password to heaven or hell?

Password to heaven or hell...

By

Vivek Hande

Security and all that stuff is good,  no doubt.  But you need a password to be secure. You need a password for everything – you need a password to log on to your email; you need a password to access your bank and credit and debit card details ; you need a password to find out your flying rewards and air  miles; you also need a password to log onto your social network accounts . You need a password to find out how much you have to pay for your own cell phone bills.

All this password business can be quite daunting. I read in the paper recently  that the worst password as per data operators is “123456”. It makes all accounts easy to hack and allow easy access to unauthorized folks. I have spent  long  days changing my password for all my accounts. You guessed it – some of us do have such passwords. I feel intimidated when the computer tells me –“password strength –weak”. It is like a direct reflection on my abilities and intelligence. I feel quite elated and energetic when I am told “ strong password”!Then everybody warns you not to use obvious passwords like your date of birth or your wife’s marriage anniversary (that is mine too, I guess) or your children’s names or your flat number . This again greatly limits your choices and makes things more difficult.

Then there are certain picky and overzealous sites- they will insist on a digit and some alphabets and they have to be mixed up in some order and some in upper case and some in lower case and at the end of a successful password registration, very often you are left feeling a mental case! It is really not fair, I think.

And then, there is the issue of the ‘security question’ to make things more secure. They are pretty intrusive and kind of violate your privacy, if you ask me. What business do they have wanting to know the color of my wife’s eyes or where I met my spouse or what breed my pet dog is. Sometimes to confuse them, I give wrong answers. The only problem is that I forget my answers and I can’t keep track of all my intelligent replies and that becomes a muddling issue more often than not.

I decided I would open a password protected folder which would list all my intelligent passwords for my various online activities. Everything seemed to be going fine for a few days and I would access my folder with one single password and then log on wherever I wanted with my myriad passwords. But this was too good to be true for long – I have , for the past three days completely blanked out on my master password and have now lost access to all my  special passwords and I just don’t seem to be able to recollect it . Things are secure I suppose. If I can’t get in, perhaps nobody can??

Salt, Sun, Sands, Sharda, Smiles and Sweetened tea

Salt , Sands, Sun , Sharda , Smiles and Sweetened tea..

By

Vivek Hande

Sharda is a six year old girl I recently had the privilege of meeting. Sharda is a scrawny, reed thin, unschooled, ‘malnutritioned’, hardworking, intelligent young girl. She runs around bare feet clad in a tattered and frayed old dress. I met her deep inside the Little Rann of Kutch , where she stays with her parents in ,what you could call a hut. Her abode did have a roof and some walls. She stays there helping her parents make salt for about eight months of a year.

She seemed to have multiple vitamin deficiencies and was deeply sun burnt and had seemingly boundless energy as she showed me around her salt pan very proudly. She did have the most ravishing smile which went straight to your heart. She was part of the Agariyas- a clan devoted to salt making down the ages in the Kharaghoda area in the Little Rann.

I was told that the Agariyas live in several villages by the rim of the Kutch. They migrate into the interiors of the Kutch around July – August and stay there till about March for the salt production. I gathered that about 25% of India’s salt production comes from this area. Each of the families looks after a salt field and there are thousands of such families scattered all over the vast tracts of the Kutch. They first, have to prepare the salt fields. The raw surface needs hardening and embankments have to be raised. Each of the pans is about 200 x 250 feet. A shallow well is dug in and locally made “Rajkot “pumps, which operate on crude oil, are used to pump the water up into the first of the pans. The water which is very rich in salt is circulated over the next couple of weeks through narrow channels from one pan to the other and the salt keeps getting concentrated and at the end of about a fortnight, roughly 10-15 tonnes of salt are produced.

Sharda is an expert, like her father, in this process of salt making. She has an instinct about the optimum temperature of water and handles the pump efficiently and does a great job in helping her parents top the pump with oil. She knows when is the right time to complete the salt making cycle. She cannot spell her name; she does not know what school is; she walks once a week with her parents about 10 kilometers to have a bath- there is no fresh water in the midst of the Kutch. Her day sees temperatures rising to 45 degrees under the scorching sun and dropping to about 5 degrees at night with howling winds and occasional storms. She has her parents and the stars for company.

She tells me proudly that her father earns four thousand rupees a month. She accepted with great joy my humble offering of a bar of chocolate, Frooti and an orange.

 She would not let me go without a gift in return – she insisted that her mother make me a cup of black sweetened tea, which was offered with a lot of affection, in a chipped saucer and she also gave me a crystal of salt from the latest production. Sharda’s smile, the sweet tea and the salt crystal will remain with me for the rest of my life …

nose in the air...

                                                     Nose in the air…

                                   By

                             Vivek Hande

I have a bit of a sensitive nose and I am sensitive about most things nasal. I have nose which tends to be runny through most of the year. Allergies,  infections, hypersensitivities, psychosomatic, attention –seeking: these and various other terms have been used to explain my problem. But the fact of the matter is that I feel a tad vulnerable without a wad of tissues. My obsession with my nasal issues prompted a very  very close member of my immediate family to comment   rather  derisively-‘ You and your nose!”

That touched a raw nerve or should I say raw nose? It got me thinking about noses in general and my nose in particular. The nose is not something to be contemptuous about. It is a vital organ and I daresay it lends character to a man. A nose says a lot about a person. Most people with deviated noses are generally deviated in character; people with a straight nose, I have seen are usually straight. People with an aquiline nose are often quite imperious; folks with a broad bulbous nose are usually broad-minded and people who have a lot of hair jutting out of their nostrils, have often had hair – raising experiences in life. People who have runny noses are usually people on the run and are go-getters in life. People with stuffed noses on the contrary are usually quite stuck up and stuffy. People with pert noses are usually pert and petite.A nose does, say a lot about a person...

You require to walk with your nose in the air to convey that you are proud and above everything around you. You don’t take your job too seriously and you nosedive! You are perceptive and have a good instinctive feeling about things if you have the nose for it. You go around delving into things that don’t concern you and you become a ‘nosey-parker’! You win narrowly and you have won by a nose and you lose by a whisker and you have been edged out by a nose.  You want to insult and humiliate someone – you rub his nose in the ground. However, if you wish to work hard, you better push your nose to the ground stone! You want to be myopic and narrow minded, you would not see any further beyond the end of your nose. You care a damn about something or someone; you thumb your nose at him(or her)!

The nose is indeed a very versatile appendage and I am going to be a trifle hard-nosed if anyone says anything ‘nosty’/nasty about my nose.  Sensitive or runny or any other way, I am going to walk with my nose in the air!!