Chp 538. Mumbai Mizo Association Sports 2014

His palms are sweaty, 

knees weak, arms are heavy

He's nervous,

but on the surface he looks calm and ready to drop bombs…

Finally, the D-Day happened. Mumbai Mizo Association annual Sports Day, 2014. The last time I attended our Sports event was back in 2011 - MMA Sports 2011

Unlike Mizo Associations of other metros like Delhi, B’lore etc, there aren’t that many Mizos residing here in Mumbai. And so we usually divide ourselves into just two houses for Sports Day - Red and Blue. The strengths of both houses are equally divided, and siblings, couples and family members are usually placed in separate houses.

This year, days before the actual Sports Day, members of both houses were already pitting against each other on social media, cheering their respective houses and jeering the opposition. Rants and slogans with photoshop images flew across here and there, which was a great way to build up momentum for the main event. Everything became a RED versus BLUE banter.

Click on all photos to enlarge on a new tab. Below photos taken from my mobile, Fela’s FB album, Bee’s FB album and MMA FB album.

BLUE versus RED, with leaders of the two houses Pu Zaithanmawia and Pu Lalmalsawma Pachuau.

On off banters between Red and Blue house...

They have motivation. We have Photoshop :D

And so on 22nd November, I woke up at 10 AM (which was a huge feat for me because I got back from work at 4 AM the very same morning) and quickly got ready. I reached the venue - Bombay Veterinary College, Parel, a good half an hour early.

MMA had hired the entire grounds for the day, and it was a truly a peaceful and beautiful place. Here’s a panoramic view of the football field, scaled down to a height of 600 pixels (contact me if you want the high resolution version).

Blue House immediately got to work, trapping the Reds :D

There was this other banner hanging above from a previous function, which was kinda ruining our MMA banner.

We Mizos have a disadvantage of being short, so none of us could reach the banner. But we have the advantage of being athletic (you know, from all those activities of climbing trees and swinging from branches to branches as we travel from one tree house to the other… haha just kidding, but yeah sadly, that was one of the stereotype people had about us back in school and college).

It didn’t take long to find a volunteer to remove the banner.

Those who arrived early immediately got to work setting up the place. Here are some of the volunteers arduously marking the boundary line of the football field.

Meanwhile, at the other end other early arrivals were setting up the banners and sound arrangements.

Soon it was time to start the function…

The coveted trophies, donated by Maria and Andrew.

After the opening ceremony, people got down to hair sprays and war paints, showing their support for the respective houses.

We started off easy, with a water filling contest between the two houses. The aim of the game was to see who could fill up a plastic cup with water the fastest, using just their hands.

And as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, but a video is worth a million :D

Blue won naturally :)

The next event after that was Tug-of-war, with 5 male and female participants each from both houses. As you can see from the photos below, Blue was clearly the much stronger team.

And then guess what happened? The rope broke! Conspiracy theorists believed Red team sabotaged the rope so that it would result in a draw, hence awarding points to both houses instead of just Blue house. Below is a candid AV recording obtained by our Blue sleuth team the next day…

The next event after that was Penalty shoot-outs. Blue house won at the women’s section, and so the organizers (Red house members) announced it was a “best of 3” competition! And so our Blue women sportingly played the made-up second round and won that too :)

When it was the Men’s turn, we lost the first round by one goal to Red, and suddenly that was it. No second round of "Best of three". Red won! :D

Other events were held after this, like Poison ball, 100m race, walking race etc.

(In the above video, I don’t have the part when it was Blue’s turn to be inside the circle because I received a call while I was filming that and ended up losing everything, grrrrr)

Soon, we all moved to the basketball and volleyball court area. The kids too had a great time, competing with each other. Red house won a bulk of their points from the children’s division.

Women’s volleyball too was exciting to watch. While this was going on, the free throw competition was simultaneously conducted. Watch the two combined videos below.

Other games like Men’s volleyball and basketball were held in quick succession…

The women too competed against each other for this game called “inkawibah” which is a Mizo traditional game. For my non-Mizo visitors, watch the video to know how it’s played.

Here are some of the more awesome shots captured during this game :)

A little bit of Photoshop on the above pics and one can have a set of really funny pics… but then, I am not that evil. I don’t edit other people’s photographs. That is so mean :)

Lunch was provided by Pi Maliani and Pi Zoni Margaret, and though I couldn’t eat due to exhaustion (after participating in basketball and volleyball), people said it was awesome. Much thanks to them for their selfless donation.

My body not only took a heavy beating, my shoe also suffered. The front sole of my right shoe and back sole of my left show came off. Bye bye shoes. Those were some great years we spent together.

Soon after everybody relaxed, we headed back to the football ground for the main event - Men's football. We cheered and shouted for our respective houses, and it was a highly contested match.

Even though Red team scored a goal that looked pretty much like an offside, the match ended with a 2-2 draw and it went to penalty.

After the football match that Blue house won, Red house was still trailing, so the organizers again conducted on-the-spot events like 100m race, 2x100m race, 4x100m race, 50+50m race etc just because they had some fast runners.

Here is Maria giving it her best shot and then falling to the ground during her race. Sportingly, she got up and finished the race.

More races were conducted…

Overall, Blue House seemed to dominate in most of the main events. It was like Goliath pummeling David to the ground. This photo pretty much sums up the difference in strengths between the two houses.

And all Red could do was react to our victories…

But the overall championship went to Red house in spite of Blue winning most of the main events…

Yeah, like I said, too many kids events :P

Overall, everybody had a great time. The main purpose of such an event was not to compete or win, but rather to come together and catch up with friends that we otherwise hardly get to meet (because of our respective busy Mumbai life) and have fun. And Sports Day achieved just that. Kudos to the organizers and hoping to see you all next year too!

Ps. Here’s a secret. One week before the Sports Day, I started exercising on our treadmill (that had been lying unused for many months and covered with cobwebs) and that made things a bit easier for me :)

Cheers! :)

Chp 537. Mizoram and Pornography

So apparently Mizoram has the highest rate of online porn viewers in India, according to a research by Quartz published today, with data they claimed to have obtained from PornHub

Link - Quartz: Everything you wanted to know about how India watches porn in one map and five charts

And here are their findings -





According to the PornHub website data above, Mizoram has the highest “pages viewed per visit” in India at 8.47 per visitor which is higher than both the national and global average.

Though I am not saying this to defend or deny this bizarre "achievement" by Mizoram (hey, if we are indeed the top most porn viewers in India, then that's all cool brah, peoples do what peoples do) but I'm just curious to know how they reached this conclusion.

First of all, let’s take a look at PornHub and its ilk. For those of you who may not have heard of it, it is a popular pornography website where people can upload and share adult videos, and visitors can view them directly online (known as “streaming”). And that is where my first skepticism comes from. Internet penetration in Mizoram is not only low but the speed is pathetic most of the time. And it is a known fact that in such places where internet connection is bad, it makes more sense to download porn rather than watch them online.

Most of the people in Mizoram that I know who watches porn, do so by downloading them via torrent and not through online streaming sites such as PornHub, YouPorn, RedTube, xHamster etc because it apparently takes forever to buffer on our slow internet speed (which also has a frequent habit of disconnecting).



Yes I know you can download videos from PornHub too, but that means you have to register, which many aren’t willing to do. Plus most of the videos are low quality and if you want to download the ones with better quality, you have to become a premium member (yeah I too did my own "research" to find this out). So that is why torrent clients are preferred at regions with bad internet coverage such as Mizoram. And that may only show that many people watch porn in Mizoram, but this statement also contradicts the very premise of this “Quartz research” since their data is derived solely from only those who visit PornHub and not any other sources.

Secondly, I don’t know how accurate their data is. I know in most cases, one can easily find out which state a visitor is from, but sometimes IP addresses can be unreliable, especially when it comes to the North East. Here in Mumbai, we develop and publish mobile games, and I have downloaded a lot of our games on my friends and relatives’ phones in Mizoram. But those instances never show up on our Google Analytics report! Even when we use our own customized in-built analytics tool, some data from the North East are still faulty. That can be because the region is still developing or due to lack of infrastructure in the NE region (people who visit my blog from Mizoram sometimes show as Kolkata or Guwahati on my blog tracker), so I’m a bit surprised to know PornHub managed to get the absolute correct info (not that I’m saying that is impossible to do so). 

I really hope they are not establishing their data from the registration form where people can state anything they want, whether it is about their sex, their sexual orientation, their birthdays or their LOCATION. After all, how many people actually reveal true information at such websites?



A part of me can’t help but suspect the data is taken from this registration form only, otherwise how can they possibly know whether the user is a male or a female?

In India, a quarter of Pornhub’s users are female, which is 2% higher than the worldwide average of 23%

But then again, I can be mistaken too and there may be other ways in which they managed to obtain such information, so let’s leave it at that.

The North East still lacks behind the rest of India when it comes to online activities, which made me doubt PornHub’s data furthermore since the Northeastern states have some of the highest rates according to their findings. Just take a look at the ongoing ISL football tournament. If you visit their website during a match, you will see an Indian map with two different colours of the two teams currently playing. Those colours are representations of the tweets from respective fans, and you will see close to 3000, 4000, 5000 number of tweets during any match for most of the bigger States. But look at Mizoram or any other NE states and you will see just a handful of tweets. A region that is hardcore crazy about football and hardly any tweets? That's because internet is only just starting to pick up over there.

Having said that, the fact that they used "average duration of visit" and “pages viewed per visit” to come to this conclusion doesn't really hold water. Suppose two guys from Mizoram happened to land at PornHub separately in spite of the bad connectivity and they both visited 8 and 9 pages during their visit respectively, that means Mizoram scores an 8.5 as is given in the graph above. And then say 10,000 people from another state with fast internet connection landed at PornHub and they visited different number of pages ranging from 1 to 10, and the average value comes to 8, it gives Mizoram a much higher rating in spite of the fact that there were just two people visiting PornHub. But to a layman, that may sound like there are more number of people from Mizoram watching porn than other states, even though that is not the case. The population of Mizoram is less than the total number of people living here in Andheri East in Mumbai! There is a big difference between highest volume and highest percentage, and obscure statistic like this tends to mix up the two.

That is why Census India sometimes categorizes India into three different sections while comparing/ranking different regions. They are - “bigger states”, “smaller states” and “union territories” since they know the findings will be skewed or unfair if all States/UTs are compared together using the same yard stick.

By all means I am not trying to shine a positive light on Mizoram just because it is my state. If the research was about the highest percentage of people who watch pornography (the sources being online streaming as well as downloads from torrent, darknet, xxx forums, HDD to HDD transfer etc etc) and suppose Mizoram was on the top of that list, then there’s really nothing I can say about that. I will openly accept that result. I am not a prude :) 

But since this particularly report is based purely on the statistical data obtained exclusively from PornHub, I feel the result is inconclusive. Apart from the fact that streaming is not popular in regions with slow internet connection, the sample space taken also raises a question mark. I mean, technically, it may be correct (after all, even a small number of people has a high rate if the base is also small) but overall, it may not be the answer you seek and it tends to throw a wrong perception. It’s kinda like how your anti-virus detects your “keygen” as a virus even though it is not. “False positives” we call them. It would be more interesting to know the exact number of distinct pings from each state rather than just the rate if we were to truly compare and rank different states. Just my opinion.

Cheers.

Chp 536. Game Developer Conference, 2014

And so last week, Sumeet and I, the two Co-Founders of FITH Media, took a last minute cab ride to Pune to attend the NASSCOM Game Developer Conference held in Pune.

We actually didn’t plan on attending this year due to our hectic job schedule, and also for the fact that we didn’t submit any of our new games for the “Game of the Year” award ceremony, unlike last year when not one, but TWO of our games were shortlisted for the final round of this prestigious award (though we eventually didn’t win, it was an impressive achievement for a new gaming studio to have two of its game nominated on its very first year of existence). [NGDC 2013]

This year had been different, with a lot of ups and downs here and there, not just regarding game development. And then in the last minute, a few discussions took place and Sumeet and I were off to Pune. The cab ride was 1900 bucks, and since we left Mumbai during evening rush hour, it took us almost 2 hours just to leave Mumbai! Once we were out of the city, we took around that same amount of time to reach Pune. :)

The next day, we made our way to the venue. Last year, NGDC was held at JW Marriott’s. This time it was at The Westin. And the best part was, this hotel was just a few meters away from Burger King, but I’ll get to that later.

Since we registered in the last minute, the participation cost was 3500 per head, unlike last year where we not only availed of the early bird registration (2000 per head) but even got an additional 1000 bucks discount because our games were nominated. But overall, the cost was almost the same as this time it was just Sumeet and I whereas last year there were 7 of us attending.

[Click on all photos to enlarge on a new tab]

The place was set up just as beautiful as last year, though it is not a hidden fact that the venue was smaller.

I got to meet Shashank, who was an employee of FITH, until he got an admission at DSK, one of India’s premier International institutes on animation and video game design. His game had been shortlisted for the “Student game of the year” category again, just like last year.

I made him promise that he’ll join us again once he graduates from DSK :)

I had a very fruitful time meeting and catching up with friends and founders of other gaming studios. Since we’ve been pretty much below the radar this year, most of the questions I got immediately was, “Hey how come you’re no longer active at our gaming discussion forums?” :) I had to explain about our upcoming big plan many times.

I also attended a couple of really good seminars.

Since most of the sessions were taking place simultaneously, Sumeet and I split up, with Sumeet attending the Technology related ones while I attended the Game Design topics.

The first session I attended was “Dual Game Narrative” by Josué Monchan, and it was definitely my favorite. Don’t get me wrong, the other speakers also spoke really well, but while most of them were promoting their own games or apps (the ones they themselves had developed), Josua gave a universal reference, giving examples such as Tetris. I mean, I never assumed there could be a narration behind such a simple game as Tetris, but his talk was really an eye opener for me. The importance of narrative in gaming. And being a copywriter for 5 years before joining the gaming industry, I could relate to a lot of stuff he talked about.

After a long day of attending more talks and meeting more people, we left the conference. We didn’t stay for the Award presentation or NGDC official party as we had a very important appointment, the content of which will be revealed later once things are made official.

After the meeting, we stopped at a cozy restaurant near our hotel, and I just had to post this here - masala peanuts. My favorite side-serve here in Mumbai, but the way it was presented in Pune was so different :)

The next day, we visited all the stalls and tried their games. The stalls were regional winners of NGDC’s game dev hackathon competitions and most of them used Unity.

What was truly impressive about some of the winners were that they were just kids, 7th standard students, and you should see how excited and enthusiastic they were while explaining the concept of their games to us. Hope that fire in their eyes never dies out.

We even gave our contact details to these kids, after all, you gotta catch them young right? :) They were able to answer any query we had and they really knew their stuff well.

There were even a number of international stalls, like the one below presented by students from Taiwan. They showcased a very interesting strategy game based around an office setting.

They told us how much they envied us because back in Taiwan, it seems the government does not acknowledge gaming as an industry, and so the people have to set up everything by themselves out of their own pockets.

Perhaps the most popular stall was Shashank’s stall, where his team “Too Mainstream” was showcasing their game called Sagittarius. It is a VR action game which requires an Oculus Rift to play the game. The gaming experience was truly mind-blowing, and we had to stand in a long queue just to try out their game.

And of course an NGDC is incomplete without the CosPlay. Lo and behold - Heavy Metal meets Half-Life Metal :)

Though these guys were good, I was kinda disappointed Niha Novacaine wasn’t hired again this year like the last time.

But the biggest disappointment came after we left the conference venue.

The one thing we really look forward to at an NGDC is visiting Burger King (not the international franchise one) before travelling back to Mumbai. They have one of the best Beef steak burgers I’ve ever tasted, and boy it is huge and scrumptious. Here’s a pic we took last year after attending the very same conference. [NGDC 2013]

This time, I was even more excited because since NGDC was held at The Westin, Burger Kings was just a 2 minutes’ walk away from the hotel. We both even skipped breakfast earlier that day, and when we left the conference around 2 PM, our stomachs were grumbling with hunger and excitement.

Heaven came crumbling down when we reached the place and they informed us that they were out of beef! Aaaaaaaarrrgghhhhhh! Out of freaking beef!!!

“Chicken burger instead?” the man asked us. We laughed at his suggestion, painfully, with tears rolling down our cheeks, and slowly walked out of Burger King dejectedly.

We found a nice restobar nearby playing 80’s euro-dance music, where we finally decided to have lunch. We were both so disappointed with Burger King that we quickly downed a pitcher of chilled draught beer to drown our sorrows in. This was accompanied by momos.

We also ordered Mongolian lamb for starters, which was pretty delicious.

For our main course, I had the “Panthe Khause”, a Burmese style chicken curry served with steamed rice and garnishes, while Sumeet ordered the “Bulgogi”, chicken strips marinated and wok with vegetables served on a bed of sizzling noodles.

Not bad, though we still preferred the beef burger. After our heavy meal, we made our way back to Mumbai.

I was keeping my fingers cross at the Lonavala toll gate because last year, our car broke down at the location, and we had to be dragged back to Mumbai by a Tow truck. It took us 6 freaking hours to travel from Navi Mumbai to Mumbai!!!!

And of course no trip to Lonavala or beyond would be complete without the traditional chikkis, papris and jelly sweets. Anybody want some? :)

So that was it. Overall, it was a fruitful conference. Hope I’ll get to attend this conference next year too. Cheers for now.