SMS Freak!

How many of us would spend 15-20 minutes in composing an SMS? Well, call me a freak, but I do!

This Diwali, much like other festivals, I gave the fancy forwards I’d received a miss and decided to give a personal touch by keying in my wishes, replete with special symbols. It turned out to be a futile (and heartbreaking at that) exercise as none of the 35-40 recipients got any text, just a blank SMS (atleast that’s what the 5 people, who were kind enough to inform me, had to say). And this when I thought, I had learnt my lessons from the past…

When I first got this mobile phone with multilingual capability, I was pretty excited that now I could type SMS in my national language. So when I woke on this cold Lohri morning, I thought it was a good option to stay in the warmth of my quilt and type my Lohri greetings in Hindi. It turned out to be quite a workout for my fingers and revision of Hindi “varnamala” (alphabets).

For instance, to arrive at ‘m’ as in मेरे (“mere”), I had to mentally recite “प फ ब भ म” and try a couple of numbers to know that it was not 6 (keypad prominently displayed MNO for help), but number 8 that I had to press 5 times! At the end of a good half an hour, I was pleased with the results. I had managed to amalgamate Hindi and Punjabi into a couple of lines that seemed to fit into 160 characters.

It didn’t take too long before my pride came crashing down as people replied back saying they received just boxes or absolutely no text as SMS. The monthly bill later revealed that Airtel considered the Hindi alphabets more than 160 characters even though hardly anyone was able to read anything of it! From that moment on, I decided to give Devnagari script a miss for Short Messaging Service.

Special occasions apart, I put in some effort for even my everyday SMS. For one, I don’t like SMS short-hand; which means you is ‘you’ and not ‘u’, see is ’see’ and not ‘c’. And it just doesn’t at “See you at 6.” I find it difficult to end the SMS in a short single line even if it sufficient to convey the message. Brevity be damned, it just doesn’t seem “paisa-vasool” to me!

The underlying thought is – when I’m being charged the full amount for 20 characters as for 160, I might as well go on and add another 100 to ask about the weather or communicate more details. End result – most of my SMS-es are in the range of 150-160 characters.

So a “c u at 6″ would, for me, turn out as 

“Hi, woke up just now. Hope the day’s going well. See you around 6 pm today. Is it possible for you to pick 1 litre of toned milk on the way to my place? “

Of course there are exceptions, but they too revolve around the 160 rule. I might give the ‘you’ a miss if I see my SMS is getting into 162 characters. So I would go back and adopt the ‘u’ even if it means a minute more and a li’l more exercise for my fingers.

Scoorge McDuck would be so proud of me!

Alles Gut {All is Good}

In a new country where you get the chance to experience a different lifestyle and assimilate new ideas, I had so much to write about my short stay here. I even kept jotting things on & off, but could not shape them into something “postable”. Now that I am already returning, I thought it would be better to chronicle half-baked thoughts than lose them completely, so am posting one of the whatever state post I had started writing…

The past month in Germany has been quite a pleasant one and as has been apparent from the past few experiences I shared, I like the place & whatever it brought with it. However, a single puny incident is enough to make you long for home – that is the power of India.

Shops in Bonn close at 8:00 PM, and I don’t need to add “sharp” here. And to top it all, the whole market place is closed (save for some eateries) on Sundays as well as holidays. So for someone in IT, it might just mean, you never find a shop open except on a Saturday. Not that I can’t plan to leave office early, but there are days when you simply lose track of time or forget the fact that you have such deadlines to live with. Today was one such day…

Though I left office early, I was with some colleagues & spent some time gadding about before arriving at the station some 20 minutes before 8. The train was due in some 7 minutes; it would take 6 minutes to reach my destination station and 4 minutes more in walking to this superstore. Don’t be surprised… this is how your mind starts functioning when you spend some time in Germany – I’ve starting planning & calculating down to the very minute! I knew already, it was a losing battle, but decided to give it a shot by running to the store, laptop in tow, as soon as I got down from the train.

I was surely at the store before 8 PM, a couple of minutes to spare, and saw this lady ushering out another woman and her daughter out of the door. Of course, they had been able to shop as was evident from the shopping bags they carried. Off the track, but another inconvenience in shopping at these stores is you need to carry your own shopping bags or buy one from the counter! I have had to buy the bags on most instances, as I forget to carry them and the only time I acted money-wise, I regretted it all the way home while literally doing the balancing act.

Anyway, back to my story, I peeped in to see there were still some customers inside and tried to make my way inside. The store lady persistently kept closing the door indicating that I could not enter now.

I frowned.

I smiled.

And gently requested “Zwei Minuten, pleaseee!” {Two minutes, please}

The lady retaliated with a bigger smile and said “Nein.” {NO}, before pushing the door shut.

I was hurt & turned back home; it was no use trying further.

Funnily, my initial thought was if I had used “Bitte” {German for please} in place of its English counterpart, she would have relented. But then I knew this was wishful thinking, Germans are ruthless when it comes to time.

When all these days I have been all praise for the punctuality of transportation services & other things in general, I wonder what made me so bitter this time. There have been multiple instances when I have rushed to reach just in time for a bus/train and even missed it on a couple of occasions.

Maybe, sometimes, you miss the litheness back home – where everything can be twisted, turned and made-to-work when it wouldn’t have under “normal” circumstances.

Win-Win-Win-Win!

Picture this…

It’s a hot summer evening & you are travelling by bus – long distance travel, when you wished you had carried something to eat & drink for the long hours ahead. To your relief, the bus halts & you see the door open with a guy, carrying 3-4 bottles of “packaged drinking water” to sell, trying to get in. However, he & others of his brigade are forbidden to enter the bus by the conductor, who thinks this will delay departure of the bus (or maybe is it just his whim?). The guy fumes & leaves the bottles still in tow.

You see another hawker from the window but the bus’ window pane would not budge to open & before you can shout, he has left to sell his wares to the next bus. You curse the heat & as the bus drives on, you try and take a short nap. Just then an altercation between the bus conductor & a fellow passenger stirs you out of slumber. You realize the conductor does not have sufficient change (chillar) to hand back to the passenger buying the ticket & both are holding the other at fault for not carrying change. Just another day, you think & sigh…

Now, picture this same setting but the proceedings quite different this time…

The guy selling water bottles climbs the bus & palavers the conductor into something which culminates in this guy jingling out 1-2 Rupee coins totalling to 50 Rupees to the conductor who promptly hands over a Rs. 50 note back to him while allowing him passage into the bus to sell his wares. What a wonderful jugaad, I mused as I bought the water bottle from this guy. And yes, needless to say the conductor was only happy the dole out the change, from his now heavy-with-coins bag, to passengers.

Idealists would term it as a sort of bribery, however I would tend to see it as an interesting arrangement where all these 4 parties stood to gain… A classic case of ingenuity at work as a result of which multiple parties benefitted.