Songs I’ve been listening to on repeat in the past few months (in no particular order)…

1. Icarus by Bastille: From their Flaws single-album release, Icarus is an upbeat, peppy song that contrasts with what the lyrics are about which gives it this weird quality. Sadly their Laura Palmer EP isn’t as good.
   
2. Where Is My Mind by Yoav ft Emily Browning: From the movie OST for Sucker Punch.
   
3. Pete Yorn & Scarlett Johansson: Did you know Scarlett Johansson sings??? In a collaboration album titled Break Up with Pete Yorn, Scarlet Johansson provides backing vocals is pretty good at it. A live performance of Blackie’s Dead seems to show Johansson so uncomfortable with the whole gig business. :D Look at her hands and the way she acts on stage – “I have arms??? And legs??? Well…what am I supposed to do with them???”
   
4. 19-2000 (Soulchild remix) by Gorillaz: Tenth year anniversary of the Gorillaz! If you aren’t a fan of this band yet, this remix should get you hooked! (My other recommendation is Clint Eastwood.)
   
5. deadmau5: The Mickey Mouse hat wearing DJ has been around for a while, 2011 has been a breakout year him. Love the album 4×4=12. Check out Bad Selection. Bonus – this promo gig deadmau5 did for Nokia Lumia’s launch.
   
6. Shuffle by Bombay Bicycle Club: I love the human bicycle they form in this music video!
   
7. Heart Skips A Beat by Olly Murs ft Rizzle Kicks: I am slightly ashamed to admit liking this one. :|
   
8. Mutemath: Normally I prefer studio albums to live recordings. I make an exception for Typical…
   
9. …and Linkin Park‘s performance of New Divide at Moscow’s Red Square. You seriously have NO IDEA how many times I have replayed this video! In fact, the whole Red Square LP gig was EPIC! Watch every single video of it – fancam or ripped from TV telecast – that you can find on YouTube.
   
10. What The Water Gave Me by Florence + The Machine: Florence Welch has such an ethereal voice and her band has been among my favourites for a while now.
    
11. Real Steel soundtrack: Three songs from the film Real Steel have been stuck with me: Make Some Noise (Put ‘Em Up) by The Crystal Method ft Yelawolf; Here’s A Little Something For Ya by Beastie Boys; Give It A Go by Timbaland ft Veronica. PS – I fucking loved the film! PPS – Also check out Yelawolf.
12. Ingrid Michaelson: Listen to her album Be OK. Also, eponymous song.
    
13. AWOLNATION: I have a feeling AWOLNATION is going to blow big within the next couple of years. Very hit-or-miss at the moment. For some reason their single Sail is particularly popular even though I don’t find it appealing; the same goes for their 2011 album Megalithic Symphonies. What I do less-than-three is this one single MF. Fucken. Love. It. This is one song I pump up to full volume, hearing damage be damned!
    
14. Bill Withers: Bill Withers Live at Carnegie Hall is the kind of album gapless MP3 playback was invented for. If I had to take a pick, I’d chose Grandma’s Hands or I Can’t Write Left-Handed. A classic. Fine, it was recorded in 1973, “jazz is not cool”, the guy gives a political lecture at the start of the song…just give it a go, please?
    
15. Entire Sinners Never Sleep album by You Me At Six.
16. The Vaccines: Their first album titled What Did You Expect From The Vaccines? released in 2011. It’s kinda astonishing how quickly they shot to popularity in such a short span of time. Check out Wetsuit and Post Break-Up Sex. (Bonus – At one point in the Wetsuit music video below, you can see “Maurice” / Richard Ayoyade from The IT Crowd crowd-surfing at a concert!)
    
17. Can’t Find My Way Home by Blind Faith: I first heard a 2010 remaster of this song on the TV show Fresh Meat. Sadly, Blind Faith’s other songs are not worth listening as it was a Jesus-music band. (Psst – Eric Clapton was in it.) Disturbing album art cover, too.
    
18. Second To None by Styles of Beyond ft Mike Shinoda: Pump your volume waaaaay up!
    
19. Safari Disco Club by Yelle: Overcomes my hate of French-speaking people. You’ll notice the final scene is a clever way of showing where the album cover comes from.
    
20. The xx: Another hot new indie band. This may be a clichéd choice but if I had to choose one I’d go for Crystalised. Whole album, yada yada.
    
21. The Dharohar Project: A collaboration between Laura Marling, Mumford & Sons, and traditional Rajasthani musicians. The first two themselves are themselves on my favourites list, but with this fusion music album – even though just a couple a songs – is heavenly! Try out Mehendi Rachi.
    
22. Way Away by Yellowcard
    
23. Autotunage by Limp Bizkit: Yeah, yeah, I know everyone knows Limp Bizkit. Just shut the fuck up and go listen to their 2011 album Gold Cobra if you haven’t already. The standout song is Autotunage, which you cannot fully appreciate without listening to the prologue in the preceding song Loser. Other favourites from the album: Douche Bag, Gold Cobra…
    
24. This Is The Life by Two Door Cinema Club: Album Tourist History is somewhat hit/miss.
    
25. Little Bad Girl by David Guetta ft Taio Cruz & Ludacris: True story – I used to think the ‘little bad girl‘ referred to in the song is Taio Cruz. :s
    
26. Charlene Soraia‘s cover of Wherever You Will Go by The Calling.
    
27. LA Mer by Nine Inch Nails: Hey, Linkin Park and Nine Inch Nails – two artists you can always expect to find on my repeat lists. :D
    

Heard anything particularly interesting recently? Hit me up in the comments section.

I’m an Indian passport holder resident in the UK, so it is possible what I write below is specific to how the embassy here handles procedures or even my specific case. Don’t consider this binding legal advice. Do your own due diligence before applying for a visa; rules change all the time and by the time you come across this, the information below may be out of date.

Does Morocco offer visa-free entry / visa-on-arrival?

A select list of nationalities do not require to get a visa in advance. Morocco does not offer visa-on-arrival for any nationality, that I know of.

What are the requirements for a Morocco visa, according to online sources?

The Embassy of Morocco in UK lists the following requirements for filing for a tourist visa:

• Application form in three pages (downloading)
• Your original valid passport + copy of the first page with photo+ Copy of your legal status in the UK
• 02 recent passport size colour photos.
• Original passport along with copies of the main pages of details and the page of the right of abode in the UK
• Copy of your detailed provisional flight itinerary.
• Employment certificate from your employer in the UK.
• For students, copy of a recent letter confirming that the applicant is attending the school.
• For business owners, copy of the last Income Tax as substitute of the employment letter,
• A recommendation letter from your business partner in Morocco for business visa.
• Hotel provisional reservation or notarized Letter of Invitation from your sponsor in Morocco.
• For applicants married to Moroccan citizens, a copy of the marriage certificate plus a copy of the Moroccan passport or national ID of the Moroccan spouse can be a substitute for the invitation letter or for the hotel reservation.
• Proof of travel insurance covering at least the period of trip to Morocco.
• last three months pay slips or salary attestation (ORIGINALS AND COPIES )
• last three months bank statements (ORIGINALS AND COPIES )
• Copies of marriage certficate and spouse s pasport .

VisaGuru mentions a slightly different set of requirements:

• Passport (Valid 6 Months on entry)
• UK residency (Must have been resident in UK for the minimum of 1 year)
• 3 application forms
• 4 passport photos
• Original employer or school/college letter
• Copy or Original airline tickets
• Copy or Original hotel confirmation (Hotel confirmation must show paid in full.)
• Copy or Original itinerary
• Copy or Original Travel Insurance
• Copy of the information pages of passport incl. UK residency.
• Application Fee

What is your personal experience applying for a tourist visa for Morocco?

What bothered me most was conflicting advice on what supporting evidence was needed for accommodation. Visa HQ said a confirmation was required directly from the hotel, which brings up the question – am I allowed to book via third-party travel booking sites? Does it have to be a ‘hotel’ or will a hostel suffice? VisaGuru (see above) also said it should show hotel booking paid for in full. On the other hand, the Moroccan embassy website mentioned ‘provisional’ confirmation without any clarification on what this ‘provisional’ meant!

Contacting the Moroccan embassy in UK was no help as I tried calling them up over a period of a week and yet never once did they answer my call. I ultimately applied for my visa through a visa processing company called CIBT (which has offices in many countries around the world) since they seemed trustworthy. There wasn’t a lot of information forthcoming from ‘official’ sources so I only provided the following documentation, as advised by CIBT:

• Proof of UK residency: My UK visa.
• Proof of employment: I am currently on an internship with a UK-based company, but I’m also a registered full-time university student as this internship is part of my degree. I could have asked at either place for this proof (students can substitute ‘proof of employment’ with proof of academic status); I went with my workplace since that would be faster to procure. This is simply a letter on company letterhead according to a template you can download off CIBT’s site.
• Proof of financial means: Past two bank statements. I had to request paper copies from NatWest specifically since I’ve turned off paper statements. Leave time to obtain this as postal mail can take 4-5 days to deliver.
• Proof of travel arrangements: Copy of my flight ticket and hostel booking. CIBT advised that booking through a third-party site rather than directly with a hotel was fine, staying at a hostel was fine, and a booking which only showed a downpayment was also fine.
• Proof of travel insurance: I went for the cheapest travel insurance policy I could find online with the least amount of frills for cheap cost; I went for one from Columbus Direct.

I sent these documents with required photos, photocopies, visa form and passport by recorded mail to CIBT and they got in touch with me for updated bank statements printed off online banking, which I sent to them by email. My visa was processed in three weeks by Morocco embassy (perhaps due to high processing times was close to Christmas) and I got it back by recorded mail via CIBT, just three days before my flight. (I heard the same received-just-in-time story from a South African couple I met in Morocco.)

In all, not a particularly cheap visa to get factoring CIBT’s fees – almost half the prices of my return flights! Still, I’m glad I let them handle it as otherwise I would’ve had to take days off from work to submit / collect my application.

To any future traveller: bon voyage!

http://www.visaguru.co.uk/182/223/India/Morocco/visa-requirements.htm

Not a single story I have read on this topic so far has pointed out that this so-called ‘messenger app’ is a skinned version of Chromium browser that does nothing more than load the same chat window you would find on Facebook’s desktop site. This should be obvious from the installer (same as Chromium) and processes the application spawns (similar …Updater.exe etc processes). There’s crap, crap, and more crap like:

The application was developed entirely by Facebook and does not constitute a new partnership with Microsoft, which is a big investor in Facebook. It’s not clear if Facebook will offer support for anything before Windows 7, or if it will simply move on towards Windows 8. Clients for Mac and Linux will likely only be released if the Windows 7 version proves popular.

If Google Chrome can be installed on Windows XP, I’m willing to bet this messenger app can be too. Man does sloppy ‘reporting’ sicken me. New York Times can be annoying in their formal and pretentious tone of referring to people as ‘Mr Zuckerberg’ and the like, but at least they bother to research up their articles before publishing rather than any bullshit that comes into the writer’s head.

***

Oh I do love the Facebook Messenger mobile app, by the way. Such an incredibly easy way to send real-time text messages without even having a contact’s phone number. The beauty is doesn’t have the urgency of SMS / WhatsApp and allows you to reply at your own pace – immediately, if online or sent as push message to mobile; at leisure, if offline or it’s a long message.

That’s so odd, isn’t it? Functionally, they are apps which are accomplishing the same thing – delivering messages in real-time – yet they have their own ‘pace’. With a smartphone, you could technically have a back-and-forth conversation using email too (if you use Gmail, it will keep the conversation threaded) but nobody in their right mind would ever use email for a chat conversation. Think about when you chat on Gmail – it actually is saved as an email conversation. There’s an implied sense of urgency when you talk to someone using an instant messenger. In this particular case, I think this happens because neither email nor Facebook Messenger give any indication of whether a message was successfully delivered to a recipient and whether it was read. WhatsApp (similarly, BlackBerry Messenger) show delivery reports as well as time of last login, thus creating implications of messages being ‘ignored’ if they are not replied to within a timeframe considered ‘reasonable’.

I wonder whether any human-computer interaction or psychological research has been done into such phenomenon, of usage patterns for means of communication depending on how they are marketed.

Christmas Eve was a lonely one for me. My housemates had all gone back home earlier in the week to be with their families. Most friends I know from university were doing the same. Yet, here I was, still having to clock in at work through a week when others I knew didn’t have to. I somehow braved through that feeling of isolation on Friday by going out for Japanese food and cinema – alone, but still kept me occupied. By Saturday, my isolation felt complete. All I had to look forward to was eating a microwave dinner, alone, at home. Fine, I usually eat microwave dinners anyway simply because of their convenience after coming back from work but doing the same on Christmas hurt. I had a meltdown. Or at least I was on the verge of tears. I don’t remember, it’s all a daze. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. All I wanted was to be with people I know and care for. I wanted Maggi noodles. Made by mom.

How did I end up in this situation? I keep coming back to this theme time and again – always wondering how different things would be only if I made different choices. Ah…do you see what’s happening here folks? It’s time for the annual “tiny tendrils of guilt” post already! Yayface! Last year, I spent that wondering how different things would be if I hadn’t chosen to go to Singapore. Whether I should have valued some friendships and relationships more than I did. And yet…and yet…if I hadn’t made the choices I did then I wouldn’t have gained from my time in Singapore! Doors close. Doors open. Doors stay slightly-ajar.

DO YOU HAVE ANY FUCKING IDEA HOW MUCH PAIN THIS CONFLICT CAUSES??? FUCK!!!! DON’T YOU FUCKING DARE SAY THE WORDS ‘DESTINY’ OR ‘FATE’ TO ME!!!

In that daze on Christmas Eve, I looked up flights back to Delhi on Kayak. £600. I’m not hurting for cash this year thanks to my internship and as I fell asleep cold, crying, and hungry (I refused to eat a microwave meal – for the first time – on principle), I vowed to give a serious thought to booking to changing the destination I was flying out to in the morning. You don’t always need a fat Caucasian breaking-and-entering to make a wish come true, I told myself. Sometimes, a NatWest Visa card is enough.

And I did. Surprisingly, for some reason, return flights to Delhi leaving on 26th December were cheaper than if I had bought them weeks in advance! I could even use frequent flier points to push down the price even further. I actually started making a booking right down to the payment page. Here I was, about to make a clear choice for one instead of the other. A choice to meet with friends and family I haven’t seen for months, years, eons.

I stopped. I’d spent about £250 on my flights and visa for Morocco already. More than that, I went through much hassle to get my visa. Indian passport holders have to go through a lot of shit to get visas issued; I think it’s because of bad karma since getting a visa for India is hard for foreign travellers, Sidin thinks it’s because “our soft power shit is not working“. Whatever. I had to provide a dozen documents to the visa, and even then the visa agency I used for convenience (CIBT, lovely people they are – no seriously, I recommend them!) considered mine would be a touch-and-go case.

I felt the Moroccan visa sticker with my fingertips. The grain of paper used for visa stickers differs so much – without being able to lift them off, you can almost gauge the weight of the paper used for each one. Smooth. Matte. Rough. Hologrammed. Watermarked. Signed-upon with a biro. Stamped with UV-reflective ink. Each country’s visa talks, in its own language.

On the other hand… Doors close. Doors open. Doors stay slightly-ajar.

Screw it, let’s do it!

Now if it weren’t for the rest of the blog post that follows – and yeah, the title, perhaps – you’d be left wondering. That line above could swing both ways.

***

It’s hard to describe that feeling I get when I land in a new country. It begins with a ritual – The Ritual of packing a backpack that metaphorically contains your whole life. The Ritual is invigorating because it gives you the potential for catharsis. You don’t need to return. You can walk away from it all if you are so inclined, now that you have all you need with you. In that moment you feel naive and empowered enough to flip life itself a middle finger. The Feeling builds when the insides of your stomach jolt from you journey beginning – the kick of a bus engine sparking to life, the recoil of a train starting to move, the landing gear of an airplane losing contact with the ground.  You reach your destination.

The Feeling hits you. It’s a pure endorphin rush of your body and mind agreeing this is the place and this is the moment that I want to be in right now. The closest thing I can relate that endorphin rush would be the rush you get after sex.

***

The Feeling wasn’t thing the only thing that hit me when I walked out at noon from Menara International Airport, Marrakech. Flying in from London Gatwick, walk out of the airport’s airconditioned environment felt like walking into a wall of heat. Marrakech is warm and toasty for this time of the year and I’m glad for it.

Marrakech stands at the crossroads of many cultures. It’s in Africa, and yet you won’t find black people. It’s not in the Middle East, and yet there are distinct touches of Arab culture in the city’s architecture and lifestyle. What may surprise you the most, however, is how strong an influence this country having been a French colony has. My goodness there are French cafes, French bakeries, French restaurants, French signs everywhere! For the next few days, calorie count = fucked is a safe prediction I’m making.

My dormmates in the hostel I’m staying in are German, Belgian, English, Spaniard, and Romanian – and yet they all speak French! To be honest, I’m kinda getting pissed off at being excluded from their conversations. I hate it when French-speaking people go all “Oui oui oui!“ Tres jolie my ass, start speaking in English already – it won the lingua franca war hands-down. Then again, the irony of lack of lingua franca isn’t lost on me.

One thing I learnt today: around these parts, people don’t take kindly to people who walk into a pitch-dark dorm room at 4am, accidentally walk to the wrong bed, and drop a netbook on their face.

I spent most of my day sleeping today. From the little time I had walking outside in the streets of Marrakech, there’s no point talking about it yet. Exciting few days up ahead. So until then, salaam walekum to everyone from Marrakech!

Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?

A cheap digital camera. “It’s not the camera, it’s the photographer“. All you need to capture memories is a gadget that can record images, the artistic value – if you’re so inclined to be concerned about – doesn’t matter whether you have a DSLR or a point-and-shoot. Get over yourself, unless you’re a professional or amateur-pro photographer a DSLR is going to be worth jackshit and you’ll only be adding bulk to what you have to carry – not to mention a lucrative target for theft. (One of the best photographers I know among my friends takes stunning pictures with a ‘crappy’ Nokia E72, I always wonder how she gets the composition right!) Get one which works with standard AA batteries and you’ll thank yourself for not always having to carry a proprietary charger around. Buy a multi-pack of Duracell / Energizer batteries.

A smartphone. Doesn’t matter whether it’s an Android, an iPhone, a Windows Phone, or a BlackBerry. You can load up / access maps offline, which is a heaven-send. (For Android users, there’s the ever-reliable MapDroyd.) If you use Foursquare it also helps you track places you have visited for posterity. Always buy an extra battery and carry it around, you never know when you get to a charging point next. A smartphone with a decent camera helps you capture moments when it’s too hard to quickly reach for a camera…for capturing those elusive ‘spontaneous moments’. That said, enjoy the moment – don’t lose yourself staring into a black mirror. Another advantage of smartphones is that your contact list can be synced and backed up – perfect for guaranteeing of peace-of-mind in case you happen to lose or break it that your vital contact information is still there.

An iPod Nano (or any music player). You’ll inevitably face downtime and music players typically have better battery life; you don’t have to worry about your cellphone running out of power.

Chargers for all devices. You’ll be surprised how much space these take up or how harrowing it can be to try replace one if you forget to pack it. Also pack a universal power plug adapter – these can be surprisingly hard to find in a new city!

A portable hard disk. Together with your netbook and your documents backed up to the cloud, this can store a lot of your memories, a lot of information about your life – bank accounts, important documents…everything can live online in some form these days.

A change of clothes. If it’s summer, pack a couple of t-shirts and pair of knee-length cargos. If it’s winter, pack a jumper, a hoody, and a spare pair of jeans. Pack them by rolling them up – they take up less space, remain relatively wrinkle-free, and you don’t need to stuff them in plastic bags; you’ll thank yourself for the space you save. Throw in spare underwear and socks. You don’t need any more clothes than that, period. Clothes can always be laundered or cheap ones bought for throw-away use.

A large towel. You can joke about it but a towel is actually one of the most useful things you can keep.

Invest in a decent windproof / rainproof jacket, regardless of where you’re going. A jacket can protect you if it gets slightly chilly especially due to wind chill (which many people forget about if simply looking at average temperatures), and it also protects you in case of rain. Nothing too expensive, mind. While some people prefer Gore-Tex products, I’m personally partial towards Nike Activewear sports training jackets. These are slightly cheaper and have a mesh inner lining that don’t make you feel stuffy, have multiple layers which helps trapping air to combat cold, and a good outer waterproof layer that keeps out the rain. Unless you’re going to a really cold place – think snowy conditions - do not buy a jacket with a cloth outer layer as you’ll be miserable if it gets wet. (If it is a snowy or really cold place go for The North Face gear and pair them up with fleece gloves / caps; fleece is warmer yet lighter than wool. Note that in Asia you get way too many fake North Face merchandise – if the deal is too good to believe, it’s probably a fake!)

Spare plastic bags. If any of your clothes get wet or it’s raining heavily, you need this to isolate your gadgets / your ‘good’ clothes.

Medicines. Band-Aid, aspirin, paracetamol, your favourite cure for indigestion. (I swear by Pudin Hara; it’s one item I buy in bulk whenever I’m in India because you don’t find it anywhere else.) Whatever floats your boat but I emphasise the need to carry something for indigestion; you never know what new foods you try out can do to your stomach! No need to carry a full first-aid kit or too many of these, one strip of each will do. Chances are you won’t need them so no point adding bulk, and if you ever end up in a situation where you need medicines you’ll probably need proper medical assistance anyway where such supplies will be available.

A journal. To record it all in.

Passport, wallet, a couple of credit / debit cards, and minimal amount of cash. Don’t buy local currency of the place you’re travelling to in your own / foreign country; you’ll almost always get a better deal on exchange rates in the local country.

And lastly, a good backpack. When people think of backpacking, they think of massive 20-30 litre backpacks – which unless you are planning to travel for many months and that too by land transport is an incredibly stupid decision. If you’re flying, large backpacks need to be checked-in thus adding to costs if you’re flying with a low-cost airline. Even otherwise, when travelling by bus or train, a large backpack will force you to compromise on your own space; believe me, sitting with a large backpack squished between your knees for hours on end in cramped buses / trains is the LAST thing you want. No, the best backpacks for backpacking are compact backpacks that meet airline cabin baggage guidelines (roughly 60 x 30 x 30 cm), are actually waterproof in each compartment (you won’t believe how many normal ‘college-use’ style backpacks aren’t waterpoof despite claiming to be so), have a padded compartment (for your precious gadgets), come with a waist strap (good for support and preventing drive-by bag snatching). Never get a sling bag as single-strap bags will bite into your shoulders and wear you down while you walk around.

That’s it. That is literally my entire packing inventory when I pack for a backpacking trip. If there’s ever a fire and I need to decide what I need to save, this is all I need. I can fit my life into a single compact backpack. Everything else is irrelevant: people lose sight of details adding snacks, toiletries, more clothes etc. You don’t need them – they can all be bought, and cheaply. “Everything else” that you could ever want in your life are the people around you who care and love you. Nothing. Else. Matters.

***

One a slightly larger scale, when I move places I have the same goal: everything I need must fit into a single large travel bag, one piece of airline checked-in luggage within weight limits (20 kg, as that’s the lower limit for checked-in baggage that will not run afoul of practically any airline in the world). This expands the list from the packing inventory above to include two suits and accompanying formal dress shirts and trousers, formal-wear shoes, a handful of more jeans, t-shirts, and hoodies…and maybe a couple of books. A bigger bag also allows me the luxury of stuffing in a folder of memorabilia – drawings, letters, and keepsakes from times gone by, although for me these are increasingly in digital form. I donate / recycle everything else I can and at worst simply throw them away.

It sounds simple yet it’s not. Fitting the sum total of everything you need to walk away with, limited to 20 kg, is hard and I don’t know of many people you can do it. Why not just take an extra piece of luggage? Why not take a slightly larger bag when backpacking and check it in, carry slightly more stuff? Because at the rates you pay for excess baggage, it’s almost always cheaper to buy what you need – even the more expensive clothing items in your wardrobe – brand new than paying the airline to take them with you. I practically end up refreshing my wardrobe every single year as every time I move, I simply get red of what cannot fit into One Single Bag start afresh. Start packing, include the more expensive items first, throw the rest away. Rinse and repeat. If you still can’t decide, throw away clothes that don’t fit you well any more.

This is all fundamentally simple arithmetic and yet I don’t get why people don’t do it. Last year in December, I flew to Chennai from Singapore with Tiger Airways, a low-cost airline which makes you pay an additional charge for one piece of checked-in luggage plus excess baggage rates (typically S$20 per kg) for any other piece of baggage additionally checked-in. Many of the passengers in queue at the airline counter were migrant South Indian labourers working in Singapore – hardly the demographic that can splurge out on anything beyond basic necessities as they need to send money back home to support their families. That’s why they were flying Tiger Airways in the first place! Yet, many of them paid excess baggage of S$100-300 (remember, this is just one-way; there were equally as many lugging back similar amount of luggage on my return flight to Singapore) – something they could certainly ill-afford to – to check in additional baggage. And I wondered – what on earth can be so irreplaceable that you cannot replace it for S$200-600! And this is just one anecdote – I’ve seen such cases every single time in airports around the world where people are willing to pay airlines what I consider insane amounts of money for what they are possibly carrying (clothes???).

Everything burns. All you need is People Who Care and One Single Bag.

***

What’s the point of this blog post? It’s not to boast. I mentioned my backpacking inventory because many who think of doing it have this idea of large rucksacks from popular culture and they think they must have one. You don’t, as I said, that’s for long-term backpacking. Even then, the concept of fitting everything in your life in one bag remains: long-term backpackers fit what I would consider my single (wheelie) travel suitcase/bag inventory (not the backpacking one) in one large rucksack.

I think not enough people do a cost-benefit analysis of taking excess baggage and I genuinely think if more people thought of the ‘crazy’ alternative of buying replacements instead, they would go for the latter. Travel is one of those things where there are so many things to keep track of that people tend to go for the path of least hassle – and this is precisely what airlines cash in on. And not just travel either: every year when university starts, I see fucking armies of fathers and siblings help new students carry belongings to their rooms and I wonder how much can one person possibly need? Need is whole different concept from want.

Give this some thought. You don’t need so many material possessions. When you really think of it, do you think you could fit everything you want to retain in one bag?

“Hello, everybody,” he announced, loud enough to be heard behind the company president’s door. “This is going to be my new job, and you are going to be my new friends.”
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…the transition program at Montclair High served as a kind of boot camp in community integration that might also be, for Justin, a last chance. Few such services are available after high school. And Justin was entitled to public education programs, by federal law, until only age 21.

Ms. Stanton-Paule had vowed to secure him a paid job before he left school — the best gauge, experts say, of whether a special needs student will maintain some autonomy later in life. She also hoped to help him forge the relationships, at work and beyond it, that form the basis of a full life.

But more prosaic lessons arose at every turn: when he should present money at the pizza place (not until after he ordered), how close to stand to the person using the weight machine he wanted at the gym (not so close), what to say when he saw a co-worker drinking a Coke (probably not “Coca-Cola is bad for your bones”).
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“There’s a prevailing philosophy that certain people can never function in the community,” Ms. Stanton-Paule told skeptics. “I just don’t think that’s true.”

I had tears in my eyes by the time I finished reading this article. It’s just so heartwarming to know that there are educators out there who go to such lengths, to have the courage and the will to fight against the system and give kids the support they deserve. Yet it’s also saddening that in the end it boils down to economics and a budding animator has had to give up his dream (for now).

Long story short, I like Yahoo! a lot. Or used to. For fuck’s sake, I used Yahoo! Search as my default search engine.

The company has been an underdog, now that you think of it, ever since Google launched Gmail back in 2004 – and who doesn’t like an underdog! I always considered what its problem was more of a marketing and image problem – a problem of making things ‘cool’ with geeks again – and perhaps working a bit more on technology. When I visited Yodel Anecdotal – the Yahoo! Corporate Blog – 2-3 years ago announcements used to be about something new or the other that Yahoo! was doing. It was a company that was trying.

The latest announcement on Yodel Anecdotal today is about how they plastered a FedEx ad on one of their sites.

Video interviews with Yahoo! employees nobody gives a fuck about (except for, bless her, the employee’s extended family).

Weekly search trends – which is nothing other than filler fluff for times when they have nothing to talk about.

Plastering Puss In The Boots movie ads on Yahoo! Movies.

Ben fucking Stiller’s face filling your Yahoo! home page.

Another one about a Barnes & Nobles Nook reader ad on Yahoo! Shine.

You know what that Barnes & Noble ad announcement reads? (I’m not making any of the following excerpt up.)

The “Close X” button is displayed prominently at the top right, which brings the user back to the normal browser view. The thin Nook banner remains along the top to compliment the 300 x 250 Nook window on the right. The wallpaper then fills in with Nooks displaying different book covers.

The “Close X” button is displayed prominently at the top right, which brings the user back to the normal browser view. Are you fucking kidding me??? Is this the most exciting thing Yahoo! can muster up – across all the projects its employees were working on that week – to announce on its corporate blog?!

If yes, then I’m very worried that Yahoo! has completely lost it. Yodel Anecdotal once was a hub of showcasing what the company was innovating on, and now it is just a loud sales brochure for display advertising on sites it owns. Either that, or a sales a brochure for a multi-billion dollar buyout from investment companies who couldn’t care less whether Yahoo! is a media company or a technology company as long as financial jugglery can show profits.

I can’t help but think that all the video profiles of all and sundry employees is merely a memo handed down by HR to keep morale up among its troops so that the decent ones don’t jump ship while Yahoo! finds itself a buyer.

It’s easy to blame recently-fired CEO Carol Bartz for the mess as she couldn’t help with providing a clear technical direction. (I do think she did a half-decent job of beefing up Yahoo!’s original content news teams globally, from personal experience I’ve heard from people working in Yahoo! News teams.) Yahoo!’s attitude run deeper, tracing its roots back to the co-founders themselves who told Google to fuck off as all Yahoo! cared about was display advertising (to paraphrase wildly).

Yahoo! bought Flickr and launched many new services either through acquisitions or in-house services. Yahoo! does seem to have a reputation of a company where acquired startups go to die – think blo.gs, MyBlogLog, Jumpcut, Zimbra… Almost all in-house experiments are mothballed now, acquired services sold or shut down, and there are murmurs that casual users have started backing away from Flickr. I haven’t heard of anything new Flickr has done in a long while – at least nothing good enough to be more important than a description of how rollover ads get closed with contact details for Yahoo!’s advertising team (who are WAITING FOR YOU RIGHT NOW IN CASE YOU WANT TO PLACE AN ORDER!!! HURRY OFFER VALID ONLY TILL STOCKS LAST!!!)

I’m being harsh. Off-late, Yodel Anecdotal has once again started including product updates albeit after a year of more or fluff, fluff, and more fluff. Yet even with the course correction things aren’t the same. Most interesting news is about content deals or existing products being launched in new markets.

To this day, I use Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! Mail has had an image problem among geeks ever since Gmail launched but even friends who don’t care about technology laugh these days at the notion of using a YMail address. (My saving grace is at least I have a ‘respectable’ lastname/firstname combo as my ID instead of embarrassing_name666 or something similar.) 4-5 years ago if you put Gmail and YMail’s side-by-side you could see how much richer the latter was. Tabbed UI, auto-embedding YouTube videos, image slideshows, (then later using OtherInbox, before Gmail had Priority Inbox) intelligent sorting of email – YMail got all of this long before Gmail did. When Gmail launched, it was minimalistic in features. It’s 2011 now and you know what, Gmail has gone miles and miles ahead while YMail has stagnated over the past few years.

My university and work email IDs cover all my university / work needs respectively, and Facebook (Twitter, WhatsApp, Skype…) cover everyone else I need to communicate with online. I send – maybe – 2-3 emails at most from my personal email account. Eventually I will move on from my current workplace and university, and then I will need to use a personal account – and I’m pretty sure I would use Gmail for that simply because it’s better now both on desktop and on mobile. (Yahoo! Mail for Android is fucking ugly.) The only reason why I stick with Yahoo! Mail is how much of a pain it would be to shift all my logins for other websites to my Gmail account, for now. And when a self-confessed fanboi for a company says the only reason he is sticking to their product is inertia, things are very wrong indeed.

I don’t know whether it is even possible for Yahoo! to get back in the game now. It is no longer the company I used to love as a user.

I’m not acting differently from many others when I say I read most news online these days. How do I discover the content I read? Mainly, through Twitter / Facebook shares, Reddit links, and blogs I follow. Yet, I’m starting to think this might be a fundamentally flawed model for news discovery. That Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist? Yeah. His 5000-word magnum opus carries as much weight in my Google Reader list as that funny picture of a cat speaking in misspelled English reblogged on Tumblr. I’m subject to whatever catches the fancy of masses. The range of people I follow ensures practically any article that ‘goes viral’ in topics I may be interested shows up in my timeline yet it feels like living in a bubble of opinions.

Every other full moon, I get fed up of this ‘more of the same’. I resolve to set aside half-an-hour daily to read all sections of an aggregator like Yahoo! News or a newspaper’s website (usually The Guardian or The New York Times, because I’m a liberal hipster like that). I could probably spend that much time daily anyway, can’t I? I could stop being at the mercy of what everyone else thinks is cool and discover things myself!

This love affair seldom lasts long. Say I start off with ‘Top Stories’ or ‘Most Popular’, I read an article about the latest iDevice from Apple. Cool. I click through to ‘Technology’. Same article again, but to be fair it is a technology-related news item so I let it slide. Click through to ‘Business’…and the same article is there again, just with a lower importance now because it’s only tangentially related. The more I try to scan through sections, the more I find an incestuous spiderweb of hyperlinked sameness. Hey, it’s great if you only read a select few sections knowing that you’ve lesser risk of missing out news that affects you but if you do read multiple sections, it’s easy to become bored quickly.

Last weekend, I was about to catch a train and wanted to keep myself occupied for the hour-long journey ahead of me, so I bought a real printed newspaper. I didn’t want to read articles on my phone as I was heading for a night out and I needed my battery to last. And thus it was on that train journey reading my copy of i by The Independent that I realised why I years ago I enjoyed reading newspapers I could hold in my hands. There is an editorial voice doing the heavy-lifting of deciding which news stories get importance, how many words to go with it, the adequate amount of text inserts to explain jargon. It is just so simple scan a physical printed page. Guess what? Stories aren’t repeated either! I can flip from Page 3 to Technology to Business without needed to read an the article that’s related to all them categories thrice. Fancy an article? You can just read it. Your eyes just glide along the page. No tapping. No pinch-to-zoom.

I know how I sound right now. What I’m trying to communicate is how much less hassle it was easily being able to read an article about rugby or a reality TV show fluff article if it caught my fancy when I skim-reading on paper, whereas on a website I may have never visit those sections. I don’t know about you, but paradoxically I find that when I visit news websites on consecutive days, I’m more likely to find the same articles on digging even slightly deeper than the highlighted articles. This is when a printed newspaper is consistently different each day! Whether this is a calculated move to position the latter as a ‘premium’ product or not, you would expect websites to be more volatile.

Yet, much like that baby in the video above playing with an iPad, I too felt annoyed. When I read something interesting, I found it frustrating that I couldn’t look up previous or related news stories. I wanted to poke my newspaper with a stick. Why didn’t it move? Why can’t I switch to a YouTube video of an adorable baby in the middle of reading a dispatch from Tripoli? Entertain me! ENTERTAIN ME!

In the digital world, everything is ‘content’. E-papers. Blogs. Webcomics. Pulitzer Prize-winning journal articles. Reddit. This ‘content’ is not to be analysed and digested, but to be ‘consumed’. You can make it look pretty by swapping out Google Reader with Pulse Reader or Flipboard but the user experience feels like a repetitive chore. Tap. Scroll scroll scroll. (Do you have any idea how many scrolls it takes to finish a respectable-length longform article?) Hit back button. Scroll scroll scroll.

Take Pulse Reader, the current gold standard for aggregation apps which in its iPad avatar was praised by Steve Jobs himself in a keynote presentation. Beautifully designed app. Seems great when you play with it for a while. Where it all breaks apart for me is that it expects me to add news sources, and then scan stories myself to see what interests me. If I add both Techcrunch and Ars Technica, or Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, I then have to weed out duplicate stories myself. This isn’t a shortcoming of just Pulse Reader as much as it is an Achilles heel for a majority of aggregation apps. The illusion of ‘beautiful aggregation’ also falls apart when every now and then Pulse’s parser messes up in correctly determining article bylines too.

News Republic adopts a different approach. This app lets you select topics you want to follow and displays relevant news stories. This approach takes care of the duplication issue…except News Republic only shows items from wire services such as Associated Press and PR Newswire. Not the cream-of-the-crop sources, so only good for a quick summary of trending news stories.

I quote these two apps as examples as they cover the two main aggregation models being pursued currently. What I really want is a Google News style mashup of the two: let me choose my favourite sources from a list, and then display the ‘best’ article for a particular news story from one of them. To be fair, Google News does this already…but without a thoroughly compelling user experience on mobile platforms beyond ‘a list of blue links’. Google News is the closest thing I’ve found to what I desire, except when its algorithm makes a boo-boo like filing ‘Passengers stuck on a plane for eight as Gatwick Airport’ under ‘Entertainment’. Amusing it may be for our robot overlords, but such glitches leave a sour taste in my mouth – wishing there was human editorial oversight, or a smarter algorithm. I wonder why no startup has taken a crack at this idea. Even if such an app does exist or is developed in the future, that still doesn’t solve the repetitive tap-scroll-back-rinse-repeat user experience most content apps tend to have.

I’m starting to see measurable benefits in going back to reading news on cut-down trees. There’s a small hiccup though: subscribing to a newspaper, compared to the free lunch of web content that I’ve become habituated to, seems prohibitively expensive! A yearly subscription of The Guardian will cost me 372 per year…

…or, The Independent will cost me upwards of £600 a year!

That’s almost as much I would budget to visit 2-3 countries (which is the only metric I resort to off late as a benchmark for expensive purchases). I’m not surprised because good content does cost money to produce. You still have to concede this seems expensive! I wonder whether showing ads for Samsung Galaxy Tab or something else equally banal on The Guardian‘s Android app earns them as much money as subscriptions.

I’d love to meet midway – perhaps with a weekly magazine subscription which often costs not more than £100 a year…except that there are practically no weeklies in the UK. Unlike in the US, where there are so many choices like Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Slate, et al. The only (half-hearted) attempt is Guardian Weekly, which doesn’t appeal to me as due to its lifestyle-focussed content. I would take well-written, analytical long form articles (Longreads.org is currently one of my top news sources) any day over linkbait crap that the news industry loves so much these days. Please, I don’t want to read Huffington Post rehashes typed out by monkeys on thousands of keyboards around the world.

I am going to try an experiment starting this week: to pick up a newspaper each day and see if I can fit daily reading into my schedule. What do you folks feel? Do you find yourself equally out of touch with current happenings, or your reading habits altered by a never-ending stream of (free) web content?

***

When I was a kid, Hindustan Times used to have a weekly supplement called HT Next. It used to be all of four pages and pure awesome. I still remember how one of its very first editions carried a review of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone long before the series became cool. It used to have exclusive sneak peaks on upcoming shows on Cartoon Network’s ‘Toonami’ (back when it was good). The last page was dedicated to an eclectic range of trivia: origins of weird idioms, odd bits of India to visit, ‘cool’ scientific discoveries out of the pages of Popular Science. I think that’s how I fell in love with trivia quizzing.

There used to be weekly quiz on the last page from current affairs and trivia. Boy, did I love that. Prizes were usually Tekson’s Bookshop vouchers and I spent every one of those blank cheques building my Tintin and Calvin & Hobbes collection. :D Later on, Teksons withdrew its sponsorship and was replaced by Orient Longman (publishers). Orient Longman, cheapskates that they were, used it as a channel to clear off their stock. Over time I accumulated books on: an analysis of the mathematical constant e (yes, a whole fucking book on it), history of Indian cuisine, a field guide to butterflies and moths of south-west India, innumerable short story and poem anthologies. Also, every single time with this random crap I also got The Orient Longman Learners’ Dictionary. Every. Single. Time. This got to the point that I when I met friends at school I used to go “Ay! You’re my bro! Here, take a free dictionary.” (Nobody seemed to mind because a notice had been issued asking all students to buy a dictionary.)

Still, I looked forward to every trip with my dad to Hindustan Times‘ headquarters at Kasturba Gandhi Marg to collect my prize. I remember how thrilled I was as a kid the first couple of times I visited to get issued a visitors’ pass and OH MY GOD I’M INSIDE THE HEADQUARTERS OF A NATIONAL NEWSPAPER! Oh, and as I progressed further along in school, approaching high school, I also noticed how drop-dead cute the woman who was in-charge at HT Next for meeting us quizzers was.

HT Next in its first avatar was so delightfully quirky! (I think I was a hipster even when I was twelve-years-old.) I collected every single edition and did in fact have them around for many years until we moved houses. Its next avatar – one which exists to this day – was as a stripped-down and slightly customised version of the main Hindustan Times edition. I read that in school, and come back home to read Times of India. Later, when our school switched loyalties to give us Times of India subscriptions instead, I read that in school and came back home to read Hindustan Times and The Hindu. (The Hindu carried the best crosswords out of any Indian newspapers in those days.)

I collected interesting articles I came across in these newspapers by filing away news clippings in folders. I had a pretty extensive collection running into hundreds of articles spanning many folders over the years. Yet, when you think of it now it’s so hard to file away a news story for long-term archiving! You only have to visit a Wikipedia article linking back to news articles from 90s to encounter broken links. Articles lost from easy discovery, perhaps forever, due to inevitable switches of content management systems at news sites. Archival and discovery of good news content is fundamentally broken in today’s web-centric distribution model.

I know I don’t have as much free time these days to read multiple newspapers or to start a news clipping collection, but at some level my present desire to read printed form newspapers is to capture that magic from my childhood again – of being able to read good content in an easy-to-digest form whenever, wherever.

I can hear the sound of a kettle boiling over inside my head every now and then…

3 guys, 44 days, 11 countries, 18 flights, 38 thousand miles, an exploding volcano, 2 cameras and almost a terabyte of footage… all to turn 3 ambitious linear concepts based on movement, learning and food ….into 3 beautiful and hopefully compelling short films…..

= a trip of a lifetime.

This video makes me want to Never Stop Moving. :)