One of the most remarkable things about India is the way traffic flows. traffic adjusts itself to conditions around it in a very organic way and in general there are very little rules that are actually followed (or enforced).

The rule that vehicles (and this includes busses, trucks, rickshaws, motorcycles, cycles, push-carts, donkey-carts, and various species of animals) drive on the left side of the road only applies in a relative fashion: one drives left of the right most vehicle traveling in the opposite direction. This enables traffic to find an equilibrium (although it looks far from that) that distributes the total available width of the road according to the traffic volume in both directions (except when there are dividers in the middle of the road like in most of New Delhi). The whole thing works rather smoothly, is a pleasure to observe and a joy to participate in…

Now today i am about to take my first low-budget flight in India (from Delhi to Bombay) and while checking in i noticed the same sort of collective balancing taking place. Low-cost airlines have opened up the possibility of air travel for less prosperous people and you see a lot of families traveling on these airlines. On my flight about one quarter of the passengers seem to be families and the rest individuals traveling for business.

Now if traveling with family Indians must take along excessive amounts of luggage and of course this does not vibe at all with the 15 kg baggage allowment of Air Deccan. As a result the check-in queues at the airport becomes one big distribution mechanism where travelers with over-baggage pair up with travelers that only travel with carry-on baggage in order to check-in their baggage in their name. This creates quite an amount of chaos at check-in as people constantly jump the queue in order to assemble their baggage sharing party, but in the end it seems to work out really well and almost nobody pays for overweight. This process of applied solidarity is even more remarkable if one remembers the constant reminders not to accept luggage from strangers that one is subject to at airports in the rest of the world.

Looks like computer controlled missiles are all the rage this weekend. first allthetechnology blogs showcase a USB powered airdart launcher that can be controlled from any mac or PC. It is being sold for 20 pounds over at the Marks & Spencer online store …

Powered by your mac or pc, you’ll have hours of flying fun with these USB air darts. Let the mission begin! Control the aim and the firing mechanism of the darts via your computer mouse! 3 darts! Software included!

… and a mere two days later the BBC reports on a ‘new tack in cyber war‘:

A new twist has surfaced in the cyber war being waged by Islamic militants.

A message has been posted to several radical Islamist – or jihadi – websites announcing a competition to design a new site for a militant group in Iraq. The prize offered is the chance to fire missiles remote-controlled by computer at a US military base in Iraq. […] The winner will be given the chance, the group says, to fire three long-range missiles at an American army base in Iraq by – in the words of the announcement – “pressing a button on his computer with his own blessed hand, using technology developed by the jihad fighters”.

Note the technical similarities: three missiles to be fired form your office chair with your own blessed hand. Makes me wonder if the jihadies do indeed develop their own technology or if the just go online shopping at M&S.

Update (04-dec-05): Looks like the contest has been announced on the 5th of november. So maybe it is the other way around: M&S nicking their x-mas toy ideas from the jihadies?

Every time i have visited lawrence in Bangalore he recommends me a book to read during the rest of the trip. Last year it was Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (be careful his self presentation on his own site is really evil) which i really enjoyed.

This year he told me to read Transmission by Hari Kunzru. I have finished it yesterday night and it is again very entertaining. the main story is about an indian computer nerd who, when fired from his H-B1 job in the US, releases an unprecedented virus attack on the internets. There are a number of sub plots and one of them features an obnoxious ad agency owner who makes a pitch for the brand identity of the newly created European Immigration Agency. Instead of winning the contract he finds himself being arrested in am immigration raid by the same agency and deported to Albania:

At 2 p.m. when he was supposed to sit down with director Becker and the other members of PEBA’s public presentation working group he was at 35.000 feet, flying deportation class en route to Tirana, Albania.

It is nice to see the term which we have coined 5 years back to be used in generic fashion in a work of fiction.

Every sunday there is a guy with fortune telling robot on the place opposite of the main entrance of russell market in Bangalore. Apparently (the guy does not really speak english) the robot is about 5 years old, was built by someone from ‘down south’ who also supplies the tapes with the fortunes on them. Against a small contribution the robot will tell fortunes in one of four 4 different languages (Hindi, Tamil, Kannada & Telgu) through headphones that are attached to its body.

I could not find out more about the function of the clock that is attached to the body of the robot. the owner just told me that it is a clock and ‘tells the time’ which makes it a truly multi purpose robot: telling both fortune and time)

If you happen to live in Shivaji Nagar, Bangalore and you get your cable tv from Devya Satellite Vision you can watch the first installment of world information city tv tonight from 1830h to 2100h IST. World Information City TV is a project of Bombay based artist Shaina Anand and is part of the World Information City event. Apparently they have made a movie out of my camera misfortune a couple of days ago.

One of the works shown as part of the World-Information City exhibition is ‘Change of State’ by Ashok Sukumaran. It is a simple but effective installation of power switches, lights garlands, a cassette recorder and a couple of other electric devices on the facade of the Elgin Talkies cinema hall on Shivaji Street. During yesterdays opening a couple of us had the opportunity to get into the projection room in the rear of this oldest cinema hall in town.

If something like the magic of cinema exists then it probably does here. the projectionists is one of the most impressive rooms i have ever seen, two old hot, oil dripping dust and light emitting projectors that are operated by two small men with an careful dedication dominate the barely lit room. The combination of sound, smell, temperature and light creates a very special atmosphere. The place has a truly analogue feel to it something that i have not been able to appreciate for a long time. Further proof that there is a world beyond bit-torrent…

More photos on flickr.com

Here is a bit of historic background information about Elgin Talkies that i dug up from the depths of the internets:

If you ever want to savour the past, the City still has the oldest entertainment house-turned-cinema – Elgin Talkies. Though it didn’t start out that way, it came to be called a Talkies.

Elgin Talkies beginning coincided with the birth of cinema in India – in 1896 – when the Lumiere Brothers presented their year-old invention for the first time to an astonished audience in Bombay at the Watson Hotel. Tents followed and after 1907 came the cinema houses. There are many cinema houses of the early 20th century vintage. But I doubt if any of them is exactly as it was originally built.

The Elgin (which takes its name from Lord Elgin who ruled India) was built in 1896 – when India woke up to magical cinema – brick by brick exactly as it was designed. Even today it follows strict segregation of the sexes – booking, entrance and seating! Thus it becomes the oldest building remaining unchanged in every aspect since 1896, now serving as a cinema house.

It started as a variety entertainment hall, but records of the Elgin are available only after its switch to cinema around the end of World War I. The exhibitor those days was a showman. He dressed for the occasion, received higher class audiences, held forth on the merits and demerits of the film and was usually an expert on public taste. This tradition continued till the late ’50s.

The Elgin exhibitor’s son, the grandfather of the present owner, was by the celluloid bug, ran away from home and came back with a projector to convert the Elgin into a cinema hall.

The Elgin has now completed 109 years of uninterrupted “entertainment”, which richly qualifies it to be declared a heritage building and preserved by the State in tribute to the grand cinemas of the last century.

Check out this video [mp4 file – 20mb] of me and my bike having fun in Shivaji Nager / Russel Market in central Bangalore. Traffic has gotten worse every time i have come here. cycling is actually the fastest (and probably most dangerous) way to get around town even though one cannot run red lights like at home. In fact most of the time you do not even get to the red light as even cycles can’t navigate through the snarls of vehicles that pile up in front of traffic lights…

There is fantastic quote in todays Times of India. In an article outlining the practices of Bombay underworld don Abu Salem there there is an description of a phone call he made to Bombay based movie producer Subash Ghai in order to get the overseas distribution rights for the movie Pardes:

Though he terrorised the film world, he was also an incorrigible fan who was taken in by the skin and glamour of the industry. Subash Ghai, in an interview with this reporter a few years ago said while admitting that Salem had called him up asking for overseas rights of the film Pardes, “He actually started the conversation this way, ‘Sir, I want the rights for Pardes. Don’t mistake me. I have been your fan ever since I saw Karz.” When Ghai told Salem that the matter of overseas rights was already settled, Salem very respectfully asked for a print of the film so that he could pirate it.

Among other things i dropped my camera (a canon powershot pro1) today. I had dropped it once before and nothing had happened then but today it broke. The 30 cm fall from a table on a stone floor resulted in parts of the casing coming of the body and the trigger casing being broken so that the trigger did not work anymore. (no pictures of the damage here as the camera is broken). Of course it sucks if you are far away from home and have 10 more days to explore the back alleys of Bangalore. But then the same back alleys can give new life to almost any piece of electronic equipment:

For the sake of comparison we first went to the official canon service center form digital cameras somewhere in the vast northwestern extensions of Bangalore city and there i got exactly the treatment i expected. They told me that my camera was broken and needed to be fixed and that they could not do that themselves but had to send it to Delhi which would at least take a week (knowing Canon, that means 6 weeks or more – my last experience with their service in europe concerned getting a replacement battery charger and that would have taken them 6 weeks even though it was a shipping model!). They also could not tell me how much it would cost but they were sure that the entire body needed to be replaced (read: will be very expensive). But as i said we only went to canon for comparison and after this everything else could only be better.

Next we went to national market which is your location in Bangalore if you want to get anything electronic and/or digital. From the latest Nokia phone to last week’s hollywood release on dvd (or last month’s bollywood release as the pirates respect the national entertainment industry slightly more than hollywood and give them a month or so of exclusivity for their theatrical releases). Lawrence had told me about a stall that where it should be possible to get the camera repaired, but the guy only sold cameras. he did however pointed me to a stall in another market around the corner where someone would be able to fix my camera.

At this stall there were two gentlemen sitting in the middle of a pile of cameras in all states of disassembly (and a framed picture of someone in a suit that was obviously taken during the middle of the last century but according to them it was nevertheless ‘the inventor of the camera’). Unfortunately they were to busy to repair my camera before monday but assured me that come monday morning i would get it repaired for rs. 250 and that it would take no more than two hours.

We went back to national market in order to buy some DVDs but on the way back i noticed a sign stating ‘Ajith Camera Repair at the end of a narrow dark hallway. So went to see Ajith who was sitting in a 2 square meter room that was filled with cameras and other electronic equipment in advanced stages of disassembly. Nothing in the room looked like it had been produced in the 21st century, but Ajith was confident that he could fix my camera in 15 minutes for a ‘simple price’. So i left my Camera with him and in exchange he gave us a little booklet ‘Why you must be Born Again’ by Edmonds Owhorode. Shaina asked him if he was a Born Again Christian which he confirmed and i knew my camera would be born again to. Actually it took my camera 3 times 15 minutes to rise from the ashes but the price was indeed simple: a mere 200 rupees which is less than 4 euros.

update (12.11): Lawrence told me today that a friend of his has actually been commissioned a while back by a camera manufacturer to research why the cameras sold in India had fewer defects than the cameras sold elsewhere. They concluded that from the fact that the percentage of cameras brought in for repair is significantly lower than in other countries. I guess this is simply due to the fact that nobody brings them to the authorized service centers because they suck.