Hear n’ There

Dear Web Designers of the Indian Government

I write this, not because I am a frequent visitor of your website. In fact I never visit your website, knowing fully well that the only reason it exists is because it should. The only governmental websites I ever access have been CBSE and the IRTC.  Both of them pale in comparison to the rape of the internet that is your ‘national informatics portal‘. You have not only eaten the d or e or s from design but you seem to have chewed it, spitted it, then drank it only to excrete and paste it on your website. Not the first three alphabets. But the whole W.O.R.D.

While most countries work hard to build an image better than the existing reality, you dear Sirs, seem to have worked meticulously hard to ensure that India- contrary to all the Microsoft and Google offices here, contrary to all the customer support jobs that we steal,  has as much technological talent as the Sahara desert has water.

This letter has been excruciatingly frustrating for me to write. I have written another draft which frustrated the hell out of me because I kept on writing and it seemed it would stretch all the way from my my laptop to the end of the milky way. I have now decided I would put in points why your portal, if you can call it that, puts many of us concerned citizens and geeks under significant cardiac stress.

We believe that the whole of humanity is at stake here. Forget WMDs or Oil or Taliban or asteroids. Hitler wouldn’t have needed concentration camps had he been able to access nic.gov.in in his time.

**Begin rant**

(1) You seem to be using a version of Front Page 304BC which was invented when Bill Gates first learn how to shag. The next time you go to Palika to buy School Girls become Naughty Nurses 3, please also buy a copy of Dreamweaver for Rs 50. I would have sent you a torrent link myself, but I am afraid that Azureus may prove too advanced for you.

(2) It pains me to recommend you to use one of the readymade templates. It is unfortunate that you have been inspired by Ramsay and his horror movies for your color schemes.

(3) Try not to have broken links. At least on your front page cad.delhi.nic.in denies me access to your highly confidential data about Computer Aided Design. Are you sure that CAD expands to Computer Aided Death

(4) People stopped using Lynx and  Mosaic many many years ago and it is possible to do many things with a language called HTML. If LTTE and the State-Jail in Bihar the only organisations offering me work, I still wouldn’t like to work with you after seeing your recruitment page. I wonder if your dresscode asks people to wear animal skin  and there are two stones and twigs in place of your coffee maker.

(4) A search for India on the search form, returns the same page. If you want to get the same thing done, you can use something called the Refresh button on your browser. The ‘software‘ that you use to display things that you call website are called browsers. The blue ‘E’ thing that you click, you know.

(5) The website is ‘optimised’ for IE only and I noticed there is a Hindi version of the site. Next time take the following fact into consideration- Number of Non IE users is 30%.  Number of people in India who have a computer, use the internet (in particular your site) and do not know English but know what Prayogiki means- Tends to zero.

(6) I have for a minute thought that you may have created this page only to add security to the pages. Which geek worth his mp3 player would like to hack your website? The idea was soon dismissed when I took your collective IQ into consideration.

(7) If a link on your homepage redirects to another website, link to that directly and not give another page saying ‘Please go to Crap.MoreCrap.gov.in’ If I suffered from OCD and liked clicking on things I would go and play Bubble Wrap online.

(8) I think you should sue IBM for copying your logo. How dare they copy your logo?

(9) There is a link to ‘Evolution’ of the NIC. It actually means the process by which things develop and diversify into better forms. How one could evolve before history was the future am sure you can tell.

(10) Your ‘History’ page sadly does not talk about how the pages that you host, are the remains of the First great Internet disaster of the fourth century. I actually cleared my browser cache just to make sure that the page that I was viewing was actually a page and not some unloaded junk. Junk, Dear Sirs, is not something that you should intend to create when creating anything.

(11) Using blinking images is not the same as using Flash in a website.

(12) To supplement your income from all the embezzlement of the millions the government provides for maintenance you should also place Ads selling Cyanide on all the pages.

(13) I really cannot go any further. I doubt if I have ever used these many phrases in italics to stress a point. For assistance contact any sixth grade student in any computer club in any school in Mozambique.
Please burn the servers buildings which contain your data. Then throw the rubble in the holy ganges which would then be unholy forever. Then never let any human come in contact within a light year radius of your perimeter or human race will not evolve.

We will have a future where the creative faculties of our genetic offsprings would be such that even the greatest poets would not be able to compose ‘Roses are red, Violets are blue, dear mom and dad I love you’ and the Rainbow that I created in second grade would be a masterpiece no one would ever be able to reproduce.

Hoping aliens who are uglier than you would eat you alive

Yours sincerely

Aditya Anand

This post would have looked much better if I used screen shots and many images that I planned to. But I am too lazy and tired at 4:30 in the morning. Further I am yet to change the permissions for my upload folder. Hence this whole image keeda would be a real bitch

Thing(s) of the Day: Don’t mess with Mommy.

In keeping with the theme of the post, I thought I should also give you this

Went grocery shopping this weekend. Let’s see what I bought, and forget about the things that I should have bought. I can stare and use  gadgets at showrooms for hours doing nothing but admire human creation the same way I would for Cobie Smulders (except, quite unfortunatey, for the using part). Standing in lines, trying hard not to crash the trolley into the forty-five year old women who race against a snail and do surprisingly well in coming last. Dealing with thirty year old executives who consult programming models and astrological charts to place their carts at exactly the places which would irritate the bejesus out of me as they they take their own sweet time on their cell-phones as if the world were was their effing toilet seat would make tragedies Shakespeare would die twice to take credit for.

Of-course he would have tried to shorten the above sentences and not make them seem like I ate the stop out of Full-Stop. Well, I just gave a test  for my Technical Report Writing course where one is supposed to shorten to One-Third the given composition. The course purpots to see to the heinous obliteration of enriching cliches alongwith flamboyantly ostentatious words and phrases barring the blatantly obvious mundane while ostensibly setting higher standards of report writing about which no one gives an iota of an iota. I on the other hand am striving my best in destituting the English language of an sin of gargantuan proportions and Satanic intentions. One long sentence at a time. Short and meaningful equals things like say e=mc^2 or Schrodinger’s equation. The last time I checked; they gave a Nobel for that piece of crap, while ink in tons, was wasted utilised to explain all that anyway.

Let this not be a rant against against forty five year old pregnant aunties, thirty year old rich businessmen, mentally retarded Hypermarket planners. Or even the simplicity of Quantum Mechanics.  I rather flabbergast by providing crucial insight to the ways of a hostel student.

Knorr Instant Soup: 12 Cream of Chicken Sachets. 12 Tomato Soup Sachets. Easy to make. Cheap. The buy one get one free offer was a steal.

Americana Double Chocolate Chip Cookies: 16 Packs. Yummy. Great when you are hungry at four in the morning. Recommended eat 3 packs if not had Dinner. Eat none in front of others, lest you like them to magically disappear. David Blaine’s magical powers pale in comparison to the collective appetites of even four college students.

Koka Instant Noodles: The cost as compared to Maggie Curry Flavor? Double. The taste as compared to Maggie Curry Flavour? One Fourth. Not going down a couple of floors to use the microwave and cook Maggie but rather use the hot/cold water system in your corridor to cook Koka? Priceless.

Gingerale: Six Cans. No comments on the value of Fizz in life.

Tang: Because drinking gingerale all the time in place of water means you either got your priorities wrong, or got more money than I do.

Chocolate Sticks: Bought only because they were cheap and it looked great. The power of Marketing. Funny, I got a course in Marketing Principles and this is a classic example of employment of Projective Technique as per Freud’s Motivation Theory. It basically involves me lazily getting up to get my book, looking up the index for Freud, quoting terms, italicising them to tell you what it is simply means that packaging, advertisements, hot blondes endorsing products help. 

Graph Sheets: Hail the force which asks nerds to buy many more sheets than they require. Oh My academically oriented friends! I meant not what I wrote. I didn’t even write that. Without Thy grace I would be calling fifty-five other people who am sure don’t have graph sheets or A4 papers to ask if they have graph sheets or A4 papers. I have a lot of phone balance, my grades, notes, knowledge of syllabi- hours before a paper thanks only to the divine aura that thy radiate.

Lunch at Chilli’s: Some ridiculously expensive Chicken exotic sounding name.

Ink for Pen: Seemed a trifle overpriced.

Healthy Food: Waiting to turn a richer thirty year old hypertense, diabetic. Innit? Oh, but I am not the only one.

Hoping that you all are living the good times, the instant way.

To provide me company in the gym twenty years later.

Thing of the Day: What 207 Million Dollars looks like.