This is the graphic that made me post my blog link on facebook. I do not ususally pay much attention to the admin page in wordpress. Nothing much usually changes there (see the number of hits preceeding 16 July). This morning as i editing a post i chanced upon this graphic.

That spike on traffic on the 19th startled me for obvious reasons. I was used to being incognito in the blogsphere. Moreover, i never shared this blog’s address with that many people (about 5 if i am not mistaken). Basking in the afterglow of public adulation i decided to investigate the reasons behind this sudden spurt in traffic.

WordPress has some of the best utilities for such investigative work. All you got to do is click on your site hit count for the day and worpress throws some serious stats at you. In my case it turns out that a certain Mr. frankcoppola514 had decided to add my post on Adult ADHD to his tweeter feed. Lo and behold – 7 uninvited guests barge in and ravage my virginal blog. Just kidding Mr. Frank- See you soon!

As an experiment i decided to promote my blog on fb. Not very many of my friends are very well read. But i hope they have they have mended their ways since . Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness. How profound!! I wish i was glib enough to say something like this but the credit i am afraid must go to the screenwriters of Matrix- Reloaded.

I wait with bated breath for a new dawn to break in US, becasue that is when the stats for today will be published and i shall see if this cheap gimmick of promoting my blog on fb worked. While i wait for that to happen, i got an inspiration to google india’s top blogs and check out my competition.

My google skills aren’t quite what they used to be during my pre-sales days, but i could not find even one list of India’s top blogs ranked by site hits. Someone did compile a list somewhere of the top blogs by category, but no numbers. So my logical mind decides to seek the help of the Oracle of website traffic- Alexa. Alexa did not have any top blog stats but it did deliver on the top 100 Indian websites. Majority of Indians visit a lot of boring websites i must say. Take a look.

http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/IN

To average user this may be yet another list with no major surprises, but my trained eye notices an interesting anomaly-At No. 14 on the list is Rapidshare. That makes me believe that i am about to hit jackpot soon. Talk about premonition- at No. 34 on the following page is the reason why Rapidshare is ranked in the top 20- Debonairblog.com. A plethora of porn should follow soon i presumed. But the top hundred did not have any more desi porn sites. Singularly curious turn of events. So i googled some more and found this post on Sifygold.

http://sifygold.com/tag/top-indian-websites/

The author is quite amused to note that sex rules in India. In fact, he needn’t be. It does everywhere too. I remember reading an article some time back which noted that the only two types of site that make money on the internet are Internet gambling & Porn.

Getting back to this list on Sifygold- I dont know when the user queried Alexa for his stats, but his list is definitely more authentic than Alexa’s current list.

Xboard.us (16th), DebonairBlog.com (18th), AdultFriendFinder.com ( 28th), IndianSexStories.net (56th), FreeSexyIndians.com (74th), to SavitaBhabhi.com (84th)

I say so because i have trawled the darkest alleys of the internet. Been there and done that you see. A favorite modus operandi of any two-bit scamster is to tag his website with keywords like- nude bollywood actress. It shows up on some google unsavvy-idiot’s google search and the user clicks it to find a blogspot page with a zillion google ads and about half a dozen pics that you must have already seen on some porn site before. The site hit counter on sites like these is what any indian blogger (wet) dreams about.

So clearly when we are talking site hits, eyeballs and stickiness- an upskirt image of a wannabe indian starlet beats the shiite out of most erudite of blogs. A picture is worth a thousand blogs.

Thus blogging is not a very scaleable profession for an out of work person. Nissim Nicholas Taleb would approve. You must read his book- Black Swan. But then again dont you have you check out fsiblog.com

xx

p.s. i crossed my self imposed limit of 500 words/post. Clearly this is a topic i am passionate about.

p.p.s. If you have come this far- most honored reader- you must must must check out some cool facts about debonairblog.com stats from Alexa. A few interesting tidbits i must point out- turns out site traffic is down almost 5 p.c. Must be due to that upstart fsiblog; also turns out that more grads check out debonairblog in India than is the internet average. What’s with internet porn and smart people?

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/debonairblog.com

p.p.p.s. One final question comes to my mind- If indeed both surveys are accurate, one needs to ask why Indians are shying away from porn in such huge numbers. Don’t the Upanishads advise people to refrain from having sex during the monsoons?

We convinced our gullible program director into approving it. I think his only condition was that we get at least 15 other folks to sign up for the course to be offered. All the prerequisites were met and our college arranged for this guy from JNU (dept of Mandarin studies) to come and teach us. The very first day he told us that he was only a beginner in the language, since he knew about 5000 of the more than 60,000 words that make up the language, and that, he had spent a good 5 years doing that. Whatever, delusions i entertained of learning mandarin well vanished after that class.

I did attend lectures. The prof tried to teach us essential business communication. He taught us using Pinyin. I do not recollect anything from those classes now save Ni Hao. For people whose Mandarin knowledge is less than mine- it means Hi. Wow!

I am all set to travel to China next week to scout for a few products. I hear they make and sell everything in China cheap. Spoke to a few friends about their china experience. Guess what the number one problem is- Language. I wonder if i had paid more attention in the class, the little mandarin the prof tried to teach us would have come in handy.

What to do? Enter the iPhone. Downloaded an app that translates english to pinyin, displays the phrase/word in  characters and finally also pronounces. I like the lite version but it has very few words (abt 200). The full version has 200,000 words.  Its $9.99 too. I couldnt help but think of my professor who had spent 5 years to learn 5K words while my little app knew about 40 times as many words and cost a fraction of one lecture.

I guess some things/feelings do not have a logical explanation. Like when your mom asks you to eat vegetables and you throw them away in the bin secretly. I did not know the taste of most green vegetable till i entered grad school. So how did i know they did not taste good? I didn’t. I just presumed that if they did so much good to your system, there was no way they could be edible. After i tried a few and figured they weren’t all that bad, i experimented lots more. I eat my greens without fuss nowadays.

So the key was to let go and experiment. I have tried the same with Sunday- In fact there used to be a brief moment in my life, couple of months ago when i looked forward to Sundays. Why? Well, this place i frequented in Pune by the name of stone water grill had this brilliant sunset party. Party was on from 1730 Hrs to well past midnight. You got to shake your booty with pretty people and the music was good. It was too good to last though. After a few sundays i figured that the DJ played the same tracks every Sunday and the pretty people went for their kind.

I want to go out but dark rain clouds threaten to let loose. So instead of venturing out I switch on the telly- freaking cartoons on all movie channels. Bloody Sunday.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/blackholescience/

Wired is a brilliant website. My favorite writer is this guy called Lore Sjoberg. Guy has to be the wittiest writer around. His latest post is about internet dependency syndrome- What to do when your DSL conks out?

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/07/alt-text-dependency

I have been a victim of this since i moved back to Bhubaneswar. Broadband is mere lip service here. I mean the two major players do peddle broadband here, but they might as well call it dial-up. I spoke to the customer service execs about the disgusting speed and they empathised with me, but expressed their helplessness. A few enterprising ones sensing an upsell opportunity decided to sell me their premium packages (for cybercafés & corporate offices) costing a few grand every month. Since internet speed= money, and i have very little of that, i decided to stop harassing the poor customer execs and shut up.

But it is not the speed which drives me nuts; it is the bloody broadband downtime. My cable modem went on the fritz on the first of July. Since, then i have complained a few hundred times to Ortel and no one does anything about it. The last customer service agent i spoke to got a piece of my mind. After about five minutes into my diatribe, she politely reminded me that she had already crossed her SLA for average call time/customer and that she would have to hang up. The other ISP is BSNL. They do not have SLAs and the like, but they do not take kindly to complaints. Infact, they do not like being addressed by their first names. Suffix a babu to their last name and cajole them into coming over like you are inviting them for a tea and they might acquiesce. If you forget to tip after they perform the service, then you are either connected to a higher-up in the telco or you have decided to forsake civilization to lead the life of a hermit far away from such irritants as telephones, modems, internet etc.

The cable modem is on now after three weeks of hibernation. In the meantime i subscribed to BSNL. I have had my share of problems with BSNL in the past. Once bitten twice shy; i have decided to subscribe to both the ISPs in the hope of creating a failover internet access system.

p.s. Cliche count= 3

The doc was not easy to fool. After hearing my story, he gave me a non habit forming attentrol. I am not sure if it works. I can find no evidence of slowing down.

Now i have taken up golf too. A few days at the driving range got me thinking whether i had chosen the right game. It is a thinking game. It requires you to shut out all external noise and concentrate very well. For an impatient person like me how would it pan out? Let me tell you my experiences so far. It’s going pretty decently. I love the game. I love it when you the sweet spot of the club connects with the ball. Everything comes together at that moment- the sound of the club hitting the ball, the shift in your weight, the follow-through of the arms.

The key in golf is to develop a rhythm wherein you are hitting majority of the balls sweet. Rhythm is really important. Sometime i hit five to six balls sweet. And then i feel so good, that i start hitting harder.

Bad shot No. 1. I agonize and hit another one harder still. Before you know it your swing is gone.

But getting back to add and golf. I have tried to focus and see the ball being hit. My mind goes zing right before i hit it. If i could focus better i would be able to see it better when it is hit. Read some forums on people with add who golf. Some people say golf is an add person’s dream game. It requires intense amounts of concentration in short bursts.

I know i am capable of just that. I can be totally impervious to the world when i am concentrating- like while i am playing wii or flight control on the iphone.

Yep! Golf should be fun. Anyone starting out here’s a nice video on grip. Youtube is manna from heaven for amateur golfers. Hurrah!!! My first video post.

Discipline. Thats what i need. I texted this friend the other day and told him that with me being jobless, writing a post gives me a sense of accomplishment. Even as i texted it to him i felt a little peeved for not having written anything but bullet points on a ppt all of last week.

Hang a second- wasn’t this post about death. So i thought my blog was going to be a still-born. Looks like it was comatose and woke up from the dead.

I have been analysis my writing style. I tend to dispense too much advice or typically the blogs are full of me. I have become a bit like Charlie Kauffman, mind you- Only the character in the movie adaptations.

Lots of things have happened in the last two weeks. Lets hope i can recount them.

I have started taking golf lessons.

I have started seeing a shrink for my ADHD

I have started getting into the business of selling cement & steel.

I made my first sales call

I am going to China.

Think, i can combine the first two to write an interesting post. The others are all legit post themselves. Nice work.

See you in the next post,

Chandan

p.s. I was advised by people to show readers more respect by cutting down on typos and taking care of punctuation. I think i handled typos pretty ok this time. Punctuation’s a bit all all over still.

There was this story about Paul Krassner. Paul Krassner is one of the heroes of the hippie era. He has a solid following in the US but sadly not much elsewhere. He has written a host of books on topics of primal importance to single young men and women around the world- pornography & psychedelic drugs.

http://www.sirbacon.org/4membersonly/groucho.htm

My time management skills are beyond pathetic. So maybe the problem i thought to myslef was that i could not juggle a job and my buried passions. Ergo, i quit my job. all the time for passions. That was then 25 days back when i was contemplating a course of action. This is now, time is spent going from one sarkaari agency to the next. Yesterday i even went to the courts to file my first writ . Technically it was the second, first was a PIL that i filed on behalf of the student body of my engg college to end a strike by teachers many moons ago.

So where has all the time gone? Do i have to stay up will 3:330 in the morning to find the time? I think i may have finally cracked the answer. I need a secretary to manage my day and my free time.

Heres some nice quotes on time.

Doug Adams as only he can, has this to say- Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

The best one yet by Will Rogers. Will Who? Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save. Hmmm. Let me sleep on that thought.

So onto themes then- What theme? Umm. A discover blog. I report weird tings from far and wide. Sure. Then i want to do a little bit of commentary on things germane to life in general, & my life in particular. There’s the business ventures too.

What about stories? Would they be ok? Why not. It’s my blog and my writ shall run large. Ok here is a story idea. Am too lazy to expand on it for the time being.

The premise is this.

Dec 16, 2042

Over the last few decades Mexico has progressed at a faster clip than the United States. The Government of General Carlos Ramirez Sanchez, won the war against the drug cartels almost three decades ago. Thereafter, the Government decided that production & distribution of a cash earner such as cocaine could not be left to thugs. Government legalized the business and opened the sector to entrepreneurs. Drug monies helped fuel Mexico’s infrastructure. With manufacturing becoming more and more economically nonviable in the US; the state only got richer. Mexico started beefing up their military machine and reinforced the wide long borders with the United States. The United States never perceived Mexico as a clear and present danger. Hence, the powers that be gladly supplied all the military hardware that Mexico wanted

Dec 16, 1942; Ottawa, Canada

After the steep price shocks in oil in 2008-09 and President Barrack Obama’s ascension to power in US; the US president challenged the American industry and entrepreneurial people to come up with alternatives for fossil fuels. What scientists in MIT & UCLA could not achieve a team of scientists at McGill University, Montreal managed to achieve- Synthesize a clean and eco friendly petroleum alternative from maple syrup. The ground breaking discovery was welcomed by all except the American oil companies. Exxon’s stock hit the lower circuit breaker in NYSE faster than you could say Chandan Mohanty. The american economy slowly tottering towards revival after the meltdown in financial markets and the housing crisis could take no more and collapsed under the weight of its profligacy. The canadians milked the patent income to improve upon and build a stronger economy.

The detoriating state of the US economy sent Japan & China into shock spirals. To this day China still sports a million half completed infrastructure projects. States like Michigan; Ohio and others in the mid west were hit the hardest. Entire towns were deserted by people fleeing to get some job, any job where ever they were in the US or outside of it. With no one to fund America’s deficit it was time for the new order to take charge.

03:03 a.m. EST,16th December, 2042

Mexican forces spilled from their bases and moved into California, Tijuana, San Diego, El Paso. The Homeland security agents and border patrol were dealt with outmost ease.

At precisely the same time the Canadians also struck. The superior fighting forces of Canada blitzed through the weak border defense and almost six hours later Canadian tanks were blockading the Brooklyn bridge. Their forces had captured Seattle, Washington and made deep inroads in Maine, Ohio & Vermont. Some reports even suggested that they were welcomed as liberators in the industrial ghettoes in Michigan & Ohio. The once famed American military command & control structure suffering from budget and equipment neglect could not believe what was happening. This was no scenario that they had war gamed. This was not happening. It was all a nightmare. If only they could all wake up.

17 Decmber, 2042, Bhubaneswar, India.

Abhishek Kar was a second year student at IIT BBSR. A very bright chap. Goes without saying. You have to be bright to crack the famed IITs. You have to be even brighter to be a computer science major at that place. His one passion apart from designing data routing algorithms & designing virtual multiversees was Civilization 24. He could play the game for weeks. With the latest release, Sid Meier games had improved the scenario builder drastically. Social and economic factors now played a far more important role in the development of a nation state.

On this Saturday afternoon as he lazed around in the student lounge of the Kalinga hostel; his friend Siddharth suddenly appeared in the common room. Looking very excited from under his Singularity headset (a portable information access device inspired by Ray Kurzweil’s singularity theory in that can stream live news; video and play 3D MMORPGs viz. Civ 24) he broke the news of the Mexican & Canadian joint military offfensive against the US.

Abhishek switched on his headset to humor his friend not believing a word of what Sid had just told him. He listened mouth agape as media & news agencies from around the world brought back news of the fighting.

Incredulous, he switched to the Civ 24 scenario he had painfully saved and released only yesterday to the Civ servers. Opening his world he was amazed to find a world very different to the one he had designed. US was still the big dog. China, India, Russia were snapping at its heels but they had a lot of ground to cover yet. This was NOT the world he had painstakingly modeled. He had modeled his Civ world on the North American continent and introduced such complex variables as government control of drug money; and the alternative energy scenario into his Civ world. Switching back to the news channels he realized with a chill that the real world was mirroring characteristics of his Civ world.

It was at this time that CNN broke the story of the first major American response to this onslaught; a couple of Lafayette Class & Vanguard class subs let loose their lethal scorn on several Canadian and Mexican cities. All the missiles were neutralised by the Canadian & Mexican energy shields. One rouge Posiedon missile slipped through the dragnet and hit the Mexican city of Juarez. The Posiedon SLBM flattened the city and its neighbouring areas. CNN was now displaying live images of the expanding mushroom.

Whilst watching all this, Abhishek was still trying to figure out the how?

Maybe I can help. Remember Abhishek was a genius at designing data routing algorithms. His algorithm was so efficient that it made its way to the SOURCE mainframes. I cannot figure out what went wrong in there but from my limited knowledge of computer networks I would guess that the North American Civ map that Abhishek had designed replaced the real world data map in the SOURCE mainframes.

Of course Ahishek was not aware of the SOURCE. This would get him started on the search but not yet. Mentally Abhishek was deciding on his next CIV map to try and reverse the effects. But he had an assignment in Discrete Math on Combinatorics to submit in a couple of days later and Mr. Ghosh was a stickler for deadlines.

I am so glad it is over. What started out as a story idea has become a story.

Since then these people have run from pillar to post. The pillar to post metaphor is very apt here. Cliched yes but apt too. Why? Have you been to a Sarkaari daftar. Ok let em tell you about my limited experiences. Last monday i went to the DGFT to enquire aboot the status of our IEC (Import Export Code). I arrived before eleven so i could get this done before lunch and get done with the job. Guess when the babu decides to grace the office. 2:53 p.m. His office people tell me Burra Sahib works rather late into the night. Yea right.

ext day was spent talking to the DIG aboot the case. For a change a dynamic servant of the people. Empathised with our cause. Set up a meeting with the IG Crime Branch.

Talk is cheap. Concrete decisive action. Priceless.

Met the IGP next day. Again a good guy. I have a feeling that the upper echelons of the sarkaari machinery is staffed by smart people. The problem is these guys only ideate but do not implement. Execution as Ram Charan & Larry Bossidy will tell you is the key. Told us that the state assembly is in session & asked us to meet him after 15 days.

The clocks a tickin’

We are paying close to a lakh of rupees to the bank for a loan not fully disbursed, for a unit’s construction that is stuck in the rut for two years now. No wonder when an Indian entrepreneur breaks free he makes it really big. The government toughens you up.

Jai Hind!!!