…Clueless

“What’s the point in going to Goa when our parents would keep worrying?”

That is what my sister tells me was told to her by her friend and colleague when he last spoke to her last, informing her about the trip they had planned for Christmas and New Year. Sadly, he along with two more friends drowned in the sea. Trying to avoid any possible threat of terrorists in Goa, they went to Ratnagiri which is more secluded.

Three lives lost. Three friends lost. Three sons dead. Countless hearts broken. As I sit here and go through their individual scrapbooks on Orkut and their blogs, I cannot help but wonder what they did to deserve this.

Their blogs and profiles and there for the world to see and be amazed at the uncertainity of life. You navigate to the previous page and there are scraps wishing them a merry xmas. Suddenly, the mood changes. There are no happy messages anymore. When I see my sister cry, I feel like crying myself. I have never spoken to them, never seen them. But just looking at the situation and what remains of them online and offline, moves me. I really don’t know what the policy of Google is in regard to profiles of members who passed away but I really wish Google preserves these profiles and blogs - for their friends, their families…

The day the trio drowned, Garima tells me she dreamt of herself with another friend who was present in Ratnagiri. Abhinav and Garima are laughing, laughing like crazy. Suddenly, they start wailing. Crying.

I sign off with a lump in my throat. May you three rest in peace. And may peace be upon the near and dear one’s. The void shall remain but God will give you strength.

Here’s a blog set up by one of their friends as a tribute.

Ever since the Mumbai terror attacks happened, I’ve been hearing only lame excuses from anyone and everyone across the border. Constant denials, accusations that the terrorists were hindus and outrageous comments by the Pakistani media. There was not a single moment when I felt that we should not bomb their asses off the face of this planet. I wanted revenge, like the majority of my fellow Indians.

I wanted Manmohan Singh to address the nation and assure us that he would “smoke them out of their holes“, just like G.W. Bush had after 9/11. Instead, all I got to see was a robotic and dispassionate speech. I even went to the extent of asking my sister if the whole thing was animated; it seemed so still and choreographed! Below you can see what I am talking about :

It angered me even more when our ministers kept ruling out the possibility of any millitary action to kill the bastards who dare to perform such ghastly acts of terror. The comments from the citizens of Pakistan only fueled the fire within me.

It was only on the 19th of December, that I read about remarks which Nawaz Sharif had made publicly acknowledging the fact that the captured terrorist is indeed a Pakistani.

Today again, while taking a break from studying, I came across two intelligently written articles by some Pakistani nationals :

• When will we act in defence of Pakistan?
• Zardari heading a turbulent country

The second article seems to have been taken down entirely and at the moment is available only through the cached pages stored on the Google servers.

To read comments from across the border that describe the situation the way it is, is a relief. It infuses positivity in me. I respect these people.

But it still cannot take the anger away. I admit that it was a huge intelligence and security failure on our part but that does not give the right to Pakistan, its army, the ISI and the terrorists that they harbour to kill us. If the Pakistani government says that a millitary strike is what the terrorists want, then so be it! I want them dead; I want them butchered; I want them to stop. If Pakistan cannot stand up and accept the fact that it guides and feeds these jihadi bastards, then it must face the music. International isolation or pressure will bear no results. I believe in what Bhagat Singh said - “behron ko baat sunane ke liye dhamake ki zarurat hoti hai (If the deaf are to hear, the sound has to be very loud) “!!

I know I’m being a bit harsh here, but the previous post just nudged me on to write some more. Who is a wannabe? Wikipedia tells me that:

A Wannabe (pronounced “Won-ah-bee”) is a person who imitates or emulates another

You ask me, how is that a crime? People emulate others and that is how one’s personality evolves, right? WRONG! People learn from others and incorporate what they see fit into their own personality and lifestyle. They add a touch of their own to what they acquire from others. Even though, it is far from being original, it is what is acceptable.

Wannabes on the other hand have the sheep mentality. They follow and copy someone, or a trend blindly. Usually wannabes are harmless but as their copycat ways continue, they can take a turn for the worse and might try to beat the original trendsetter at any cost.

Symptoms of a wannabe :

1. During the initial phase, they are basically just nobody’s with no standing in the crowd.
2. They have a strong desire to learn from you and adopt.
   You got yourself a new pair of jeans and an hour later you see the wannabe with the same pair.
3. They have a special place in their brain to store whatever you say and seem to remember things long forgotten.
4. They are usually good listeners.
   They listen to you and your stories with such deep concentration that you get pumped to spit out more and more and more!
5. They are clever at making stories.
   Clever is an understatement here. The stories that you narrated in the previous stage will now come back to haunt you. You suddenly realise that whatever you told them, is now being rebranded and narrated to others as if it had happened to the wannabe himself. So, your plan of telling your friends that real life horror story of yours at the next get together goes down the drain.
6. They are jealous.
   The sooner you realise this, the better. Wannabes are jealous. They are jealous of where you stand amongst your peers, of what you have achieved and what you are.
7. They start teaching you.
   This comes a bit late but you are sure to arrive at this stage at one point of time or the other. The wannabe still considers you the guru but will now often cut your words to correct you. They’ll try to act all cool in front of others and will now narrate stories to you in a bid to show the rest of the crowd that they are now incharge.
8. They become your clones.
   Sadly, after the 7th stage, this is inevitable. You begin to see more and more of yourself in the wannabe. The way the wannabe talks to his sense of style. Everything seems to be a direct xerox copy of your own life. You want to stop this and take situation under your control but you fail.

Once they reach the 8th stage, it is usually impossible to reverse the trend. The wannabe is now armed and dangerous so you must proceed with utmost caution. The best way is to let the wannabe be until he tries to harm you in any way. That’s what I had done. But if the wannabe crosses that fine line and tries to act over smart, then don’t just stand there. That is the time when you must turn nasty yourself and prepare to eliminate the monster that you had yourself help create.

Slowly, bring out the truth in front of the others. Since the wannabe is usually a jealous retard who is heavily complexed, you do not have to try too hard. When the wannabe is confronted with the truth, he will always be defensive or will outrightly deny what you’re saying. The former is what usually holds true in my experience. The trick is to push the wannabe on the backfoot without making it too apparent to the rest of the world. You do not want everybody else to be thinking of you in the same way as you think of the wannabe.

You will begin to see the wannabe expose himself to others. You must strike hard and you must strike when it is abso-fucking-lutely hot! The moment you see him expose his true wannabe self, fire another round of fresh facts at him. Make him come face-to-face with the fact that he is a wannabe. Make sure that you prolong this process over a period of a few weeks or even months so that the world gets ample time to see the true colours. But keep in mind that people are selfish and bitchy. They will always try to take advantage of this animosity between you and the wannabe. The only rule to follow is that you have no friends here. You must only state the facts. No fiction allowed here or that might get you into trouble. State only those facts which you can easily counter in case the wannabe decides to confront you.

If you are smart and cautious enough, you can easily kill the wannabe. They have low self esteem and know whatever they have is acquired. Since they do not have originality they are perplexed by the situation and usually falter. So, just take it slow. Be careful that you do not become the villian. Paint your picture in such a way that it is the wannabe who is ridiculed.

And the most important point that you must remember. You do not have to destroy the wannabe yourself. You have to trigger his death. He will kill himself and will decay into oblivion. Be the trigger and not the bullet. Do not be at the forefront. Instead, guide the wannabe downhill from behind.

This post is dedicated to you “S“. Had you not rubbed me the wrong way, we would still have been friends. Your actions forced me to take concrete steps.

And all of you who actually read through this rubbish, everything written above is tried, tested and experienced. All thanks to S.

I won’t be teaching you something new or radical. It is just an explanation of what I did to stay happy when I was surrounded by strangers. Strangers here does not just refer to unknown people but also people with absurd thought processes which you cannot seem to relate to no matter how hard you may try.

Around a week back, my feed reader alerted me of a new comment on my blog. The comment was from a reader karen on a very old post on this blog :

how is collegge life now and you? im a collegge student for almost two years now, and i seem to have a problem where im not happy with my friends, but i try to stay happy and sometimes faking it to other people and just dont want to show that im upset you know.

As I sat there reading those few lines, I could completely empathize with the person. Around 2 years back, when I entered college, I was face-to-face with a very similar situation. Even though my college is jus 16KMS from my house, it used to feel as if I was on another planet altogether. I tried to befriend different people, spent time with them and judged them. But the more I stayed with them, the more I felt suffocated. I felt lonely - all alone in the middle of nowhere. The only time I felt happy was when I skipped college (my attendance must have been below 40%). The atmosphere in college was pathetic. It did not seem like a place to study and it sure was no place to enjoy or freak out. I always knew that films showed the half truth but my college life was far from what I had imagined. Looking at my sisters getting nostalgic when talking about their own college days, I felt even more depressed.

Then this realisation dawned upon me. There was no point in cribbing. There was no point in just brooding over the fact that I could not find even a single person who was like-minded. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em! Or atleast pretend that you have. That is what I did. I let them be. I opened up my head to their thoughts. These thoughts and views really did not matter to me. My brain was on auto-pilot. It filtered out what it thought was a bit sensible and discarded the rest. This way, I had no load to carry. I had nothing to worry about. I was completely detached.

I did not need friends. I did not want friends. I already had loads of ‘em. I wanted company. I wanted to hear somebody blabber something for those 8 hours I was in college. It broke the monotony, it provided me relief and best of all I had no problems with the people that surrounded me. I realized that there was no point trying to fight a losing battle. There was no point trying to find that one needle in this haystack. Just pretend that you always had it. Or you didn’t need it at all!!

I followed this philosophy. I went to college, passed my time, had pure fun without worrying about anything else. Even though sometimes I did not really relish it, my brain just discarded that thought. I quit worrying and cribbing. I stopped thinking about my past and where I was currently. I stopped comparing. I stopped keeping a count of my gains and losses. I just let them be. This way, I welcomed everybody with open arms and by the time I knew it, I had an army of people to keep me company. I shed the prejudice that I had and in the process I gained relief. I gained company. I gained mental peace. I gained satisfaction. I gained friends (yup, friends and not just company). I gained happiness.

Now, I’m actually happy when I go to college. Had I not taken that step to welcome everybody, I’d still be cribbing and ranting here on this blog. But now the situation is different. Now, I’m not seeking company. Rather I’m enjoying the time that I spend in college.

The only way to overcome difficult situations, the only way to feel wanted when you’re alone, the only way to stay happy when you’re not, the only way to feel at home when you’re in the middle of nowhere, is to just change the way you think.

I know there’s nothing much, actually nothing that I can do to take away your grief and provide you with any sort of comfort. This is just to let you know that I’m here. We’re all here for you. Anytime. You’re not alone.

Your loss is irreplaceable. God WILL give you strength to get through with this. You and your family are in my thoughts, my wishes and my prayers.

I hate this guy. I simply hate him. The way he talks, his voice, his style, his accent… he manages to show the world that he is a thorough wannabe.

If I remember correctly, the very first time Amit Tandon came in front of the camera was for the reality show Coke [V] Popstars, which used to air on Channel V. On that very show, Tandom had told the producers of the show that his girlfriend had died and that he wanted to become a superstar for her (which is a bucket full of horse shit in my opinion). Tandon failed to make a mark in that reality show but his tantrums and dramas caught the eye of the people at [V] and he was hired as a VJ. From there on, he participated in Indian Idol, where he tortured everyone with his crappy voice and also did a couple of television serials.

It seems, Tandon has finally managed to save some cash to launch his very own music album. Believe me people, music cannot sound crappier!!

The title song, “Tanha” is a clear rip-off of the Panjabi MC song, Mirza II (or Mirza 2) sung by Surinder Shinda. The video reminds me somewhat of the video of Quit Playing Games (Backstreet Boys) and Back for Good (Take That). The way Tandon is throwing his hands and making gay faces in the video makes me all the more nauseatic.

Tanha, Lonely At Heart eh?! Seems you’re going to be the lone person listening to your pathetic songs.  Amit Tandon needs to get a reality check. Dude, stick to where you’re making some cash atleast - the saas bahu soaps. Your cheesy accent and gay mannerisms are too much to be tolerated elsewhere.

This is certainly hilarious. People like L.K. Advani sure know how to make a fool out of themselves. I fail to understand that why, whatever they do is not their own decision but directly as a consequence of others’ actions?

Now, L.K. Advani does not have the balls or maybe his false ego just hurts too much if he would admit that he is emlating the U.S.A. President Elect, Barack Obama. “Advaniji”, as the B.J.P. asslickers address him, was gifted a website for campaigning on his 81st birthday. This is a result of the successful online campaign that Obama had launched for himself which eventually saw him getting elected to office.

And… OH-MY-FUCKING-GOD!? 81st birthday? Die already, dude!! Strange are the ways of nature. People like Advani who love enticing violence throughout the country are the people who have the longest lives. “Advanji”, there is still time. At this juncture of your life, go for religious or spiritual excursion to wash your sins. Since I’m pretty sure you are computer illiterate, what use is a website? A better gift would have been a forced retirement for the douchebag.

I use the StatPress plugin on this blog installation to gather some basic and live statistics of the visitors to my blog. I also use the WassUp plugin to capture some similar statistics. While both plugins have their own pros and cons, there is one thing that used to bother me about the StatPress plugin.

While there is an option to delete the older records from the table after a certain time, there is no option to empty the entire table of the stats. Why is this option required? Well, certain people like me host their blogs on servers which give a limited amount of database storage. Statistics plugins like WassUp and StatPress tend to accumulate a large amount of data and thereby take up a lot of database space.

WassUp has an option to empty the table whereas StatPress misses this functionality. I had to manually go into phpMyAdmin and empty the table. So, I decided to look into the plugin and try to add this functionality within it so that I could save myself from the hassle of going to a another software to manage the mess. I am no coder. I read through the entire code in statpress.php and made modifications as required.

I present to you, StatPress with empty table option.

As the above screenshot clearly shows, when you click on StatPress tab within your WordPress Dashboard, you will see an extra option called “Empty”. Clicking on it will delete all your stats from within the database and makes StatPress start afresh. However, please note that this action is permanent unless you have a previous backup. Once you click on Empty, it will empty your database without any further prompts or warnings.

DOWNLOAD : StatPress v 1.2.9.2 with Empty table option (79KB).

Those of you not wanting to undergo the exercise of downloading a new ZIP file of a plugin, deactivating the original StatPress 1.2.9.2 and reactivating this plugin may simply copy the entire code from the text file linked below.

DOWNLOAD : statpress.txt

Open the statpress.txt file. Either save it as statpress.php and overwrite the wp-content/plugins/wp-statpress/statpress.php file. Otherwise, from within your WordPress Dashboard, click on Plugins. Navigate to StatPress and click on Edit. Replace the entire text in the textbox on the next page with the text from the statpress.txt file you just downloaded.

Please note that I am in no way responsible to any damage or loss whatsoever the use of this modified plugin may cause to your installation. I am Jack of all trades, master of none. I don’t claim the code and modification is perfect. It is just a basic implementation. Take all precautions before you activate this plugin.

Finally, the development of StatPress seems to have stalled. There is another plugin StatPress Reloaded. Check it out.

No. I’m not on a In.com bashing/loving/reporting spree here. It just so happened that I was browsing both the websites side by side when I noticed the favicons on their respective tabs.

Now, is it just me or the “in” part in both the logos seem kind of similar. The similar background colour, similar text colour and except for a few minor tweaks, the “in” looks quite the same. Now, this could be a far-fetched theory but I’m just writing what I feel (and what I see!).

It was the 1st of August, 2008. I came to know about a website, “in.com”, which had been launched by the guys at Web18 and offered free email accounts @in.com. The offer seemed lucrative to me. In.com is a very tiny domain and I wanted an email address on it, jus for the cosmetic value of the address.

I went over to the website. It clearly said that it was in “beta” stage (testing). I registered for a couple of addresses just for the heck of testing out the service. Then I thought of creating an ID with some special characters. I tried underscore, hyphen and a dot. The minimum number of characters for an ID was 4. Then a brilliant (exaggeration) idea struck me. What if I could compensate some of the characters in my ID with special characters?!!!

Hyphen (-) and underscore (_) are so Web 1.0. I stuck with dot (.). Now, just to test my hypothesis, I typed four dots (….) in the “Email Id” space on the registration page. Immediately, below the form element, it said “Account Available : Yes” !! I never expected this. Seriously. I had my idea in my head but had never expected the software to be vulnerable to it. I went over to the next step and tried to register but it failed.

I hurried back to the registration page again and this time I put it “..in” as my ID. Sure enough, it was available. I went to the next step and BOOM! I was in! Now you, I and everybody would say, what’s the big deal with an email address that starts with two stupid periods? Well the thing is, the in.com website magically eliminated the dots from my id and now I had a shiny 2 letter username on their website, which I supposedly could not have had.

I had “in@in.com” with me. I logged in with “..in” and seperately with “in” and I got into my mailbox successfully. This email address was tiny, very tiny! I liked it just for that. The interface kind of sucked. Yes, they tried to make it all Web 2.0 with ajax and stuff but it was still slow and buggy. On top of that, their SPAM filter was and still is simply useless. And SPAM was the biggest reason that I never really suck to this tiny email address that I had acquired.

It seemed that every third person on this planet earth, who registered for any serive on the web, typed in their email as in@in.com! From Friendster accounts to Cellphone purchases, I got emails from everywhere! On top of that, there was the regular SPAM which targeted my inbox. When there are so many disposable email address services on the Internet, why the hell do you guys have to type in a random email address when you register on a website?! So practically, the super cool looking email address that I had somewhow registered for myself was simply useless because of the sheer amount unsolicited messages that it received with each passing day.

The account kept lying unused for about a fortnight after which again I tried to login. It failed. I tried again. It failed again. I logged into the other 2 letter and 3 letter accounts that I had registered along with in@in.com I successfully logged into each of them. So it was evident that the folks at In.com had found out about my successful circumvention of their registration restrictions and had disabled the email address : in@in.com.

The same day, I tried to see if the bug still existed in their software. It did. It was there for a few more weeks. This morning, when I checked, it was gone. They had patched their software. A bug, which should have not been there in the first place itself; a bug, that should have been found on the first day of the testing; a bug, which affected the most fundamental module of their software - the registration had been rectified after months and months of so-called testing.

So what have I learnt after all this? Well for starters, the other email accounts I had grabbed are still intact and functioning. Secondly, I should have sold off the email address to some fool while I had the chance (just kidding) ! Thirdly, the guys at Web18 need to employ some actual testers at their development centre itself. And lastly, the advertisments that they are currently running on their TV18 network make no sense at all.

And one more thing, the guys at in.com should give me the id back as a token of gratitude for not disclosing the bug until it was rectified (some might say I should have informed them myself). What would I do if I got in@in.com back? The answer is nothing until people start using their real email addresses or take some pain and use a disposable email service to register accounts on different websites accross the web.

Adios.