Author: The Metrognome

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Learn

Your fingers tell your secrets

Sudhir and Shweta Hattangadi can tell if you’re a compulsive liar, or if you’re better off pursuing sports than academics. A science called dermatoglyphics reveals all.
by The Editors | editor@themetrognome.in

Imagine having your thumb print reveal the best and the worst about you. What’s more, under the right conditions and with accurate equipment, it probably will. For over two years now, former teachers Sudhir and Shweta Hattangadi have tested over 1,000 children and adults in Mumbai and other Indian cities, and come up with brain pictures that gave away the most intricate personality traits in 10 areas of human intelligence.

“We’ve been able to tell if a person can be easily influenced, or is a compulsive liar, or such factors as being better at research than analysis. We use a thumb print that helps map the person’s brain. We come to know what the person’s strengths are, and his or her weaknesses. Based on the inputs, we give an impetus to the strengths and help minimise the weaknesses. This is helpful especially for very young children, much before they are forced to make career choices that may not be suited to their natural aptitudes,” says Shweta.

If you think this seems a bit far fetched, think again. Sudhir and his wife Shweta are actually practicing a science known as dermatoglyphics – the scientific study of fingerprints. “The brain and fingerprints start developing at the same time at about 13 weeks for the foetus,” Sudhir explains. “The ages zero to six years are known as the ‘golden age’ for a child, because the brain is still developing and any corrective ideas can be implemented at this time. Ages six to 12 are when reformation happens, when ideas can be cemented. After 12 years, we concentrate on the strong areas only.” He says that behavioural alterations are possible in children up to 12 years old. “However, nutrition also plays a big part in correcting certain anomalies,” Shweta says.

This is how your brain can be mapped: your fingerprint is taken on a biometric device. Then it is recorded on a computer and relayed to a server in Thailand. The fingerprint is then classified into one of four types – whorl, loop, reverse loop and arch – and the final analysis is then generated back. “The analysis is quantitative, and Shweta then exhaustively makes notes on each case. We have about four to five sessions per person.”

Shweta recounts how the analysis may even give early warning signs of things to come. “We had analysed this boy who showed the tendency to be easily influenced by others. We told his parents this. Later, he and a friend killed his grandmother for money to buy a bike. We were stunned to learn of this,” she says.

The couple has tested close to 1,000 persons so far, most of them children. “However, this science can really come in handy for corporates, when they want to employ the right people. But the idea has not yet caught on amongst people. Even the children who come to us are brought by their parents because they exhibit some worrying symptoms. However, getting this test done at an early age helps children chart out their future better,” Sudhir says. “And why just children? Even couples can get their compatibility tested. Or employers can test potential employees for reliability, loyalty to the company, whether they can be trusted with money, and so on.”

The test costs Rs 5,000 and comprises of exhaustive discussions and analyses over five sessions. “Many parents are satisfied with just two sessions also. But I give them my notes to keep so that they have all the material about their child handy. Generally, students who are about to make a career choice come to us for testing. Our teaching experience and the training we’ve taken (from their Hong Kong-based trainer) helps us minutely analyse each case and offer solutions,” Shweta says.

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Read

Working better in Mumbai: A special analysis

Clyde D’Souza (author of Kissing Ass – The Art of Office Politics) lists five ways to improve your working conditions.

1. Spondylitis chhutti

Stop cribbing about the potholes in Mumbai and make them work for you! Use them as a valid excuse to cash in on unscheduled spondylitis leave. Then head to Goa and drown yourself in Kingfisher beer. When you do return with a hangover, just ensure you wear a neck brace. Your boss will be forced to go easy on you.

2. Flirt jam

So there’s a hot chick in the office but there’s no way you can get her to yourself thanks to all the other despos around. Asking her out would only make her think you’re a pervert (which you are). So the only thing you can do is offer to drop her home – even if she lives in Dombivali. Then sit back in the rick and use the never-ending jam to get to know her better.

3. Mid-week partying

A five-day week is totally unfair but there’s nothing stopping you from mid-week partying. Head out to a stand-up act, karaoke or late night movie. If your boss is cool enough, take her along so she won’t give you grief when you show up late the next day.

4. Bonding over Bollywood

Making small talk with the boss in Mumbai is a little bit better than bonding with the boss in Delhi (political bullsh*t), or Kolkata (more political bullsh*t). Because we live in Mumbai, we can totally ditch boring conversations and make small talk about Sallu’s latest fight with SRK or Ranbir’s latest girlfriend.

5. Mall meetings

Office meeting rooms are boring because they are filled with ugly colleagues you want to punch in the face. So why be stuck in hell when you can use legal means to escape? Mumbai offers a variety of malls with great air conditioning and killer restaurants. Schedule a meeting with a client over a working lunch and spend the rest of the day window-shopping!

About Clyde’s book

Kissing Ass The Art of Office Politics is a non-sloppy guide to surviving and succeeding at the workplace. In it, you will find answers to such critical issues as:

Have you ever wondered what to say to the CEO in the loo? Or how to leave work early or bunk on a Monday?
Or maybe you want to spot the cool guys in the office or are wondering how to cover your ass in an email?

If you’ve been working (as I have) for a number of years, I’m sure you’ve already done some of the above  and played the great game of office politics.

Massaging your boss’ ego

Who to CC and BCC in your emails

How to get away with sex at work

Writing a farewell mail

Clyde D’Souza is the author of Kissing Ass – The Art of Office Politics. He is currently stuck in a traffic jam.

 

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Big story

Ab bus karo

A point-to-point bus service aims to solve your commuting woes, when autos and taxis are just too expensive to hire.
by The Editors | editor@themetrognome.in

The recent revisions in auto and taxi fares have probably sent your monthly budget straight to the cleaners. And nobody’s really willing to wait for crowded BEST buses to lumber up and take them on board. But come to think of it, buses are actually a better road transport solution – they take a lot of people from place to place, and they don’t cause as much congestion as smaller vehicles do.

Which was what prompted Siddharth Sharma (37), a computer programmer who is an IIM alumnus, to start rBus, a bus pooling company that allows people to take a comfortable, point-to-point bus commute to work. All customers have to do is inform the company that they wish to take a bus from a certain point to a certain destination, and the bus arrives with prior intimation.

“I started rBus because in our city, there is a demand for good quality transport that saves people time and which is clean and hassle-free,” Siddharth tells The Metrognome. “BEST buses are often overcrowded and slow. Our buses reach on time, and customers don’t have to wait long hours for them to arrive or reach the destination. Also, once you have booked a seat, nobody else can take your seat.”

Additionally,  each bus is fitted with a GPS tracker, and users are informed of the bus’s location a few moments before it arrives at their requested spot. “Time is of the essence in Mumbai,” Siddharth says. “Besides, people want a comfortable commute from their homes to their offices. The way we work out the bus allocation is, we first study the demand on a particular route. If we have about 200 people on a route, we hire about ten 20-seater buses. There is no compulsion on the commuter to take a bus at a certain time, we work flexibly around the commuters’ timings,” he explains.

The buses are hired from private contractors, and payment for the service is taken on a monthly basis. “A non-AC bus would cost the commuter Rs 1,800 per month, while for an AC bus, it is Rs 3,500 per month,” Siddharth says. “So far, I have a pool of over 165 registered users. When there is a demand on a particular route, I get a contractor who provides the bus for that route.”

He says that from the time he started the company in July this year, demand is slowly going up, though consumers are often finicky about the pricing. He says he even revised his original pricing – Rs 3,000 per month for a non-AC bus and Rs 5,000 for an AC bus – because customers found the rates too steep. “But there are also various people who are interested in availing of the service. I have queries from the CEOs of certain companies, who are very interested in this project, since they are concerned about employees reaching office late owing to delays in travel,” he says.

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Hum log

Coming soon: Bedardi Baalam

Harish Iyer’s ‘fun’ project for women, Khuli Tijori, will have him visit colleges and start a debate on local trains.
by Vrushali Lad | vrushali@themetrognome.in

He shot to fame when TV show Satyameva Jayate featured him on its child sex abuse episode. Viewers cried as Harish Iyer told his heartbreaking story, how the experience shaped his reality and how he took solace in Sridevi’s films. But if Harish gave you the impression that his early life must have made him a serious, constantly brooding individual who measures his words when he speaks, that impression will shoot itself in the face when you speak with him in person.

Because the man is funny and quite fun to speak with. And that forms the core of his ambitious project, Khuli Tijori, where young people of both sexes can speak about sexuality, their bodies, their ‘dangerous’ bent of mind and so on, in a light vein on a quirky blog. “Activism should be fun, then it becomes effective,” Harish says. “I am a big fan of Geet from Jab We Met, and I love the line where she says, ‘Akeli ladki khuli tijori ki tarah hoti hai. That inspired the name of the project. We are not looking at naari shakti activism. Rather than a boring (read: intellectual), Bengali activism method, I want to make it intellectually sl***y in a Tam Brahm way, like me,” he laughs.

Harish started the project in February this year, and the idea for it was probably germinating even as he started the Sita Sena in 2009 as a counter point to fundamentalist group Ram Sene’s Valentine’s Day exploits in Bangalore. “We were a group of men wearing the most obscene pair of shorts we could find, and each of us carried a whistle. Then we approached women on the street, and told them they could blow the whistle at any man in the group,” he says, adding that the blog and the project is a chance for him to present his views, which may not be the world view. “People have lost their rational thinking. Either they speak loudly in front of 10 people who share their opinion, or they act cool by not listening to other voices. There has to be a middle path.”

That middle path is what he chose for the project as well. “Women can be sexy, bi***y, sl***y and as horrible as men. We either make women goddesses or whores, so where are the normal, common women? The project will celebrate these women, the in-betweens.” He plans to do this by not intellectualising issues plaguing women, but by promoting serious activism in a logical, fun manner – and he started by adopting the name ‘Bedardi Baalam’ for the project. “So I might go to a college, hand a camera to two girls and tell them to stare at a boy’s pe*** and record his reaction. Do you know that a woman staring at a man’s pe*** is likely to embarrass him at least 10 times more than when he would stare at her body? Of course, the girls will not be shooting his pe*** on camera, but it will be a good experiment,” he explains.

Similarly, he and partner-in-crime Deborah Grey (whose moniker is ‘Maal’ for purposes of the project) will stage ‘train plays’, where they will travel by local trains in non-peak hours. “We’ll stand in the compartment and start reading out passages like, ‘Isne mujhe chheda, mujhe chutiya kaha’ and ‘Main akeli rehti hoon’. People will start listening in and a dialogue will be initiated right there,” he beams.

Harish’s plans include taking the project to college students in a major way. “By the end of this year, I will have two or three projects planned around these activities. The projects will be for women’s rights, for single women and for the right of women to have sex. We may also do basic conversations in flash mob style. And we plan to take the train plays to bus stops as well.”

Right now, he admits that he hasn’t been feeding in any posts on the project blog. “But I want it to be a place which is not just mine, though I will edit its contents to keep it non-sleazy. We will also build a team to take the project up in a big way. My end goal is to start an NGO called The Hiyer Foundation. All of this is very ambitious and it sounds great when you say it, but I know the actual implementation will be tough.” For now, though, Harish has already started visiting colleges in Mumbai “on the pretext of giving lectures” to develop “this sense of making activism fun. So the dialogue has already started.”

 

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Places

Out with the X-Men

A scenic Rajmachi trek became a screaming free-for-all as Prashant Shankarnarayan shared his trip with the loudest people on Earth.

So I went to Rajmachi recently. It’s a village situated on a hill that is part of the Sahyadri range. The itinerary was clear – Mumbai to Lonavla by bus, then an uphill trek from Lonavla, reach Rajmachi, roam around and stay overnight in a villager’s home, next morning trek downhill to Kondivade village where the bus would wait for us, head to Mumbai.

Everything would have gone as per plan had it not been for one aspect, a pretty important one – the company. When my friend told me to hop on with him, his wife and just a few friends – the reason why I even tagged my girlfriend along for the trip – I never realised that his definition of ‘a few friends’ meant a cluster of families who will henceforth be referred to as X. (Hint to decode X: the loudest families to frequent Mumbai’s restaurants and theatres).

Anyway, we set out from Mumbai to Lonavla in a private bus and no, I am not going to share the details of my bus journey, lest you mistake me for a 16-year-old girl armed with a dairy in one hand and her teddy in another. So what hits you first in a bus filled with X? The sheer noise, damn it! How could someone be so loud?

All the way, X maintained that we will ‘trake’ from Lonavla to Rajmachi. Soon enough we arrived at the spot in Lonavla where our trek  and their trake would begin…with a prayer! Let’s not even go there – I have stopped commenting on people’s religious beliefs, but I couldn’t help but stand at a distance from the prayer session. So we started walking uphill around 2 pm. It was the usual out-of-Mumbai-everything-is-green-and-we-should-do-this-often experience. But soon I realised that it wasn’t a trek. I tried correcting the Xs by explaining the difference between a hike and a trek, but eventually trake won hands down.

After an easy hike that lasted a few hours, we reached Udewadhi village in Rajmachi at around 6.15 pm. The lone toll-collecting guy (still don’t know why you need one there) said that it was better to trek to Shrivardhan Fort atop the hill the next morning. Although I wanted to go on, I opted to stay with X just to thwart unwanted attention.

Udewadhi village has accommodation arrangements, provided that sleeping on bare floors without sanitation facilities counts as arrangements at all. Being a regular trekker, I had no issues with this aspect of the matter, although the women in our group were soon mumbling about how they wouldn’t feel comfortable about defecating in the open. Thankfully, our room owner has constructed one toilet just for women. The villagers provide homemade Maharashtrian staple food and you can have pure vegetarian as well as Jain variants, provided you inform them as soon as you reach.

So after a tiring hike, just when my girlfriend and my friend’s wife thought it was time to doze off, the X-Men uncorked their bottles and started yelling. In some parts of the world, they call it singing. Then the X-Women joined in. Then the X-Kids. Not a single person could sing in tune, and there were around15 of them. Their unflinching loyalty to Kishore Kumar songs for almost two hours moved me…to the next room. By the way, did I tell you that a bunch of youngsters from another random group were sharing the house with us, and yet the Xs kept bawling without a thought for the poor strangers?

Post a decent dinner at the villager’s home, we crashed for the night. This is where you make a note – get your own sleeping bags, bed sheets and mattresses. Post dinner, the Xs continued howling Kishore Kumar hits, while the others tried to sleep in the  heat. The great Kishore Kumar’s soul could finally rest in peace as the X-Men went to sleep.

And then…it happened. In the dead of night, we awoke to strange noises. We were exclusive witness to an orchestra featuring natural wind percussion, or farts. The X-Men just went on with their fartestra without even considering that they were sleeping in a room filled with strangers (Hint #2 to decode X: the loudest in Mumbai’s local trains.)

Anyway, let’s cut the crap and talk about the one that everyone takes. Like the early bird that gets the worm, the early riser gets to take a crap in the loo reserved for women, instead of defecating in the open. So if you are staying overnight at Rajmachi, the trick to evade defecating in the open is waking up early. As X stayed put in the rooms, some of us trekked to Shrivardhan Fort, and needless to say, it’s a must-visit. It just takes around half an hour to reach the top of the Fort and the view is like that from any other fort, but it is still something the serious traveller must do.

After clicking few photographs we came down and headed for a dip in the nearby pond and it was serene, especially without a single X-Man, Woman or Kid in sight. It was soon time to head back.

The ‘real’ trek – the descent to Kondivade village, is not easy. Okay, it’s pretty tough, and really tough if you are a novice. The downward trek includes manoeuvring uneven rocks, random thorny plants as you pass by streams and waterfalls. Do carry enough water, unlike us – we set off with just one bottle between us. Every trekker worth his/her salt would love this part of the trip.

We were trekking silently, when an X-Kid repeatedly started shouting for her papa. We trekked faster just to avoid that kid, then we added pace to avoid the entire X cluster and soon enough we were way ahead. We trekked in peace for about four hours to Kondivade, where the bus was waiting to drop us back to Mumbai.

I used to cringe on hearing clichés about how its not about the destination, but the journey and blah blah blah. But this is the first time I understood it. I am someone who prefers to trek in silence, observing keenly whatever meets the eye and exchanging gyaan with other trekkers. But on this trek, I was put outside my comfort zone, and that changed the entire perspective of my trip. Maybe if I had been with a different group, this account would have turned out different. Maybe if someone from X had written this, they would have branded me a misfit because I was aloof and never mingled with them. I guess that is the idea behind any journey – knowing where you fit in.

Do you have a travel story to tell? Write to us at thetraveller@themetrognome.in and we’d love to feature your experience.

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Patrakar types

Whatchoo talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?

Do those who condemn the media’s standards really know what their own expectations of the media are?
by Vrushali Lad | vrushali@themetrognome.in

In a train to Churchgate recently, gaggles of giggly collegians on every side were mighty excited about the fact that a senior and her two friends had been featured in the entertainment supplement of a daily newspaper. Both groups tore away the main newspaper and made a grab for the supplement inside it, which they pored over as if studying for their exams. When one group got up to alight at Dadar, the newspaper lay forgotten on the seat, while the supplement was still being tossed about.

Meanwhile, a portly uncle in the gents’ first class compartment was reading the Shiv Sena mouthpiece Saamna. Half of the front page carried an ad of some sort, while the other half had news of national and city interest, all content similar to any other newspaper that day. Two young men seated opposite him scanned the headlines before declaring, “Main yeh bakwaas paper kabhi nahin padhta.”

If a survey were to be conducted, we would find that one of every two newspaper readers thinks The Times of India is a yellow, crappy piece of paid-for newspaper that is shitty beyond words. Both these people surveyed would be The Times of India readers. When asked what they found crappy, the answer invariably is, “What nonsense news they publish, yaar!” No details are ever given, but yet, on Twitter, TOI headlines are routinely tweeted and retweeted.

A leading daily newspaper in the city, (not The TOI) routinely rehashes its own stories and publishes them in a pretty form. Readers can never tell the difference.

Only one daily broadsheet in Mumbai publishes pocket cartoons even on Sundays, when the usual norm is to have a large editorial cartoon on the edit or Op-ed page. It also carries the editorial cartoon. Five marks for knowing which newspaper this is.

Readers routinely diss the media for pandering to advertising. Then most of them participate in contests run by those media and those same advertisers, and rejoice when they win prizes.

Judging from most readers’ responses to news content, all politicians are thieves, Mahesh Bhatt is a slimeball, Aamir Khan is a better actor than Shahrukh Khan and Priyanka Chopra’s debut music album is doomed before it releases. Similarly, all heritage structures in the city are to be wrapped in cotton and preserved for eternity (“It is our history, after all”), those bowing to union leader Sharad Rao’s wishes receive ‘cuts’ from him, and the Ganesh celebrations were very really noisy, particularly this year.

Readers often start slanging matches with each other on online forums when somebody has the nerve to have an opinion contrary to theirs.

Lastly, this column was written by a pro-Congress, paid writer who has never done an honest day’s work in her life. All journalists are like that – they write false news, they take bribes from everybody, and they are heartless, microphone-carrying robots. I tell you, nothing good will happen in our country if this media is there.

Vrushali Lad is a freelance reporter who has spent several years pitching story ideas to reluctant editors. Once, she even got hired while doing so. 

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