Manish Vij

The second coming of the Jesus phone

Manish Vij — Tue, 07 August 2007 14:34:53 -0500

The iPhone is as much a letdown for this longtime Apple fan as the man hands of Seinfeld’s hot date. I was primed to love this shiny precious, to gently nudge its ovoid edges into my technological nest. I even switched mobile phone companies and, on the weekend of the iPhone’s release, trooped down to the Apple store to see my baby-to-be.

What I saw quenched my affection. The iPhone’s design is a triumph of flashiness over usability. At every point, the designers chose chrome over day-to-day use. I can understand why they did it: to create sexy demos and to justify the iPhone’s stratospheric price. But sheer lickability won’t sate your appetite.

The iPhone’s keyboard-free design is useless for high-speed typing. Forget about using your thumbs. Even hunt ‘n peck with the on-screen keyboard takes spellcheck on steroids just to get you to George Bush fluency. Trusting AutoCorrect is like trusting your airbags: they’re supposed to be a last resort.

Those claiming to have reached 100% accuracy on the iPhone’s virtual keyboard are either yoga masters or liars. At best, your email will look like it was typed by a mentally-challenged gerbil. And that is nit wjat yiu wsnt. (Sent from my iPhone.)

Then there’s Steve Jobs’ jihad against labels. One of the top iPod support issues was reportedly how to turn it on. Not only is the iPhone’s power button not labeled, neither is the silent mode switch. They’re just baffling little strips of smug black plastic floating in a silver sea, thinner and more stylish than you’ll ever be.

The phone doesn’t start with the numeric keypad you expect. Instead, it begins in a dashboard cluttered with sixteen garish, full-color icons advertising useless functions like weather. If you’re walking around with your mobile phone, you probably already know whether it’s raining.

What you really want is to get to your friends’ phone numbers. But the iFlash foils you again: you can’t jump to ‘Steve’ by typing the first two letters of his name. Instead, you have to go to your S’s and then scroll through all of them by flicking. The same is true when setting an appointment in the future. You can’t just choose the next year; instead you have to rotate what looks like slot machine wheels, one month at a time. This is apparatchik, not iChic.

The iPhone’s wide-screen Web browser promises great things. But it loads Web sites with an illegible thumbnail. Tap on an article, and you’re dumped again into a 50,000-foot snapshot rather than the text of the story. It takes four taps – browser, zoom, story, zoom – to accomplish anything useful.

The ad campaign for the iPhone makes much of its pinch and open gestures for zooming. But in real life, they’re sloppy and prone to triggering nearby hyperlinks. As I tried zooming in on an online map, the mushiness of the pinch left me longing for a plain old slider.

The much-hyped Cover Flow feature, a slick way to scroll through album art, is pointless and undiscoverable. It’s pointless because, as Apple’s own iTunes has proven, music buyers now think of music as tracks rather than albums. It’s undiscoverable because to start this feature, you enter music mode, scratch your head, read the manual, and then turn the iPhone 90 degrees on its side. Trust Apple to design a feature so non-intuitive, it makes a Moroccan souk look friendly.

The iPhone designers deserve kudos for reimagining the smart phone for those handicapped by loss of stylus. We smartphone users roam our cities substituting a finger for a point, a pose much in vogue when commenting on blogs. We are the walking wounded, and we are everywhere. But you can’t select text precisely with the stub of your meaty finger, and thus the iPhone omits even cut ‘n paste. In the pursuit of gloss, Apple has pared actual usefulness to the cuticle.

The first attempt at an iPhone is as over-ambitious as Apple’s earlier flop, the Newton. It’s the second coming of the Jesus phone which I await.

Hello again

Manish Vij — Thu, 18 May 2006 04:54:45 -0500

Check Ultrabrown.com in ~4 days. Come, Watson, the game is afoot.

New blogging software

Manish Vij — Fri, 16 September 2005 11:53:46 -0500

Check out my new blog editor, RocketPost. I’ve used it to publish this blog for the last year. A blog editor is like a word processor that publishes to your blog. If you’ve ever lost a post because your browser crashed, you should use one.

RocketPost uploads photos automatically and checks spelling. It also lets you link to old posts quickly, adds source cites to quotes, links to Google, Wikipedia and Flickr quickly, adds those big, fat pullout quotes and so on. I use it to post to our group blog and this one at the same time.

If you’re a friend, email me and I’ll hook you up with a free copy. Otherwise, it’s totally free if you use Blogger. It also works with Movable Type and WordPress, and TypePad is coming soon. It’s Windows only, but we’re looking for a good Mac developer.

This frickin’ thing has been my personal project for a year and a half. It’s my nerd novel, my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the blogosphere. Please check it out and tell all your blogging friends!

Hipsterville

Manish Vij — Fri, 16 September 2005 05:02:32 -0500

My Brooklyn ‘hood is on the water facing Manhattan. Aside from being musician central, Williamsburg is a half-blue collar, half-gentrifying neighborhood with four ethnicities: Polish-stan, Hasidic-stan, Latino-stan and Hipsterville (Diesel denim with red stitching, messenger bag in earth tones, fauxhawk bed-head and a big gay belt buckle). It’s also got a high PQ (poseur quotient.) I swear upon your grandma’s shriveled National Geographics that I’ve seen people sell pink trucker hats by the subway entrance with an airbrushed ‘Bitch’ on the front.

Sometimes you run into desis with pierced eyebrows and mutton-chop sideburns. You know those signs on Disneyland rides, ‘You must be this tall to ride?’ The L train has a sign, ‘You must be this hip to move here.’ I’m totally dragging down the curve as a stealth sinc duppie (single-income-no-colonialism desi-urban-professional). Tonight a thin brown girl in a black sack dress rode a big Huffy with wide handlebars down the sidewalk, the kind of bike you see in pre-WWII photos. We exchanged subtle, curious glances while trying not to let the other intrude on our indie brown singularity.

· · · · ·

It’s a fun ‘hood — families dancing salsa in their dry cleaning shops, a charismatic revival church which plays Arlo Guthrie and saves souls in Spanish, nice Hasidic landlords in curls who refuse to shake women’s hands, hipsters exclaiming, ‘You’ve never heard of Death Cab for Cutie?’ on the sidewalks, family-owned Polish wine shops, Latino families chilling on stoops and sidewalks in folding chairs and hammocks, communal roofs, polished wine shops and snarky film buff video stores cheek-by-jowl with Latino squids congregating around customized R1s with spinner wheels. A couple of weeks ago someone wrote the following sign in fat black marker on three sheets of sketch paper duct-taped to the wall: ‘We found a cow skull on the roof. If you want it back, come to apartment 3J. We’ve put a rope around her neck and named her.’ (pause) ‘We hope the new name doesn’t mess with her head.’

Williamsburg is in major gentrification clash. My building, a converted munitions factory, has nice lofts but is next to a vacant lot with Scary Drunken Camper Man living out of a pickup. The lobby is fighting a losing battle against graffiti, and the outside has already lost (it looks great), but we’ve also got Victoria’s Secret models who stumble home drunk. One emaciated giraffe in a minidress apologized loudly to her friends for the way we dressed. ‘Sorry, it’s Brooklyn, it’s jean land,’ she whinnied. We sniggered as we left the elevator. Like a picador, a black girl stabbed back: ‘Shit, this is Brooklyn. She might as well paste “victim” across her forehead.’

· · · · ·

This year was my building’s maiden Fourth of July. On the left, the Brooklyn Bridge stood in silhouette against the fireworks; on the right, a water tower sat like a squat, ’50s toy spaceship against the rockets’ red glare.

Earlier, the landlord had distributed a letter banning roof parties. But that same evening, there were at least four hundred people on the roof barbecuing, drinking beer, yelling ‘USA,’ ‘God Save the Queen,’ ‘O Canada’ and ‘Don’t Mess With Texas!’ People even found their unlikely way atop the little hut capping the stairwell. And, inevitably, tagged it with graffiti.

A bat flew by erratically overhead. Someone spotted it and yelped. Robin, is that you? There were new fireworks this year: cubes, tesseracts, spheres with horizontal green planes inside. The smiley faces, as always, were a hit.

U2 and Cartier-Bresson

Manish Vij — Fri, 16 September 2005 04:59:17 -0500

I just realized that U2 recreated this iconic Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph, ‘Madride,’ in their video for ‘Mysterious Ways,’ or at least filmed in a similar location.

The ‘Mysterious Ways’ video:

Business schools prove they’re tech-illiterate

Manish Vij — Tue, 31 May 2005 02:10:42 -0500

A few months ago, some b-school applicants stumbled across a fascinating post on a BusinessWeek message board. The post explained how change the address in your Web browser while using a grad school application site to find out whether you were admitted:

The instructions told people to log onto their admissions Web page and find their identification numbers in source material that was available on the site. By plugging those numbers into another Web page address, they were directed to a page where their admissions decision would be found.

This security hole was a rookie mistake — all Web developers knows it’s bad programming to rely on easily-changed Web addresses. These instructions were the equivalent of being in the dean’s office and peeking at your admission file lying open right on top of her desk. As ethics issues go, this is thin gruel, akin to using your neighbor’s WiFi for a day or getting a parking ticket.

A few hundred applicants forwarded the instructions among themselves and followed them. For the pecadillo of visiting a Web site, the mainstream press and b-schools labeled them ‘hackers.’ Harvard summarily rejected them; surprisingly, so did MIT and Stanford, tech-friendly schools which should know better.

The applicants who were proactive enough to check their application status early are mavericks, not hackers. They should be applauded, not censured. They’re the go-getters who aggressively eliminate uncertainty like good ops types. They’re the people who route around traffic jams instead of just sitting there like cattle to the abbatoir. I suppose b-schools are doing what they do best: selecting and breeding unexceptional middle managers. Were I hiring MBA’s, these people would be at the top of my stack rank.

Marrying age

Manish Vij — Sat, 30 April 2005 12:01:33 -0500

I cringe at many a desi village custom. It’s thoroughly depressing that some Indian girls are still being married off by age 12:

When the teacher read out the Hindi-language alphabet in the modest two-room village school, Munni, 9, held her textbook in one hand and rocked her wailing 3-year-old brother with the other... even with the free meals, girls often drop out of school. They "have to help the family during the harvest season or look after the younger siblings," Ahmad said. "Girls also get married quite early. It is very difficult to retain them because education is not a priority." Munni's mother acknowledged as much. "She is our firstborn and we will marry her in about three years," she said. "She can study until then."

That age is suspiciously coincidental with the age of menarche. The obsession with female virginity obscenely reduces half the world to a box of disposable tissues with a faulty seal:

[A]s Thomas Aquinas once noted, the generative power of the Holy Ghost pierced the Virgin's hymen 'like a ray of sunshine through a window--leaving it unbroken.'

(The Immaculate Conception is a heck of a convenient explanation. ‘We’ve got to get Mary to be saintly. Hmm, how do we rescue her from the messiness of actual sex and original sin...’ There are lots of these little elisions in all religions. Krishna stole the gopis’ clothes, but their relationship was purely chaste, wink wink.)

But we’re not alone. The nice thing about Jehovah’s Witnesses was reading the Bible and thinking, holy shit, their stories are just as surreal as ours. The advantage of moving to New York is governors named Cuomo and Pataki and apartments whose prices go up the closer they are to ethnic neighborhoods with good food. The wonderful thing about travel is figuring out the ethnic origins of white-bread American words. Johnson is analogous to Johannsdottir, Smith came from Schmidt, pariahs and polo chukkers are straight-up deshi. Ethnic is the new white, from public school taunting to downright posh.

Today the NYT reminds us Neanderthal marriage customs are not a uniquely desi shame, they’re tribal:

More than half of Kyrgyzstan's married women were snatched from the street by their husbands in a custom known as "ala kachuu," which translates roughly as "grab and run." ... at least a third of Kyrgyzstan's brides are now taken against their will. Kyrgyz men say they snatch women because it is easier than courtship and cheaper than paying the standard "bride price," which can be as much as $800 plus a cow.

This in particular is reminiscent of desi village culture:

Once a girl has been kept in the home overnight, her fate is all but sealed: with her virginity suspect and her name disgraced, she will find it difficult to attract any other husband... "Every good marriage begins in tears," a Kyrgyz saying goes.

It’s always bothered me the way the doli / vidai in a Hindu wedding ends in tears. Here you are on the eve of marrying someone you love and are starting a family with — it’s a muharrat, not a funeral. Some of the tears are genuine, but I suspect many more are of the crocodile variety, the spigot turned for sake of tradition. I have no use for these tears, just as I have no use for the Kabuki show that is hired wailers at wakes.

At its heart it’s a submission ritual: the baraatis have stormed the gates, the bride has been caught, the doli is her broken surrender, carried off in a palanquin to the conqueror’s harem. ‘Dilwale dulhaniya le jayenge’: it’s Alexander entering Babylon, Hulagu entering Baghdad.

Actually surrendering to your significant other is deeply intimate. It’s neither the beseeching supplicant on bended knee nor the teleprompter bride.

The talented Mr. Rupinder

Manish Vij — Tue, 26 April 2005 15:20:35 -0500

Yesterday, while walking through Williamsburg (official neighborhood motto: ‘We’re Hipper than You’), I ran into a blonde wearing a flowy top, blue jeans and a reflective red teardrop bindi. She had an American accent.

In a rambunctious Meatpacking District bar, I met a woman whose parents were German. She was tall, brown-haired and fair and had grown up in India. She had a Delhi accent.

At a self-storage business, I met a manager who looked black. He had a courtly manner and a delightful accent, and his nametag said Seetram (Sitaram). He was surprised and pleased when I guessed Guyanese.

In college, the hardest partier in the entire coed dorm was a girl from a wealthy Bombay family. We’d always see pot smoke curling out the bottom of her door and hear inflated stories about her extracurriculars. She once told me, ‘English is my native language, yaar. I can hardly speak Hindi.’ She had that aggressive Bombay accent, the hard one used by young men on the make, not the singsong one nor the Marathi tapori.

On Fifth Avenue, an older Spaniard once accosted me for directions. I switched into passable Spanish; she looked at me as if I were a curio under glass. ‘¡Ay, Lupe, vea qué bien habla!’ she told her companion. ‘¡Y es Hindú!’ Hindoo, always Hindoo. In Spanish, my accent is light. I walk up to a bodega, they address me in Spanish, and if the exchange is short enough they’re none the wiser.

In Barcelona, a middle-aged cab driver with a rich baritone guessed I was Latin American, narrowing it down to either México or Costa Rica. He was very good, because I had picked up my Spanish from a costarricense teacher in a California high school. In his mind, the Hindú bit was of least importance.

In New York cabs, if you can pull out authentically-accented Hindi or Punjabi, you’ll not only bond with the driver, some sardarjis will even refuse payment. They’ll say they figured you for whitewashed, but since you speak the mother tongue... You press the fare upon them anyway and walk away happy.

In 1993 I rode my motorcycle from San Francisco to Seattle and back, pausing overnight at a remote motel in Crescent City near the California-Oregon border. The motel owner was happy to hear Hindi. It’s a pity I didn’t have Gujarati in my repertoire for that extra discount.

Congratulations, Mr. Rupinder. You’ve successfully passed just this once. But you’re only as good as your last con.

Religious pandering

Manish Vij — Sat, 02 April 2005 21:43:46 -0500

In case there anyone still doubts whether the U.S. is a religious majoritarian nation, the current NYT home page devotes around 90% of its primary news coverage (marked in yellow) to more than 18 stories about the death of the pope.

The deathwatch itself was Schiavo-ish in its intensity. Did he speak a word at the window? Did he not speak a word at the window?

Just let the poor man go. Don’t create a cult of personality, don’t go all Mayan and fetishize him as a living representative of the sun god. The ecclesiastical handlers trying to smokescreen his frailty in his later years rivaled those of Dubya.

He was just an old man trying to do his best, rest his soul.

‘Love’ kills me: ‘Fatal Love’ at the Queens Museum

Manish Vij — Mon, 28 February 2005 00:50:53 -0500

Diaspora narcissist that I am, I just had to be at the first South Asian American art exhibit at a major museum that I’ve ever heard of.

And oh, the things I’ve seen. I saw a photo of a naked desi man smeared in Vaseline sprawled cockily across a green vinyl chair. I saw a self-portrait in cow dung with an LED in Hindi that spelled out ‘Bihari.’ I walked into an inflatable, 20-foot-tall man-organ through a red slit in front. I saw a hijra in a skin-tight salwar shaking his boobs to old songs and cheers. I saw a queer Rani of Jhansi, she of the Mutiny, played by Chitra Ganesh and lying dead in snow. I saw a six-yard sari made of Coca-Cola bottlecaps, silver with an orange border. I saw a wall of crimson medicine bottles called ‘Blame’: blame a minority, you’ll feel better in the morning.

I saw a book of memory by a Malayalee daughter, Annu Matthew, who must’ve loved her daddy like Anna loved hers. Her father had died young of smoking. She collaged her childhood snaps into new photos, painting her own Pygmalion paternis. Then she surrounded her false memories with tobacco strewn on cigarette paper like ashes.

I saw quite a witty painting executed by Siona Benjamin, a Jew originally from Bombay. It was done in Islamic miniature style, yet it was large; she toyed with scale like Alice on mushrooms. It had a Hindu-like deity, though it was of Islamic style; a blue figure who was a woman, not Krishna; Hebrew inscriptions instead of Urdu. The woman was painted head-on, not in profile; in a peaceful pose while cradling ammunition; in a pose of power, but with a blooming chest wound. And it was a day for commingling: Shahzia Sikander showed a relaxed animation of demons and deities from Christian, Hindu, Muslim and Asian Buddhist traditions flying together around a Mughal palace.

I ran into Kal Penn and asked him how he’ll play a super-henchman. ‘Dude, I haven’t even seen the script yet,’ he said. But he remembered the Harold hungama. Boy, did he ever. He was in celeb-out-for-groceries attire, a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes; he’s taller and thinner than he looks on screen.

I teased Suketu Mehta by telling him I read the maximum book, flew to the maximum city and still couldn’t find his vada pav idol, Borkar sahib. ‘Juhu Beach is rubbish,’ he said. ‘Borkar is in the downtown area.’ Although he lent the show its purplish name, he’s as modest in person as his usual prose.

Against great odds... we the peoples of the Subcontinent love each other. It is an adulterous love, an illicit love. When we want to live together safely, it has to be outside, in some other country, in someone else’s house... We are ready to kill for love.

And I ran into a couple of friends enjoying the wine and paneer. Anuvab Pal held forth on the kitschy villainy of Bollywood; he goes weak-kneed for monocles, molten lava and undersea lairs. Mitra Kalita showed off her adorable new baby and boosted her husband’s oil works. Anjali Malhotra’s film subject quoted a friend who said the unexpected: Imagine how bad the motherland would’ve been if a Shi’a had bombed a Sunni mosque — so what’s happening to Muslims in the U.S. is ok. ‘It’s like saying my neighbor slaps his son three times, so let me slap you one time.’

Outside the museum, Shea Stadium and the World’s Fair site were wintry carcasses. The Unisphere, its fountains drained, hung without an Atlas. I stood below the Indian plate, staring up at the stainless-steel underbelly of America.

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