Silence *is* golden

Laurie and I are back to being the only people in the house 🙂 Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed having our niece and nephew over but it’s almost impossible to get any writing done with "Pooh’s Heffalumph Movie" or "George of the Jungle" or even "Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" playing in the background. Instead of being transported to the world of my story, I end up in the jungle with George, telling him to watch out for that tree :p

Now that we are all alone, I’m able to go back to the world of my story and imagine things as they should be. I’ve already got about a page done today. The story is a long ways away from being done. I just started on it and am on the third page at the moment. However, I’m kind of hoping that I’ll get this one done much faster now that I can concentrate fully on it.

Sometimes I find myself wondering if it is worth it to write another story when I haven’t sold the first one – my first short story (at least my first in a long time and the first one I seriously wanted to consider publishing) is still out there. I have not heard from the people I submitted it to yet but then again, they did mention that it would take about three month’s for a response. I guess I could simply sit there waiting to see what the response would be but I just don’t feel like doing that 🙂

If this was a novel, I probably would be more concerned. A novel takes a lot more time and effort to write and I just don’t see the point in going to all that effort if it is not likely to go anywhere. Sure, the main reason for writing must be for oneself – if you don’t enjoy writing, then you shouldn’t be doing it. But on the other hand, I can enjoy the stories in my head without going to all the trouble of putting them down on paper :p So the only reason to put them down on paper would be if there is a possibility that others might enjoy it too 🙂 But then again, that’s just me …

Anyway, the new short story is humming along and hopefully, I can get it done by about the end of the week. I still have no idea where this story is going. All I know so far is what will happen in the next two or three pages. Once those events actually transpire, the characters will decide where it goes next 🙂

Things to do and places to be

Today is my off day but unfortunately, it doesn’t look as if I will have much time to rest or relax :p There’s quite a few things that I need to get done and we also have to go out today. First, there is the server that I’m setting up for a friend. That’s kind of set up with Apache, PHP and mySQL but I want to do some changes to the SMTP and POP daemons and I still haven’t got around to doing that.

Then there are some site changes that I’m contemplating 🙂 Yesterday I realized that my writing page needed more stuff in there. I only had a few lines on the books I’m working on at the moment but nothing about all the stuff that I’ve published so far. So I started work on modifying the page and adding a lot more information but that’s going rather slowly 🙂 I’ve managed to set up separate pages for my fiction and non-fiction, to put up a few samples of fiction I’ve published so far and that was about it. I still need to complete the non-fiction page but that’s a pretty large task by itself since I have had around five or six regular columns at one time or another – not to mention all the other miscellaneous articles that I’d done. So the non-fiction page is going to need some work 🙂

Then there is the fact that my niece and nephew are leaving today. We’ll have to take them over the airport, see them off and so on. Since it’s an hours trip to the airport and an hour back, that’s probably going to take care of the whole afternoon. And that’s my whole day gone for today and I start work tomorrow again. Ah, to have a five day week instead of a six day one! I long for the days when I used to work only five days a week :p

Things to do and places to be …

With people in the house (rather than just the two of us) the days are blending into one rapid blur which is becoming rather alarming in a way. We left on Friday morning (since Friday is my day off) for a bout of shopping and did not return till late in the day on Friday. I think we bought over 60 DVD’s in one day alone :p The rest of the day was spent in simply cataloguing all the DVD’s we’d bought.

Yesterday went by so fast that I didn’t even have time to turn around. I didn’t make my usual blog entry because I just didn’t have the time and then on top of it all, I’ve been falling behind on my writing as well. It’s really hard to concentrate with the TV blaring on one side, a child asking questions and so many things going on around you. I really envy Louis L’Amour who said that he could sit in the busiest plaza in the world, have hist typewriter on his knee and be able to hammer out a story :p Actually, I’ve done something similar and so, I guess the problem isn’t crowds but having people around that know you and can interrupt you 🙂

Today’s been another whirlwind day and I have only been up for a couple of hours! A friend of mine is getting a new dedicated server for his site and he’s been kind enough to invite me (at least the virtual me :p) to take residence on his server. I’m still not certain when/if I will move but I’ve been working on setting up his server, ensuring things are shipshape and generally making sure that it will be secure and functional. That’s been taking up a bit of time since yesterday. I still am in the process of doing some of the stuff there and have some questions about a few things since this is a slightly different environment than I’m used to. So lots of stuff to do but not much in the way of writing :p

Lessons of life

What exactly do we teach our kids? That’s what I find myself wondering at times. OK, I don’t wonder that all the time but recently, I’ve had more occasion to wonder about this than usual :p We have our nephew and niece staying with us for a couple of weeks at the moment. Ike, our nephew, is five years old and so, he gives me plenty of things to think about 🙂

This latest train of thought was set off on its merry way when Ike was watching a movie. Now Ike’s mother and sister have a habit of covering his eyes when a "bad part" comes up in the movie. This is not usually Ike’s choice mind you – they just decide what they think is something that will scare him and then cover his eyes. Or tell him to cover his eyes. It made me wonder what he actually thinks about all of this and what goes through his mind when his eyes are covered?

Personally, I think it would be more terrifying for me to have my eyes covered and not to know what is going on. I’d be imagining all sorts of horrible things going on on the screen – much worse than what was actually happening. But then again, I have a really vivid imagination :p

The thing is, what are we most afraid of? I think what we fear the most is what is unknown. Which probably also explains why a lot of us fear the dark and death :p Wouldn’t it be better to know what is going on on the screen and to let understanding illuminate the dark corners of our imagination rather than to have our eyes covered and not to know what actually is going on? I would think so. But then again, most "adults" don’t seem to think this is an option. Perhaps because they always live under the impression that children are somehow less capable of dealing with emotions and new sensations than the "adults" are – shows how much they know :p

Powerless to act …

We lost power yesterday in the morning and I couldn’t work. A couple of days before that, the ADSL connection went out and when I called them up, they said that it would take about 5 hours to fix it. Today, the ADSL connection is up but it seems to be on the fritz – downloads stop after a while and I have to restart the whole thing all over again. This seems to be a general fact of life here in Sri Lanka – breakdowns happen and they happen often. And of course, you can’t do anything much about it.

Things didn’t seem to be so bad – or at least, the rosy glow of memory is misting up all the bad stuff :p But these days, everything seems to be reaching a pinnacle where breakdowns, laziness and sheer indifference is creating an untenable situation. But of course, when you live in a country and things appear to become this bad, what can you do? I don’t want to move anywhere else. I like Sri Lanka. Can you try to change the country itself? That is an interesting mental exercise but I am not sure how well it would work in practical terms :p

I don’t know about the ADSL situation but at least the power related issues are only in this particular area. My parents live about 15-20 minutes away and they don’t have as much trouble with power outages and such as we do. Maybe we should consider moving over there if this continues to happen but then there are issues with that as well … but isn’t there always some issue? Seems to be a fact of life – at least, you can’t complain that life’s boring :p

Cartoons and chaos

I have been staying away from commenting on this issue because I don’t believe I can be totally objective in my commentary. My religion is close to my heart and while I would try to be objective in my commentary, I can’t be a 100% certain that I was totally and completely objective in what I said. However, I went to mosque yesterday for Friday prayers and the sermon included references to the whole cartoon row and I must say that I totally disagreed with some of the comments by the Imam of the day and felt I had to write this here just so that there are opinions to the contrary – opinions which hopefully present a more balanced view.

Firstly, one of the tenets I believe Muslims should live by are words straight from the Qur’an – specifically Surah Al Kafiroon.The verses basically say, "you believe what you believe and I/we believe what we believe, you have your path and I/we have my/our path". This, to me at least, is one of the central rules of guidance for Muslims – both in dealing with others of different faith as well as other Muslims who decide to take a different path. We cannot try to enforce our ways, our beliefs on others nor does God want us to. Faith, any faith, is about belief – it might be belief in God, belief in an afterlife, belief in rebirth, belief that there is nothing after death but it is about some form of belief. This belief is personal to us. So why would we go worrying about what others say or do regarding our beliefs? Their beliefs (and actions) are theirs. Unless they forcibly try to stop us from believing what we believe or somehow try to coerce us into believing what they believe, what they do should not have any impact on what we believe. We should, as Muslims (and human beings), learn to co-exist with those of other beliefs because none of us will ever believe the same thing – even amongst Muslims, you have differences in belief. So why cry about the differences in belief that somebody else has?

Yesterday’s sermon started with something good. About the fact that yesterday, the 10th day of the first month according to the Islamic calendar, was a holy day for Muslims, Christians and Jews alike. Now I don’t know if this still is the case – this particular incident which was related was from the prophet’s (PBUH) time. At that time, both Christians and Jews had fasted on this day because that was the day Moses had led the children of Israel out of Egypt and defeated the forces of Pharaoh. This again illustrated something that I strongly believe in – whether Muslims, Christians or Jews, we believe in the same God We all believe in the God of Moses, so unless there were three separate Moseses, we believe in the same God! So whether it’s prophet Mohammed (PBUH) or Jesus or Moses getting caricatured, we should be equally offended. (Yes, I realize that there are other issues in the case of a depiction of the prophet (PBUH) but again, that falls under your beliefs/my beliefs).

Where the preacher diverged from Islamic tenets, (in my opinion of course) was when he started with such a good foundation and then went on to say that we should do what we can to oppose those who publish the cartoons by boycotting their goods. If he’d built upon what he’d started, said that we all follow the same God and that while there might be those who might do stupid things either for the sake of publicity, stirring things up or simply because they believe they are doing the right thing, that what we had to keep in mind was that our faith was ours and that we couldn’t force anybody else to believe what we did, I would have agreed wholeheartedly with him. But he didn’t say that. In a way, I’m glad that Islam does not have a clergy – because probably a lot more people would have blindly accepted what he said because he was "authority" if we’d had a clergy.

As far as I’m concerned, Muslims have three God given things that dictate our path – the Qur’an, the prophet’s (PBUH) hadeeth and our brains. We should try to interpret the first two using the last and decide our course of action instead of being told by somebody else what is right and what is wrong. If we all learned to do that, we’d have far fewer problems from Muslims as a group both within the Muslim community and outside. But again, being human, I am not sure we’ll ever get there …

Releases, bugs and other stuff ….

I released the next beta of WriteTrack yesterday. I’d been working to get the features sorted out for the last couple of days and I was finally satisfied enough with it to do a release. There was one major feature outstanding when I did the last beta – the ability to track income and expenses on your writing projects. I got that sorted out and I also fixed a lot of minor usability issues since I’ve been actively using it during the last couple of days to transfer over all my old tracked submissions from the Excel spreadsheet I was using into WriteTrack. It’s only when you use something that you figure out what doesn’t work and what can be improved 🙂 I still want a few minor features added to the app but I think it is more or less ready for a 1.0 release as long as nobody finds any major bugs in this beta.

Speaking of bugs, there has been a bug which has been irritating me in a major way and unfortunately, it’s not something that I can fix. The bug is with my banking system :p My bank is HSBC and they are probably one of the bigger banks in Sri Lanka, what with being an international bank and all. They have an Internet banking service where I can check balances, do transfers, pay bills etc and I find this very useful since I don’t leave the house much. I usually pay my rent via the Internet banking system but at the end of last month when I tried to make my usual transfer (the same transfer that I’d done for six months before) I was presented with an error message.

I call their customer support service and a Customer Support Rep (CSR) takes down the details of the issue and promises that they’ll call back the next day to let me know the resolution. The next day comes and goes, no call. I try the system again, it still doesn’t work. So I call them again. The same CSR takes the call, says that she’ll talk to the relevant people and they’ll get back to me and the next day comes, nothing again and the system still does not work. I call again. A different CSR this time and she says that the Internet banking department looked at it, that the problem wasn’t in their department and that it has been escalated to networking and that they’d "definitely" get back to me the next day.

We were out most of the day the next day but I didn’t get a call on my mobile nor were there any messages on the answering machine when we got back. It was too late to call by then and it being Friday, I couldn’t do anything over the weekend either. I call on Monday and get another CSR, I tell her the issue and tell her that I had not heard anything from them after repeated promises of calls. She escalates it to a "senior colleague" who is courteous and says she understands and that the matter will be dealt with and that I’d hear from them before 5 o’clock. True to her word, she does call back around 3 o’clock and says that it looks like a technical issue at their end and that it has been escalated to IT and that I’ll hear from them by the next day, which was yesterday.

End of day yesterday, still nothing from HSBC. I try the system again in the hope that they fixed it but didn’t call me. It still doesn’t work. So I call their support line and ask for a manager. I get to a manager explain the situation to her and tell her that I find this rather unacceptable. She makes soothing noises, says that she understands and that I’ll hear back from them the next day – today. I’m hoping that they’ll prove me wrong and fix the issue and call me to say that they did it. But given the track record so far, I’m not taking any bets on it.

I do have two questions though – is it so hard to keep a customer informed if you are taking a long time to resolve the issue? I work in customer support, I know it’s not easy for the CSRs to do this and I don’t expect them to. But if the issue is escalated, shouldn’t whoever it was escalated to take the time to let the customer know? My second question is, what the heck is their IT department doing? It shouldn’t take them over a week to fix a simple issue like this, should it? Come on, even without knowing anything about their system, I think I can fix it within a day :p Ah well, such is life in Sri Lanka …

Memories are made of these …

I’m totally sleep deprived today :p We had a gathering of old college buddies yesterday. We all went to this boarding school and it was 30 years ago that we all met. Well, at least most of them did meet 30 years ago. I joined this particular school in grade 9 while most of the others had been there from grade 1. It is over 18 years ago since I last saw any of them.

Somebody had the idea recently that we should get together for the 30th anniversary of the fist meeting for most of them. So they organized everything and it was supposed to be an evening event and I was planning to go. Suddenly somebody changed plans and two days before the event I was told that it was to be an all day gathering and they were meeting up on Saturday (yesterday). Of course, the problem is that I couldn’t go since I had work. So, through the day I receive calls from various people that I hadn’t heard of in close to 20 years and we keep talking about the good old days.

They were supposed to be there till 6 o’clock and my work ended at 5 o’clock. So I promised them that I’d meet them there at 5 but that if they were to leave before then, they should all come over to our place since we were like 5-10 minutes from where they were meeting. Close to 5 o’clock I get a call saying that they are leaving and that they were coming over to my place. I figured that there’d be may be 10 people tops. Imagine my surprise when like 6-8 vehicles pull up and around 20-25 people get out!

It was a great reunion. Of course, in the midst of it all, my replacement for the next shift does not arrive. So I have all these guys sitting around staring at me while I sit there waiting for the replacement to arrive :p I finally had to call my manager and get him out of bed to take over the shift. By that time, the guys had left to go over to somebody else’s place. However, one of the guys stayed back, since we have no vehicle of our own, and took both Laurie and I to the other guy’s place after I finally got off work.

It was a fun evening. We talked about old college pranks, old friends who weren’t there due to one reason or another, recalled all the old nicknames and screamed ourselves silly. It was over all too soon though since some of these guys had travelled around 7-8 hours to get there and they had to get back the same night. We ended up going with the same friend who gave us the lift over to his house to meet his wife. Then they came back over to our place and we had a nice conversation which dragged on close to midnight. The upshot of it all is that I had a terrific evening yesterday but I’m so tired today :p

Back at the helm

We were gone for a couple of days since we went to stay with my parents. It was the Haj festival (the second of the two Muslim festivals but I think mentioned that already in my last post :p) yesterday and we’d been staying with my parents since day-before-yesterday. Since we didn’t take our computers with us and since my parents don’t have any form of high-speed access anyway, we wouldn’t have been online. It was nice to get away from everything and to get back with family. Besides, my sister was there with her kids (we hadn’t seen one of the kids since she’d been born) and since we hardly ever get a chance to see the nieces, it was a double (or triple) pleasure 🙂 Of course, what with all the playing, the carrying around of kids and the general running around, I am sore all over and sorely aware of the fact that I need to exercise more :p

It was good to get away from things as well. We’ll actually be going back to my parents’ place again today since today’s the last of the three days I have off. My parents live only about 15 minutes away and so we could have come back home the last couple of days as well but my parents like us staying with them (I have no idea why :p) and so we figured we might as well do so for at least a day. Of course, tomorrow I have to get back to work on things and I guess figure out what I need to do now.

I did get some feedback about WriteTrack but I haven’t had the chance to do anything since we were away from the computers. I’ll probably finish that up first and then start thinking about what needs to be done with Blog and get back to that next … or something :p

Perceptions

Isn’t it interesting that we don’t always see ourselves the same way as others see us? Or is that just another facet of human nature? I’m aware of the fact that our perception of ourselves (or how we think others see us) isn’t always the same as how other people actually view us. But I had not considered the fact that this could be true also of cultural or racial groups. The fact was brought home to me recently by a comment somebody made.

I had just written an article for a Sri Lankan travel magazine about the Muslims of Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka, to lay some background to this whole entry, is kind of strange in that the people here don’t consider themselves Sri Lankans. Instead, they usually consider themselves as parts of a different ethnic groups – the Sinhalese, the Tamils and the Muslims. To me, that’s the strangest way to go about being a nation because you are never a single whole but a sum of fractured parts, if that makes any sense :p But then again, I guess this same sense of fragmentation occurs in many nations, human beings being who they are, just not to this extent.

Anyway, as I said before, I wrote this article about the Muslims of Sri Lanka. I was asked to write the article since I am a Muslim myself. So I wrote it and I kept it totally factual – I researched the story thoroughly, though I knew most of the bare outlines, and laid out the story of the Muslims from the early days in Sri Lankan history to the present (well, not actually the present – most of the major historical stuff ended around the British colonial period but who’s counting, right? :p) The editor’s comment on reading the article was that it was good but "not what he’d expected". I was a bit surprised since I thought the story was fairly accurate, so I asked him what he’d expected thinking that I’d slipped up somewhere. He said that he’d expected a story replete with buriyani and watalappam.

Now for the confused, let me hasten to enlighten you. Buriyani is a rice-dish that Sri Lanka Muslims are famous for, in Sri Lanka. It’s actually an Indian dish but they call it biryani there, what do they know? They might have invented the dish (I don’t know if they actually did …) but they can’t go around naming stuff differently than us Sri Lankans now can they? :p It’s basically rice, meat (and sometimes potatoes – the recipe varies a bit) cooked together with spices and it tastes really good. Muslims usually have buriyani at weddings, festivals and other festive occasions and so buriyani has come to be identified with Muslims.

Watalappam is a dessert. It’s basically a jaggery pudding. But then I guess I have to go into what jaggery is :p It’s the solidified treacle from either the kitul or coconut palm and is really sweet. It’s like a big, brown, chunky block of sweetness 🙂 And watalappam is basically jaggery and eggs. Again, it’s considered a Muslim delicacy in Sri Lanka and most people agree that Muslims make the best watalappam.

So what has all this got to do with the article? From my perspective, nothing :p I didn’t really think of the Muslims as being identified by either buriyani or watalappam since that has nothing to do with who the Sri Lankan Muslims are, how they came to be in Sri Lanka and their involvement in Sri Lankan history or politics. On the other hand, the editor, being a non-Muslim, expected me to write about buriyani and watalappam because I was after all, a Muslim :p I just find the fact that we have such diverse perceptions of the Sri Lankan Muslims as a whole and find myself wondering, if another Sri Lankan Muslim had written the article, would s/he have written about buriyani?