Wordle Diaries

 

Jan 20: Of late, on my Twitter feed I have been noticing some tiles, interspersed with a combination of green, yellow and white squares. When I closely watched I saw that on top it was written ‘Wordle’, along with a number, followed by fractions like 2/6 or 4/6. The one with 2/6 closely resembles a dairy milk chocolate pattern.

Can’t make any head or tail of it. Looks like some colour puzzle.

Jan 24: Got a WhatsApp forward from my friend providing a link to an article regarding Wordle (Well it is a word game after all) and its ground rules.

I have been a jumble word puzzle enthusiast and used to pore over newspapers for such puzzles. Many a weekend and office hours were spent solving them. And I am quite proficient in it. So Wordle must be easy. 

Sigh! My cockiness was misplaced. I wish I had the patience to read through the ground rules. Exhausted all six tries without hitting the right word.

Pored through the ground rules and tried to access the game again. Heck, the next game will happen only the next day. Wordle follows only one word per day! Even newspaper jumbles had five words. Anyway, no apps need to be downloaded.

Jan 25: Today I was able to solve it 6/6. Looking back I realized I did goof up a bit. Had used those grey marked letters in subsequent words. So basically it is a guessing-cum-elimination word game built on a bedrock of sound vocabulary. It allows only six tries and a useful rule of the thumb is that if a letter falls into a grey tile, ensure that subsequent words you guess don’t have them.

Jan 26: Wow! Got 3/6 and as soon as I finished, the screen flashed ‘splendid’. Began doing some Google searches about the background of the game and its creators. From all those readings I could gather that the game’s inventor is a guy named Josh Wardle and he did so to entertain his wife Palak Shah. This Indian connection surely must have warmed the cockles of many a desi heart. Wordle made its debut last October.

Jan 30: By now a couple of my friends have also started wracking their brains for that elusive word that could paint the row green within those six tries. I began getting their results on WhatsApp. From the timings of their messages, I felt basically the Wordle universe can be divided into two. Those who solve it at around midnight by keeping awake at those unearthly hours and those who do it first thing in the morning.

Feb 1: Got a few forwards of links stating that the New York Times has decided to purchase Wordle for ‘low-seven figures’. Checked Twitter and it was abuzz with opinions and memes ranging from plain wonderment that a game, which is a few months old, could catch the fancy of a reputed brand like NYT, to fears that the game would soon go behind a paywall.

Feb 5: The NYT acquisition seems to have made Wordle a talking point and brought in more players. In certain WhatsApp groups, I came across people asking ‘Wordle anyone’. Meanwhile, the Wordle results of friends on WhatsApp are also on the rise.

Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes

1984: More Relevant Than Ever

 

There are many books which we may like to read, but somehow fall through the cracks of our 'sick hurry and divided aims' (my apology to Matthew Arnold). For me George Orwell's 1984 was one such book. Though I have read his Animal Farm and a couple of his short stories, but this dystopian classic has languished in my reading list for long. Recently I decided that it was high time I laid my hands on it.

Since we are in the middle of a pandemic, I decided not to take a chance of visiting my favourite second-hand bookshops, but order them online. In a way I feel picking up 1984 at this juncture was pertinent - as some of the worst prophecies in the book are coming true only now. Big data surveillance is the new buzzword for both governments and technology giants and our lives are getting mapped, overtly and covertly, by them.

The first chapter of 1984 sets the stage for the futuristic world where surveillance is all pervasive. The 'big brother' watches you through a telescreen which can be dimmed but not shut off. Written in 1949, Orwell had foreseen how television will become a major propaganda tool.

The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a citizen of Oceania which is ruled with an iron fist by one Big Brother of Ingsoc (English Socialism) party, who off an on keeps appearing on the telescreen. Then there is Emmanuel Goldstein the erstwhile comrade of Big Brother, but now branded as enemy of the people.

Smith works for a department known as office of truth, but is torn between his fear for Big Brother and a sneaking admiration for Goldstein. He writes a diary knowing fully well the perils of such an exercise. He risks being charged with thoughtcrime - harbouring unorthodox thoughts, such as unspoken beliefs and doubts that contradict the tenets of Ingsoc.

At times he also wonders about the pointlessness of writing a diary. If caught by the thought police, he would not just face death but total annihilation - the diary will be reduced to ashes and he will be 'vaporized' from the records. For rest of the citizenry such a person never existed.

Oceania is constantly at war with one country or another and its friends and foes keep changing like musical chairs. Smith's department is constantly updating the records as the party wants its citizens to forget and remove from their consciousness that today's friend was actually a foe a couple of years ago and vice versa.

The party believes who controls the past, controls the future and who controls the present, controls the past. With constantly shifting enemies it is forever on a 'manufacturing consent' mode.

Another major project in progress is the compilation of a dictionary in Newspeak - the language of Oceania, as opposed to Oldspeak. The aim is to reduce the number of words by weeding out synonyms and thereby narrow down the range of consciousness of the people. Winston's colleague and philologist Syme believes it will bring down thoughtcrime as there will be no words to express it!

When 1984 was published the reviewers were quick to interpret it as a critique of Communist societies that had sprouted in Europe after World War II, backed by Soviet Union. The overarching presence of the party machinery and the curtailment of liberties for common citizens led to this conclusion.

However, in the current post-Soviet era it is becoming clear that even democratically elected leaders are no less ambitious about exercising greater control over citizens. This trend has been on the rise since the tragic 9/11 attacks and quite often these overreaches are couched in reasons such as safety and security to make it more acceptable to the people.

But what is more closer to the Orwellian nightmare is the rise of tech companies, especially in the social media space such as Facebook, Twitter and Google and the repository of information they maintain about their users. And sadly, unlike governments, they cannot be voted out.

Yet another unsettling byproduct is the dark web - an amoral underbelly attracting amateur and professionals out to make a fast buck by conning users, stealing data and carry out malware attacks. No amount of safety infrastructure is proving enough of a deterrent to firewall data from these criminals.

Confessions Of a Gtalk Addict

This withdrawal symptom refuses to go.

For me it used to be the first ritual after logging on to the computer. A small chat box with my username as default used to pop on the right side of the monitor and all I needed to do was type the password.

In addition to all those green dots denoting 'available' and orange ones conveying 'idle', it used to provide a sneak peek about the new mails that landed in my Gmail inbox, since my last login. It helped me separate wheat from the chaff (Linked-In, Wayn friends' requests, credit card discount offers and of late mail from Prime Minister's Office and other central ministries). It used to help me decide whether there was any mail compelling enough to suffer the toil of clicking the Firefox or Chrome icon.

All this changed one fine morning. When I tried to login to Gtalk I got message 'wrong password', then I tried again and this time with more caution checking each key stroke, but to no avail. A dreadful thought crossed my mind, 'has my mail account been hacked'. Somewhat panicky I double clicked Firefox and tried to log in to my Gmail account. It opened without a hitch, but there was a mail stating that Gtalk services are no longer 'supported' by Google and one must download Google Hangouts instead to enjoy the service.

Then I remembered about a fortnight ago when I had logged in to Gtalk, I had received a message from Google team stating that they were going to scrap the service sometime in February last. But somehow I totally forgot about it. So the day of reckoning finally arrived and I was totally ill-prepared.

Had vaguely heard about Hangouts, but never bothered to check as both my fingers and eyes have very low mobile internet compatibility and are easily vulnerable to the guile of Auto-correct. Hence was wary of even trying it.

Later through some site I came to know how to upgrade to Hangout inside my Gmail inbox, but no stand-alone messenger box for those wanting to stay put with browsing on desktops and laptops, a rapidly depleting market segment. For them as a consolation prize Google was offering access via third-party applications like Jitsi, Psi, Instantbird, Miranda IM and others (the very names sound dubious) with a ominous caveat, "Please bear in mind that these aren't Google products, so exercise caution when signing in with your Google account."

In an oblique manner Google was telling technology laggards like me  that better become smartphone savvy, or else ... Meanwhile my Gmail inbox already has quite a pile (and still counting) of entries  with subject line 'Google Talk for Windows is no longer supported’ a tell-tale reminder of the number of absent-minded attempts I made to log on to good old Gtalk!

Also Read: Bangalore Beat

Quote and Misquote

When I heard about Bharat Ratna awardee C N R Rao being at pains issuing clarification after clarification regarding his remarks about politicians, I was reminded of an old Pope joke. The Pontiff visits US and is asked by a journalist whether he would visit a night club there. The Pope tries to play safe and asks "Is there a night club in America". The next day the top headline of all newspapers was "Pope asks 'Is there a night club in America?'"

Similarly Rao was only lamenting the fact that the government's funding towards science was measly and politicians were doing 'idiotic' things. But for TRP/predatory circulation driven media it was too tempting not to 'spice' things up. So they went to town stating that 'Politicians are idiots: C N R Rao'. The noted scientist may have by now realised the even the most unpredictable electrons and ions in particle chemistry are far more easier to handle than mediamen.

As for funding on science research, Rao would realise how blessed his community of scientists are if he bothers to take a look at what the government and universities spend on humanities. The sole exception, of course, was the  alacrity with which it goaded the Archeological survey of India to carry out a gold hunt at Unnao, based on a Sadhu's dream.

And it not just the politicians, the bureaucrats are also have a major role. They painstaking work day and night to ensure that there are enough spokes to keep files moving at a glacial pace.

The scene at private sector is no better. The crony capitalism driven industry captains have little patience for long gestation activities like research, thanks to their 'sasta aur tikau' mindset.

Also Read: Bangalore Beat