A Leap

..once in four years and that day becomes a special day, in a special month.

12 X 2 = 24. That’s how the equation goes this time. It was 12/2 all this while and suddenly the / became a X this year and the writer turned 24 years old and yeah, the two great people turned 199 :)

And what was it like this year? Yes, every year its special. Every year its in a new place with new people, at least since the past 3 years and the saga continued this time too, with me back in the BigApple and the city welcoming the day with snow, much to my delight.

I know its been really long since a post came out on the blog. Well, this post is not going to be all about me, so lets get back.

If you pass the Times Square everyday on your way to office, you are bound to see a lot of interesting things happening. This one day I witnessed a big group of people with a flag in their hand, cheering a parade. I took a couple of snaps not knowing what it was and when I checked to see what it was, I got to know that it was about a country becoming independent. Well, that’s how I got to witness a historical event :) and in February.

And the month also marked my second trip to the Lady Liberty.

February, definitely, is an interesting month. It has fewer days than all other months and once in four year it gets this special treatment. In this fast-paced life, everybody wants an extra minute, an extra hour, an extra day in life and so, for all these people, February gives this extra day every four years to people who always felt.. "if only I had an extra day in life, I would ... blog" (yeah, that’s me) but honestly, it could be THE extra day that people need to do what they wanted if only they had one more day. Wouldn't it be easier if this day was declared a holiday? What would you do with that extra day?

And the month brought me back my reading habits somehow. I figured I would make a log the books I read, on my blog and I would have a count of the books I read and can use it to check and make sure I don’t read the same book twice ;)

So, here's a good one-liner from the book "The Kiterunner" by Khaled Hosseini.
"Zendagi migzara" translating to "Life goes on...".

February or March, birthday or not.. "Life goes on...." Very true.

'Demo'-crazy

A rich star kid gets married. It wouldn't affect a single person on earth other than the family. Yet, the news channels show the whole saga day and night for two weeks. We don't like it. We do not complain.

The price of onions goes up by a couple of rupees. It affects the whole nation. Yet, no channel reports it. Nobody cares.

We do not like paying fine while speeding on a "Speed Limit 20KMPH" marked free highway. It doesn't make sense. We do not complain.

We say its a free nation. But people cannot express what they feel. It feels so wrong. We do not complain.

We do not like the policies of the Government. We do not have a choice till 5 years.

Why?
Because only a limited set of people take decisions and the rest of us have to accept. And why is that happening? Lets see.

In a democratic country, ruled by a Government for the people, by the people and to the people, how many of us actually exercise the power of Vote?

If our voting percentage is a meager 50-60% and a political party requires 60% majority to form the Government, that would mean that only 36% of the total population 'actually' approve of the Government. The rest, which, unfortunately is the majority, disapprove. Isn't it ironic that a party disapproved by the majority of the people forms the Government and rules the country for five years creating policies for the nation. And that is happening because "we" - the "we" who do not complain/care haven't voted.

And how easy is it for a powerful political party to capture 35% of the votes? A little money and some power can do the magic for them. But if they had to get the 60% to vote for them, they would have to do some real good to the country. As the old saying goes, we cant fool all the people all the time. Automatically, that would mean better policies and a better nation. Isn't it?

So, the next time somebody tells us its polling day in our place, lets not sleep late and enjoy the holiday. Lets go, vote, and make a difference.
Otherwise be prepared to SMS your guess about the chance of a movie star marrying a cricket player and we will all spend our day cribbing about it and never complaining. Its not the fault of the channels. Just that the feedback and the TRP ratings suggest they go in that direction. So if you want it to be changed, better give them your feedback.

Issued in public interest. No offence meant.

the days...

It was raining cats, dogs and even fly-overs over the past month in Hyderabad, which kept the whole city busy and I was no exception :). It reminded everyone of the good old rhyme "Rain rain go away, come again the next day..little johnny wants to play". Nothing wrong in little johnny wanting to play but the parks in Hyderabad were no safe either...so unlike many of us who spent our childhood running around streets and parks, these new generation kids were warned not to go to parks :( poor fellows, had no choice but to stay indoors and make their paper boats sail over the flowing rain-water than go run around in the rain..

Talking about rhymes, paper boats and parks, isn't it true that we all love our past days and cherish them the most? We remember a lot of things about the past, like the first running race we ran in class 2, thinking that we would easily outrun everybody, but to our own surprise ended up on the ground, midway to the finish line, knees hurt and crying?? I know, PT Usha would not relate to that scene :-) but most of us would. Right?

When we tried heroism like in the movies, trying to ride bicycles hands-free and returned home with a broken rim and a bunch of alternative ideas to beg for the 150 bucks needed to get the bicycle back to shape. The day we bought the big Preity Zinta poster when we realized that we would no longer be seeing the dimpled girl daily, only to realize that posters don't speak. The days when we stood in the line at 8 AM to get the first day first show's tickets and the moment we put our hand in, the guy announced "tickets khatham ho gaye" and left us in a state of shock...

Of exams, OMR sheets, results, marks and seats...

And once in college, the list has no end.. of parties, 2 AM chais, one night exam preparations, egos, best friends, craziness, movies, "projects", goa and everything..

The point is, why does everything of the past seem so beautiful now, though there were some not-so-beautiful things also back then. As far as I remember, half of the time during those days we were busy thinking/dreaming about the future. I guess most of us would agree that those days wouldn't have been any better but given a chance to go back in time, who would not want to take it?

But then we were told, "Here's the game called Life. You want to play the game, play by the rule. And the rule says .. "There's no second chance"" .. only we were too busy to listen. :-)

lazy, independent and asleep

Much to the delight of the readers of the blog(all one of them), my carpals are back to work and so here comes a post after a really long time.

But wouldn't it be a great idea if a blog wrote posts by itself? Something like quines, but more sophisticated so that it printed out different stuff each time, some of them sensical and some of them non-sensical, just like what this blog has :)

Anyway, back to blogging, questioning, answering and everything !!

Come August and "Independence Day" is what comes to every Indian's mind. The three colors of the flag seem to be everywhere. And this year being the sixtieth year of independence, the diamond jubilee year, it was more so special. From ice creams to huge hoardings, the three colors were the predominant of the spectrum.

But do people still remember why, how, when we became independent and what it means to be independent? I am not sure. But yeah, definitely, people are more cognizant about who Mr. Gandhi is, now. Stop a kid on the road and ask him who Gandhi is and more often than not we will get the answer - "Yeah, I know him, Isn't he the guy who acted alongside Sanjay Dutt in Lage Raho". Good that in one way or other, the man and his principles are still remembered in some way or the other. :)

One thing is clear. Movies have become the most powerful media tool in these days. From history to sports, you want to drive a point, movies is the way. May be it was like that always, only I am realizing it late. People dont seriously take some sport unless a top hero endorses the sport by acting in one of those sport-movies. And the real sportspersons, poor them, they do not have so much fan following, even though they are the ones who win real cups.

But there is a flip side to it too. Imagine Sachin's case, there are people who still complain that he got out on 99 in two of the last five innings he played. There is no limit to what people expect from you, once you are a hero :)

Guess all of this is part of the bigger saying "phir bhi dil hai hindustani". Only we can complain about traffic jams, while we are the ones causing it :)

while you were sleeping ...

Its been three years now from the day I answered the final question in the Mobile Computing paper explaining the protocol architecture of WAP. It felt like the longest answer I ever wrote, not because I was unaware of WAP, but because I was too eager to get out. :) That day marked the end of an era, an era of Questions and Answers, an era that most of us call 'the golden era', the era that started from 'I class B section' and ended at 'B.E.'. That day the gigantic Engineering college building stood there smiling, standing as testimony to the day that marked the end of that era.

From that day, three years, that is more than a thousand days have passed. The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of what I did these three years is typing. :)) I have typed more words than I have talked. Courtesy, the software field. Other than that, the journey is pretty much the story of Rip Van Winkle. Remember the guy who falls asleep and wakes up after twenty years to see that the whole world has changed and he wasn't even aware? Something similar I can say. Or may be the journey all these years was just like a good dream, too comfortable to wake up.

Lots of things were part of the good dream. The independence, the luxury, the satisfaction and much recently a trip around the world taking me to the place of Mr. Winkle himself. Isn't it coincidence again? :)

"What??!!?? Its been three years? THREE years just went by? But when?" I asked myself and the title of the post is what I got as an answer.

All in all, the era that succeeded the golden era is close to being called golden, but not exactly the same.

I picked.

Remember the kid from the movie Kuch Kuch Hotha Hai, busy counting stars on a starry night? That kid is the inspiration for this post.

I have been asking myself a similar question these days. What do you do when you have nothing to do? How do you pass time? I know, different people have different answers. Some of them are happy solving the Barber Paradox, some of them try creating a few when they are free, while others have a target and move in the direction of their target and some of them blog. Yeah, there are sports, but haven't we pledged not to watch the game called cricket and was the recent French open a replay of last year's games? I don't know. So there is not much interesting there either, at least in the ones I understand. So sports ruled out. And movies, I think we talked about them in the last post.

I remember I fell in the category where people blogged in their free time, but its been a month and the blogger part of my brain has been inactive :-(

Keeping all of this in view, isn't it easy to spend time counting stars, like the intelligent little kid? That way we always have something to do every night. We can recount them everyday to see if our previous day's count was correct and most probably we end up being wrong and we have a new count to start :-) But there is a problem. The Hyderabad night sky doesn't give you the chance to do this. Serious people say it is because of pollution and 'global warming'. Whatever be the reason, there aren't any stars to count. So we have to drop the idea.

So I figured I could count my blog posts ('stars', thats what I call them) and pick the best ones. My first thought was to pick the top 5 but I ended up picking 21 of them :-(.
I had to prune the list and finally came up with a list of 12. The criteria being these are posts I LIKED, readers liked and for some of them, the comments provided some good reads, thanks to the commenters. So all in all, presenting to the reader community the best 12 posts of this blog. I have included them in a separate section on the right, so someone new can quickly take a look and get a sense of what this blog provides to the world :))

Any feedback will be appreciated. Inclusions/deletions will be considered :-) Picking 12 out of 75 was tough. Like the old sentimental saying "can you pick your favorite of the two eyes?" ;-)

We, the people.

Seems like the job resumes and eligibility criteria in India have changed in recent days.
Nowadays there are just two columns in one's resume. One, the name, and the second asking how the candidate is eligible and the second one always has the same answer "My father/mother/ancestor has been in this profession and was successful".

Does that entitle you to become eligible for the same profession? I am afraid, looks like it is true.
How else can you answer the hundreds of movies dumped on us every Friday just because the children of earlier actors want to start their acting career. How long has it been since we saw a new actor without a movie background?

This phenomena, I observe, is not really movie-specific. It has spread its wings in all directions and all professions. Guess, who the latest politician on the block is? Wasn't he/she the son/daughter of an earlier minister? Who was the magician you saw the other day trying to break an earlier record? Wasn't he trying to break the record set by his own father, who was a magician himself? And who won the recent Booker Prize? By the way, wasn't her mother a Booker prize nominee herself?

So, here we have a pattern. No wonder, children are always inspired by their parents and tend to develop interest in the same field as their parents, but as we observe, this is evolving into a more common trend than usual.

But wait, does anybody remember a similar thing read in a history class in school. What was it called? Yeah, the society in ancient India divided people based on the occupation. Families had a single occupation and all members of the family, irrespective of their choice, had to practice the same occupation. Lets leave the merits and demerits of such a system, but somehow with Independent India, this system was out and the "free" system came in. But after 60 years are we actually going in the original direction?

How many doctors today are children of doctors? How many engineers are children of engineers? Painters, singers, musicians, actors, politicians, sportsmen, pick the field and we have a parent and child famous there. Seems like we are reaching where we actually started.

Is this called what we know as "History repeats itself"?

Reasons may vary but I feel, we are going there. Though, earlier, the social status of a person depended on the kind of occupation he did, the only change with the current trend, I see is, the social status of a person now is based on the amount of public attention he gets. Remember the marriage that got covered for a whole week by the press? Was it because the children were famous or the parents? No offence meant!

One can argue, this is uncommon with "we, software engineers" ;-) Aren't we trend-setters :-). On a serious note, I guess we have to wait for one more generation for an argument like that. Lets see how many s/w engineers in 2050 are offspring of s/w engineers :-)

As usual, lets end with a question... Are the children any better than what their parents were?

Part Deux

I saw, I liked, I learnt.
I waved, I cheered, I talked.
I asked, I gave, I took.
I argued, I fought, I explained.
I stayed, I understood, I waited.
I hoped, I expected, I prayed.

But you left me in anguish and THE GAME has never been the same.

Happy Birthday to YOU.

... and the phoenix never rose when it had to.

back home

What's different?
Not many. Just a few.
The skyward horizon doesn't have skyscrapers anymore. What I see are just clouds and some stars.
Trees with green leaves compared to the leaf-less fall trees back in New York.
Yellow autos replace the yellow cabs!

What's changed?
Nothing. The biryani tastes the same, though they pushed the prices up a bit making it less affordable !
The traffic chaos is still the same with the "360 degree theory" still in effect. Anybody can hit you from any direction at any time, which is what the theory says.

What's new?
Was I expecting that something new would come up? I am not sure.
But one thing surprised me. The new 2 rupee coin! The new coin is so much in circulation already that I get a coin everytime I get some change. Something is different about the coin. Things are not center aligned somehow:(

Everything else is same, unchanged and old, including me! :)

stumped !!

Let's go forward 60 years in time ...

It was the summer of 2067. Sunny was ecstatic. He just finished his fourth grade and was eagerly waiting for his summer holidays. The whole three months. He thought he would play some football, fly kites and learn swimming. But only one thing worried him. The assignment his Fifth grade teacher gave him for the summer holidays. He wondered what the fifth grade had in store for him if he had to solve assignments even before school started. But he thought the assignment was fun. Who would not? If it was about games. But there was one problem. He had never heard about the game. In fact, he could not pronounce it. He tried spelling it out to his watch-cum-pda for any search results the internet would give him. Nope, none he could find. How would he, after all he was spelling it as "kraikate", "chrichet" and finally he got it right. Boom popped the result on his PDA. The first result said "Cricket - Extinct game in India since April 2007". "Oh ! Was it something from the early 21st century? Then Grandpa would be able to help me", Sunny thought and added to his list of reminders to ask his grandfather about the game when he visits him in summer holidays.

A month later, Sunny's reminder beeped and he went straight to his grandpa and asked him "Grandpa, what is see--aar--ai--see--kay--ee-tee?".
His granddad was surprised. How did this kid know about the game now extinct for many years? "Tell me about the game, I gotta know about this one" Sunny said.

So the old man started telling about the great game of kings. How the game evolved from a royal one, played by select people, to a common man's game running in the bloods of every kid ever born in the late 20th century in the country, and how without holding a pen you could graduate from school, but without holding a bat and ball in your life, you would not be called complete. How all the kids used to spend all their pocket money in buying cricket balls, how they utilized the old, unused furniture turning them into things called bats, how the walls in their rooms never needed paint, because every year a new cricket hero's poster replaced an earlier one and the "new look" stayed forever.

He spoke to Sunny about how, as a kid, he bunked school to watch live cricket matches, sometimes missing meals, having to lie to teachers about sudden stomach-ache and then run back home to see India batting and applaud for every run they made and curse the opposition team for every wicket India lost.

Sunny was amazed at the kind of passion with which his grandfather was talking about the game. He had seen a movie called Gandhi once, where people had the same look on their face when India was declared independent. That same look appeared on the old man's face. Sunny thought the game should really have meant to lot to his grandpa.

The old man continued telling tales of all the heroes ever born in the cricket world and how many of them were from India and how every four years he would cancel all his appointments for a one month period to watch all the World Cup matches, live. He went on for hours before Sunny interrupted "But grandpa, how did a game with such unbelievable craze become extinct? What happened?"

His grandfather laughed hysterically and then started.. "Sunny, it was in 2007. The Indian team was enjoying Godly status, each one of the players was a hero. People worshipped them, prayed for their victory and they were equally capable too. Some of them were the best in the history of the game and eyes around the world were on them. The world cup started. The very first match, these demi-gods showed how even Gods can be mortal. Not because they were overpowered by other immortals but because they could not use their capabilities. They showed no passion whatsoever. In the third game again, the team collapsed like a pack of broken cards built on quick sand. It was shocking. The team was out of the world cup in the very first stage. A billion hearts broke. And people don't forget, Sunny, their hopes were shattered, and from that day nobody ever spoke of the game. The players returned and the democratic government that we had, made a wise decision that the game and the team were given too much importance and if only the people had shown the same interest and concentration on education, we would have had 100% literacy - instead of everybody knowing the know-hows of Duckworth-Lewis rule, they would be kowing that the English alphabet had 26 letters. So cricket was out, never to be played again. And that's how the game has ceased to exist".

Eventually Sunny completed his assignment and learnt how to pronounce the word too :-)

Coming back to present, we now know what the Greeks went through when Achilles was hit right in the heel. But the Greeks won back then. They had something to cheer about. And we? Nothing !!

the lazy weekend

It was a lazy Saturday morning and I was thinking of ways to spend my unplanned weekend when I opened my browser to start the day checking mails, a usual ritual since almost three years now. As usual, the home page google.com opened up on my favorite browser. Not many of us would have google.com as their home page, I assume. The reason being obvious. How many of us have creative things to search for, the first time your browser starts up. Obviously I am not one of them. But I chose google because of the light interface and the time it takes to come up. It is fast and also doubles up as an indicator of the internet connection speed, so I know how many mail accounts I can check in ten minutes :)

So this fine day, March 17th, as I was going through the same ritual, I observed an interesting logo with three green leaves, on the google home page. Now a new logo on Google home page would mean that the day was special in some way. Any google
holiday logo fan would know that. Their holidays logos are so famous! Intrigued by the green, simple logo, I thought I would find out what it was about. A single click on the logo told me it was St. Patrick's day.

St. Patrick's day?? Wow, I thought. All I knew was that there was a St. Patrick's Cathedral two blocks away from the place I stay and I guessed there would be some kind of celebration there and I was happy I had something to do on this lazy weekend. Little more googling helped me discover it was lot more than just celebrations that mark the day. The Cathedral hosts one of the biggest parades in New York on St. Patrick's day and millions of people witness it, as I understood. Wow, that would be a thrilling start for the weekend, I thought.

So, in an hour, I set out to witness the awesome parade myself. So many people. I have never seen such crowd. An India-Pakistan cricket match would have come close but I haven't seen that one either :). The Avenue was closed both ends and groups marching in the parade with music, discipline and cheering from the audience. Green was the color of the day. Irish was the theme. Green hats, Green t-shirts, Irish flags, captions, logos were seen everywhere. It was fun to be witnessing such a grand event. Various colleges, schools, offices, departments had their groups marching in the parade. The whole city was right there, playing audience to this grandiose event.

I wondered how I did not know about an event of this grandeur, before hand. May be it was so obvious, no one needed to discuss it. Now, the sale of green t-shirts the night before makes sense.

Let the pictures describe more . . .







How much would I have missed if google was not my homepage!! :)

Coming back to cricket, the world cup has started and already half of the Indian fans have lost hope. The rest of the matches are for the other half.

Which half are you in?

charts maketh us

Personality charts.

Not one, not two, but there are hundreds of these charts that tell us what kind of persons we are and what our traits are, based on the date we were born, based on our favorite color and some of them even based on how much sugar we add to our coffee. No matter what kind of person you really are, these lists have some good ones for you!!

One such chart divides the dates in the year into groups named after trees. Say, if you are born in the first ten days of June, you have fallen from the Cedar tree, and there is a list of traits associated with persons falling from Cedar trees - honest, outgoing, enjoys animals (??)

One more similar list groups people into fruits based on the birth date and with a completely different set of features.

Imagine the same guy “falling from an Olive tree” based on one list and “is an apple” based on another similar chart based on fruits. What would that mean? Is he a mismatch :( having fallen from an Olive tree but is an “apple” instead of being an olive? Which of the characteristics apply to him? What if one of the lists actually mentions that he “hates contradictions and arguments”?
Wouldn’t it be even worse that his actual classification among different charts is itself a contradiction, leave alone the rest of the traits. He is already one confused person while “confused” is not on the list of traits in any of the charts!!

If you fell from a Cypress tree you tend to fight for social causes, eat less, are keen on keeping fit and so on. And what would a believer do? Yes, he would start raising his voice over how rats are fed high calorie food in a particular household leading to high cancer in rats, assuming it is a social cause and he has to fight for it, just because it is mentioned in his “list”!! He might as well really eat less and start working out which would make matters worse :(

Not impossible!!

But preparing these lists is way too easy. I have figured two ways of how such charts are prepared.

One - Make a list of adjectives like sensitive, truthful, passionate, empathetic, independent, humorous, courageous, tolerant and all possible synonyms of these, group them and lo, you have a chart for yourself. Attach some date ranges to each of the groups. If you want a chart based on favorite colors, you just have to attach a color to a group of synonyms, instead of the date range. Wasn’t that easy?

Two - This approach is a better one, because you can actually show it is true. For a particular date range, pick the list of famous people born in the date range, get the list of their traits - hard working, athletic, born leader etc and lo, for each date range you have a list of characteristics which are actually true.

So the next time someone says you are a great speaker, intellectual and an innovator just because you are born on February 12th, don’t fall for it. It is quite possible that the list was made from one of the approaches mentioned above. Abraham Lincoln was a great speaker born on the same day, after all. Not you.

Not that I fell for that list :)

What kind of a chart do you want to make?

Charts maketh us or we maketh charts? :)

limits and numbers !!

The numbers 2 and 3 started appearing predominantly these days. Might be the movie bug has caught me, but it’s true too.

This time the numbers with a slash in between, i.e., 2/3 - tell the number of cities in the US, to which I have been to. And that count also says how many of the three biggest cities in the US I have visited :) New York first and now Chicago is on the list after the fun-filled trip this weekend.

So many hurdles to the trip, first the snow storm postponing it, then flights getting delayed, cancelled but finally I could make it there.

The trip was thrilling - to see a beautiful city in full splendor, exciting - as it was my first trip outside NY, nostalgic - witnessing college life and meeting old friends and getting lost in long chats, adventurous - going on long trips in snow, cultural - visiting temples :), disappointing - missing trains and having to wait for hours together, and last but not the least, coincidental - again with the number 23, because that was the date I landed there :) There is a word called limit but seems like that does not apply to the coincidences that happen to me!!

Over all, it was a memorable trip and thanks to a bunch of friends who made the weekend all the more eventful!

And coming to the continuation of the story from the previous post, let me add to the story something: " . . . " that's all I have now in the story so far, just three more dots!! :)

a true 'story'

There was a guy and then there was a girl and . . .

Happy Valentine's day to one and all.

the number 23..

The number 23 - the upcoming movie of one of my favorite actors, Jim Carrey. The plot, just like his earlier movie, seems promising. Finding that a particular book's plot has parallels with your own life is, of course, thrilling.

But that's not the whole point of the title for this post. If you have already guessed the actual point, a big thank you. But for the others, the point is -

I have turned 23 years old today !!

Yes, its funny how the movie 'The number 23' is will be released just after I am turning 23. Guess there is some parallel going on with me and the movie too ;). That should be interesting.

Of course this is not the lone coincidence associated with the day. One year back, exactly when the clock struck 00.01 am on February 12th, I was on my way back to Hyderabad, from Coimbatore, just finishing our South India trip on the South Central railway train. The place was a non-descript place somewhere between Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, I do not even know, which state it was.

And exactly after one year, the same clock struck 00.01 am on February 12th and I find myself in the New York local train heading to Downtown, Manhattan. Again I dint exactly know where I was, as the train was running underground ;)

So trains first, and then being in 'unknown places'...in total, coincidences, in their best form, mark my birthday.

While its a different story that the Coimbatore to Hyderabad experience was unique in the way I cut my cake in the running train, thus waking fellow passengers, courtesy a bunch of enthusiastic and great friends, this new york travel was rather calm, only I realizing how much change a year brings in :)

From a South India trip to a New York trip, from among friends to among globe-trotters, from cutting cakes to visiting City Halls, from paddy field views to Manhattan skyscraper views, from night to day :), one year has brought me far.

Hope its not too far !!

with the paintings...

A trip to the Museum of Modern Art and I realized my position in terms of appreciating art or rather, modern art. Who wouldn't want to view the great pieces of art by the Picassos, Van Goghs and the like. So was I, all set to experience the beauty of the world famous paintings at this museum.

But something seemed wrong the moment I saw the first piece of art. It was very bright, colorful but somehow I couldn't make out what it was. I tried to read the name of the painting and made a valiant attempt to co-relate the title to the painting. Even then, nothing seemed right. Little did I realize that this was the first to come from among the tens of "modern art" paintings that would flood my day and leave me in a confused state for the next couple of days.

Painting after painting, each one was different, each one was unique in the way the title and the painting were unrelated (or may be related). One of the names said, 'A little girl' and I had to use all my stereoscopic vision only to realize that I am not qualified to find a girl in that picture. Solving fourth degree polynomial equations was lot easier :(. At least now I know I am an illiterate in the subject of "art". I should have known it when I almost failed in my drawing class, but somehow I wasn’t sure then. Now I am.

I could not just accept it and get out of the place. Instead I chose to try and understand. I stood staring for longer times at pieces of art by familiar artists. Picasso kept me standing for long, for one, he had a large number of paintings under his name and the other, because I knew his name the most.

I guess it was for people like me that some of the paintings had an explanation too, besides having a title. But that didn’t help me either. It added to more confusion. One of them said "The blue square in the middle of the painting reflects the human sub-conscious". I said to myself "What?!! how??!! and How did you know??!!!" and all this added to more confusion so I moved along.

The terms "surreal", "abstract expressionism" and "layers of creativity" were found all over on the description plates. How a particular painting was special because the artist spilled over ink on a flat canvas 'uniformly' so that spilled ink created a sense of beauty. ??!!??? Everything pointed to the same words - "Art is not for you" and I had to accept it. :)

But one thing was fascinating. How different objects intercepted each other in some paintings, yet could be clearly distinguished. Even I could appreciate some, I thought ! May be if I tried.

So I kept moving until I came across two kids around four years old looking at one of these paintings and trying to draw them in their own drawing book, with their teacher beside them, guiding. I could not believe my eyes. At that age I would rather be happy trying to draw a frog and ending up drawing a lizard, leave alone attempting to reproduce a modern-art painting. But what were they trying to draw? There were no distinguishable objects in the painting except for a surreal idea flowing between colors of different variety. Guess that's what separates me from budding-artists, I thought, and this time I realized it was time to leave.

After the trip, even chess board seems to be a wonderful painting to me :) May be the designer of the board had something creative in his mind too !!!

Dear to dream !!

I just completed my trip up the Mt. Everest, got selected into the Indian cricket team and was saying "Hello" to the President while receiving the Khel Ratna award and planning an audition for the MRF ad alongside Sachin later in the day and ....suddenly the alarm clock starts 'trinnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggg' and I wake up to face the real Mt. Everest called life standing before me repeatedly telling me how many astronomical miles I am far away from my dream.

Dreams... !!! Well, I am not talking about the dreams of the "I have a dream" kind, rather these are the "I had a dream" kind.

These spells of imagination which some of us experience daily are pretty intriguing and complex at the same time, besides being so powerful. They can make us Kings of the world in one second and can get us hunted by a hungry lion within a gap of 10 seconds. Who else is so powerful? God comes close?

And the best part with these dreams is the 'uncontrollability' factor which is mysterious and interesting.

We may not be Sigmund Freuds but some of these may co-relate to events of the past or events during the previous day. Trying to understand or interpret these dreams is some times fascinating and we can either get a whole new meaning out of your dream and get inspired or can get devastated at the incidents we see in these dreams.

And the sheer pleasure when one of these dreams actually comes true the next day, like the Mathematics question paper having the same question you saw in your dream can be rejuvenating. Well, not so much if you aren't prepared for that one but somehow it got into your dreams and in the exam paper :)

The imagination part, no bounds to it. You might have imagined a Cyclop in a hundred ways while you were reading the Trojan War but the Cyclop that you see in your dreams is way better, I mean way dreadful.

The creativity part...amazing. You could be driving a golden chariot equipped with Bridgestone tyres overtaking Michael Schumacher riding his Ferrari while listening to 92.7 FM playing in in the background. Could there be a limit to the creative canvas of the dream?

The unpredictability part. We can never be sure of anything in dreams. Your golden chariot can have a puncture the very next moment and throw you down in the Arctic ocean ( remember you were traveling between planets ;) ) and you would be frozen for 100 years to be found by a group of aliens later and the rest is...unpredictable as usual.

All in all, "dreams" is a great topic of interest having complexity, creativity, uncontrollability, unpredictability and most importantly the involvement of brain in some unknown way. I guess that is what makes dreams all the more dearer and exciting. Where else can you see the Taj Mahal daily even though you don’t stay in Agra :)

Day-dreaming is okay but dreams - aren't they dear?

the new old look

The blog is now upgraded to the new blogger account. I guess it is obvious that something has changed - with the archive links on the right, now, well-organized and the "About me" section becoming almost invisible. May be it went to its rightful place :), quoting in the lines of Salman Rushdie's, "blogs should go out and become famous, writers can stay home and write (and remain unknown)".

But I was disappointed. The first thing that came to my mind when I saw "Update to the new blogger" was that I would get a new set of templates to choose from. But to my dissatisfaction, the same old templates showed up in the new one too. May be they want the bloggers to become creative and create their own templates :). So even after the upgrade, our blog shall have the same old template.

And yeah, integration with google. I can now log-in to blogger with my google account. May be in the near future, every site we use will let us in if we have google account, like a universal log-in account, offering services ranging from mails to online-shopping to social networking to gambling :)

Don't be surprised if in future, you get a mail to your gmail account that a music album you discussed with your friend over chat the previous day is now available at a nearby store for discount and the mail gives you driving directions to the store and even lets you share the music with your friends, besides helping you post a review of the album on your blog and finally helps you place the album for sale on the internet, if you do not like it. It might be called the UISP, Universal Internet Service Provider :) Google is going there I guess, and fast!

A change is always for the better, they say, and the first thing that is better is I do not have to remember the password of my blogger account, now that I can use a google account to post on my blog.

Statistics!! The blog has 63 posts so far and this one is the 64th. And the good thing to note is that the posts have increased every year. This again, I could know straightaway, thanks to the new blogger. Otherwise I would have to count them manually.

Thanks blogger, you not only have given a blog to write but, with the new version, you have given some content to write a post while I was waiting for some topic to write!

pardes

I am back, as promised, with (and in) pardes, seven seas away from home, as they say.

It would seem that I am listing down Shah Rukh's movies as the titles for my posts. Swades earlier, now pardes. But let me clarify, that's not the case. Its just coincidence. And please do not expect a 'Dilwale Dulhaniye lejayenge' in the future, although I cannot guarantee ;-)

New York. In one line, New York is all sky scrapers, huge LCD screens showing baseball games, organized streets, fast walking people, coffee, low calorie food, "good morning" wishes, limousines, high end cars and much more besides being the business capital.

Someone already said that this place is a world in itself and I am already seeing it. You can see people, culture, cuisines from all over the world in this city.

And one thing's for sure. You can't believe what you see here. You see out of your window, its a bright sunny day and you come out only to see that its freezing cold outside. I started to believe weather.com more than my eyes these last few days. :-)

Of course, there are some usual things too here.

You see the voice message LED blinking on your office phone early in the morning and you are all excited to get the first voice message in alien town and what you hear is a message in a language you don't understand, about a product you can't catch even after listening to the whole message. :-( [The language was definitely not English]. Sounded like the "Want a credit card?" calls I used to get back home.

And yeah, the alu doesn't turn golden brown in color even here :-( I never understand how the chefs get that right. Or is it just a myth?

All in all, I am not yet 'lost in NY'. :-)

From circles to squares, [yeah from Punjagutta circle to Times Square ;-)], the journey has been quick and easy. Lets hope the rest of the stay also will be memorable.

Before I start singing "Deewane ne, mujh ko bhi, kar daala deewana" like SRK singing while driving a convertible in the movie, I think I will have to see more of NY. The Statue of Liberty is still waiting.

There's one more song from the same movie Pardes, which I guess I should be singing when I go back :-)

And here's the second display of my photographic skill. The first one was a scene all natural and this one depicting human-made-architecture.


Place : Opp. Times Square, NY. Date : Today. Time : Shown in the clock in the picture.
Title : Untitled(so far).

what do u want to be?

"I want to be a police officer", says the kid when his uncle asks him "Beta, what do you want to be when you grow up?". And "why beta" would get an answer something like "I like the dress and the gun". Typical child answers. We all have seen kids crying for a police dress. Minor things like the dress and the gun are what appeal to the young kid at that age. Nothing else matters to him.

Few years later, ask the grown-up kid the same question and he says "I want to be an IAS officer". Ask him why and he has reasons for it too "because he has more power than a police officer and is paid better". This is the stage where one gets to learn what actually rules the world - power and money. Naturally, he wants them both :)

While in the pursuit of his "What do I want to be", the kid now in his teens toils hard to realize his "power and money" dream until one fine morning he happens to see a real beauty. Suddenly he forgets all his earlier answers to the question. Ask him the same question and his answer from that moment would be "I want to own the beauty". Well, he really can't state a reason for this one, because some things can't be explained. But the reasons range from beauty, attraction, sense of happiness, etc. That beauty becomes the passion of the kid from that moment and all his energies are spent trying to realize his dream from then on.

Like most of the people in pursuit of their passions end up becoming Software Engineers, the kid finally becomes a s/w engineer and within no time becomes the "owner" of his favorite. Now that he has "become" something, ask him the question - "What have you become", he would rather say "I have become the owner of favorite-item" rather than "I am a software engineer". Here, there are multiple reasons. Firstly because most uncles do not understand what a s/w engineer does and why they are paid so much for sitting in an AC room for 8 hours and it is real trouble trying to explain the concepts of outsourcing, internet etc, and secondly because passion is more important than profession, because profession was a means, not an end.

From what is "eye-catching" to what is "ideal" to what is "important to us", I guess, our interests change as we grow. Or do they actually evolve? From things of no significance to anybody to things of importance to others to, finally, things of significance to one's self? Self or “I” being utmost important.

A Long and heavy post to start the year with. Happy New Year 2007 to all :). Hope this year brings in more posts, comments and most importantly readers too!!

Coming soon is the other side of ‘swades’ because the kid has just answered "I am going to be a guest of New York". ‘parades’ follows !! :)

thanks....

Its been more than a fortnight since the official Thanksgiving day but does it matter? Saying thanks is important. Isn't it? Or is the date too important?

We have William Shakespeare to help us :) Altering and quoting Juliet, Juliet of the "Romeo and Juliet" fame, I say "What's in a date? That thanks when said on any other day would mean no less gratitude". Yeah, I have been doing a lot of alter-and-quote lately. should reduce it :(

So, here I am, trying to thank all those who have been readers of the blog. This should be done some or the other day.

Let's go by the group.

First of all, thanks to the person who has been reading this blog from the very beginning days till today, regularly, almost every day, suffering through all the bad posts, enjoying the good ones and reading both the good and bad ones with equal interest and always waiting for new posts. Now most of you might actually guess I am thanking myself here. :)

Thanks to the irregularly regular readers, reading posts now and then, commenting on some, criticizing some others and helping me gain some readership.

Thanks to the forced-visitors, who when given the link to my blog, click on it and read the first post, click on random posts, read them and then forget about the blog and then visit the blog only when the link is sent again.

Thanks to the readers, who "do not" click when the link to the blog is sent fearing it might be a link to some unknown virus on the internet which would erase their hard disk. Thanks for being so careful, yes there are such viruses. Thanks for being careful, again :)

Thanks to the kind of readers who accidentally tumble upon my blog searching for -
1. "Swades mp3 download" - guys, u forgot the "free" word in your search box, otherwise you could have found the correct sites.

2. "Intermediate QUESTIONS and ANSWERS Andhra Pradesh" - Are the S.Chand and Vignan guides out of date that Intermediate students are searching for questions AND answers on the Internet. I pity them for being pointed to my blog, adding to their already existing list of confusions.

3. "Guide to the Spelling bee" - sorry guys, I am not so much into spelling bees, but thanks for visiting my blog on the path to your bigger quest.

4. "chalkpieces" - are chalkpieces so hi-tech now that one has to order them on amazon or something? Aren't they available at the nearby grocery store? Sorry guys, am not much into selling chalkpieces, though I was once busy stealing some. Anyway thanks to you too for visiting the blog.

Thanks to one and all.

Illusions...

The Taj Mahal.

Everybody would have heard about this masterpiece, the eternal symbol of love, the glorious beauty.

There I was, standing right before Taj Mahal, in awe, wondering at the no-words-to-describe monument. Everything else seemed so minute. I have seen nothing ever-so beautiful and might never see one until some romantic has a better way of expressing his love, which, might not be possible considering the resources needed. :) There is not one thing that is okay-ish about the mahal. Everything is just more than perfect. The sheer size of the monument, the grandeur of the four minarets, the as-white-as-snow marble and not to forget the intricate design on the walls, are all exceptional. One has to see it to believe it. I can't say more. So, I was standing before this Taj Mahal, admiring and cherishing that very moment feeling as small as a drop before the giant beauty.

Suddenly, the phone beside me rang, and the Taj Mahal disappeared into thin air without the slightest trace of the beauty I was seeing all that time. I realized I am now in Hyderabad, not in Agra, and it had been almost a week since my Agra trip and yet the illusions cease to stop. Every time I gaze into nothing, I see the Taj mahal forming from nowhere and this illusion of mine keeps recurring.

While Einstein was right about saying reality is just a persistent illusion, there should be some explanation as to why certain illusions out of these are more persistent than the others. May be the persistence is again linked to the forgetting-theory related to the brain. :) Much more complex than we can comprehend.

Coincidences never cease to exist with me. It was coincidental that besides these frequenting illusions, there is one more 'illusions' that I was part of in the recent days and that being Richard Bach's book - Illusions. Many of them have already said and keep saying the world's an illusion after all. I am not sure how true that is.
But one quote from Richard Bach might help explain my illusions about the Taj and the quote modified to suit the context is -

"If you want to be with the Taj, aren't you already there?"

May be I want to.

I write...

Two posts wouldn't do justice to such an intricate topic like "forgetting". There is much more to write about it, I feel. Like in the past two posts, the advantages of forgetting are not even touched upon, like - how forgetting certain things is good to us. :), The times when your teacher slapped you in front of the class, the first time you fell off your bicycle trying to pull a feat etc, etc. Forgetting is good, at least some times.

A third post on the same topic would be monotonous and boring. So let me 'write' something else.

Coming to writing, I think its a lot tough than blogging. As for blogging, you don't even have to think much to make a new post. In the worst case, when you can't think of anything else to write, just pick a random picture( most often your own ) and post it with some tagline/title and lo, you become a blogger. Not the same case with writing. You have to pick a pen, start thinking, which itself is a tough job, and then start building words and make meaningful structures out of them. Overall, its tough to be a writer. But I chose to do so, for this post.

So, here I am, 'writing' a sample post as the first written piece.


And yeah, lot of thinking has gone into writing this one. ;)

meeku telugu vachaa ?

Forgetting... I feel it is much more complex than I actually thought or expected or, in fact, wrote about in the previous post.

Just yesterday, I had witnessed a scene which brought back memories of a very very small discussion I had with one of my friends seven years ago. I didn't even realize I had actually remembered that discussion until I saw this scene.

A foreigner was sitting on the stairs of a big shopping mall. While she was waiting for somebody, she opened her HINDI book and started reading it in that short time she had.

Immediately the topic of foreign language vs. native language struck me and my mind went back seven years. That was the time when the Andhra Pradesh government was planning to change all the boards on local buses to Telugu. The names of the 'To' and 'From' on all buses would be written in Telugu and I guess even the registration numbers. Now this friend of mine was strongly criticizing this idea of the government. He didn't want the boards to be written in Telugu as he could not read or write in Telugu though he could speak :(. To his benefit and to many others' like him, the government did not go ahead and implement that idea. Otherwise the publisher of "Read Telugu in 5 days" would be competing with Ambanis in wealth.

While the idea of learning the language just to be able to read a bus board is slightly nonsensical, but how many of you think one has to be a literate in his native language. Unable to read your mother-tongue - Wouldn't it be pitiful?
Globalization - that's the term we use most often to explain this. People prefer learning English, French, German etc, leaving the very own native language, to be part of the broader world. How good is it !

Then, there would be no difference between the foreigner who has just landed and the person who has been a native staying here for all his life. Both equally strangers to the language and seeking the help of others trying to figure out the name of a recently released movie.:)

Which one are you or which one would you rather be?

to forget or not to !

How many of you remember the year the first battle of Panipat was fought?

If you are finding problems recalling the date, dont worry, you are sailing on the same boat as me. And for the others who know the answer, my guess is that you were a big fan of the "panipuri"-walla beside your school and thats how you remember the "Pani"-pat well. Yeah, history students and teachers are exempted from this question :)


How many of you have trouble recalling a childhood friend?

Now, this is real trouble. One fine day you get a message/mail from a childhood friend who claims to be your partner in stealing chalkpieces(the colored ones and the white ones too) from the classroom cupboard. You remember the class room - Class III B, you remember how fast you ran after finding that someone was following you, but you dont remember the guy who was your partner in that petty incident. Pretty bad isn't it?

Not that you wanted to forget and not that you didn't care to remember him. It just happens. And once you get to see him in person or in a picture, all memories of him flash in your mind. You suddenly remember all the childhood stories and you may even tell some more which he, now, doesn't remember. :)

Happens!! This is what wikipedia says too about remembering - We recognise things better than we can recall. And that is why the percentage of scoring in Multiple choice Questions is more, it seems - because we can recognise a correct answer easily than trying to recall it from the 'memory database'. I never realized this :) Now all scores make sense to me !!


Now the million dollar question. How many of you forget to wish friends on their birthdays?

I know, most of us (should I dare to say 50% or is it even more ?) do this. And what would the reason for this be? Simple. Its not about forgetting your friend's birthday. Just that you forgot what today's date was ;) I know, not many would buy that answer. But sometimes its true.

This seems like a reverse of the case mentioned above. You can recall a birthday easily but you fail to recognise when it comes. :(

On the whole, forgetting seems to be a complex phenomenon involving the brain, which in itself is a complex structure of millions of neurons, and also involving theories like these - recognition/recall/inaccessability of data etc.


Now, if you want to forget forgetting, its like fighting the brain with itself. Handling such massive biochemical reactions would be too hard I guess. Like the first battle of Panipat where Babur's 12000 men had to face One lakh soldiers of Ibrahim Lodhi. Who would win? Yes I do remember who won that battle of Panipat.

On a side note, I still couldn't comprehend the reason why history students are asked to remember all the historical dates and years !!

Now one more question - when was the Bastille prison in Paris stormed. I remember this one somehow :)

expectation and reality

After a long break, I am back with a post in line with the 'Questions without answers' theme.

Why is an expected result, observed just once, believed to be more probable than an unexpected one occurring multiple times?

I have never seen a teller at a bank recheck the number of currency notes if the counting machine shows 100. But if it shows a 98, the teller rechecks until the machine shows 100.

Isn't the probability of a 98 note bundle becoming 100 same as the probability of 100 note one becoming 98?

Guess the world is just "optimistic".

How close is reality to expectations?

coincidence(s)

Tried finding some reasons, if not good reasons, but none of them impressed me. Seems like I have already made a valiant attempt to answer the question "why do I blog", in one of the posts in the past, but the reasons mentioned there now seem unimpressive. Change of perception, again, I guess. Reminds me of a proverb - source unknown, which goes like "The philosophy of one generation is common sense to the next generation". That explains why complex things in the past now seem simple and sometimes stupid. Anyway, I am back to random writing, leaving the reasons thing un-attempted.

Coincidences amuse me a lot. Come September 5th, I am reminded of all the coincidences that happened on this particular day a few years back. It was teachers day as usual. And it was Ganesh Chathurthi too. A coincidence in itself, that the teachers day fell on the birthday of the God considered a maestro/guru of education. Another coincidence being that Mother Teresa passed away that very day. So, in total, this day brings memories of all these incidents, good and bad, all happening on the same day making the day important in more than one ways.

Coincidence of ideas is what brought me to write about coincidences. Sometimes when I see a new software product or a new portal, I feel I have thought about this idea sometime in the past and how the idea of the product coincided with mine. I know, most of us programmers feel the same. But what separates us and them is initiative, and most importantly, vision, I guess.

One more coincidence is that I have already written a post about coincidence in the past :).

And yeah, in the meanwhile we had Blogger's day, the 31st of August*. Happy blogging to all bloggers. I am sure this one is not popularized by the greeting card companies. Whoever did it, it comes as a boon for people like me waiting for a topic to fill in some text and post it on my blog so that my reader(s) don't see the same post when they visit the blog.

* - For the unaware, 31st of August when written in DDMM format - 3108 looks like BLOG, hence it is considered Bloggers day.

stuck in second gear

Trying to find 5 good reasons why I should blog. Hope I find them as soon as possible, because until then this blog will be devoid of posts.

Feel free to help me. :)

On a side note, I never thought planets would be removed from the list. Would have reduced a lot of memory-work if done some 15 years back. And I guess the importance of the number 9 has reduced, now that the first example anyone would give to show how important 9 is doesn't hold anymore.

Bye Bye, Pluto. There will be lesser people in the coming generations who would know the name. If you are thinking for a choice of name for your grandson, you now have a choice, don't you. I just sincerely hope that someday the scientists won't come up with a revolutionary theory saying "There is nothing called a Solar System, Earth is the centre of the Universe", going back to Ptolemy's theory, and leaving us at Square One after centuries of research.

aazaadi

A long vacation it was..away from my blog for so long. Contrary to what some of you might have guessed, no, it was not the mobile that kept me busy and away from the blog. There were things less mundane ;).

Independence day. This time commemorating the 60th year of liberty, freedom, democracy. (Are they different?). The day is always beautiful, with the all-colorful flags being hoisted, people wearing small flags - symbol of patriotism. And the day becomes more vibrant if you are traveling. Every village, town and city has this central market-place where the flag is hoisted and colorful ribbons hanging around. Truly picturesque - the saffron, white and green. :)

This time I couldn't stop but observe some minute things.
1. One of the TV news channels was asking for an SMS poll on "Did India do the right thing by opting for Democracy?". [Ya, they do charge you for expressing your opinion]
2. The three main problems our country is facing now, as evident from the PM's speech were not poverty, unemployment, population explosion, but were terrorism, terrorism, and again the same word.
3. Even this time politicians were asked General-Knowledge questions about Independence like who ruled us before 1947, who is Gandhi etc. but a more appropriate question would have been to ask them to spell the word Independence, not that they do not know or not that I am still obsessed with the spelling-bee..just for fun, you know ;).
4. One surprising news I read somewhere was that Gandhi went starving for one whole day after we were declared independent. Hunger-strike for want of independence and celebrating independence by starving..Strange..Same situation, one for the want of independence and the other because we got it.

Reminds me of a similar situation, of course less important. Once, in a bus, I had two choices. One - to sit shrunk beside a huge person because he was getting down in the next stop so that I get the window seat after he leaves, and the other a normal non-window seat for the rest of the journey. Obviously, the greedy me chose to sit beside the huge dude waiting for the window seat. The person left and I got the window seat after some 15 minutes. Happy. But 5 mins at the window seat, a beautiful girl comes up, smiles a big smile and asks for an exchange of seats. The generous me immediately accepts and leaves to the new place only to find one more huge dude sitting happily...and the rest of the journey, you can imagine.

Bad seat and a smile, like Gandhi's starving and independence. ;) Same situation before and after. One for the want of a better seat and the other because I got it.

All the above mentioned things apart, I think India has evolved and is evolving into a developed nation at a good pace. And these 60 years have seen India-Emerging.
Hope this continues and we become the next super power. Hope peace prevails and we do not have to stay terrified.

Jai Hind!

PS : Do you think the beautiful girl story was fiction? A) Yes. B)No. C)Can't say. Do not SMS your answers. :)

call, shoot and play.

After a serious post about EQs IQs and Qs, lets come back to things more mundane, more selfish and more earthly.

Presenting to the world, my latest possession, my new mobile the Nokia N72.

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all. Isn't it?

Heiligenschein

We shall come back to the title later.

A small story follows -

Place : XYZ school, First standard classroom.

Teacher to Ram - "Ram, how do you spell Bee?"

Ram - "B".

Teacher - "No, I am not asking about the alphabet B, I am asking about the insect?"

Ram - "It is B, teacher".

Teacher - "That’s wrong. Shyam, can you give me the correct spelling?"

Shyam - "It is B-E-E teacher."

Teacher - "Ram, see that’s the correct spelling. B-E-E. Not just B".

And 5 years later, Shyam won the National Spelling Bee[1] contest and 20 years later, Ram became the creator of the ultra cool "Internet Chat Slang version 2.0", which was a huge hit. People were using it more than the usual English words. SMSes, IMs, Mails they all used the ICSv2.0.

Well, this is the story that happens in every classroom. Poor students like Ram don't really understand why the spellings of words had to be so complex, without much relation between the arrangement of the alphabets and the way they sound :(. Why do we need the extra two 'e's when a single B would do. And his teacher had no answer either.

Neither do I.

It seems so weird to me, leave the formation/creation of spellings, but contests like the National Spelling Bees. Kids of the age 8 start participating in the contest and continue participating for a good five years, before they win. And at the age of eight, the kid is supposed to know the spellings of the zillions of words present in the English dictionaries, their meanings, their language of origin etc, etc. How can it be? What do these guys do? Start memorizing the dictionary at the age of five? What would YOU prefer doing at the age of five, running your toy-train and making faces at the neighbor kid whose train runs faster or try by-hearting the spellings of words similar to the title - yeah, I know you read the word twice to actually pronounce it. ( If you didn't, you should have participated in the Spelling Bee ;) ).

And I thought the winners of these competitions will eventually idolize Shakespeare and be some kind of a linguist or writer or a judge at the Spelling Bee competition :). But this dude, who was into the final rounds of the contest I have seen, wanted to become a physician. Imagine a physician taking time to spell each medicine in the prescription correctly. Did you ever see that? We all know how well a prescription is written, only to be understood by the pharmacist. :)

The point is, what is the point in Spelling Bees, or what is the point in spelling 'scissors' that way? Wouldn't sizars be easier?

Then, I came across this article. See, I am not alone in thinking so. :)

For the readers who have waited so long to know what the title actually meant, it means 'holy light' . :) This was one of the words asked in the final rounds of this year's Spelling Bee competition in the United States.

National Spelling Bee : It is a contest where contestants, usually children, are asked to spell English words after listening to the pronunciation of the word.

one and one make two..

Look at the sunrise, look at the sunset, listen to the chirping of birds early in the morning, they are all beautiful. Periodicity, the feature that is common to them all, is the reason for that beauty. And periodicity it is, that should make this post beautiful. Its been one year since I have written a similar post, marking my first year at the firm and with this post, I enter into the third year, completing two years at my work place. Yay!

I was going over that post and I found interesting things - changes in perception in this past one year.

Well, for a starter, I am no more flattered to be a tax-payer. At least, after seeing how well my tax amount is spent in putting up huge hoardings of the so called "politicians". No. Not anymore flattered.

And I have lost track of stocks, sensex and other such stuff. They are no more beautiful, I mean no more "periodic". The sensex touches the peak one day and falls into an abyss the next day. Unreliable, aperiodic and so not-so-beautiful :)

One thing though remains same. I still miss the golden college days of care-free attitude and aimless life, though a bit less than what I did the last time. Past is past.

Coming to the changes,

As anyone would expect, I have grown. While the growth is in my weight which is an altogether different story, but the important point is I've Grown.
By the way, would growth in weight mean growth of the brain i.e., more brain cells, more thinking capability, more intelligence? I guess this is not one of the Questions without answers thing, because if that were true, sumo wrestlers would be scientists, right? So leaving it there.

I have read enough books(titles at the very least) and known enough authors the past year that I can successfully pass off as a "well-read" guy. Sidney Sheldon is a man, Ayn Rand is a woman, Monks sell Ferraris, Kaavya Vishwanathan copied stuff over, Harry Potter is a magic-kid. See, I have proved it.

Sadly, my wisdom hasn't yet taken me to a point where I have opinions about everything. If only that was there, I would have written hundreds of posts this year.
To name a few -
"What do you think about the reservation issue?" - I don't know.
"Is Sania Mirza the Indian youth Icon?" - Can't say.
"Do you agree with the ban on Da Vinci Code?" - Should I?
"Was Zidane's farewell pathetic?" - Not sure.

Looking forward to more changes and more challenges in the coming year.

And why did I cross the line of "posting ONLY about Questions, answers and such stuff"? Simple. The url of my blog was complaining that I was making justice to the title of the blog but not to the URL, so I had to write something about 'gklelsani', which is me, to be unbiased, balanced, thus periodic and again....yeah...beautiful :).

the double r.

Krrish, the movie with an extra r. And this extra r, rooted from the numerology factor(or whatever factor), must have been one of the reasons for the movie's success.Released as a sequel to the movie Koi Mil Gaya, which itself was a big mix of all the E.T. related movies, this one has gone to the next level. The protagonist is a gifted dude having all the powers of Batman, Superman, Spiderman and our very own Shaktimaan too ;), not to forget the Indian dance factor, he excels at this too. But the picturesque landscapes and the action sequences are no less than the best. The movie gets a big thumbs-up for these. And Hrithik is, without any doubt, the unanimous pick for the role.

I am no big movie reviewer and I am not suggesting you guys to go and watch this one. The point is something else. This movie was the first movie to be screened directly from a satellite, getting away with the reels and boxes, which have shown us movies since ages. Well the satellite thing may not be new to many of you, but it was, for me.And the place where I saw the movie was no big technology hub of South India. It was just an average town where people have hard time trying to figure out what a call center is. That's the reason for my surprise.

I was just astonished with the ease with which these boxes, from which the term 'box office' was derived (I guess), were so easily given up for good and replaced with a signal receiver uprooting the livelihood of so many "behind-the-projector" employees. I believe this is a straight hit on their pockets, for soon, more theatres will adopt to this new technology and more of these people will be jobless. Finding a replacement job would be tougher, since their skill-set is now totally a waste. The arms behind the rotating projector will be denied the work they are best at doing.

Its not just this one case, the rise of technology has resulted in the regression of so many such jobs. And this is the 'double r' I started off with. "Rise and Regression". Rise of technology and regression of unsophisticated manual jobs. And the world needs skilled labour able to operate this new technological innovations and not the plain old manual operators. What about them? Does this mean that a person who knows nothing but digging wells with a crowbar for his living, will now have to learn operating a bull-dozer?

Is this possible?

go, score a goal.

Twenty three years ago it was on the same day (June 25th) that the underdogs had made history and since then cricket has been "THE GAME" for us, Indians. We have been watching, eating, drinking, talking and walking cricket since then and this, by no means, is an exaggeration. Any product starting from a fairness cream to a car, if endorsed by a cricketer is supposed to fetch more market. Cricket is our religion and cricketers our Gods. Streets are named, tattoos printed, strikes held in the names of these men. And the game has become one of the top grossers in terms of business.

But what suddenly happened to us? Nobody cares if Laxman made a century at St. Kitts. Nobody realizes India was headed for a follow on. It is as if suddenly all the cricket-fever in our brains has been erased by some unknown virus. And the virus, yes, you can guess, is Football, or is it called Soccer! Football has become "THE GAME" replacing cricket, at least temporarily ( until the news of Sachin making a 155 in some match is not yet out ;) ). Questions have changed. From "How much did Dravid score" to "What’s an off-side? How many yellow cards equal a red card?". Topics have changed from Greg Chappell to the Scolaris and the Klinsmanns. And people fearing being left out of discussions involving football have started a 2 day course on football, trying to memorize the player-country table and even gone as far as picking a favorite team and a favorite player and cheer their teams :).

Why would I write all this? If it were not for the hoarding of a star hotel in Hyderabad showing a fork dug into a football offering soccer-dinners( or whatever they are called), I would have not written all this. Not only this one hoarding but every other shop/business you see has something related to football. From T-shirts to TVs, nothing is left out without a trace of soccer in it.

And the immediate question that comes to any mind - Are businesses trying to capture the craze of the people? Or are these guys the ones who are inducing this craze.

Reminds of something I heard about "Rose Days" and "Daffodil days" being popularized by greeting-card publishing companies trying to boost their business.

I guess by the next world cup, we will have chicken footballs like the drumsticks, to savor, while watching the so-called favorite team sweating out in a penalty shoot-out( er, what’s a penalty shoot-out! ). :)

Till then, peace.

look around, we are lucky !!

I am talking about the generation born in the early 80's and have now seen slightly more than 20 years of this world.And what a transition it has been. Technology innovation hit its peak during these 20 years and the leaps in innovation are byfar amazing.Looking at the surroundings then and now, I feel we are lucky to see so much of development in so less a time, at least in this part of the world, an average town in India.

Lets start with the television. This piece of technology was unheard of in my early years. The common man was happy listening to songs, cricket commentary and even movies in the then famous transistor. Suddenly the idea of seeing a picture besides listening to voices amazed many. Well, I should say, the flip side of this was that it subdued the imagination of the listeners. People would have imagined readers on radios to be as beautiful as their voices sounded. Not sure how it turned out to be after the innovation of TV ;). It did not stop there. Colors came in. Monochrome became a thing of the old-stone age. Channels grew. We did not have to be content with the single channel broadcasting an alien-language movie in the afternoon, every weekend. Slowly choices multiplied with the cable TV revolution. We had an unlimited range to select from. But then, earlier, people listened to news on the national channel and had their own opinions. And now, with the explosion of news channels, people's perceptions and opinions are dictated by the source of news they opt for. Biased !

There were many innovations and discoveries before the 80's but the ones I am talking about are the ones that are of interest to the common man. Things that only could be imagined earlier became, in this period, part of the day-to-day life of a common man and now, at the end of these 20 years, we cannot imagine life without these, TV being one of them.
Then comes the telephone. Hand-written letters are a thing of the past. How many of you now write letters by hand when you can talk to the person you want to on this fancy thing called the telephone. Though the telephone was invented way before our period, it is during this period that it became the essential part of the common man's life. This too had its own share of evolution. From the hard-to-execute trunk calls, to optical fiber transmission to the now in-place mobile phones, there has been radical development in the way people communicate. And all of this in so short a period as 20 years :). Seems like every year, we had something new to see. How lucky were we!! And now, mobiles with cameras, GPRS, 2.5G etc etc and by the time I finish writing this post, a patent would have been filed about the high-end-TV-cum-mobile-cum-what-not !! How fast can we adapt to these things?? Seems like the technology is outnumbering the growth percentage our brain can handle ;). If only our lessons of the Grahambell's innovation did not have to be replaced so soon with the 3G and 4G mobile technologies !!

There could be so many generations witnessing these developments. But it is a prize for our generations to have grown and understood things as they evolved and changed.
And the next one, is right before you. Sitting like a rock before you, it is slowly replacing your brain. It is called the Computer. Unlike the TV which had a radio and the telephone which had snail-mail, this thing does not have a predecessor. Some say it is calculator++, but we all know it is more than that. And words wont suffice to describe how much this thing has changed the way life goes. From a mere calculator, to a word processor, to the latest high-end super computers, added with the all-powerful "internet" this thing has grown by leaps and bounds, amazing even its own inventors! People managed every task without the help of things like the computers before they came into picture. But now it has so woven into the lives of every other person that imagining life without them is impossible. And thanks to this particular innovation, I have a job now!

Enough of reporting technology innovations over the past two decades. I can go on and on with the list. The point of this discussion is not that. To have seen so many things, which were completely unimaginable earlier and now have become part of our daily life, in such short period of 20 years makes our generation the ideal one to have born in.:) No generation earlier and later could have had this privilege. Lucky, that we are ....

Lucky that we are !Lazy that we've become !!

early rays...

Not a single post in the last fifteen days, :(. I wonder if I would get anything to write in the future!

Every time I read a newspaper or a book I wonder how those authors manage to write thousands of words. It seems impossible to me. Whenever I try to pen down a post, it does not exceed hundred words, how much ever I try. But this time, I decided my post would be at least a thousand words. So I started off thinking about all the happenings in the country, so many hot issues, people supporting agitations and some opposing them and as usual authors writing volumes about the happenings and their precious "opinions". But no, they are not my kind and so I decided not to write about them.

Then, I got this brilliant idea. So here's my post of a thousand words.


A picture is worth a thousand words, or so they say.
A display of my photographic skills, titled "SoBrightTheProOfSun" [searching for anagrams?? I don't think there is one. :)] Location : Kanyakumari, India. Time : Sunrise.

of flutters and after effects...

The Butterfly effect. This one would go straight to the top of my favorite movie list. Ten minutes into the movie and I thought I had a new post in hand. This movie not only added fuel to my imagination but also connected some of the missing links in it.

Being a programmer myself, I could see the whole story as a series of if-else statements each condition leading to results miles apart. I guess everyone who have watched this one, would take a few minutes to reminisce the various paths they have trodden over their lifetime, take time to think "What if it was the other way ...?" and like the great Robert Frost would say to themselves "And that has made all the difference". Seems reasonable.

The only difference between reality and the movie, seen by my programmer's mind, would be the missing 'while(!satisfied)' loop, wrapping all the if-elses, which is absent in the real world. If only that was there, I am not sure we would love our lives as much as we do now, if at all we do. After all, even the hero was content with the original state of events.

Coming to programming and an other favorite movie of mine, the Matrix, I imagine Programming the Matrix would be lot easy with this idea of the butterfly effect. If all such effects are carefully taken care of and every path thus emerging made to end in one final situation, which is the desired state of the Matrix, the Architect would not have needed to make six versions of the same thing. Guess that's what makes programming difficult. Every other day you find a case you have not dealt in your code and that one becomes "The One" resulting in the fall of the existing version and a need to write a new one arises.

One more concept which made the movie more interesting was that of Probability. The force which drives and connects the events together. A lot of events might have happened. Instead, just one of them happened, the destined one. And what made that event a destined one? Yes. Probability. This again reminds me of one of the good books I have read "God's Debris" which states that God is part probability. Now if God was the creator, He is the one who controls events on this earth, then with all probability, He must be Probability or the one who defines and manages it. Perfect.

Incomplete, convoluted and uncertain ...

Be stupid. Be safe(r).

Not often does someone instigate me to write technical stuff on my blog. I like to keep my blog away from the complexities of compilers, intricacies of the interpreters, profundity of programs and the difficulties associated with databases. I like to keep this piece of the web simple and naive.
But posts like these prompt me to describe my small observations in this [in]secure world of user names and passwords.

How good would it be if no one could crack your password. Because your password is not in the dictionary. It is not one of your pet's, relative's or for that matter your name. And the best part is, it is not tough to remember either. It is not one of the complex capital and small letter combinations.
It does not include vague numbers in between. It neither has weird special characters in it.

Sounds like a perfect fit for all of our innumerable mail accounts, currently abandoned because the passwords were forgotten! Doesn't it?
And what would that password be? Well, it is just a mis-spelt word in the dictionary.

I know, it would take just a small amount of extra time for the crackers to check for all the permutations of the words in the dictionary. And bang, the password is cracked. But what if the cracker is not doing so. What if he is a bit stupid? And what if we are stupid enough not to know the correct spellings. That would make our password safe, without our knowledge.

That means "stupid people who generally misspell words and continue this habit even in choosing passwords are comparatively safe than people who spell words correctly". Sounds like I am re-inventing the wheel. May it be so.

Ignorance is bliss..proved again !

the man, the legend.

Way back in 1992, for the first time that day, when a cricket match was being broadcast, I did not switch off the TV. Before that day, I could never understand the game. So many men clad in white, complex rules of the game, it was not as simple as kicking a ball into a goal post. And, the inset view in which two people seemed that they wanted to meet each other but never did, and instead, crossed over.

But that day I thought I would give it a shot and try to understand the game. Not that the day was special. But it was this person's feat which really inspired me to do so. And the person was Sachin Tendulkar, the legend himself. No, as many would guess, it was not his batting that caught my attention but a catch, he took. Catching a ball miles high and with such ease, he made it look so simple. That day I became a member of the cricket fan club. From catches to matches, my passion grew, about cricket and about the man's batting.

From that day till today, the reason I watch cricket is Sachin. Not me alone, he is the reason lakhs of people watch cricket today. He is God. For without him and his elegant style, I would have quit watching cricket long back. Every time I think 'This is it, we would get no more from this man', he comes back strong to prove his Numero Uno position. No man can equal his skill. Batsmen may come, batsmen may go. But Sachin is class apart.

A tribute to this cricket God on his birthday.
Thank You Sachin, for all the cricket.


Happy Birthday.

a trip - then and now

"Children, we are all going to the zoological park tomorrow."

"Get dressed in your best clothes and don't forget to take a note of all the animals there, for, you may have to write an essay about your trip later. Most importantly, don't eat junk food near the zoo.", said the teacher to the third grade students.

"Yesssssssss, teacher" said all the students in unison.

And the day after, i.e., the day the students were to write the essay, one of the students pulled out his piece of paper which had the names of the animals he saw at the zoo and started writing his essay. He figured he had to sharpen his pencil. Not having a sharpener, he decided to use the wall for the purpose and started his essay. 'A Trip to the Zoo' was the title and he continued writing .. "Yesterday all the students of our class went to the Zooological Park along with our class teacher. The zoo was very big. We stood in a line and went one after the other. The zoo has many animals. We saw the tortoises first. Two were there. They were very big. Teacher said they can live for hundred years. Then we saw the monkeys, chimpangees, orang-uttan and white monkeys with hair. We saw many tigers also. Four white tigers were sitting there behind the cage. There was one cheetah. Hippopotomus was swimming in water. It was looking like rock. Rhinocerous also was there. We got frightened when cheetah got up and roared at us. It has long, sharp tooths. There were jackals and with stripes on their body. Then we went to the safari in a bus. We saw lions, bears and deers also...".

And the student was awarded 3.5/5 as he could not fare as well as the others, especially at the spellings and as he missed the scientific names.

Poor fellow, he neglected them as unnecessary.

Fifteen years later, he thought he would re-visit the place, this time with full freedom, not needing to stand in line, more importantly not requiring to write an essay about it. But his blog, devoid of posts since long, yelled at him "If you don't have anything to write, why don't you write about your trip to the zoo" in the voice of his teacher. So he decided, he would go for it. But laziness got the better of him and instead of writing the whole thing again, he reproduced part of his childhood essay. If he had to write it now, he would be awarded a 5/5, now that he had access to spell-checkers and search engines to get the scientific names.

Obviously, the 'he' mentioned is me.

Life has changed. From pencil to keyboard, from a notebook to the web. It sure did.

sports and movies

Having seen quite some movies involving one or the other sport, I can assuredly say all these have the same pattern, except for one or two which obviously go ahead and become Oscar material.

Seems like there is nothing sport'y' in these movies.

To start with, the hero, who with utmost probability is an underdog waiting to prove his worth, or a complete newbie to the game.

There is always an inspiration involved. Be it an old coach, unsuccessful at the game in his years, wanting to relive the game through his student, and/or a girl who has immense faith in the hero's talents.

The movie has a practice session, where the protagonist (and/or his team) starts off poorly and slowly pick up the game and learn the intricacies. At the end of this session, he becomes the master. The journey of the hero from the initial rounds of the game to the final is very quick, our hero beating every one in the way to the final in a convincing way.

Then, about the opponent. Ideally, the opponent is not just another competitor. He would have already had an encounter with the protagonist, where again with most probability our hero ends up being on the losing side. And now its time for the 'revenge'.

The climax, ah! This is interesting. The unwritten rule is that the game always runs into extra-time or a tie-breaker, the scores being leveled at completion time. And no guessing, our hero is the eventual winner of the game, come what may. And in this extra time, we get to hear a repeat of all the inspirational dialogues we have heard throughout the movie.

And so ends the movie.

And the question is - Why? Why should the hero always win? What if he loses at the end? Do people always like to watch successful stories?

And how many times did an underdog team win the cricket world cup? ( Cricket, because that’s the game I am most familiar with ). Once in 30 years?

keywords used as keys?

If only the search engines could find us answers to every question under the sun and beyond, this blog wouldn't have existed in the first place.

Thanks to the mighty search engine that points to this blog when asked for the toughest question on the planet, the hits on the blog have increased two fold. Two fold?? Don't get surprised. That means there is one more person other than me who browses through this blog, ambitiously trying to find answers while I am busy trying to find questions ( or answers or both or what?? ) myself.

So dear reader, if you have accidentally tumbled upon this piece of the web while in the quest for bigger, broader questions, a big thank you.
We share the same interests. I have tried, and will try, to find more questions, more answers and thus more posts and keep you interested.

But for queries on answers to pendulums, to life's questions, to interview questions etc, all I can say is, there is a possibility you may find them here but the probability is infinitesimally small. As the rule says, there are always questions you can't find answers for.

I guess this post would increase the relevancy of this blog to the words 'questions' and 'answers' and make it to the top of the search results.
Secretly, I hope it did, but otherwise I hope there are better references on the World Wide Web than this blog that will result in the search engines.

Happy searching.

Test post :

Posting this using the Blogger API - Net::Blogger from CPAN (Perl).
Looks good.

Being a programmer helps. Sometimes. Or all times?? ;)