I am drawn to themes of crime, especially law and order and justice. Almost half of what I read is crime fiction. I like books and movies with police procedurals at least as much as suspense and detective fiction. I occasionally spend hours reading about true crime cases and investigations. I realized that I even prefer games with these themes (especially in a noir setting) far more than, say, war games.

The charm of the Police is easy to fall for. Whereas a soldier may be a national hero to one country and a national enemy to another, and therefore his or her roles and acts inherently ambiguous, a policeman on the other hand is a social character with clear goals. The Police face a problem that can be attempted to be controlled but not eliminated from a non-dystopian society. (I subscribe to the views I found resonant in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange.)

I like and think about these themes more than I intend to discuss about right here and right now. Instead I will get verbose about various ways in which the Police are difficult to like in the Indian society.

పొలీసాడు గడప తొక్కాడు. A policeman entered the house.

That is how my mom described the worst damage from a major fire accident in our house some months ago. It is a sentence that occasionally rings in my mind with deep sadness. I am not sure if my parents got some శాంతి done to counter that evil, though I won’t be surprised.

On 15^th August, 2011, when I and my dad were in a shop that made and fit frames, a policeman entered the shop. The setting was fraught with tension because on national holidays, according to some labor law, owners of all non-emergency enterprises should disallow workers from working. The shop owner knew it, and was conducting business with the shutters half pulled down. The policeman knew it, I guess because it’s a big day for him in terms of wages as well as catching law-breakers. But the policeman came with a portrait to get it framed. His opening remarks were about some senior policeman who never pays for anything, and how he himself was not like that and thus deserved a decent discount. The shop owner spoke his mind, including not so subtle hints that the Police are always fleecing small businessmen even on Independence Day, and the policeman got more aggressive and started cursing.

There are a few other memories as an adult. Like when a friend’s house was burgled (twice), the investigating policeman suggested that an FIR would be useless because burglaries get little priority compared to cases involving violence. Of course, cases without FIRs get no priority. Or like when the investigating policeman of a murder case I was acquainted with gave a press statement in which he said that the victim was a vegetarian and the accused/suspect was a non-vegetarian. That apparently was a crucial psychological profiling in the case. Or like when a policeman once visited me in a hospital to take an FIR about the accident where no second party was involved, and collect some mandatory payment, without a receipt, of course. Every time I got pulled over by a traffic cop – at least 4 times – my only instinct was to pay the fine and flee as quickly as possible, trying not to look him in the eye. It was as if even their presence could reduce my lifespan, apart from the ignominy of standing a few feet away from them.

It is a norm for the Police to charge some fees during verification as part of a passport application, just like the postmen do. In college days, most moms used to warn us never to go to the police station all alone for this verification and to never haggle with them (unlike while buying vegetables and groceries). I know many people who consider visiting a police station to be unfortunate and dangerous.

In one of the schools that I studied in, about half the students in my class were children of policemen. We were very young, so I never heard any police stories (except that one fellow’s father worked in some intelligence department), but there were stories about one father belting a child and another father kicking a child from behind and another father locking up a child in the bathroom. These were very few and spread over five years, but they still created an impression that police parents are in general stricter, almost cruel. Unlike doctors’ children becoming doctors, CAs’ children becoming CAs, everybody else becoming engineers, nobody became a policeman. Nobody does.

Probably my first memory about the Police was from when I was seven years old. I and my brother were sitting at the entrance of a jewelry shop while my parents were shopping inside. A police jeep stopped outside the shop, and from it a man and an old woman got down. The jeep went ahead to park somewhere on the roadside. The man, wearing a white shirt and khaki trousers, sat beside me while the woman went inside the shop. The man started small talk, with questions about our names, classes, and then my dad’s job (మీ నాయనేం చేస్తాడు?). My dad wasn’t a policeman. The man talked about how the Police are the most respected, pointing how even their mothers got attention from total strangers. Even at such a small age I could see that what he said was totally not right.

These are a sample from nearly twenty years of memories. But in all my life there isn’t a single instance where the Police could be seen in a positive light. If there was any, my mind successfully suppressed it. The only applicable adjectives are cheap, corrupt, cruel, fearsome. The Police are the boogeymen for children and adults alike.

Indian Police have a major image management issue. This is also true about politicians, bureaucrats, increasingly people in judiciary, and probably all public sector fields. But I think the contrast is clearer when the Police are considered. Such an image will create problems in their recruitment and day-to-day operations.

Back in my favorite school, Teachers’ Day had two specialties. One was that a few senior students took the roles of teachers by dressing like them, talking like them, and teaching their lessons in classes, while the teachers themselves took the day off from teaching and roamed around the school hanging out and having fun. The other was that students recited something about Teachers’ Day, which inevitably meant a banal biographic sketch of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. Not once was the significance of teachers itself brought up. It was possibly taken for granted.

After reaching college and especially since joining a job, I realized how rare it is to find a good teacher or mentor. It isn’t a terrible thing because adults are hoped to be capable of learning from everywhere without the need for dedicated teachers, but that doesn’t make up for their absence. That value particularly in school environments is reminded to me today by wonderful teachers like Kate Nowak and her friends who blog, and my own school teachers who are becoming more net-savvy.

But this is not about likeable teachers, beautiful teachers, good teachers, or popular teachers.

Once in 6^th standard and once in 7^th, two of my teachers came to know that I called them fat. Those remarks caused them pain and humiliation, though my rudeness was innocent and not malicious. Between 9^th standard and the second year of Intermediate I developed an indifference and even condescension for several of my teachers, feeling sure that their teaching methods were inferior to my previous teachers’ and even that I knew more and better than them. I was 18 the last time I made fun of a teacher. After many years I still remember those moments of madness. Most students laughed at the teacher among themselves, but I was the only wretched one who had the gall to make fun of him in a room full of students. He didn’t seem to notice. May be he did but ignored it. I am thankful either way.

I am thankful for all those teachers that I didn’t like, or respect even when I didn’t dislike them. I continue to have my differences about various incidents, test scores, teaching methods, and continue to reminisce about how students make fun of teachers, but I call truce. To walk into classrooms filled with unusually curious and conniving kids day after day, to attempt to take control of them, to care for them, and to teach them so that one day they might reach higher than themselves is noble, courageous and altruistic. Given their own ordinariness and the students’ diverse backgrounds and behaviors they must have strived to be impartial, to rise above their own prejudices, to wish everybody’s greatest possible success, and to work for that possibility.

There are many people who continue to function even when they hate their jobs. But given the thanklessness and low wages, I wonder whether teaching is one of the few professions which its practitioners have to like, in its various dimensions.

Since the day I decided to write, now is the longest period when I think the least about writing. Today I neither dream of becoming a full-time writer, nor write as much as I used to. Friends are always considerate to not point out that I may have gotten over her it. They ask. What are you writing these days? Why aren’t you writing much these days? Well, if that is what you want. If that makes you happy.

I started blogging nearly seven years ago. Back then and for a long time after, all writing was a form of unwinding. My catharsis was the reader’s ennui. For a while I wrote regularly and walked coolly in a sense of underachievement, certainty of knowledge (or ignorance), precocious wisdom and occasional anger, like a misunderstood rock star. I got interested in fiction because I thought I could — or wanted to — write as well as the writers I read. I thought I knew the whats, hows, whys. I was taking courses. Certainty was another keyword. A little later I stumbled upon professional tech-blogging (neither professional nor tech), writing regularly and earning on the side. It started with a sense of discipline, ended with a sense of monotony, and occasionally haunts me with a guilt of content farming. Somewhere in between, I wrote to my mentor that if I quit the day job (which I actually enjoyed) I will have more reasons (like starvation, I suppose) to force myself to write, and I discussed options and other trivial things with close family and friends. I am glad I wasn’t ready to star in love stories with great class differences and glorious endings.

I didn’t ask until much later: to be a writer or to write? I can’t always tell when I am lying to myself. Still I thought I’ll just write. Mail, blog, review, criticize, critique. I continued being verbose in mails and their replies, blogged this and that less and less, and passionately wrote scathing reviews when I didn’t like what I read or watched.

I got picky with the books I read and the movies I watch. I got lucky and stumbled upon blogs by activists, artists, critics, economists, linguists, mathematicians, mavericks, moms, poets, satirists, sociologists, sysadmins, teachers, and writers. They all collectively mellowed me down and filled my mind with questions, uncertainty and ambiquity. Whereas earlier the question was the choice of point of view, fiction being the only way and first person being the pen’s pet, now the questions multiplied and zoomed out. Short fiction or long? Fiction or nonfiction? Writing or other art forms? Why and how?

No longer is it a mission to publish, I told myself. If you want to write, write. Write without the fear of coherence or completion, rhyme or rules, sense or sensitivity. Let the mind look under the bed and above the attic and that damp dark smelly corner that you were afraid to probe because you didn’t want to get caught. I guarantee you a place where the mind is without fear, if you promise to not ask what happens to what you write.

I sold it. I bought it. That is not to say I wrote much after that, or at all. May be a paragraph here, a broken sentence there, and one or two other things whose future I don’t know. When I knew that what I write might not necessarily be publicly posted, my reasons to write changed. A desire to say something now has a higher mortality rate, a craving more often remains private. There is a difference between expressing an opinion (me too) and that opinion meriting publishing and publicity. The biggest contribution has been an embargo on empty and snarky reviews.

Sometime ago, on BBC or was it NPR, I listened to a wonderful panel discussion on the role and the art of criticism. It singularly influenced on what I think of this subject, and to an extent all writing. As incredibly fun and surprisingly satisfying bashing something for what I think is wrong can be, while also smudging the something with someone and the wrong with stupid, I am getting picky there as well. On the occasional instances when I let myself to freely unleash such wrath, the mission as I said is not to publish. They may be left as drafts or private posts. I don’t question that decision.

Last week I deleted a story for the first time. A friend asked why anybody would do such a thing instead of, say, striking it, zipping it, anonymizing it, and leaving it in a hidden folder. He has a point. The reason why I don’t go back to some of my old posts and delete them or at least mutilate them is because they are a reminder of my thoughts and beliefs, however militantly opposed I may be to those today. But this time I judged the story as uninteresting as well as worthless, and the act of cruelty felt liberating, though not on the scale that Mother India may have felt when she killed Bad Birju. My stand on posthumous works remains unaltered.

P.S. My first short story was published six years ago.

Visiting a beach doesn’t feature on my fun-to-do list. I can’t stand it; the noisy crowds shouting over the roaring boat engines, the thick smell of marine life that I could never taste, the sticky atmosphere and the sand that falls off on reaching indoors. But I’ve had my share of experiences on sea shores.

During my college days I once watched the sun rise above the thick curtain of sea at the Besant Nagar beach. I can’t now remember the colors and shapes, though there were many, that came into being along the end where the sun and the sea merged. I can’t remember the sounds of the calm sea and the birds swimming across the sky. I can’t remember anything specific about that morning, except that it felt inexplicably humbling. By nature I stay as far from nature as artificial food flavors in densely populated smoggy cities can take me, and I seldom feel humble.

Four years ago I visited a few beaches in Goa, and stayed for a few days within walking distance of a private beach. I clicked a hundred photos of specimens of the flora and fauna surviving close to the sea, paying little attention to what they looked like. I was so deeply engrossed in finding new things, what seemed to my inexperienced eyes as new, that I was in that state of bliss that one finds in when lost in something that has no known personal significance and is done for no specific reason. Never again have I tried to look at those photos, let alone find out what they represented. I am devoid of such curiosity.

Six months ago I walked along the shore a little away from my group singing on top of my lungs, escaping the waves reaching my feet, and occasionally staring distastefully at the crowds. As the crowds fell out of our sight the concept of privacy leapt to the forefront of my mind. I had been unhappy with man’s increasing craving for privacy as well as security, and suddenly wondered how it applies to the sea. Man has interminally plundered the mighty vast sea, constantly threatening its sense of security and balance if it could be attributed any. And where could the sea ever feel a sense of privacy, with every square inch of coastal land colonized by civilization? The thought itself is nonsensical. At that time I also asked myself why the waves never stop, a doubt that I had never truly considered. Thankfully it didn’t seem more difficult than understanding the ripples and splashes in a busy swimming pool. Sometimes pools spill over the surrounding platforms with a helpless vengeance.

A week ago I visited the sea again. Once during the wee hours. There were few lights flickering afar, and no other human in sight. The restless sea shone in the moonlight, and its whispers were audible at last. First it was the color that caught my attention, an ominous silver that conjured in my mind a phantasmagoria of heinous crimes and natural disasters. As we walked closer I noticed that the sea was receding. This is a phenomenon that I had not paid attention to in school, and as my companions explained it the sea held my breath the way the moon held the sea’s. I remembered the notices that I had read in college mentioning some students visiting the beach by the night and never returning, unlike the sea. I was aware of the damp sand we walked on all over the land that had been impulsively abandoned. I couldn’t smell anything; no complaint. The sea was chaotically noisy, frothing around the corners of its mouth, and no doubt imagining the moon giggling. We didn’t walk as far as the edge, but I never took my eyes off, well aware of my heightened pulse. As I stared into it, I think I pitied the mighty vast sea for its violently devoted frivolity, that it could become so enslaved by a distant little circle for a few hours every day. I wish I had petted it and consoled it, and may be even tried to impart some wisdom. I thought I knew what the sea was going through.

This year’s Google Zeitgeist carried its own surprises like it does every year. I digged a little deeper and found that Google Trends paints a very different picture of 2010. I could see the differences in the global page itself, but here I focus on India.

The “fastest rising” are debatable because they are not well-defined, but if “most popular” is more or less proportional to the volume of searches then I’m very suspicious. I am not sure what Google means when it says, “Our Year-End Zeitgeist is just a small sampling of the queries and search trends that we found interesting this year.” It will be interesting to know why Google found something interesting and something else not interesting.

In the below four tables, note that the Google Trends rankings I gave are mostly true to their order, but not universally accurate given my unscientific approach (random queries and sizing up as against Google’s access to its databases). I will let the data do the rest of the talking.

Most popular

Next 10: mobile, movies, yahoomail, gmail, yahoo, nokia, software, news, cricket, porn

Most popular movies

Next 10: rajneeti, dabangg

Most popular brands

Next 10: reliance, wikipedia, microsoft, vodafone, dell, honda, twitter, lg, maruti, micromax

Most popular how to

Rank	Google Zeitgeist 2010	Google Trends
1	get pregnant	download
2	kiss	change
3	impress (a girl)	get pregnant
4	improve spoken english	hack
5	reduce weight	learn
6	gain weight	love
7	tie a tie	copy
8	create a website	impress
9	make money	kiss
10	meditate	print

Next 10: win, buy, reduce weight, earn, lose weight, prevent, clean, make love, maintain, dance