The cable & wireless series

Historical evidence reveals that wireless communication is not a new fad, but a centuries-old practice.

News has it that a high profile project is currently on to develop a wireless communication system that can transmit data at 100 Gbps, across an incredible distance of up to 120 miles. To put that in perspective, a new film carefully locked up in the hard disk of a high-end computer in a studio in Chennai can be 

transmitted in roughly a hundredth of a second to Venkatagirikota - all two hours and twenty three minutes of it - and burnt onto a million DVDs before the first reel gets to the second frame. But since this column adopts a strong anti-piracy stance, we'll overlook such disturbing uses for new technology and focus on the more productive ones. (Yes, that means you will have to catch that flick in the theatres.)

The first ever wireless communication system was developed by the Persians, and later adopted by the Greeks and the Romans. It was far more advanced that the present one - they could transmit messages beyond the 120 mile barrier and could send several Terabytes of data, as long as it could fit into a little scroll which was rolled into a tiny packet and sent through a pigeon network.

However, most people began forwarding useless jokes and small messages in less than 140 characters which gave rise to the now-popular small packet problem and caused a congestion collapse. Besides, mischief mongers would catch pigeons and interchange the messages they were carrying - this led to packet switching issues as well. Special packet protocols were created to ensure that such glitches could be controlled in future. Well, the future is here - and so are the problems. Obviously things have not worked out as planned.

But the concept of wireless technology has been gainfully exploited by mobiles, with most leading mobile manufacturers offering wireless charging. Nokia, for instance has introduced the Lumia series of mobiles with a charging plate called the Fatboy Pillow on which they can be rested, to be completely charged.

Unhappy with this development, mobile users have launched a series of complaints citing that mobiles now have an unfair advantage over man. Apparently, a couple of them were fired from their jobs when they were caught resting on comfortable, fluffy pillows at work. They tried to reason that they were simply getting charged up for the job on hand, but the management wouldn't listen. Life was unfair – why was it that when they rested on pillows, they were derogatively referred to as couch potatoes, but the mobiles resting on their Fatboy Pillows were called ‘smart’ phones?

This complaint didn’t go down well with the potatoes – the tuber population had enough reason to be annoyed with this insulting reference, for they were playing a key role in wireless research. Around 20,000 pounds of potatoes were used for testing wireless signals inside an aircraft. After careful observation, the scientists had decided that sacks of potatoes best replicated human behaviour – the converse was also found to be true, especially when a TV was switched on.

The experiment has not only resulted in a major breakthrough in Wi-Fi in the sky, but has also given the food industry the secret of making light original potato chips - sending the potatoes 40,000 feet in the air made them lose excess starch. However, the wireless charging technology for mobiles – not involving potatoes - can be traced back to the Chinese theory of energy flow, known as Qi.

So, even as technology is freeing itself from the maze of wires, we are being strung along like puppets on a string. But there’s nothing new about that – which is why every new invention is merely history repeating itself. 

The lies of Pi

It took a bit of technology to make a stunning revelation about Mars that left the planet red-faced.

Before technology kept little boys busy with PSPs, tablets and Attacknids, they had little to do except indulge in outrageous creative exercises, during which they imagined that they saw the emperor without his clothes or had conversations with stuffed tigers.

Close on the heels of the story about a boy who stayed afloat on a boat for months with a tiger for company, has come another incredible tale about this kid and his gigantic dog being lost in Mars. Apparently they were afloat for several days in the sea of tranquillity on the moon. And when they sighted Mars, the boy expected his companion to come back to him, with his tail wagging. But the dog simply looked up at the planet, howled and gravitated towards it.

Heartbroken, the boy got back to earth. Night after night, he watched the stars and the planets. And on one cloudless night, he zoomed into Mars and spotted the huge canine.

Needless to say, no one was willing to believe him - until he shot images of what he saw and posted them via Instagram. His argument was simple – if there could be a rabbit on the moon, why couldn’t there be a dog on Mars? Besides, Instagram itself was an acronym for ‘Mars giant.’ He sent a white paper on the topic to NASA, but they found his story unbelievable. The image of the dog on Mars soon featured on Facebook, which was the quickest and the most sure-fire way of catching the attention of any authority and predictably enough, the powers-that-be ordered a probe into the matter.

 A ‘name the dog’ contest was conducted online by an unknown body which also announced that Bill Gates would give away half his wealth to the name that most people liked. A tidal wave of creativity engulfed cyberspace and finally the dog on Mars was named Rover. A space song titled Hover like Rover was created by Snoop Dogg and The Mars Volta, an American rock group and went viral, infecting the entire planet.

Meanwhile, NASA decided to prove the boy’s story wrong and, leaving the moon and the rabbit alone, embarked on a mission to Mars. If it didn’t work, at least they had good footage from Brian De Palma’s movie of the same name that they could beam across to the world.

There were several parallels between their mission and the child’s story. To start with, there was a Rover, but it was the robotic space vehicle that they had sent to Mars – Curiosity Rover. The incredible story of the boy’s space odyssey with his dog was the outcome of a child’s curiosity, and NASA’s next expedition to Mars in 2020 was nicknamed Curiosity’s child - aptly so, as it would be based on Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) architecture, which was used to design and develop the Curiosity rover.

But the clincher was what the Rover - the space exploration vehicle - dug up. It was a bone, which not only proved that life existed on Mars, but also the fact that Rover - the dog - had hidden the bone playfully, hoping to find it later on an acid-rainy day. The dog was wrong about the acid rain, but the kid was right about there being a dog on the planet. With the exhumed part of the skeleton becoming a bone of contention, the space organization finally decided to go with the child’s story – and that’s how, when we look at the sky with superhuman vision or through a high-powered telescope, we can spot a dog on Mars. 

Tracker, scanner, detector, spy...

Man’s got no place to hide, because technology’s quietly shadowing him everywhere.

First there was nothing. Then came the fig leaf that clung on for centuries. And just when man decided not to give a fig about it anymore, technology took a leaf out of Lex Luthor’s creations – and radiation blocking underwear was created.

No, seriously. It’s already available abroad and could soon cover the entire globe. To understand the demand for this product, we need to go back in time to Hollywood, because research has shown that 97.5% of all people understand technology only when it is demonstrated in an English movie, is set in the future and features either an action hero or Keanu Reeves.

The year was 1990, when a Schwarzenegger-starrer titled Total Recall was released. It showed the future with total body scanners that bombarded the human body with powerful X-ray blasts. People would walk past a screen and their skeletons would be seen from the other side.

Then came the era of biometrics, made popular in films like Mission Impossible, Gattaca and Minority Report, where an individual's retina, fingertips, DNA, molars, premolars and canines – in short, everything except his ID Card - were scanned to ascertain his identity. Another system of tracking made popular by Bond movies like On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Casino Royale, and sci-fi and action movies like Demolition Man, The Day the Earth Stood Still and Safe House was RFID.

Things could have stopped there, but since man's curiosity constantly gets the better of him, he moved on from writing Software For Dummies to writing software for dummies. And the result is available in every major store worldwide, in the form of store mannequins - with a difference. These are as inquisitive as we are, and constantly seek to collect information about the shoppers.

They have a camera for an eye, are installed with facial recognition software and record everything, including the way you looked at the attractive woman in the other corner of the store and walked up to her on the pretext of examining shirts in the nearby rack, and to your utter disappointment, found that the shirts were actually neatly folded aprons and the pretty woman, another mannequin. Thus vital information is gathered about you – the mannequins have noted that you not only have a roving eye, but also myopic vision that can't see distant objects very clearly. So the next time you visit a mall, a bouncer grabs you at the car park, sets right that glad eye and then whisks you away to the nearest Lawrence & Mayo where your short sight is rectified. Needless to say, you pay for both and the world of retail remains eternally grateful to technology.

Unfortunately for you, the evolution of this peek-a-boo technology is not likely to stop here. The next step could well be a combination of some of the technologies mentioned above. Consider a scenario where these mannequins are fitted with the x-ray scanners seen in Total Recall. (Incidentally, this technology actually became a reality when such scanners were installed in airports. Most passengers felt outraged that their skeletons were being ogled at, leading to such full-body scans at airports being appropriately named terminal exposure.) Besides laughing all the way to the bank, the retail stores fitted with these mannequins would also be giggling their way to the security room where scantily clad images of customers will be displayed on multiple monitors.

Without an iota of doubt, there will be immense pressure from various bodies (pun not intended) to stop such scans. And if they have it their way, there's only one thing that various leading innerwear brands can do with their gargantuan piles of radiation blocking underwear in every store - total recall.

Technology - with a twist

The story of how technology added zing to the world’s oldest Bollywood plot…

Not knowing big names in Bollywood can be quite a problem - especially when you have a brilliant idea and can't see it come to life on the big screen. Like a sequel to a lost and found story - with a twist of course.

It has three brothers who get lost because of technology and in the end, it’s technology that brings them together. It begins with the father - on the run from a gang of goons - messaging his wife, asking her to check her inbox. He had sent a mail, giving her directions to meet him at the neighbourhood park and take care of their three sons until he returned. Unfortunately, the mail gets into the spam folder because he unintentionally mails it to his girlfriends as well. And his wife doesn’t see it.

The father, after hours of waiting in the park, finally sets out to look for the mother. To make sure that the kids didn't disturb the couples there, he gives the three brothers an iPhone, an iPod and an iPad respectively. As fate would have it, the iPhone has no signal, the iPod has no songs and the iPad has no flash support, so the three brothers go in search of the missing elements in their lives and are duly lost.

The passage of time is shown by a download in progress. Once it reaches 100%, we dissolve to the present. One of the brothers decides to look for his siblings and begins tweeting, using the Twitter handle @luk4akbr_antny. To his surprise, he gets a response from a stranger tweeting as @luk4amr_antny. Could this be the second brother? Now, all he needed to do was find the person with the Twitter handle @luk4amr_akbr and the family would be together again.

Meanwhile, the second brother is doing his own search. He records the family song and makes it go viral on YouTube. The good news is that he gets a billion views. The bad news is PSY and Justin Bieber had more hits, but they couldn’t be his long-lost brothers.

Finally, the youngest brother tries using Instagram to locate his brothers. An image with the hashtag #oldhouse keeps popping up - it is his old house where he had stayed with his brothers. He also sees an image of a park with the hashtag #linkinpark – this park would be the vital link as all three brothers separated here.

He switches on Google maps and after a long adventure, which involves a couple of romantic duets and a fight, finds the park. The couples he saw on that fateful day are still there, but there’s no sign of his brothers. Another dead end. Not willing to give up, he gets on to Google. It is Brother's Day and to celebrate it, the Google doodle shows three brothers on a specially made cycle for three. This had to be a sign! He uploads a photo of his tattoo on Google+. Within an hour, he gets three responses, one from a corporate professional with a LinkedIn profile, the second from a Casanova with a Lavalife profile and the third from a jobless youth with a Facebook profile.

The youngest brother is puzzled - he was expecting just two responses. Who was the third? He calls all of them to the park. That's where he figures that the Facebook and LinkedIn profiles belong to his brothers. The Casanova turns out to be his Dad. 

The goons land up, there’s a big fight, the brothers win and the family song plays in the background as all of them happily connect with one another through the Family Tree app on Facebook. 

I love this game, but…

Technology has done so much to improve the game of cricket, and yet…

"I love this game, but it’s never-ending! There's only so much that one can take."

That was the world's first recorded crib on cricket from a fan who tottered out of the stadium in Kingsmead, Durban. It was the 14th of March, 1939, the scene of the Timeless Test between England and South Africa that had gone on for 10 days - and still ended up being a draw.

Unfortunately, economists and world leaders outside of the three and half cricket-playing nations had little interest in the game, otherwise they would have found the actual cause for the Great Depression - years of zero productivity because the crowds were forever watching cricket. And the matches were simply not showing any signs of getting over.

As always, the wise men got into their huddle and decided that the only way to end the depression was to change the way cricket was played. Test cricket was soon limited to five days. However, while this reduced the duration of the game, it did little to help overcome the financial shortcomings. The wise men returned for another innings.

This time around, they decided to use technology to change the way cricket was watched. Radio commentary began and soon cricket was televised - a new channel for earning revenue had opened up. Meanwhile, the game continued to get shorter - one day cricket was introduced and a couple of decades later, the more abbreviated version, T20 would revolutionise world cricket.

Technology soon added video replays - and a third umpire, to review decisions. Dizzy camera angles gave exciting new perspectives to the game, from the bird's eye view through cameras attached to blimps, to the worm's eye view provided by stump vision. The five-day action that was speeded up to last a little over three hours in a T20 game was also slowed down to 1000 frames a second to capture every nuance of the game and every tiny strand of nasal hair that quivered in synch with the background music when a fast bowler thundered in to deliver.

Ball tracking technology brought in Hawk-Eye to find out if the ball would have gone on to hit the stumps. Hot spot left the umpire in a tight spot in case he had wrongly given a batsman out lbw despite the bat making contact with the ball.  Snickometer revealed if the batsman had edged a ball to the keeper. Dazzling graphics packages helped draw manhattans, worms and wagon wheels that could be superimposed on the field. Both stumps and key players were 'wired' with mikes to catch more of what was happening on the field.

Websites began to cover the game, live commentary online ensured that office productivity went from dismal to abysmal and live streaming ensured that fans could become couch potatoes even at the workplace.  Sirji and 3G ensured that the game could be followed on the mobile as well. YouTube had zillions of hours of footage for cricket buffs to prove their point in an argument. Blogs turned millions of fans into cricket scribes while social networking sites turned them into selectors, commentators and critics.

Thanks to technology, the mobile, the computer and the TV now covered every game played, from Australia vs England to Awesome Adyars vs Enigmatic Egatturs. Each game was short and crisp, just about the duration of a three-hour commercial flick. The wise men approached the cricket fan. Now there surely couldn't be any cribs - everything had been sorted out. They asked him. He looked at them bleary-eyed.

"I love this game, but it’s never-ending! There's only so much that one can take."

The (tri)cycle of life

A white paper on the evolution of mankind across three very important eras.

There have been various theories floated on man’s evolution, but now, a detailed study has helped classify and document the progression into three eras - mythological, illogical and technological.

The mythological era lasted from 10,000 BC to the time television was invented. Next came the illogical era, the age of cynicism that coincided with the invasion of TV. Notably, glimpses of the first era were depicted through long-drawn, but popular serials with disastrous production values, causing people to scoff at arrows flying in slow motion and laugh at the funny wigs that everyone wore. The technological era began with the advent of social networking.

Now for some pertinent details on each of them.

The Mythological Era

It was an era when nothing defied belief, not even gravity. Man could fly, levitate, change his form at will and take on a new identity. He could make himself invisible. He could enter any place and slip away unnoticed. He had the powers to see things that occurred thousands of miles away. He could beam himself across the seven seas or interact with anyone from halfway across the world. He had devised magical mantras that could open locked doors. Only he could utter them - if someone else tried, it wouldn't have the same effect. From cities beneath the sea to herbs growing on a faraway mountain, he could locate anything in a second.

The Illogical Era

This was an era when nothing defied gravity, not even belief. Man picked up his remote and sank into his couch, only to vegetate happily ever after. The past was a myth; everything about it was illogical. If he was really meant to fly, he would have sprouted wings. Sure, planes had been invented by then, but they wouldn’t take off – either the airlines was grounded or the pilots were on strike.  If he was meant to go invisible at will, he wouldn't have been given a beer belly that had nowhere to hide. And those mantras couldn’t help him unlock a piggy bank, let alone open the vault at Fort Knox.

So man convinced himself that everything that had to be invented had already been invented and that stories from the past about teleportation, telekinesis and telepathy were not as real as teleshopping for weight loss products.

The Technological Era

This is the current era, where nothing defies belief, not even Gangnam Style. (One does talk about horses for courses, but horsing around in the middle of a dance does call for suspension of disbelief.) Social networking allowed man to change his form at will and take on a new identity. (On last count, Facebook had 83 million fake profiles.) He could make himself invisible during chat sessions. Hacking enabled him to enter any place and slip away unnoticed. Webcasts and podcasts gave him the powers to see things that would take place thousands of miles away. Skype allowed him to interact with anyone from halfway across the world. Voice-enabled passwords became his magic mantra that could open locks - and biometric technology made sure that only he could use them. If someone else tried, it wouldn't have the same effect. Google allowed him to search and locate anything in a jiffy, from cities beneath the sea to herbs growing on a faraway mountain.

As for levitation, he’s still cracking it. Once Spielberg and Apple join hands to mass-produce the hoverboard that was featured in Back to the Future 2, it’ll be a reality. 

Getting to the 100-crore club

The scoop on how technology is helping Bollywood get to the billion figure mark with alarming regularity…

Bollywood. An opulent set of a large haveli abutted by sunflower fields on one side and the Swiss Alps on the other. Inside, everything’s covered in white cloth, except for a table in the center, with the industry’s biggest names (that will not be mentioned here to protect identities) seated in a huddle.

A baritone voice boomed across the table. "I'm sick and tired of our films being compared to Hollywood's technical wizardry all the time. Why should it always be about their technology, digital marvels and software simulations? What should be done to add technology to Bollywood?”

“I've brought in a couple of young computer guys who have a few suggestions…” a senior director mumbled. “Ok, we need technology that will give us access to any song, movie, plot, script or story that we might take a fancy to,” a producer winked as he proceeded to brief them. “And we should be able to search across 130 languages.”

The pair began their presentation. “We’ve been put through a crash course of the 100 kitschiest Bollywood blockbusters and have spotted the areas where technology can be of the greatest help to you.”

“We’ll begin with an audio application called Shazam,” said the first techie. “Just install it in your mobile, turn the application on and hold it near an audio source – it will automatically identify the song and it’s all yours.” “You mean we could take any of it and be… suitably inspired, right?” the famous lyricist wanted to know.

This tendency to ‘copy left, right and center’ had already led to an abbreviated use of the expression - copyleft, a term which meant that every piece of work was freely available to be downloaded and open to modification. It was Bollywood’s contribution to technology, but then, the world was not yet ready for such shocking revelations.

“Incredible! And what if I know the tune, but don't have the song with me?” asked the music director. “You could use Midomi. Hum the tune into the mike - the application will instantly find the complete song. The other option is Musipedia - a virtual keyboard will appear on your screen and you can play a tune on it. The original song will be located at once.”

“What about scenes? We love to lift scenes as well, you know...” stated the writer. “There is AnyClip, a website that has categorized scenes according to genre, year of release, actors, whatever...” The second techie continued. “You can even enter a line of dialogue and it will help you identify the movie.”

“We make around 1000 movies a year - we can't write the stories for all of them, you know...” the maverick moviemaker trailed off. “You could enter key words like boy meets girl, brothers separated at birth, lost and found or love triangle in Jinni.com or IMDb – it’ll throw up several plots and storylines for you to choose from,” the first techie added.

“What about complete scripts? There are times when one needs to rip off complete scripts,” said the head of a leading production house. “IMSDB would assist you on that. Musicals, award-winning scripts, family drama - take your pick,” said the duo.

“But the future is all about 100 crore blockbusters – can you ensure that?” enquired the lead actor. The duo shrugged. “You could launch a start-up and hire us.” “How will that help?” asked Team Bollywood.

“Even if your movie doesn’t sell, your start-up will – you are sure to make your billion.”  

A tryst with technology

(Note: This is the writer's cut and an unpublished version...)

After years of Indian cinema pinching from Hollywood, Silicon Valley retaliates with a ‘same pinch’.

September 27, 1998. Bollywood. A large haveli abutted by sunflower fields on one side and the Swiss Alps on the other.

Big B's baritone voice boomed across the table. "I'm sick and tired of our films being compared to Hollywood's technical wizardry all the time. Why should it always be about their technology, digital marvels and software simulations? What should be done to add technology to Bollywood?”

“I've brought in a couple of young computer guys who have a few suggestions…” Yashji mumbled. “Ok, we need technology that will give us access to any song, movie, plot, script or story that we might take a fancy to,” Mahesh Bhatt briefed them. “It would be ideal if there can be a single point from which we can access all of them,” he winked.

“We’ll begin with an audio application called Shazam,” said the first techie. “Just install it in your machine, turn the application on and hold an audio source near it – it will automatically identify the song and it’s all yours.”

“Incredible! And what if I know the tune, but don't have the song with me?” asked Bhatt. “You could use Midomi. Hum the tune into the mike - the application will instantly find the complete song. The other option is Musipedia - a virtual keyboard will appear on your screen and you can play a tune on it. The original song will be located at once.”

“What about scenes? We love to lift scenes as well you know...” mumbled Yashji. “There is AnyClip, a website that has categorized scenes according to genre, year of release, actors, whatever...” the second techie continued. “You can even enter a line of dialogue and it will help you identify the movie.”

“We make around 1000 movies a year - we can't write the stories for all of them, you know...” Bhatt trailed off. “You could enter key words like boy meets girl, brothers separated at birth, lost and found or love triangle in Jinni.com or IMDb – it’ll throw up several plots and storylines for you to choose from,” the first techie added.

“What about complete scripts? There are times when one needs to rip off complete scripts,” said Bhatt. “IMSDB would assist you on that. Musicals, award-winning scripts, family drama - take your pick.”

“Wait a minute!” Bhatt sat up. “But all these sound like different sites to me. Are you sure they are all yours?” “No, they are not,” replied the first techie. “But our site will take you to all of them.”

“The future is all about 100 crore blockbusters – can you ensure that?” enquired Big B. The duo shrugged. “You could have a start-up and hire us.” “How will that help?” asked Team Bollywood. “Even if your movie doesn’t sell, your start-up will - you are sure to make your billion.” 

The trio got into a huddle. “What do you think?” “I don’t know, it sounds so farfetched that even our ridiculous storylines and action sequences sound more believable.” “We’ll get back to you,” they chorused, but never did.

The techies soon met a VC and things worked out. Their new company would offer a single window from where one could search for anything. Needless to say, the idea was pinched from the Bollywood meeting. And that was how Google came into existence.

And that’s also why, despite September 7 being the day when Google was incorporated, September 27 is celebrated as its birthday. For, that was the day Larry Page and Sergey Brin were ‘suitably inspired’ by Bollywood’s big idea. 

And then there were seven Bonds…

A chilling expose of how technology unearthed a secret agent’s identity from Neanderthal paintings.

Marseille, France. Daniel Craig was experiencing a free fall five miles above the earth. In exactly 15 seconds, he had to be in the caves of Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, Northern Spain. He pressed a button on his belt to unfold the Eurocopter, powered by Zorin microchip technology. Before he could say ‘Oops, wrong button’, there was a huge explosion and he was at the cave in the nick of time.

He struck a neon flare and heard a voice. “Welcome, Mr. Bond.” It was Indiana Jones. “Do you know that you are not the first Bond here?” Craig nodded. “I know, I’m the sixth…” “No, you are the seventh - the first Bond came 42,000 years ago.” “You can’t be serious,” Craig raised an eyebrow.

“We used advanced 3-d scanning - and employed digital reconstruction to recreate images,” Indy continued. “Uranium-series technology helps – do you know that uranium decays into a form of radioactive thorium when incorporated into the minerals and...” “But these specimens are too minute to...” interjected Craig, raising his other eyebrow. “I know, we used Accelerator Mass Spectrometry radiocarbon dating for more accurate answers - we've taken all the c14 atoms, you know...” “So what did you find?” asked Craig impatiently.

“See that cave painting there?” Indiana pointed to a painting of a wheel with a man walking in the foreground. “That’s not a wheel. We created a full‐scale, digital representation of the cave and used an enveloping media installation – it layers the 3‐d laser scans onto the existing image.” Craig shook his head. “But it's a wheel, see those six spokes...” “The wheel wasn't invented until 8000 BC. This painting is 42,000 years old. Those, Mr. Bond, aren't spokes, they are the chambers of the .38 calibre gun - and the man seen walking before them was the first Bond.”

Indiana continued. “He was forever bound to the wheel - so they started calling him Bound for short. Since it sounded so much like Bourne, they removed the u and began calling him Bond. That’s when he began the ‘name's Bond' routine. But, with the poor acoustics of the caves, it sounded like James Bond. And that was how it all started.

40,000 BC. The caves of Santillana del Mar. Q takes Bond to a secret chamber inside the cave. “This is the latest in communication devices - the smoke signal SS C902. You are assured of a signal at all times. Works without a battery. Leaves no traces because it burns itself out…”

“Technology,” said Bond, shaking his head. Q then displayed an ejector mechanism. "This will lift you off your seat and propel you 30 feet across. It comprises desiccated cactus thorns - I've hardened them further with a mix of ethylene glycol monoacetate and diacetate. Just sit on it - the built-in ejector mechanism will do the rest.” “This is cutting-edge stuff,” cried Bond. “There’s more,” said Q blushing, “I'm still working on the tiger skin camouflage jacket that can change into a deerskin blazer when worn inside out...” He was cut short by a loud rumble.

"Run," yelled Q. "That’s Dr. Hannibal Lecter – and he’s hungry!" “Haven't you invented anything that can save us?” “I don't know,” mumbled Q. “There's the Aston Martin Vanquish, a high-tech cart that can become invisible, but there’s only space for one.” And he dived into the cart. Bond was left alone to face Hannibal.

“It’s nice to have a celebrity for dinner,” purred Dr. Lecter.  “Doctor… No!” The screams echoed across the caves for centuries until Hollywood heard them.

The rest, as they say, is history.   

See Da Vinci smile…

Technology finally reveals the secret behind Mona Lisa’s mysterious smile

1522 AD. September 9, 2 am. The powers that be were censoring everything that was being said – even birds could only chirp and not tweet. Da Vinci's peers complained to him. They were being targeted because they were avowed critics who were very vocal about their views. “But do you have to…,” Da Vinci began. “Don’t be ridiculous, we’re art critics,” they thundered. Da Vinci smiled. “This is nothing - the future will see bigger threats to free thinking and communication.” Saying so, he began to paint the Mona Lisa.

2012 AD. September 9, 2 pm. Robert Langdon was fast asleep. He had just returned to his hotel room after rescuing the Pope, the American President and Austin Powers. He had long retired from teaching symbology at Harvard. One of his books - The Symbology of Secret Sects - had become an international bestseller because of a typographical error in the title and was outstripping the figures of Fifty Shades of Grey. Thanks to the royalty from the sales, he could live like royalty. But now, this incessant knocking on the door...

"Message for you," gasped the man at the door. Langdon checked his mobile. "Cheap plots at Porur", the sms said. He shook his head in disgust and checked his Facebook, Orkut, Google+ and Twitter accounts. There was nothing in any of them. He looked enquiringly at the man. "If there was a message for you in your mobile, why would I be here?” the man gasped. “The computer museum, hurry" the man gasped and passed out. "Silicon Valley?" Langdon thought.  "Too far away, I’ll have to send my holographic image."

In a couple of seconds, he was virtually there at the scene of the crime. It was a man strangled with a USB cable, grotesquely straddling a Pentium and a Cray-1, reminding Langdon of Ajay Devgn’s entry scene on two bikes in Phool aur Kaante. The word Illuminati was tattooed across his chest in UV ink. “This is unusual,”he mused. “Am I not supposed to unscramble something?” 

Soon the letters ‘I-l-l-u-m-i-n-a-t-i’ swam in virtual space and rearranged themselves into ‘I-I'm a li’l nut’. “Little nuts or coffee beans - Java!" Langdon snapped his fingers - "The clue leads us to the internet - Java is such an important language for the net. It’s in line with other hidden meanings I've found in renaissance paintings using predictive diagnostics."

Five seconds later, Langdon was in his lab, analyzing the Mona Lisa using diagnostic imaging technology that involved thermographic analysis, the kind typically seen in biomedical applications.  Analyzing Mona Lisa’s smile with complex algorithms, he cracked open the mystery behind that enigmatic smile – the brush strokes were in fact, several tiny words. Magnifying them to an incredibly high resolution, he read them out. "They had to go to the rein tent, start a nail or wet sock, o fake cob or write terrible things. Have coca nut? They’ll go glib conk your set wet and spots.” Cracking this would take a journey to at least 37 countries in the next few hours.

Turning the Mona Lisa around for clues, he found a tiny inscription at the bottom - La Soluzione. The solution! “Rein tent is internet, nail or wet sock is social network, o fake cob is Facebook and if you abbreviate terrible things to tt, then write tt is twitter. Coca nut is account, glib conk is blocking, set wet is tweets and spots is posts.” His voice trembling, he read out the message that Da Vinci had left behind for future generations, Nostradamus-style. "They had to go to the internet, start a social network, Facebook or Twitter. Have account? They'll go blocking your tweets and posts."

Run for your life, the apps are here…

There are two kinds of people in this world who exercise – the app-ers and the hapless…

It's early morning, relatively speaking. You're ready in your all-new Nike Flyknit Racer. The iPod gets into your pocket. Your Timex Ironman’s next, followed by your Polk Audio UltraFit sports headphones (with tangle-free planar cables and moisture shields), and the Tune Belt Sport Armband for your brand new iPhone (protective cover, waterproof design, unique ear bud cord organizer – the works). You strap your app-heavy mobile onto this. What you can't wear, clip on or shove into your pocket goes into your backpack. Ready? It's time to pump up the volume with a remixed theme of Eye of the Tiger or Ek Tha Tiger and hit the road - it's time to run.

Since when did an exercise as simple as running get so complicated? Forget power jogging and power sprinting, one didn’t even have Power shoes to wear for a morning run, a decade ago. How did all this change?

As always, blame it all on the t-word. In recent times, technology, through apps, has stood us in good stead through all those hours of sweat and dirt, being our willing partner in grime. In fact, most apps have been named appropriately to emphasize this affiliation, like FertilityFriend, BP Buddy, WeightDate, SportyPal - and of course, an App Mate to handle all these apps.

Apps like calorie counter, session counter and km counter help keep track of various unpleasant facts while you run. Just as there are many ‘counter’ apps for running, there are also several apps to counter running – these help you dismiss suggestions from fitness freaks who unnecessarily force you into physical activities. So when they talk about the benefits of walking, your app can tell them how running is more effective, and if someone recommends running, you could pitch for trekking. Likewise, trekking can be countered by cycling, cycling by swimming, which in turn can be proved inferior to walking – and you realize that it’s a great way to have everyone go around in circles. It can get pretty exhausting, but then, it certainly beats getting tired by exercising.

But there are apps for fatigue too. So, when you feel that compelling urge to put your head down and rest for a while, there's the useful Lap Counter from iTunes to help you count those laps that could make vantage resting points. Just make sure you don't try this in your neighbourhood park or in places where you can be identified.

There are other apps that have resulted from a moment of inspiration - like iStepLog, created by a software engineer who went on an early morning walk after a particularly rainy night and accidentally stumbled on a tree that lay across the road. To cater to the Indian market, related apps have been launched, like iStepPuddle, iStepPoop and iStepDitch, to help you watch where you are stepping.

But it is important that you don’t take these apps too literally - not all apps deliver what they promise. There could be times when the deluge of apps could leave you all muddled up, but an app like Better Brain really doesn't get you that for 150 bucks - it merely tries to exercise your existing brain with some activities.

There are a host of apps for yoga too. But the challenge is to hold your smartphone in one hand, balance the other on the ground and with one leg in the air, try to wrap the other around your waist. It's called the ek app pada bakasana, or the one legged crane holding android device pose.

Tomorrow never lies...

Why has man been so keen to find out what the future holds for him? An analysis...

There are some things in life so predictable that one doesn’t need to be clairvoyant to make a prophecy. For instance, Facebook will have its billionth user soon. (Ignore the bit about 83 million fake users.) Or, Apple’s next product – named iPin – will mark the end of banks. But man’s undying curiosity about tomorrow has always resulted in prophets and profits.

It all began when early man tried to use animals to see the future. From the dove that helped Noah during the great deluge to the pigeon that helped Salman Khan in Maine Pyaar Kiya, there have been enough precedents of oracular animals. Paul the Octopus had set the stage, and soon the rest - Citta the Elephant, Funtik the Pig, Lazdeika the Crab, Leon the Porcupine, Maggie the Monkey, Mani the Parakeet, Pino the Chimpanzee, Rocky the Raccoon, Traudl the Goat, Xaver the Bulldog and Yvonne the Cow - followed. 12 animals, each of them making their own predictions – and that was how the world got its first zodiac.

The future continued to hustle us. The zodiac man had used a dozen animals, but the Mayans would go one up. They created 13 mysterious skulls made of piezoelectric quartz crystal, which is a good conductor of energy. Each skull was a storehouse of information about everything in the universe, including our future. Legend has it that when it’s time for the end of the world, the 13 skulls, when brought together, will help save mankind.

Quartz crystal, the fundamental element in today’s computers. Skulls that could hold and transmit energy. Their coming together to form a network. Piezoelectric quartz, a key component of modern transmission devices like the radar. The larger picture slowly emerged. So that was why the Mayans didn’t have the time to extend their calendar beyond 2012 – they had been busy creating the world’s first Wide Area Network. Was it possible that they had already predicted their end and had tried to communicate it through their indigenous computer network and radar devices? Was that what Indiana Jones had tried to find out before Harrison Ford was retired for the next instalment in the series?

There are other links between modern technology and ancient forecasting techniques. One of the oldest known Indian forecasting techniques is the nadi astrology. Nadi in Tamil means ‘to search for’ – it was this concept that led to the creation of the search engine. Since ancient India had perfected the art of counting up to 1 followed by 153 zeroes, taking a cue from this, two young men, Sergey Brin and Larry Page began a search for a financial windfall of 1 followed by a 100 zeroes – and googol, or Google came into being.

While stargazing indicated the future, the stars themselves were found gazing into tea cups. Kate Moss was believed to be into tea reading until her publicist clarified that people were mistaken. Being a leading fashion model, she rarely ate or drank anything and was often found staring into her tea cup. 

A different kind of reading – of Nostradamus’ almanacs - would reveal that the end of the world was scheduled only for 3797. Besides, like the Y2k issue, the Y10k problem had already been identified. So life couldn’t end in 2012 – there were bigger problems to be faced.

But the condition of the internet, its trillions of websites, the rapidly exhausting Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses and the new social networking sites were clearly predicted by Sir Walter Scott in 1808 when he said, "O what a tangled web we weave..."

An SOS from Hamelin

Who exactly was the Pied Piper? And why is he back in the news?

1284. Hamelin. A bustling little town in Germany where shelves were stocked with cake and cheese, the kitchens were forever making food and there were parties every night. (And the town's council wondered why there were rats.) Luckily for them, the Pied Piper came over and played a ridiculous Bollywood tune that made the rats develop suicidal tendencies and jump into the river Weser. (Shah Rukh's movies have been a rage in Germany ever since. And there have been no reports of any rats after that.)

2012. Batman and Spiderman were back. So was Catwoman. Unfortunately, Hamelin saw the return of another super species - rats. But where was that dratted Pied Piper when they needed him the most? The council met once again. They almost didn't recognise one another - after all, it had been over 700 years. "We need to know who this Pied Piper is for us to call him again," declared the Mayor. “And since making an army of rats disappear needs hi-tech methods, look for him in the tech world.”

"It's Dean Kamen, the Segway guy,” stated Mr. Brown. “He’s known as the Pied Piper of technology.” The Mayor scoffed. "Apparently, the last time the rats vanished, they used his Segways as escape vehicles, which is why we don't see any today. No, it can't be him."

"It's actually two persons," said Mr. Black. "Why do you think so?" asked the Mayor. "Because," stated Mr. Black emphatically, "a man who drives out rats for a living cannot make his fortune at the click of a mouse. My guess is Jerry Yang and David Filo," replied Mr. Black. The Mayor shook his head. "They're too busy trying to fund their website with a reality show titled 'Yahoo's got problems'. Leave the poor guys out. Incidentally," the Mayor blushed, "do you know that their new chief is also a Mayer?"

"What about Larry Page and Sergey Brin?" asked Mr. Black. "The Google guys? But why them?" "The clue lies in the misspelt name. Most people misspell Hamelin as Hamlin - likewise, Google is actually..." "Googol," completed Mr. Orange. "Bingo! Besides, they were the ones last seen searching for rats," added Mr. Black. "But then," sighed the Mayor, "they search for everything. You can rule them out."

"It's the Apple guy," said Mr. Orange. "He would have just had to play his iTunes. All the kids would have put on their iPods and walked on, until they were lost." "But the Pied Piper was dressed in such garish colours - and Steve Jobs was forever in his black turtleneck and jeans," remarked the Mayor.

"It has to be Mark Zuckerberg," cried an excited Mr. Blue. "He got the rats to post their party pics on Facebook. Their bosses saw the cheesy images and all the rats were fired from their jobs. They had no choice but to move to another town…” "But," interrupted the Mayor impatiently, "What about the children? How did they vanish?"

"Well, Mark Z had asked the town to oversubscribe to his IPO in exchange for getting rid of all the rats. And that was how the IPO came to be known as the Pied Piper IPO. But the council didn't think much of his efforts and so didn't buy any shares. The IPO was a flop and Mark got terribly bugged. He first unfriended them all and then added a whole lot of apps and games to the site. Predictably, the kids went crazy and followed him to a place where even Google Plus couldn't find them..."

The great geek tragedy

A gift horse can be deadly dangerous, even if you don’t look it in the mouth…

Why does history repeat itself?

As always, technology answers this question best. The fact is, if history was made only once, we would still be trying to figure out how to carry around the monster DynaTAC 8000x mobile phone in our pocket and Bill Gates would still be crying himself hoarse that he never said anything as dumb as 640K of memory being enough for anybody.

However, according to Karl Marx, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” That’s the reason why the first Trojan horse that was introduced to man resulted in the great Greek tragedy - and the one that followed it in the technology era ended up being a geek tragedy.

It all started with the Trojan War when the Greek soldiers sneakily gifted a large wooden horse to the city of Troy as a peace offering. The battle-weary residents were polite enough not to look at the gift horse in the mouth, but they should have looked at its gut. Perhaps they thought that the horse didn’t have the stomach for a fight, but they were wrong. By midnight, the horse’s belly spewed Greek soldiers who jumped out and conquered the city. The incident ended up contributing an important phrase to the English language, without which Martin Scorsese and Ram Gopal Varma would have felt quite lost – the dark underbelly of crime.

But more importantly, creating a diversion and slipping through the strongest walls, or firewalls - as the case may be - of security would become a dreaded nightmare in the future. The malicious programs that get into your computer pretending to be harmless, and then proceed to create havoc were aptly named after the Trojan horse. The only difference was that while the original Trojan horse had more to do with the doors of the walled city of Troy, the ones that followed, like Stuxnet, busied themselves with Windows.

What makes these Trojans so God-almighty powerful? Well, if Zeus, the king of the Gods, couldn’t escape the trap of deception, how could mere mortals? Zeus was distracted by the beautiful Hera while the Greeks emerged the stronger force in the Trojan war. And for this blunder, Zeus was cursed to lend his name to a Trojan – the Zeus Trojan horse – that would gain notoriety in the banking sector because of its exploits in collecting personal data and passwords.

The concept of creating a diversion and hoodwinking many evolved during the churning of the ocean, when a ravishing beauty named Mohini deceived the asuras while the devas ended up having all the nectar to themselves. The incident set a bad precedent - soon a legion of Trojans and viruses named after beautiful women was unleashed to haunt the internet. Shakira, Jennifer Lopez, Britney Spears, Angelina Jolie, Anna Kournikova, Pamela Anderson, Jennifer Aniston and Beyonce Knowles – in their cyber avatar - teased, trapped and tormented millions.

The geek tragedy not only brings us a truckload of Trojans, but also three vital lessons. One, the perils of resorting to deceit and subterfuge are many – just look at what is happening to Greece today. Two, fortunes keep changing. Troy may have lost the war, but has made its presence felt across the United States - over 30 states in the country have a city or town named Troy. And three, never take English phrases too seriously. One hears of ‘shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted’, but in the case of the wooden Trojan horse, it was quite the opposite - the door was stealthily opened after the horse had come in.

In troubled waters…

An investigative report on why water and technology often combine to result in explosive face-offs…

It was a bright, blistering hot day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. “Time to send all of them to the service centre,” announced a man, wondering why the clocks had gone cuckoo all of a sudden. “Water clocks,” growled Big Brother. “Since time immemorial, a deluge of water has invariably resulted in an epic disaster. Haven’t you seen Waterworld?” “But why does it hapen?” the man asked. “Technology will give you the answers,” said Big Brother, and the giant telescreen switched to a commercial break.

It was 1984. The man decided to follow the trail of technology from the beginning of the world. And sure enough, he found proof – water in any form and in any quantity (usually large ones) resulted in the polarisation of people into groups that competed with each other against a larger technological backdrop.

There was a time when mankind was presumed to be far more advanced than we are today. They called themselves the antediluvian (pre-flood) civilisation even before the floods came – that’s how smart they were. And when the deluge did arrive, two things happened. One, lives were saved in pairs, possibly the inspiration for binary opposites in critical theory. And two, it was the good versus the bad, the former being saved by Noah’s ark and the latter perishing to rains and floods. 

The waters receded, but the floods have seeped into technology in various forms. The act of inundating a particular system or network with data, signals or requests, causing it to slowdown or stop is, not surprisingly, called flooding. And so, using evocative names like ping flood, SYN (sin?) flood and crapflood, technology has singled out many of these disasters for us to be good and avoid.

In another era, a water dispute of a different kind raged between the devas and the asuras. The ocean was being churned in search of the nectar of immortality. One of the outcomes of this exercise was the release of a deadly poison, the intake of which turned Lord Shiva’s throat blue. In a poor game of Chinese whispers played in Danish, blue throat became Bluetooth and led to the famous wireless protocol. Proof of this lies in the fact that the ‘h’ and ‘b’ in the Bluetooth logo actually represents Halahala (the poison) and Bali (the demon king who started it all when he defeated the devas) - and not the initials of Harald Blatand, as is popularly believed.

The phenomenon continues in today’s times - behind every technology battle is a representation of a water body. Intel’s strength in chipping away at AMD’s market share lay in its projects like Clackamas, Deschutes, Klamath, Merced, Nehalem, Potomac, Tillamook, Tualatin, Willamette and Yamhill – all named after rivers.

Android’s legendary fight with iOS can be attributed to mankind salivating in anticipation of its operating systems named after desserts. With names like Cupcake, Donut, Éclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean, a dribble deluge was inevitable. Furthermore, when both Apple and Google outdo each other in promoting a puzzle video game named Where's My Water?, you know that disaster has arrived in the form of a crocodile fishing in troubled waters.

As for the next instalment of the water disputes, get ready with your flood gear and expect thunder and lighting. Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft are waging the mother of all battles – and according to reports, it has to everything to do with a cloud. 

Head on with Hadron

The search for the God particle leads to a collision, an answer – and an endless quest for a question.

550 feet below the Franco-Swiss border, a group of scientists convened, excited at the prospect of advancing technology. The touchscreen Ouija board that they gathered around had come alive - the laser pointer moved to form the word ‘universe’. They were puzzled - if the universe was the answer, what was the question? They hadn’t asked one.

 “Technology can find the question when pigs fly,” the critics snorted. Angry Birds made that happen. But the question still eluded them. Finally, a detective was summoned.

Contrary to popular belief, Sherlock Holmes never stated, "It's elementary, my dear Watson” or anything to that effect. Graham Bell did say "Mr. Watson, come here, I need you." And Crick (of the DNA fame) did announce, “Watson, we’ve found the secret of life”. But as for Holmes, he probably said that the game's afoot, which itself is borrowed from Shakespeare’s Henry V, thus leading to the other famous quote - 'When you've eliminated the source, whatever remains, however improbable, is your own quote'. The misquote however, could be attributed to a transmission loss over the ages. What he had actually said was, “It's hypothetical elementary, my dear Watson”.

Holmes was cryptically referring to the Higgs Boson, the world's first hypothetical elementary particle. Then came the key question - if something is hypothetical, how could it be elementary? This divided scientists the world over into two factions – those who espoused concern and those who chose to discern the truth. To avoid a collision course, they embraced common ground – CERN, and made a beeline for Geneva, Switzerland to the Large Hadron Collider, which was located in a deep tunnel, the same one at the end of which they had expected to find light. “Hadron? Doesn’t that sound a lot like Hades?” one of them asked. That’s when the others began to examine the close links.

Hades was associated with the underworld and the Hadron Collider was pretty much in the underworld, around 175 meters below the ground. Hadron is a particle that could be a proton. Hades was also known as Plouton (pardon the lisp). Did the answer – or rather, the question, lie underground?

Heads spun, vision blurred. The Large Hadron Collider seemed to spiral endlessly until it resembled… a large Mayan calendar. The concentric circles at the center, the spokes going outward, everything seemed to match. But the clincher was that the Mayan calendar was rumoured to end in 2012. “Did you say 12?” asked one of the scientists. “But everything in this universe is made up of 12 fundamental particles.”

And what plays a key role in giving these 12 particles mass? The Higgs Boson, also known as God’s particle! And it was the Higgs Boson that was being explored in the Large Hadron Collider. So the scientists were back to where they had started – 550 feet below the Franco-Swiss border.

Finally, a scientist lost it. “Look, we’ve been spending years looking for God’s particle, the Mayans and Sherlock Holmes. We’ve spent over nine billion dollars on the collider and are yet to find a thing. If only we had handed over the search to the guys who make twice that amount each year by just searching for everything on earth, including…”

“…the earth!” the others chorused. That was when they arrived at the question. So, if the universe is the answer, the question is - just how much can a Google search cover?

The shastra of Facebook

A theory on how Facebook offers you the perfect foundation to build your social fiefdom

Since time immemorial, man has depended on books to straighten out key aspects that defined his personality – from rolled up posters of Claudia Schiffer to curled up currency notes. Books, when used appropriately, have been quite effective in straightening out kinks of character – that was how the phrase ‘to throw the book at someone’ originated. The other less famous, but equally effective way of building character has been to open a book and read it. 

Books that guided man on the most important aspects of life have been around for ages. Approximately 2300 years ago, Kautilya wrote Arthashastra, a tome that advised the king on how he should manage the state, the economy and his army. Almost 1800 years later came The Prince by Machiavelli, a treatise on governance, power and human nature.

Subsequently, rampant deforestation and global warming reared their ugly heads, and with the noble intention of saving the earth and its trees, man gave up reading. But he still needed guidance on how to go about life. That was when technology came to the rescue. And it turned out that the only ‘book’ that 900 million people spent hours on, day after day, was Facebook, a fascinating guide on how to win friends, influence people, like comments, share photos and drive the boss and spouse mad at work and at home respectively. More importantly, it captured the essence of both Arthashastra and The Prince, in one web page.

In Arthashastra, Kautilya elaborates on the seven pillars of an organization as ‘the king, the minister, the country, the fortified city, the treasury, the army and the ally’. Similarly, Facebook also lists seven pillars that are crucial for survival in a social network. Naturally, you are the king of your domain,  your close friends are your trusted ministers, their friends - especially the good-looking ones - are your allies, the groups you're a part of form your country – think of your voyeuristic wandering to other’s pages as illegal immigration, the apps become your fortified city – you wouldn’t want your personal information to go beyond the walls, your comments and snaps are your treasury that you desperately guard against ever-changing privacy settings, and the Like button is your army, with which you can change the destiny of a post.

In The Prince, Machiavelli Niccolo talks about human nature and of self-obsession, with every action fuelled by the ‘what’s in it for me?’ syndrome. You don’t have to look beyond one’s Facebook page for proof of this. Machiavelli also believed that people are mainly concerned with their property and honor, a fact that’s evident from the way they spend hours huddled over Farmville.

There are chapters in The Prince that makes you wonder if they've been written for the Facebook generation. For instance, Chapter XVI, ‘Concerning Liberality And Meanness‘, throws broad hints on how naughty your posts can get. Chapter XIX, ‘That One Should Avoid Being Despised And Hated’ tells you why the Hate button has never been introduced in Facebook. Chapter XXIII, ‘How Flatterers Should Be Avoided’ alludes to why fawning remarks to your profile pictures should never be taken seriously.

With Arthashastra being lost for centuries and The Prince being banned, the hidden principles of Facebook had to be guarded from oblivion, internet censorship and more importantly, from Google’s new products. Facebook had to live on forever – and that was why Timeline came into being.

Facebook would now be the future – and Arthashastra and The Prince, history.

Salman and the six-pack cerebrum

With technology, you can now order anything online – even a Master’s degree.

Urban legend has it that the closer a student is to the blackboard, the more studious he gets. Nothing can be farther from the truth because the advent of technology has ensured that distance has no impact on learning.

The origin of the distance learning programme supposedly dates back to the 18^th century, somewhere in the land where the sun never sets and the prince never becomes king. However, as with anything Western, the estimate is off by a few thousand years in time and a few thousand miles in location.

Records from our part of the world suggest that the first instance of distance learning can be found in the Mahabharata, when Eklavya was refused admission into Guru Dronacharya’s archery class. Undeterred, Eklavya kept a safe distance and learnt the nuances of archery, thus becoming the world's first distance learning programme student.

Ever since, India has had a huge role to play in infusing technology into distance learning, taking it from the era of cyclostyled notes to using audio, video and online resources.

In the 1999 World Cup, Hansie Cronje, the then captain of South Africa, wore an earpiece during a match, with coach Bob Woolmer imparting instructions from the dressing room. This was one of the most famous instances of distance learning through audio. The innovation does have an India connect – we were the opponents.

India has also popularized distance learning through video – it takes grainy footage aired in a news channel for us to learn of a corruption scandal. These sting operations also educate us on several other topics – for instance, a legal delivery in cricket can only fetch six runs while a no-ball can bring home a million bucks. India’s criminals have also acknowledged movies as their inspiration in hatching novel plots – proof that distance learning via video pays.

Internet-based learning has also revolutionized the distance learning approach, for this is a great way to learn about things you never knew - like someone's bank account details, Facebook password, etc. All it takes is a sneaky mail to lots of random ids – and you can sit wherever you are and be educated on how to use technology and get rich.

These incidents made tech-savvy minds wonder - when technology offered so many attractions, why use it to pursue a college degree, of all things? That was when it came to light that Salman Khan was teaching online. The very fact that the initiative was called the Khan Academy and not Being Studious should have told the fans a few things, but they were too star-struck to realize it.

The very mention of Salman made a lot of teenagers take their shirts off and sit expectantly in front their computers. However, on being given an option of watching Marigold, Veer, London Dreams or an educational video on Newtonian Physics, they wisely chose the last-mentioned, thus opting for a six-pack cerebrum instead. But this could be achieved only through rigourous exercises that required an elephantine memory. This pachydermal hitch was easily brushed off by a part of the brain where everything one learns gets hardwired - the hippocampus.

Soon getting a coveted degree from a prestigious university - without ever having to set foot on campus - became a rage and students were willing to give an arm and a leg for it. Their only crib was that Eklavya got away lightly - all he had to do was give a thumb.

When Carnot and Atlas shrugged…

Who would have thought that the speed at which technology progressed would cause weather problems?

From the time the nerdy Mesopotamian realised that he needed a wheel to move on, technology has been racing ahead. With the wheel came the idea of a vehicle. But it was bad weather that inspired a cycle.

The year was 1815. Volcanic eruptions and a snowy summer could well have been the first signs of global warming, but people had no idea - the phrase hadn't been coined yet. (That would happen almost 160 years later, when Wallace Broecker would use it for the first time.) Those were the worst of times and the fact that such tragedy could inspire an invention called a Laufmaschine could be attributed more to the German language than to irony.

Laufmaschine - meaning running machine in German – was a cycle with no pedals and had to be propelled with one's feet. (Picture the image of postmen on these cycles, pushing along with both feet and delivering letters, and you would realise where the phrase 'push mail' came from, in modern technology.) However, what was historic about the incident was that it was the first time that extreme weather conditions were being linked to a ‘cycle’.

Technology’s evolution was fuelled by the arrival of cars and bikes that belched smoke, causing pollution and contributing to global warming – bad enough to sink an island nation like Kiribati. Not surprisingly, the blazing speed with which the future arrived caused a lot of heat – something had to be done to cool off. A German engineer named Sadi Carnot had already propounded the concept of the heat engine based on his principle, the Carnot cycle. In a dramatic reversal of technology, the reverse Carnot cycle came into play – simply put, the Carnot cycle had to be back-pedalled to produce cool air. But then, with air-conditioners, opinion leaders and corporate honchos working overtime, a lot of hot air had to be let out for the world to be cooled. And that made the global warming debacle a whole lot worse. Yet again, a cycle had influenced the weather adversely.

In Hollywood terminology, global warming could freeze the world like The Day After Tomorrow, melt it like 2012 or flood it like Waterworld. James Bond's next chase could be across frozen oceans, only it would have to be on foot because there would be no fuel to power his Aston Martin.

From nano membranes to fusion power and algae biofuel, various technologies were debated over, but the argument just got hotter. And while scientists continued to search for a solution, Google came up with a driverless car. But there was a roadblock - in the case of an accident, even Google wouldn’t be able to facilitate a search for a driver to pin the blame on. Thus, what started with a primitive cycle led scientists to the reverse Carnot cycle, the carbon cycle, the solar cycle, the energy cycle and ultimately a denial cycle that led everyone to blame everyone else.

The wise men went into a huddle and figured that they had to stop this vicious cycle. Since all their new ideas were biting the dust in the ozone layer, they decided that the only way out was to recycle an old idea. “It all began with Carnot. Now, let’s end it with an Atlas,” one of them famously declared and wheeled out an old cycle. “Let’s ride into the sunset - while it’s still there,” he said with a shrug and pedalled away.  

When Abhimanyu met Heisenberg

Advanced software helps unearth a deadly secret that lay trapped inside the chakravyuh for centuries...

The truth’s finally out as to why Abhimanyu couldn’t make his way out of the chakravyuh. Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t because his mother, Subhadra had fallen asleep when he was in her womb, listening to his father, Arjuna demystify the unassailable military formation. Abhimanyu was good enough to have gotten out of there in his sleep. The problem was more complex – traffic diversions.

Research scientists have made use of ChakraView, a Stellarium-based Astronomy Simulation Software that helps predict planetary movements and configurations, and have figured out how and why Abhimanyu lost the plot and his way when he was trying to exit the deadly formation.

One of their key findings reveals that technology was pretty radical back then. Sanjaya’s ‘vision’ of the battle happening several miles away was a classic demonstration of Augmented Reality. However, for snooping into a family feud between two sets of brothers, he was cursed. “Will I never have an idol built in my honour?” he asked. “Worse, your namesake will be on American Idol. And if you really are as clairvoyant as they make you out to be, you’ll know the rest,” the voice from yonder resonated, amidst guffaws.

From the pushpaka vimana to invisible cloaks, time travel and out-of-body experiences, men had also perfected several futuristic ways of travel that negated the need for flyovers or a metro rail network. This explains why neither history nor mythology has thrown any light on traffic diversions in the past. But the influx of armies warned the local authorities at Kurukshetra of an imminent traffic jam. And that was how it all began.

Traffic proceeding straight towards Hastinapura was diverted at Kurukshetra Junction to take the route via Anga and a detour south of Bhadrika. The stretch from Indraprastha to the battlefield was made one-way, with entry only for chariots and infantry from Dwaraka, and a no entry from the Magadha-Kekaya Junction.

On the Assapura stretch, heavy vehicles like eight-wheeled chariots and elephants were not allowed. Instead, they had to go via Vanga, traverse the stretch between Pandya up to Kasi, and enter from Chedi, with a no entry in the general direction of the Vidharba junction.

At a time when heat-seeker missile arrows, implosion-type nuclear weapons and other hi-tech artillery were commonplace in war, finding his way in and out of these traffic diversions was child’s play for the 16-year old Abhimanyu. After all, he had GPS installed, which accounted for lane closures, VIP convoys and of course, traffic modifications.

The Kauravas knew this and rushed to their commander Dronacharya, who decided to juxtapose Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle with the principles of warfare. While there’s uncertainty about everything in life (except death and taxes, according to Benjamin Franklin), Heisenberg made certain that he made a name out of his theory on uncertainty. He had famously suggested that just as you figure out the route when travelling from point A to point B, traffic will be redirected in a way that will leave you uncertain about how to get there.

Applying this principle, Dronacharya brilliantly reversed and revised the traffic schedule several times. The chaos that ensued altered the celestial alignments of the stars and planets. This affected the satellites, causing Abhimanyu’s GPS to fail. And the Pandavas, caught in the various traffic diversions, failed to reach the spot on time.

Moral of the story: Even with the best of technology, don’t attempt to fight your way out of a traffic diversion. 

No IIT, only IT

The story of how technology offers a shorter, less painful passage to the US than the IITs…

Long, long ago, there was a time when technology didn’t mean computers and JEE didn’t stand for Java Enterprise Edition. Those were the heady days when everyone wanted to get into IIT. (“Man, if four days of Mood Indigo, Rendezvous or Mardi Gras can be such a blast, imagine how four years will be.”)

It was about pushing themselves, crossing the cut-off and scaling the pinnacle of excellence – in other words, a laborious exercise that few could succeed in. But times changed. Mardi Gras became Saarang. And the word ‘elitist’ was no longer popular. In fact, the most popular word in the dictionary was ‘popular’. So, to offer more opportunities to more students (as opposed to the elitist system that offers more opportunities to the same set of students), it was decided that an IIT would be opened in every state.

The next step would be to move from ‘popular’ and make it a rage, even if it would outrage a few puritans.  For this to happen, there would have to be an IIT in every city, and if needed, in every suburb. There were a few murmurs that the nomenclature, despite its common nature, could lead to a lot of confusion. For instance, someone hopeful of making it to IIT M or IIT K would be referring to IIT Mylapore and IIT Kilpauk, though the trained mind would tend to misinterpret it as IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur.

However, since the situation was yet to arise, these objections were dismissed and those needlessly trying to look for problems were asked to look elsewhere, like in the JEE question papers for instance.

So, year after year, India’s best tech minds passed out to begin an illustrious journey. They left their campus, they left the country, but what came as a surprise was that many of them left technology too. The result? A preference for KPMG, FMCG and RPG, but not technology.

Now, all those not getting into IIT had a problem – their decent scores got them into decent colleges, but the obscene fees they paid were not translating into obscene salaries. More importantly, they weren’t able to follow the famous Pet Shop Boys diktat – ‘Go West’.

While the better brains were westward bound, there was something else coming up in our backyard, like a mammoth beehive, with honey on tap and a non-stop buzz – information technology. The IT industry had arrived and soon, IT engineers were attracted to it in swarms. Unfortunately, there were more H1Bs than worker bees and this led to several projects being hived off to other countries.

The wise men had to do something about the vacancies and opened their doors wider to ‘non-IT engineers’, with back-up options for non-engineering graduates, non-graduate students and non-student passers-by – hopefully, they would never be needed.

So, year after year, the cream of India’s engineers passed out to begin an illustrious journey. From marine to mining engineering, from organic farming to organic chemistry, everyone took to IT like cricketers to IPL. And IT took them to the US.

Where complex algorithms, Euclidean geometry and linear programming failed in finding the shortest path to the US, another form of technology had succeeded.  Students finally figured that they didn’t have to get into IIT to go west - they just had to get into IT.

Ultimately, it took the best technology to disprove the theory that two I’s were better than one.

Technology killed the Dodo

An expose on why the Dodo and other creatures couldn’t avoid extinction…

Long before Intel came into existence, the primary responsibility for making processors was shouldered by God. Of course, he had his own proprietary line-up called neurons, with which he created animals that roamed the surface of this earth. At around 85 billion neurons, he got a little experimental – and man was born.

Unfortunately, man hunted animals for various reasons – from KFC to Versace. Soon animals became extinct. From the Caribbean Monk Seal to the Caspian Tiger. From the Pile-builder Megapode to the Passenger Pigeon. From the Thylacine to the Toolache Wallaby. None of them could escape being wiped out. The result was devastating - 99.9% of all animal species that had ever walked the earth had disappeared.

It was up to man to do something about it. He examined the choices before him. He could storm abattoirs and animal labs and free the animals. He could camp out in the forests and protect them. He could stop taking his kids to the circus. He could travel to remote areas and campaign against animal slaughter.

All this required time and effort. It was about dedication and devotion, about turning all the night time into the day… But that would put him in dire straits - he would have to take time off from work and from watching Desperate Housewives, desperate news channels and desperate cricketers. 

Then man created Facebook. It could serve dual purposes, giving millions the option of expressing their support and opinion for a cause without actually having to do something about it – and also helping them reduce their guilt about their crocodile skin bags, alligator shoes and other leather accessories. There was also the added incentive of Bill Gates donating 1000 dollars to anyone who posted ‘Facebook kills time, but saves animals’ as their status message for 20 minutes.

Now, millions could sit in the comforts of their living rooms and support a cause, simply by clicking a ‘Like’ button. The miracle of new-age technology had arrived – one could prevent a species from being lost forever, right in the middle of a cricket match, between overs.

Thousands of Facebook pages came up to save animals. Millions extended their support from their homes and offices. As expected, it dented the psyche of the smugglers and traders heavily and in their next General Body Meeting, a resolution was proposed to stop further activities involving animal products. “We’ve decided that we’ll not even have animated discussions from now on,” said a senior member on conditions of anonymity. The campaign hit the hunters hard too. They put down their arms and decided to spend the rest of their lives supplying bullets to PowerPoint presentations.

Meanwhile, the cruel animal trainers were flooded with YouTube links to ‘Two Brothers’, a movie about a couple of tiger cubs separated when they were, well, cubs and later reuniting as adult tigers. In response, the trainers filed a case against the makers of the movie for having lifted the lost-and-found plot and the ‘two brothers separated at birth, united in the climax’ storyline from over 200 Manmohan Desai movies. They then filed individual cases against all those who had uploaded the ‘Two Brothers’ movie online without permission. So everyone kept everyone else busy and the animals breathed easy.

Thus technology successfully saved millions of animals from extinction. Suddenly championing a cause became so simple - keeping roads clean, preventing pollution, fighting corruption and stopping the mining mafia could all be done from home.

If only such technology existed when the Dodo was going extinct…  

From the dork era to the dark ages

A brief Asimov-esque history of the digital era – from the very beginning – and all that which followed…

First there was nothing. I mean, what else would you call 640 kB of memory, despite the fact that Bill Gates is supposed to have stated that ‘640K ought to be enough for anybody’? He never did, but as Mark Twain purportedly said, why let facts get in the way of a good story?

Then came primitive computers with floppy disks – and evolution chugged along at the speed of Mega Hertz. The arrival of the Stone Age was announced by the assault of the Stone virus. The Iron Age began when Big Irons, as mainframe computers were called, bullied their smaller counterparts in tech labs.

All this technology was alienating people from one another. Man being a social animal, had to network. He began one-to-one communication with select people, sending long, passionate pieces to his ex-girlfriends, sharing spicy gossip with his college friends and shooting off angry rants to his colleagues. Since anything that’s passionate, spicy or ill-tempered generally increases ambient temperature, he wanted to call this phenomenon hotmail. But it turned out that the name was already taken, so he took a different route. ‘What do my ex-flames, friends and colleagues have in common?’ he asked himself. It turned out to be the two letters, ‘e’ and ‘s’. A name like ‘smail’ would remind people of a slow slug, so he named his creation email.

But emails could be sent only to people whose ids he had. He wanted to clog the cyberworld with his strong opinions on everything. It didn’t matter whether people liked it or not – he would bash on regardless. ‘Boldly clog’ became his mantra which, as with all things tech, was abbreviated to blog.  Soon, all those who fancied themselves as writers began blogging. The converse also became true - all those who blogged began fancying themselves as writers and began getting their blogs published as books. Since no one reads books, this unwise move sounded the death knell for blogs.

Suddenly people wanted something shorter - no one had the time for long-winding rants. It was a huge challenge. “If you can manage it, you should give us all a tweat,” said Elmer J Fudd, Bugs Bunny’s nemesis, obviously referring to a party without carrots. Soon 140 characters came together and created short messages that came to be known as tweets. And so life went on.

Then came the Dark Ages – power cuts. Without electricity, mails, blogs and tweets became virtually impossible. The elders went into their customary huddle, fanning themselves with their MacBook Air – there was little else they could do with it now. After days of debate, they finally emerged, tired but triumphant.

“We’ve created the perfect alternative to email, blogs and tweets,” they announced and held up three sheets of paper. “This blue one will carry your email,” they proclaimed. “Once you’ve composed your mail, just fold it, stick it and send it. This yellow one,” they held up an A5 sized rectangular sheet of thicker paper, “will carry your blog”. And this white sheet of folded paper will carry your tweets like a ticker tape message pasted on it. We have even created standard tweets for you to choose from, for specific occasions.”

That was how the inland letter, postcard and telegram came to be. And technology reigned supreme ever after.