The RMIM Switch Debate -- A "Philosophical" View



Someone used the word "philosophical" in a recent post. That set
my mind thinking.

There are so many things in our life that we seem to take for
granted. And I am not thinking about your wife's cooking or your
granchildren's chirping. Rather, I am thinking about the comforts
and conveniences of everyday life, particularly in the case of
people who have moved over to the US. Take milk for instance,
which is available aplenty in grocery stores. We don't blink our
eyes when we find different 'purities' (skim, 1 %, 2 % or
even whole milk) all available at the same price. Moving from
one apartment to another ? Or buying a new house ? Getting a new
phone connection is a breeze. A far cry from conditions we used
to experience back home when even removing your instrument to a
new residence was such a big hassle. You would be lucky if you
could do it in three months. {"Sorry, our Santa Cruz Exchange
cannot handle this".} And more often than not, the phone people
would quietly replace your new, shiny, jade green instrument with
some old, cracked, black instrument which was at lease 25 years
old. And why even talk about the phone connection ? Getting your
"free" annual new phone directory was next to impossible. The
phone exchanges had a perennial shortage. You could of course
shell out Rs. 70/- or Rs. 80/- and buy the new directory from a
street vendor selling old books. Here, you have all brands of
phone directories placed neatly on your door. And you keep on
dutifully recycling them, to prevent clutter. Back home, of
course, things could be different if you knew the right people.
Once, the General Manager of MTNL came to meet me for some work.
I took the opportunity to tell him about the difficulties we were
having in getting the STD and ISD facility in our new residence.
He promised to look into the matter. We got the facility within
the hour --- the time it took for him to get back to his own
office and pass the word round. {Thanks Mr. Kulshreshtha,
whereever you are !}

Another boon of the modern age was the e-mail. In the late 80's
and early 90's, few people in India had computers. Large organi-
sations, while taking out full page Announcement or Advertisements
in newspapers, would proudly display their "Electronic Mail" in
fairly bold characters. The shortened form "E-mail" had still to
come into vogue. Here, in the US, things were different. When I
set up my first e-mail account with Yahoo (which I still use),
they generously offered me a storage limit of 3 MBs and, to my
joy, they soon increased it to 6 MB. To get a larger limit, one
had to pay, something like $ 19.95 or so. In those days, it was
possible to get all RMIM posts (every day) in your Yahoo Inbox
through an "RTM" system. Things changed for the better, when the
storage limit increased. I remember Prof. Surjit Singh sending
an almost ecstatic message to RMIM : "When I visited my Inbox
this morning, I found that the limit had increased to....MBs !"
{If Dr. Singh is reading this, he will probably recall that mail.}
But newer problems continued to crop up. Virus-generated SPAM
mail flooded your Inbox --- each one a precise 43 k. I remember
having an e-mail exchange with Ganti Garu, who was plagued by the
same problem. In desperation, I set up an alternate e-mail
account, and informed all my friends accordingly (including my
RMIM friends). I remember someone complimenting me on my new
ID which, he felt, was so much in sync with my (computer)
character ! Was it UVR, perhaps ?

Now, e-mail has virtually limitless storage --- even Hotmail
which, originally, offered a measly 2 MB. But problems still
persist. A few friends correspond with other friends and then,
quietly, BCC a copy to me. And every time, it lands in my "Trash"
folder ! So I have picked up this habit of scanning through the
Senders' Names and Subject Headers in the "Trash" folder with
religious regularity. Maybe, it is this daily exercise which has
made the RMIM-SPAM problem comparatively easy for me to navigate.

My point is : SPAM is something which we can safely add to the
other two items in one's life, which are not only inevitable but
also unavoidable --- Death and Taxes.

Right now, I can visualize the SPAMMERS keenly going through all
these threads and making preparations for a counter-attack. Quite
similar to the running fight between computer security set-ups and
the hackers. Unlike the hackers, of course, the SPAMMERS on
RMIM have a better excuse --- rozi-roTi ka mu'aamla jo hai !
When all websites have advertisements galore, why shouldn't the
SPAMMERS be allowed to seek their livelihood ? Sometime back,
there was a big hue and cry against Dr. Mandar who had some adver-
tisements on his Video Songs website. All his feeble excuses
obviously fell on deaf ears. RMIMers seemed to be insistent :
At least, RMIM-related things in life must not only be completely
free, but should also seem to be so (like the old adage about
'Justice').

Some people have tried to argue : "What if the new system also
fails in due course ?". Which reminds me of a sher by Zauq :

Ab to ghabra ke yeh kehte haiN ke mar jaayeNge
Mar ke bhi chayn na paaya to kidhar jaayeNge ?

And if someone is still reading this post, he must be thinking :
"This guy is sure to be in many people's Killfile".

So I am signing off on that cheerful note.


Afzal




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