Mousetrap - 145

As spoken in..
IDEA - The International Dialects Of English Archive
Two weeks ago, this column pointed to a site that served up a menu of common English words with their pronunciations in different parts of the world. This site, an archive that was started just over ten years ago, at the University Of Kansas in the USA, as ‘a repository of primary source recordings for actors and other artists in the performing arts.’ It is a sort of collaboration with the university’s Department of Theatre and Film and a global network of associate editors. It features recordings of one of two passages in English, with ‘both English language dialects and English spoken in the accents of other languages’ covered. You can download and play them for free.

Spare the rod
How Many Five Year Olds Could You Take in a Fight?
Another wee diversion—we need a life, yes?—dedicated to friends who swear they will never, ever, ever have children. Your results ‘are based on physical prowess, training, swarm-combatting experience, and the flexibility of your moral compass.’ But not to worry. All you’ll need to do is answer the questionnaire. But you’ll still need to steel yourself. The reward: a banner to display on your own site, with the number of brats you could take on filled in. (No real five-year-olds were harmed in the writing of this column. Promise. We love kids.)

Zz
Human Body and Mind - Sleep
As the good folk who put this page together will testify, your columnist has weird sleep patterns. The poor wee things get their copy in the pre-dawn hours if they’re lucky; otherwise it slides under the door just as the page needs to go to press. And one of the ways we keep tabs on our state of sleep deprivation is a li’l game on this microsite on sleep (part of the Beeb’s excellent Science & Nature section) which lets us shoot tranquilliser darts into virtual sheep as they gambol across the screen. It’s a test of reaction time, one of many tools and tests featured here that are designed to help you improve your sleep and your understanding of it. You can also get a personalised sleep profile, figure out your circadian rhythm, find out what foods keep you awake, read articles and more. See ya next week. We have sheep to put to sleep.

Reader suggestions welcome, and will be acknowledged. Go to http://o3.indiatimes.com/mousetrap for past columns, and to comment, or mail inthemousetrap@indiatimes.com. The writer blogs at http://zigzackly.blogspot.com.

Published in the Times of India, 20th April, 2008.

Tags: The Times of India, Mousetrap

Mousetrap - 144

The original Yahoo!
Shammi Kapoor
Way before David Filo and Jerry Yang named their ‘Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,’ this Indian film star had already made the word famous on this side of the world. But a lesser-known facet of the exuberant Mr Kapoor is that he was a net pioneer in this country (I’m told he is a founder and still chairman of Internet Users Community of India). This is probably the earliest personal website from a Hindi film star, certainly predating all the slick, commercially produced sites and allegedly personal blogs of today. He built the site himself, and it is dedicated to the Kapoor family. It hasn’t been updated since the late nineties, as far as I can figure, but it’s a wonderful insider look at that fascinating family, with photos of them in their pomp (and also of some of our current sensations in rather more rotund avatars). For a slightly more up-to-date look at Shammiji’s life, check out this fan site.

Pardesi
Bollywoodbloggers
This column shares one thing with Amitabh Bachchan (aside from our distinguished good looks, natch). Which is that we don’t like the term ‘Bollywood.’ Well, okay, we can’t vouch for Mr B’s scorn—a vastly more connected friend told us of it—or the reasons thereof, but we dislike it because it is derivative, and we think it shouldn’t need to qualify itself against Hollywood. (End rant.) But we, the tall thespian and I, are in a small and shrinking minority. Because sites like this one (at last he gets to the point!) only institutionalise it the more. This one has no India roots as such. The bloggers are from Austria, the USA, Slovenia, Germany and South Africa and are linked by their transparently genuine affection for the popular Hindi film industry (yeah, okay, it is a mouthful). It’s ‘about International Bollywood Community. We write about difference and same views about indian cinema in different countrie. This place is to make bollywood fandome international.’ Aside from regular posts on films, the team also passes around a Shah Rukh Khan doll, which they photograph in a variety of locations, and track via a Google Map.

Tracks
The Indian Railways Fan Club
Here’s another fan site, for a rather different Indian institution, the good old railways. With apex fares and budget airlines, many of us haven’t been on a train for yonks. But for your columnist, a rail journey has always been ‘real travelling.’ And these railfans (as they call themselves) think so too. This site grew from a mailing list back in the eighties, started by a group of railfans in Amercian universities (hence the ‘A’ in the URL), the contents of which were later archived by several members before being brought together here. You’ll find ‘anything and everything having to do with trains in India!’ Routes and timetables, technical stuff, history, travelogues, photographs, video and audio, simulations, screensavers and more. Lalooji would be pleased. (But no, it’s not connected with the Indian Railways at all.)

Reader suggestions welcome, and will be acknowledged. Go to http://o3.indiatimes.com/mousetrap for past columns, and to comment, or mail inthemousetrap@indiatimes.com. The writer blogs at http://zigzackly.blogspot.com.

Published in the Times of India, 13th April, 2008.

Tags: The Times of India, Mousetrap

Mousetrap - 143

Tomahto / Tomayto
Sound Comparisons
‘England and America are two countries separated by a common language,’ said that caustic wit, George Bernard Shaw. And in My Fair Lady, the Broadway and Hollywood musical version of his Pygmalion, Henry Higgins says, the various accents used just in the UK, ‘One common language I’m afraid we’ll never get.’ American accents also differ widely from region to region, and, now, with English pretty much the world’s connecting language, the accents that come into play are mind-bogglingly diverse. This site has value, then, beyond the fun bit. You get a set of words, with recordings of the way they are pronounced in various parts of the world, which load as small mp3 files which play on mouseover. (There are also phonetic-transcripts of various defunct versions of the language, and sister sites that focus on other languages and their variations.) You’ll need a fairly decent browser and OS, a fastish net connection, and a sound card and speakers or headphones.

Mixed up
Will It Blend?
This site is a classic example of how to use the web to sell a product in a fun, non-intrusive way. The commerce angle is there all right, but the site went viral for its sheer lunacy. Its name tells the story. A gentleman in a lab coat asks the simple question: will it blend? He then tests the hypothesis with a food blender, what we call a mixie in India. And he performs his tests not just with fruit and vegetables, but with things like a garden hose, assorted plumbing hardware, a golf club, action figure toys, even electronic gadgets including—and this broke your columnist’s heart—an iPhone. All this in a section tagged ‘Don’t Try This At Home.’ Of course there’s another section called ‘Try This At Home’ which has more conventional uses of the blender, many of which would be quite easily within the capacity of your average mixie.

B.O.
Barack Obama Stole Your New Bicycle
A month ago, this column featured a site called ‘Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle,’ which took off on the feel-good vibes the USA presidential candidate seems to exhude. This one works just the same, except in reverse: every page refresh gives you fresh reasons why Obama is a bad idea. Less giggle-worthy then the original, we thought, and the database of ‘reasons’ seems smaller, but it’s worth a few minutes of idle clicking.

:)
Smiley
And to end, a smile for you. A smiley, to be precise, an emoticon, one of those things that make language purists either cringe or utter grim predictions on our return to the dark ages of illiteracy. The smiley celebrated it’s 25th anniversary last year (19 September, 1982; yes, it’s that old!), and is still going strong. What led to its ‘invention?’ Well, it was the good old days of the BBSes, and, in the words of its creator: ‘if someone made a sarcastic remark, a few readers would fail to get the joke.’ Which sometimes led to acrimony, and ‘caused some of us to suggest (only half seriously) that maybe it would be a good idea to explicitly mark posts that were not to be taken seriously. After all, when using text-based online communication, we lack the body language or tone-of-voice cues that convey this information when we talk in person or on the phone.’ Go read the whole story.

Reader suggestions welcome, and will be acknowledged. Go to http://o3.indiatimes.com/mousetrap for past columns, and to comment, or mail inthemousetrap@indiatimes.com. The writer blogs at http://zigzackly.blogspot.com.

Published in the Times of India, 6th April, 2008.

Tags: The Times of India, Mousetrap

Siteseeing - 17

ResponsibleTravel & The Responsible Tourism Awards

Responsible Travel is a bit of a thing with us, starting with hikes in the Sahyadris as a college student; the Adventurers and Mountaineers Club walked with a large bag, where all hikers were supposed to dump their garbage, on pain of ostracism. ‘Take nothing by memories, leave nothing but footprints’ and all that. So it was a delight to chance upon these sites. The first claims hand-picked listings for 270 tour operators, and they cover pretty much all of the planet and various preferences, ‘over 160 countries, 250 different types of activities.’ (Yes, 173 India holidays as of this writing.) And it’s not just agents and operators—we would not have bothered with the site if that was it—but a lot of accommodation-only options, even self-catered and volunteering opportunities. The site also features unedited user reviews of listed holidays to help you make your choices, and the ability to book holidays through them. RT also created and runs the awards site, a reflection of the need to honours best practices in responsible travel. The awards ‘recognise individuals, companies and organisations in the travel industry that are making a significant commitment to the culture and economies of local communities and are providing a positive contribution to biodiversity conservation.’ You’re too late to nominate entries to the 2008 awards, but you can check out previous winners and their accomplishments. Go green, my children.

Published in Outlook Traveller, April 2008.

Tags: Outlook Traveller, Siteseeing

Paul Theroux

In The Elephanta Suite, you examine the lives of visitors and tourists to India. Why did you choose to look at the outsiders? I chose Americans as the central characters in these stories because I cannot pretend to know much about the inner life of Indians. I have made the dramas of Americans abroad one of my obsessive subjects, and in this sense I am a great fan of the writing of Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky and many other works) and Graham Greene, whose characters are English but in alien surroundings.

You have travelled through India and Asia several times, including long train journeys. Could you tell us about your most unusual, most memorable experiences? I live and travel in the hope that I will meet someone — a trader, a desperate youth, an enigmatic woman, an Ancient Mariner, who will fix me with a glittering eye and say, “A strange thing once happened to me...” My travel books are full of such encounters. A man in Cambodia said to me last year, as an opening, “I did something in Siem Reap that I've never done before in my life...” See my new book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, for the whole story.

That’s the revisit of your classic The Great Railway Bazaar, retracing your steps through the countries you wrote about then? As I said, the book is called Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, and yes it is a revisiting. It was a tremendously enlightening experience. I was startled by the changes — in many countries, and in myself. I was also startled by the changelessness of — say — Burma. What is most striking is the materialism in India, SE Asia and China — places that, 35 years ago, were traditional societies, scraping along, are now countries full of rapacious consumers; not a happy sight, but perhaps inevitable. Where will it lead? Ask me in 20 years.

Have you seen any great travel writing from India? Vikram Seth’s From Heaven's Lake and Chaudhuri's Autobiography of an Unknown India both have a powerful sense of place and time. But much of Indian writing that I've seen is concerned with family life and seems to me more a sort of anthropology.

And any great travel writing about India? The obvious books are by Naipaul, Forster and others, but these describe surfaces and are probably very irritating to Indians — as irritating as books by Indians on American life, which, to me, are full of howlers.

You're off to lead a workshop with travel-writers-in-the-making at Madras/Chennai. Do you often do that kind of thing? People who conduct workshops often say that they wind up learning as much as the participants. Do you find that true for you? I very seldom do this sort of thing, which is why I volunteered. I wanted to meet unpublished writers and to read what they'd written. A lucky teacher learns from his or her students and when they stop learning it's time to find a new job.

Are you still haunted by Sir Vidia's Shadow? Is the catharsis complete? Not haunted at all. The book remains one of my favorites and I feel blessed that I met Naipaul when I was young, that I knew him well and that the friendship ended, so that I could write about it. I have moved on, and so has he. I look forward to Patrick French's biography — out in the few months.

Published in Outlook Traveller, in a section called 'Fellow Traveller,' April 2008.

Tags: Outlook Traveller

Mousetrap - 142

To help you along to April Fools’ Day, the plan here was to come up with a complete column-full of weird but fictitious websites. But that we rejected partly because that would mean we would have to actually think, which we can manage only once a week or thereabouts, and partly because the web is rather more weird than even your columnist’s imagination.

Dream Holiday
Sans Serriffe
This is a very old joke. It dates back all the way to 1977, when the staff of the Guardian, in the UK, came up with a special supplement in the style of similar things done earlier about real countries. The supplement claimed to commemorate the tenth anniversary of San Serrife’s independence, and even had themed ads (which the advertisers actually paid for!) from major companies. It was one of the most successful public pranks ever, with many readers, who didn’t get the typographical in-jokes (the islands of Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse, the capital city of Bodoni, and other cities like Arial, Baskerville and Port Clarendon), falling for it completely. This page, on the community site Wikitravel, is a kind of ongoing homage to the hoax. In the style of the site, completely deadpan, it lays out a comprehensive traveller’s guide to the island nation, borrowing freely from the original joke, the literature derived from it, and with some new stuff as well. Have a great holiday!

History Lessons
Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes Of All Time
The Museum of Hoaxes is worth a visit on its own, for its Hoaxipedia. But this is a special treat, listing pranks dating back to the 16th century. Some favourites: the BBC radio gag that had people jumping in the air to feel the effect of lower gravity as a result of a planetary alignment; the Swedish TV station back in 1962, that had its viewers pulling nylon stocking over their sets to get a colour picture; the Swiss spaghetti trees; the moving of the Eiffel Tower. Also go see their Top 10 Worst April Fool's Day Hoaxes Of All Time page.

Searching for more?
Google
Since 2000, the search giant has been one of the go-to pages on April 1st. Their Pigeon Rank gag in 2002 was a personal favourite, and last year’s TISP broadband internet service (Toilet Internet Service Provider, which, the page claimed, would give users access through sewage lines). What’s more, they’ve mixed it up a bit, by actually launching real products on the day. Gmail was one; it’s unprecedented 1GB of free storage was unheard of at that time, so many people thought it was a joke. Which, of course, only helped spread the news faster. Worth keeping your eyes open, one way or another.

Reader suggestions welcome, and will be acknowledged. Go to http://o3.indiatimes.com/mousetrap for past columns, and to comment, or mail inthemousetrap@indiatimes.com. The writer blogs at http://zigzackly.blogspot.com.

Published in the Times of India, 30th March, 2008.

Tags: The Times of India, Mousetrap

Mousetrap - 141

Time out!
SI Vault
A magazine, a global icon, though perhaps some in this country know it best for its swimsuit issue: Sports Illustrated. The magazine is over 50 years old, and just this last week—Thursday to be exact—it opened up its archives online. And, in a sign of the times, where even the most closed-fisted media organisations are discovering the benefit of making their content freely accessible, this little treasure house is totally free. So go browse to your heart’s content. Yes, the magazine’s content is US-centric; only naturally, considering that that was where its audience was, so you’ll see lots on basketball, baseball and American football, and no cricket. But there’s lots of other stuff too, of interest beyond American shores. And yes, there are those swimsuit editions.

..love and brotherhood
PeaceSymbol.org
Fifty years ago, on the 20th March, several thousand British protestors set off on a 50-mile anti-nuke march organised by the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. And the symbol that they marched under was what we now know as the ‘peace sign,’ a circle with one vertical cross-bar and two others radiating from the centre in a sort of inverted V shape. Its designer, a chap called Holtom (who, one reads, designed it at Bertrand Russell’s request) explained that he has formed it from the semaphore (the language of flag signals) for ‘N’ and ‘D’ superimposed on each other, for ‘Nuclear Disarmament. This site isn’t much—we’ll confess that it was just an excuse to tell you about the peace symbol anniversary—a few image galleries, some photographs, no history or anything. So, well, um, just peace out, bro.

Graphically
Symbols.com
And while we were researching the site above (what, you thought we pulled it all out of a hat?) we found this fascinating site on pictorial images. While its stated focus is Western signs, we did find quite a few from cultures in the Eastern hemisphere. There’s oodles of information here (over 2500 symbols) about origins, cultures, meanings and so on. You can search through the database for particular words or themes, or, if you prefer, find data on a particular symbol by choosing its characteristics (shape, symmetry, open/closed, et cetera) and checking out the results. Random fun and enlightenment—always this column’s preferred method—can be obtained by just searching for arbit words and then checking out the symbols that show up.

Reader suggestions welcome, and will be acknowledged. Go to http://o3.indiatimes.com/mousetrap for past columns, and to comment, or mail inthemousetrap@indiatimes.com. The writer blogs at http://zigzackly.blogspot.com.

Published in the Times of India, Mumbai edition, 23rd March, 2008.

Tags: The Times of India, Mousetrap

Mousetrap - 140

Darn!
Damn Interesting
This site does what your columnist tries to do as well: give you something interesting to read; stuff you’ll look at and go, ‘Damn, that was interesting.’ Except that the team of writers here goes much further, with long, witty, well-researched articles on all sorts of interesting topics, ‘facts and ideas, whether they appeared in the past, the present, or the (anticipated) future.’ The mix is amazingly wide; just a random glance through the archives reveals erudite pieces about mutant killer seaweed, could-have-been apocalypses, invisibility, a subglacial freshwater lake in Antarctica that was sealed under the ice at least 500,000 years ago, and, oh, just go see. It’s Damn Interesting. (Be warned, though, that it can be seriously addictive and a major thief of your time.)

Dak
Indian Postage Stamps
For our younger reader, let’s recap. Once upon a time, when people wanted to communicate with friends far away, they wrote (with pens, a sort of writing device without a memory) on paper (like what you’re holding just now, only blank), put those sheets of paper into envelopes (which looked like the ‘new mail’ icons in your inbox), sealed them, and then stuck on these small paper rectangles called postage stamps. They then walked over to a device called a postbox, and slipped their ‘letter’ in. A globally-linked entity called the ‘postal service’ then, when it wasn’t losing them, would, via mysterious methods, deliver the letters to the intended recipient. These postage stamps, for some reason, were very popular collectibles (your doddering columnist has a few albums ina shelf somewhere), with hobbyists willing to pay large sums for some of them, due to rarity, or even things like misprints. Well, this site is devoted to those little stamps, with a focus on the ones issued by the Indian postal service since 1947. Lots of enlarged scans, some interesting articles, and links to other sites.

See
Visual Dictionary
Sure, there are folks like us, who read dictionaries and encyclopaedias for pleasure. But more and more, we’re becoming visually-oriented. This dictionary, with its ‘20,000 terms with contextual definitions, developed by terminology experts; 6,000 full-color images of a wide variety of objects from all aspects of life’ in some 15 or so categories, is a rich resource, and not just for kids. The visuals are beautiful, all labelled neatly, for further study. I’m told it works well as a language-learning tool, since you can see and read, and find stuff based on what you already know. But it’s a darn fun read even with no particular agenda.

Reader suggestions welcome, and will be acknowledged. Go to http://o3.indiatimes.com/mousetrap for past columns, and to comment, or mail inthemousetrap@indiatimes.com. The writer blogs at http://zigzackly.blogspot.com.

Published in the Times of India, Mumbai edition, 16th March, 2008.

Tags: The Times of India, Mousetrap

Mousetrap - 139

To the roof of the world
Tibetan Uprising Movement
A short while ago, this column featured the Bhopal survivors padyatra to Delhi. This is another such people’s movement. India is host to a large number of Tibetan refugees, including the Dalai Lama himself, and the Tibetan Government in Exile. This year, just after the Beijing Olympics, it will be fifty years since the Dalai Lama escaped from the Chinese army (who claim that Tibet is historically a part of China). This group, a united front for several Tibetan organisations, aims to bring international attention to the Tibetan cause at a time when the world’s eyes are on China, thanks to the Olympics. On the 10th March, they will begin walking from Mcleodganj, in Himachal Pradesh, to Delhi, and from there to the Tibetan border, where they plan to cross over into Tibet. They are soliciting support as well, so, if you’re not Tibetan, you can choose to walk with them part of the way, up to the Tibetan border. Or organise some form of protest elsewhere. All details are on the site. [Link from poet and activist Tenzin Tsundue, via Menka Shivdasani.]

Simple interest
Toybank
This bank is an Indian NGO that wants your custom. They seek an unusual deposit: toys, used (in good condition) or new, which they make available to deprived children in state-run schools and hospitals, orphanages, NGOs who work with kids, and other areas where one might find families in need, like building sites. They offer to collect from institutions, corporate offices and residential societies, by prior arrangement, so you can organise collections yourself, and get in touch with them to make a pick-up. From the site, I gather that they’re active in Bangalore and Bombay. Details available on the site.

Wear your..
Exactitudes
‘Exactitudes’ is a portmanteau of ‘exact’ and ‘attitude.’ It is a photography project, an online exhibition or sorts (though it has also had real-life showings, and been published in a book), which takes a wry look at the way people seek to stand apart from the crowd by literally wearing their attitudes. Of course, what happens turns out to be a conformity to the group, where all members wind up looking much the same. The photographers underscore this by shooting their sets of subjects against similar backgrounds in almost identical poses, thereby ‘an almost scientific, anthropological record.’ They go on to say that ‘The apparent contradiction between individuality and uniformity is, however, taken to such extremes in their arresting objective-looking photographic viewpoint and stylistic analysis that the artistic aspect clearly dominates the purely documentary element.’ Fascinating.

I(m)print
If I were a book
The young man behind this site is a most persevering chap. He sent in a note and several polite reminders, but we had a long backlog, so this is a bit delayed. What the site promises is an avenue for self-expression via a book. It invites members to post original manuscripts (or even the contents of a personal blog) and have them instantly converted into book format. Other members provide feedback and comments. And a few listed publishers (the site claims sixteen publishers and agents, but lists only seven) also have access, and can choose to contact authors, and, if everyone has, in their youths or childhoods, done something good, they could wind up in print formally.

Reader suggestions welcome, and will be acknowledged. Go to http://o3.indiatimes.com/mousetrap for past columns, and to comment, or mail inthemousetrap@indiatimes.com. The writer blogs at http://zigzackly.blogspot.com.

Published in the Times of India, Mumbai edition, 9th March, 2008.

Tags: The Times of India, Mousetrap

Mousetrap - 138

Flat World
Apartment Therapy
Friends forwarded some cool staircase designs to us a while ago. Living in a rented flat, we could only forward them on to duplex-endowed friends. Then recently someone else sent us some more rad designs and we looked more closely. The site’s mission is ‘Helping people make their homes more beautiful, organized and healthy by connecting them to a wealth of resources, ideas and community online.’ And it has a wealth of cool ideas updated blog-style; focussed on a US homeowner, many of the ideas aren’t doable in the Indian context, but even a random search yielded ideas worth filing away for whenever we can buy our own home. Add to this its sister sites (all linked to from the top panel), re-nest which puts a green slant to the same basic goals, unplggd, which is tech-meets-decor, thekitchn, well d-uh, and ohdeedoh, for the kiddie spaces, and you’re bound to come away with an idea or two even for a Bombay 1BHK.

Uh O
Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle
As the world watches, large parts of the US—or at least the bits who vote Democratic—look like being swept off their feet by a Senator only his home state knew just a year or two ago. Something about him seems to have caught voter fancy, though there isn’t much to him bar some fuzzy words about change. (Or so this column thinks; but then we don’t get the fancy pay cheques the folks on the edit pages do, so ignore us.) Anyhoo, we loved this site, which gives you, with every page-refresh, more reasons why you too should fall into the thrall of BHO. Hilarious.

..and spice.
Popsugar
A young lady we know sent this in with a note that said it was an ‘awesomely addictive portal’ adding, with a smiley that it was for women, ‘but I am sure men can get some tips from it.’ Forewarned, we were not traumatised by assault of that shade of pink prefixed ‘mithai’ when we were young and impressionable. Popsugar is a regularly updated, Hollywood-oriented gossip column, part of a larger network of sites from a company called Sugar Inc, all of which have the word ‘sugar’ in their names. They cover fashion, beauty, entertainment, finance, news, home and hearth, advice, kids, tech, humour, food, even pets. And if all that wasn’t enough, you also have a community site where you go shmooze with the other, erm, sugars. We had to leave. Perhaps its because we’re not target audience. Or maybe it’s because we gave up sugar many years ago. [Courtesy Divya Manian]

Now you see him..
Banksy
Banksy’s a cult. He (there seems to be consensus that Banksy’s male) is a street artist. Well, actually, perhaps ‘guerrilla artist’ would be better, because his exploits aren’t restricted to the streets: this column first heard of him because of a coup he pulled off in a museum, sneaking in his own subversive works and placing them amidst more, um, famous works. But it’s his street work that’s best known, part art, part social commentary, many of them have been made into prints and sold, though the originals were spray-painted onto urban walls. Banksy, it is said, doesn’t make a penny from these. The site features his art, and it’s as official as you’re likely to get with this artist.

Reader suggestions welcome, and will be acknowledged. Go to http://o3.indiatimes.com/mousetrap for past columns, and to comment, or mail inthemousetrap@indiatimes.com. The writer blogs at http://zigzackly.blogspot.com.

Published in the Times of India, Mumbai edition, 2nd March, 2008.

Tags: The Times of India, Mousetrap