It's a Brand new joke !

“Yeah can I see those headphones?”

“Which ones sir?”

“Those .. there on the right .. the umm.bmmm..ymm”

“What? I couldn’t hear you .. do u mean the Bhattacharya ones ?”

“Yeah .. those .. give it to me” 

Lucky dog. This guy Amar Bose. Being a electrical engineer would have had no use for him had he been born Amar Bhattacharya. Who in the world would buy a sound system by that name? Can you imagine calling up the service center number of this company and they go “Welcome to Bhattacharya Corporation .. press 1 for technical assistance .. press 2 for placing an order” I would laugh for an hour if I heard that someone did name his company such. And I’am also not saying that Gupta Corp would name a good name. Even if it did manufacture fissile material shielding it would still sounds like a grocery store.

Some brand names just get lucky. If Steve Jobs had worked at a banana plantation and Beatles had not named their record “Apple” (yeah that’s the reason why Jobs called his corporation so) the story of i-Pod and Mac would have been different today. Imagine a white glowing, peeled, half eaten banana shining on the lid of the laptop. Except for monkeys no one would like that. “Hey did u see the i-phone?” “Yeah.. the one that Banana launched right”

No offense to you Banana Republic, your brand name stinks and so do your over-priced clothes.

And what is the deal with the brand- Tom Tom? I wouldn’t care less if they had named it Knock Knock. It sounds like a horse beating the African drums with it’s hoofs. No complaints about the GPS they make. It does a perfect job but couldn’t you think of a better name. Navigator? Path-Trak? Blip? Opto-Route? See, it took me 2 mins to think of four humane names. How hard can that be?

Snickers, it sounds more like a brand of under-wear than a candy bar. 7-up, sounds like 7 naked men surrounding a woman. Subway, unless you are selling turkey and chicken bred in the dark underground alleys, you have no right to retain such a misleading name. Once in Mumbai I asked a guy in the street “Excuse me, do you know where is the nearest Subway?” and his look changed from blank to bewilderment to contempt as if I was trying to make fun of Mumbai and said “Andheri Station is around the corner” but when I elaborated he said “Sorry, I don’t know”.

Axe, nice! For a male range of products you couldn’t think of a more masculine name than that? RPG’s, machete, hombre, sledgehammer huh?

Canon, add another ‘n’ and the camera can blow your mind. Literally. Why such a hostile name?

ASUS, ha ha ha ha ..really? That name?

Even in the automobile industry few names are very credible like General Motors (not that the company is credible anymore!), Ford Motors and even Honda and Toyota to some extent. But what’s with the tongue twisters and acronyms? Volkswagen (voks-va-gun or volk-sva-gun or vaulk-sva-gun or wyaaaa-wyaaaa-barf) and Lamborghini (don’t care how it’s pronounced but what is with the yellow color!) and the king of it all Porsche (phor-sha or por-shey or when I can’t afford one why the hell should I know how it’s pronounced). BMW just makes do with an acronym – Bring Me Woman but Broke My Wallet! and don’t even get me started on Volvo.

Brand names attract a lot of slur but I guess that the acid test they go through make them market-proof but then again the H₂SO₄ I carry around is of a slightly higher concentration. Skeptical or not, some of these do offer a laugh in the boring aisles of Walmart or HEB.

“Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha”

“What happened there?”

“Nothing. I just found a pack of frozen vegetable called Apetits. If that’s how they call it” 

The digital marijuana

Do not smoke they said. I said fine. Never do drugs. I said yes of course never. Never drink alcohol. I crossed my fingers and said yeah. No one said anything to me about Facebook.

The rage of social networking sites hit me in the junior year when I was hooked onto Orkut and took extensive pains creating my profile, putting in all the info with intense quality control and, I have mixed feelings as I say this, my circle of friends grew. I even bumped online with some long-lost people who were now on my ‘Friend’ list. Gradually Orkut expanded it’s umbrella and became more flexible in usage. People began to use it as a dating engine and two friends of mine (wonder why all this happens to my friends and never to me!) found their potential match on Orkut. In one case the potential wasn’t strong enough to drive the current and it went phut!

That being that, 2 years later I was sitting at my friends place in Andheri, which used to be my weekend getaway, when I saw him logon to Facebook. It was a totally cluttered website with too much information to fathom in one glance. If Orkut was a showroom, this was a warehouse. Stickers, notes, maps, quotes, gifts, trivia, ads, red boxes, white boxes, yellow boxes. It was as if Ronald McDonald had thrown up after eating a box full of crayons. Finding what you were looking for was like an Illuminati Trail and there was no Robert Langdon. In all, it was confusing. I was also told that this wasn’t for Indians i.e if you live in India. If you are in US, that’s a different matter altogether. The inability to understand the logic and messiness of the site got me hooked. And the occasional lack of work in Schlumberger helped. I joined the network, went through the ritual of filling the info, imported contacts and I was in.

If the intrigue got me hooked, the search reeled me in. I went to every box, fiddled around, moved it and at the end of to days I was bored. I rarely logged in again but that was until I moved to US for my studies. Here the network was so widespread that if it had been prevalent over 50 years back Roosevelt and Hitler had been on each other’s friend list. The US Constitution should add an annex to it’s free speech clause about the liberty to post at anyone’s wall. People from all age group are active on it. I once went to a friend’s graduation party and later that night I got friend requests from her mom and her aunt! Let alone people, even dogs have facebook accounts. But I’am sure they would just pee on a laptop if they saw one. It must be the owners.

Over time the clutter was taken out too and the interface became much more simpler. The population here was too much active. So much so that Facebook recently changed it’s “What are you doing now” to “What’s on your mind”. That makes more sense since when you are logged onto facebook, chances are that you have pretty much nothing else to do.

As I kept bumping into people around campus the parting question would often be “Are you on Facebook?” and thence on a single face to face stumble would grow more personal. Facebook has become like an obsessive-compulsive disorder for me. I sometimes even clean up my wall to make it look like less used! Even while writing this blog I must’ve logged in 20 times at the least.

Initially I was just involved with it. Now I’am totally committed. It’s like the egg and ham breakfast. The chicken was involved, but the pig, my dear friend, was totally committed. 

Nothing worse to learn about !

Circa 1994 when I first heard the ‘F’ word and thence on the learning curve has been steep. It’s true that that they don’t teach curse words at a sex-ed class but then we did not have those either. Indian education system boasts of high standards and rolling out geniuses but when it comes to birds-n-bees we have to rely on street talks, friendly banter, the shady shop around the corner and after hour television.

I was in 5^th standard and we were playing soccer on the field outside school when there was brief scuffle and as it broke apart a boy, I knew was in the same class as me, shouted “Take that you @##$@@@%!^@#*”

Ok that’s a new word for me so I later went upto this guy and asked him “You just uttered something a while back which did not sound Hindi to me. What was that?” And he told me that he was sitting in his Dad’s shop two days back when he heard some customer use that word hotly and that’s how he picked it up and that’s how mostly all of us do. No one sits you down and writes on the white board for you spelling out the phonetics, you just take it off the airwaves. But that is not where the learning stops. It gets worse or should I say exciting.

I’ am in the school bus riding back home when a guy, who’s 4 years senior to me, is talking to his friend about something called a condom and from the auxiliary information I can make out that it’s not a term in physics and neither in chemistry and to say biology would be to a digress a lot. So when I get back home and I ‘am having lunch with my mom I ask her “Mom, what’s a condom?”. I swear to God her hand stopped midway to her mouth. “Where did you hear that?” “Just some guys in the bus were talking about it” “It’s something you do not need to know about now. You need to grow up”. And the matter was buried. RIP.

Years progressed and I kept assimilating information with which I had no idea what to do. When I learned about Faraday’s law I knew that I would need it when I studied turbines, when I leaned Pascal’s law I knew I’d need it n fluid dynamics but when I learned the F-word, the C,P,G,L, and what not words I was at a loss of what do with this information. Clandestine information was exciting but overwhelming. And later when I learned that birds do it, bees do it and even educated fleas do it my floodgates were creaking already.

If it only had been the ending to it. Internet hit India big-time during the late 90’s and my knowledge bank surged and by surged I do mean phenomenal, exponential and tsunamial. Few years later I entered hostel life and then I hit the freeway. No u-turns and full speed ahead.

15 years later it seems like I have nothing more left to learn. People keep saying that you are always learning. True! Very True! But about science, finance, current affairs, Obama’s deeds, Pak’s misdoings,  Dow Jones crash but not anymore about “Bad Stuff” that you need to stow away under lock and key until you are an adult.

That’s what adulthood snatches away from you. A twisted, grey but really awesome childhood.