rpm --inside_out --timecode

I’ll be honest. I didn’t really know the guy. Of course I knew him, but if the standard is set by how well you can know someone after 4 years in the same hostel in college, then you’ll understand, I didn’t really know the guy.

Two Fridays ago, as Chandana and I were all set for a great weekend break in Kabini, with the additional bonus of briefly seeing Ravi in Bangalore for the first time in a year and a half since our wedding, an email with this ominous subject made its way to my inbox.

About Amol? About anyone, in my experience, has only gone as far as announcing that the person had been fired, or a relative of theirs had been hospitalised. But I don’t work with Amol or even live in the same country. The last I’d heard of him was that he was also at Penn State with Jawm.

I already knew, by elimination, what this would have to mean, but gluttons for evidence that we all are, I read on in disbelief. As some of us had probably heard, Amol Mupid had died in an accident three weeks earlier.

I immediately called Jawm, but it was news to him as well.

Amol wasn’t the first guy I knew from IITM who had died way too soon. Only a few months ago, Yarlagadda Sidhartha, a junior I remember well by face, had been found dead in Spain under mysterious circumstances. I had very few memories of him, though. I know for certain that we’d spoken. I remembered his voice, a polo shirt that is in my mind an undecided shade of green, black floaters, the way he walked, and the way he pedalled his bicycle. It was a total of maybe 5 seconds of memory footage. It upset me tremendously, but eventually, I moved on.

Amol was my batchmate and was in my hostel. I remember him a lot lot more. For the greater part of Friday, random memories of Amol kept springing to mind, each making me sadder.

There’s one reason very dear to me that I will never forget Amol Mupid. It is Right Now, the Godavari Hostel Nite 2004 video, that I had personally shot and edited, working with every single one of us seniors. I’ve seen it hundreds of times in the 5 years since I graduated. As I recollect it, the 3rd wing had been, without doubt, the most exciting bunch to shoot, and towering above them all in enthusiasm, was Amol Mupid.

I’m not just saying this now, but of the numerous clips that made up the film, I believe the most loved by people in our batch is the one around 4:58 where Amol is seen counting Shiwam’s ribs, and then shrugging in an extremely endearing smile after, curiously, stopping at five. The text reads right now thin men serve science.

As I replayed the video that day, I realised Amol was all over the place: heartily cheering Refugee’s goal (more appropriately, Patro’s miss) around 1:10, and duelling with Conda before throwing an interceding Saurabh onto a sleeping Bimari/Doma around 4:10.

I visited Amol’s Orkut scrapbook and saw a couple of RIPs, preceded, heartbreakingly, by someone who says Hi dude, whr r u??? Waiting for ur call since a long time, pls call me back…

I thought of leaving my own, but I didn’t know him well enough to say what I felt in just a line or two. I saw some of his photos. He looked pretty much the same.

I checked his Facebook profile as well, but that didn’t seem to reflect his demise in any visible way. A few hours later, Facebook suggested him as a friend. I thought of accepting, but couldn’t.

Somewhere in between, I remembered Amol’s middle name is Jitendra. Amol Jitendra Mupid. Wasn’t he also called Killer? In fact he was. The cartoon of him in the Godav Magazine suddenly came to mind – spiky hair and round eyes and all. He’s saying Kill! Kill! Ashish (Chair) is saying Burn! Burn! The context escapes me.

Amol had a voice fit for heavy metal. And an unforgettably unrestrained laugh. I seem to remember both of us talking at the mess over filter coffee, though I don’t know about what. Considering he was in his workshop uniform, it would have to have been in our first year. The single strap of his bag is slung diagonally across his chest, and he’s pouring the coffee from the tumbler into the bowl.

His voice. I seem to remember finding a specific use for it. What was it? Why do I remember it so well?

Did I ever borrow a CS textbook from Amol to prepare for my AGRE? Did he borrow one from the library for me? I have no way of knowing if I owed him that little bit extra. I hope I did.

And then I remember. Mupid’s voice. First year, Hostel Nite freshie play. A slightly unimaginative plot around our various seniors and where they are 20 years on, well into marriages with kids and even the odd infidelity. We needed someone to be Abhijit Datta, the much loathed hostel sports captain and rightly condemned traitor in some institute election episode.

Incidentally, in our story, 20 years later, Datta had yet to escape from the clutching hold of his Naval Architecture degree, and was still Datta the sailor man! You may have laughed if you saw it. In real life, though, Datta left Godav and IITM the very next semester. He’s hardly been missed.

We needed someone to imitate his famed death call to freshies in our initial one month of ragging – the words of which I’m happy to omit here. And we hit upon Mupid, who was gold.

Two weeks later, I’m convinced that’s all I remember of Amol, and I’m now finally ready to speak to him.

Amol Jitendra Mupid. I barely knew you beyond these memories. I didn’t know your dreams and your fears, what you had made of your past and what you were making of your future. I don’t know what plans have been cut short by your untimely death, and that actually makes me much sadder than if I could have had a concrete measure of its cruelty and injustice .

Your Orkut profile says you were committed. My heart especially goes out to whoever she is, her relationship to you as yet unlegitimised by society, yet her mourning, doubtless, as strong as that of the parents and sister you’ve left behind.

Equally, you’ve left behind some excellent and dedicated friends who’re working hard to help your family in whatever way they can.

I don’t know what plans our batch has for a reunion and who may or may not attend, but where I may not have thought about it before, if I do attend one, I will sorely miss meeting you.

Thanks for that smile and that laugh and that voice. And that book, maybe? And for counting only to five.

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it is that in a country as large as ours, any victory can only be small.

Any change we wish to see can only be achieved by aggregate. And, most of all, you only know you’re dreaming big enough when you are willing to place the results of your effort beyond the limits of your own lifetime.

For every do-gooder that ever attempted to take on the biggest problems that infect our society, we have a cached reply: It’s always been this way. You can’t change a whole nation’s mindset. Of course, it does nothing to deter the more resolute, so they go out against the tide and learn for themselves, returning, if alive, unwittingly brainwashed from the bludgeoning, recruited for life for the cynics’ cause.

It is my belief that most people who want to make a real difference fail because they start out with too much good in mind. For whatever reason, the wisdom of starting out small is lost on a whole generation. Perhaps because the appreciation of succeeding small is lost on the one immediately before it.

There are all sorts of problems that drive us up a wall on a daily basis – some a lot more than others. What makes some of them more attractive is that they weren’t always this way, and therefore, are perhaps easier to solve.

Let’s take, for instance, driving on the wrong side of the road. I know every urban Indian takes some sort of perverse pride in his or her own city being the bad traffic capital, so it should come as no surprise that I come bearing Hyderabad’s flag, waving it strongly, and outshouting the “Come to Bangalore da”s and other equivalents.

In my own unbiased assessment, though, prevalent as it may be in all big cities, Hyderabad really takes wrong side driving to another level. My bigger point, however, is that things weren’t always this way, and we’ve all seen them go from bad to worse in our own lifetimes, heck, adulthoods even.

If there’s one thing in India that’s slower to change than the laws, it’s perhaps the textbooks. So just as I learnt in Class 1 Social Studies in 1988 that “Keep to the left is the rule of the road,” I’m sure children today continue to be taught to parrot the same words in the same dragging chorus. When they’re old enough to notice the disconnect, they can say it was always like that in their lifetime, but we don’t have the excuse.

Keep to the left was indeed the rule of the road. And I’ve seen it gradually degenerate into an apologetic recommendation.

If I were to put dates to it, I’d say the year 2002 was stage 1 – when the change was met with Surprise. By 2004, we were at the Condoning stage, rationalising the misdeeds of others by citing virtually absent gaps in the median, but rarely imitating them. Stage 3 came in 2006 – Complicity – accommodating and aiding people driving on the wrong side, getting out of their way passively, but still not imitating on a large scale. Stage 4 was Conversion, large-scale, irretrievable crossing over to the other camp and collectively discovering the high of ill gotten convenience. We were here by 2007.

Stage 5 is the goddamn point of no return, and I’m sad to say I finally saw it happen in late 2008. Legitimisation. I saw a cop regulating wrong side traffic along with all the others, stopping them as he let the other platoons pass in turn, and then signalling the idiots to carry on again.

This issue has been the singular focus of my shamefully irregular conversations with the Traffic Police since 2007. I pointed out from the very beginning that this isn’t a specifically recognised offence and never got anything more than a helpless smile. Sure there is the ever vague dangerous/rash and negligent driving offence, but the line between negligent and deliberate has long been crossed, and unfortunately, this bad habit isn’t turning out to be quite as dangerous for the idiots who have it as it really should.

The ancient Motor Vehicles Act of 1988, which still applies today, clearly couldn’t have foreseen that the most fundamental rule would one day be stood on its head. So, in all fairness, I don’t blame the lawmakers.

The most I’ve been able to do so far about this is make my displeasure known in as uncivilised a gesture as the offenders deserve. Let’s just say I’m empowered by the finger, but increasingly, I’m aware, this solution doesn’t scale, and neither do the violent daydreams that play out in my head.

The newspaper this morning carried a glimmer of hope.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Soon-traffic-violations-to-invite-hefty-fines/articleshow/4325835.cms

If the article is to be believed, a major revision to the Motor Vehicles Act is on the cards. Though I’m not thrilled about its very short-term motivation, namely, to smooth Delhi traffic for the Commonwealth Games, I guess any change at all is welcome.

Clearly, they have got a couple of things right: they want to crack down on driving with a cellphone very seriously (if I were them, I would add some more emphasis on those idiots on bikes courting spondylitis with their hands-free-but-not-face-free cellphone driving); and fine amounts are being made high enough to be a serious deterrent. For now I’m going to ignore that the higher the fine, the more attractive the lower bribe looks. We’re talking specifically about framing the law right now, so I’d like to avoid descending into the usual debate about its enforcement or lack thereof.

I’m serious about petitioning the right people in Delhi to update the list of recognised traffic offences to include some of the more modern additions  to the Idiots’ canon. Off the top of my head, I have:

1. Driving on the wrong side of the road, obviously.
2. Blocking the free left turn lane at an intersection (a cause that Sameer Mehta took up in 2007 with some success, more impact, and even more awareness).

I welcome suggestions from anyone reading this entry. Keep in mind, these need to be tangible and provable offences even in the chaos of urban Indian traffic, not just something transplanted from some other country that you wish was a law in India as well.

Another valid point the article raises is that speed limits are ridiculously low, and something seriously needs to be done about this. I’d mentioned this several times to the Police but never got an answer that satisfied me. For example, the posted speed limit on the Old Bombay Highway is 30, on the new Outer Ring Road is 40, and further away from home, on the new Bangalore-Madras highway is 50. On these roads, I consider the safe top speeds to be, respectively, 70, 120 and 100. Your opinions may vary, but either way, you’re likely to think the posted speed limit is at least half of what it really should be.

Irrespective of how well these laws are enforced, I really believe we need to give them the opportunity to become laws in the first place. So if you’d like to help, or know someone else who would, pass on the word.

For my part, I promise that if this effort ever takes the form of an email forward or one of those insufferable online petitions or Orkut communities or anything on Facebook that you can become a fan of, it wouldn’t have been my idea.

As for the textbooks, I guess by making the recommendation a rule again, we save them the trouble of changing at all.

Update: After a prolonged internet search, which makes me look like quite the fool for not having discovered it on earlier attempts, I found that driving on the wrong side is in fact covered by the Act. To be precise, MVA 119/177 stipulates a Rs. 100 fine. The larger part of my rant is now moot, but I guess there is still some point to identifying newer offences that need to be included in the act. Further, given how popular the practice has become now, it needs to be among the 20 or so main offences that are printed on the reverse of traffic challans and that the cops are specifically instructed to crack down on.

Every working morning, after I wave my wife two goodbyes, I walk half a kilometre to where I must make the most trivial yet involved, mentally exhausting yet stimulating, recurring practical choice I’ve ever known.

For a couple of months now, since Microsoft’s transport coordinators, in their new overzealous adherence to old schedules, cranked the lever all the way up to Needlessly Rigid, there have been no stops on demand on the morning shuttle routes. What this means is that even after I’ve walked the usual half kilometre to the Road #3 Banjara Hills main road, I’m still another half kilometre away from either of the nearest stops.

I could walk downhill and meet the bus at Nagarjuna Circle at 8:34 or I could hitch a ride uphill and meet it at the Masjid at 8:37. That’s not the choice I’m referring to, though. I’ve been an uphill guy for a while now, simply for the extra few minutes it buys me.

Every morning, I must very precisely mime my way into a short distance lift. To the whizzing two-wheeler on a good wide road pre-rush hour, that gives me just under a second of eye contact.

The thing in India is (speaking from several frustrating experiences at Gajendra Circle, IIT Madras and elsewhere), rather than just drive on, those without the slightest intention of giving you a lift will politely and untruthfully mime back that they’re turning left or right and so can’t help you. In my case, the ride I’m looking for is so short that it doesn’t matter if or where they’re turning – my stop will come first anyway. So in that little time, I have to establish that I’m just looking to be dropped around the corner. How to mime this isn’t the challenge I’m referring to either.

The trouble begins after some kind chap actually stops. In a glance that lasts under a quarter of a second, I have to profile him by an uncountable crowd of parameters to pick one of three languages in which to speak to him. And I hasten to add, without offending him.

It’s a dilemma that is, I like to think, quite uniquely Hyderabadi. For here, we have two local languages that are actually perfectly equally prevalent with no bad blood between them. In case you were wondering, Hindi/Urdu is certainly more a local language in Hyderabad than a national link that we tolerate for the convenience of the out-of-towners. And then there is English, the language of prestige.

I don’t need to explain where offence enters the picture, but a little story may help. My cousin Hemanth got married last weekend, and Amma helped arrange for our family friend Jaywant Naidu, an accomplished Hindustani classical Hawaiian guitarist, to perform at his wedding reception on Sunday. When the performance was done,  Amma walked up to the sound mixer, a fair, bearded, elderly gentleman, who unlike the rest of the ensemble, didn’t seem headed towards the buffet, and asked him in her well rehearsed nawabi Hyderabadi Urdu accent, if he’d like to have his dinner.

Calmly, but with much purpose in his eyes, he replied in the clipped British-Indian accent, presumably of a 1950s boarding school education in Panchgani, “I’ll be waiting for my boss, thank you very much. Once he arrives, we’ll all eat together.”

It was, as a sentiment, distinctly servile, or at least accepting of hierarchy, and not very unlike any member of his sound-mixing fraternity. But if there was any ego his situation would afford him, it would be to establish that any presumption that placed the English language beyond him was, well, misplaced.

With embarrassment, the subject and the language were changed.

So where was I? Quarter-second, three languages. And I pick one.

If you must know, these are as many things as I’ve known myself to randomly evaluate in the process:

Nature of two-wheeler, tucked or untucked shirt, trousers or jeans, presence of ID card lanyard, nature of backpack/briefcase/bag, nature of spectacle frames, existence of facial hair, trim of beard, trim of moustache, religious headgear, North Indian tilak/South Indian bottu or vibudhi, colour of hair dye, paan stains on teeth, complexion, eye lining.

I’m sure there’re more that I can’t immediately recollect. Either way, it is a complex decision tree, and I’ve been politically incorrect enough in listing the parameters in a way that doesn’t particularly conceal what they might indicate, so I’m not risking too much by explaining the process any further.

My point, though, is simply to attempt to acknowledge and formalise that there is a method to class profiling, and no matter how little any of us younger generation types may truly care about a person’s religion or caste or economic background when we interact with them, we are nonetheless class-aware.

Even 5 years ago, I’d have said I wasn’t proud of how I accomplished this very accurate classification at all, far less on a daily basis. Now, of course, I’m a man of the world, (and of India, more to the point), and realise there’s no shame in recognising external differences as long as you’re sound in your mind about which side of the door of judgement to leave them on.

The reason I’m reflecting enough upon this to write about it today, 20 months since my last blog entry, is that for the first time, earlier this week, I did it wrong. It wasn’t a hideous misjudgement with terrible consequences – what’s the worst that could happen here after all? I chose to speak to the guy in English, but he replied to me in Telugu. I then immediately switched to Telugu and got on.

When I had to get off and told him again in Telugu to pull over to the left, he pulled over. As he left, he reprimanded me, “Telugosthe Telugulo maatlaadachchukadaa?” (If you know Telugu you could have spoken in Telugu, right?), and sped off.

This far, I’ve found that the only way you could offend someone is if they knew English whereas you had pegged them as the vernacular type and they were sensitive about it. Through my little failure and the little scolding it supposedly warranted, in this moment I suddenly became conscious of the fact that I’d been class profiling people the last few months. And I just had to write about it, bar set by 20 months of silence be damned.

Oh, and by the way, if the first line didn’t make it plain, among the many things I did in the last 20 months was get married a little over a year ago! Her name is Chandana, and she’s the best thing about my life.

For the numerous oblique and cryptic references on this blog that she’s patiently been the subject of for over 5 years, the very least I can do now is the blogospheric equivalent of holding her hand and shouting from the rooftops, “This is my wife, my mirror and window, my meaning and purpose, my reason and faith, and everything the world could aspire to hold, and I’m crazy as hell in love with her!”

Consider it done.

My obsession with ID3 tags and the bafflingly uniform punctuation, spacing and title-casing (as in the popular music industry where it is very common to find that all words are initially capitalised even if they’re functional words, i.e. articles not beginning the title, conjunctions and prepositions of 5 or fewer letters, rather than in pure title case as used to title books and movies) in the filenames and tags of my entire, rather sizable, music collection is not in the least surprising to those who knew me at the most obstinately perfectionist time of my youth. Why, it’s even documented as among the more notable of my many quirks, on the Biography section of my website, again, that monument to the very same unrecognisably obstinate time of my life. But I promise this entry isn’t about that.

Given the many many hours I have spent organising and tagging my collection (manually at first and using a bulk tag editor later), I used to think I was intimately familiar with the ID3v2 format. But something got me thinking a while back, and when I finally crossed the threshold and was consumed enough by the thought to just shut up, wake up, and look up the standard, I was rather pleasantly surprised to see what a narrow window of the format all our media players and jukebox programs and bulk tag editors expose.

Indeed, in the interest of keeping things simple, most programs concern themselves with the obvious Track Number, Title, Album, Artist, and provide the standard interfaces to get to the more obscure, like Genre, Year, Album Art, Lyrics, Sampling Rate, Bitrate - stuff on the basis of which users seldom organise their music. I would have much preferred giving Rating and Play Count (that modern programs, taking a cue from iPod+iTunes, shove in my face by default) a miss. This is owing to a historic personal revulsion at the culture that overpersonalises, and then overquantifies personal popularity. It’s the reason I never use the My Documents folder or any of its derivatives, and the reason I categorically disable My Recent Documents. The much needed dropping of My in Windows Vista has made me only slightly friendlier, but I still don’t use them; and as if to preserve the zero sum, the introduction of ratings for all media files in Vista has made me swear off the details view altogether. But as usual, I digress. I must mention the Rating and Play Count here only because I discovered they are actually stored in the ID3 tag, and not separately in the program’s library structure the way iTunes stores its downloaded album art.

Moving on, the starting point for my thinking about all this was that though it suits me perfectly, a collection that can be organised and more importantly navigated only by artist, title and album, must be woefully inconvenient, especially to the vast majority of Indians who listen primarily to film music. Sure, Title and Album are fairly obvious. But how does one quickly select songs sung by Mohd. Rafi or Yesudas or composed by Salil Chaudhry or Ilaiyaraja or written by Majrooh Sultanpuri or Vairamuthu? I’ve so far only exposed the contention of playback singer, composer and lyricist for the Artist field. I’m sure people make their personal choices, often between playback singer and composer (let’s face it, lyricists are rather neglected in comparison), or otherwise crowd the Artist or Title field with as much information as they may want to be able to later search for (in the process, they seriously break the usefulness of sorting by either of these fields). But consider the kind of additional knowledge that participants of Antakshari-type shows may be expected to have of each song: the actors it was picturised on, the director of the film, the mood of the song (I know I’m taking this rather far). How could one include all such information in the ID3 tag?

Further, consider that those who listen to classical music may care for more than just the artist: In both Hindustani and Carnatic music, the raag(am) is absolutely key information. Taal(am) may matter to some listeners. Accompanying artists may matter to some others. Composer is especially important in Carnatic music, though subordinate to performing artist and barely a contender for the Artist field. How would the ID3 tag include all this information too?

Filled with these questions, I sought to find out how truly global the ID3 standard inherently was, or otherwise at least how extensible it was. I was pleased to find, as I had mentioned earlier, that it is a remarkably well thought out format, and is capable of storing a wealth of information. Many of the so called frames readily step up to cover some of the things I’ve raised here. But not all. And that fact alone does expose a distinct western bias in the specification of the standard, for many of the western Antakshari-equivalent trivia fields find a place in the format. However, considering that, like all good formats, it has its share of private or reserved fields for future use, I suspect it already is sufficiently capable of being global.

What that might take is identifying and standardising a mapping of (localised names of) fields of interest in each genre to frames declared or reserved in the ID3 standard. This would be so applications can decide which core frames to show by default for each genre, and by what name. Of course, since ID3v2, we’re no longer bound to the genres specified in ID3v1.1, which means we’re free to define our own. So that’s another piece of standardisation to get right!

I’m not out to provide complete answers just as yet, but I foresee I might pursue this at another time, perhaps by joining the ID3 developer group. For now, though, I want to share a link to the ID3 v2.3.0 Standard, and especially Section 4: Declared ID3v2 Frames.

Give this a good reading and join me in marvelling at how nearly complete it is - from accounting for covers and remixes to a rather comprehensive set of frames for people involved; from the live recorded western classical music-friendly separation of tags for Section, Title, and Subtitle or Description Refinement, all the way to audio level information, Playlist Delay and the various event timing codes.

Then think of some gaps that remain. I found it rather irritating, for instance, that the frame for Key, which our raag(am) could easily have piggybacked on, is restricted to 3 characters, as that is all it takes to specify it in western classical music. So we either define a new frame or come up with airport-codesque 3-letter abbreviations for all our known raag(am)s. You may notice that the BPM frame could well have lent itself to taal(am), except that it is a numerical string. The standard does not specify a string length limit but I presume the numericalness of the string must somehow be enforced, making this unsuitable for the purpose. As for the ambitious list of extra Antakshari-friendly fields for film music, I’m sure we can dig into the extensibility of the standard.

I think there is tremendous potential in the idea of extending the ID3 standard and developing the idea of genre pages along the lines of character code pages. Internationalisation efforts in the last decade or more have made the world a far more equal place. Music, being very nearly as diverse the world over as language, couldn’t be too far down in the laundry list now, could it?

I don’t know about you, but most of my near-spiritual journeys begin with the decision to employ the screwdriver kit to dismiss an irritant. I know the symptoms now like a sage knows a good stump and an anthill knows a good sage (think Hindu mythology and the story of Sukanya). The irritant is typically some aging device that doesn’t work like it had initially agreed to. This time, it was the lock on my bedroom door making a fuss - in seeming compensation for the complete lack of opportunity it has had to express  on my behalf any slamming opinions of my own.

I’ll waste no words bemoaning how little notice we take of all the design and engineering ingenuity that surrounds us every minute of every day, especially that which involves moving parts. Instead, I’ll make an example in my own life of the wonder that it may take no more than a hand assembled lock past its prime to unlock.

As an aside, I instinctively presumed this lock may have been made in Aligarh, UP. This is because in all the scattered memories I have of Sheel and Link padlocks from my childhood and Alba locks (very specifically!) in IITM, somewhere in the details of 7-lever, 6-lever and 5-lever is also the consistent appearance of the inscribed text, Aligarh (U.P.), parentheses and all. I just checked on the net, and yes, there is an unnatural concentration of lock-makers in Aligarh. Why, even the All India Lock Manufacturers Association is based there! Some other time, I’m going to research the history of that fact a bit. As for the actual door lock I’m speaking of, I have no way of telling if it was made in Aligarh or not. Maybe their expertise is only in padlocks, which, given their greater popularity in India, is enough reason to base the whole association there! Who’s to know?

The problem wasn’t with the lock itself, but with the bolt above it that’s supposed to spring into the hole in the door frame by itself when the door shuts, and retract when  the latch turns. That, of course, is simple enough, and it was no challenge to set that right. However,  when I opened the whole assembly, the lock mechanism caught my eye and I was rather surprised to see how differently it works from how I had imagined.

In moments when I had half-heartedly pondered the working of locks in the past, I arrived at some intuitive approximation to what I now more formally know are called pin and tumbler locks where pins line up on a shear line to allow the cam to turn. I also know now that I had not earlier accounted for the extra pin (or extra two, if there is a master key) that sits above (or below, and I shall get to that in a minute) each pin to prevent turning when there is no key or when there is a key that just lets all pins fall below (or above) the shear line or one that pushes up (or down) all pins over the shear line. It will help to see this howstuffworks page (and the rest in the series) to get an idea of what I’m talking about. Having seen this page, the difference between the orientation of locks in the US and India struck me, and I’m quick to add the parenthetical alternative now when I describe it. The howstuffworks page, understandably, assumes the key is inserted with the notches facing up, as in the US. What I’ve added in speaks for the locks in India.

The problem with those moments of pondering, of course, was that I allowed myself to be satisfied with one explanation and never thought again about the rich variety of locks we have. The lever based padlocks that are common in India are actually pretty different (as of course, are the keys) and the one inside my door lock was lever based as well. There doesn’t appear to be a howstuffworks page on these locks, so I urge everyone reading this to go off on the journey of discovery for themselves and join me in my realm of the micro-incrementally enlightened. I certainly have no intention of spoiling it for you.

With that near-spiritual awakening now behind me, I sought to learn as much about the different locks I have seen as I can - beginning with those most confounding combination locks that I have only seen for real in the US in locker rooms (and in movies and the like on safes). I’m embarrassed to say I had no clue, until now, how to even use those things, far less how they worked. I always thought they were like miniature egg timers. I never asked. It’s odd enough being the locker-room-cultural misfit that kept a towel on. I had no intention of adding ignorance about the locks to that!

How many of you remember the program Surabhi (made and co-hosted by Siddharth Kak) from many many years ago, telecast Sunday nights on Doordarshan? This was the program that made Renuka Shahane a household name, that was (along with Girish Karnad’s Turning Point) the paragon of wholesome educational Doordarshan programming that almost everyone has forgotten once existed. It was probably the first TV programme to have computer generated animation in the opening sequence (of a scene of a temple and a classical dancer which the camera panned and dollied happily about!). And it was the program that is single-handedly responsible for the introduction of the competition postcard, although the fad is itself more than dead now.

For those too young to know, there was a time TV programmes (starting with Surabhi in the early 90’s) had little quizzes or lucky draws, where the audience were supposed to snail-mail their entries on a postcard. This started to seriously hurt the postal service, which at the time sold yellow postcards at a heavily subsidised 15 paise each, primarily for the rural poor. To counter its abuse by people clearly rich enough to own a TV set, the blue 2-rupee competition postcard was introduced. All TV programmes were instructed to insist that entries be sent only on these blue postcards. Needless to say, there is now email and specially overcharged SMS serving the same purpose.

Back to Surabhi. Every week, at the end of the show, there was a question that related somehow to the features shown. The features themselves were usually on the arts or crafts or cultures of some little corner of India, and made for an excellent (like you wouldn’t believe) one hour. After the week’s question was asked, the postcards with correct answers to the previous week’s question were put in a huge pile on the floor and a few lucky winners would be drawn by the two hosts as well as by some kids who were brought on the show just for this purpose (and subjected to the usual What’s your name beta? Which class are you studying in? and the like). Most of the postcards were yellow, as I believe Surabhi had just about gone off air when the competition postcard was introduced. Some of the senders had been clever enough to decorate their postcards to catch the kids’ attention.

So much for that whole prologue. What I’m getting to is the one time there was no big pile. There was one episode in which the previous week’s question received precisely one correct answer. The question, relating, doubtless, to some ancient local craft, involved Siddharth Kak holding a fancy old handmade (and rather exquisite looking) lock and asking how it was supposed to be unlocked. Even in the absence of the explicit barring of so and so and their family and friends from participation, the entire nation had coughed up precisely one person who knew. I still remember the incredibly neat diagram that was on the back of the winning postcard. This was just the guy who knew how to unlock it. It scares me to think of the designer.

This was strangely appropriate, as I happen to personally regard cryptography and network security to be among the most significant mathematically grounded and intellectually stimulating fields of study in Computer Science. Evidently, then, security with moving parts is just as much the reserve of the brightest minds around.

At the end of it all I feel so very enriched by the collective ingenuity of civilisations of the world. I see the roots of our current non-moving-parts engineering wisdom in what they made with moving parts (and no less wisdom by any means) hundreds of years ago. I know this thing with locks is not a fascination that will die any time soon. Neither will it, I assure you, be subverted into non-constructive lock-picking!