chinna chinna aisai

Sometimes I pity the song .. once touted to be the "song of the millennium " is allmost allways skipped when it pops up on my player . No offense really .. i used to like the song when first came out . There is somehting about Rahman's song that would not make u listen to it after a while . The song comes out .. it's a craze .. i'm listening to it all the time .. then after a few years , i don't think twice before skipping the song! The funny thing is that I never - ever do this to a old classic ( what would the song say .. it may get offended ! ;) ) .. jokes apart , I can listen to them (non rahman songs)many many times no matter what . Anyway , I digress ! .. the point of the whole post is the small stupid asai's that I have .. some i've done .. some i've not ..
1. to stand over a freeway ( i mean on the bridge ) & watch the cars whiz past below me .. gives me a strange sense of calm .
2. to go generally ( maybe to drop off somebody) to the airport & board a flight .. i like flying .. airports are like magnets literally !
3. to travel in a train in India & buy everything that is sold in the train .. most of the stuff sucks .. but i still want to buy it .. ne it the "coffeeeey" or the "vegetable cutlet "
4. to go on a trip without a destination ( nope .. i didn;t want the kudremukh trip to go the way it went & anyway it can;t be put i nthis category .. coz it did have a destination - kudremukh ,eventhough we never reached it !)
the list goes on ! ..

allways seperate

I wish I had the spell check thing when I was in junior school .... that way my teachers would have thought i was a a potential contestant for the spelling bee . ;) A strange thing happened today - I was putting together a presentation; when the Mr Smart (or should I say Miss Smart - for some reason I allways associated good spelling as a feminine quality (maybe becoz I've seen girls spell better than guys ))! ) Spell Check kept interrupting me .Yet again , I had made an error in spelling. This happens to be a word my teacher made me write God know how many times as a punishment for not spelling it correctly then .. the word is separate ( & the way i spell it is seperate ) .. but that did not correct my thinking ! Actually , I disagreed then & I still disagree that I did not spell the word correctly .. we dont say ''sepaaarate '" we say "seperate " , to me "e" fits there better than an "a" . Another word which i often make a mistake in is allways ( i mean i spell it as "all"ways & not "al"ways ) .. in fact i allways make a mistake with allways !! for the same reason .. it's all ways - why doesn;t it have a double l ?? it has to happen "all" the time right ?
Actually the whole post may sound juvenile - this guy is some loser in spelling & so he is pulling out some vague reasons for all those mistakes he makes ! but thats not true - I believe I'm fairly good at spelling - you tell me a word & based on the sound - not on stupid rules , I can spell the word .. In that sense I like the american way of spelling things - spell it as they sound ( color as against colour ) . As a mark of my disagreement I title my post with my version of the spelling . PS : You can comment on anything other than tell me why seperate & allways are spelt as separate and always.
& I dont use spell check ;)

& are you going back ??

quite frankly, I'm tired of answering the question. For the record , here's how the question pops up - I'm generally having a conversation with some X . We talk to about general stuff .. blah .. blah .. & some where in between the question i hate to answer will be asked ( i.e am i going back ( to India ) ) . These days i dont even make an attempt to answer it ! I just grin ;) .. it keeps them guessing- is it the "Ya right ! .. go back ! " grin or is it " thats a stupid question! " grin .
This evening was the worst .. i had to dodge the question thrice ! First was my manager .. then my friends Mom & finally the Vietnamese girl at the salon !
Am I going back ? short answer - yes :) .. long answer - I dont want to go to gaga about India , it's culture & stuff like that .
It's where I am from. Any other place seems alien to me . Often I think about a situation where I reconstruct my entire life here ( or in any other place ) .. i mean family , home , friends , environment ...then would i still want to go back ?? Thats some food for thought . Actually,I dont have an answer to that. Home is the only place I feel to be myself ( if thats something u can understand ) . So thats why I will go back .. :)

tortoise & the hare

Some time back I got a forward about the new version of the tortoise & hare story ( the "corporate" version ) .. but the old version is still etched in my mind. Though I never thought of it before, I never really understood why they came up with such a story ...i mean the whole story seems stupid to me .. there is this hare who is damn good at what he does .. run , i.e , but the problem is that he is stupid enough to not make good use of it in a race ; & this other sap ( tortoise) who is just not a "race" person just keeps trudging on to the end & wins ( personally i think the tortoise won because the hare was stupid) .
With all the introduction let me try to make sense of what i really want to say . Does slow & steady always win the race ? These stories effect the psyche of a person in a very subtle way . When you are in a situation , your mind tries to relate it a story you might have heard sometime in your life . The respose to the situation is very similar to what happens in the story too . People tend to convince themself of a conclusion in a given situation based on the stories - in this case "slow but steady ... " .
Also, the kind of story ( i mean fable ) likes should reflect something about the psychology of the kid ( in more general sense .. of the person .. coz i believe psychology hardly ever changes ) . As for me, I found a couple of stories very fascinating .. .. like that story about those bears & the girl .. then the panchatantra story about the mangoose ( where it gets killed at the end .. rather unfortunate ) .

void main(..)

from my point of view all functions have no return value ..
It happens after every big effort in life - when it's all over, u either feel satisfied ( with the result ) or see what went wrong .. but after that period is just a void - void in terms of thoughts , actions , emotion . All along all thoughts & emotions r focussed on that one effort (i would never forgive myself if i give anything less than 100 %)
void is a very strange feeling .. it's not associated with either sorrow or happiness. It's just a state, comes pretty much by itself & goes only when u find the next thing to focus .. not necessarily work , though very well could be work. Void can be good to .. it rejuvenates you completely !
This post is getting as complicated as it can get .. since this is about void ,i wouldn;t want to conclude the post ...

how we killed the number game

Quite some time ago, I read an article about some researcher in IIT Delhi who was trying to use Sanskrit as a base for a programming language , because it was more suited for that purpose than English. Before I go any further, I want to make it clear that I am no language fanatic; but I do find many thing in many languages funny ( not amusing .. just funny ;) ) . English, ofcourse has it's own set of illogical things.
Take for example numbers in Hindi. I've studied Hindi in School & can speak / read/ write fairly fluently; but when it comes to numbers I'm completely blank! Why ... because there is absolutely no way of deducing what a number would be called based on it's basic blocks ( or atleast I don't know how to do it) . Most ppl just know what is say 29 or 78 in hindi ( because they have been saying these numbers for years .. it's more like ok .. 29 is .. this ). The only number I memorized ( yes..memorized ! ) was my house number ( i think it was "teen saw bathiis" ) so that i can reach home without a problem ( this was when i was in Gurgaon ).
Yesterday, I was looking for something on wiki while I stumbled upon this thing about numbers in languages.. check it out
"though most spoken languages express most numbers, especially those larger than a hundred, in a "big-endian manner"^[5] (in modern English, for example, one says "twenty-four", not "four-and-twenty") there are notable exceptions such as the German, Danish, and the Dutch languages, which use "little-endian" for numbers up to 99 and "mixed endianness" for larger numbers (e.g. vierundzwanzig/vierentwintig (24, literally "four-and-twenty"), and hundertvierundzwanzig (124, literally "hundred four-and-twenty"). Sanskrit language is a larger exception which uses "little-endian" for small (e.g. chaturvinsh (24, literally "four-and-twenty")) as well as large numbers (e.g. chaturvinshatyadhikashatatam (124, literally "four-and-twenty-over-hundred"))."
( Source :wiki) ( otherwise they'll kill me for plagiarism ;) )
Have a look at the last part, where it talks about Sanskrit , and how the numbers are perfectly logically represented in it . I guess this would make Sanskrit to be a suitable base language for programming, but it would take eons of years for it to take off ! It's pretty amazing to see that our ancestors thought through the process of numbers so logically while we kill it in certain languages like Hindi !( No offense .. I just hate to memorize things that u don't actually have to memorize .. )

sensible

This evening, I was going through the chore of washing my dishes when i suddenly remembered my school loo ! strange huh !
Out of all the senses , the strongest and the most mysterious is that of smell . Apparently we got a new dish washing liquid which smelt like the disinfectant they used to use in my school's loo.
( Don;t start saying this going to be a gross post just because i have mentioned loo twice already ! )
This wasn't even the regular loo - it was that which we guys used to use when we were in junior school; it used to be in one of the most ridiculous locations - behind the canteen . I don;t know why I;m going so much in detail of it's location,etc.. !! Anyway, I hated the place for various reasons & consequently hate the smell too . Instantly, I just wanted to get out of the kitchen into a cleaner place ! Funny, the way the mind works ;)
To end the post- I'm gonna give u a link to a song i like ( why do i want u to listen to a song ?? well , i myself have posted this while thing in a gross mood ... just wanted to forget abt that ! .. )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ka--K41dyI

marriages are made in .... orkut ??

Yes .. they are ! Last week, i met a couple here who met on orkut & thats where their entire relationship grew. Apparently, the two of them were a part of the same community ( oh ! the communities in orkut ! they get really creative with names and ideas ;)) . It's not like they never met before deciding to get married, they did eventually meet to finalize things.
I found the whole thing very amusing ( it's funny how i find so many things amusing ! ) . You meet a person on the virtual world , form a virtual relationship & finally converted it to a a true life relationship.
When it comes to technology - I completely favor abstraction - like my OS prof says - "there is nothing that can't be solved with another layer of abstraction ! ", but in real life I prefer no abstractions at all .. phone over chat , face to face over phone . So to me it was really amazing that orkut could form the basis of a relationship. Personally, I dont spend time on orkut - I belong to that group who would check the scrap book if i get a mail notification that some one has scrapped .
Afternote - They are a really cute couple & seem to be having a time of their life . So , i guess they would have probably been together even without orkut .. so afterall marriages are made in heaven ! ;)

nan vegetarian !

I laugh at the joke in "Nala Damayanthi" every time i watch it !
Yesterday, I had lunch at an interesting place - it's a only salad restaurant . You get to make your own salad with anything u ask for , or take any prepared salad ( which were good too ) . This got me thinking into my vegetarianism. Before I venture any further , I would like to say that i don't mean to critique anybodies food choice and that I'm not being sarcastic about anything anybody told me (some of which is going to follow ! ) .. i merely am using your words to express my thoughts :-)
Some days back a friend of mine asked me if I was vegetarian by choice - I thought about it & could not really arrive at an answer . The question , ofcourse , was did i choose to be a vegetarian, or is it because of some religious sentiments or any other thing. The way I think this works is that ,initially, you are what you are told to be - in the sense that when you are a kid , you just eat what your parents tell you to eat ( though they have a lot of difficulty in getting you to actually eat all that ! ). So, if you eat only vegetarian food , then thats what you are . If your parents thought that it was perfectly fine for you to have something - say rabbits meat ( which people tell me is really tasty ) , then you would just have it and consequently would become a meat eater.
Once, you actually start thinking & reasoning out what you eat , etc.. you would most probably stick to what you had before . I dont think there is anything religious or emotional attached to it .As a matter of fact , why is religion associated with so many things that it should not be associated with is still very puzzling to me ! ( but that would take an entire post by itself .. so I would not venture into that topic now ) . Though I haven't answered the question i asked in the beginning , I'm going to bring up something another friend of mine said - this was about how he read an email about how the animals were treated in these farms ( In case you haven't got any such email - it talks about how the animals are drugged so that their meat is better or something in those lines ) and after reading the email , he decided to switch to vegetarianism. With all due regards, this is a completely hypocritical statement - I mean , even if they were not drugged , your still killing innocent being for your food .. it's like your some primate ! . Today you see that chicken flitting around your back yard and tomorrow you cook it in your grill ?? !!
You don't need an email to tell you that it's a poor living being your killing ( the email just goes a step further in saying that your drugging the living creature , just so that you get more juicier meat ) . I'm not sure how long he's going to stick to his decision - because the basis of the decision seems too flimsy to me .
Getting back to the first question - Am I a vegetarian by choice ? - I dont know really . What I do know is that I think I can;t bear the thought that I'm eating something that was living - probably didn;t want to die this early .. but is dead coz I'm hungry .Are there any religious setiments attached - absolutely not . I consider my religious sentiments to be very sacred - it's only between me and God & not related to anything else !
Consider this - how do you think a cannibalistic society would sustain ? I don't even know if any exist today . But if they would , then would it be confortable for anybody to eat anything - logically it should , coz thats what you've been seeing since you are a kid ( i mean absolutely anything .. i dont mean to put up a totally gross post , but in my opinion there is absolutley no difference ) .
As a rule , I don't criticize anybody's food .. for the simple reason that I have no business to do so. If there is anybody at all who should be thinking about it , then it should be the individual eating it . So , what I'm trying to say here is that I'm not preaching vegetarianism. All I'm saying is - if you can , and want to , then think about it ( not vegetarianism , but about what you are eating ).

spring into action!

it's here ! & it makes no effort in being modest about it's presence . This morning I step out wearing my NCSU jacket ( i love that jacket ;-) ) like any other day, but it's a whole new world outside. It's a really an amazing sight to see these kutty flowers n leaves sprouting out of completely barren trees. where were these things yesterday ??
Vasanth has put me in a super mood :-) . It puts an extra energy into me .. I've been humming "Yuh hi chala chal rahi" from the morning . I would give u a link to the song , but that would be downright plagiarism ! ( My cousin,Anu's blog usually has these links to youtube .. i like that idea :)) There is a certain freshness associated with the song that goes well with the onset of spring .
Hopefully my academic work will bloom in the same way ;-)

life is good :)

recently, i have realised that i'm a pathetic optimist ( which is bad in a short range & damn good at the long run ) . I feel infinitely happy about extremely simple things ( which in is in many ways contributing to the "pathetic optimism") . considers these:
1. take offs in a flight ... i bet the person next to me things i'm crazy ;) .
2. this is a series ... "yennai thechi bath" on a sat ( day is specific) .. followed by "vengaya sambar", "malaga rasam", afternoon seista ...
3. chatting with my mom on a rainy evening with a bowl of boiled ( yes boiled , not fried) ground nuts.
4. driving down command hospital rd in my baby with bheegi bheegi on the stereo .
5. playing tt after a real hard exam !
.. the list goes on ..with things added everyday to it ;)

of all things amusing

I've been here for about six months now .. so i thought I'll put down some of the things i found amusing - amusing because they are new to me , or that i had expected them to be different out here .. or whatever !
So , what tops the list here is the automatic stappler machine . I've never seen anything like this back home ! u just place the sheets of paper & zap it gets stappled . The first time i used it i was almost scared by it .. as if it were some moster that would bite me ;)
Then there is the concept that u got to do everyhting urself at the gas station ( i.e petrol bunk in our lang ) . I've always liked petrol .. i mean the smell of it . Maybe thats why i find it good to do everything myself at the gas station .. i unhook the pipe nozzle system off the dispenser .. i key in the figures ..
After two good ones , lets talk abt something that is amusing in a sad way ... I'm pretty much used to internet banking , ATM ,etc.. so much so that the bank starts with Mozilla and ends at the ATM for me ! You would be astonished with the level of tech advancemnt atleast int he banking sector here .. the ATMs have a pathetic interface ( i cursed the SBI's ATM interface in India ... SBI is atleast a zillion times better than this !) . E- banking seems to be jkust another facility , even if i want to tranfer finds from one acct to another within the same bank . same branch , i need to go to the bank for that !
So far i've only talked abt "objects" I've found amusing ... in the next post i'l try to talk abt people ( indians as well as non indians ) ..

whats in the name

"Gurukanth Desai . Tha nahi . hain aur rahega .." Thats what caught my attention in Guru. Until then I wasn't really watching the movie with much interest ( not like it was not good till then ! ) .
There's something abt these name dailogues that i like - it could be the way it is said ( which btw was awesome .. abhishek bachan rocks :)) .. or maybe just gives a more stronger foundation to the character itself. Same thing with the "my name is not anderson .. my name is neo" in matrix 1 . Can't really define the effect that the scene produces , it's just powerful ! .
Talking abt Guru , it's a must watch movie . I thought there were shades of Amitabh in Abhisheks action in this movie - the court scene ( when he just raises his hand ! ) .. that stupid song ( ek lo ek muft ) . The end is quite argumentative - i guess it's more of an urge to make the hero not lose than anything else. He makes Madhavans work look stupid at the end.
In certain sense the end is good becoz the fact is that this character did have good intentions in his actions . I believe that are three aspects to anything we do - intentions , thoughts and actions . Your intentions are something which are innate ( can't be changed , you could "pretend" at best ) .
Your thoughts are based on the way your brought up, cultural aspects , educations , etc.. ( so .. u could have potentially screwed up thought process inspite of having the truest of intentions ! )
Your actions are dependent on the situation, past actions ( causal system ? ;) ) , ability , etc..
Anyway , what i was getting at was that Guru's actions may have been wrong legally , but his intentions were true and judging one by his actions alone is wrong ( my personal opinion ) .
You could watch the movie & judge for yourself..