iNegotiate

I've spent a good part of my life negotiating with authority figures about how late I can return home. I belong to a certain social sect that thinks monsters and werewolves slink about the streets at night. The first time I did stay out late at night, I was quite disappointed by the conspicuous absence of vampires. 

Suppose the curfew-setters believe that the risk of something untoward happening at night is normally distributed, then after 9 PM, we can say that the probability of being a victim of crime increases steadily, reaching its peak at 1 AM. But even the criminals need to go home and get some sleep to be fresh and alert for the next day, so after 1 AM, the probability of crime reduces, returning to pre-9 PM levels at 5 AM. So parents shouldn't tell their kids to "return home by 12 or not return home at all." They should tell them to return home before midnight or after 3 AM, thereby avoiding travel during the peak crime hours. 

But behaviour usually doesn't follow this logic, so I'm forced to assume that the normal distribution idea doesn't appeal to most parents. In fact, considering how their impatience escalates with time, I surmise that they probably think that risk is uniformly distributed over the 9 PM to 6 AM interval. As time goes by, the total area under the curve increases and that explains their panic. Worry not. I have the perfect negotiation strategy. At all events, it is unlikely that the distribution of the probability of crime at night is a discrete distribution, because that would suggest that a crime can only be committed at specific points in time. A continuous distribution is far more plausible. However, in a continuous distribution, only intervals have positive probability. The probability of crime at any given point of time will be zero. Explain to your parents that while you understand that there is some risk spread over the time interval in question, if they think of your safety at a specific point in time, their fears are inconsistent with their beliefs. 

Let's assume that doesn't work either. As a final resort, I recommend negotiating for spending the night at a friend's place instead of coming home late. You don't actually have to spend the night at anyone's place. You push your friends to party till the wee hours of the morning and return home like a good kid just as the lamps are being lit and the prayers recited. Your parents will love your devotion to family life and your friends will think you are a party animal of sorts. If that isn't a win-win, I don't know what is. 

Ageing Gracefully and Other Lies

I am absolutely terrified of getting old. Not the lines, wrinkles and knee replacement fears, no. I’m afraid of turning into one of those people who are so not fun that you just can’t accept the fact that they were once kids. You take one look at them and it’s implausible. “Nooo! That guy? Why, he must have worn a well-tailored suit and a frown ever since he was a baby!” Horrifying, isn’t it?

Age figures quite prominently in pop culture. There are numerous hilarious references to ageing and old people.  And that’s just as well. Pop culture is, after all, a youth thing.

So do “I hope I die before I get old?” Well, I don’t really hope to die. I know I will someday, but I think we can all agree that it’s not something that most of us really look forward to. That said, I must admit that dying young has its perks. You never have to worry about ageing gracefully, whatever that is. You remain forever youthful in everyone’s memory because nobody has ever seen you any other way. You don’t get to the point where you have to eat your words because you don’t live long enough to be brought to account for your verbal diarrhea. And you get to leave the world having severely pissed off your insurers and bankers. That’s got to feel good.

How about Benjamin Button? Get old age over with as soon as you’re born? That arrangement makes dying early really suck. Besides, I’d hate to have to worry about my dentures and cataract when I should be a curious toddler excited about the world. Not taking that deal ever.

That leaves Dorian Gray: staying young forever. I would’ve said Peter Pan but the boy could never get a drink. Most of us fancy being Dorian Gray. Botox takes us halfway there. But I’m not impressed. I don’t think we stop doing foolish things until we realise how foolish we look doing them.

I think Biology has got it about right. 

Life, The Universe, But Not Everything

The long break in blog posts has been on account of what you could probably call direct marketing for my blog, although the truth is always more frivolous than my well-crafted lies.

During this period, I’ve taken quite a fancy to a number of things. I’m suddenly very fond of the subjunctive. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve found grammar so cool and moody. The subjunctive is insanely classy. The need to be judicious with its use is what makes that sweet spot – the maximum possible amount of class without being pedantic – even more unattainable and thereby even more awesome.

The sudden spike in socialising has also caused me to do a lot of thinking about language. I wondered how spelling errors like ‘pwned’ and meaningless abbreviations like ‘sup’ were assimilated in the language with such alacrity but nobody ever thought of designing some useful linguistic improvements. English sure could use them. We desperately need a gender neutral pronoun. ‘He’ is sexist, ‘she’ is feminist, ‘they’ is grammatically incongruent and ‘one’ is begins to sound comical after a point. It makes third person writing very challenging, which is probably why so many writers prefer the less accurate, more aggressive second person for everything other than fiction. Uniformity in spelling and pronunciation on both sides of the Atlantic would also be welcome. ‘Indian English’ incorporates elements of both, so I’ve spent half my life thinking ‘color’ looks incomplete and the other half wondering why ‘colour’ seems like a longer word than it should be. Phonetic spellings could eradicate spelling bees and accents on the alphabets could make English seem a lot artier than it is. If it were a computer language, we’d be cursing Microsoft (and it’s always Microsoft’s fault) and wailing for debugging at this point.

I have also realised that I no longer use the word 'random' as liberally as I used to. Economics has impressed the difficulty of achieving randomness. It's not something you can do randomly. 

The Need for Mediocrity

Everyone should watch Aaj Tak once in a while. Rakhi ka Swayamvar was India’s answer to The Bachelorette. Masterchef India was in a league of its own. They have all brought much laughter to the world. But mediocrity extends well beyond TV shows.

Consider Chetan Bhagat or Stephanie Meyer. But they are relatively popular authors with mediocre abilities. Think of all the lousy books you’ve ever tried to read by authors whose names you don’t remember. Would you fully appreciate a good story if you had nothing worse to compare it to?

We are fortunate to have so much to dislike and mock. Imagine how boring life would be if every TV show was fantastic, every book was a masterpiece and every song was pure genius. What would we make fun of? What could possibly peel us away from TVs and computers? More importantly, how would one come to terms with their own mediocrity if they are surrounded by excellence?

Chances are that we won’t be able to take it. Conversations would taper away if everything was praiseworthy. We would actively seek mediocrity or pressure those who are great to generate so much material that some of it is bound to tend towards the average. We might even entirely lose the ability to recognise brilliance. 

The law of large numbers is fantastic. It makes life worth living.

Examination Simulation

I must admit that after two years of claiming to have every weekend ruined by an exam the following week, I find life extremely boring without them. I always thought that whoever came up with the idea of formalised tests must have been an evil, miserable person. I was suitably elated when my exams ended this week and proudly declared that they are “over forever.”

However, when I struggled to come up with a birthday surprise for a friend, I sighed and realised how “naturally” the idea would have formed itself in my head if I were to have an exam the next day. It really brings out the best in me in every aspect other than the subject matter of the exam. I don't feel motivated to do anything anymore because I no longer feel like I'm engaging in shenanigans. I try to fool myself into believing that I should be studying so that I can enjoy the things I usually spend my time on. 

As you draw close to an exam, every second of your time is so valuable, so precious that you feel rather kingly about squandering it. Without exams, wasting time is the equivalent of being a useless lout – nobody cares about your time anyway. Just as stolen apples taste better, time always seems well-spent when it is misallocated. Watching TV when you’re supposed to be studying is a lot of fun when you’re negotiating with your conscience for another hour’s break. Watching TV because you don’t have anything else to do is just sad.

In fact, exams are worth taking just for the joy of having them end – that goofy, incomparable feeling when you realise that you can stop pretending to study. 

My Last Superpower

I was a bit concerned when I scrolled through my blog a few weeks ago and realised that the average length of my posts was about 200 words. Such brevity is very unusual for me. It may be enough to make a point, but it’s certainly not enough to be particularly articulate.   

I wondered if I was unconsciously responding to the fact that most people have short attention spans (thank you for that, Google) or if I was unable to elucidate my own ideas. Worse still, what if 200 words were all I ever really had to say about anything? I'm not suggesting that ranting is good writing, but my rationale for disliking Twitter is that it doesn’t allow you to say much that makes sense because the word limit is crippling. All that nose-in-the-air-ing breaks down if I voluntarily operate within a word limit, even if it's self-prescribed. 

It’s quite intriguing that being concise has suddenly become important. If nobody likes reading or listening for very long and the average person, in general, favours succinctness, why did the world ever have such long articles, essays and books in the past? Perhaps the speaker/author’s conceit allowed them to get carried away. Or maybe preferences do change. Were the lengthy speeches of yore social constructs – unnecessary chatter to sustain social gatherings before alcohol and dancing were invented? Or has our grasp of language improved so tremendously in such a short span of time as to allow us to communicate so much by saying so little?

Well, I’m glad to say, I don’t care. The length of the last couple of posts has allayed my fears. I’ve still got it!

I’m also proud to say that I’ve stopped caring a terrible lot about grammatical perfection. It’s very liberating. Exams give me a lot of time to think about nothing and that brings so many ideas all at once that I have to scribble them down quickly, sometimes even before they are fully formed in my head. Have you ever had an idea and forgotten it? You feel like you lost the one spark of brilliance that could have changed your life forever. You progressively inflate its importance and genius until you remember that it was something stupid like having eggs for breakfast. It’s times like these when you wish you had just forgotten it altogether, so that you could continue feeling like you could have ruled the universe had fate not promptly snatched the opportunity. 

But to return to my original point, when I went back to read the scribbles, I realised they were not bad. Sure, there are errors. But just as researchers should not give precedence to method over matter, I, too, have learnt to stop prioritising language over content. It really is the thought that counts.

You're in Hell, Potter

I was all of 11 when I first read Harry Potter. Even at that tender age, I had had enough of fairytales. I was coaxed to read it by many but I still put it off for about a year. When I finally got around to reading it, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the plot wasn’t absolute rubbish like I expected it to be.

But the magic world didn’t fascinate me nearly as much as it should have. As a little girl, I thought Harry’s world sucked for two reasons: limited wardrobe options and the absence of telephones. I didn’t like the idea of wearing robes all the time or sticking my head in a fireplace every time I felt like talking to a friend.

Today, I’m older and wiser and I must admit that I feel sorry for anybody who thinks travelling by apparating or floo powder is better than driving a Jaguar. I abhor the shameless slavery – wizards and witches need house elves to work around the house because they don’t have any labour laws or dishwashers. I’m forced to call their education system to question if there’s just one school in each country instead of one in each neighbourhood. What of free choice and competition? I must also point out the sexism apparent in the narrative. Although Rowling is one of the few authors to use the word “witch” with a positive connotation, she often lapses into sexist linguistic patterns: “Triwizard” tournament in the “wizarding world” even though “witching world” sounds so much better.

All of Harry’s adventures would end even before they started if he had a cell phone with a network that worked in dungeons. But there’s so much more that’s wrong with his decision to live with the magic folk instead of the muggles. Wizards don’t have much by way of entertainment. They don’t have iPods or TV and pop culture is basically Voldemort myths and three weird sisters. They don’t even have cartoons or animated movies: they have to make do with photographs that wave at them. What is childhood without cartoons?

Adulthood isn’t much better. There’s no social life in prison because the dementors are such party poopers. I’d feel terribly insecure if owls were smart enough to find absconding criminals but law enforcers were not (although that may well be the case in my world too). Hell, even our bankers are capable of being far more evil than the stupid little goblins at Gringotts.

Most of all, I feel sad about the fact that they live in a world where there can never be any innovation. The best they can manage has already been done and they refuse to take a page out of the muggle book and get internet. Frankly, I don’t see how owl mail can ever be cooler than email. Magic folk have to buy expensive books because they don’t have Amazon, eBay, Flipkart or Kindle. They can’t send huge gifts because they use owls instead of FedEx. And when I think about how their Christmas gifts are broomsticks instead of MacBooks, I feel so sad that I want to cry for them. Technology makes magic look like such a loser.

When I tell anybody a fairytale, it’s probably going to be the story of Steve Jobs. That’s the stuff dreams are, and should, be made of.

It's only Inertia, Dear Boy

The London Olympics brings back fond memories of the 2010 Commonwealth Games – the media always had something to do. They were so happy. The world seemed so eventful.

Here is some of the fodder that the London Olympics is providing for the journalists: the logo is hideous, the allegations that Olympics uniforms are being manufactured in sweatshop labour conditions in Indonesia are being taken “very seriously”, the security threat of lone idiots disrupting the events has been recognised and the closing ceremony will include a tribute to British pop culture called “Symphony of Rock”.

The London Olympics Organising Committee is also taking the Symphony of Rock “very seriously”. No, really. They’ve pulled out all the stops. The list of performers is expected to include the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Elton John and Coldplay, among others. You might even say they went overboard with their enthusiasm. Among those invited was The Who’s legendary drummer, Keith Moon. It’s very nice of the organisers to ask, of course. But they just missed him – by nearly 34 years. In an uncharacteristically selfish move, Keith Moon has declined the invitation to play at the Olympics because he is dead. What a bummer.

Well, you can’t argue with that. It certainly is a valid reason, possibly the only one acceptable for refusing the honour of representing one’s country on a global stage. But 1978 was such a long time ago. Things change. Perhaps the organisers were just checking if he’s still dead.

I suspect they saw pictures of Moon dressed like a sex kitten and assumed he had nine lives. Or maybe, since he is Keith Moon after all, they believed that he could do pretty much anything he wanted to, including rising from the dead to detonate a drum kit for an Olympics ceremony. The Who’s manager, Bill Curbishley, hasn’t ruled out the possibility. In his polite response to the invitation, he helpfully suggested, “If they have a round table, some glasses and candles, we might contact him.”

I would totally watch that.

Addiction and Overdose

I have a confession to make: I’m a pop culture addict. And when it doesn't give me the kick I need, I dabble in counterculture and cult classics. I use movies, books and music to drive me to distraction, more so when I’m under stress, quite the same way that others in my position would use alcohol. The condition becomes very acute during exams.

There are moments of lucidity when I can see the world as it is and everything seems so simple and straightforward. But for the most part, I’m just stumbling through life, trying to push time along its way quickly in the hope that something nice will happen, much like trying to peek at the last few pages of a book in anticipation of a happy ending when things look particularly grim. It is a measure of the severity of my condition that I can’t describe reality without references to the details of my addictive behaviour. The only advantage over alcohol and other more popular addictions is the absence of major after-effects like hangovers or permanent brain damage.


I wonder what would happen if you make a pop culture addict go cold turkey. Just the thought sends shivers down my spine. I can see it: pop culture rehab. It must be where bad folks go when they die. 

Potayto Potahto

If we are what we eat, I’d probably be a potato (or a chicken?). I really feel for the potato. It’s one of my favourite vegetables and it is severely discriminated against. There is nothing villainous about it. In fact, if there was a king of vegetables (and clearly mango is the king of fruits), it would undoubtedly be the potato. Your brain loves potatoes. No, seriously. The human brain requires starch to function and what better source than the humble, delicious potato? And yet, we are so ungrateful to it: couch potato, potato head, dumb as a sack of potatoes - what’s so smart about a sack of onions?

I’ve always thought onions are evil and deceptive. They are so brash and overpowering that they make you cry. Broccoli is obviously the smartest vegetable. It’s green, it helps your body absorb calcium, it’s great for your health and it looks like a brilliant professor with crazy hair. And nobody likes it: it's an exceptionally smart anomaly in a family of otherwise stupid vegetables. 

If you want a dumb vegetable, think cauliflower. It looks like such an air-head. It has an even dumber cousin, cabbage, which has more layers of ignorance than anybody else in the vegetable world. Turnip heads are foolish and incompetent. Carrots are ferocious. Brinjals are seedy and not to be trusted. Okra looks a bit like Cruella’s fingers – definitely wicked. So many perfectly acceptable insults and people whale on the potato instead. It's a wild world. 

Ba Ba Ba Ba Barbara-Ann

I recently had an interview (another firm that decided it didn’t want to hire at all as soon as they met me) where they asked me what I would like to be questioned about. My interviewer, a rather dashing man, helpfully added that, “It’s no fun if you have no clue about the topic,” just to boost my confidence, I suppose. The only answer I could think of at the time was pop culture. And I turn up my nose at quite a lot of that too. Considering the fact that they didn’t hire me anyway, I realise now that I should have overcome my inhibitions and said it: “Ask me anything about pop culture.” And if he dared to ask me about some horrible single that’s topping the charts I could’ve sneered at him and refused to work with someone with such an awful taste in music.

Pop culture is such a wonderfully unnecessary social construct that I can’t help wanting to waste all of my time on it. The connection between two people who listen to the same music or love the same TV show is instantaneous, maybe more so than two people who grew up in the same neighbourhood. The more obscure the reference, the stronger the kinship you feel with the person who was able to identify it.

Lately, however, it’s started bothering me that all my conversations are an awfully tangled mess of pop culture references. I can’t for the life of me remember the last time I went an entire day without alluding to anything that I came across through popular media. For someone who, as a rule, avoids social networking sites like the plague, this is a real bummer. This means that if I was cut off from the internet, television, reading material and my iPod for a few weeks, I would have absolutely nothing new to talk about. Oh, the horror!

But let’s think about the alternative. Let’s assume for a moment that I wasn’t quite so obsessed with music, movies and suchlike and that I had “real” conversations with people. Exactly how would these conversations go? Would I talk about my feelings? The meaning of life? Idle gossip? I’ll take pop culture any day. Don’t kid yourselves. We’re not Einstein reincarnations. It is time to accept the fact that there is no life beyond youtube.

Tiptoe

I came across an interesting read today. Being more comfortable with skin show rather than talking about sex is by no means a purely Indian problem. You’d think it would be more of a male problem if you trusted enough stereotypes. Apparently it isn’t.

This is probably the only issue I can think of where words can indeed be louder than actions. We get outrageous advice from our politicians. And movies, well, let’s just say our dialogue writers aren’t up to the task of writing out a regular conversation on the subject. We still prefer the flower analogy. Is that why parks are such creepy places? In fact, even our censors seem oddly squeamish on the matter although item numbers are considered perfectly normal.

God knows, our MPs sure could have used some sex education in school. 

We Are All Rock Stars

Mr. Keith Moon was known for blowing up drum kits, toilets and pretty much anything else that took his fancy. It’s a pretty run-of-the-mill thing for us Indians – we set off explosives far more powerful than cherry bombs every Diwali. Even five-year-olds do it. So clearly, that can’t be what sets the Indian rock star apart. People will just jeer at him for not knowing when Diwali is.

Mr. David Bowie thought he was quite the star because he liked to play dress up. Children grudgingly do so for school plays and fancy dress competitions each year. Any rock star who tries to use this route to fame will get laughed off the stage. Mr. Bowie himself had to court this fate sometimes.

Let's consider Ms. Grace Slick's TUI habit: "Talking Under Influence." Would that work? In all honesty, our politicians often say things that make me wish they could use being drunk as an excuse. 

What of getting drunk and throwing things at people? Surely that should qualify as rock star-like behaviour? Nope, sorry. Half of India does that every year on Holi. Kids often do so with more precision than most adults.

On average, I believe that sober Indians drive worse than drunk drivers elsewhere. So this form of recklessness would not get a rock star noticed either. General violence and destruction are things at least some Indians indulge in on a daily basis, and unlike most rock stars, they don’t even pay for the damages. So far, so bad.

We have arrived at the last arrow in the rock star’s quiver: setting things on fire. Oh wait. We’ve got Lohri. And Dussehra. Indian festivals make the most badass western icons appear endearingly childish for taking such joy in doing what we do so regularly, not to mention a bit stupid for spending so much on it.

So what can an Indian rock star do? Oh I know! Wear an unfashionable cap and starve himself.

Stop... er...

I was directed to the Stop Kony movement by a comment on one of my previous posts. As far as writing material for a blog goes, this is the absolute gold standard. But words fail me.  

I was introduced today to a rather interesting paper on the nature of political revolutions. It appears that 2012 is the season for revolutions of a different sort. 2011 set the stage pretty well with our beloved Mr. Hazare and Occupy Wall Street which, for some reason, seem to have eclipsed real (and more violent) protests elsewhere. 

The Invisible Children movement is probably a natural extension of the power trip that social media thinks it is on. But Oprah Winfrey and Justin Bieber's endorsement should have set off alarm bells much sooner. Now, now. Don't judge young Mr. Russell. People have done far worse under stress. 

Losing my Unemployment

I expected my first paycheque to cover a lot of expenses I had planned. Having a job requires one to sacrifice a lot of the time ordinarily earmarked for doing nothing. To compensate, I made extensive plans to correctly channel money towards buying myself all the joy I want.

But I’m sorely disappointed. My first paycheque can’t buy me a grand piano, a vacation in western Europe, a decent vinyl record collection, a section of a library, a Bugatti Veyron, real estate on the moon, a small Hawaiian island, tuition for a good academic program, a quaint bistro in southern France or youtube. Money can probably buy happiness if you are as shrewd at planning your purchases as I am. But I can’t know for sure. Not within a month of getting a job in any case.

I also feel like I’ve lost some part of my identity by losing my unemployed status quo. My tally of companies that came, saw and left without recruiting anybody was steadily rising, something that made me believe I had a superpower. A larger sample does, after all, indicate more robust results. Receiving a job offer has taken away all my imaginary powers, not to mention the inspiration for many a blog post.

On the bright side, I got bored of worrying last week and decided that things could either sort themselves out or they could go to hell. I’m happy to report things voluntarily chose the decidedly less attractive option of sorting themselves out despite my curtness.

Additionally, the placement cell is truly relieved: far more excited about me having got a job than they seemed to be about their own jobs. Within 3 minutes of sending me my offer letter, the placement cell officially declared the close of the placement season. I was clearly the most difficult case on their hands. I know it took a lot of patience. 

Oh Karma, you used to be cool...

Few people would be as fond of karma as I was. It's "practically Newtonian": what goes around, comes around. And we all like to believe the world is fair. Even Bénabou and Tirole agree. Karma extends this idea to a multiple lifetimes with reincarnation setting. In every lifetime, you accumulate points for doing good things and get negative points for anything that makes God frown. The higher your score, the better your next life will be. It's quite an elegant system: it ensures that one has the will to live a decent life even when one is about to die. 

Lately, however, I've been having some misgivings. Or perhaps I should call them reasonable doubts. As I get older, it's a bit difficult for me to continue to believe that someone keeps score so fastidiously for the whole world's population. Is ignorance adequate grounds for arguing innocence? Do you need to create a good score for moksha too or is it based on seniority? If the latter is true, then everyone who spent all their lives amassing good karma would presumably want to spend all of it on a wonderfully hedonistic life in the last time period. Or at least bequeath it to the subsequent generation. How do inheritance laws work with karma? How does one know which time period is the last one before attaining moksha? 

Isn't it enough to have to chase so many things in one lifetime without the additional worry of topping the karma charts across lifetimes? 

Mind it

My family and friends like the way I write. Or at least they say so and I choose to believe them, partly because trust is the foundation of every relationship and all that but mostly because it does wonders for my ego. I suffer from a condition called the writer’s flow nearly as often as I court its daft and lazy brother writer’s block. I have a way of really holding people down to the words they utter and making them wish they hadn’t been quite so magnanimous with their compliments. I start sending them a lot of reading material, probably more than they have to go through at work. There comes a point after which they give up. Reader retention is not one of my strengths.

That’s probably why I’m not particularly generous with praise. I’m cautious with my compliments to begin with so that it’s easy to retract when the person’s work suddenly becomes absolute crap or escalate when it turns out to be a lot better than I expected. And it feels wonderful when others don’t do the same thing to me. Karma is great but the “do unto others” idea is far too anglicised for my taste. 

A Valentine Miracle

The Shiv Sena and the MNS decided not to make a spectacle of themselves as they usually do during that special time of the year. I was surprised and confused. Reading about the moral brigade’s new initiatives and applauding their creativity is as much a part of Valentine’s Day as Archie’s oversized teddy bears and heart-shaped balloons.

Perhaps the relatively young Mr. Raj Thackeray has found love? He decided not to harass lovers celebrating Valentine’s Day this year. In fact, the Shiv Sena and the MNS, easily two of the most entertaining parties in India despite stiff competition from their peers in Karnataka and elsewhere, made arrangements to ensure that election campaigns don’t interfere with the celebrations. It appears that these icons of exemplary behaviour are unable to disentangle matters of the heart from matters of the vote.

However, other right-wing groups across the country, eager to add to their core competency, decided to pick up where the story was left off and adopted new measures to combat the social evil of publicly proclaimed love. I hardly think carrying mangalsutras around to insist that any couple celebrating Valentine’s Day be married on the spot is awfully bright. But I'd be a fool not to acknowledge that it does solve the dowry problem quite neatly. 

Girl Power

You can’t be sexist when you are a girl, right? Wrong. I’ve been sexist for most of my life – whined about how there are no (or not enough) female icons, how girls are given stupid dolls to play with while boys get cars, and so on. As a kid, I hated having to play with other girls because the games would almost never be any test of athletic ability, involve very little, if any, competition and never get around to being half as fun as football. Being a tomboy was a convenient social construct that allowed me to straddle the gender divide in the playground.

It wasn’t until I grew older and wiser (I like to believe) that I understood that the reason women seemed a lot less cooler was because they hadn’t had a chance to do much for a very long time. A lot of behavioural patterns that bothered me were the result of social conditioning. I also came across some truly impressive women in fields that are traditionally male-dominated, and that ended my whining for good.

When I was a kid, I wasn't particularly girly. But I do think it’s a lot better to be a woman than a man. I’m really happy that I can never think with any part of my anatomy other than my brain. 

A Matter of Class

I’m quite a fan of an online cartoonist who has devoted much of his time to researching minor behaviour and speech modifications that can make you appear “100% classy.”While he usually deals with more serious issues like the possibility of adding, “You may quote me,” at the end of each sentence or naming your dog ‘Sir’, I decided to turn my attention towards the more mundane matter of appearing classy on paper so that I could help people ooze class on their webpage or blog. I have the first step all figured out. It’s quite elementary, really. In order to appear classy, I must do exactly what Wikipedia does to be mistaken for a real source of information: obsessively reference everything I write and add footnotes wherever possible.[1]

The second step, obviously, is to use hyperlinks. Now this step calls for some prudence. If you hyperlink everything, your page ends up looking rather shady. Hyperlinks must be evenly distributed, thoughtful and used judiciously. One hyperlink for every 150-200 words is ideal.

The third step is to replace a few words with more complex synonyms. This will require a little bit of effort to ensure the context is correct. Another excellent idea is the use of third person. “One” is just so much classier than you or I.

The last step of course is style. If one doesn’t have that, there’s not much one can do.

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[1] Support for this school for thought can be found here.