Krakozhia!

So, I got to meet Viktor Navorski :P .. well , obviously I'm kidding ! There is no real Viktor Navorski, no real Krakozhia (I did check that ! ) & I didn't even meet Tom Hanks !
But, the person I did meet reminded me so much of Viktor Navorski :) .. I almost blurted out "Krakozhia" when he started talking !!
Now that I have this lucky streak of meeting characters from movies that I like (terminal happens to be among the top in the list) I really hope I'll meet some specific ones. To do justice to all languages I'll try to name characters from every other "wood" . Shalini from Dil Chahta Hain (thats Priety Zinta , in case u forgot ) , Kalpana from Ghajini (thats Asin) , Mona Lisa Vito from My Cousin Vinny . I don't really follow any of the other "woods" , but thats just some of them ! Anybody else who wants to join the party is welcome ;) ..
Before U say "Ya , but U've only mentioned all the female characters .. " , I gotto point out that I did start this post with Viktor :P . I would also want to meet Luis Vargas from Original Sin (thats Antonio Banderas) (& not Angelina .. I;m not fond of her! ) , George Clooney (U can come from any of the Oceans ! ) , Vito Corleone from ... (I dont need to tell u that !) ... thats Marlon Brando , Neo from Matrix (only Matrix 1 .. not 2 , not 3 , only 1 ) .
Pixar's characters are on the top of my list too .. since there are so many of them , I'm not going take the trouble of telling you all of them ! As of now , I'm just going to keep my fingers (& toes) crossed :P

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 .. )