Nerd for hire.

Awkwardly addressing the elephant in the room – probably by talking to the wrong end or something – we discussed the topic of awkwardness at the pub on Friday night.

But this was not like five people discussing the moon landing or, I don’t know, success or anything – this was five experts in their field, contemplating their craft, like Kevin Spacey on ‘Inside the Actor’s Studio’ or, rather, David Blaine on GMTV.

Apparently, a full moon packs out A&E. We don’t know what the moon was doing on Friday, but it was a particularly awkward night. Me and Brook’s sister Ruth wandered into the wrong exhibition opening (but, as it turns out, the right place to pinch some booze). Olly found himself not locking lips but locked in air-kiss etiquette hell.

Is it one kiss or two? Should it be combined with a hug? Some gentle petting? (The answer is almost always ‘no’ to that last one.)

We swapped stories of awkwardness like the shark hunters in Jaws comparing scars, each one a bigger social faux pas than the last. “Hmm…” I thought. “We’re gonna need a bigger gloat.” Awkwardness is nothing to be proud of… Is it?

Is awkward the new cool?

Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg is so awkward they named a new kind of awkward after him (“Awkberg“). And he’ll tell you himself: “You know what’s cooler than a million dollars? Being awkward.”

Actor Michael Cera’s awkwardness is career defining as (awkwardly-named) George Michael in Arrested Development. For the ladies, awkward anti-hero Zooey Deschanel is kind of a dork and kind of adorable at the same time (adorkable).

But where were these gods of awkwardness when I was pulling a ‘Push’ door in the terrible sweaters of my youth – uncoordinated, unrelatable and unfashionable in my big NHS prescription glasses. I see those same frames on people now, but I don’t always see the glass.

So, what next? Will people shave their heads to imitate male pattern baldness? Lop their feet off to appear awkwardly short? Bite their tongues to speak with a lisp?

I don’t know. I don’t even have an ending for this post. So, I guess I’ll just peter out with the catchphrase of the awkward:

So…

You could say that I was never properly introduced to computers. At school we shared one between three and the other boys seemed to know them much better, negotiating them as they would girls at the school disco. As such, I hung back, dreading my turn. We’d bump teeth, I thought, step on each others toes.

We didn’t really get to know one another until my dad brought one home, unannounced, from God Knows Where (probably the same place he got my mountain bike or the VCR). The Amstrad PC-1640 sat on the dining room table, eating actual floppy disks. Sometimes it took two to get going and you had to pull a latch down over its mouth so it didn’t spit them out.

My dad had no idea how to use it, but somehow it fell for my lines and showed me a rudimentary Paint programme and, eventually, a Bruce Lee video game, which I, amazingly, accepted as playable.

A year or so later, my uncle handed down his old Windows 3.1 laptop. And while I was initially impressed with its mobility, the feeling soon evaporated when he explained how the battery and the power cable were both faulty. It still worked, mind you, but only when you kept your foot on its power cable.

So, while I couldn’t take it into school, I could swap its not-so-floppy disks with my friends. I traded a ‘perfectly playable’ Bruce Lee video game for some pixelated photos of Gillian Anderson, which loaded on my laptop’s greyscale screen, one line at a time, coming into focus to reveal a frowning FBI agent in a trouser suit.

My network grew with the advent of a new PC – the Advent ‘Astute’, which ran Windows 95, CD-ROMs, like the Encarta Encyclopaedia, and the revelatory Internet. It was with this that my love of computers grew. I couldn’t get enough. I ripped demo CDs from magazine covers, I clogged up the phone-line and ran up the bill. “You hang up,” I said to the Internet. “No, it replied. “You hang up!”. And I made what was, probably, the wisest investment of my life: a box of old .Net magazines from a car boot sale for just a pound. At the back of each issue was a section on how to code your own website. Now, 12 years on, I’m making a living doing just that.

We were never properly introduced, but computers, the Internet and that box of old magazines changed my life.

Today is the last day of Movember, an annual, month-long, moustache-growing charity event to raise funds and awareness for men’s health issues.

Now, I may not be the best ambassador for men’s health: having fallen through the cracks of the NHS, I’ve not been to the doctor in over two years and I don’t know if this growth is normal, but – hey! – I signed up anyway, and have spent the month growing a moustache in the name of charidee.

But it nearly didn’t happen. Movember rules state ‘Mo Bros’ must start the month clean shaven, which I did, using the only shaving paraphernalia I could find in the flat – a bottle of Herbal Essence and Brook’s lady shave.

I’d kept a full-beard for over two years, had thrown out my own shaver and was a little bit worried about what I would find underneath the facial hair. Would there be spots, I wondered. Or a tan line?

There were neither, thank God, but as I chipped away at two years of beard and the little bits of biscuit I found in there I started to think back to the first time I shaved.

While I’m keeping one now for charity, it’s not technically the first time I’ve had a moustache. Like so many Asian boys it came early – I was perhaps 10 – and like so many Asian mothers mine was reluctant for me to shave it off and enter puberty.

I did the summer before starting “big school”, but it kept coming back, each time thicker and faster. It meant that I left one institution looking like Frida Kahlo and entered another looking like an Ofsted inspector with a 3.30pm shadow. Teachers clutched their lesson plans nervously as I walked the halls. I was an 11-year-old man-child, ravaged by puberty, bones flung in all directions; I was stretched to six feet, sinewy muscle just covering the expanse of my growth; my voice an imperceptible pitch, miming its way through three years of school choir – a music teacher unable to harmonise my low growl with the soprano of my classmates.

I must have imagined that the feeling of awkwardness would pass as I grew into my body and became a man but, in truth, I don’t think it ever has. I’m just as awkward now with my moustache, as I was at 11 years old without one.

“Oh, this is not a look I’m nurturing, by the way,” I said in an effort to explain away my moustache to a conference delegate last week, gesticulating awkwardly at my own face. “I’m doing it for charity.”

“You’re doing Movember too?” Another delegate asked, joining us, and pointing at his own moustache.

“Oh,” the first said, laughing so hard her name badge popped off. “I thought you meant your glasses!”

***

One man dies every hour of prostate cancer in the UK – more than 35,000 will be diagnosed this year! It’s the most common kind of cancer here.

Movember is now in its third year and, to date, has achieved some pretty amazing results, working alongside The Prostate Cancer Charity. You can find out more at: http://uk.movemberfoundation.com/research-and-programs.

And look back over my progress at: http://uk.movember.com/mospace/248626 and – please! – it’s not too late to make a donation.

I may be losing my moustache tomorrow, but I’m keeping these glasses forever.

Quite often, what we mistake for our earliest memories are, in fact, our fathers’ first camcorder outings. So I won’t claim this as my own, but I do remember seeing, at least, a home video of a man known to my family as simply… the Swami.

The Swami, which is an honorific title, is a holy man who tours the world, staying for a few days at a time in Hindu homes. And since the South Asian Diaspora is amongst the furthest flung, the Swami is a very well travelled man.

In the home video, he is shown praying in the flat above my parents’ corner shop in Newport, Shropshire. Not his most glamourous gig, I imagine, but for us – my two sisters and I – he was an exotic visitor in our otherwise suburban lives.

In what is a particularly uncomfortable scene for me, the Swami reaches down from his seat on the sofa to where we children are sat, at his feet, and strokes my head, like I were the cat to his Bond villain. Instead of purring, I stifle a laugh for what felt like an hour, but what the video reveals to have been only a few minutes.

For us, it was the highlight of the Swami’s visit. We recounted the story to each other (though we were all there), each time its telling more exaggerated. “It was like I was his bowling ball!” I’d say, not realising how creepy that sounded.

***

When he returned, years later, we were in our teens and had moved house. As he climbed our driveway, I noticed a pair of Nike Air Jordans peeking out from underneath his orange robes. He looked up at the new house, much bigger than the last, a symbol of my parents’ success, and declared it bad luck.

“Its shape,” he said. “Is like the open mouth of a roaring lion.”

I came out to help him with his bags, paused and looked up at the house as if it were a Magic Eye illusion. Maybe the lion would appear if I moved up close, fixed my eyes and stepped slowly back, I thought. But, however I looked at it, it was a new build, detached house with a separate garage joined by a granny annexe extension.

Once inside, he found our house more to his liking. Furniture draped in tarpaulin, at his request, so that when he sat he wouldn’t come into contact with the seat. Water too, on his arrival, was poured into his mouth so that the glass didn’t touch his lips. He plugged in his mobile phone to charge (it was the first I’d ever seen) and announced his final request – that he stay in my bedroom. As the youngest, he said, my room would be untouched by carnal desires. Good luck with that, buddy, I thought.

That evening, as we gathered in the lounge for a prayer session, we resumed our original positions: children (and mere mortals) to the floor, Swami perched on the covered sofa. This time, when he reached down to stroke my head, he found himself tangled in sticky hair gel.

“Any questions?” he asked, when we were done. “Anything you like.”

It was quiet. I guess we thought that if we asked any questions we’d only have to sit there, stifling laughter, for even longer. But it was awkward, so I raised my hand and scanned the room, looking for inspiration, my eyes landing on a painting of the avatar Krishna, in typical pose, playing a flute and dancing with women. Topless women, I’ll add.

“Mr Swami?” I said.

“Swami,” he corrected me.

“Swami, why’s the Lord Krishna always surrounded by women?” I asked. I was fifteen, bear in mind, and if I could just have his secret…

“Sandeep,” he said. “You mustn’t ask questions of your religion. OK?”

OK. So his question, as to whether we had any questions, was a rhetorical question?

I was glad when he left. And as I helped him with his bags I thought that for a Swami, “free from all the senses”, he sure had a lot of shit with him. Checking for his mobile phone, a dance I’d soon learn myself, he was on his way, off to chide more children and put them off the religion their parents so wanted them to embrace.

I was reminded of all of this when I went home for Diwali last weekend. It was a similar scene: the family gathered in the lounge for a prayer session on the Saturday evening, except we all sat on the floor this time. And perhaps because this made me feel like we were on the same level, I interrupted the prayer to ask why we didn’t say it in English.

“I mean, no-one understands this,” I said. I hadn’t wanted to start a revolution, but the debate my question had sparked was turning into one.

“Can’t you be a Hindu without speaking Hindi?” my sister asked.

“Yeah, why’s the religion and the language so tied up?”

You can see that our line of questioning had matured since the Swami’s visit, but even still it was upsetting mum. She finished the prayer, put away her books and went to the kitchen.

The next day, as I was packing to return to London, I came across a magazine in my old room. Though the Swami wasn’t with us this Diwali he’d found his way onto the cover of Hinduism Today, which had pronounced him, “Hindu of the Year”. I wondered how he’d earned the title. Fluent in Hindi? Unquestioning? Looking at the cover, he had a lot of bindis. Maybe that helped. I took a photo of the magazine and put away my camera. I’d been teaching myself photography and Diwali this year had turned into an ethnographic study.

In the car on the way to the railway station I apologised to my mum for upsetting her the night before.

“That’s okay, son,” she said. “It just upset me, I suppose, that you’re willing to teach yourself photography, but you seem uninterested in your own religion.”

It didn’t feel like my religion, I wanted to say. And the fact that I asked questions meant that I was interested.

But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want an argument before I left, and I didn’t really want a revolution. I’d had a great weekend, and I knew that when I got home and processed the photos I’d have the evidence in my hands. You just can’t say that about religion.

“Mum,” I said, as I got out of the car. “Why is Krishna always surrounded by topless women?”

My mum wound-up the car window and started the engine. I guess you can’t say that either.

I was squeezing into an old pair of trousers when I first realised that I’d gained weight. In fact, it was the third pair I’d tried to squeeze into that day. I thought they too had “shrunk in the wash”, along with my shirts, my jacket and my… watch?

Adjusting its strap, I thought to myself that it was time to lose some weight. The hips don’t lie, as they say, and neither do the scales. As I stood on them, the needle swung wildly to the right and I watched as my toes slowly disappeared beneath the girth of my belly.

What was next to vanish? I shuddered (and wobbled a little bit) at the thought. How did I let myself go?

I’ve been working from home for about four years. And while there are advantages, like not having to commute, it does completely negate the need to exercise. When I was living in Shrewsbury, at least, I’d walk to meetings. Then I moved to London, where I lived in Kilburn, where you had to move quickly or else get mugged. But now that I’m in Hackney with Brook I don’t even have to travel to see her. She comes home after work to find me sprawled on the sofa, deep in a bag of crisps, like an actual coach potato.

But standing on the scales, as I was, eating crisps, I realised that if I couldn’t change my diet I was going to have to do some exercise. And while I might not be tightening my belt, I am tightening the purse strings, so I worked out that buying a Wii Fit was cheaper than buying a good pair of running shoes. Not only that, but it would overcome any awkwardness I’d feel at running with the Olympic hopefuls in Victoria Park. Plus, if there’s anything that’s going to get me into exercise it’s technology, right?

So now, when Brook comes home, she finds me off the couch, out of that crisp packet and onto the Balance Board, swinging my hips around an imaginary hula-hoop, punching the shit out of thin air or hitting the negligible slopes of our front room. I don’t know if she’s any less disturbed.

But, while I might look more ‘bunny boiler’ than ‘gym bunny’, I am actually losing weight! 4 lbs, to be precise. And I’ve got Brooky Wook involved too. The healthy competition has me determined to reach my ideal weight even quicker. Unfortunately, that competition has already closed. The Wii Fit tells Brook that, according to her BMI, if she gets any thinner she’ll be dangerously underweight. So, soon I’ll have the added challenge of trying to lose the pounds while my girlfriend tries to gain them.

Stepping off the Balance Board tonight, however, it looks like I’ve beaten her at her own game, having gained the 4 lbs that I had just yesterday lost. It makes me wonder how heavy my clothes are! Maybe tomorrow, when she comes home, she’ll find me naked atop the Board, lunging at the TV – not necessarily fitter, but having lost weight, all the same. And at least I won’t need to buy new trousers.

I’ve been using Twitter for about three years now and have never, in that time, been approached by anyone urging me to ‘tweet’. In fact, I think the only conversations I’ve had on the topic have been with sceptics, urging me to stop. So, where this fear comes from – that one day soon ‘Tweeps’ all over the world will rise up and force us to open accounts and update them with the oft and ill quoted “I’m having a sandwich” line – is something of a mystery to me.

And, I think, there are two ways of dealing with mysteries; that is, dealing with that which we don’t understand. You can, like the great mystery solvers – Holmes, Marple, Fletcher, Creek – attempt to unravel them. Or you can fear them, run and hide. Or really go for it – galvanise your fear into a pitchfork and torch-waving angry mob. Well, I don’t much like crowds, so I’m going up the Jonathan Creek route with this one. And I’m taking a paddle.

I spent the early part of this weekend politely batting comments from a techno-sceptic on a number of topics, from records versus MP3s to e-book readers versus paperbacks. And I’ll discuss them here, even though I don’t think they’re really versus debates.

But I think there’s a word for the kind of person with whom I was debating and that’s a prosophobe – someone who is afraid of progress. You could say that she was a luddite, a term that has come to mean an opponent of technological progress. It comes from the social movement of 19th century workmen, who destroyed laboursaving machinery and stood against the Industrial Revolution. But since the debate ended with her gently pulling out her iPod nano and not by flinging it across the floor in protest, I don’t think that would be quite fair.

To be fair would be to say that even the luddites would find it difficult to stick to their principles in the 21st century. My prosophobic friend mourned the death of vinyl, but pulled an iPod out of her bag; she derided the Twittersphere in a Facebook status update; and I imagine she wants to take London off the Google Map over this Street View controversy.

As a luddite might realise, that’s a lot to smash up. But a cure for what scares you, as a prosophobe, is to realise not that the new replaces the old but that it lives alongside it. Take, for example, the e-book reader versus the paperback debate.
“It’s just ridiculous,” she said. “What will people put on their shelves?”
“Well, books.” I said. “You can have both.”

Books are, as Stephen Fry reminds us, themselves a technology and one that many called, at their advent, the work of the devil. “They only went and taught people how to make e-book readers, didn’t they?” I said.

As Fry puts it, “You don’t throw away your books when you buy a computer. You keep both. The beauty of living in the present day is you don’t abandon the past. The past co-exists.”

And the future is forged by the curious, not by the fearful. The greatest mystery solvers weren’t Holmes, Marple, Fletcher or even Creek. They were Darwin, Edison, Curie, Obama. And, if they were around today, I reckon, they’d be on Twitter. Obama is.

And, I shouldn’t say this in the same breath, so am I! Follow me at: twitter.com/sansharma

My sister, Suman, is late to the party that is social networking. At 29, she graduated before Facebook became the big man on campus it is today and left high school while MySpace was still a twinkle in Tom Anderson’s eye.

In the last month, she’s joined both networks, muddled them up in her head and failed in her attempts to stay relevant by referring to each as MyFace. (I had to stop her from inviting friends to meet there. It was a conversation I never wanted to have with my sister.)

Just as Suman’s getting to know Facebook (and her friends in a more intimate way than she imagined), I’m trying to distance myself from the social network that’s costing UK business over £130m a day and 233 million hours of ‘lost time’ every month.

I’ll be running for the hills when it rolls out its new instant messaging feature in the next couple of weeks. It’s hitting some networks and the reviews are pretty good, but Facebook’s already given me a second inbox to battle, not to mention another Wall to climb, and I’m terrified that I’ll never keep up with friends, nor will I want to know that they’re getting a sandwich, packing for their holidays or being surprised at the result of a football match, reality TV show or STD test.

It’s hard enough trying to sneak onto Facebook without someone noticing that you haven’t replied to their message (“oh, I haven’t checked,” doesn’t really work). Now its new chat features promise to bring back into fashion a certain keyboard shortcut dance I used to perform when avoiding friends on instant messengers. (If I log on and then off immediately, you’ll know what just happened…)

It’s not too late for my sister, Suman – she’s not yet hooked. However, by making Facebook a more real time experience, its developers are hoping session length will go through the roof. But it might just be the poke that pushes users, like me, over the edge.

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While other mums worry about their sons turning to drugs, getting their girlfriends pregnant or joining some sort of gang, mine is concerned with matters more spiritual. (Besides, I don’t have a girlfriend, I’m a responsible member of an online community and I just turned down a line of coke because I had a “terrible blocked nose”.) The way my mum sees it, the only road I’m heading down is the one clearly marked, ‘Identity Crisis’.

“Coconut boy,” she calls me. “Brown on the outside, white on the inside.”

While there might, at least, be parts of me that resemble a coconut – brown, covered in hair and full of a white, milky fluid – at this time of the year, when my colour fades, it’s quite easy to ‘lose my roots’ when they’re not so etched onto my face in hues of burnt sienna, sepia and mahogany. I’m invited to fewer dinner parties, considered less effective as a token person of colour, and stopped far less by police men.

It takes just a two hour journey up north and one weekend with my family to bring that muddy colour back to my sweet cheeks and to remind me that my roots don’t stop in Shropshire, but in a land far, far away, to which ex-pat relatives still squint and admire what remains of a changing culture.

I found out this morning that my cousin, a graduate from Kings College London, is in India to get married.
“That’s crazy!” I said. “Has he even met her before?”
“Oh yeah,” my mum replied, nonchalantly. “At the engagement party, I think.”

He’s my second cousin in as many years to go east to find the perfect Indian bride. Some send for the brides to come over to the UK. Others, like my cousin, get married in India with a view to bring their brides home once ‘the paperwork’ is ready.

On the one hand, I think it sort of represents a failure, as if the groom-to-be was no match made in heaven for the British Indian girls he would have seen on the arranged marriage circuit (which I like to imagine is like the selection process of American Idol; Simon Cowell as busty bride-to-be).

On the other hand, it’s like the son or, more often, his parents, look to India for the ‘old fashioned decency’ quickly escaping British Indian girls. (It’s being replaced by ambition, I’m pleased to report.)

What they don’t know – or fail to see – is that the kind of girl that insists on a wedding register at the UK Border & Immigration Agency, is probably pretty ambitious. And that India is going through it’s own (belated) sexual revolution (after ironically triggering western ‘free love’ movements of the 1960s and 1970s, with the rediscovery of its ancient culture of sexual liberalism).

The pursuit and purchase of the ‘perfect Indian bride’ might be more a case for Trading Standards than Border and Immigration control. Ambition and sexual liberalism is completely at odds with the requirements of my cousin, his parents and other British Indians who look to India for ‘old fashioned decency’, as impossible to attain as the ‘impaling on a stake’ position of one of its most old-fashioned texts, the Kama Sutra.

Nevertheless, I wish them luck. If I’m like a coconut, and life a box of chocolates, an arranged marriage is like a curry. It’s hot, it’s exotic, you can pick it up or have it delivered, but soon enough that shit’s going to really hurt.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.