All wired up

(Image courtesy: New Indian Express)

25 years of the PC. 15 years of the World Wide Web. And one day in the life of man. L Suresh reports.

"A man has been arrested in New York for attempting to extort funds from ignorant and superstitious people by exhibiting a device which he says will convey the human voice any distance over metallic wires so that it will be heard by the listener at the other end. He calls this instrument a telephone. Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the human voice over wires."

This was a news item published in a New York newspaper, way back in 1868, when Alexander Graham Bell was trying to promote his pet invention. Ever since, well-informed people have been busy eating their words, and yet, have had enough left over to spend hours talking over the telephone. And over the years, one thing remained unchanged - man’s cynicism towards new-found technology.

Thomas J Watson predicted a world market for five computers, in 1943. Thirty-four years later, Ken Olson, President, Chairman and Founder of Digital Equipment Corporation would wonder why anyone would want a computer in their home. And in 1981, Bill Gates, who hadn’t yet thought of the road ahead, succumbed to the foot-in-mouth syndrome that had gripped his predecessors with the immortal words - ‘640 k ought to be enough for anybody’.

And life went on till 1991, when the next big wave hit the shores of technology and Walcott, Weekes and Worrell were displaced by another set of 3Ws that would be infinitely more popular - the World Wide Web. But more importantly, 25 years of the PC and 15 years of the World Wide Web have given us ten things that we just couldn’t have done without.

Dot Com Boom shake the room
50 lakh salaries, cars for 23 year olds, parties at the drop of a hat, three pay hikes in a year and – get a load of this – male strippers for a woman’s day party. As Charles Dickens put it, ‘those were the best of times, those were the worst of times’.

Indiaworld.com was bought from Rajesh Jain by Sify for a whopping Rs. 499 crores. Hometrade.com splurged Rs. 24 crores on an advertising blitzkrieg with Sachin, Shah Rukh and Hrithik. Indya.com got The Times of India to do what no other brand had done before – vacate its front page for a full-page ad. That was some life - until the lights at the end of the tunnel were switched off.

Portals shut down, retrenchments were the order of the day, pink slip parties followed. Go.com, Pets.com Flooz.com, eToys, Furniture.com – all the big names defied the laws of gravity on their way up, but faithfully conformed to the law of physics which said that everything that went up must come down.

A prêt line? I’ve lent my name to a virus!
Having a star in the Hollywood walk of fame was old hat. Having a virus named after you became the mark of celebrity status. Avril Lavigne, Anna Kournikova and Angelina Jolie – the biggest stars found themselves playing godmother to baby viruses that were unleashed across the network.

Kamasutra, Michelangelo, Melissa, I Love You, Code Red, SQL Slammer worm, MyDoom - the speed of attack, the reach and the aftermath increased with every passing generation of virus.

And of course, each virus not only spawned more of its kind, but also brought forth numerous spoofs – like the Bobbit virus, that would remove a vital part of the hard disk and then re-attach it, the Arnold Schwarzenegger virus that would terminate and stay resident (I’ll be back), the Star Trek virus that would invade the system in places where no virus had gone before, the Titanic virus that would make the whole computer go down and the Mike Tyson virus, that would quit after one byte.

Blame it on technology
As technology was increasingly being used to increase office productivity, it also had the opposite effect, with computer breakdown, hard disk crashes, UPS shutdown, network problems, lost files and all these leading to a 404 situation - employee not found.

Also, it gave the savvy employee ample opportunities to dodge a job coming his way. Reasons for delay could involve hot-swapping a bad disk from a UNIX box while building a file system on the newly inserted drive. Or an email database that was completely damaged when the mail template was accidentally replaced with a calendar template as 900 user systems were being replaced and their data migrated in a span of 25 days. (Of course, one could add to the complications by citing the fact that the main hub had to be accessed from some place north of Gautemala).

The result – the geeks were kept on their toes while the ‘it’s all greek to me’ kind took to their heels.

Hope you understand what I’m saying – I don’t
Another major advantage of the technology boom was that when all else failed, one could resort to jargon. Bandwidth, offline, network, real estate, stakeholder, eyeball, landing site – the 3Ws that led to the dot com era brought in new words that had multifarious meanings. Of course, leading the pack were three syllables that would thrill, chill and tide the world over a thousand years in the space of a night – Y2K.

And then, there were acronyms that caught everyone’s fancy – like PCMCIA (People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms), ISDN (It Still Does Nothing) and SCSI (System Can't See It).

I mailed to five people and got a Merc
Ever got cash from Microsoft, free merchandise from Nike or free cell phones from Nokia? Ever enjoyed a bit of good fortune, thanks to the Hawaiian Good Luck Totem or the Tweetie Bird Chain? Ever helped Bill Gates test a particular software or did your bit so that a dying girl could get into the Guinness Book of World Records? No?

Well, terrible things are likely to happen to you. Firstly, you haven’t complied with the request of flooding your friends’ inboxes. More importantly, you have broken the all-important chain, so not only will you bear a curse for life, but will also lose out on the opportunity to win a Merc or a thousand dollars from Bill Gates.

The Indian versions of junk mail tread on dangerous territory - names of Gods, religious heads, sacred chants and old age superstitions - that make it difficult for the recipient to ignore them. Of course, goodness comes in slabs, as your good fortune is directly proportional to the number of people you forward the mail to.

It’s okay Mom, I won’t disturb the net nanny
While most other technology-related industries were struggling with bandwidth, faster downloads and file sizes, the porn industry surged ahead, pushing the frontiers even as they managed high resolution images, video clips, payment gateways, member forums, streaming media, live webcam shows and above all, blazing download speeds.

While child lock programs like Cyber Patrol, Net Nanny, Bess, WebSENSE and SmartFilter tried their hands at restricting visitors to these sites, porn sites became the forbidden fruit of www.gardenofeden.com as kids who had mastered the art of hiding comic books inside their textbooks found no problems in circumventing the barriers and boldly going where no child was meant to go.

Hi, I’m Ted. Will you marry me?
Why mail someone when you could message them? This thought bubble popped up on screen as an instant messaging window and resulted in the first free to download instant messaging service in 1996 - ICQ. Others followed, like MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Skype, Google Talk and the Indian Rediff Bol.

The next step was networking – social networking, business networking, dating, meeting people, making friends and being part of larger forums. Community sites like Orkut, Ryze, Fropper, Gaia, Friendster and MySpace got into top gear.

But the Indian youth seemed to have very noble intentions, for after dating sites, matrimonial sites became a colossal hit. Shaadi.com and Bharatmatrimony.com found many takers with Jeevansathi.com coming a close third.

It says XL or XML. Which shall I buy?
It could have begun as cadabra.com, but instead became amazon.com and began operations in 1995, selling books. A year later, eBay came into existence. Suddenly the shopping cart had shrunk to the size of a tiny stamp while the shopping mall stretched right across cyberspace.

And as if to prove that life could be lived web hopping, Mitch Maddox hatched a plot that could be straight out of a tech Hollywood movie. On January 1, 2000 he changed his name to Dot Com Guy, moved into a bare house with nothing but a laptop and a net connection and stayed there for a whole year without any contact with the outside world.

It wasn’t just buying that caught one’s fancy – it was selling as well. Elise Harp from Georgia auctioned her pregnant belly as real estate for advertising. Amber Rainey followed suit and sported 'Golden Palace.com' on her pregnant stomach. Yet another woman, Angel Brammer from Scotland sold her bosom space for $4,050 for a fortnight. Meanwhile, Andrew Fischer of Omaha sold his forehead to a snoring remedy, SnoreStop for a month and netted $37,375. Kari Smith did the same and tattooed GoldenPalace.com on her forehead for $ 10,000.

It was not just people – even places got into the act. Halfway, a tiny town in the US changed its name to Halfway.com for a year and made $73,000 in the bargain.

Wait for the launch or download it now
Why wait for an album to release and buy the CD for an obscene amount when it can be downloaded in minutes from the net? Seven years ago, Shawn Fanning thought along similar lines as he made the latest hits available in mp3 formats and facilitated easy downloads and free exchange through napster.com. Of course, it was too good to last as a year later, Napster was sued for copyright violation and was forced to change to a pay site.

With audio sharing and downloading, video and mpeg clips followed with sites like Sideloading, Youtube and Google video becoming popular by the download. Apple bit into a huge chunk of the music industry with the iPod in 2001. In a year, the company sold over a million units of the music device. iTunes was launched a year later in 2003. By 2005, broadcast and webcast merged to result in podcast and if you weren’t following what was going on, you could well huddle in front of your radio and wait for the valves to get heated up before you tuned into Binaca geetmala.

My deep dark secrets I can’t tell a soul about
While the first blog started in 1994, it wasn’t until 1997 that the term weblog began to gain recognition. Two years later, in an attempt to break the term into two, weblog became we blog and eventually blog – the most endearing term to a billion writers around the world. By 2004, a new blog was being created almost every 7.5 seconds.

The blog by Chinese starlet Xu Jinglei on sina.com tops the list as the world's most popular blog, with over 50 million clicks and still counting. And Boing Boing is the most read group-written blog, enjoying over 68 million hits.

Back home, while most blogs are about personalized expressions, there are some others that serve as personal black books, containing the deepest, darkest secrets – about lusting after the neighbour’s wife, having a crush on the boss, voyeuristic exploits and erotic fantasies. They have one other thing in common – they are all maintained by brave souls who hide behind evocative aliases like Devoured Petals, Little Johnny and Been Stalked.

The time has now come to take the next leap into what one think will be the future of technology. 30 years ago, one thought that the PC wouldn’t find a place in the life of common man. And one seems to think that the PC will not find a place in the life of common man in the future as well, with mobile technology, wap, bluetooth and the www ganging up and putting the PC out of work. Of course, like everything else in life, that could well be misquotes on technology coming a full circle.

(Appeared in the New Indian Express Sunday Supplement on 24 September, 2006)

Tamper Proof

(Image courtesy: New Indian Express)

L Suresh follows the trail of ball tampering controversies left behind by Pakistan.

If Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had based his crime fiction series on ball tampering instead of commonplace crime, he would have been aghast at the knowledge that he had created the Pink Panther Jacques Clouseau instead of the true-blue detective Sherlock Holmes. For several decades, goof ups and cover ups reigned supreme as the wise men tried to figure out if there was something in the pitch that the cricket ball was allergic to.

The ball was increasingly being noticed in the presence of raucous company - bottle caps, sand, vaseline, sugar-coated lozenges, human nails, zippers and many other objects that hung around in the cricket field, acting as surrogate steroids and enhancing the performance of the ball, making it do things no ball had ever done before. And with this, a new member was introduced to the anti-establishment group, to join the hallowed company of anti-matter, alternative music and women’s lib – reverse swing.

Interestingly, just as cricket has strong similarities with baseball, ‘doing’ the ball seems to have a well-bred lineage emerging from the baseball diamonds where spitballs, knuckleballs and forkballs were the order of the day. While everything from petroleum jelly to peanut butter was tried out to soften up one side of the ball, nail files, emery boards and sandpaper were the choice of match-hardened pitchers who desired the opposite effect. But since those were the days of prohibition, Al Capone and rigged boxing matches and since crime had not yet been declared illegal, the authorities decided to keep pace with the times and exempted some players – who would otherwise be out of a job without the nuances of cheating - from the ban on ball tampering.

Like all popular trends from the West, ball tampering too found its way to other parts of the globe and finally found its calling in cricket as willing bowlers waiting for redemption from the likes of Bradman and the three Ws embraced it with open arms and extra–long nails. And like all outbreaks, the epidemic raged on, but the vaccine was yet to be found. The world was curiously watching the ball get jiggy with it after the first session of play and was yet to make something of it. The ICC and the guardians of fairplay meanwhile were taking to the new issue the way most teams reacted to powerplays – they just didn’t know what to do with it.

Interestingly, India’s brush with ball tampering came along with a brand window as the country was exposed to the multifarious uses of Vaseline, appropriately endorsed by a bowler named John Lever. It was the mid-70s and India, thriving on the fiery medium pace of Karsan Ghavri and Mohinder Amarnath, was yet to see Kapil’s outswing, leave alone reverse swing. Vaseline was found on a ball that creamed the Indian top order as India lost the Delhi test by an innings and 25 runs. Lever ended with 10 for 70 and the officials ended with a ball that looked all set for a cold Delhi winter, slathered with Vaseline. In the end, what should have been the first big ball tampering incident ended up being called an accident.

However, on the other side of the border, cherry-red missiles were learning to swing the wrong way with alarming regularity. The chronicled reports begin with the early 90s during a one-dayer at the Lords, between England and Pakistan - old friends who took out their nail files and emery paper at the very sight of each other. As the series unfolded, Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis and Aaqib Javed were suspected of having done things to the ball that made it reverse though it was not enough to reverse the outcome of the one day series. England won, cried foul and went home brooding about how the diabolical action (a term that, to this day, remains Darrell Hair’s literary contribution to cricket) of the ball could be adapted to county cricket. The officials couldn’t prove a thing, but the fast bowlers of the world didn’t need further proof that wickets were there for the taking – the ball had just passed its first big ‘scratch and sniff’ test.

A couple of years later, Pakistan was at it again. This time round, ball tampering came hunting in pairs with another phenomenon that had an incurable effect on the game – match fixing. On one hand, the ball was doing crazy things that batsmen weren’t able to come to terms with and on the other, the English team was doing crazy things, like winning a one day series against Pakistan’s express fast bowlers. With one side rumoured to have gone after quick bucks and the other after victory, the match-fixing scandal ensured that neither team ended on the losing side. Of course, the ICC played the role of duty bound cops to the hilt – it took them two years to arrive at the heart of the matter after a shocking disclosure by Javed Burki, a former Chairman of the PCB.

A pattern was emerging - with ball tampering fast becoming the force majeure that resulted in reverse swing, and with reverse swing having its origins in Pakistan, one didn’t have to put two and two to end up with a scuffed ball. Meanwhile, ex-players like Imran Khan, Sarfraz Nawaz and Abdul Qadir began trooping into the confession box and narrating the secrets of their success, all of which could only be taken as incriminating evidence against the whole team.

It took the turn of the millennium for the ICC to finally take a stand on ball tampering and pronounce a sentence that had the word guilty in it. The Singer triangular series in Sri Lanka saw Waqar Younis and Azhar Mahmood take on South Africa with a tampered ball. South Africa won the match and Waqar, besides losing half his match fee, became the first player to sit out for a match for doing the unmentionable to a ball. Rumour has it that Waqar thought of appealing against the sentence because he thought he was being unfairly targeted – how else could one explain the fact that when everyone else was into ball tampering, he alone was caught by the cameras for the second time in two weeks?

The Pakistani nomenclature of naming their fast bowlers after express trains did have a telling effect on its leading pacers as they seemed to be suffering from a one-track mind. After Wasim, Waqar and Aaqib Javed, it was Shoaib Akhtar’s turn to turn psychopath with the ball against Zimbabwe, an opposition that was already wilting against express pace. One does not know if he was inspired by the fact that early scorers kept track of runs by making notches on a piece of wood and decided to mark his tally of wickets on the ball, but had the match referee not intervened in time, the ball would have needed stitches in places other than the seam. Shoaib was hauled up, given a dressing down and strictly told to mark his tally of scalps in his personal scrapbook henceforth.

But every epic saga has a bad sequel – and the terminator returned to terrorise the seam of the ball and leave it in a mess in a match against New Zealand. The tri-series played in Sri Lanka was ultimately won by the Kiwis, but the man who was grounded for two matches was Shoaib Akhtar.

Finally, what began at the Lords came full circle at the Oval, when the Pakistan team was accused of ball tampering by Darrell Hair. From the moment Hair removed the bails, it was a foregone conclusion that the matter would take racial undertones. An Australian umpire, a South African match referee and an Asian team have just about the same effect as ammonium nitrate, sulphuric acid and hydrogen peroxide mixed together in midair. But this incident had a lot more than inter-continental strife. Changing the condition of the ball, match forfeiture, bringing disrepute to the game, a 500,000 dollar ransom note, a call to legalise ball tampering, rumours of resignation – it was already being dubbed the biggest scandal to rock cricket since Bodyline.

What was most surprising was that despite being surrounded by men who have all had a brush with cricketing laws during their times, Inzamam did not get the right kind of advice from any quarter. It is during times of crisis that one wishes to be in the company of experienced men who could come to one’s rescue. But when it includes a coach who has seen enough ball tampering controversies during his stint with South Africa, a manager who had come close to forfeiting a match as a captain when he led Pakistan off the field in a match against India, a bowling coach who was the world’s first player to be penalized for ball tampering, a board chairman who didn’t quite understand what was going on, but felt it important to drag national honour and religion into the fracas and a young wicketkeeper who decided that it was the opportune moment to relax and while the controversy was spreading like wildfire, was seen in the balcony of his dressing room, calmly reading a newspaper - Inzamam would have preferred solitude.

But as with all crime thrillers, there had to be a twist in the tale. Out came an e-mail with Darrell Hair’s vow of complete silence in exchange for $500,000 – a shocker that has turned the controversy on its head, transforming the hunter into the hunted and the accused into a martyr who forfeited a match for his country. It suddenly looked like a jailbreak where the prisoners were digging a tunnel from one end and the warden from the other. During his days, Holmes would have found it easy to crack this case because once he had eliminated the impossible, whatever remained, however improbable, was the truth. But there was one contingency that he didn’t have to take into account – what if anything’s possible?

(Appeared in the New Indian Express Sunday Supplement on 03 September, 2006)