After the German bakery blast yesterday, one thing is clear to me – Indian government needs to device a strategy around creating citywide surveillance systems that enable reviewing suspicious behavior, viewing ongoing events.

Political persuasion isn’t ever going to solve the terrorism problem ever – its not rational / logical people we are dealing with here. Neither is any amount of manual police control or tracking going to be sufficient in a place as populated.

The basic concept is similar to Jeremy Bantham’s Panopticon – create a system where everyone feels they are being watched all the time. Privacy hell? Yes, but so what.

How does it work? Simple idea outlined here –

1. Streetlight Cams – attach cams to the streetlights (or lamp-posts as they are know), controlled by small hubs

2. Make it a requirement for any restaurant / bar / club to have an always-on monitoring system. The cams need to be connected to the central surveillance network as well.

3. Create several call-center style hubs in every city, that employs young guns to review the ongoing footage. Police officers should be able to call in and get them to track.

4. Create / purchase an intelligent tracking system that can track the same object through a series of video streams.

5. Spread a massive stop-and-search police network through all the cities. Increase the size of police force by an order of ten, if not more.

City of London provides an excellent example of how networked cams create a feeling of being perpetually watched.

With the massive security loopholes everywhere in the country, the problem of terrorism is only going to escalate with increasing population.

Yes, above is easier said than done, but anyone else got any better ideas?

Just finished watching 3 Idiots, the highest grossing Bollywood film ever released only a month ago, with my friend Hemant – who also went to the same institute as hinted in the film.

You have to hand it to Aamir Khan – not only is he the lead behind two of the highest grossing Bollywood films, the man, even at the age of 45, plays the role of a twenty year old student and manages to pull it off with incredible success.

Watch and learn how to tap into Indian psyche.

Return, originally uploaded by desoumal.

Trudged four hours in Camden through snow on the heaviest snowfall day in decades, and made a series out of it. Find it here: http://flickr.com/photos/desoumal

Watched Quantum of Solace today. Bad, very bad climax. Actually no real climax or buildup, because the first and second act of the film itself was pretty intense and it waned off near the end.

Definitely was nowhere close to the previous one of the franchise. Still… go watch it. Its fun.

Amongst the most insane places to visit in Mumbai is Chorbazar (or, ‘thieves’ market’), where you could purchase everything from parts of dismantled ships, to statues stolen from dilapidated monuments, from original hand-sketched posters of extremely old bollywood films, to books and magazines that date back to early 1900s.

This image was taken in an anonymous warehouse that you had to enter through a backdoor…

The ‘loot’ comes from everywhere, each store has its own network spread across the country and outside (you would find stuff from Sri Lanka, parts of Africa…)…

Obviously, photography is not allowed. However, a few gentle words helped break into their world.

As I started digging into the history of the place, I found that the Wikipedia entry about the place itself had been hijacked! An excerpt below :-

Chor Bazaar is an area in South Mumbai famous for its second-hand goods. Although the name Chor means “thief” in Hindi. This area can be considered one of the tourist attractions of Mumbai (Bombay). It is a basically an “organized” flea market, where one has to rumage through junk and hopefully find treasures. The reason it is know as “thief’s market”, is because it assumed that goods sold there are stolen. Chor Bazaar if off the beaten path, but everyone knows about it.

In addition, the name Chor Bazaar was adopted by an Indie Indian Fused tshirt label based out of Brooklyn, NY with roots in, India. link title

Our designs are meant not just to be “cool” but to evoke memories of experiencing India, the India that our parents were raised in and the one that exists today. Both are far different but both are still very Indian.

Our mission is to expand the Indian-fusion art form to another realm. Most have experienced this, “fusion”, in music and literature but have hardly seen this transpire into urban apparel. We utilize the medium of our graphic t-shirts to assist in creating an identity that stems farther than mainstream’s portrayal of Indian culture.

Dang!

This image was part of the article on serial terror in Tripura as reported by Indian Express here.

What’s going on in his head?!!

In my delirium yesterday night, I dreamt that Desoumal is nothing but an extravagant jigsaw puzzle. I could see vivid glimpses through his life in sepia, spread over the years and how they fit together seamlessly to reveal a strange meaningless existence. Not surprisingly, the vision broke the moment the flu left me, but few pieces remained to haunt me today. I need to write this piece out fast, lest my memory goes completely blank.

The dream moved through time, space, and his life. Somehow I always knew the age. It was as if I was viewing his life through a camera’s viewfinder, instead of the aperture and shutter speed, I saw his age and other parameters overlaid on the happenings. In one of the pieces, there was the fragile looking disgruntled seventy year old man wirelessly hooked to the cloud, sitting on the roof of a house in Goa. His internal biological processes closely monitored by an anonymous call center employee, one whose job is to alert Des, his family and the doctors about any fluctuations in his internals.

That piece of puzzle was an exact fit with a particular event from when he was sixteen, a fateful day when he found himself fascinated by the supernatural tolerance of the himalayan yogis and the naga babas, who would completely dip themselves butt-naked every morning in the freezing water of the Ganges, and yet remain untouched by any malaise. That puzzlement sat adjacent to the piece of time later when he would practice the act on his own body through a freezing cold winter, eventually falling terribly sick and sowing seeds for years of corticosteroid dependence that would slowly eat through his body, causing him to be easily infected by any random germ floating through the wind. In this specific instance, the canvas even revealed how the flu virus traveled through the burritos cooked by his girlfriend, make their way into his blood stream, and then make him suffer and moan in pain at their will, through two largely sleepless nights of delirium, juxtaposed perfectly with the day when he’s supposed to move, for maximum effect.

I could also see him listening intently to the tales narrated by his grandfather about strange exotic lands, the seven year old child trying to piece together a scene through fragments of his tales and an atlas, the very places he would visit later in life, make acqaintances and absorb influences that would make him shift careers multiple times.

The yellow canvas was full of interconnected shapes — photography causing massive dents in his pockets in his late thirties, an expensive hobby acquired purely due to provocative images of women on photography magazines; three failed film projects which could have been something had he finished them in time, second phase of vagabondish wanderings that would deeply influence his tummy. Everything was in there, or so I felt at that time. And, of what I knew of Des, it all made sense. He tried to be everything, and thus ended up being nothing, an irony that would make him laugh on his deathbed.

I have forgotten most of the details by now, but I do remember how it all came together, a blank canvas with images and words popping up; all I need to do is to get a chart large enough, write out all the parameters that have come to define his existence, and then extrapolate. Life’s not that hard to figure out actually… once you get a flu.