As If Pluto Cares

This Thursday, 2,500 leading astronomers defined what a planet is and decided that Pluto (formerly the 9th and smallest planet) didn't make the grade. A planet today is a "celestial body that is in orbit around the Sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigit body forces so that it assumes a....Nearly round shape, and has cleared teh neighborhood around its orbit." Instead it will be reclassified in a new set of "dwarf planets." My brother skyped me hurriedly saying that his favorite planet is no more a planet.

But Pluto's gone nowhere. It's been there since the big bang or supposedly after. It may continue to be there or may not. It never knew that some group of "people" in some other neighboring piece of mass decided to call it so and later decided not to call it so. As it is scientifically accepted ("scientifically accepted" again sounds funny), time has limited significance in space (and hence the need for spacetime) - so Pluto could already be gone in our future (earth-future as defined by our limited quantification of time) and we may be now simply wasting our limited earth-time trying to bucket it into a planet and then not. This is true for most aspects that we and our scientists are trying get a handle on - the issue is with our limited understanding and not with our limitless Nature.

Hair, Blogs and Vlogs

It's always fun to be around someone who's just had the aha! One of the many I-don't-get-that type things that my wife does is to have her haircut at home (yes). Last I heard, my grandfather who worked with the bureaucratic British-Indian police force did that. She exactly knew what to do to keep me quiet - I also got some interesting haircut! And so that way I met Ehsaan, the hair stylist who ran away from his hometown Nagpur because his father would beat him up. While he didn't know how old he was ("may be 26, 27 or 28"), he distinctly remembered that it was 15 years since he had seen his mother and stayed in touch with only his brother. He came to Mumbai with nothing, figured he could give styling hair a try because his great grandfathers were hajaams, became really good at it and became a salonist. Now he works in the day at one of the premier salons in town and by evening visits his "special" customers at their homes to reach his monthly personal target of Rs.150,000 (~$3,000) or 120-150 clients.

In between applying white pasty chemicals on my wife's hair, he expressed his immense desire to get fluent in English, browse the Internet and get up to tech-speed for his elite clientele. The aha came when we talked about blogs and vlogs and what he could do with them (he's used to making portfolios using his camera phone) - he instantly got it and rambled with a dreamy daze - "I can view and read about the latest fashion trends in New York and Paris", "I can take appointments online", "I can also create a personal portfolio so my clients can pick the styles they want", "I can build relationships with stylists in Europe"....and so he went....

Are Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay the only hot Internet stories you know?!

Last weekend in Hyderabad, I was riding the city's new, smooth roads along with my parents. Somewhere close to Banjara Hills (aka Beverly Hills of Hyderabad or so they think), a big roulette board on a sign screamed at us: "Come, join the world's largest gaming company - PokerWorld" I already knew the story and narrated it much to my parents' fascination. Here it goes...

PartyGaming (operator of PokerWorld) is one the wildest Internet super success stories that no one talks about - it has offices only in Gibraltar and Hyderabad (yes!) and sells mostly to poker-addicts in the US. Global? Definitely. Big? Super huge. Online? Completely. It was started by a not so unknown one-time queen of Internet porn, Ruth Parasol. Very quickly.... her story goes that her dad (holocaust survivor Richard Parasol) used to own massage parlors in California. She completed her law degree - joined him and got into the phone sex business, then left him and started out on her own on Internet porn. After 1999, the poker business interested her. She found a desi IIT guy called Anurag to write the software for online poker. Anurag's software allowed 70,000 simultaneous players and she gave him 30% of the company. Launched only in 2001, the company quickly grew to $500M in profits by 2005. Today, Anurag Dikshit is worth $3.1billion - 10th richest Indian per Forbes Billionnaires. He roped in his buddy from IIT, Vikrant Bhargava who also made his millions. Dikshit is never openly seen associated with the business and has recently quit the board, sold some shares and even hides behind desks in the company's photos! It's believed that if they have to step into US shores, they risk being arrested. End of story.