+ Real Bad News

“As US Secretary of State Colin Powell could not help noticing, some of the countries affected were Muslim. That the US hiked its contribution despite this knowledge shows the extent of its forgiveness, Powell explained.” (The Mathematics of Giving, The Times of India, Sunday, January 09, 2005)

I really am not surprised, having questioned the US’s motives for long, but I must still admit to being furious. There isn’t an iota of honesty here, or the morality that the presidents of that country keep talking about. What has Muslim (or Eskimo, or cannibal, for that matter) got to do with giving humanitarian aid? But then, as we should know by now, that is how the “world’s greatest nation” stinks – I mean, thinks. This, coming from the one person in the administration who is widely reputed to have had half a conscience in the Iraq invasion; imagine the rest of the spooks!

If Muslim is a defining word in the Americans’ thought-and-action process that leads to giving or not giving aid, will somebody explain how Pakistan has been getting all those billions in cash and kind? Ah, and Saudi Arabia! Here, we are talking about a piddling $350 million from the US for tsunami relief, and sanctimonious crap on top of it. Well, by now most people (except those who are totally besotted with the glory of America) know, there is nothing that drives American action except strategic interests. They’ve spent $200 billion on Iraq, but then the oil will more than compensate when they have a nice shit-eating regime installed there. The tsunami concerns a few hundred thousand people who can do nothing for the US – hell, all put together, they can’t probably even buy a couple of fancy Fords coming out of Maraimalainagar.

I can kind of understand that, but that is not what makes the US a dangerous entity. It is that, combined with a breathtaking stupidity and a total lack of morality riding on their ultimate belief in their own power. Everything considered, it seems quite amazing that the American administration can’t see beyond the tip of its bright red nose. I can’t think of any country that has blundered so consistently for as long as the US has. Worse, they probably don’t think they need to take all that care – money, bombs and some simple arm-twisting can resolve almost anything. To top it all, the Bushman and the others of his ilk with blankets-worth of wool between their ears “know” that God is with the morally right people – meaning, these woolly-headed worthies. Well, to put it mildly, this God must be one deviant crazy.

One other aspect to the dangerousness: with a nation such as China, its people know it’s not worth betting on, but they can’t do anything about it; with the US, a lot of its people actually think the administration is working for the good of the world. And in case the loonies created by the US manage to get together enough to threaten the world, the moon (and probably, Mars) are getting ready for the US brains trust; meanwhile, you and I can enjoy our tsunamis.

+ Three cheers to PC-Man

Computer games these days are meant to knock you over, and your computer too. My cousin was telling me the other day about a new game – Doom 3, I think it was – that installs over a few GB on the hard disk and needs a 3 GHz processor and 512 MB RAM for decent play. Forget the piffling 128s on your that you might have on your antiquated P4 2.4s. So, what do you do? Go ahead and shell out a handsome few thousands for an upgrade or replacement so that you can have your ears explode and your mind reel from the energy of Doom 3 and its ilk that ship in 3-CD packs. Maintaining status quo is an uneasy choice because the ante is being constantly upped.

I don’t suffer from the angst, of course. I draw most of my sustenance from dear old dos games.

It was love at first sight with two of the all-time classics – PC-Man and Arkanoid. And it has ensured that I will never buy the latest PC to play a 3D game with 5.1 Dolby surround which requires that I become a monster with about 12 hands in order to go through the hundreds of keyboard commands fast enough to avoid an early gory end.

At my sometime amateur level, PC-Man is like chess, with its inexhaustible variety. Wonder how they managed to pack that kind of randomness and the seeming intelligence of the four monsters in less than 50kb.... I remember playing both these games on a 286 about a dozen years ago. And if I like that time the best, it is also because the speed of the machines allowed me to score pretty high. In fact, on faster machines I have not reached even two thirds the points or levels I did on those cute slowcoaches. It is only recently that I have started to get better results optimised by the tweaking of the wormily named SloMo.

PC-Man palled a little after I hit a peak of about 70,000 and when I realised that after level 8 or 10, you come all the way back to level 1, only this time it plays at relatively blinding speed. Of course, the level discovery was something I reached with some cheating. You don’t have highly developed cheat codes for diddly little games like this. So I had a geek friend look into the program code and tamper with the digits for the number of lives, which gave me unlimited lives. But it wasn’t a fraction of the fun as when you knew you had only three lives plus the ones you gained on the way. It’s the challenge of playing by the rules and winning that provides the thrill, not being able to be god.

Arkanoid, on the other hand, remains quite a challenge. The 286 helped me reach close to 190,000 points on the 18th level - after that, I haven't even reached six figures. And am I curious to know about the beyond!

Sure, I have a library of hundreds of games, but I still don’t play more than a dozen frequently. And half of them are dos games, including a couple of shoot-‘em-ups and a grand prix racing game.

Oh, I almost forgot. Another reason I keep going back to PC-Man is the music. Music’s never been cuter in the post-midi era.

+ The Creative Impulse

Every year gone by is another time, another opportunity, to look back and ruminate on what was and what could have been. Often, they are two sides of the same coin – it’s only when the coin comes to rest that you really know – and do you also get the feeling that both sides of the coin are the same?

So, here we are – another year, another grimace – as time and space shrink around us. It’s alarming.

I keep thinking of writing something – something substantial. Have never managed to write more than a few pages at a time. And, of course, there is never any getting back to it. There was a host of people who were in the same boat. Collaboration was the next idea – get together with a like-minded person moving along on inertia and write a book together. When was the last time that worked…?

After that, it was: “Hey, why don’t you keep writing something, doesn’t matter on what, and I’ll do the same, and let’s see if we can put it all together, tweak it a bit, and come out with something substantial?” [Smirk smirk!]

Then came the big online revolution. Suddenly, everyone was emailing (well, some of them) and instant-messaging each other. Idea No 3: When you are in the mood, chat with your would-be collaborator, archive all those chat transcripts, and at leisure cull the interesting stuff from it and weave a coagulator around it.

Hasn’t happened yet, but surely it isn’t time to smirk yet. This year, the chances look brighter than earlier. I have a lot many more transcripts. Now, I can really write that book, if only I can manage the time. (And don’t forget the inertia....)