I wrote this piece for Digantik.com in 2005.

Neither at the reasonably comfortable hotel room at Parvatipuram, nor when I am at the base camp of the team that takes a periodic trip to the hilly villages with the Mandal Revenue Officer some 18 kilometres from the town, does the realization of where we are going dawn on me. It is only when the jeeps can no longer cross the ditches and our path started getting ever more vertical that ‘the walk’ started. Our luggage, mostly containing edibles and filming equipment, was unloaded and the officials who we were travelling with led the way to what was to be the destination of our lifetime.

One afternoon, boredom brought back memories of watching B R Chopra’s Mahabharat on Doordarshan long ago. I remember hearing one story about the son of Hanuman. Yes! I know how it sounds. I told someone the same story some time ago and got, “Yeah sure! And I am Queen Elizabeth…” kind of responses. Whatever that might have been, here is the story - or what I remember of it.

Heights of Velahood or creative recreation. Make your call. But I honestly came to appreciate the cool of a Vampire as opposed to the skin ripping passion of a Werewolf. Look at it my way, a Vampire loves his job. Every being it bites into is a finger-licking treat. A Werewolf on the other hand, lives in constant dread of what he is. He turns into a power far superior to any that most mortals would ever have and is too taken by it to actually feel it.

Now there’s something that makes sense. I was beginning to wonder if it was only the Japanese that even had a modicum of appreciation for a moral machine’s potential. American Sci-Fi is always so “machines are going to kill us all.”

There are hundreds of thousands of machines today that can physically outperform human beings in particular tasks. Ever since IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov at chess in 1996, the mental task, too, has become academic. Obviously this fact does not make Deep Blue better than human. However, consider a machine that is morally superior to man; that, in my opinion, could qualify as a machine that is better than human, in fact, superior to mankind.

Oh mighty lazyweb, riddle me this. I like to frame people with my nifty little Nokia 3220 video camphone. Though it is one thing to easily MMS my JPEGs to the web and share the photos with the world, doing the same to videos taken is till something of a mystery to me.

The phone stores those files with a .amr extension. I have no clue what application a computer would require to be able to play them. Anyone who has a clue can share it with me please. I like clues. They make life worth living.

No really. Doesn’t the traditional way of doing it have something to do with chewing and swallowing? Who on Mars cares how you get to that stage? Personally, I have never been one of the masters of soo-aaa-vve. Forget about clean and mess-free handling of the spoon, fork, chopsticks, knives (and god knows what else they put next to the food to see what you can manage with your hands), getting those oversized burgers to fit in my mouth without slurping and splattering their ill-packed innards all over my civilized company is challenge enough.