard around the above requirements, the answer came to me. Wikimedia Commons, one of the most extensive media repositories ever.

I was already an occasional contributor to Wikipedia, I could just extend my contributions from articles to media. Many of my photos have already been uploaded to Wikipedia (and consequently wikimedia) by others, I just had to complete the collection.

It took me around 10 days, working 6-7 hours a day to put around 2200 photos to Wikimedia. Time consuming tasks include

  1. Setting the correct copyright & license information for each photo
  2. Setting the correct Title, Caption & Description for each photo
  3. Assigning photos to the correct category (Quite tricky with nested and overlapping categories)
  4. Assigning depictions to each photo

Finally, when it was done, I heaved a sigh of relief and promised myself not to do this all over ever again. Indeed, even if I wanted to, there’s no easy way to mass delete my photos from Wikimedia Commons.

In fact, once you upload photos, there’s no temptation (or a way) to see stats, likes or comments. Luckily, 1 month in, I don’t regret doing this.

Rant

Humans Suck Balls

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The more I live & see what’s going on around me, the more I am convinced that we humans suck big time and don’t deserve this planet. Let’s look at why:

Incompatibility with other species

lynx on branch in forest near hole in tree
Photo by David Selbert on Pexels.com

Do you know that in less than 300 years, humans have already driven 600 plant species to extinction? But that is just plant life which is comparatively resilient. Humans are actively driving between 10,000 to 100,000 animal species to extinction every year.

Incompatibility with other humans

grayscale photo of man holding rifle
Photo by asim alnamat on Pexels.com

Humans not only have problems with other species, we also cannot co-exist with other humans. There are currently 56 separate armed conflicts on going on around the world as of May 2024. Just look at thIs map. Except a few specific areas, these conflicts span the entire globe.

Do you know that since record keeping began, there has not been a single moment in history where there was peace everywhere?

We are also killing approx 475,000 of our own every year even outside of wars.

Counter-productive use of resources

destroyed residential building under gray sky
Photo by Алесь Усцінаў on Pexels.com

US has sent billions of dollars worth of aid to Palestinians in Gaza. So noble. But on the other hand, US is also the biggest supplier of armaments to Israel which kill the same Palestinians. I mean, what’s the point even? This is so counter productive. Either just kill them or just let them live. Why this game?

Modern buildings cost millions to build. It also takes millions to make missiles which will eventually destroy the building. How counter-productive is all this? Why build something only to build something else to destroy the first thing?

Humans as a whole, spend approx $2.1 Trillion every year on the military, not to protect humans from inter-galactic threats, but to kill other humans. On the other hand, we spend only approx $39 Billion every year on medical research and approx $117 Billion every year on space exploration. Now imagine if humanity worked as a whole and diverted all their resources to work towards a common goal.

I won’t even talk about climate change in detail, because that is a whole new topic in itself. Most of the planet will be uninhabitable in less than a century, but we won’t stop there and are planning to colonise other planets. Who gave us the right? Must be the colonisation behaviour we inherently have. Some cunts even think it is more productive to terraform Mars than to save our own planet.

This behaviour of humans is not even new. We have been the most selfish species ever, for millennia and other species have always suffered from it. Because of this, I think this behaviour is inherent in most humans and humanity as a species is flawed and cannot improve.

So I agree with the character of Ye Wenjie from The Three-Body Problem.

Rant

Anxiety Medication Fail (Yet Again)

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One thing that you should know about me is that I don’t seem to be able to learn a lesson. I am writing this just a few weeks after my latest anxiety medication fail.

So, I had a good thing going on with my medications, no problems, good productivity, happy in life. But, I started looking for ways to cheap out. I found a pharmacy which would provide me cheaper versions of the medications I currently take from my hospital.

MedicationBeforeAfter
Escitalopram 10mg (Half Dose)LexaproEsidep
Risperidone 1mg (Half Dose)NeurisRisperidone GPO
Before and after medication

Basically I replaced my expensive medication with cheaper versions, with supposedly the exact same chemical composition, but at 1/4th the price. What could go wrong?

Lots.

Turns out, all medication are not created equal, even if the box says so.

The first night I switched meds, I had awful sleep and woke up the next morning with an altered mental state. I had a work-related argument the night before, so I thought it was related to that.

The second night, too, I slept awful. At this point, I started suspecting the meds, but decided to give it another try.

Luckily, I still had some of my old medication left. So I decided to do a series of experiments

  1. Third night I rolled back Escitalopram to Lexapro – No Joy
  2. Fourth night I rolled back both medications – Much joy
  3. Fifth & Sixth night, I did Esidep + Neuris – Much joy

Hence, I identified that the Risperidone generic version is no good. The next day, I went to the doctor and got my regular medication.

Anxiety Medication Withdrawal Fail
The Culprit
Rant

Horrible Benders

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I wrote about how I went sober (But eventually failed to maintain it), I wanted to reflect back on some of the worst benders I have been through. Why? Maybe just to remind myself why I shouldn’t drink like that anymore.

Below are some of my worst benders over the years:

Nagpur

man in white long sleeved shirt on red window
Photo by abhishek goel on Pexels.com

Most of my engineering days were about booze. And since I was young, the benders were not that bad. However, there are some incidents I remember.

  • This was when I was living with my senior roommates. For some reason, one day we decided to drink whiskey at 9 AM in the morning. I have never had a good relationship with whiskey, so after many pegs, while I was at Sandeep Kalia’s house, I puked in the toilet. His kindly grandmother (We called her aaji) was very concerned what was happening, but the others told her I had eaten something bad.
  • One time we went drinking at PP’s garage pub and drank too much vodka. While others were puking, I was puzzled why I was lying awake in bed and not able to sleep. This was one of the first times I realised that alcohol affects my sleep so negatively.
  • One time we were returning from a drinking session at one of the dhabas and my motorcycle got tangled in a high tension electricity cable hanging on the road and launched into the air. I remember passing out, but luckily I was back to normal next day.

Delhi & Gurgaon

grayscale photography of bottles on top of table
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Our time in Gurgaon was the first time we had freedom to do what we wanted and we had money to spend because we were earning. Sood sahib was my roommate and very frustrated with his job. So, almost every evening, he and his degenerate colleague would come over and get drunk. It didn’t help me that I worked night shifts and went to work drunk many times. However, this was not the worst part.

  • I remember we gathered together with Chatur after a long time and started pub hopping at Saket. He came all sophisticated in a car, dressed in a suit, which we found funny, but probably helped getting us into fancy places. So we got drunk on cocktails and not being satisfied enough, drank at 2 more thekas over the night. Eventually, Chatur passed out and we somehow got home. Again, I couldn’t sleep all night while Chatur was puking in a pizza box.
  • While working night shifts, it was very common for us to go drinking after our shifts. One morning, after our shift, we went drinking with Amar sir, who was famous for making “lauly (Lovely) pegs”. We were standing on the road outside DLF Phase II Central Arcade (Less than 100m from where my parents were sleeping). Since it was peak winters, we all got drunk on dark rum. My body doesn’t react well to dark rum & I don’t remember getting back home. Next afternoon, I woke up with my knees bruised and vomit all over my bathroom. Somehow, I cleaned everything up before my parents saw but felt terrible. All afternoon I drank water and Gatorade, but there was hardly any pee and it burnt when I tried.
  • We once went on an office party and Karkose (who incidentally doesn’t drink himself) suggested I drink beer buster, which is beer mixed with tabasco sauce. It felt fun drinking it then, but I couldn’t sleep all night because my chest and stomach were burning. Horrible experience.

Xiamen

Baijiu at Zhongshan Road, Xiamen
Baijiu at Zhongshan Road, Xiamen

I was drinking Baijiu at Zhongshan road with my office colleagues. It was very cold, so instead of sipping it like the others, I did shots non-stop. Big mistake! I couldn’t sleep because my chest and stomach were burning all night. I puked many times and next day the pain in my stomach was so bad, I had to see a doctor at the airport (I was travelling back to India). The doctor told me the 60% alcohol volume Baijiu had stripped my stomach of its lining and likely made ulcers. I couldn’t eat anything other than simple rice for at least a week afterwards.

I am just glad I didn’t puke in front of my colleagues.

São Paulo

happy diverse friends clinking bottles on terrace
Photo by Kampus Production on Pexels.com

I was at São Paulo for the second time and me and my colleague went drinking Caipirinhas at Eu Tu Eles. Now, Caipirinhas are one of the most deceptive drinks I have ever had. They are sweet and tasty, so it is very easy to have too many too fast without realising it. Anyway, I don’t remember how I got back to my hotel and what happened later. But next morning I woke up to find my hotel room smelling of vomit and my brain feeling like it was in a vice. I used many of the hotel towels o clean up the vomit and then hid the towels behind the AC unit on the balcony. One of the most shameful things I have ever done.

Bangkok

Once we moved to Bangkok, I discovered how cheap and easily accessible booze is. But since I have absolutely no friends here, there have not been many social occasions for me to go on benders. There have been just 3 incidents, all with office colleagues. Unlike the other incidents, I drank too much not because I was having fun, but because of peer pressure.

  • I was just visiting Bangkok and it was my farewell party. 6 of us finished many crates of beers within a few hours. I don’t remember how I got back to the hotel.
Stacks of beer bottles
Stacks of beer bottles
  • We (the wife, the kid and the dog) went to the kid’s friend’s house, whose parents are north indian. He doubted from the beginning, if me, as a Bengali would be able to drink much. To prove him wrong, I got shit-faced. Soon, I proved him correct by missing my step in the dark, losing my balance and falling into their building fountain. Again, I don’t remember how I got back home. Next day I cursed myself and promised I will never get into such a situation while out with the kid or the dog.
  • The last and most recent incident was when I went out to drink with my colleagues. 3 of us went through 8 bottles of wine in 6 hours. I came to, next day covered in bruises and my room smelling of vomit and me still drunk and stumbling about. Unfortunately, soon, the AC servicing guys came and saw the state the bathroom was in. I have never felt worse in my life than that day. My nails, my room etc all smelt of booze and I felt sick. It was truly the worst day of my life & the day I decided to give up alcohol for good.

I am still not at a stage where I can look back at all this and laugh about it. But just the act of typing all this out has strengthened my resolve to not get drunk ever again.

Rant

Kolkata: The City of (kill)joy

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My family hails from Kolkata, the (supposed) grand and noble megacity. I have ranted about this city many-many times, especially during the only 1 unfortunate year in my life that I stayed here. But that was more than 15 years ago and since then, I have never stayed here more than a couple of days at best (My shortest trip was a few hours long).

Because of the holiday season in Thailand, I decided to go visit my parents for slightly longer and re-analyse this city to see what has changed.

Full disclosure: Even within Kolkata, my parents stay in an objective worse location, so my point of view may be skewed compared to people living in more affluent areas.

Nature

Kolkata is quite green, compared to other cities in India. Especially the area where my parents live, there are many trees around.

Palm Trees & Greenery
Palm Trees & Greenery

At one point of time, Kolkata was dotted with ponds & lowlands. In fact many of the neighbourhoods names end with “pukur”, which means pond. Over the years, these ponds have been paved over and lost to eternity; leaving only their namesake “paras”. However, there are still some around, in the less affluent areas.

Cleanliness

There’s no way around it; Kolkata is the filthiest city I have had the misfortune of visiting. There’s trash and filth everywhere, even the fancy neighbourhoods. No one gives 2 shits about cleanliness.

Filthy streets
Filthy streets
Filthy buildings
Filthy buildings
So pretty na!
So pretty na!
Look at this trove, treasures untold
Look at this trove, treasures untold

People openly spit on the streets, throw their garbage anywhere they want.

Services

If you want to get work done, Kolkata is not the right city for it. Mobile services are one example. Banking is the biggest one. I already discussed how I spent shit loads of effort doping paperwork to convert my SBI account to NRO. What came of that? Zilch. They just sent back everything without an explanation. This time, when I went there to close my account, they were quite annoyed to start their working day on a negative note of account closure.

Private banks are not much better. I required some services around my Home Loan, so I looked up “Loan servicing branches” of my bank and spent an entire morning visiting them one by one and they all refused to help me. They would either say “we can’t do this, go to xxxx branch”, or simply “We have never done this before, we don’t know how”. Eventually I did find a very good branch to assist me and my work was done.

Similarly, calling labour to your home for repair work is a nightmare with them not coming on time or not showing up at all.

One particular example. I needed to update some details on my Aadhaar card. So I looked up a list of Aadhaar processing centres across the city and went on a (seemingly) easy mission. Here’s what happened

New Alipore Useless Post Office
New Alipore Useless Post Office
  1. Attempt 1 – Hobe na (Won’t happen, no explanation given)
  2. Attempt 2 – Ekhane hoye na (This doesn’t happen here)
  3. Attempt 3 – Lok neyi (Don’t have staff)
  4. Attempt 4 – Token shesh hoye gechhe (Out of tokens)
  5. Attempt 5 – Election duty te gechhe (Gone on election duty)
  6. Attempt 6 – Kalke aashun (Come tomorrow)
Bhowanipur useless post office
Bhowanipur useless post office

Eventually, I had to go to the main office 26kms away, where my work was done reasonably fast.

Transportation

Transportation in Kolkata is a proper shit-show.

Road Transport

Kolkata people have a special affinity towards honking. Almost all the cars would start honking a few seconds before the lights turn green. Some cars even keep honking while the lights are still red. There’s honking while overtaking and especially when there’s a traffic jam. The first few nights, I could even hear the honking in my dreams.

Typical sound on Kolkata roads

If you drive your own car, it is a nightmare. People have no sense of discipline and you need to do all you can to keep yourself from getting hit. Very-very stressful experience.

One funny thing I noticed was the affinity of Kolkata Traffic Police towards road barriers.

Random Barrier on the road
Random Barrier on the road
Random Barrier on the road
A Random Barrier on the road

The traffic police like to strew road barriers randomly on the streets (In the middle of major roads) with no explanation. You are driving along, minding your own business and suddenly there’s a barrier blocking your way and you either have to brake to a stop or swerve. I really don’t understand why this is. Not like the traffic is very fast here to begin with, why slow it down even further?

Random Barrier on the road
Random Barrier on the road

At traffic signals, the traffic needs to divide itself into 2 streams on the left and right sides of the barrier. Crazy.

If you decide to take a taxi, best of luck with that, too. Uber in Kolkata is notoriously bad. Every time I get a taxi, the driver calls me immediately after and tells me to cancel the trip and pay them cash. It is not even a one off incident, every time I call one, I go through 4-5 drivers who demand cash and cancel when you refuse. The cars are filthy inside and stink. The drivers also resist turning on the AC unless you keep pestering them.

The roads are also all littered with ugly billboards.

Fugly billboards everywhere
Fugly billboards everywhere
A typical road full of billboards
A typical road full of billboards

Curiously, most billboards in Kolkata are either for gold jewellery, political ads or house construction material (TMT bars, pipes etc).

Public Transport

Why use road transport you ask? Why not use public transport? Because that sucks balls, too. Kolkata people keep boasting about how they had the first metro in the country, but fail to mention how it has failed mostly into disrepair and has seen little expansion in decades.

Where else in the world can you find a metro with a frequency of 50 minutes between trains?

50 minute interval metro
50 minute interval metro

Where else in the world can you find a metro which doesn’t run on weekends? When my parents first told me about it, I thought surely they were misinformed or joking. But no, it is true.

In short, going anywhere in Kolkata is a struggle, whether you are rich or poor. We all suffer equally.

Food

Restaurant Food

Food in mid-end and high-end restaurants in India is quite costly for the value provided, but no different than the rest of India.

The good part is, there are many good restaurants and delivery is ever-present and fast.

But restaurant food is not what Kolkata is known for.

Street Food

Street food is where Kolkata really shines. It is cheap, delicious and (mostly) hygienic.

Others

Kolkata has many malls, but they compare nowhere to Delhi/Bengaluru/Mumbai mall standards.

South City Mall, Kolkata
South City Mall, Kolkata

However, the character of Kolkata lies not in the malls, but in the by-lanes.

By-lanes of Kolkata
By-lanes of Kolkata

Airport

Kolkata airport international terminal is the lousiest airport terminal I have been through. Unlike normal airports, both sides of a check in counter are named the same alphabet, but used by different airlines.

To make things more difficult for everyone, the displays above the counters don’t show flight information, but propaganda on how the airport is the “best improved” airport ever.

Guess which flight it is
Guess which flight it is

The immigration counters are sparsely staffed. When I travelled, there were 2 babus manning the counters.

The security check area has only 2 lanes.

2 lanes of security check
2 lanes of security check

The duty free section (as pcthepathfinder aptly said) looks like a stall at Pragati Maidan.

Kolkata Airport Duty Free joke
Kolkata Airport Duty Free joke
Bengali Airport Fight

Overall, I am glad to turn my back to this city and go back home.

Food & Beverage, Rant

Bye Bye Alcohol!

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I have had a long relationship with alcohol, full of ups and downs. When I was young, the “ups” far outweighed the “downs”. Nearing 40, that is unfortunately not true anymore. It fucks up my sleep pretty badly and the after effects get worse every year. Notably, 2 very bad recent experiences recently led me to take steps.

Many times, I have tried to drink in moderation, which is all well and good before one starts, but after a few, everything goes out the window. After wondering why I do something that causes so much grief, I decided to give up on alcohol altogether.

What Next?

The most difficult part was, I had been conditioned to hold a bottle or can while doing certain things – watching TV, sitting on my balcony. And it felt weird to do these things empty handed. So I decided to swap alcohol with non-alcoholic drinks.

Drinks, but without alcohol
Drinks, but without alcohol

So now I have stocked my refrigerator with non-alcoholic drinks. Eventually, I would wean off these, too, as they have lots of sugar. One particular drink I really like is Bundaberg Root beer. Everyone around me seems to hate them, but I can’t get over how tasty they are.

I had assumed that the hardest part would be social events, but it is much easier to tell people you don’t drink (No one tries to coerce you) than to say you want to stop drinking after a few (Come on, just one more). For pure booze events, I decline them altogether now.

As of today, 1 month sober and counting, I notice these changes in my life:

  1. I am spending less time in bed on weekends, but still waking up more refreshed and have more energy throughout the day.
  2. I am not waking up to pee in the middle of the night anymore.
  3. I have more energy while running. Especially, my weekend runs now feel much easier.

Let’s see how long it lasts.

Rant

Cities

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I think at this point in my life, I can safely call myself well travelled. Although I have never been to the quintessential western cities (Like New York, London or Paris), I have been to some pretty off-beat places.

raised building frame
Photo by Peng LIU on Pexels.com

I have a job where it is quite easy to shift my base to different places. I had a few offers to move again recently, and I was conflicted about it. So recently I started making a list of ratings for various cities I have been to, based on different parameters. These parameters are only based on things that are important to me.

Below are the cities, I have been to, rated on various parameters between 1 to 10.

Some things to remember

  1. I am only including major or metropolitan cities
  2. These ratings are purely based on my preferences and observations. Does not take into account other metrics I don’ deem important to me
  3. I do not take into account finances like income or cost of living. I assume proportional income everywhere
CityInfraFoodWeatherWalkabilityHistoryFriendlyDogTotal
Istanbul81069107555
São Paulo879958955
Bangkok6910679653
Melbourne10681042950
Budapest855896950
Vienna865894949
San Francisco757857948
Prague855894948
Helsinki9521043942
Kuala Lumpur655665336
Shanghai752852231
Bengaluru178364231
New Delhi281277027
Kolkata183165226
City Ratings

Infrastructure

This is probably the first thing one notices about a city, when you enter the airport and then when you leave it.

No doubt, Melbourne is the best city in this regard I have been to. Everything is clean and perfect. The roads, buildings etc. are all as should be in a utopian society.

Although I didn’t spend too much time in Helsinki, I found its infrastructure to be top-notch, too. The heated pavements were something I had never seen or imagined.

Budapest/Vienna/Prague all rank pretty high in this regard, too and São Paulo feels just like a quintessential European city.

San Francisco is beautiful, too, but I couldn’t un-see the mounds of human feces on every street corner and the sheer amount of homeless people.

Indian cities rank lowest. Although Delhi has a pretty good metro system, that is it. Everything is filthy and unkempt. Kolkata is even worse. Bengaluru, which has a huge potential has horrible roads and no water.

Food

Food is subjective, so the ratings are purely based on my own personal preferences.

Truly, I have never had food as good as Istanbul, ever.

Bangkok comes second, because of the sheer variety of the food available here. You have cheap (but hygienic) street food vendors as well as many Michelin starred restaurants within a block of each other.

Delhi and Kolkata come next, followed by São Paulo & Bengaluru.

view of a beyti kebab dish on a white plate
Photo by Mustafa Erdağ on Pexels.com

Weather and Air Quality

Weather is subjective and since I prefer warmer weather, I have rated Bangkok the highest.

Delhi and Kolkata are lowest because of the filthy air quality year round. Delhi is even lower than Kolkata because of the extreme heat during summers and unbearable (because there’s no heating anywhere) winters.

Walkability

I love walking (and street running), so walkability is important to me in a city. Perhaps it is not too surprising that these ratings mirror the ones for infrastructure as both these things are closely related.

Most cities in my list are extremely walkable, except the Indian cities, where walking on the streets is like gambling with your life. Maybe a few important ares in the cities have proper pavements, but certainly not throughout the city. To top it off, most motorcycle drivers feel free to ride on the pavements and cars try to run you down even at zebra crossings.

Historical Artifacts

Istanbul again wins hands down in this regard, being one of the oldest cities in the list and having been shaped by multiple empires.

European cities rank next, I love the thousands of years old architecture.

Most of the monuments in Delhi are a few hundred years old, but it is not difficult to find ones which are thousands of years old.

European colonised cities rank lowest, simply because they are not old enough to have significant historical artefacts, especially with the propensity of these colonisers to erase ethnic history.

brown and black mosque under white and blue cloudy sky
Photo by Yogendra Singh on Pexels.com

Friendliness towards outsiders

These ratings are purely about how the locals treat foreigners and expats.

Bangkok rates pretty high, because Thais, with some exceptions are very friendly and welcoming people. Although, if your appearance is very different from what they’re used to seeing, expect stares. Brazilians in São Paulo are also very friendly and welcoming. Because of their multi-cultural make up, there’s no one in the world who looks “weird” enough not to fit in there.

I have already written about the Chinese here.

I found most Europeans if not outright racist, at least pretty cold towards outsiders.

Australians are the worst. Although I did meet a few friendly Australians, most of them are racist pricks.

Dog Friendliness

I admit, some of the cities in the list above I visited before I had a dog and didn’t really notice how dog friendly they were, so the rating for those cities is from internet research.

Most cities in developed countries and São Paulo are as dog friendly as can be. Dogs are allowed almost everywhere – in malls, restaurants, cafés, bars, public transport, hotels. There are very little restrictions on what the dogs can do and where they can go, because their parents have enough common sense. These cities also have public dog parks.

India is not at all dog friendly. While pets are tolerated in Bengaluru and Kolkata, there are very few places where pets can go, limited to designated pet-specific businesses. Taxis won’t agree to take you if you have a pet. The public transport is not even human friendly, so I won’t even talk about dogs.

Delhi is the worst of all. People there actually hate dogs. There are severe restrictions on having dogs even in your own homes. Dogs need to take a separate lift when going out and they can’t be walked within the society grounds.

Bangkok is somewhere in the middle. Most people love dogs. Dogs are allowed in taxis and Tuktuks , but not in metros and buses. Most restaurants/cafes and malls allow dogs in the outdoor areas on leash and indoors in a pet buggy. Some malls and restaurants allow pets freely.

Rant

Microsoft Sucks Balls

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At one point, I was a rabid proponent of Microsoft. Deeply entrenched in the Microsoft ecosystem and recommending Microsoft products and services to my friends too. But even after switching to Apple, I am being constantly reminded of how Microsoft sucks balls, thanks to my work ecosystem.

I have realised foremost that Microsoft has no idea what users want, adding/removing/changing things randomly as they see fit. Secondly, even after possessing vast resources, they are clueless on how to solve the most basic problems.

Below is a list showcasing how Microsoft sucks balls:

Windows

Microsoft x86-64 Integration

Windows has been running on x86-64 hardware for decades. You would think that is enough time to refine things and have them working in a seamless way, but, no. This is what happens when I wake up my work laptop from sleep, while connected to an external display:

13 seconds from sleep to usable
  1. Show signs of life : 1 second
  2. Flicker once : 4 seconds
  3. Flickr second time : 4 seconds
  4. Screen sort of pulsates, zooms in and out : 4 seconds

I have some questions

  1. Who, in Microsoft decided that waking a laptop from sleep to usable state requiring 13 seconds is acceptable in 2024? Macs take less than 1 second for the entire process.
  2. Why does the main display need to blink and be unusable every time I connect or disconnect an extended display?

Security/Group Policies

I understand that organisations need to have tight control on what happens on their machines. But the way Microsoft does it is completely bollocks.

  1. So, in our org, the Microsoft Store app is blocked by policy. Good enough. But then, if I go to the app’s Microsoft Store web page and click on install, the app installs just fine. What is even the point of blocking it then? Just to make things more inconvenient for users?
  2. Our organisation policy forbids one from saving/adding usernames/passwords to Edge. But there’s no policy to prevent importing of passwords via a csv file. So that’s what I do. Again, why block something half-heartedly just to make things more difficult for the user?

Bluetooth

  • Most platforms (Including Windows) can display the battery level of Bluetooth devices based on a standard. Other devices can also show you if the device is charging, which sadly Windows cannot do. What Windows does is, it gets confused and shows the battery level flapping like crazy.
Bluetooth battery level doing the St Vitus’ Dance
  • It’s 2024 and Microsoft still doesn’t allow you to reverse your mouse scroll direction easily. You need to dive into device manager to see the mouse’s HID and then mess around with the registry to toggle a value, reboot the OS to reverse the scroll. The alternative is to use an app the OEM provides and do it from there, but that is buggy too, as every time the computer wakes up from sleep, the scroll goes back to the default for a few seconds before reverting back.

Windows Hello

Ok, this one is more on OEMs than Microsoft, but why does Microsoft certify shoddy level sensors as Windows Hello certified? Approx half the time I try unlocking my laptop using my face, it fails. Even though I have “trained” Windows Hello multiple times under different lighting conditions. 10-20% times, even fingerprint recognition fails.

Even worse, some times, Windows Hello authentication succeeds, but windows still shows an error message “unable to recognise you” while at the same time logging me in. Make up your mind, asshole.

Wireless LAN

Many times, when my Laptop wakes up or boots up, it just doesn’t connect to my home WLAN even though the network is remembered and “Connect Automatically” is selected. Happened on my old Dell work Laptop and even on a newer HP work laptop, so can’t really blame the OEM for a consistent bug across different hardware.

Widgets & Shit

Microsoft introduced the new social area in Windows 11. It has a handful of supposedly helpful widgets but in reality, it is bullshit

  1. The news articles are of such low quality and full of click bait and propaganda pieces. And there are so many of the news widgets that it is impractical to remove them all one by one.
  2. The trafic widget is not configurable. Our company uses ZScaler, so the traffic widget always shows traffic conditions in Malaysia or Singapore.
  3. There’s no widget for Outlook calendar if you use the “new” Outlook.

Thankfully, they do allow you to disable this feature altogether.

Microsoft Windows does indeed suck balls.

Microsoft 365

Sharepoint/OneDrive for business

Some time last year, Microsoft pushed out an update that if you share a link for some Sharepoint file/folder via email, it would automatically give read permissions for that file to everyone in your To/cc list. While, this may sound useful, it makes your Sharepoint site into a horrible/fragmented mess of user permissions, something that a user cannot easily fix/reset via the GUI.

Microsoft Teams

  1. Sometime around June last year, I discovered a bug that if you share an HDR display in a teams call, teams crashes within a few minutes. Via my IT team, I raised a bug with MS. Almost a year later, Microsoft still has not been able to fix this bug. Even worse, the “New” Teams, which is supposedly built from the ground up, has the same bug.
  2. If you have a wireless audio headset with a mute button, the mute button does not sync with the Teams mute button. So many times I have been speaking thinking I have unmuted myself, but I forgot to unmute myself in 2 different places. Both hardware and software mute work independently of each other. The kicker? This feature works perfectly with Microsoft Teams on iOS and macOS.
  3. If someone updates their photo on Teams, the new photo appears on the mobile app almost immediately, but takes weeks/months to update on the desktop client, even the “new” client.
  4. Out of Office notifications between Teams and Outlook don’t sync well. If you set OOO on Teams, it ruins the format of the actual message

Microsoft teams sucks balls.

Outlook

Outlook was such a bloated mess, I was kind of relieved when they replaced it completely with a new app which is nothing more than a web wrapper. However, months later, it still has bugs. One annoying one is, if I select an appearance theme, it only loads 1/5 times I launch outlook. All other times, it loads with a plain GUI.

Not to mention that the new Outlook doesn’t even launch without an internet connection (Which is often because of the Wireless bug above).

Office Apps

While office apps have gotten better over the years, I don’t understand why there are 3 ways to open a Word/Excel/Powerpoint file

  1. On the web
  2. Inside Teams
  3. Using the desktop app

Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster tools is the only Microsoft product I now use personally, to manage my blogs. While Bing perfectly recognises my vitriolic blog (This one), it refuses to index pages from my other, much nicer photography blog. All it says is that my domain is blocked. Customer service cannot provide a reason and they cannot talk to you more frequently than once in 6 months.

Although Microsoft Bing sucks balls, I cannot migrate to Google as a user (As a WebMaster, I find Google’s Search Console vastly superior).

Rant

Just stop with the bullshit studies already!

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I read news everyday. At least some of the news articles are about bullshit studies telling you what is good or bad for your health. Over time, I started seeing a pattern. Most of these bullshit studies contradicted each other clearly. Below are some examples I found very recently.

Vitamins

photo medication pills on white plastic container
Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com

This study says that Vitamins are good for you and can slow cognitive decline.

Then, this article cites several studies that say that Vitamins increase the risk of cancer appreciably and will kill you faster.

This study says the Vitamins are neither good nor bad for you, but completely useless.

Alcohol

three cocktail drinks
Photo by Prem Pal Singh Tanwar on Pexels.com

This article cites multiple studies which say that moderate alcohol consumption is good for you (and me).

This study proves that drinking even moderate amounts of alcohol will shrink your brain.

Egg Yolk

adding of egg on a heap flour
Photo by Klaus Nielsen on Pexels.com

We all know in the last decade there were several studies advising you not to eat egg yolk, because they are high in cholesterol.

Thankfully, it was recently conclusively proven that eating food high in cholesterol doesn’t cause higher levels of blood cholesterol.

Ketamine

This study proves that Ketamine helps with Depression and Anxiety Disorders.

This study proves the exact opposite, Ketamine can cause your Anxiety to become worse.

Psilocybin (Magic mushrooms)

wild mushroom
Photo by Fazlul Kader Chowdhury on Pexels.com

This article cites multiple studies which provide that Psilocybin can alleviate depressive symptoms for up to a year.

This study says that Psilocybin is in fact, bad for mental health.

Marijuana

dark green leafed plant
Photo by Washarapol D BinYo Jundang on Pexels.com

This study cites that cannabis is effective in treating mental disorders. There are many studies claiming cannabis is effective for pain management.

This study (among many others) cites the exact opposite. In fact, I, myself have seen marijuana crazed people in mental distress.

Grain free Dog/Cat Food

photo of person feeding dog outside
Photo by Ricky Esquivel on Pexels.com

There was a fad a couple of years ago where all pet parents started feeding their pets grain free food. The logic was, the ancestors of these animals lived in the jungle and hunted for food, so never had access to grain.

All was well, till grain-free pets started dying from heart failure. Now there’s an FDA alert against grain free food.

Ozempic

This article says that if you use Ozempic to lose weight and then you stop taking it, you gain back more than you had lost.

This study says the exact opposite.

Blue Light

Remember all the studies that told you that blue light in the evenings and at night is bad for you and your sleep? How every OS there is actually baked in a feature to turn your screen warm after sunset? Remember that they even sell lasses that block blue light?

This study linked from this article states all that is bullshit, it is now yellow light which is bad for you and your sleep.

I wonder what is the reason for such contradictory studies. I can think of the following cases

  1. Both studies are in fact correct, people are different and everyone reacts to things differently.
  2. Some of these studies are bullshit/unscientific.
  3. The entire mechanism of studies is inherently wrong.