South Asia Daily

Joining in uncritical celebration of Facebook

Facebook founder, chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg

I am told Mark Zuckerberg was overcome with a billionaire’s ennui this morning. Even the Winklevoss twins or Eduardo Saverin were unable to shake him out of the wealth-induced indolence. 

He even refused to put on his favorite slate gray T-shirt, jeans and hoodie to go to work. I half suspected his Facebook update this morning to be “What now?” He picked on his breakfast until his mother scolded him and said, “No cookies unless you finish your oatmeal.” He responded in mock irritation, “Maaam”, slammed the door and went right back to sleep.

I can continue in this vein but fear that it might lose its humor. So let me get on with uncritically reproducing some factoids from Facebook’s website. After all, the whole world is Facebook’s PR machine today.

Did you know that…

there are 901 million monthly active Facebook users at the end of March 2012?

approximately 80% of them are outside the U.S. and Canada?

there were 526 million daily active users on average in March 2012?

there were 488 million monthly active users who used Facebook mobile products in March 2012, and more than 500 million mobile monthly active users as of April 20, 2012?

during March 2012, on average 398 million users were active with Facebook on at least six out of the last seven days?

more than 125 billion friend connections were made at the end of March 2012?

on average more than 300 million photos were uploaded per day in the three months ended March 31, 2012?

an average of 3.2 billion Likes and Comments generated by Facebook users per day during the first quarter of 2012?

there were more than 42 million Pages with ten or more Likes at the end of March 2012?

Facebook is available in more than 70 languages?

none of those languages seems to have the expression what the fuck are you doing spending so much time on Facebook?

A thing or two about bipedalism and brain

The feet by MC

I do not know why I woke up this morning thinking about the bipedalism before the larger brain question.The point is I did and hence I might as well deal with it.

One of the great debates of anthropology has been the now settled question whether bipedalism predates brain evolution. This is notwithstanding that one is everyday confronted by bipeds who seemed to prove the reverse to be the case. Today’s post is written only so that I can use my very early putdown that goes—You conclusively prove that bipedalism indeed came before the brain. But I digress.

It is now widely accepted that our ancestors had to become bipedal in order for us to eventually emerge as the dominant species. Unless two of our four limbs were freed up some five million years ago as an evolutionary response to do other tasks including build tools and improve our diet for nourishing our brains better, it is almost certain we would still be knuckle-charging our way to work, picking berries and eating ants crawling on fallen tree branches for breakfast, not that there is anything wrong with any of that. Sometimes one looks around the world and wants to devolve into that primal life. Try knuckle-charging with a fully evolved brain and see how harrowing it is. But I digress.

There were scientists who believed that the brain evolved and became larger before we became bipedal, but from what I have read that is no longer the accepted scientific wisdom. As Charles Darwin wrote in ‘Descent of Man, And Selection Relation to Sex’, "If it be  an advantage to man to stand firmly on his feet and to have his arms free . . .  then I can see no reason why it should not  have been advantageous to the progenitors of man to have be come more erect or bipedal." The reference “more erect” has nothing to do with erections lasting four hours. So do not call your doctor if you have been able to walk erect longer than four hours. But I digress.

As we all well know while bipedalism may well have been the single most defining change whose benefits we are enjoying millions of years down the line, it has also led to our species perfecting technology to such an extent that we do not really need it to socialize (A case in point? Facebook) and to kill (A case in point? The drones). It was not until the rise of Homo erectus some 1.8 million years ago that scientists say bipedalism became fully efficient. Incidentally, Homo erectus is not the title of a gay porn movie which President Barack Obama endorsed. But I digress.

Bipedalism, for those still on all fours, is walking on two feet. But for those still on all fours, accessing the internet and finding this blog to read is too far in the future.

Cash is a great lubricant in diplomatic intercourse

The tossup this morning is between Pakistan President Ali Zardari attending the NATO summit in Chicago, the declining rupee and General Motors quitting as a Facebook advertiser. So rather than choosing one, let me write about all three.

A spokesman for the Pakistani embassy in Washington has confirmed that Zardari will attend the summit whose primary focus will be Afghanistan. Incidentally, my spokesman has also confirmed that I will be attending the summit on behalf of the IANS wire and South Asia Monitor.

The immediate task for the NATO countries, particularly the United States, is to persuade Pakistan to reopen the border route so that overland supplies into Afghanistan can be resumed. Pakistan has enforced a blockade ever since US airstrikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in November last year. The blockade has come to symbolize the breakdown in bilateral relations between the two countries.

Pakistan’s change of heart about lifting the blockade is as much prompted by its wish to remain a key player in Afghanistan’s strategic future as hard cash. Washington is said to have guaranteed some 1.1 billion dollars to Islamabad to fight the militants once the Afghan border route is reopened. Islamabad could not be unmindful of its fast depleting cash since November. Cash is a great lubricant to smoothen a squeaky diplomatic intercourse. Pay cash, will open seems to be the logic.

I cannot help but point out the absurdity of some 60 countries coming together in McCormick Place, “the premier convention facility in North America” here in Chicago, to discuss the future of a country that lies 6961 miles or 11,204 kilometers to its east. Equally ironic is The New York Times story by Mathew Rosenberg today about how Afghanis trained by the US military are turning against the latter.

I cannot think of any option other than the NATO countries, particularly the United States, clearly deciding to leave Afghanistan to Afghanis with an explicit warning that any future attack against their interests emanating from Afghani soil would invite decisive military response. However, the problem with such a warning is that we all know how the current decisive response has turned out after ten years of occupation.  One does not expect the NATO leaders to admit that by and large the Afghan campaign has been colossally mishandled by an alliance of arguably the world’s mightiest fighting forces.

For Zardari, the visit to Chicago is mainly about its optics because most of the actual decision making about such matters lies well outside his office and influence. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who is also expected to attend, has to be aware how short his own writ runs within his country. On balance, the NATO summit cannot do much better than reaffirming that they cannot do much better for Afghanistan than what they have done so far.

****

The Indian rupee’s sharp decline in recent weeks (it fell to 54.43 rupees to the dollar today) reminds me of what some currency analysts have been saying for a while now. They have argued that the rupee is overvalued against the dollar and it should ideally be between 60 and 70.

I don’t understand all the complexity that goes into determining currency values but India is concerned at the decline. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee is already talking about enforcing austerity to achieve fiscal consolidation while his political opponents are wondering whether the country is reliving its 1991 economic and foreign exchange reserves crisis. It was that very crisis that forced India to embark on sweeping economic reform and liberalization.

Two decades down cynics may feel emboldened to ask whether it was worth doing all that if the rupee has weakened to a record low. It now has the dubious distinction of being the worst performing Asian currency having eroded 20 percent against the dollar in the last nine months.

It is amusing when skeptics invoke the 1991 crisis to describe India’s current predicament. In 1991, the country barely had foreign exchange reserves enough to cover two to four weeks of imports. As of May 4, 2012, the country’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India reports foreign exchange reserves of a little over $293 billion which could easily cover seven to eight months of imports. It might help to remember that India’s population in 1991 was about 850 million compared to 1.22 billion now and yet it has managed to strengthen a lot of its economic fundamentals.

The point is the rupee value is a function of the currency market (oftentimes some currency traders pull the value out of their ass—literary exaggeration) which is important but cannot be the only determinant. If the rupee is falling, it only means that gravity likes it better than the dollar.

****

General Motors (GM) has decided to quit advertising on Facebook. This reportedly represents a loss of $10 million for Facebook at a time when the company is preparing for its blockbuster IPO this week. More than the money it is the public relations of the GM withdrawal that could hurt the social network giant.

Reports say GM does not seem to get enough “Likes” on Facebook. I think the company has figured out that all that the Facebook users do is sit in their unlaundered pajamas and post silly updates without even once thinking about buying a GM car.

The hoodied one and his 100 billion

The Hoodie by MC

Would you give a 28-year-old, who wears a hoodie, 100 billion dollar plus? We will find out later this week as Mark Zuckerberg goes about pumping many investing hands in New York.

We have been spared the conceit of Facebook’s initial public offering (IPO) being timed with the hoodied one’s 28 birthday yesterday. All indications suggest that the company will notch up an evaluation of 100 billion or more, which could also be taken to mean a little over a dollar for everyone of its some 900 million members.

With Steve Jobs gone and his black turtle neck and jeans having been retired from corporate folklore, we now have a black hoodie, slate gray T-shirt and jeans that Zuckerberg wears with nearly messianic nerdiness. There has been some chatter in the online media about whether Zuckerberg has been disrespectful of the Wall Street by not turning up in a more formal attire while seeking their cash. What the Wall Street sees is the more than $4 billion that Facebook makes in annual ad revenues because of suckers like me who are frequently drawn to “What’s on your mind?” box on Facebook several times during the day.

The IPO marks the onset of Facebook’s corporate puberty. Corporate puberty is a little more invasive than a cracking of the voice and sprouting of body hair. In a world where even a dollar does not come without strings attached, 100 billion will come with a massive burden of expectations. He can continue to wear his hoodie but his investors would expect that they earn enough out of him to sleep in their Brioni Vanquish II or Alexander Amosu suits.

I would like stick my neck out and say that Facebook has pretty much garnered its effectively addressable user base with its 900 million plus users. The sheer mass of that number is bound to act as a drag on the company’s dizzying trajectory. One of its obvious problems will stem from whether the ads that appear on the right hand sidebar really get value for the money for the advertisers. I do not consider myself a typical FB user by any measure but I have never bothered to even look at what they sell. I wonder whether Zuckerberg can afford to visually assault FB users by allowing far bigger and more intrusive ads for indifferent Facebookers like me.

The one billion dollar purchase of Instagram, which allows people to post photos directly from their mobile phones, has been much talked about for its value addition. I am not sure Facebook wants more photos either.

I suspect there is too much of everything on sites such as Facebook for people to really notice anything. A longer and sustained attention span is no longer a viable option and Facebook will have to make the most of impulsive updating that most of its users do to get in and capitalize. Experts believe that Facebook has not done enough to leverage its virtual currency Facebook Credits that users use to buy virtual goods. FB takes 30 percent of the transactions and earns real hard cash which last year touched topped $550 million. While ads are fine as a business strategy, payment would have to be form a significant part as well.

The point is Zuckerberg can wear to work what he wants as long as he justifies the projected 100 billion plus valuation by earning his investors a lot of money. Otherwise he may soon have to form a club with Jerry Yahoo! Young.

Sophistry, philosophy and physics

Just a random illustration for a random post (Artwork by Mayank Chhaya)

I became a sophist before I knew what the word meant. That dates it back to my early pre-pubescent life. I have always been partial towards sophistry because by the time your interlocutor has become wise to it, you are gone. The way I understand a sophist is one who considers being compelling more important than actually making sense during an argument.

That short introduction has a bearing on the currently raging debate among physicists and philosophers into which I am about to jump.The debate seems to be over whether philosophers have almost written themselves out of the plot, meaning whether they are relevant any more when it comes to understanding the fundamental questions about the universe.

At the heart of the debate is a book by well known theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss called ‘A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing.’ I have not read the book yet but the basic idea is that the universe may indeed come from nothing.

Krauss sets it up in the very first sentence of the preface where he says, “In the interest of full disclosure right at the outset I must admit that I am not sympathetic to the conviction that creation requires a creator, which is the basis of the world’s religions.” To the unfailing response from the proponents of a creator as to who then created everything, he says, “Nevertheless, the declaration of a First Cause still leaves open the question “Who created the creator?” After all, what is the difference between arguing in favor of an eternally existing creator versus an eternally existing universe without one?”

I think I may have a reasonable answer for this brilliant question. One way to get around the question whether the universe could have been born of nothing is to declare everything and everyone everywhere to be one massive never-ending hallucination. We are a product of our own hallucination. We have imagined ourselves into what we believe to be real is what I am saying.

However, if we accept that premise, we then run into a more abstruse problem. If everything is one massive hallucination, then we would not really know that it is one massive hallucination because that’s the only reality we would have ever known. For hallucination to be hallucination it has to be contrasted against what a vast majority accepts as reality.

Once we all agree that the universe is nothing more than a bizarre confluence of our collective and conflicting imaginations, no explanation is necessary. The universe changes according to the way we imagine it. As for the laws of physics, they too then would become a component of that imagined universe. And beyond that, once we agree that our universe is just one slice of a multiverse the need to prove anything really becomes redundant. But does it really?

As I walk towards the edge of sophistry and run the risk of going off the cliff, let me pull myself back a bit. The core point of the debate appears to be that philosophers, who are supposed to understand sciences in a broad sense, are not keeping up with all the advances taking place. Apart from Krauss’s so-called assault on philosophers, we also witnessed Stephen Hawking declaring last year that philosophy is dead because philosophers  have not kept up with scientific advances.

In an interview with Ross Anderson of the Atlantic, Krauss responds to the antagonism between physicists and philosophers: “I expect it's because physics has encroached on philosophy. Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then "natural philosophy" became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads. Every time there's a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves, and so then you have this natural resentment on the part of philosophers…..And so I'd say that this tension occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened, and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn't.”

What throws most people off their comfortable religiously defined certainties is the idea that the universe may have come from nothing. They should bear in mind that what they understand of nothing may not be the way physicists mean nothing to be. But even if you accept for a moment that nothing indeed means nothing, it fits well with their belief of some sort of a miracle having created the universe.

Rather than getting emotional about any side of this argument, we might want to simply consider that we all may be travelers from different and conflicting beliefs or unbeliefs simply bumping into one another for short durations inside overlaps between many universes. How is that for sophistry?

Reading Kalidas on a whim

Quite on a whim, I have just started reading one of Kalidas’s three masterpieces, ‘Vikramovarshiyam’ in Sanskrit with Hindi translation/interpretation/dissection.

The edition that I am reading was published by Ramnarayan Lal Benimadhav of Allahabad. Unfortunately, it does not mention the year of publication but I suspect it has to be the early to mid 20th century. It was priced at three rupees fifty paisa.

Reading a great epic poet and dramatist whose vintage is traced to anywhere between the first century before the current era to the fourth century current era, demands that one declutter one’s mind of 21st century constructs. However, Vikramovarshiyam remains remarkably accessible.

The basic plot is about a king named Pururva residing in the ancient capital of Pratishthanpur who counts Indra, the lord of the heaven in Hindu mythology, among his close friends. It is magical right there because by definition Indra dwells in heaven, which is not earth, and requires some sort of celestial journey. Kalidas tells us that Pururva is a regular visitor to Indra’s court which would require us to imagine that he does back and forth between our world and the other world. I am sold right there.

But then comes Urvashi, variously described as a celestial nymph, or a celestial seductress, whom Pururva falls in love with during one of his heavenly sojourns. A major twist in the story is introduced by Kalidas here. According to the Hindi translation I am reading, either through a curse or because Pururva saw Urvashi naked that the two are separated. The curse means she is turned into a vine, Lata as it is called in Hindi. Some time later, because of the divine munificence, she is again turned into her original form and the two reunite. Urvashi bears Pururva eight sons.

The very first act of the play begins with Urvashi being abducted by a demon named Keshi from whom Pururva rescues her. Kalidas’ description of Pururva’s chariot, as its slices through clouds (Yes, the chariot is flying), is striking. He writes about the chariot’s wheels crushing the clouds and kicking them up like dust. He also takes care to point out that the chariot is going so fast that the spokes in its wheels appear to be one single piece as they revolve.

Kalidas is regarded, and quite rightly so, as the greatest poet in Sanskrit whose imageries were breathtakingly detailed, picturesque, erotic and stunning. I can read Sanskrit but barely understand about .00001 percent. Of course, I feel many of the words because they have spread throughout Indian languages, including my own Gujarati. Mercifully, I read, write, speak and fully understand Hindi.

It is obvious that as a poet and dramatist, Kalidas considered it very important to be nearly cinematic in his descriptions of whatever situations he was describing. He combined his profound knowledge of the art and grammar of poetry with the power of observation. In his epic poem ‘Kumarasambhava, here is how describes Uma (Parvati) in intense meditation through the summer and as monsoon rains approach. The translation is by Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls, Sr. who was the Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University. He died in 1999.

“Still sat Umā though scorched by various flame
    Of solar fire and fires of kindled birth,
Until at summer's end the waters came.
    Steam rose from her body as it rose from earth.

With momentary pause the first drops rest
    Upon her lash then strike her nether lip,
Fracture upon the highland of her breast,
    Across the ladder of her waist then trip
And slowly at her navel come to rest.”

Rain drops tumbling down from the sky, momentarily trapped by Uma’s long eyelashes and then dropping to her nether lip before breaking down on the “highland of her breast’, sliding down the “the ladder of her waist” and finally settling on her navel. If this is not a poet of the highest imagination at the peak of his craft, what is?

YUP, That’s right

 

Alert: Today’s post is a shameless plug of a new venture that I am embarked on. Its success will determine whether you will continue to read this blog and do so free. I exaggerate but the gist is accurate.

 

I have set up Yet Unnamed Publishing (YUP) (YUP, That’s right) as an impulsive endeavor of a journalist who has, over the past three decades, unwittingly gathered considerable amount of material about India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives, Afghanistan, Tibet and China. The sheer law of probability would suggest that a fair amount of this content would be of publishable and readable quality. If nothing else, I may be able to monetize some of that content.

The YUP staff (in a manner of speaking) has just begun consolidating the material which will be eventually organized as ebooks, both in fiction and nonfiction categories. The YUP content is being made available on www.issuu.com, which is claimed to be the leading digital publishing platform offering content in various formats, including books, magazines, catalogs and journals. The platform claims a monthly worldwide readership of 52 million and 3.4 billion impressions. My site is issuu.com/mayankchhaya.

The first three titles that I offer here are part of what I pompously call a trilogy of three vaguely connected novels. I have uploaded excerpts from the three, ‘Asoka’s Mint’, ‘The South Asia Daily News’ and ‘South Block’ here as well as given their direct links below. I intend publishing the first of the three sometime in September/October this year followed by the remaining two a few months apart from each other. All three have been designed by me with ‘The South Asia Daily’ jacket being temporary for now. Feel free to leaf through the excerpts and, if you will, tell me what you think. Of course, that is strictly voluntary.

The choice of the name Yet Unnamed Publishing is deliberate as is the tagline ‘YUP, That’s right.’ So here is to a new venture in my effort to ensure that I do not die in penury.

 

HH does Scottish weather a favor by announcing it

Prince Charles did the Scottish weather a favor by announcing it yesterday on BBC Scotland. The weather of Scotland has never felt so seduced as it did when Charles caressed it in his dulcet, smooth tones.

Weathercasting has become a fun thing on television worldwide and weathercasters do use celebrities and some unscripted humor from time to time. BBC Scotland thought of gainfully employing a prince who is forever waiting to become the king of England.

BBC presenter Sally Magnusson did not forget her guest weathercaster’s honorific as she said, "Let's take a look at the weather forecast now. I'm delighted to say we've got a new member of our weather team – let me hand over to him now. Your Highness..."

His Highness was waiting holding the pointer with very royally mild amusement in his right hand and left hand inside the pocket of his double-breasted coat. Do notice that the left hand was inside just a little above his knuckles. Right on cue, as the presenter said “Your Highness”, he gave her a very propah nod sideways with a slight arch of his eyebrows and began as if he was born to do it.

“Well it is an unsettled picture as we head towards the end of the week,” he said making it sound improbably profound. For a moment I thought the weather was instructed to courtesy and behave in whatever impromptu manner that the prince wanted it to. The Scottish weather matters to Charles because he is known to spend a lot of time there.

There is something about those forever living surrounded by royal privilege that whatever they do comes across as something of great significance. I suspect even when members of the British royal family pee they do so as if they are doing the urinal a favor. “Let me take a bit of a tinkle on you,” is what they might say.

Say what you will about the British royals but you have to grant them this—no one does royalty with such subtle but unmistakable sense of entitlement as them. The genteel imperiousness, the judicious stammer, the studied fidgetiness, the eternal expression of forgiveness for the less fortunate, common folk like us for the sheer temerity to exist, it is all done with such extraordinary élan.

Marry, don’t marry, whomever, whatever

President Barack Obama on ABC News

Among many things I am emotionally under-equipped to comprehend about the human experience, the importance of marriage, straight or gay, has to be fairly high on the list. My most considered response would be, “Marry, don’t marry, whomever, whatever.”

The notion that coming together of two people of whichever gender in a formal union has intrinsic sacredness and that society has to sanctify that sacredness is hard for me to understand. Like almost everything in human life, marriage is an entirely arbitrary act that requires the consent of no more than the two persons getting married. We know from evidence that marriage does require a person other than oneself.

Of course, you can always marry yourself but what would be the point of that? Or, you can also arbitrarily marry someone else of your choice without that person participating in it. But what would be the point of that either?

It is mildly amusing that President Barack Obama’s endorsement of gay marriages is being hailed as a watershed moment for civil rights in America. It is also being hailed as a morally courageous decision. We have set the standards of moral courage so low for ourselves that something so utterly routine as not preventing two people from getting married is regarded as historic and momentous. It seems anything anyone does these days becomes momentous simply because anyone has done anything at all.

I find it troubling that President Obama or for that matter any one has to at all grapple with the question whether gay people should be able to marry and have the same legal rights as straight people. Why has it been allowed to be an issue in the first place?

Among the fundamental points at the heart of this debate has been that the purpose of marriage is to procreate and perpetuate. And since two gay men or women cannot of their own do either, nature/religion/god has ordained that marriage has to be between a man and a woman and anything else is abomination/abhorrent/deviant/unnatural/sin/punishable. I simplify but that is the general crux of the argument by those who are fanatically opposed to gay marriages.

That, of course, is non-sense even if you, and especially if you believe that god created everything and everyone. If that indeed be so, then accept that god also created men who like men and women who like women and they were not meant to procreate and perpetuate their own DNA. You cannot take the position that god created everything on the one hand and on the other assert, “Yeah, but god did not create gays because they acquired their gayness of their own volition.”

It is a good thing that Obama has come out and unequivocally supported the gay community’s fundamental civil right to marry and enjoy all legal protections. But to call it historic and momentous and courageous is to diminish the meanings of those words.

Can Iran convert its rupee stash?

The Indian genius for jugaad or ingeniously crafted solution of a difficult situation is on full display in the country’s dealings with Iran.

As Tehran continues to pursue its nuclear program in the face of the crippling US-led international sanctions, which specifically disallow dollar and euro transactions, India and Iran have found a way out.

The news that India pays 45 percent of its Iranian oil import bill in rupees to get around the sanctions is old and well-known. The US and others have so far chosen to disregard the rupee-part of the bilateral trade because it does not defeat the overarching purpose of depriving Iran of the globally traded currencies of the dollar and euro which it needs to fund its nuclear program. The rupee is not a fully convertible currency.

It strikes me that getting paid in the nonrepatriable rupee, while not particularly helpful for Iran, may not as devastating for it as intended. If you permit me to indulge in a flight of fancy, I can explain why. Quite apart from the fact that Tehran can use the rupee cash to buy Indian imports (which is already happening), there could be another more creative dimension to this. Granted that this is highly speculative but it is not entirely impossible to convert rupees into dollars in the underground market that operates throughout the world but is particularly active in South Asia.

I am not suggesting that Iran could convert a meaningfully significant part of its rupee stash into dollars without attracting unpleasant global attention or that it is even possible to make very large conversions in the illegal market. However, if I am thinking of this as a plot for a novel of global intrigue over the politics of sanctions, it is not all that improbable.

Let’s crunch some numbers on the basis of last year’s figure of $988 million worth of Iranian import that India made, almost all of it oil. Say for the sake of argument that of the $988 million, $700 million was earned from oil. In reality, it is higher because Iran imported Indian goods worth just $91 million in the same period. Forty five percent of $700 million is $315 million, which would be the nonrepatriable  rupee component.

I wonder whether it would be difficult to convert the rupees into dollars or euros in tranches of 10 million from time to time. There are bound to be cartels that are capable of moving that amount of money outside the legal channels. Once you consider the amount unaccounted cash, real estate holdings and even gold that exists in those parts of the world, you begin to see possibilities.

Of course, as a country that claims to be a respectable member of the international community Iran will consider it beneath its civilizational dignity to engage in such transactions. But still if it comes to that, it is not altogether inconceivable. That’s my point, I suppose. A belabored and fanciful one but a point nevertheless. It is at least good enough plot for a novel.