2011++

2011 is out. 2012 is here.

Wishing all my readers a very happy new year. So I did neither better nor worse in 2011. With 14 posts each of the past two years, seems like I am setting a standard for the blog. Lets see if I can do a hat trick of 14 posts. In these days of twitter, I guess 14 is still an ambitious one.

Coming to 2012, the number has a special significance for me. "be2012" was my login id for four years of my Engineering and the number 2012 was probably the most I typed in those four years. The number brings back great memories of segmentation faults, C++ templates, long nights in labs and those tricky networking programs that kept me glued to the world of computers. And here I am into the eighth year of pro programming, which has now become my bread and butter, of course with a lot less segmentation faults and shorter nights at the computer. It is common philosophy and a very naive one at that, but want to reiterate that computers are these amazing machines that do exactly what you ask them to do, no less and no more. Obedient things they are!

And it was an interesting thing that happened the very next day I wrote my last post that I got to hear the Hyderabad traffic boss mention some statistics that a work force of 2000 is managing a traffic of 25 lakh vehicles in Hyderabad. That should give an idea how tough a problem it is. The infinite demand and limited resources equation is true after all!

Good luck for the new year and wish great things happen in my favorite year :-)

apun ka hyderabad..

I had read a rather shocking news recently in the local newspaper that Hyderabad is adding around 50,000 vehicles every two months. That approximately translates to a 1000 new vehicles hitting the road every day. Simply put, a thousand people realize every day that public transportation isn't going to work for them and decide to ride on their own, which reflects the sad state of transportation today in Hyderabad.


Considering the fact that neither the number of roads, nor the width of the roads is increasing, this is an unimaginable number of vehicles that is going to flood the roads and one that can eventually lead to a traffic chaos. Of course, the day is not far. Daily commuters like me can vouch for that. One can experience this slowly increasing congestion that hits you irrespective of what time it is. Be it 2.30 am in the morning or 2.30 pm in the afternoon. A steady flow of vehicles bumper to bumper is a regular sight these days all over the city.

Although, I can't say nothing is being done. I see these few and far initiatives by the traffic system. Some of them innovative, and some of them very quick in implementation. Have to give it to these guys for living with a system that has inifintely increasing demand with a fixed supply. Its definitely one of those management kind of problems on how to much manage such demand with so scanty resources. The challenge becomes all the more complex because any solution is going to take really long to implement, and in the process is going to lead to even bigger problems. Like the Metro rail being planned.

It has to be seen as to what pans out and how Hyderabad will face this challenge..

Make a difference..

A friend thought posting this on my blog could spread the awareness and reach a few who might be willing. So I have added a gadget to the right so that the link stays permanently on the blog :-)

In my friend's words:

I believe everyone wants to help the underprivileged, there is always the emotional side of us which responds sensibly for others' ill fate. But we are so much occupied with our own things that our senses do not materialize to reach them.

And there is always the doubt even if we are supporting indirectly in monetary things, the least that we can do to help them beside our limitations,  are these funds going into good hands.?

This time I thought I would try reaching out to a social service organization to HELP and have that experience of being there among them.
After an exhaustive search on world wide web, I tossed on this foundation called 'SPHOORTHI'.

A small gesture of kindness makes a difference for those children and is a reward for the person who sacrificed his career and ambitions dedicating himself for the foundation.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish!

It is a young industry. People who are involved with the gadgets you work with, technology you use, languages you program in, are all still around and continuously working and improving things to make the world an even better place. So when you want to write a tribute to a person who is no more around, it feels very odd as it is for the first time that you will attempt to do such a thing!


Apple ranks, for me, at the top of the best human-machine interfaces. It is a completely different experience working on apple gadgets. They just seem to understand what you want to do and transform accordingly to let you do things with ease. Everything seems so intuitive and perfect. Gadgets come, gadgets go. But when an Apple product comes out, it is the most desirable for one and all. And the one and only man behind all of that, the great Steve Jobs is no more. He has been the face of Apple for as long as anyone remembers and will continue to be, always. Such is the aura of the innovator, who made Apple what it is now.


It was a mail circulating back in 2005 about Jobs' Stanford commencement speech, that introduced me to the man and his experiences in life. The speech was, like all great ones, unique and inspiring. It had some of the best lines I ever read. As much as I want to quote a few of them here, I am running out of choice for which to pick among the many - they are all equally exceptional. I guess it takes a Steve Jobs, with his momentous highs and lows in life, to come up with such beautiful lines.  


Here's a tribute to one of the best innovators who made working with gadgets a beautiful experience.


PS: And there was another such a couple of days ago, which we completely missed! RIP Dennis Ritchie, the man behind the C language.

Marvels of science..

From thehindu.com :

CERN says a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometres) away in Italy travelled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant. But given the enormous implications of the find, they still spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there was no flaws in the experiment.

When I first read this news in the morning, I could vaguely remember that I had once thought about something similar happening and shattering the very foundations on which much of today's science is based on. That was six years ago!

No discovery is insignificant unless proved incorrect. It is not that hard to believe either, that the great Einstein equation might have to be revisited. From history, we know that it is not uncommon for us, mere mortals, to build our active world on the basis of certain theories, and as we keep discovering new things, we move on to newer worlds! The earth was not always round, remember!

I am no expert in the field to comment on the new observations and what it can mean, but I am always impressed with the way we humans never cease to experiment and keep discovering newer and newer things that have the potential to alter and improve life. And what appears to be the key to such discoveries is to "assume nothing". Not even e=mc-square!

I do.

You see a fancy car on the road and wonder how the designer of that car came up with such intricate details of how the lines, angles and colours blend in to give the machine that beautiful look. You see a/the Taj Mahal and adore the architectural brilliance of the monument and of the architect who thought marble would do the most justice to that masterpiece. You drive through the valleys of Himachal Pradesh, by the serene beaches in Goa, ride on the backwaters in Kerala and be amazed at how nature has lent itself into those formations, ever pleasing to the eye and soothing to the mind. Designs like these are just so perfect, everything about them comes together in the best possible way, like the pieces of jig-saw puzzle, they are an exceptional fit.

And there's the other side. Like the famous Sirivennela song, you wonder why the beautiful swaying of honey-filled flowers is short-lived while on the contrary, the sedentary rocks sit around forever. And why the cuckoo, blessed with a silvery voice isn't dressed up in a pleasing color while the raucous thunders of the clouds have a beautiful silver lining! Some things just don't seem the best of matches, yet have a reason to be that way - may be they just offset each other to bring about balance.

Limitless is the imagination, vision and implementation of the architects (sometimes nature itself being the architect) who produce such marvelous pieces of creativity. And what comes with this authority to design and create is responsibility. Knowing well ahead that they may be credited or criticized for ever, they take up this responsibility.Such is the spirit of the great.  Handling expectations and yet performing is definitely something extraordinary. Magnificent it is, that they create these beautiful things of joy.  Impressive it is, that they say 'I do.' to whatever follows their creation - be it unlimited admiration or never ending criticism. 

Zindagi..

The thing about get-away/adventure genre movies is that they trigger that thought in you - to jump right up, pack your bags and just go on that trip you always wanted to. So does the movie Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. With an introspective title and a festive trailor, one can easily guess what the movie is about.

But as most movies of this genre are, it is the journey that matters, not the climax towards the end. Not letting one down, the movie takes us through a pleasant ride woven around three friends who set out on an adventure trip far off in the picturesque lands of Spain. Punctuated by tiffs of the past, fresh experiences of the current and thoughts about the future, the three friends go through a roller-coaster ride of emotions with each of the adventures they try, and in the process, learn to let go of their fears - both inside the head and outside.

At the end, they emerge victorious having conquered their apprehensions and realizing their priorities, which I guess is the point to take back from the movie, that once you let go of your worst fears, you emerge as a new person with lots of optimism, a fresh and dynamic outlook. After all, its just one life!

"Hello... Its raining.. "

It was the kind of day when people knew it would rain but did not exactly know when. Typical monsoon day in Hyderabad. Two minutes into my ride that day, it started pouring and I had to stop and find a shelter lest I find myself swimming in the Hyderabad waterways :) And so I did. It was an abandoned shop with a small extended roof overlooking the busy roads, good enough to give cover to four random people like me who had dared the rain gods and lost!

In a different world, it would have been an opportunity to strike up random conversations with these four strangers. And like any such conversations one would imagine, we would have started with Cricket - the universal subject. All four would have enough accolades for the Indian team. Then we would move on to Politics - the Universal language that everyone understands and has opinions about, and probably next about the unique feature of the city - how it can turn into an ocean when it rains. It probably was designed that way to make up for the lack of an ocean in the near vicinity. And at the end of it all, we might even have realized one was a distant cousin of the other etc. Happens sometimes ;-)

Yes, all of that would have happened, but in a different world. In today's world that isn't the case. All the other three quickly reached out to their mobile phones and started conversations with people they already know while I stood staring at the overflowing waters, knowing well that if I called somebody on a Saturday afternoon all I would get is a good amount of bashing! In a while the rain subsided, and everyone went their ways entrusting their bikes with the additional job of swimming. Obviously, the distant cousin will never be found.

May be I am generalizing this all too much to say that while mobile phones have brought distant people closer, it also made people around you distant. There is some truth to it though. One can always spot people fiddling with their mobiles when in new environments rather than looking around or talking to somebody. Our contacts have become our world. So it seems.

Ten thousand...

select datediff(day,'19840212', '20110630')

10000


For the number freak that I am, what can be a day more interesting than June 30,2011 - the day I turned 10000 days old? Ten thousand days!!! That seems such a big number! If instead of 365 days, a year had 100 days, I would be 100 years old already. How cool would that be!  But honestly, apart from the seemingly beautiful number of zeroes in it, nothing interesting happened on the day. Except that my watch stopped working, at around 10 AM, which I guess is ironic in a comical way! It probably had the 10K bug ;-)

And with today, I have completed seven years at work too. Approximately 1/4th of the ten thousand days. So numbers and numbers it is the past few days.

Mon-soon!

Monday comes soon enough. It always is the case. Though I was completely unwired the past week and away from the happenings of the dynamic and ebullient world, it still wasn't enough to eagerly look forward for Monday to get back to the sparkling life of traffic, ever-changing news, social networking updates and this beautiful invention called mobile phone.

It was calming in a way, to see the news come and go by the time I got to them and to find out that India already won the WI series before I knew it started.

And the week was also witness to the first showers of the season - the other 'mon-soon' had set in and Hyderabad, which was pretty close to a boiler the earlier week, had suddenly turned into this pleasant city with a cool breeze welcoming me on the way back to work. Makes me wonder how varied and rich the Indian seasons are. One minute they are something and the next, the exact opposite.

So its back to work and world, after a monsoon break. :)
And probably a few blog posts too!

Three cheers..

A look at the recent succession of events that dominated the headlines would convince anyone that one success begets another and that one victory spreads enough optimism to fight another. It was an interesting article in last weekend's Hindu magazine (couldn't find an online link unfortunately!) trying to link the optimism and the fighting spirit shown by the common man around the country in supporting Anna Hazare's campaign to that of the spirit shown by Dhoni's men in winning the World Cup. The joy of the world cup spread into this fight against the corruption, it says, backed by the feeling of 'we can', shown first by the Indian team and then by anti-corruption crusaders around the country. While I leave the pros and cons of the movement for the technically inclined, and the criticism for the skeptics, the biggest outcome of the fast was the unity with which everyone responded and expressed support for one of the biggest evils that hinders development in this part of the world.

Quick to follow it up was the successful launch of the PSLV placing three satellites up in the orbit - another thing to cheer about, makes it three in a row coupled with the two mentioned above. Though the debate continues on whether satellites are the need of the hour for a still developing country, what is praiseworthy is the effort put in towards attaining the scientific precision required for such high tech projects. Think about parking your car in a busy Koti road and you will know :-)

One enthusiastic journalist covering the launch live on tv asked a bystander if he thought spending on satellites was justified at all. If you ask me, he had the answer right in front of him. Without satellites, he wouldn't have been seen live across so many screens across the world. Spending on science is justified, I feel. It is for science to predict the future and envision things ahead of time and work towards making them a reality in the coming days. So anything that they do today might seem irrelevant, but as time progresses, it all will come together to give us a better future.

More optimism and victories for the hard working!

It's magical..!!

And so four years later, the Indian team, with their wonderful performance has answered the critics who had poured out their disappointment of the 2007 loss at various venues like me. What a victory it was, and what a time and place to make it happen. From the lows of 2007 to the victory of 2011, that too right in the midst of the people for whom they had to prove a point. Like the proverbial phoenix, they rose from the ashes to conquer the Cup, and with it, the hearts of millions who spent their better part of the month watching cricket and trying to make sense of the impossible-seeming UDRS. Integral calculus was easy!

Sure, when I re-read my post, I bit my tongue and felt sorry for having had been so harsh four years ago, but back then the defeat was so diasppointing. Hope Sunny will himself be part of the team in 2067 giving India the 15th World cup, and not trying to decipher an unknown word called cricket :-)

Personally, I had much more to be happy about the World cup for having attended one of the league matches India played, and having seen the victorious team perform on their way to winning the Cup, and having had a glimpse of the 'soon-to-be-ours' trophy that was displayed before the match (probably an imitation, but who cares!). How much I wanted India to win the cup at that moment! And a month later, it is all ours.

Congratulations Team India, it was great watching you play. And hope the success spreads a smile across every Indian staying far and wide.

Of poets and people..

రాజు  నివసించు  రాజ  సౌధమ్ములోన  

కవి నివసించు ప్రజల హృదయమ్ములోన 

[The King stays in magnificient palaces..
While the poet stays in the hearts of the people]

..so goes the fantastic poem written by Gurram Jashuva which very aptly describes the lines that I would have liked to write, post my visit to Mysore and Bangalore recently.

On the first day in Mysore, I was audience to the grandiosity and splendor of the high rise palaces, magnificient pieces of art that were hung in the museums, showing the rich and glorious lifestyle of the rulers back in the day, how people would throng to the palace to celebrate festivals and participate in processions, showing their loyalty to the King.

The very next day, in Bangalore, I was witness to the unparalleled affection and unprecedented admiration that a few thousands of people can have for a single man, and how, at the top of their voice, they were cheering for their super hero when he first entered the field and marked his place at the crease, like he had been doing for the past 21 years, never failing the hope people have in him. 

I could so easily relate the above poem to my experience of the two days drawing parallel to the King in the poem to the Mysore royalty and the great cricketer to the poet mentioned, and how the King can rule the masses, but it is the poet who truly wins them over.

My memory failed me in trying to recollect the other beautiful lines of the poem which would have added more meaning to this post.


On a very different note, it is such a sorrow to see nature's fury over the place I had written about earlier, and after I have written specifically about the beauty of nature in my last post. How contradicting! Hope they recover soon.

One thing is sure - 'nothing is for sure'.

Vertically off..

Adjectives always fall short when it comes to describing nature.  Many a poet have drawn inspiration from the swaying leaves, blooming flowers, chirping birds, gushing streams and twinkling stars to produce masterpieces.

A five minute gaze into the twilight sky on a full moon day can make anyone a poet I guess.  While the blue to orange to dark turning sky takes down along with it the glowing red ball which lends its color to its counterpart that rises from a distant horizon illuminating the world with a natural glow that no amount of man-made inventions can beat.  You are left wondering how precise and rythmic nature's workings are and start thinking of how it could all have come into being. Thoughts quickly jump back to the Universe, the planets, the big bang theory, the dinosaurs, the human evolution.. the never ending tale of how things around us were created, are being created, and will continue to be.. and before you get too far on this tangent, the traffic signal turns green and you wake back into your regular life, shifting gears, revving the engine enough to do your part in wiping off a few things off the beautiful canvas that you were appreciating a moment earlier..

Nature has been the greatest of inspirations, though it continues to be an enigma at best.

Lets ROLL..

Festivals are rejuvenating. And travel during festivals is an even more interesting thing. Especially if you are the kind who loves to watch people. People from different walks of life come on board the same bus/train you are traveling in and the atmosphere resembles a mini world. You have that perpetually nagging old man who has enough experience of the good times to earn the right to criticize. Then the lone traveller sitting aloof drowned in his thoughts. The group of friends who, with their discussions, keep you informed of all the important news going on. And then there are always a bunch of kids hanging on to their kin watching with an ecstatic yet surprising look on their face, happy about the new environs they are in, yet feeling insecure about the unknown people around them. Of course, no description is complete without the cell-phone-to-the-ear guy who keeps chattering away, generally a bit louder than he would otherwise.

If you are in a contemplative mood, watching all these people would give you enough food for thought to write about it. So, here I am :)

Not all of that, but one particular thing caught me. There was this two year old kid looking around and suddenly his mom thrusts a cell phone to his ear and asks him to say 'Hi' to his maternal uncle and then to ask how he is etc. The poor kid repeats her words verbatim clueless about  what he is doing, nevertheless with a tinge of excitement, seeing his mother all cheerful. Does the two year old kid know what he is doing. That there is an uncle far away waiting for their arrival, and he is "talking" to this uncle whom he can't "see"? Does his imagination allow him to feel that the communication is real?

What about the same age kids before the advent of the cell phone? Did they have the same imaginative capacity, except that they couldn't display it.
Or do the new tools that come up in this scientific age bring out skills hitherto unknown at that age?

Big questions! As long as the kid is happy talking on the cell phone, I don't mind.

Wishing everybody a very happy new year. 2011, in a way, resembles the word ROLL. So, hope everybody has a 'rock and roll' year and I hope the posts in my blog also roll..

Who's the best?

Comparison is inevitable in this world. Whatever people do, accomplish, fail to do, etc, it is always compared to things of the past, or similar things that others have done.
Comparisons are done, ratings are given and finally everybody wants an answer to the question "Who's the best". And the things that are compared range from infinity to infinity. Anything can be compared. Starting from which kid in the school has more toffees to who makes the fastest century in a 20-20 match, comparisons are a never ending phenomenon.

What do these comparisons serve? Probably, it is because of comparing and contrasting that we are able to improve our capabilities. So it might not be that bad either.

Again, within these comparisons, there seems to be an inherent trend, at least one that I feel, to put people earlier in time in a more positive light than they would deserve otherwise. And this is in every field.. Sports, music, arts take anything.. The earlier guy is always better/greater than the contemporary. Shakespeare, Picasso, Newton, Bradman, they are all great people and considered better than their current counterparts and probably anybody in the future too. As if great people are born only once and that too in the past!  Ghantasala is a better singer than SP Balu, Ilayaraja is better than A R Rahman, Nobody can think of a better actor than NTR in Telugu.. the list goes on.

Why so? One reason I can think of is that resources were limited in the past and anybody who achieved so much back then would have done even more now. True, but not always. Another reason then, probably, is that it is the modesty of the younger generations to revere and respect elders in their field and to attribute greater skill to their predecessors. Besides that, in most cases, the predecessors would have been their gurus or idols in the field, so they can't dream about surpassing the idols or at least openly accept it.

There might be other reasons, and I might be only seeing one side of it all (think about scientists before Newton and poets before Shakespeare, they existed too, but still the later ones are considered the best, right?) but it is mostly the case that in a list of successful people in a field, the earliest is always considered best. And, these comparisons never end.

So, which was the best movie of the decade, who was the best sportsman, which year was the best, etc etc.. and the comparisons go on and on... and while you are on it, you could also try and tell which of my posts is the best :) Yes, I am no different.

the canine question

Freedom. Contrary to what the word means, I think the word has a different connotation that is exactly opposite to the meaning, one which means restriction. We are all free by definition, but are we really free? Probably its a bit easier for us intellectually superior beings called humans ,to understand what the word really means and what we should and should not do under this empowering word called "freedom". But think about the animal world, specifically the "pets" the we so dearly love and have them by our side always. Are they free? Do they know whether they are free?

Watching two dogs on one day in different circumstances triggered a doubt in me as to what this word "freedom" would mean to each of the dogs.

The first of them was traveling in the rear of an air-conditioned car, sticking his head out of the window, wearing a dreary look on its face. One look at it and you would feel it is missing something. Is it freedom? But think about it, and the comforts it is enjoying, probably not even the upper middle class human can afford. But is it really free? Does it want to jump out of the window, hunt for its food, eat his hard-earned meal rather than eat artificial dog food fed to it every 6 hours. Is it happy being in the car? Probably yes. Is it free? Does it want to be? Only the dog can tell.

The second, a street dog, again with a dreary look on its face, this time looking out for some generous human who can give it some food. Is it happy? Not so much I would say, it doesn't know what its next meal is going to be and when. Is it free? It definitely is freer than the earlier one. Yes, it can hunt at its own times and for food that it wants. Sleep in its own time at any place it wants, be it right in the middle of the road under the shade of a tree. Freedom? Totally. But the very next moment a rash auto driver runs over its leg and it squeals in pain and runs amok as far away as it can. Is it happy being free? No. Does it want to be in the air-conditioned car, in return for the freedom? Only the dog can tell.

Never having reared a dog, I am not sure if these canines have a sense of freedom and whether they have a preference to have it or not, but what impresses me is their loyalty. They are loyal when they are free, and even more when they are tied up. One quality worth learning.

If only these canines could speak..

Been there.. Seen that..

It might be for just a couple of minutes. It might not be the greatest of the innings. But finally, I can cross an item from my list of "100 things to do in life".  That being "watching the master Sachin Tendulkar bat" live. Been there and seen that yesterday when I went to the test match played between India and New Zealand in Hyderabad.

On another day, it would have been a century that every cricket fan was waiting for - century number 50 in tests for the master, but it was not to be yesterday. That was the only disappointment, but not so much after seeing the other batsmen bat. All those batsmen whose shrugs and styles, defences and boundaries I was used to watching on TV were now playing less than a hundred yards from me. It was thrilling on that front but not so much in the play itself, it being a test match and our guys playing slower than usual, I was pretty bored with the game.

So, 1 out of 100 is over. Now I should plan for the rest 99, or rather I should make a list of those 99 first, because I never had a list till I did no. 1 :-)

Tweet.. tweet..

First there was the good old telephone. Then came the e-mail. Then the mobile phone. Social networking followed. Micro-blogging is the new fad. Like everybody I've taken to anything that's new and happening, and in the process, I've added a new gadget to the blog today - my twitter feed. I am not very active on twitter as such, but I thought interlinking them both would be a good idea because in a sense both the blog and the twitter are for the same purpose. I use them both to express myself to friends and readers.

While twitter is for an informal thought or a single line that flashes in the mind suddenly, blog is for the more-thought-about topics and things that I find time and words to write about.

So twittering, blogging and everything that the amazing world of internet has to offer. I particularly like the innovation that has come up on the communications front in these recent years. Its good to watch the trend :)

the new car..

After writing about bigger, grander and more meaningful things in the past few posts, let me turn a bit into the normal human this time. The kind that talks loud about global warming but still wants to own a car inside. :) After all I want my share too!

So it was a couple of days ago that I bought my first car. I am no expert in cars and how they work, and so had to do a bit of googling and the like, ultimately to realize that all these tech specs and comparisons do not make much sense if it is your first car. All you want are pleasing looks and enough space inside :) Trust me.

I zeroed in on the Hyundai i20 Magna and now I am a proud owner of one.

I wrote a similar post quite a few(!) years back about my CBZ and how it caught my attention on the very first day and I ended up owning it. Nothing like that happened for the car though :) Either I became older and more practical now or my dreams now know no bounds, for, only the Audis and BMWs catch my attention :)