Last week, I needed to be in Copenhagen, for a meeting, and I decided to take my bike along with me, and ride back home. Since I couldn't ride on the Øresund bridge between Denmark and Sweden, I decided to take a bus to Helsingborg instead, and then make the ferry crossing over to Helsingør, from where I'd ride to the meeting venue, 45 km away.  I spent a few hours agonizing over route choices with ridewithgps, (but in hindsight, ought to have been even more cautious) and created all the routes that I needed; the ride from the ferry to the meeting venue, routes to get to my hotel from the meeting venue and vice-versa, and finally, the route to get from the meeting venue to all the way back to Linköping.

When I return home from a long ride, one of the first things I do is to upload my ride data, for analysis. A large part of it I suppose is for the satisfaction of being able to see the ride visualized, but it also provides really valuable information about the ride conditions.  One of the biggest challenges in doing a long bike ride is designing the course itself; when done successfully, it will result in a smooth and enjoyable ride, but mistakes in course design could mean that you end up in places where you should not be, like expressways or restricted roads, or places where you don't want to be, like an unpaved dirt road, when you are on a road bike.  While the GPS records all of the points which we traverse on, sites like strava might be a bit hard to use, to find a particular point in your ride, from memory alone. If there were places on the course where the GPS had incorrect information, or indicated that I needed to use roads which were forbidden, I certainly would have stopped and used my GPS to reroute me. If the precise location of that stop were to be available to me, it would be easier for me to modify the route, to avoid that stretch in the future.

Having experimented with the Velib rental bikes (http://prashanthchengi.livejournal.com/77523.html), I knew it was a nice enough system. There are quirks in the system, for instance, when a defective bike shows up as 'available' on the app/website, and the fact that they don't provide a simple way for the user to mark a bike as defective. That said, the company makes regular inspections, or sends out repair crew, when a particular bike doesn't get picked up for several hours. The bike with the punctured tire that I spotted in the morning? It wasn't there in the evening, so it was evidently fixed and returned to service.

I'd heard sometime ago that there was an interesting bicycle rental system in Paris, and had hoped to give it a try sometime. I got to do just that today! The interesting rental system that I'm refering to is 'Velib' (http://en.velib.paris.fr/How-it-works/Bikes). The company behind it must have done extensive research on commuting habits of people, before coming up with their business model, which works like this: Subscription types are long-term (annual), weekly or single day tickets. (I'll describe how a single day ticket works) A single day ticket can be purchased after paying a 150 EUR deposit, and a 1.7 EUR charge. This ticket is valid for 24 hours. You get a special number on the top of the ticket, and get to create a 'PIN'. All this can be done at any Velib bike station, of which there are many, all across Paris (across France?) If there is a bike available at the station, you can then borrow it, or use the system there to query other stations to find the station nearest to you, with available bikes.

I'd last replaced the bottom bracket on my beloved winter bike, Rusty, back in July 2014. Though this bike logs the least mileage of all my bikes, it's used in the harshest of conditions; snow, ice, and worst of all, lots of salt, so the wear is rather accelerated. Since then, I'd removed the cranks once, to clean and reseat the BB, but had mishandled the crank removal, resulting in some partial thread stripping. The BB had now failed completely and needed to be removed, and I made the same mistake while attempting to remove the crank (I tried operating the crank puller, before removing the locking nut). This time, the threads which were already damaged, completely gave up the ghost. I winced, realizing that I had to use a lot of violence to get it off now.

Bliss in the Hills is a little-known 1200 brevet, which is possibly the toughest ride in all of India, and possibly ranks very high in the list of some of the hardest rides in the world. Now, when I call this little-known, I might offend many fans of the ride, many of whom have attempted this ride more than once, but I call it so, because it's only known to a bunch of people who regularly follow traffic on a mailing list, and probably a few others, who may have heard about it, from these regulars. I got to know about this ride when I saw ride reports and periodic updates, last year, and it had captured my imagination. I'd thought right then that this was a ride I'd attempt, if I got the opportunity. When I heard about this year's edition, I decided to time my India visit (which I'd originally planned for late December) so that I'd be able to do this ride, and quickly decided to sign up. Though I didn't finish the ride (I retired after logging in 509 km), the little that I saw made me realize that this was a brilliant ride, which deserves way more attention and reach than what it gets currently.

Completing the 600 brevet this year helped to complete a circle I'd started spinning last year, when I started out as a randonneur. In 2015, I successfully completed 200 and 300 BRMs, but faltered at the 600, when I was clearly lacking the fitness and mental strength needed for two days of riding 300 plus km. The group I rode with, led by Marcus Carlholt, were a strong bunch of riders,  who were nice enough to drop their pace quite a bit, to allow me to ride along with them, but I was still nowhere near ready. I had to do a long stretch by myself, and by the time I rode to the hostel we'd booked for a night halt, it was very late and I had too few hours of sleep when I resumed in the morning.  Since they were going to be too fast for me, I elected to ride by myself, and ultimated ended up aborting the ride after 545 km, when the temperature dropped to 2°C, and it even started to snow!

June 12, 2016 was Halvvättern 150, a ride which was quite eagerly awaited! This was the first time I was going to be doing a Vätternrundan/Halvvättern ride in a formal group. Earlier in the season, Patrick, and his sons, Jonathan and Alexander, thought up practice sessions, which would help us get used to riding together. There were two memorable 'pizza rides' which saw us riding from Linköping to Borensberg, and wolfing down guilt-free pizzas :) The third and final practice session was a ride around the Lake Roxen, which I missed out on, as I was attempting a 600 km brevet.Sunday dawned on us, and promised to be a lovely day. It'd been decided to meet at Patrick's, and hitch up the bikes onto the bike racks on two cars, and leave to Motala together.  Practically every third or fourth car we encountered on the road to Motala had a bike or two, or more, mounted, pointing to the enormous popularity of the ride. There were cars coming into town with bikes, and many were biking into town too.

Bicycles make all kinds of noises; the whizz of a smoothly oiled chain running its merry course, the clicks of the gear shifters, the reciprocating clacks of the chain engaging with a different cog, the the drone of the tires on tarmac, or the crunch on gravel.  They are all part of biking and are perfectly harmonious and in fact, pleasing to the ear.  What's dreadful is when you hear things that are not harmonious; things which are not right.  Even as a child, I'd be extremely distressed if the cheap pedals on my kids' bike used to make clicking noises, and that aspect of me has not changed in the least.  Of late, my rides have been accompanied by a god-awful creak, and it was wearing me down.  To hear an unwanted creak a couple of times on a short ride is one thing, but when I do my randonneuring rides, I don't plug into any music device; I prefer to listen to the sounds of nature, and the calming sounds of my bike. With this creak however, it meant having to listen to it hundreds and thousands of times, over and over and over, during the course of a long ride spanning several hours.

Here's wishing you a very happy birthday, !

For the past few rides, my road-bike's fork was creaking and squeaking quite badly. It was initially only rarely heard, when riding along a particularly bumpy stretch of road, but later, it increased. On my 400 km brevet a couple of weeks ago, it was quite noisy, but I didn't have time to properly investigate it before I pressed it into a 300 km brevet last week, during which it became a near constant creak. My bike's headset has never been serviced since I bought it two years ago, and that's saying a lot, considering that I've ridden it in a lot of rain. Today, after a trainer session which was made quite unpleasant due to the creaks, I looked at a GCN video on youtube, to see how a headset was to be serviced. Here's the link:

Here, I'll describe what I call a post-ride functional cleaning of a bike.  A functional cleaning is cleaning from a mechanical perspective, and is not quite the same as cleaning from an aesthetic perspective. It's not about making the bike look good, but ensuring that crucial mechanical parts are clean enough to keep damage at bay.  A functional cleaning can be achieved fairly quickly, leaving out parts which are not needed, depending on the nature of the ride.

I started this year's brevet calendar by registering for the Linköping 200 brevet, organized by CK Hymer. This was going to be my second appearance at the event and I was hoping to be better. What the event did was to show me exactly where I was, in terms of fitness and preparation, for such long rides.

I've just begun on the journey of analyzing riding habits critically, in order to identify and iron out bad habits and mistakes, with an aim to increase performance and reduce effort. During a recent brevet ride, I was paying close attention to my vital statistics (heart rate, cadence, power output) and was spinning with a cadence far higher than my normal 70 RPM grinding. The one thing I have a marked difficulty dealing with, are climbs; I tire easily and my average speed drops to abyssmal lows. It happened this time too, but since I was paying closer attention to my riding habits, I was actually able to pick up flaws in my technique, and figure out fixes.<ol>

</ol>

After my last attempts to learn unicycling left me with an inflamed back (http://prashanthchengi.livejournal.com/73182.html), I took a while to recover. After that, the weather also took a turn for the worse, leading to lots of ice/slush formation. Now, snow is something I generally like and look forward to, as it means better light, but it makes it totally hostile for an activity like learning to ride a unicycle.  The long gap since my last outing on the uni was also weighing on my mind; with each passing weekend that I didn't practice, even when conditions would have permitted it, I felt worse. It was beginning to feel like something of a jinx, and I knew that the only way to get on top of it was to go out and have another session.  Today, after staying boxed indoors for most of the day, I decided that I'd do a short session.  It was half past five, but the light was going to be good for another hour at least, so I pumped up the tire and off I went.  Since my last experience of stepping away from the wall hadn't gone all that well, I decided to go back to the basics, and the wall.

I have now racked up some experience,  hosting and conducting workshops and code sprints. The experience has been humbling, exasperating, interesting, and more.  Here are a few things I've learned along the way.

It was a facebook post by my friend Sharath M.S. in 2013, about his wheelbuilding experience, that triggered my own interest in wheelbuilding, but like many of my acquired interests,  there was no immediate action. The interest to build my own wheel was only in the far recesses of my mind. What occupied a position of higher priority in my mind though, was exploring ways to improve my fitness and get faster on a bike. I did some reading about gear ratios and decided that I might be able to train better, if I switched from my 12-27 groupset to an 11-23 one.  Whether it would actually help me or not was something I'd have to actually test and find out for myself, so off I went to the local bike store and ordered myself a new Shimano Ultegra 10 speed 11-23 groupset, in October of 2014.  Even as I was ordering the groupset, I was toying with the idea of building a new wheel for the extra groupset, as that would allow me the option of doing a simple wheel swap, instead of a messier groupset swap. I ordered a new rim too, but decided that it would be cheaper to buy a wheel truing stand in the US, during my visit in December.  The 11-23  arrived within a week, but it was about a month before I actually got around to changing it.  I changed the groupset in November of 2014, when there was already a lot of snow and ice on the roads.  I tried to test out the new groupset, but within minutes of hitting the road, I'd picked up a flat, thanks to the sharp gravel that had been scattered on the roads, to assist traction. This was the last time I rode my road bike in 2014. 2015 started with a semi-official visit to India, where I got my first experience of riding a brevet. Though I completed it, I didn't qualify, but what it did was get me keenly interested in brevets. Returning to Sweden, I rode and completed successfully, the Linköping 200, organized by CK Hymer, and the Mölndal 300, organized by BeGe Olsson, using my new 11-23 groupset. My successful run however stopped with an abortive bid on the Jonköping 600, a ride which left me wishing I'd used the 12-27 set instead. After this debacle, I switched back to the 12-27 and also decided to finally start my wheelbuilding project.

I got my unicycle on the 30th of January 2016, and have spent a few hours in the saddle thus far, trying to learn.  Here's the story thus far.  The day numbers are the days I practiced, and are not successive days.

Social media is a wonderful medium, that allows us to stay in touch with loved ones and make new friends; it provides a means to voice one's opinions and findings and also a platform to debate and discuss views. It however has its share of negatives, in the form of trolls, abusive people and the most insidious of them all, people who create and put forth articles with misleading and often-times totally untrue claims. The contents of these posts are actually well crafted, with a few scientific sounding words, and at times, even bits and pieces of real facts thrown in, to convince the reader that the whole post is true. The motives behind these posts are not always clear;  while some directly attempt to sell some quack remedy or magic pill or potion,  others are written to gain acceptance or recall value, or to attract attention from more people.  Some of these posts generate actual income for the content creators while the download/share counts of other posts simply simply serve to flatter the egos of their creators. Innocent social media users who come across these posts often accept them at face value, and even go on to propagate it further, by sharing it amongst their friends. One of the eleven fundamental duties which are assigned to each and every citizen of India, is this: "to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform;" What this means, is to question and research any manner of information placed before us, before accepting it as a fact and consuming it or propagating it, and I take this duty seriously.  Let's consider a few classes of misinformation that abound our social media.1. Catering to false pride/sentiments: From political supporters claiming achievements where none have been made, to posts that rely on the sentiments/patriotism of people to not probe claims further, this class has it all. eg: Unesco has named 'Jana Gana Mana' as the best national anthem in the world, India had supersonic aircraft during vedic times: every person in the world, even the most cynical ones, would love to hear positive references to their own country. Why let facts get in the way of a nice story? Many people routinely forward such reports, without doing any independent enquiry. Read the article from the perspective of a skeptic; does the article provide credible references, or does it simply state that all evidence for the claims exist in some ancient texts, without giving proper references? Does it require you to suspend disbelief, to be able to believe it? If something is too good to be true, or too perfect, it probably isn't true. Sites such as hoax-slayer.com and snopes.com are good resources to check for most commonly forwarded internet hoaxes.

When I watched Chris Martin of Coldplay ride a unicycle in 'Paradise', I was merely intrigued, but when I saw a Linköping resident commuting on a uni, I was more than intrigued; I was deeply interested. While I didn't follow up on that interest last year, I pulled that back from the dusty recesses of my mind and decided it'd be something I'd do this year. A few youtube videos and light reading later, I found that the fastest way to get my hands onto a uni was to simply get it from the LBS (local bike store), which is only a couple of kilometers away.  They however were out of stock and mentioned that they'd not get it for another few weeks. http://unicycle.se was my next stop; I even ended up ordering a 24 " unicycle from them, but after reading some more, I began to have doubts about my initial selection. While a 24" uni would be easy to learn on, it wasn't the best of options if one intended to do any longer rides on it, as I intended to. While most people might buy a starter uni and then move on to better models, I was clear that I didn't want to take that route.  While I could add one uni to my growing collection of bikes, two or more would be overkill and I didn't think there would be a great market for used unicycles.  When I called them for help, I spoke to Martin Sjönneby who was extremely helpful; he spent time patiently listening to my needs and constraints and initially recommended a 29er. When I told him that I was only 165 cm tall, he recommended that I try out the 36" Nimbus Nightfox, and I agreed.  He even agreed to send me an invoice for the upgrade, instead of canceling my earlier order and making me wait for the time it took for the bank to process the refund.  Within a day, I had shipping details of the product in my mail and was eagerly counting away the days to Friday, when I was expected to get the delivery.Friday came and so did my new Nimbus 36" Nightfox, along with a concise getting started guide. I quickly put it together and set out, to begin my practice. Will post separately about my progress at learning to ride it, but it'll suffice to mention here that I'm doing fine and hope to be able to ride confidently, within a few days. I'd like to personally thank Martin and team unicycle.se for being super helpful and ensuring that I got started off in the best way possible. Here's a picture of my latest possession!

When I moved to Sweden in 2013, I immediately realized that I wanted to bike again, but what I didn't know was that I'd not only get hooked to biking but also end up growing a collection of bikes! Having been used to commuting on a motorcycle in India, I felt fairly crippled in Sweden, and was desperate to get my hands on a bicycle, as that would greatly increase my mobility.  I kept an eye out on the university site's buy and sell section, and soon found myself calling and writing to many people in the hopes of getting a cheap bike to get around.Bike # 1: After a few disappointments, I finally found a bike which seemed decent.  Unlike the earlier ones I'd seen/tried, most of the gears seemed to be working and the chain and gear cassettes seemed okay, at least for a few more months of use. I knew straightaway that it would entail some tender loving care, but it felt and looked okay and the price seemed okay too, so that became my first bike.   Since the purchase, I have painstakingly replaced all parts that were too far gone. Over the three years I've owned it, I have replaced the rear wheel (due to a worn out freehub), chain, front and rear derailleurs, gear cassette, bottom bracket and tyres! The components have cost me several times the amount I bought the bike for, but it's pretty solid and now my primary winter bike.  I call it 'Rusty'.

I was rewatching Tarantino's 'Inglourious Basterds'  tonight, and it features a most interesting plot element; a German soldier overhears a British spy, masquerading as a German soldier, and gets immediately suspicious on account of the spy's accent, which he cannot place. What follows is some typical over the top violence, served Tarantino style, but this post isn't about that.

This is a topic that I'm sure many people have dealt with conclusively, and probably better than I could do it, so I acknowledge that I'm bringing nothing new to this topic. However, when my friend Abhilash mentioned to me that his bike had a punctured front tire and he neither had tools nor knew how to fix it,  instead of simply redirecting him to another link, I wrote this on his facebook post, as a comment.  Since I went to the trouble of detailing the steps, I thought I might as well put it down on this blog post, for future reference!

I flew into California yesterday, and this time, I was accompanied by my road bike!  Earlier this year, I bought a Pika Packworks EEP (exercise equipment pack) 29er bike bag, and it sure made my life easier. I originally bought it to help me lug my bike around Sweden for various brevets.  It's a very well constructed soft-shell case for bikes and my version can take even largish mountainbikes.  I rented a bike for my use last year, but that was a hybrid.  Renting a road bike can be shockingly expensive, so bringing my own was always going to be cheaper, even after paying the excess baggage fee.  I hope I can have some fun and get a few more miles of road biking before 2015 draws to a close.This is how small the bag folds down into, for stowing away.

One of the things I have dreaded for some time now is inflating my road bike's tires; they need to be pumped up to pressures much higher than other types of bikes, and the really irritating thing is getting the pump's connector locked in securely. Removing it is far harder than putting it on ; if you don't do it quickly and cleanly, you'll lose a lot of air pressure and if you put the slightest pressure in the wrong angle, you can quite easily end up bending the delicate valve. I've had to throw away perfectly good inner tubes simply because the bent and weakened valves simply broke. I searched high and low for pumps with metallic screw-on connectors, but drew a blank, till I found exactly what I wanted on a site called http://rosebikes.de I ordered it straight away and got it delivered within a week too! Tested it out and am fully satisfied; the design of the pump makes it easy to use, the connector is perfect, so no loss of pressure or damage to valves and the built-in digital pressure gauge is quite accurate too (cross checked with my Topeak D2 pressure gauge). It supports both Presta and Shrader valve types, without the need for any clunky convertors.  Very happy!

Here's wishing a wonderful birthday.  Have a nice one, Prem and keep rocking!

February 2015: India

My first 100 k ride this year was the Anchetty 200 BRM that I attempted and finished, albeit without homologation, on my trip to India. The weather in Sweden hadn't been exactly conducive for longer rides and when it had, I hadn't been out much.  I finally decided to shake off my lethargy and head out for a 100 k ride yesterday.  The weather was splendid, but I was already well past noon and I was wondering about the light.  Another unknown element was the actual route, along the Stångån, across Hackefors, Atvidaberg, Bestorp and back.  I hadn't done this route earlier and I'd only ridden till Hackefors and didn't really know the nature of the roads past that point, but I guessed it'd be fine. I'd made two versions of this route, a shorter 65 k route and the longer 104 k route and both of them were on my Garmin. When I finally started off, equipped with water, bananas and some electrolyte, I decided to take on the longer route, cutting it shorter, if need be. I carried a couple of extra inner tubes and a pair of tire levers, but failed to add my multi-tool with Allen keys to the mix, and this would come back to bite me, and hard.

I arrived in Bangalore on the 4th of February, two years, one month and four days after moving to Sweden.  I arrived to the characteristic bustle and chaos that is the hallmark of Indian airports. I found to my surprise that I had to go through another baggage and security check, though I only had to exit the airport! Reason? Gold smuggling by recruited mules, who fly into the country via Dubai and Qatar, where gold prices are significantly cheaper!! Having gone through security check, I waited for my cousin Ajay and his family.  I'd missed out on meeting Ajay during my stay in the United States and as coincidence would have it, he was flying back to the US after spending two and a half weeks in India, just a couple of hours after my arrival.  I met his wife and him, saw them off and hitched a ride with his parents and brother, who dropped me all the way to my parents' house.  I was back in town!

I have a trip to India coming up at me, and as all of my travels, this too has me in the clutches of crushing pre-travel anxiety.  I decided to watch a movie and picked the 1978 Kannada movie Parasangada Gendethimma starring noted Kannada actor Lokesh.  The movie however left me with deeply mixed feelings, which I'll come to, in a moment, but before that, I must note that this movie showcases some of the best casting and acting I've seen in a long time.  Each and every person does full justice to the screen time.

I had some work at the central post office of Linköping, which happens to be behind the Linköping Central Station. Since I hadn't biked to work today, I took the bus to the central station and walked the couple of hundred meters to the post office.  Once done with my work, I walked down to the River Stångån, to a spot I'd biked to sometime last summer.  When I reached the spot, I was happy that I hadn't simply gone back home, for it looked very beautiful. The moon was rather high up in the sky, but I wanted it in the frame, so had to do some awkward angling to get it. I took a couple of free-hand shots and tried to get in as much light as I could, and got this.

Lake Roxen is quite close to where I live, and is one of my favorite haunts.  I'd ridden there several times last summer and had even taken there a couple of times, including the time when we went to Svartåmynningen Nature Reserve. Today, I set off to Roxen, to see if it would have frozen over, as the temperature had been below freezing consistently, over the weekend.  After my previous experiences with falling on ice,  I equipped my bike with studded tires, which offers suprisingly impressive levels of grip on icy surfaces.  I also used my Topeak pressure guage to ensure that the tires were inflated to only 22 PSI and 25 PSI (forward and rear), to ensure better grip. Yup, though the effort may be slightly more with under-inflated tires, the enhanced grip is well worth the effort, in icy conditions.

Riding on ice isn't really dangerous, as long as one is aware of it and takes due care.  A few of my colleagues heartily recommend the use of studded tires, but I've not really felt the need for them, as the roads and paths where I live and bike to are generally cleared up well.  For my friends in India, it might seem strange when I tell them that I prefer the temperatures to stay below freezing, instead of fluctuating above and below 0 °C, but the reason for that is simple: when the temperatures are below freezing,  fresh snow that's powdery and fine gets packed and firm, with passage of time and addition of further layers of snow.  When the temperatures rise above zero, and then fall again below it,  the snow first turns into slush, which is not very nice, and then, into ice, as it refreezes.   Fresh/packed snow provides excellent cardio when biking through, and even slush isn't too bad, except perhaps for the bike itself, but it is ice that's the worst.  While MTB tires are fat enough to ensure a wider contact with the road,  they really can't grip the ice.  This means that you can continue rolling on them, purely due to the combined weight of the rider and the bike and the large contact surface.  This however can be assumed only on flat surfaces, and in higher gears.  Inclines are better off being taken at higher gears, despite the greater workload, as lower gears cause slippage.  The biggest difference between tires with studs and the non-studded ones is performance under braking/cornering; with non-studded tires, you simply can't afford to lock brakes, but need to mimic the ABS, with quick jabs and multiple applications of small braking inputs. This also means that you shouldn't be riding too fast in the first place, as you can't stop in time, if you need to.

Star gazing and photography requires a lot of luck, patience, and right timing.  Due to the rotation of the Earth around its axis, what we get to see moves and changes, slowly, but constantly, meaning that some stars are pretty much right below our feet, across the other side of the Earth! It was amusing to see a friend initially struggle to grasp this, as he was trying to find stars using Google Sky Maps.  Sometimes, geographical location can also help or hinder sighting.  A bunch of sky scrapers could hide a constellation behind it, or it could be just below the horizon, meaning you'll only be able to see it if you are at a considerable elevation yourself and have nothing blocking your overlooking gaze. The best star photography can be done on days with perfectly clear skies and with a new moon, as the moon itself adds a lot of glare, reducing the contrast in the night sky.

Once upon a time, software patents and digital rights were concepts that only mattered to small set of people (relatively speaking). It only affected people who were IT aware, and bought or sold digital media etc.  It didn't seem to affect people like my father, who is computer illiterate.  That is no longer the case.  With the advances in technology in every field imaginable,  there's a microprocessor chip driving everything and software instructions for that microprocessor and here, the companies that churn out these products are taking away the right of the owner of the product to tinker around with the product, using software patents and digital rights as the blocking agent.

Thanks to my jet lag, I've been struggling to sleep properly. This morning, even as I was wondering whether I should stay in bed or get out of it, I saw some wonderfully colored clouds and sunshine through my window blinds. I grabbed my camera and stepped out and got a few shots of light refracted through the clouds. Nope, it wasn't sunrise or anything. The skies looked fantastically lit up.

Mera Naam Joker (1970) is a Raj Kapoor musical, which introduced an eighteen year old Rishi Kapoor to Bollywood.  The movie narrates the story of Raju aka 'Joker',  a boy whose passion is to become a successful crowd entertainer as a joker.  Raju's mother is completely against her son joining the circus as her husband too had been a joker in circus, and had fallen to his death in a stunt which went wrong.  The movie tracks Raju's turbulent passage through adolescence in which he finds himself infatuated with his young and beautiful school teacher.  Though the movie is supposed to be a Raj Kapoor movie all the way,  Rishi Kapoor, who plays the young Raju, gets nearly a third of the screentime and delivers a very commendable and memorable performance.  Raju continues to don the colors of a joker and entertains street crowds, till a twist of fate leads to the fair skinned Raju being mistaken for a member of a visiting group of Russian circus performers collaborating with a local circus house.  The event results in Raju joining the circus as a full time joker, after the mistaken identity is exposed.  From then onwards, the movie traces the dual life of Raju; the happy-go-lucky circus clown and the deeply emotional and sad individual behind the joker's facepaint.  A small doll of a joker that he has right from his childhood serves as a metaphor for his unrequited love;  Each time Raju falls in love, he gifts the doll to the one he's in love with, but each time, they end up returning the doll to him and exiting his life.  Raju tries to hide his disappointment behind his smiling countenance, but we realize the depth of his sadness.  When he grows older, he sends out invites to all the lost loves of his life and puts on a special show for them, marking his retirement from the life of a circus performer.

I shrugged off my fever induced lethargy and rode down to the downtown area of Linköping today,  to get some fresh air, and possibly a hot meal.  Expecting some extra lighting and decoration due to Christmas/New Year, I took my camera with me, and  I sure was not disappointed!

A week before I left for the US, I picked up a puncture on my road bike after riding it on a road which had coarse gravel and salt strewn to combat the ice buildup.  The gravel often has very sharp pieces of stone which don't inconvenience cars, but can kill a road bike tire in no time, as I learned the hard way.  After fixing up the puncture, I started to inflate the tire with a new handpump equipped with a built in pressure guage.  Till I bought this pump, I had to manage with a small portable pump, which was quite difficult to use, and I'd go by the feel, for the amount of pressure.  This time around, instead of going by the feel,  I chose to trust the pressure gauge on the pump, and that was my mistake.  My bike's tire and tube were rated for upto 8.5 bar and I only wanted to pump up to 6 bar, but the guage under-reported the pressure by a big margin, which meant that my tire and tube simply blew up when the guage was still registering just under 6 bar.  When I was at the bike store in Livermore, I spotted the Topeak SmartGuage D2 digital pressure valve, and realized that it was exactly what I needed.

On the 26th of December, I bought myself a new bike; a brand new Pure Fix Tango Fixed-gear bicycle, to add to my family of bicycles. I had plans of buying a Mercier Kilo TT when I came to the US, but instead ended up buying the Pure Fix. I wanted to buy a new Kryptonite bike lock, so decided to ride to the local bicycle store, and after that, I planned to have an Indian lunch at Sansar, in downtown Livermore, before heading on to the Shadow Cliffs Regional Park. The round trip was just over thirty kilometers on mostly flat terrain, so it seemed the perfect way to get to do a check ride of the new bike. Without further ado, here's the bike itself.

While returning from my bike ride to Los Vaqueros Watershed,  I'd noticed a sign leading to Brushy Peak Regional Preserve.  Today, I decided to ride there, as it wasn't too far from my hotel.  The weather was perfect; a bright and pleasant 12 °C, perfect for biking.  I saw while making the GPS course, that it included over 200 meters of climbing, but hoped the cool weather would make it easier.  First up on the route was Frick Lake, a tiny lake, possibly man made.

After returning from the ride to Del Valle without having seen the lake, I'd told myself that I'd return the very next day, to be able to tick it off my list of places to see. Today, I woke up to a cloudy day, but more importantly, it was dry, which meant that I could ride up to Del Valle, as I'd intended.  Even as I was getting ready to leave, Arvind Mallya, a friend from Facebook who I'd met earlier this month in California, pinged me to tell me that he was going birding with a friend and that he could pick me up by noon, if I wanted to join him!  I did the math in the head; I'd ridden to within two kilometers of the lake the previous day, in an hour and ten minutes, and had taken a little under an hour for the return.  Since it was already past nine and I wouldn't be able to start before ten, an hour and fifteen minutes both ways and a half hour for some rest/photography would mean that I would be able to get back by 1300. It seemed tight, but doable, so I told Arvind that I'd go birding with him, if he could pick up up after one.  On the previous evening, I'd carried a heavy backpack with my tripod and my camera case slung around the neck.  The camera sling had dug into my neck, causing some discomfort and the weight on the back had been less than pleasant.  I switched to a compact backpack with just a small water bottle (in addition to a bottle of pomegranate juice in the bottle cage) and a banana. I used laces from my non-biking shoe to secure the tripod to the underside of the top-tube, and it worked like a charm.  The tripod and case were slim enough to not cause any obstruction when I pedalled.  I also ensured that the camera sling went over my jacket and not onto the skin of my neck.  Having made these changes, I was optimistic that I'd be able to ride faster than I had managed, the previous evening.

I'd been wanting to ride to Lake Del Valle for the past couple of weeks now, ever since it was recommended to me by a friend.  I finally set off yesterday, though it was rather late in the afternoon, as I wanted to stretch my legs a bit.  Sunset was just an hour away, but I told myself that I could always turn right back, if I needed to.

GPS can be a lifesaver; it can make it possible for one to be in a completely unknown place and simply get around, without asking anybody.  When I bought my Garmin Edge 200 just before starting my Halvvattern ride in June this year, it was a purchase on a whim; I hadn't done my homework, didn't even get to choose between models, as that was the only model that the stall selling them had. That said, it's probably been one of my best purchases ever, as it made it possible for me to bike without any issues in the UK, when I visited my friend , and now in the US.As far as GPS devices go, mine's one of the most basic ones, without support for any external sensors or even support for 'base maps', which are detailed maps of a region, which would allow the device to plan out alternate routes or indeed display the map, for manual consultation.  Instead, what I can do with my device is simply create a GPS 'course' or 'route' on one of a whole bunch of online services (garmin,strava etc) and upload it onto my device.  This course is nothing but a bunch of preprogrammed coordinates (which cannot be created on the device itself) and when you select to use the course, the device provides navigation.  It detects whether you are on course or offcourse and displays an arrow pointing to the direction you need to go, in case you are offcourse.  It works like a charm, if you can get yourself to a point on the course (not necessarily the start point), but this means that you need to plan your routes beforehand, create them and upload them onto the device.  It's not even possible to simply reverse directions of a course, on the device itself, meaning if you have to return to the same place where you started from,  you have to either load two courses, one for each direction,  or have the whole loop in one course, which has certain disadvantages which I'll describe here.

Tonight, I decided to test out my until-now unused Manfrotto Befree tripod, along with my new camera, to do some night photography.  I hoped to be able to experiment with some basic exposure/ISO settings, as I haven't done much photography in anything other than the auto mode. While the weather was pleasant, with the temperature at 12 ° C, the skies were unfortunately not clear, with a rather heavy cloud cover.  The moon however was bright enough, but at almost 12 '0 clock position, so it proved to be a lot of work with the tripod, for a first timer.  While setting up the tripod and aiming the camera, I discovered for the first time, how inconvenient not having a flip-out EVF can be, as I found myself having to adjust the tripod height and my own posture, to be able to view the EVF.  After some initial hiccups, I managed to get the angle right, and get a couple of shots of the moon.Exposure: 1/1000s, ISO 160, f/6.5

This post is inspired, at least in part, by 's posts about his camera and mobile experiences. While I enjoy taking the odd picture of a beautiful sunrise or the rare low flying airplane/chopper, I hardly qualify as a photographer.  Indeed, for eight years, between 2003 and 2011, my only camera was the 1.4 megapixel camera built into my Nokia 6630 phone. It took ok shots in natural light, which was all I used to click.Here's a picture I took with the 6630, of a really friendly and helpful staff member of NSCT Kharghar, Ms Rekha, with her kids, when all of NSCT had gone on a picnic to Bordi beach in 2007.

Ever been through that phase when everything you touched broke, everything you did went wrong or landed you into deeper trouble? When you felt you were simply being drowned under more and more tasks, much like level 95 of Tetris, where you were simply unable to process anything anymore?  Self-help books and those cosmic consciousness type gurus often simply tell you to hang in there, but guess what? Sometimes, it really works :D Just when you think that things couldn't get any worse,  you get a bit of respite from old man Murphy, much like the tax office sometimes sends you a refund check, realizing that they've screwed you too hard.  This could be something active, like winning a lottery, or passive, like a fine being waived off.  It's the timing that really makes even a small respite seem so very relieving.

Learning a new language can be fun, or one of the most frustrating things imaginable. For me, it's been a mix of both, as I struggle to learn Swedish.  Before embarking on this exercise, I thought it would be like trying to program in a different programming language; a programmer who knows one language doesn't find it too hard to learn a new language, as the challenge is only about picking up new features and syntax, finding out the equivalents to a language already known, but my experience has been quite different with Swedish.  I find myself all at sea, trying to grasp the basics and find myself getting more and more frustrated when I fail miserably, and this despite attending most classes thus far.  I'm going away for an extended spell, on work, to the US and will find myself missing up to thirty hours of classes and I really don't know whether I'll have the fuel to make a comeback.  It's harder than anything I've ever done and it seems to be getting harder all the time.  The fact that others in my class seem to be doing better doesn't exactly make me feel better either.

I watched 'Zehrila Insaan (1974) for the first time tonight.  A Hindi remake of the 1972 Kannada movie 'Naagarahaavu', it was directed by Puttana Kanagal who also directed the Kannada version.  Although Rishi Kapoor has delivered a commendable performance, I don't think it quite measures up to the performance delivered by the Late Vishnuvardhan, in the Kannada version. Just as Amjad Khan ensured that nobody could ever reprise the role of Gabbar Singh in the iconic movie Sholay, Vishnuvardhan delivered a powerhouse performance in 'Naagarahaavu' which was also marked his celluloid debut in a leading role.  While 'Naagarahaavu' firmly established Vishnuvardhan as a lead actor and went on to become the first Kannada to enjoy a theatrical run which exceeded a hundred days, 'Zehrila Insaan' bombed at the box office.  To the Hindi version's credit however is the extremely popular and memorable song 'O Hansini' which was composed from scratch. Most of the movie, like its Kannada version, was shot in and around the hill city of Chitradurga in the state of Karnataka in India. Here's the 'O Hansini' song, the music score of which was composed by R.D. Burman and sung by the legendary Kishore Kumar.

Here's wishing a very happy birthday. He's given himself an early birthday gift, by getting himself a bicycling and hitting the road with it.  Peeyush, I wish you many years of health-filled happy biking ahead! 

I got my first taste of mountain biking yesterday, when I went to Ljungsbro with Patrick and his son Jonathan.  Suffice to say that it was an experience like nothing I'd experienced before, and I loved every minute of it, even though it was tough and I made more than a couple of basic errors.  In all these years, though I've ridden mountain bikes, I've only ridden them on bad roads in India, or over tarmac/snow, in Sweden and never on any real mountain trail,  and so this experience was rather unique, and I came away happy, without any injuries of note and with a bunch of lessons learned for future trail rides :) Here are some of them:

Counting teeth has long been the means of estimating age of cattle and horses, but have you ever counted the teeth on your bicycle's group set or cranks? I hadn't, before today! I was reading a book about getting faster on a bike and one of the things that was described were the common gear options.  I learned that the most common option for a ten speed cassette is sprockets ranging from 11 teeth to 23 teeth which is simply called an 11-23 set while a 12-27 set is generally considered a better bet for tough climbs. When I did the counting, mine turned out to be a 12-27 set, which in essence means I suck a whole lot more at climbing than I thought :(  It also means that I might be losing out on some higher-end speeds. Oh, well. If I need to get any faster, I must simply cut back on junk food and lose some more weight and bike more.  Bah!

I'm no Apple fan and indeed I've laughed at the antics of many Apple disciples and the company itself, but Apple really had nothing to do with that whole sordid saga of leaked photographs.  In another post by a friend I don't wish to name, she mistakenly believed that Google has been hacked because a huge number of idiots have compromised accounts thanks to their using the exact same passwords in a dozen different poorly managed sites.  In both cases (Google and Apple), those affected either had:

I was out on a ride the day before, when I saw a whole bunch of cars with rally stickers and race numbers.  I tried to snap pictures of them, but with my lack of familiarity in clicking fast moving objects, I couldn't produce much more than extremely blurry images.  Turns out that they were here in town, for the Linköping leg of the SM rally 2014! I wish I'd known about this earlier, as I could have made it to the Cloetta Center (now Saab Arena), where all the drivers gather.  It would have been easier to snap up stationary cars and with the splendid zoom on my SX50, I could have come back with some rally car pics, even if I couldn't get too close.  I only got to know about the SM rally today, when I was trying to look up what the event could have been. Here are two of my best effort pics.

I've had a couple of people asking me for tips about buying their first bike, so I put my thoughts down into this blog post.

Bike redundancy is a good thing to have, particularly in a high wear-and-tear environment such as the one Sweden poses in the winters.  Ever since my cheap but new mountain-bike got stolen in May, buying a new one was on the cards, but I didn't quite get around to doing it till today.  Today, I got myself a spanking new MTB, from Haga Cykel in Linköping.  It's a 'Specialized Hardrock SE 29', with 29 " tires! <Drumroll!!!> It's the first time I'm buying a bike with such a large wheelbase and boy, does it make a difference! Without further ado, here's the beast!

Bicycles, like books, can be read, by those who love them.  No two are the same, even two of the same make and model.  Each and every bike made and sold has an impact on those who people who use it and in turn, gets some part of their personality copied onto it, so each bike tells a different story.  While some of the tales are about the bikes' owners, others are about the period during which the bike was made.  A bike sold in India during the sixties would in all probability be very different from a bike made and sold in Sweden, during the same period.  Linköping being a city with a major university, it sees a lot of students and hence a lot of bicycles and each one of these bicycles has a story to tell, if there is somebody who cares to listen.

I was riding home from work yesterday when I heard a sharp clack followed by the chain on my bike going off the crankset. Hmm. My gears and derailleurs get a lot of attention, so this was a completely unexpected problem.  I clicked it right back in place by downshifting and rode right on.  Upon reaching home,  I checked and found the cause;  the front derailleur cable which had a long section trailing off, had been rolled and tied in place by me with a piece of string (I hadn't done it with a proper cable tie). That string had come undone and the long cable had been pulled in between the chain and the crankset, leaving the end of the cable frayed.  Now, a frayed cable is very bad as left unchecked, the cable then begins to unravel itself and before long, it weakens and snaps.  I cut off the entire length of the frayed section with a cutting plier and found an unused cable end cap (new cables come with two or sometimes even three end caps) which I put on the cable's extremity and crushed it in place.

In my post 'The right tool for the right job' (http://prashanthchengi.livejournal.com/61269.html), I wrote about the importance of using the correct tools, but what if the right tool is simply not available? Then, one would need some luck to find out alternative options and then some more luck, to get that alternative option to actually work!

We've often heard the adage 'The right tool for the right job' in probably every possible field and also perhaps its contrary counterpart, 'An axe is a clumsy tool to open a can of milk'.  I've often learned the value of these statements first-hand, while working on my bicycles.  All too often, a tool, even a tiny one, does work which simply cannot be achieved without it, without going through a whole lot of difficulty.  Two actual tools from the world of bicycle maintenance that come to the mind straight away are the chain-link removal tool and the crank puller.  These tools make it extremely trivial to accomplish the tasks that they are designed for and without them,  there is no end to frustration and wasted effort.

You've been having that bike for sometime now and it's seen a lot of use, but now, it's started to make clacking noises each time you push the pedals down or worse, you actually feel a slight sideward tremble, as you push the pedals; It's probably time to change the bearings or your entire bottom bracket.  To check, simply park the bike, grip the crank arm on the left side of the bike right at the base (near the pedal) and try to move it sideways, i.e., perpendicular to the direction of its normal arc; there should be no movement. Repeat on the right hand side. If there is any sideways movement where not just the crank arm but the entire crankset (gears) move when you push, it's a sure sign that the bearings or the bottom bracket set needs replacing.  Older bicycles generally have a spindle and two sets of external bearing 'rings', on either side of the cylinder while newer ones have a sealed bottom bracket set, with the ball bearings on the inside.  The spindle itself would almost never merit replacement; a mere replacement of the bearings would suffice.  To take on this job, you would need the following tools.  If you don't have these tools, particularly the crank puller, don't attempt to sledgehammer your way; you'll wreck things. Simply get the tool and then take on the job!

This post is a beginner's guide to understanding bicycle gears.  Yes, you have bought yourself a shiny new bike and wow, it has so many different gear combinations, but how do they actually work? A check on the internet brings up words like derailleurs, cranksets, cassettes and freehubs; Just about enough to put many an unsuspecting newbie into a tizzy.  I'll try to explain all there is to know about bicycle gears and shall attempt to keep it as simple as possible.  This post, by the way, is dedicated to my good friend and go-to guy in a crisis, , who has just bought himself a new bike and has started bicycling again after a hiatus of twenty years.<div>There are a great many kinds of geared bicycles, but by far the most common type have both front and rear 'derailleurs'. Derailleurs are gear shifting mechanisms, which guide the chain onto differently sized gear cogs. The cogs on the front, which together form what is called the 'crankset', differ a lot in sizes, even when considering cogs which are adjacent. The largest cog, which is on the outside is quite a bit larger than the smallest cog, which is the innermost. The cogs on the rear set, which are often constitute a single 'cassette' are much closer in size to their immediate neighbors, in comparison with the front gear cogs.

Bicycling has long been a passion and I used to bicycle a lot, till after my graduation. When I moved to Pune, however, I swapped the bicycle for the motorcycle and that I soon found my fitness levels dropping and weight ballooning. The first thing I’d observed on my first visit to Linköping in August of 2012 was the unmistakable bicycling culture of the city; It brought back memories of when I used to bike actively. I decided right then that the first thing I’d do when I moved was to buy myself a bicycle. Within a week of moving, I found a good deal on a used bike and started riding to work.  Though I found a couple of uphill stretches quite daunting, I managed to not only ride it everyday but also did it right through the winter, not even chickening out when there was heavy snow!

My start time for the 300 km ride in Vatternrundan 2014 is now just over 24 hours away! I'm set to start at 0010 hrs, CEST (0440 hrs IST). If you should wish to track my progress in real-time, you can do so, if you have an Android phone, and here's how:

1. Install the Vatternrundan app from Google play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=se.vatternrundan.android2013

Today marked the start of yet another Formula 1 season. Fans have known about the sweeping changes that have taken place in the technical aspects of the sport; the v8 engines of old have given way for newer more fuel-efficient v6 engines, the cars now have bigger energy recovery systems which will play a greater role than ever. We’ve also known for sometime now, that the pecking order looks very different, with teams on Mercedes power doing the best while those with the Renault systems are lagging the most, in terms of reliability.

"If I've seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants", said Sir Isaac Newton.  The early adopters always faced the greatest of difficulties and then strove to make it easier for those who followed in their footsteps. 'We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak and not to please ourselves', goes a famous quote from the Bible. This is the philosophy that the true pioneers did their very best, to stay true to.  However, for every supportive pioneer, we get to enjoy the unpleasant experience of coming across individuals I call the 'Knowing brats'.  These are typically kids who are definitely smart;  they learn the ropes fast and pick up a trick or two, but their motivations for learning are very different from that of the helpful pioneers;  These individuals use their knowledge as a weapon against those who possess lesser knowledge than themselves.  Instead of giving the newcomers a helpful hand, they give them scornful rebukes or if they ever reply to an innocent question,  it's full on insulting or condescending in nature.  Most of those who start out with this attitude go on to be successful and knowledgeable people in their later years, but they never stop being nasty to newcomers.  I've seen such individuals in fields as diverse as Free and Opensource Software (FOSS), wild life groups and photography.  Quite recently, I came across a guy who'd written a very arrogant post about mercilessly insulting people who asked for help identifying common bird types.

Ebooks are wonderfully convenient and allow book lovers to carry their entire book collections with them.  However,  despite all of the positives of the ebook phenomenon, it has a few quirks too.

BBC has been airing their 'Sherlock' TV series since 2012 and people have been raving about it, but I joined in late.  That said, I've been as hooked as anybody who started watching the series from the first episode.  While Sherlock may be the quintessential king of deduction, different people pick up different things.  I pick up details such as aircraft tail numbers and contents of displayed newspaper articles.  Here are the birds that have costarred with Benedict Cumberbatch, on BBC's Sherlock, so far:

Bollywood has made many heist and planning related movies, probably way too many to mention.  The Dhoom series of movies, which were heavily 'inspired' by movies like the Oceans' series,  movies like Awara Paagal Deewana and Cash which ripped out whole sections of plot from movies like 'The Italian Job' etc.  By far, the Bollywood formula that sells is not a plot in which the bad guy gets away with it, but one in which the bad guy gives the hero a tough time, but the hero always prevails, by the end of the movie.  Johnny Gaddaar (2007) was a movie that was very different.  It was neither a whodunnit and nor was a howdunnit; it wasn't even a 'let's see how it ends' movie;  like many non-linear movies, it gave up the ending, right at the beginning, so the movie was really about how it moved to the ending you knew.  A rather unusually made Bollywood flick,  right there.

Today marked the end of yet another Formula One season, and as the end of each season brings with it, this one too brings the prospect of a whole load of changes the following year; some welcome, others not. 2013 had its highs and lows like any other year, but a few things were rather different.  Here's my take on them:

Sometimes, we don't spot a perfectly obvious problem, simply because we don't believe that it can even exist!  After suffering some really annoying gear slips on my bike, from the largest cog (highest gear) in the front to the second largest, I spent a lot of time investigating my front derailleur for trouble.  What I did not even give a cursory glance to was the condition of the teeth on the cog itself, for I did not believe it could have worn itself out.  Today, when I checked it, I found that they'd worn pretty badly, and unevenly.  The problem had existed for a while and had only gotten worse recently. Some of the teeth were so badly worn that it's not at all surprising that the chain kept slipping off! Arthur Conan Doyle, through his character Sherlock Holmes, said: "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth".  I believe that a corollary to this,  is equally useful.  Here's my version "Once you eliminate the impossible and the improbable, whatever remains, the trivial solution, is the truth!".  I make the change because once the improbable solutions are exhausted, what's left is indeed what you suspected in the first place, the trivial answer, the most probable cause, the worst fear. In the above example, the most improbable causes, ordered from highest to lowest, were as follow:

Reading the obituary of a former secretary of Information Technology of Karnataka, I realized how insincere the obituaries churned out by our media are.  Read a bunch of obituaries and they all seem exactly the same, with only minor changes.  If the deceased was fifty years or less,  there'll be a line stating that 'he/she died very young, leaving many unfulfilled dreams' or something to that effect.  If the person was over seventy years old,  you'll see something like 'leaves behind a rich legacy.. his/her loss is a monumental one' etc.  They are so similar that I wonder if the media actually has a software that churns out these pithy obits, if given the name, age and gender as inputs.  It'll also invariably end with a line saying "He/she is survived by <insert list of surviving family members>".    There's also an unwritten rule in the media, never to bring up a person's less savory past while writing their obituaries.   I was tickled by an observation that even Bal Thackeray who went on tirades against Tamilians in the 80s and people from Bihar/UP in the 90s and 2000s was called a 'Nationalist' when he passed away.  Yes, racists, criminals, communal and parochial bigots are all remembered with reverence after they die.   I don't think pissing on people's graves is either nice or necessary,  but neither is glossing over a person's misdeeds and glorifying them, as the media tends to often do.

After my last post on Shobhan Sarkar and the gold hunt,  I was looking at a few debunking videos of famous skeptic and former stage magician, James Randi.  In one of those videos,  I got to know about an Indian rationalist called Sanal Edamaruku.   Sanal is an incredibly brave rationalist who put his life and safety at risk in taking on conmen posing as godmen.  He was unfortunately hounded out of India by certain influential Christian missionaries who took offence to Sanal's debunking of a so-called 'miracle' in a Mumbai church;  A statue of Jesus Christ was supposedly oozing water which was being offered to the faithful as 'holy' water.  Sanal discovered that the water actually originated from a leaking sewer!  Needless to say, this revelation was not what was desirable for the Church and its supporters and Sanal had to relocate to Finland where he is continuing his rationalist activities.  His followers in India continue to run a rationalist organization in India.

One of the most rewarding and respected career options in India is that of a Godman.  Feared, respected and revered for the most part,  they make or break public opinions, amass wealth and affect electoral outcomes.  If politicians are kings, Godmen are often kingmakers.  Most Godmen are little more than conjurers and street magicians, but a few are gifted with the art of really slick speech-making, and these are the ones who rise to occupy the upper echelons of super-powerful Godmen.  While Sri Sri Ravishankar uses witticisms and an effeminate voice to mesmerize people,  those like the Late Sai Baba of Puttaparthi used parlor magic and sleight of the hand to gain attention and earn gratitude and respect of followers.  How?  The Baba would 'materialize' holy ash for the benefit of poor devotees and gold ornaments and diamond jewelry to gain the trust and support of the richer devotees!  Wow.  Wasn't that an expensive proposition? Nope. Those were investments;  Baba would gift a really rich devotee a gold ring worth a few thousands and then, on a later date, after the unsuspecting devotee had become sufficiently enamored and overwhelmed with his gifts, he'd drop a casual hint about something he needed: a building, funds or in one famously documented story, a jeep-chariot! The rich devotee would do everything in his power to see to it that Baba's wishes were fulfilled.  Baba Ramdev appealed to the fitness conscious with his yoga and Asaram Bapu was wonderful at spotting and latching onto unsuspecting,poorly educated but rich victims… Each Godman has a different modus-operandi but they all share one thing in common: power.

Happy birthday, !

In 2007, I attended FOSS.in, a FOSS convention in my home city of Bangalore.  I was fresh out of college, armed with book knowledge and a lot of confidence, but little else.   The suggestion to attend FOSS.in was made by a senior colleague who had some working knowledge of FOSS.  It was supposed to give us a glimpse into the working of the FOSS world.  It did, but it was a lot like trying to drink water from a fire hose pumping out at full blast!  I tried to soak up as much as I could while filing away things for later perusal.  Some of those filed entries were automatically consigned to trash over the years.  Some stayed.  One of them was a talk by Professor Yogananda of SJCE Mysore who had developed a LaTeX package for transliterating English into Kannada.  However, the package doesn't just stop at transliterating.  It's got 'hooks' built in to automatically supply the correct Kannada equivalent for various native LaTeX components of a document such as 'Chapter', 'Preface' and Table of Contents, numbering for pages and list items etc.  In short,  it's does what no other software to my knowledge offers:  an easy way to have a document completely in Kannada. You can paste Kannada unicode text into a Microsoft Word document for instance, but what you can't get is Table of Contents, Chapter environment and numbering, all done in Kannada, automatically! The table of contents for instance will have to be hand-crafted and will have to be updated manually each time the document changes even marginally.  The Sagar package however does all that by providing the relevant values to the underlying LaTeX system which is ultimately responsible for generating the final document. You can find out more information about the project itself through this presentation: http://www.sirinudi.org/Sagar/sagar-project.pdf

One of the really wonderful things about Linux is the variety one gets.  While this might seem confusing for a few, it's pretty much like the menu options in a gourmet's dream-come-true restaurant: you can get exactly what you want, and Linux users ask for a lot of different things!  For me, I've always loved stability and reliability more than cutting edge and bleeding edge tech.  I've only ever wanted an operating system that just works as expected, without throwing nasty surprises.  Unlike many other Linuxers, I'm also not overly fond of undoing and redoing my installs.  Given a choice, I'd want to install something and never ever have to reinstall it.  Debian hit a lot of these checkmarks: Debian was stable and had a very conservative release schedule (one release per year or more).  Even after a new release came out, the older release still got updates and packages for a fairly longish time, something that scored bonus points in my rating system and I stuck to Debian

On my recent trip to Iceland, I bought the only available brand of soap from a local supermarket. It was simply called 'Neutral' (it's a Unilever product). When I used it, I realized that not only is it Ph neutral, it neither had any color nor any perfume. If lovers' conversations are sweet nothings, the smell of this 'Neutral' soap had to be unpleasant nothings! I hated it, but my ever-thrifty Indian genes kicked in and I had to discard thoughts of discarding the soaps! I brought them back with me. However, here, in Sweden, I have a problem. I'm slightly over-stocked on soap! Over-stocked? How's that, you ask? You see, I love soaps with strong perfume and my favorite brand of soap is an Indian one called Cinthol. Now, before I left for Sweden, I must have been really terrified at the prospect of not being able to bathe with my favorite soap. So terrified that I bought twelve hundred grams of it, yes, that's twelve large soap bars! Maybe I thought I'd run through one bar each month and gave myself enough to last me for a year. However, upon reaching here, I used one of the many sagely tips offered by and used a sponge to place the soap upon, instead of a using a conventional soap box. This seemingly innocuous tip has resulted in my soaps lasting three times longer! They don't melt away into goop anymore! This means that my twelve bars will now last me three damn years. The three bars of Neutral soap that I bought in Iceland? They are slightly smaller, so I guess they'll last me another six months! I have soap stocks for three and a half years! That makes a legitimate SADP (Soap Armageddon Doomsday Prepper). Yup, when the aliens land on Earth and completely divert chemicals used for soap manufacture into their sinister initiatives, I can still enjoy bathing in real soap for a long time! I might even auction off a bar or two from my collection to really rich survivors who'd be willing to pay anything just to have a bar of soap in their hands again! Ah, the stuff of dreams! :D

With most of the NSC staff on vacations, it was decided to suspend our traditional Friday morning breakfasts till the end of the vacation season.  That meant that there was not going to be a Friday breakfast this Friday, but Andreas Lindqvist had other ideas! He announced that he was going to bring two disposable barbecues along with some bread and sausages and welcomed people to bring their own stuff, if they wished.  Chandan and Krishnaveni wrote back saying they'll bring some vegetarian stuff and Janos pitched in too.  When I reached office, my colleagues were looking pretty as a picture and enjoying the beautiful summer day, with their improvised breakfast! I dug into the falafel and the barbecued veggies which tasted great, but it was the ambience and the company that made it so much more enjoyable.

In a country where sunlight comes at a premium, it's apt that the Swedes celebrate midsummer, the day of the summer solstice, the longest summer day. I'd been to Trädgårdförening in Linköping, to take in the celebrations this year. "Midsummer is more of a national celebration than the National day celebration in Sweden", exulted a happy Swede, and was I happy that I went, instead of staying cooped up indoors!

Atul Chitnis, a friend of mine and somebody who's done a lot for the FOSS movement in India, passed away on June 3, 2013. He was fifty one. Within minutes of news of his passing breaking out on twitter, his many friends were struck dumb. Though many of us knew he was fighting Stage 4 cancer, we'd expected him to hang in there for longer. First there was silence, and then came the eulogies and blog posts, mostly referring to him in positive terms, but Atul was a man who rarely side-stepped controversies when he was alive: He ran head-first into them. He'd had all the diplomacy of a bull in a china shop and I was hoping that his old detractors would exercise better judgement in letting their differences rest, but that was not the case. One of them spewed a horrible burst of venom and vitriol and within a few short minutes, major flame-wars were blazing on twitter and other channels. Atul had been a hard-headed, short-tempered person but even that did not seem to merit such a fusillade of hatred. Where did that come from?Mailing lists are this great resource for people to learn, share, teach and explore. You have a problem? You post a question. You have an experience? You share it. Mailing lists have been around for as long as email has been around (it predates the internet). We now have blogs, micro-blogging engines and a whole gamut of social networking sites, but back then, the mailing lists were everything. Mailing lists are also traditionally archived (not a necessary feature for a mailing list, but they almost always are) and support searching, which ensures that people don't need to ask the same questions all over again. This feature also ensures that everything you say or do on lists get preserved for posterity, dirty laundry and all. It was these very archives that I sought, to find possible explanations to the terrible outburst that sickened practically everybody.The mailing list in question was the linux-india-general list. When I found the archives, I realized that they were far from complete, with several instances of mysteriously deleted, lost or omitted mails. Some of the mails also had originated off the list and had been suddenly pulled onto the list, leaving puzzling questions about what really was exchanged, prior to the discussion landing on the list. What became clear after a quick once-over, was that the lists were a lot dirtier than I'd thought it would be. The exchanges which were actually related to Linux gave fascinating insights about how Linux used to be in earlier times. Linux has matured so much over the years that it's now come to the point where a Linux installation is about as painless as a Windows installation, and things just work, as soon as you are done with the installation. Things were far from being that simple back then, when many of these flame wars actually took place. A slight digression, to describe how things were back then, is quite essential.Today, broadband internet is common-place in India, with most urban Indian homes being connected. Information availability is not a problem anymore. All one needs is a desire to learn and information to help one learn, is just a few clicks (or swipes across a smartphone/tablet!) away. A decade and a half ago, internet was a luxury and connections had to be established using modems, over telephone lines and the charges were fairly high and the speeds were really slow! Only ISPs and research institutions had mail server setups and handed out email accounts. People used POP to download all of their mails from the server and then got off the phone lines, to read the mails at leisure. They'd write replies which were quequed to be sent and would connect to the internet for a brief interval, to dispatch all the replies they'd written. There was no wikipedia! If you had questions to ask on a list, you'd send the mail and keep your fingers crossed, hoping somebody would reply to it, and do the connect-fetchmail-disconnect routine, several times a day, to see if you got any responses. Back then, Linux was truly a wild beast which only the bravest of bravehearts could take on, and these mailing lists were where several questions, trivial for Linuxers today, were first asked and answered.There was nothing which was really too trivial, as everything was really new and shiny. It was both amusing and heartening to see a post by a user who is used to download managers in Windows, enquiring how one can download multiple files without having to type the command for each download. Kiran Jonnalagadda aka jackerhack points out that in Linux, one can invoke the same command many times over by `backgrounding' it, but Atul Chitnis goes a step further. He suggests putting the list of download items in a file and reading out of it! This is something that practically every Linux user, even perhaps a rank newbie of today would know, but it was a big deal back then when people were still discovering Linux. That user must have felt super-happy with the reply and his newfound knowledge! All this is quite warm and fuzzy, so where did the disagreements start? It all started because of numbers.When Atul started his BBS, it got a lot of people interested but that was nothing compared to the number of people who got hooked to Linux. While it's great to have such a large number of interested people, it unfortunately led to several problems. Atul, by virtue of being one of the earliest onto the scene (if not the first), was not only widely respected, but also deemed to be the de-facto leader. This became a pain-point for many people. Much like people had problems referring to Linux as GNU/Linux (You could start here: http://atulchitnis.net/writings/why-linux-and-not-gnulinux/), there were many who believed that they had as much right as Atul Chitnis, to be considered to be the leaders of the community. This often led to some ugly exchanges and lots of washing of dirty linen in public. Here were a bunch of really smart individuals who had the intelligence to make the world a better place for a lot of people,  investing all that intelligence into waging turf wars.  The Linux groups from various cities of India were at loggerheads with each other and bandying names and abuses all around. Those must have been really difficult times and I admire Atul all the more for staying put despite all that and not taking the easy route of cutting himself off from the community. That even after all these years, some of those people have virtually crawled out of the woodwork, only to gloat over his demise is very unfortunate and sad.

The note, requesting people not to take these books away for selling on the flea market.

I visited Paris in May 2013, on work. Though most of the week that I'd spend there would be on job, I was optimistic that I'd be able to take in some of the famous sights of Paris, and I was not disappointed.

Most of us aspire for success in our professional lives, but few achieve it. Of those few, fewer stay successful and of those who do, it’s only a very, very small number of them who actually enjoy the sweet fruits of their labor; The rest are too busy achieving succcess to even enjoy their life, away from work. I have the pleasure of having a friend who belongs to the former club: one who works hard for his success but also celebrates life! Today, he turns fifty. Premnath Kudva, hearty wishes on your half century! May you continue to enjoy life and inspire others to enjoy theirs too!

Valborg, also known as Walpurgis Night or Walpurgisnacht is a traditional spring festival, celebrated on either the 30th of April or the 1st of May, in many parts of northern and central Europe. It sees large congregations of revelers singing and dancing around bonfires. Linköping had its own celebrations of Valborg with a bonfire on the river Stångån. While I was unable to make it in time to witness the fireworks and the bonfire, I did get to see the people who'd turned up in really large numbers and felt the festivity in the air. Along with my friend Itthipon who spotted me in the midst of a large crowd, I took a few photographs of the lovely riverside, ending the day on a happy note.

The last of the icy slush from the winter had melted away, exposing parts of the road which had disappeared from view during the winter months, indicating that spring was indeed on its way. After seeing nothing but the white of snow and the grey-brown of trees bereft of leaves, I was eagerly looking forward to the infusion of colors by the now over-due spring, and I was not disappointed. What I didn't know however, was how much the colors would move me!

I'd blogged in June last year, about how Pirelli was killing Formula One. It's been ten months since, and things are just as bad, if not worse.  In the Malaysian gp last month,  Sebastian Vettel overtook his teammate Mark Webber who had all but switched off his engine and was coasting along to the finish, upon orders from his team to conserve fuel and reduce engine wear.  More than ten laps remained at that stage.  Vettel went on to give a public apology to Webber, saying that he'd put himself above the team.   Just about everybody called Vettel's move a cheap tactic, and I don't disagree.  However, the issue brought something more important than Vettel's lack of sportsmanship to the fore, and that something has been largely ignored by everybody: why was Webber coasting along with a tuned down engine, with more than ten laps to go in the race?  Oh, that's standard practice.  Nobody races in the last ten laps anymore, unless they really have to.  Hmmm.  See where I'm going with this?  Thanks to some ridiculous restrictions such as an increased number of races each engine will have to last for, and Pirelli's notoriously poor quality tyres,  it's becoming increasingly common for teams to instruct their drivers to turn down their engines and just coast the last few laps.   For some teams, the last few laps begin as early as fifteen laps from the end of the race!!

'Everything is fair in love and war' goes an old adage.  The same must also apply for advertisements, going by the sheer number of their ridiculous claims, mind-numbing stretching of truth and their forays with blatant lies.  However, they are not all the same.  Some of them use cunning and ingenuity to gain an edge while others simply count on the stupidity of their audience to do the trick.  Some of those tricks are pulled to circumvent laws of the land.  When Sunny Deol stars in an ad purportedly selling 'club soda',  you know exactly what it is a surrogate ad for.  When a toothpaste company says their product has 'extra calcium shakti',  you know that the extra calcium will only help if you eat the toothpaste instead of using it to brush your teeth with, but that's you!  They count on the ad fooling the majority of the people.

I'd gone to a supermarket near my place and I found to my dismay that the person manning the billing counter spoke very little English.  I don't remember what it was that I was trying to find, but it was something he was not able to follow. After a lot of tries, he called for another colleague who could follow English and she helped me out.  I think it was coat hangers or something.  Once that was cleared, the billing counter guy smiled and asked "Where you from?". When I told him that I came from India, his smile broadened and he said he knew a phrase in 'Indian'. This of course reminded me of a Russell Peters joke, and I was wondering just which Indian language this guy might have heard.   Considering that most of the Indians here are from Andhra, it might well be something in Telugu, but I didn't really know.  It could be anything from the ever popular 'Namaste' to 'Kem cho!' I asked him to say it and he did. Only, I was flummoxed when he said it: it sounded like a rather rude word in Kannada!! Was it a Kannadiga who'd taught this guy the expression, and more importantly, was that Kannadiga such an a**hole that he taught this unsuspecting guy a swear word?!! The billing guy must have seen from my expression that he'd probably said something wrong or that he'd not remembered the words incorrectly.  Even as I was wondering if the word could mean anything else appropriate/meaningful in any other Indian language,  he said the words again, this time remembering to add a crucial syllable at the very end.  This time though,  there was no mistaking the expression! It was Hindi after all! He'd said "Theek hai!!!(It's fine/Is it fine?)"  The first time a Swedish person said something to me in an Indian language? It was not a 'Namaste', it was not a 'Kem Cho' or even a 'Vanakkam'.  Instead, it was 'Theek hai!!'. Manmohan Singh would have been so proud! :D

1) Are you the harried customer of a nationalized/public sector/private bank operating in India? 2) Have you been made to run around in circles by your bank in order to get service which is rightfully due to you? 3) Can you substantiate that your bank has taken longer than thirty days and still failed to resolve your problem?

It’s been over a month now since I started to bicycle to work. I feel much fitter, perspire less and enjoy the ride more now. The enjoy part is mostly because I gave the chain some much needed cleaning and lubrication, recently. I also adjusted the gears so I can now shift to a better gear ratio when needed. So, how exactly do I do on the bike? I used to think that I was pretty good in India, but out here, is a completely different story!

I completed my first month in Sweden, on the third of February and I’ve been adjusting fairly well to life here. I’d feared that I’d have a tougher time getting acclimatized to the weather, but I guess it’s all about the clothes and before long, I found myself agreeing wholeheartedly to the famous Swedish adage ‘There is no such thing as bad weather; only bad choice of clothing’. One thing that I hadn’t gotten around to doing since moving however, was unpacking fully! Since I was staying in a temporary accommodation, I’d only unpacked as much as was absolutely necessary. After obtaining my Person Number, which is THE identity in Sweden, I set about finding myself a more permanent place to stay, and fortunately, I found a very nice place within my budget, before too long.

The human body works scarily like any man-made alarm clock when it comes to warning about cold exposure: It has a snooze mode. After raising the alarm, it goes completely silent and that is when it’s all the more dangerous. The stand on my bicycle had broken and I’d fixed the replacement myself. Only, I hadn’t fixed it right, so it was bending away whenever the weight of the bike was transferred onto it. I decided to fix it this evening and since I couldn’t work with the small screw assembly and tools, I took of my gloves and set to work, telling myself that it would be done before the cold could get to my fingers.

The education system in India is something that’s quite dreadful in so many different ways. The emphasis seems to be almost completely on percentages and marks scored in examinations, and it’s not at all uncommon to find students only studying from the ‘scoring’ parts of the course while ignoring the rest as it’s simply not considered worth their while to actually get knowledge. As for the pressure on students (and their parents, in most cases!) to crack various entrance exams, it’s quite legendary and could take up an entire post in itself. It’s also not at all uncommon to find students who are forced to sacrifice their real passions for courses which simply guarantee better returns. The Bollywood movie ‘Three Idiots’ rightly lampoons the education system in India.

After staying cooped up for the better part of the weekend, I decided to step out for a long walk. I thought I’d explore Tornby, as it has a couple of nice shopping centers and a bike store. The store lights were fairly large and visible from a long way away and I just walked towards them, only to find that they were on the other side of the highway and I couldn’t possibly walk across it! The GPS came to the rescue though, pointing me the way to the underpass, and it was smooth sailing, er, walking, from there!

Despite having a lot of time to prepare for my departure to Sweden,  there were quite a few things that I left undone/underdone in India.  One of those underdone things was setting up my machine in India to auto-install security updates.  I also failed to install an easy means by which my parents could, on my request, enable me access to my machine in a secure manner.  This shortcoming proved to be quite troublesome.  Over the past week, I'd started to worry about the security of the machine.  I didn't want script-kiddies or crackers from the wild sniffing around my machine and causing mischief.  More important than loss of data was the fact that my parents might not be able to use the machine in the event of any mischief.  In the event of any trouble,  I also didn't know anybody with Linux know-how who could actually drop by my place and fix my machine.  This meant that I had to do things the hard way: I had to coax my parents into sitting and typing commands that would allow me to access my machine, and that was definitely going to be hard!

Here's the background of this tale: a few years ago, Bank of India decided to do away with browser-based access to internet banking. They instead created a piece of software called 'Star Connect' and started forcing customers to download it and use it, if they wished to use internet banking. Now, this software is available for only Microsoft Windows. If you are a customer who uses Linux/Mac, oh well, that's too bad. "Hey, why don't you use Windows instead?" probably best describes Bank of India's attitude towards non-Microsoft using customers. I thought I'd procrastinated about complaining, for long enough and decided that I'd register a complaint on the Bank of India grievance page.  I filled in my particulars, and in the 'Details of Complaint' box, I wrote the following:

At long last, I’m here! But for a minor hiccup with my luggage getting delayed out of Frankfurt which meant I was without most of my warm clothes for a day and a half, the journey itself was pleasant. Some of the sights out of the airplane window were simply amazing and I clicked them as best as I could with my new camera, the Panasonic SZ1. On reaching Stockholm, nor only did I have to deal with my ‘missing’ luggage but also the fact that I could not use wifi at the airport as one of the steps for being access was receiving an sms: I didn’t have a functional Sim.

I'm the proud owner of a Micromax A110! :) This is my second Android phone, after the HTC Salsa that I bought late last year.  When I bought the Salsa, I was pretty excited, but it didn't take long to realize that the Salsa's biggest problem was extremely limited internal storage.  When HTC finally allowed users of the Salsa to unlock the bootloader, I immediately did so and promptly rooted the device.  While rooting the phone solved some of the storage related problems making it more usable, it simply did not possess adequate processing power for video calling. There was also no way to upgrade the operating system from Gingerbread. With my impending move to Sweden in mind,  I was looking to buy a new phone which could support video and voice calling and would not cost an arm and a leg!  It was then that a then colleague of mine showed me the Micromax A110.  

Right from our childhood, we've learned that 'united we stand, divided we fall'.  We have listened to stories of the wise elder who showed his squabbling grandchildren the power of unity by asking them to snap sticks pulled out of a broom (which they do easily), and then, to attempt snapping the entire broom in half (which they cannot).  At work, the first thing that I read about grid computing was its basic premise: 'The whole is greater than the part', that when brought together, even the most mundane resources can become a force to be reckoned with.  These very lessons and premises were what came flooding to my mind when I set about repairing a Rubik's cube, today.

I'd bought a Rubik's cube, to pass time, an a recent train journey.  Unfortunately however, one of the blocks of the cube was incorrectly placed,  making the cube unsolvable.  I'd put away repairing it to another day. Today, I took it apart, to put it back together in the correct way.  As I was putting it back together,  I realized that the Rubik cube is a perfect example of strength derived out of structure.  What kept the individual blocks of the cube together? The blocks themselves!  The cube consists of a 'core', which has the centers of the six faces projecting outwards.  All the remaining pieces support each other and give the cube its structure and strength.  Pull away a single piece and the whole cube will become unstable and fall apart.  Makes me wonder if the whole universe is not really a gigantic cube, with zillions of individual blocks making it up.  We humans take pride in proclaiming ourselves masters of all that we see.  Do we really know the composition of the universe? And how our actions (and possibly non-actions) can affect its stability?




At the center lies the core of the cube, which consists of the centers of each face of the cube.


When the lowest layer is built, the cube is still very unstable and incapable of staying together.


As we start putting the second layer together, we begin to appreciate how the blocks provide support and strength, to each other.


Once the second layer is put together, the cube begins to look far more robust.


With most of the blocks in place, the cube looks almost completely sturdy.  The cut-away section reveals the inner structure of the cube.


The complete cube reiterates the fact that in unity lies strength, and that there is more to strength than what meets the eye.

On a recent official trip to the famed Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, I saw quite a few cows on the campus. I couldn't help wondering if these 'lawn moooers' were actually smarter than the cows living outside the IIT campus! :D

I visited Mumbai in August, on work, and had been to C-DAC Juhu, still fondly referred to nostalgically as NCST by people who've been part of the organization prior to its change of name.  C-DAC Mumbai is NCST, even to several students who studied there and picked up the NCST name from the faculty members out there.  The rebranding of the organization is a topic which rakes up a lot of issues, and memories, both pleasant and unpleasant, both in the past and in the present and deserves a post in itself, but suffice to say that there are people who still proudly refer to the organization by its former name. 

Back when I was a student at NCST (or C-DAC Kharghar, if you prefer it that way), we even designed a T-shirt which carried both logos, the new and official C-DAC logo on the front and the NCST logo and the words 'Proud to be an NCSTian' on the back.  On this trip,  I was looking forward to catching up with a whiff of the NCST air after a long time, and was also looking forward to catching up with 
After a quick 'hi' to Peeyush and tending to the work at hand, I slipped out for a chai with my colleague Rishi, and this was the only visible sign of NCST that had survived the transition, that I could find in the vicinity.





The swank, newly remodeled face of the building now sported the 'official corporate logo' of C-DAC.


 The work got over the same day and I had to head back to Pune, but not before grabbing some great coffee with Peeyush.    Needless to say,  meeting Peeyush was the best part of the trip. 

Here's wishing Donna aka  a very happy birthday! Donna, have a memorable day and a wonderful year ahead!

One of my hobbies, of late, is putting together greeting cards, using LaTeX.  I enjoy it immensely, as each card provides a lot of opportunities to learn new things about formatting documents in LaTeX.  My last card was a Teachers' day card, for a very special teacher, and for that card, I wanted to include a verse in Sanskrit.  I'd heard about the devanagari package for LaTeX, but had never used it.  I Googled it up and came up with this blog post which was most helpful. In that blog post, the author explains how one can install the devanagari package and use it, on both Windows and Linux platforms.  In the same post, I also found the link to a wonderful manual on using the devanagari package with TeX.  Using that, I was able to get off to a great start on my own greeting card! Here's something I put together, to explain how it's done.

Teachers' day was on the 5th of September.  On that day, each year, I usually remember to call/message/mail and wish all of the people who've made a difference to my life.  This year though, I just couldn't get around to doing it as I was combating a viral fever even while being swamped by work, so here are my wishes to my teachers, and a card to a very special teacher of mine!

1) Mom: My first teacher and a bonafide school teacher, so it's a double wish that goes out to you, ma!
2) Shantha madam: My math and Science teacher, back at 'The Home School'.  Kindest teacher, ever. No contest! How I wish I could wish her in person.
3) Saroja madam: My English teacher, back at 'The Home School'.  The innovative methods she employed to get us to remember spellings of words are probably what I need to thank for my never fubbing spellings of words like believe and receive and several more.  She taught us to learn to see spellings in our heads. Thanks, ma'am.
2) Radha madam: I'm all that I am, thanks to her.  She taught me all that I know about programming, but more importantly, she taught me the philosophy of computer programming and not just the syntax. My card goes out to her!
3) All the members of the faculty at NCST, but special mention is a must for Sasi sir, Ripul Gupta, Rahul Upakare and Chandrashekhar aka Chintu.
4) , belated Teachers' day wishes to you.  You've taught me a lot more to me than the contents of your lectures at NCST. It's a pleasure knowing you buddy!
5) ASR, my HOD at Surana college and Surabhi Bhandary, my colleague and partner-in-crime, also at Surana College: A very warm Teachers' day wish to you both.

Blogging is a very intesting topic in itself, to blog about! What do people blog about and how do they go about it? How did the people who blog actually start out? Did it start as a new year resolution? Were they inspired upon reading somebody else's blog post? An epiphaneous moment in which the decision was made? For every blog that thrives, one can find thousands which were abandoned or orphaned by their creators.  I myself started out on a whim on blogger and switched to lj upon a lecturer's advice.  My lj initiator has long since abandoned lj, but I hung around here and made many wonderful friends, some whom I now have the pleasure of knowing in real life too.  Over the years, I've tried to get people onto lj, realizing that more is indeed merrier, but of those that I did manage to bring over, some are active and many have dropped off the radar.

So, why do people get onto the blogosphere in the first place? Here are some of the reasons.

1) For some, it's a simple ego thing.  An extension of the ego surfing trip.  A Google search should bring up one's name. Ah! Posted a couple of posts and they have now been visited by Google's bots. Mission accomplished! These blogs usually get abandoned after the first couple of posts.
2) Curiousity: What's the whole deal all about? Is it social networking? Will it get me acceptance in some hallowed circle of geeks? Is it (God forbid!) the in-thing? Let's get a blog with an intelligent sounding name, just to be on the safe side.  These blogs usually die as soon as they are created.  They don't even get a 'hello world' first post as their creators are too concerned that what they post may not measure up to somebody or the other's benchmark.
3) Commenting on other blogs: I've seen many people create blog accounts only so that they can leave comments with their own names, instead of leaving anonymous posts.  They don't post anything, but occassionally post comments on others' posts.  Noble souls. May their tribe increase, but it would be more fun if they posted too!
4) New year resolutions/dares: Ouch! There are those who decide to 'challenge' themselves to start a blog. These are the same kind of people who need to go to a TV 'reality' show to 'realize their self-worth'.  They typically start with a post about what the blog is going to be about or how it came about being and ends on an optimistic note.  You may see another post or two, but that's it.  An orphaned blog! Sob!
Side-note: My own blog was started on a new year day, but the date was purely incidental!
5) True journals: The Dear Diary blogs.  Truly committed bloggers.  They are the zen monks of the blogosphere. They realize that nothing has to be 'blog-worthy' to blog about. Anything and everything will get blogged, and they make it seem wonderful, and not mundane.  It comes with practice, but needs a lot of commitment.  These bloggers often use photographs, videos, graphitti etc to garnish their posts.
6) Special occasion blogs: These are bloggers who decide that they'll only blog about 'special' and 'blog-worthy' topics.  They wait for divine inspiration to blog.  There are blogs which start with a lot of promise and dry up somewhere down the line.  Some of them get temporarily revived (revivals are most likely to occur around the first week of a new year) before going into hibernation again. My own blog has gone through extremely long periods of quiecence, much like these 'special occasion blogs' , but mine's not exactly a special occasion blog.
7) Special purpose blogs: These are blogs with a set focus, aimed at a specific audience.  Tech blogs, photo blogs, cookery blogs, sports blogs. The bloggers of these blogs rarely stray from the topics they specialize in.  Many of them have alternate generic blogs. Very useful if the author is going to make a lot of posts about the same subject/interest.  
Side-note: I've often thought about having an alternate blog for my Formula One posts, but they are so few and far between that I think it doesn't merit a whole blog. Same goes for my technical posts. 

I'm sure there are hundreds of other reasons people start blogging, and many of them may be simple variations of these seven.  I've spent a lot of time reading blogs and some, posting into my own, and is there something I've learned over the years? Anything that I can offer to a new entrant to the blogosphere?  Here are a couple of things.

1) There is no perfect blog. It's your space and only you decide what goes up on your blog, but it may be worthwhile to have separate blogs for separate topics, rather than have everything in one place.  For instance, you may want have an exclusive blog for programming related topics and one for everything else. For this, you could get started with a simple blog and then plan on new blogs as you post more. I think such a conservative approach is much better than starting five empty blogs and leaving four empty for ever!
2) There is no such thing called a 'blog-worthy' topic.  Way too many people don't share wonderful experiences only because they think it's too mundane.  When you make an attempt to put down your experience in words, you'll notice that you actually start getting better at narrating/story telling.  The more you narrate, the better you get at narrating.  I've seen many people who blog about perfectly everyday things, but do it in a delightful way.  Unless you are obsessed with being elitist, concentrate on quantity.  Quality will follow in due course.
3) Enjoy blogging and don't get flustered by lack of attention/appreciation/comments/feedback on your posts.  I know for a fact that far more people read posts than those who leave comments. Find your rhythm and before long, you'll have your very own fan following! 

My cousin wrote a post called 'Care for happy endings?' in which she wrote about how she feels cheated by movies which don't end on a happy note.  While I love happy endings as much as any other person, I'm of the opinion that the ending of a movie has to be one that does justice to the story, one that adds substance to the movie and not one that takes something away from the experience.  Any attempts to goad the story to a happy conclusion when the soul of the movie innately steers it elsewhere, just to cater to people's expectations, is a bad idea according to me.  That said, many directors go ahead and do exactly that: beat the story into a conclusion which can meet the approval of the masses.  Rare are directors who do their own thing and risk angering movie-goers in trying to stay true to the soul of the story and of them,  fewer are those who have managed to get the people to see their view point.  While some movies naturally gravitate towards a happy ending, others simply don't.  Shrek and Shrek 2 are examples for the former: in the first part, Princess Fiona turns into an ogress and to her surprise discovers that Shrek is more than overjoyed to take her into his life, just the way she is! In part two,  though Shrek is able to transform himself into a handsome man,  Fiona doesn't choose to transform herself as she loves the shy and bumbling ogre to the handsome stranger she sees.  Both were lovely movies with perfectly happy endings.  However, there are stories which gravitate towards sadder conclusions and they ought not to be tampered with. 

For movies with sad endings which simply would have been completely disastrous, if the ending had been different, let me call upon two examples. The first is Anand, an absolutely wonderful Hindi movie starring the late Rajesh Khanna as Anand Sehgal, a terminally ill cancer patient with a never-say-die personality.  The movie ends with Anand dying and Bhaskar Banerjee, Anand's doctor,  is shown presenting Anand's story to a highly appreciative audience. Now here's a what if:
How would it have been, if Dr. Banerjee had come up with a miracle cure that ensured Anand's full recovery and ended up getting a Nobel prize in front of a thunderously applauding audience? One word: Terrible.  Why? Here's why:
1) The audience was being led towards the impending death of Anand, right from the beginning.  His quirks and eccentricities, which otherwise would have had him labelled a lunatic were accepted as examples of his 'sunny disposition', only because the audience knew he was dying.  If he recovered, the audience would only feel cheated!
2) The alternate ending would have completely taken the focus of the movie away from Anand and directed it towards the doctor who cured a terminally ill cancer patient, and that was not the intended effect at all!
3) The movie would have been panned by critics for being insensitive to millions of patients suffering from cancer, as it would give rise to false hopes.

Second example? V for Vendetta. In the end of the movie, V is fired upon by multiple gunmen, cronies of the evil Mr. Creedy.  After V finishes off all his henchmen, an exasperated Creedy asks V "Why don't you die??!"  "Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof." is V's reply. V, after killing Creedy, succumbs to his injuries, in Evey Hammond's arms.  Evey goes on to complete V's planned demolition of the parliament house and people, inspired by the event, decide to rise up against all tyranny.  Now here's a what if:
What if V had emerged unscathed and gone on to remove his mask and kiss Evey Hammond? Would we have had a wonderful conclusion? No! Why? Here's why:
1) The entire movie was about ideas and how ideas are more important than individuals.  The ideas of Guy Fawkes and V lived on, long after they ceased to exist.  If V survived, the conclusion would be damned!
2) The movie was not about the romance between V and Evey, though it did play a crucial role.
3) Right through the movie, V doesn't take off his mask as his face was supposedly horribly burned.  If it were to be a happy ending, the focus would go to whether V would show his horribly burned face to Evey to kiss her, or kiss her with his mask on, his cause and idealogy be damned!

Stories should be allowed to flow towards their natural conclusions and not get doctored, to suit popular tastes. I rest my case.

I'd posted about a couple of nifty tricks that one could do with LaTeX, sometime back. The post got a few people interested, but most of those interested were Windows users and the kind who'd back away a safe distance the minute I said Linux! Now, I'm not one of those FOSS brats who give Linux and FOSS a bad name by behaving like absolute boors when they get help requests from non-Linux users. ``You don't use Linux? Well, damn you!" they seem to exclaim, before moving away with a self-righteous smirk. Nope, that's not me. I strongly believe that people ought to have the right to make their own choices and not be belittled for them. I like the power that Linux has to offer to me, and I'd not be happy with anything else, and I do try to help people if they want to make a transition to Linux, but that's about it. I leave it to them to decide if and when they want to make a transition. Coming to LaTeX, I'd only used it on Linux, and when my friends who were Windows users asked for more details, I thought that it would be a pity if they could not use LaTeX, on account of them not being Linux users. I did a google search and came across MikTex.

Now, before I could point people to it, I HAD to use it myself, to see how friendly (or not) it was. I downloaded the `basic' installer of MikTex, version 2.9 from http://miktex.org/2.9/setup and ran install. It presented me a familiar notification page which I accepted and decided not to change any of the default installation options. Upon hitting next, it started downloading the required packages (oh, you need a working internet connection to complete installation), and before long, it was complete. MikTex boasts of a feature that prompts for installation of components required to render a document and proceed to set up everything on it's own, once permited to do so. I thought I'd put it to test. The MikTex installer installs an editor called TeXworks, which makes it easy to edit your LaTeX documents. I fired up Texworks, opened a tex file that I had created earlier, on Linux, and hit the green 'typeset' button (the one that looks like the mediaplayer `play' button). True to word, MikTex prompted me that I needed other packages installed, before my document could be rendered. I hit install for all of the required packages, and voila! My document compiled! Just the way it had on Linux! Just like that! To say that I was thrilled would be an understatement! Now I knew that my friends who were not onto Linux could also enjoy the power of LaTeX!

Hmm. So we now are able to create documents in LaTeX, on Windows. Great, but how are the actual documents created?
A google search on LaTeX provides a great variety of resources, but this is a good place to start: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Basics

Let's now see a few basic examples, on how to get things done. I recommend using the `memoir' class in LaTeX as it is both powerful and simple to use.
The most basic document in LaTeX would be something like this:
<pre>\documentclass[12pt, oneside]{memoir} \begin{document} This is the body of the document. \end{document} </pre>
The 12pt refers to the size of the font and `oneside' specifies that this is going to be an ebook or a pdf document, one that does not have to have special margin settings that allow for pages to be bound together. Yes, LaTeX can take care of all that, if you intend to typeset a whole book for publication! How cool is that!
Now, how about getting a numbered list? How easy is that with LaTeX ? Your doc will look something like this:
<pre>\documentclass[12pt, oneside]{memoir} \begin{document} \begin{enumerate} \item This is the first item in the numbered list... \item ...while this is the second... \item ...and this is the last. \end{enumerate} \end{document} </pre>
And it would look like this:
<ol><li>This is the first item in the numbered list...</li>
<li>...while this is the second...</li>
<li>...and this is the last.</li>
</ol>To get a simple bulleted-list, instead of a numbered list, replace `enumerate' with `itemize'.

A few points to note:-
<ul><li>In native LaTeX, both pagination and paragraph breaks are taken care of automatically. In Miktex however, paragraph breaks need to be taken care of by the user.</li>
<li>Inserting a simple blank line in TeXworks would cause a paragraph break to be inserted.</li>
<li>Words beginning a paragraph are by default indented, in LaTeX You may turn it off by putting the following statement just before the \begin{document} directive: \setlength{\parindent}{0mm}</li>
<li>Paragraph breaks don't by default provide `whitespace'. To ensure that there is visible `whitespace', you can put in something like \vspace{3mm}\\</li>
<li>Enjoy exploring LaTeX!</li></ul>You can download the tex file for this post from here. 
The pdf version is available here.

As a sysadmin, I cannot possibly overemphasize the importance of regularly and systematically backing up ones digital data, and the same is true for content on your Android phone. I suffered an sdcard failure, but thanks to the fact that I regularly backed up the apps on my phone using Titanium Backup, and then backed up the contents of the Titanium Backup's backup folder (which was on the sdcard) onto my workstation, I didn't lose anything. I had installed the rsync binary for Android which I was using to back up all my photographs and videos, apart from the Titanium Backup files, and it did save me a lot of frustration!  I now only need to get a new card (getting that is going to be another post altogether, I fear!) and I'll be on my way to getting everything back, just the way it was. If you are under the impression that your sdcard is perfectly reliable, let me shake you out of that reverie and help ensure that you are ready for a crash, whether it occurs or not.

1) If you don't have Titanium Backup, please get it. The paid version allows you to directly upload the backup files to dropbox and what not, but even the free version does a great job. You can even set it to perform automated backups of your apps. The free version only saves backup data onto the sdcard, which you must realize is only half the work.
2) Install rsyncdroid if you haven't done so already. You can get it here.
3) This article talks about how you can use 'Script manager' to set up automated backing up. If you prefer the shorter way, see the section 'My Way'!

My Way
1) Install 'sshdroid' app from the market and run it.
2) Write a simple bash script on your PC/workstation and run it whenever you want. My Wifi setup gives my phone a private ip 192.160.0.5, and I run sshdroid on the standard port 22.
3) Script for my setup is as follows 
#!/bin/bash<div>rsync -av –chmod=u=rwX,g=rwX,o=r -e ssh root@192.168.0.5:/mnt/sdcard/dcim/100media/ /home/prashc/htc_backup/100media –rsync-path=/data/rsync</div><div>rsync -av –chmod=u=rwX,g=rwX,o=r -e ssh root@192.168.0.5:/mnt/sdcard/TitaniumBackup/ /home/prashc/htc_backup/TitaniumBackup –rsync-path=/data/rsync
4) Remember to change the paths, as applicable (rsync path, source and destination dir paths).</div>5) Each of the rsync invocations would prompt for a password, but that's quite ok, right? The backup takes only a few seconds as it only copies files which are not already present. 
6) You may also want to use the –delete option to rsync to remove files locally when they have been cleared on the phone. This is recommended only for the Titanium backup and not for any other data.

Restoring
If something does go wrong, like your sdcard dying on you, you just need to copy the Titanium Backup directory to the new sdcard and use the Titanium Backup app to do the restoration.
Alternately, you can also do manual restoration (app only, not data). Here's how:

Prereqs:
a)You'll need the Android SDK on your desktop/workstation.
b) adbWireless app on your phone (optional)

1) Connect your phone to your PC/workstation using the USB cable, with USB Debugging turned on. You may just start up the adbWireless app as an alternative.
2) Change to the directory containing adb on your PC/workstation and start adb. If you are using adbWireless, start adb with the IP address and port of your phone, as supplied by the adbWireless app.
3) Unzip the compressed Titanium backup of the apk file of the app you wish to restore, using the gunzip command.
4) Execute "adb install -r  <path to apk file>"
As long as there is no space related issue on the phone, the installation should succeed.

Never Forget…
1) …to backup data on your phone!
2) …that you should not move Titanium Backup or apps like busybox, sshdroid, andftp, connectbot  etc onto the sdcard, as you won't have these apps on hand, if your sdcard does die on you. A parachute is of no use to you if you don't have it on, when you need it! 

LaTeX (pronounced lay-tech) is a document preparation system written by Leslie Lamport, which works on top of Donald Knuth's Tex (pronounced tech) system. To a large extent, it is used by research scholars to typeset technical publications. Over the years,  various tools/classes/templates have been created which allow the usage of LaTeX to achieve specific needs.  'Memoir' is a LaTeX class which can be used to typeset books while 'Beamer' allows one to create wonderful presentation slides. I've been experimenting with LaTeX for a little over a year now and have come to realize that it is exceptionally powerful.  While the learning curve is a tad steep, it makes it possible to accomplish just about anything that can be desired, when it comes to document preparation.  I quickly realized that LaTeX can be used to do a lot more than create books and presentations.  Here are a few greeting cards that I made using LaTeX and a 'newspaper article' :) 

Tripwire is a book in the 'Jack Reacher' series by Lee Child.  Jack Reacher is an ex military cop who has chosen the life of a ghost, even since he was 'let go' from the army. Tripwire sees him doing what he likes best: leading the life of an anonymous drifter when he encounters Costello, a private detective, looking for Reacher on behalf of a mysterious Mrs Jacobs.  Not wanting to lose his anonymity, Reacher refuses to identify himself. Within a couple of hours though, two 'enforcers' come to bar where he's working as a bouncer, also looking for him.  After an altercation, the enforcers beat a retreat.  Reacher, who goes after them comes across a dead body: of Costello.  Why was the man looking for him in the first place and why did he get killed?

Following the backtrail, Reacher finds the mysterious Mrs. Jacobs: Jodie, daughter of Leon Garber, Reacher's former commanding officer.  By the time he traces Judie, Leon has sustained a fatal heart attack.  Reacher uncovers that Leon was trying to help an old couple to find news about their only son who had gone 'Missing in Action' in Vietnam. Was there something sinister about the missing Victor Hobies? Were the deaths of Costello and his secretary related to it or had Leon unearthed something bigger? These are the questions Jack Reacher sets out to find answers for, even as he has to stave off attempts on his and Judie's lives while combating military red-tape and information classified beyond his access.

Title: Tripwire
Author: Lee Child
Genre: Thriller

My Scores:
Suspense: 8/10
Character Sketches: 9/10
Background Research and Authenticity: 8/10
Overall Enjoyability: 8.5/10
Total Score: 8.4/10

This is the second post in two part series called 'Tires and Formula One'.  The introductory part is here.  
While tires have traditionally played a very important part in any kind of motor sports, tires have never been solely responsible for swinging race results, one way or the other, in Formula One, or at least, till not too long ago.  As explained in the introductory post,  tire choices are very crucial, but they only were critical in changing weather conditions.  They were largely predictable otherwise. Also,  Formula One tires were built to last long.  Indeed in the controversial 2005 season,  cars had to run the same set of tires from start of the race to the finish, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Prior to 2006,  there were primarily two main tire suppliers for Formula One teams: Michelin and Bridgestone.  Some teams went the Bridgestone way while others went with Michelin. There were tracks where Bridgestone tires performed better while Michelin had the upper edge on other track surfaces, but they both made tires that lasted.  Pit stops were seldom made for tire changes only.  Drivers pitted for fuel and fresh tires were slapped on each time they stopped for fuel, as it took less time to change tires than refuel the car.  The fueling rate in Formula One was 12 litres per second and cars routinely fueled up as many as 80-120 litres of fuel in one go, meaning stationary time of 5 to 10 seconds, which was more than enough to change the tires.  Drivers rarely wore their tires out before they needed to stop for fuel and the only time when the tires necessitated the stops were when they got punctured or badly flat-spotted and those were rare incidents.  

Cut to 2005, the governing body of F1, FIA mandated that cars will no longer make tire changes during the race.  That is, cars had to complete the races on the same tires they started with,  unless they were punctured or flat-spotted to the extent deemed unsafe. This rule was introduced with the intention of cutting costs to benefit teams which did not have pockets that ran deep enough.  In hindsight, it was one of the most disastrous rule changes ever brought in by FIA.  While Bridgestone and Michelin both manufactured excellent tires,  it's too much to expect a set of tires to last the entire race distance in a typical Formula One race.  Indeed, it made racing risky.  So much so that Michelin issued a safety directive which stated that it was unsafe to use their tires for the United States Grand Prix, if the track layout was not modified.  The layout was not modified prompting all cars running Michelin tires (all but six on the grid) to retire after the formation lap was completed, thereby not even completing a single lap of the race.  Read 'The United States GP fiasco'  for details. This caused a huge furore and and the next year saw FIA reinstating mid-race tire changes, while limiting the maximum number of sets of tires a team could use over the weekend.  Also, Bridgestone was appointed the sole tire supplier for all teams in Formula One. With the advent of single tire vendor,  all teams had exactly the same tire options available.  This leveled the playing field further and put the focus back on drivers' skill and the cars themselves.  All seemed to be well until Bridgestone announced their decision to exit Formula One at the end of the 2010 session.  FIA announced Pirelli as the replacement for Bridgestone.

How Pirelli has been killing the sport as we know it:

How? Simply because in the past year and a half that they've been around, they've proved that they are utterly incapable of manufacturing tires that last.  Combined with FIA's restrictions on the number of sets of tires a team can use over a race weekend, this has led to disastrous consequences.  The Pirelli P Zero tires get shredded to bits in no time and teams don't have the luxury of changing them, forcing drivers to run their cars progressively slower.  Races are now a war of attrition: you bide your time while your opponent wears his tires out doing what Formula One is all about: driving fast.  The cars which run slower then lay in wait and attack at the end when their opponents have vastly degraded tires. This is NOT real Formula One racing.
Pirelli management claims that their rapidly deteriorating tires make for a more interesting and suspense-filled race. That is like saying match fixing makes cricket more interesting!   Drivers put in a fast lap and their racing directors get on radio immediately, telling them to watch their tire wear.  Sebastian Vettel secured the fastest lap in the middle of the European GP prompting commentators to ask why he was driving so fast! Formula One races have now stopped being a competition in which cars try to go faster than anybody else.  They now are about cars going as slow as they possibly can, while still staying ahead of others.  The races are no longer about the drivers and their cars.  It's about tire poker.  Take the race in Valencia, this year.  Fernando Alonso who was winning was pretty nervous as his tires were almost completely destroyed. The only reason why he won was because his main competitors were also battling similar problems.  In contrast,  Michael Schumacher and Mark Webber, who made late stops for fresh tires were suddenly overtaking everybody on track, simply on account of being on fresher tires. Both had elected to bide their time, driving slower than others on shot up tires before making their late tire changes, and both would have passed a helpless Alonso if the race had a few more laps remaining.  If driving slower for most of the race is the strategy to finishing better, I think Formula One as we know it is dying a slow death.  FIA has been making change after disastrous change and now Pirelli seem to be driving in the last nail in the coffin of a sport we've known and loved as the pinnacle of motorsports. 

Tires have always been an extremely important part of all forms of motor racing and the world of Formula One has been no different. Traditionally, tires came in three compound varieties for dry weather conditions: hard, soft and supersoft. Supersoft tires afforded the best grip but would last the least amount of running while the other extreme was the hard compound which was very durable, but came at the cost of grip. These compounds are for use in dry weather conditions only. Now, one of the fundamental differences between regular road going tires and Formula One racing tires is the tread: Regular Formula One tires had very few grooves.  In their current avatar, they are called 'slicks' and they have absolutely no grooves, in effect, they are perfectly bald. Yes, you read it right, they are bald tires.  These tires offer maximum grip on a dry surface but are completely unsafe in wet conditions as water builds up in front of the tires and lifts up the wheels in a phenomenon known as aquaplaning. A driver will have absolutely no control over a car which aquaplanes and having it happen when you are at a speed in excess of 250 kph is nerve-wracking, even if it ends up as a harmless spin instead of a massive crash. This fact necessitates the usage of special tires for wet conditions.  Tires for wet weather usage also come in three variants: intermediates, wet and full-wet.  Intermediate tires were suitable light to moderate drizzles, wet tires for heavy drizzles and moderate rains and extreme wet tires for heavy rain.  

In the event of rain or prediction of rain, the choice of appropriate tires becomes extremely important.  If a car stays out on track with a dry weather tire and it starts raining, things can get ugly pretty fast, as the car starts sliding and aquaplaning. However, the reverse is not a nice proposition either.  Wet weather tires have more grooves and hence provide grip even in rain, but the car will run slower.  These tires also heat up and degrade very quickly, in the absence of rain.  If a driver gambles to go in for intermediate tires anticipating rain, and it doesn't rain,  he will lose a lot of time going slower than other drivers and his tires will also get destroyed pretty quickly.  Similarly, if a driver chooses extreme wet tires and the rain drops to a light drizzle or stops altogether, he will be very much slower than other drivers who are on wets or intermediate tires. Some drivers handle wet conditions better than others.  The late Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher and now, Sebastian Vettel are acknowledged as experts in wet conditions while many others like Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen haven't been known to thrive in rainy conditions.  The correct and timely choice of tires and the driver's own abilities can often turn a hopeless situation into a race win while it is equally possible to throw away a certain victory due to a bungled tire decision.  

Here's a video of the stunning opening lap at Donington park in 1993.  Ayrton Senna managed to stay on dry tires longer than anybody else on track and was able to clock in such exceptional lap times that he quickly wrested away the race from his more formidable rivals. 

My cousin came to know that I love postcards and planned a surprise. She sent me a whole bunch of absolutely lovely picture postcards from Russia, along with an Agatha Christie novel. Thanks so much, Divya! You made my day!


The St. Basil's Cathedral, Moscow.


The Cathedral of Christ the Savior.



Novodevichiy Monastery, Moscow.



Porch of the Protection of the Virgin Cathedral.



State Historical Museum and Red Square.



The St. Basil's Cathedral at night, Moscow.



The throne seat of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, 1740-1742



Ostankino TV Tower.



The Kremlin, Moscow.



The Cathedral of Christ the Savior.



Fountain of the People's Friendship.



The cards came enclosed in this beautiful jacket:

'One Shot' was the first book I read by novelist Jim Grant, better known by his nom de plume, Lee Child. It stars 'Jack Reacher', an ex military cop who was 'let go' by the military because he was too good at what he did. Reacher is a character who stars in a whole bunch of Child's 'Reacher' books.  Post retirement,  Reacher lives the life of a ghost: no credit cards, no automobiles registered against his name, no property records, nothing. Zero. Nada. Zilch.  He lives his life that way, partly due to paranoia and partly because he believes that it continues to keep him sharp.  He pops out of the woodworks when he chooses, and disappears right back as if he'd never come forward.  

I loved squirrels very much. On my way to work this morning, a frisky fellow dashed right into my path.  I saw him, slammed the brakes and knew in the pit of my stomach that I wouldn't be able to stop in time…when he put on his own brakes at the last possible nanosecond!!! And his brakes seemed to work better than mine! My heart was pounding as I skidded past him.  He was actually looking at me right in the eye as I shot past. He seemed to be saying to me 'Sorry 'bout that, bud! I'll take better care the next time!' The feeling of relief that washed over me was beautiful.  Oh, I'd have felt soooooo miserable if I'd run him over.

The background:-

Android is a Linux-based operating system for mobile and hand-held devices, and like Linux, it bestows full power only to the 'root' user, that is, the power user or the administrator.  However,  Android phones for most part are 'locked', that is, users don't have 'root' privileges.  They can only use the functionality provided by the various applications and nothing more. This is done partly to ensure that users don't screw up the software on their phones and in many cases, to ensure that a user stays bound to a particular service provider. While the typical user would put his/her hands up if a feature or the lack of it frustrated him/her and leave it at that, I'd want to get my hands dirty and try and fix it.  This led me to the forums that discussed 'rooting', that is, means to 'unlock' the hidden powers of the devices, to be able to change things at will.  Rooting however comes at a price: the warranty is immediately voided and there is a very real risk of turning the device into a really expensive paperweight, in case things go wrong! 

A casual search of the terms 'Android' and 'Rooting' throws up a whole lot of data, but not all of it is easy to understand, or even relevant. While some articles describe ways to get super user privileges on the existing system, most talk about replacing the entire system with a different system.  I was more inclined to try the former than the latter, as I was pretty happy with the software provided by HTC.  I only wanted to iron out a few kinks, not have a completely new system which I may or may not like.
Sometime back, HTC announced that they were allowing users to 'officially' unlock the bootloaders on their phones and I grabbed the opportunity, as an unlocked bootloader is the first requirement to be able to obtain root privileges on a phone. The bootloader unlock process was pretty straight-forward,  and before long, I had accomplished it.  The next question was how to go about getting superuser privileges on it.  Once again,  there was a lot of information, but two webpages were particularly helpful:
http://androidforums.com/incredible-all-things-root/420788-how-regain-root-s-off-htc-unlocked-bootloader.html
and
http://www.addictivetips.com/mobile/root-and-install-clockworkmod-recovery-in-htc-salsa-guide/
It was not all smooth sailing, as the primary method, including the software listed and the method described didn't work for me. User scott85's comments on the first site were really helpful, and I successfully rooted my phone, that is, obtained super user privileges without changing the whole system. Let me sum up what it took, to successfully root the HTC Salsa, just in case anybody needs it.

DISCLAIMER:-
This is what I did to successfully root my HTC Salsa (Gingerbread 2.3.3) phone.
I offer no guarantees that these steps will work for you and and take no responsibility for any damage that may occur to your phone, if you decide to try these instructions out. The links provided and the packages referred are not owned/maintained by me and I'm not responsible for any content on those sites or in the actual packages.
ROOTING IS DANGEROUS AND MAY RENDER YOUR PHONE USELESS IF YOU GO WRONG. LET THE USER BEWARE!

How I rooted my HTC Salsa

1) Updated my phone's software version to approved Software number (1.12.720.5 for my region) by accepting the OTA update (HTC Twitter client).
2) Downloaded the RUU (only works on Windows) for my software number, from the HTC dev site, after logging in with a new account.
3) Installed RUU and completed the listed steps to unlock bootloader.
4) Formatted my sdcard in Fat32 format. 
5) Downloaded recovery image archive PH11IMG.ZIP and unzipped it to get 'recovery.img' which I copied onto my sdcard.
6) Downloaded superuser application files archive Superuser-3.0.7-efgh-signed.zip which I copied onto my sdcard.
7) Put my phone into HBOOT mode and THEN attached phone to computer with USB cable. 
8) Ensured that the phone was detected by the computer and then executed
fastboot flash recovery recovery.img
9) The fastboot command reported the successful flash.
10) Rebooted my phone into HBOOT mode, and then into recovery mode. This brings up the 'Clockwork Mod' recovery tool.
11) Chose the 'Install zip from SD card' option.
12) Chose the 'Choose zip from SD card' option.
13) Selected the Superuser-3.0.7-egfh-signed.zip file and selected the 'Yes, Install' Option.
14) Got a 'Success' message and rebooted to normal mode to find the 'superuser' app installed. The rest of my apps and original system were unaffected.

Some really cool apps that I found, for my newly rooted phone. All these apps are available for free, in the Android market. While not all of them require root, they make a lot of sense on a rooted phone.

1) Titanium Backup:  Very powerful utility to backup and manage applications.
2) BusyBox:  Enables many, many useful system commands.
3) Terminal Emulator: Allows you to use all those useful commands enabled by BusyBox.
4) SSHDroid: Allows you to setup an ssh server on your phone, allowing you to log in to your phone from another phone/machine on the same network (wifi)
5) ConnectBot: Allows you to log in to other machines/devices on the network (wifi).
6) RomManager: Check/fix file permissions, reboot into recovery and a lot of ROM related functions (I don't use most of them).
7) Link2SD: Allows you to combat the dreaded low internal storage space problem.  This deserves a whole post.  Coming up soon.
8) Root Browser: Allows you to browse all directories and cut/copy/paste/move/delete files/directories. I prefer the commandline, but this is a nice graphical tool.

For a techie, my relationship with technology has been rather atypical.  So much so that my friend once called me a Luddite! Facebook is one thing which I resisted for a very long time, though it seemed to be all the rage, but now, I've made my peace with it and am even enjoying it. I used to argue that it would never be like lj, and on that score, I'm still right: lj still holds a place much closer to my heart, but the fact is, most of the people I know are not on lj.  I use fb, and sometimes even twitter for sharing links and videos. I often find links to interesting videos and news articles on twitter and fb, which I read when I find time for it.  However,  if there is one major difference between lj and the rest, it's permanence. If I post something on lj and come back after a month, it's still there. My friends who are interested to go through my posts can find it right away, unlike on fb and twitter where wallposts/tweets get buried under tons and tons of other content that keeps going up every moment. The lifespan of content on fb is a few minutes, most often, and a few hours, if it's a slow day for others.  I often get the feeling that I can't really keep pace with fb and twitter, but it doesn't really seem to matter much now.  For me, lj is where I go when I have something important to share.  fb and twitter are what I think as random babble gatherers and I like them for their own strengths.  I've even started to post links to my lj posts on fb and I daresay more people seem to be reading my blog these days as a result!

"That's a small step for man, a giant leap for mankind."
-Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon.

Man has always aspired to achieve things hitherto believed impossible.  For each inventor/adventurer/scientist who succeeded in achieving greatness and gone on to get a hero, thousands perished, aspiring for the same greatness.  While the Wright brothers invented the first successful heavier-than-air powered aircraft, many were those who tried and failed before them. "If I have seen farther, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants", Sir Isaac Newton is reported to have said, and it describes perfectly the efforts of many who failed, which went on to serve as a guiding light or a warning beacon to their successors.

The idea of being able to take off and land aircraft, from ships on the sea was one such: a desire which seemed too difficult to bring to fruition. Yet, people tried, failed, and tried again, and again, and again, till they achieved it.
Squadron commander Edwin Harris Dunning of the British Royal Naval Service, on the 2nd of August 1917, became the first man to successfully land an aircraft on a moving ship, the HMS Furious, creating history and providing hope to people who'd almost started to question the feasibility of the whole idea. Trying to repeat his feat, just five days later, on the 7th of August 1917, Edwin got caught in an updraft due to which he wasn't able to bring his aircraft to a complete halt before it tipped over the edge of the ship, drowning him in full view of his horrified shipmates and friends. Since then, aircraft carriers and indeed aviation itself, both civilian and combat, have come a very long way, but such progress just wouldn't have been possible had it not been for the incredible bravery and sacrifices made by people like Squadron commander Edwin Harris Dunning. I found these pictures of him on wikipedia.org



Squadron Commander Dunning being cheered by his colleagues upon achieving the first ever landing of an airplane on the deck of a moving ship.



Horrified crew members look on as Dunning fails to bring the airplane down in time. Though he managed to bring it down on the ship, he was not able to stop it before it tipped over the edge of the ship.

I also found this video which documents some more early attempts to land airplanes on the decks of aircraft carriers.

I've just got myself an ebook reader (Nook Simple Touch by Barnes and Noble) and I've been having a gala time reading novels on it.
I'd always been cynical about the quality of experience of trying to read a book in its digital avatar, but this device threw all those reservations right out of the window!
It's light-weight, sits comfortably in one hand and provides an incredible reading experience which in my opinion not only provides an experience at par to that of reading a print-and-paper book but actually surpasses it!  Now, I know this is a lot to digest for a lot of traditional book lovers, but I used to be one of them myself before I became a convert! Allow me to me explain!

The common complaints regarding ebooks is that print-and-paper gives more of a feel to the reading, complete with the feel of crinkly paper and smell of old paper and print. That they strain the eye and are in general clunky.  Modern ebook readers still don't flatter the tactile and olfactory senses like the books of old did,  but the rest of the drawbacks have been completely ironed out.
The Nook comes with something called the e-ink technology, which besides being very frugal on the battery (provides up to sixty hours of reading on a single full charge!), it is extremely friendly on the eye.  Also, the capacitive touch screen is a joy to use: the gentlest of finger-strokes are sufficient to turn a page or access other functions such as a built-in dictionary lookup tool which allows you to instantly learn the meaning of hitherto unencountered words.  A neat feature which would have appealed very much to my late grandfather is the notes feature which allows readers to highlight portions of text and to write their own 'footnotes'.  Changing font sizes is also a breeze and the page resizes accordingly thereby preserving the aesthetic beauty of a page intact and saving the user the trouble of having to scroll vertically and horizontally, to read the text.

Right, the experience is great, it's very friendly on the eyes and makes it possible to carry virtually any number of books, wherever you want to go.  What's the catch? There are a few. Firstly, the ebooks themselves. While a great many pirate sites are available on the internet which make it possible to get just about any book, without having to pay a single rupee, I'd much rather be able to buy the book, own it and enjoy it.  Hey, if the printed versions of the book cost x rupees, a digital version of the book ought to cost much less than x rupees right? Considering that there is no printing/binding/display costs involved in its sale? Um, no. That's not how things work in the ebook world.  When I tried looking for purchasable ebook of John Grisham's 'A Painted House', I found it pretty quickly. It was selling for INR 550 whereas it's print-and-paper sibling only cost INR 270! Isn't that ripping me off? Why is it so? It's because authors actually tend to be very vary of publishing their books in the electronic format simply because they believe that the internet is an evil place where people would start making copies of the electronic books and sharing/distributing them on their own without paying a cent/rupee to the author of the work.  Now, this is not a completely baseless fear, but it doesn't justify completely ignoring the electronic book market either.

Piracy is a crime.  Piracy is bad.  We all realize it, no doubt, yet most of us, if not all, would at some point in time or the other have consumed pirated products, be it in the form of an operating system or software being used with a 'cracked serial key' or license, or music (mp3) or those pirated movie DVDs which always hit the market so much earlier than the originals and at a rock-bottom prices at that!  We've also perhaps been tempted to buy or have actually bought cheap pirated paperback novels being hawked on pavements or in small roadside shops simply because these books cost a small fraction of the price of the original books.  Many a time, it's the extremely bad quality of both the print and the paper that it is laid on that dissuades some of us, including yours truly from buying the cheap knock-offs. Industry pundits, authors and self-styled experts have all held palavers and given grandiose sound bytes to the media about the need to fight piracy but nobody has actually done anything concrete to solve it. Or has anybody?

Moserbaer, the digital media giant caused a lot of eyebrows to go up when they acquired copyrights to a whole slew of Bollywood movies, both old and new.  What they did next stumped everybody: they brought out original CDs and DVDs of these movies, into the market, at rock bottom prices. I repeat: Rock bottom prices.  To give you better reference, the average price of a DVD of a Bollywood flick used to be about INR 300 ($6) at least.  Moserbaer brought out their DVDs at INR 45 ($0.95).  The pirated prints of these movies used to sell for nearly twice as much in the market!  Within no time, they virtually sent movie pirates packing and it was not long before the movie-makers themselves began seeing further profits.  The steep prices in the days of old meant few takers and hence rights to DVD sale were hardly big earners, but now movie makers earn substantially more through sales of DVDs.  The other prevalent myth in the movie industry was that early DVD releases would impact the performance of the movie in the movie halls.  Now why is this a myth? Simply because the people who don't want to go to the movie halls to watch a movie will not go to a movie hall. Period. Now, if they were to get an original DVD at the price of a pirated DVD (which often is of dreadful quality) or lesser, right around the time they'd get it in the pirate markets,  many would opt to buy the original DVD instead. Moserbaer hit upon a very basic premise and delivered an epiphany upon the world.

Now, if the same approach were to be taken by authors of books, it would be a wonderful thing indeed! Are there pirates now who pirate and sell rip-off books at rock-bottom prices? Yes. Will there be people passing around copies of ebooks for free, if ebooks are made available? Probably, but think again. If ebooks are really priced low, it would attract a lot of readers who are onto the digital bandwagon.  In the long run, the profits due to volume sales would greatly overcome the 'loss' incurred by pricing it low. When I found that the ebook version of Grisham's book was nothing short of a rip-off, I actually managed to find a pirated copy online, for free. Now, if I'd been able to find a purchasable copy at half the cost of the printed book, would I have bought it, since there is no difference in quality of a pirated ebook and an original? Yes. I would have paid up and bought it because I believe that I need to pay for something that I enjoy so much: reading an author's beautiful work. I'm sure I'm not the only person who'd do that.  Are publishers and authors listening?

News reports of an Indian couple being persecuted under Norwegian laws recently made headlines and triggered a lot of heated debate.  Are our laws really any better, fairer? Feminists who want to bash me up for this post can get in a line, but before you do so, I ask that I be given a fair trial.

For years, women have been persecuted by the dominant male faction in this 'glorious' country of ours.  Do I condone that? Not for a moment.  I also don't condone the caste-based excesses that have thrived unopposed, for centuries in our country.  Today however, we have two things in our society, neither of which is constructive or helpful to build a society free of caste and gender-based inequality.  Caste-based reservations, which were aimed to give the repressed a fair life have now gone on to become an electoral issue rather than a social one: political parties use reservations and the promise of more lucre to the 'supposedly backward' to attract votes.  The other deplorable thing? Laws which are totally gender-biased, laws which are made to give women supreme power, absolving them of all wrongdoing,  while punishing the men, often for no reason other than for the excesses committed by their forefathers.


Take the anti-dowry legislation in India for instance.  The latest avatar of the anti-dowry law in India is called as Section 498A.  You may read about it here. It allows for a husband and any of his relatives to be jailed, without the prospect of bail, on the basis of a simple one-line complaint by a married woman: no other proof is necessary and the accused are deemed guilty, until proven innocent.  The maximum sentence, if proven guilty, is three years, but given the rate at which Indian courts dispose of pending cases, it's not at all unusual for people, including innocent victims, to spend more than the maximum sentence time, just as under-trials. Figures about the misuse of section 498A vary very much, with even the most conservative figures indicating that as many as 30% of all dowry harassment cases filed in Indian courts are false, with other estimates indicating as many as 85% all filed cases to be false and malicious in nature.

http://www.498a.org/ is a site which hopes to crusade against this extremely unfair law.  Here are some statistics, gathered by the site, to let you know how skewed this law is:
Under false cases involving Section 498A,
An INNOCENT child is arrested every day.
An INNOCENT senior citizen is arrested every 2.4 hours.
An INNOCENT woman is arrested every 23 minutes.
An INNOCENT person is arrested every 5 minutes. (presumably an aggregation of the above listed and men)
The site, and this document quote sources for their statistics and claims, so those of you who wish to verify/ratify them would have an opportunity to do so.

The primary motivation behind all these false cases seems to be an opportunity to extract money, closely followed by women guilty of adultery, looking for a bargaining chip in what would otherwise be a messy and 'unrewarding' divorce. Speaking of adultery, the Indian penal code states thus:

497. Adultery.-- Whoever has sexual intercourse with a person who is and whom he knows or has reason to believe to be the wife of another man, without the consent or connivance of that man, such sexual intercourse not amounting to the offence of rape, is guilty of the offence of adultery, and shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to five years, or with fine, or with both. In such case the wife shall not be punishable as an abettor.

Nowhere does this law provide for the possibility of a woman indulging in adultery. If a married woman were to have a physical relationship with somebody who is not her legally wedded husband, oh, the Indian law would penalize the other person for it and not the woman. Get's better and better, doesn't it?

What prompted this post was an article in the newspapers a couple of days back. It mentioned a boy from IIT Delhi being charged with harassment and blackmail. He was allegedly trying to blackmail a girl from IIT Kanpur into marrying him by threatening to make public photographs and video footage of 'their private moments together'.  Now, if the boy is indeed guilty of his alleged crimes, I don't condone it at all, but it still raises a very interesting point about how the long arm of the Indian law targets men alone. In India, if a boy and a girl have a physical relationship together and the girl dumps the boy,  the boy is advised to 'be a man and get on with his life'.  Their physical relationship, if there was any, would apart from triggering titters and vulgar comments would be entirely irrelevant. Now, switch sides.  If the boy were to lose interest in the relationship and walk away, all the girl would have to do is file a police complaint, and suddenly, all those sessions of passionate, consensual sex that the couple enjoyed in better times now get a new tag: rape. The boy is then generally roughed up by the 'friendly neighborhood policemen', beaten up and threatened with multiple charges of rape if he does not choose to do the 'honorable thing' by marrying the 'victim', the girl. 

I was frankly amazed when I read reports, sometime back, of some aspiring 'Bollywood starlet' who accused a well-known Bollywood film director, of having raped her several times, over a span of more than two years. Did the director kidnap her on so many occasions? Oh no. She went to his place, every time. Now, apparently, consensual sex is considered rape if the male had promised to marry the 'victim' in question.  Would a girl be penalized for dumping a boy, after years of being together (physically and otherwise), with marriage very much having been on the cards? Oh, no. The male has no grounds to complain, whatsoever. It's something that only a woman is empowered with, to enable her to get her way in any relationship, if she so chooses. It's high time these outdated statutes and laws are updated, as they are, I believe,  in direct violation of the first fundamental right which is promised to each and every citizen of India:
Right to equality, including equality before law, prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, and equality of opportunity in matters of employment, abolition of untouchability and abolition of titles.

I'd love to know your thoughts on this.

Edit:-
I totally agree with the idea that women's rights need to be safeguarded in any self-respecting society. Men have in the past perpetrated grave and horrific crimes against women and unfortunately, many are still doing it. However, while it might seem like poetic justice that these skewed laws are making men 'pay' for all the wrongs done onto women, it's in my opinion akin to charging every non-Jewish German, both born and unborn, with heinous crimes against the Jews, for what Hitler did. Every person in a self-respecting society deserves fair laws, irrespective of their religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth.

I hate Februaries as they have that day when people are expected to write mushy notes and exchange gifts and chocolates.  From sites peddling gift/flower/chocolate delivery services to card companies urging me to send out that card to that wonderful someone in my life, I get them all, this time of the year.  I just need to open my inbox and suspend my disbelief. Wait, did I mention matrimonial sites? Oh, they ensure that your inbox is chock-full of special offers to woo that, you guessed it, special person!  As the dreaded day approaches, more friends will start posting pictures of red hearts, roses and pink balloons! A couple of friends even call up and wish me, taking care to remind me that I'd better do something to fix that single status of mine! Oh yeah, like I'd completely forgotten!

Here are my thoughts about criticism in general and about criticism over writing in particular. I believe that a one-size-fits-all approach can only be an unfair attack on a lot of people. When it comes to literary skills, it would be wrong, in my opinion, to judge and criticize, for instance,  a blogger, a newspaper journalist and a novelist, using the same yardstick. I'd expect the highest standards from the newspaper journalist as I'm not buying the newspaper to read 'his/her' writing. I'm buying it to read news presented in a coherent and correct manner.  If the journo writes terribly, he/she is spoiling my experience of reading a newspaper and I'd reserve my harshest criticism for him/her.  A novelist? I am buying a novel to read a certain author's work, and if I don't approve of his/her writing, I can just junk the book or write a letter of protest, which will in all likely-hood be consigned to trash by the author in question. A blogger? He/she is a person who is writing for pleasure, their own and possibly that of whoever happens to read their posts.  They are not paid to do it and they rarely even get comments and positive feedback, even from people who enjoy reading their posts, so should they be subject to ridicule and discouragement when a reader does not like their work?


A friend on fb wrote this post, titled 'How Not to Write Badly' (http://satyakiroy.posterous.com/how-to-not-write-badly). I'd have to ask you, my reader, to read it, as the rest of my post would not make sense otherwise.

Done? Good. Now, his post did specify if it was aimed at a particular set of people. Wannabe novelists? Bloggers? Journos with bad writing skills who serve the occasional bowl of howlers with a main course of pain? Satyaki Roy writes very well and seems to write from his heart.  Only, I felt that he was a little off, actually, more than a little off, with his views.  I know how people tend to feel about personal views, and criticism on it, but since his post was a critique in itself, AND he was a friend, I thought I'd post what I felt about it. 
I wrote:

I started to read this post with interest as i wanted to see what your thoughts were. However, the vitriol was so strong that my gag reflex could barely be suppressed. You write very well, but frankly, this was churlish at best. You claim discouraging individuals who write poorly as a right? You've got to be kidding me! Are you trying to compete with Muammar Gaddafi or Shelley's Ozymandias? I had a friend once who blogged a lot, but in SMS-speak. No capitalization anywhere (not even for the personal pronoun 'I'), incorrect and inconsistent punctuation, riddled with typos even an Albanian spell-check program would flag and more. I pointed them all out to her instead of just telling her to stop!
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">
Chetan Bhagat pisses me off immensely, but that is precisely why I stopped reading his books after tolerating one and attempting to read another one with an open mind. Nobody is compelling you or me to read it. Even if an extract from a Chetan Bhagat story were to make its way into an English textbook for students in India, I'd review the actual content before screaming hoarse. Even the Vogons found an Arthur Dent who appreciated their poetry! A friend of mine regularly posts recipes with photographs and finds a lot of takers for it. I like it too, sometimes. We still are a free country, Satyaki, and nobody is forcing stuff down your throat. If you see a banana peel on the ground in front of you, what do you do? Do you sidestep it or do you go "Just my luck! I have to slip and fall down again" ?

He replied in a little while, pointing out that if I'd lived by what I was preaching, I'd have ignored his views too, which led me to tell him why it was that I felt compelled to 'correct' him, a word that was probably not the most appropriate one to convey my intentions and it might have seemed harsh to him.  We parried back and forth for a while, each failing to convince the other about why his version of the criticism was justifiable while the other's was not.  While no harsh words were exchanged,  I chose to end the discussion right there, when he called my criticism 'an apology for mediocrity'. 

If I'd ended the conversation then, why am I raking it up again now? Perhaps because it affected me more than I thought it would.  Perhaps the fact that he reads a lot and writes very well gave me hopes about many more of his entire generation (he is a few summers younger than I am) being more erudite than I suspected, and his seeming lack of tolerance for his less talented peers dashed my hopes.
Or perhaps, there was some truth in his accusation after all, that I was tendering an apology for mediocrity.
However, I don't believe that I was tendering an apology for mediocrity. Perhaps, what I really was doing, was going out to bat for my own kind, people who've been tagged as mediocre by a lot of people and who've got sick of that tag. Yes, that's probably the real reason why it affected me so much.

<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">

When I speak, am I too not listening? -Ramakrishna Paramahamsa

I'd written about Swype here. While I was pretty excited back then, over time, it's something that I've come to both love and loathe.
In principle, it's a wonderful idea: it allows users of touch-enabled devices to just trace out the letters of the word they intend to use and Voila! The software works out the word you intend to use and puts it into whatever you are trying to enter text.  It makes it possible to quickly and without too much effort, type out whole sentences and paragraphs, ideal if you, like me, write long emails, blog and  write comments which run into paragraphs on Facebook posts, all using your mobile device! The undesirable side of it is that it often throws up words which you certainly had no intention of using. What makes it worse is that once you get used to Swyping, nothing else seems as much fun, and Swype is in general very accurate, but the times it goes wrong, it can go horribly wrong, as I've been finding out time and again, of late.

had posted a witty poem about spell-check horrors sometime back and Swype just takes it to the next level.  In spell-check, you are less prone to mistakes and if you are really confident of your spelling abilities, you can turn it entirely off.  With Swype, a boon turns into a bane in the time it takes for you to swipe your finger across the screen of your shiny touch device!
Just last night, I was chatting with Deepa and I saw that Swype had offered 'simmering' when I'd wanted to say 'something'. Since I'm so used to Swyping fast, the rather meaningless line went on to Deebah and I had to explain the gaffe.

I started explaining to Deebah all the cases of Swype-bloopers and even as I was attempting to do so, many more sprung forth and I kept adding them all on. The conversation went something like this:

Me: 'Something' becomes 'simmering' and many a time, 'post' becomes 'pussy', for God's sake!
Now, even as I swyped God, the default selection was 'good'.
Me: And 'God' almost always comes out as 'good'.
Now, Swype had given me 'add' when I wanted 'as'. It does it every single time and it's really irritating.
Me: And 'as' comes out as 'add'.
Simple sentence right? Wrong! 'comes' came out as 'chimes'.
Me: And when I typed 'comes', it came out as 'chimes'.
Me: And when it typed 'typed', it offered me 'touted'!!

Swype also routinely substitutes 'have' for 'gave', 'stud' for 'stuff'….I was telling another friend of mine about my woes with Swype and he recommended that I upgrade to the latest version. The new version has done nothing to ease my woes and has in fact become worse as the Swype guys have further shrunk the keypad to add another couple of function buttons. When the user is somebody like me who has short, stubby fingers, usability just goes right out of the window.
I've switched keyboards for now. 

“There was an old man from Peru
Who dreamt he was eating his shoe.
He awoke in a fright,
In the middle of the night
And found it was perfectly true.”

-Anon

The movie 'Inception' is about dreams and explores several possibilities within the world of dreams. It suggests that it is possible for a dreamer to receive external inputs during the dream and perceive it as part of his/her dream.  Despite many things suggested by the movie being simply outlandish, the different aspects of the story are beautifully woven together to form a gripping movie. One of the more believable aspects of the movie was the premise that time within a dream can feel substantially longer than the actual time spent dreaming.

I had a most vivid dream, and an experience that could be described as being straight out of the movie.  The dream was a dark one, about demons and demonic possession. I was the one who was possessed and I seemed to know all about the onsets of crazed frenzy. I'd recover from the spells with vivid memories.  The within-dream time span stretched over several hours, perhaps even days.  I could see concerned friends and well-wishers trying to do their bit to help ease my trauma, but it was an unidentified woman who was right beside me, right through.  I could hear her praying when I was wracked by spasms, and I could feel her hands wiping the sweat from my forehead, after the spasms stopped. I remember calling out to her repeatedly, but I don't remember her name.

Now, as this whole nightmare was unfolding,  I kept hearing music, in my head, in my ear, in my right ear to be specific. I was not wearing any earphones and I just couldn't stop that music.  It seemed to be playing right from within my head.  The whole idea probably seemed plausible, given the nature of the dream.  After a particularly violent spasm, I remember feeling a strange sense of calm and then, it was all peaceful and silent.  I woke up bathed in sweat.  I could see the first signs of dawn from my window, and then, I heard it: the same song. I'd gone to sleep listening to 'Bon Jovi's 'Blaze of Glory' and for some reason, the song had been playing in a continuous loop.  When I'd woken up, the song had not been audible because of the couple of seconds of transition time before the song loops over again. My left earphone-plug had come off during the night leading to the phantom song in the dream, audible only through my right ear!  While the phantom-song part of the dream in now no longer unexplained, the remaining part of the dream continues to be a mystery.  Was there a message for me in that dream? Who was that lady?  Even though I have questions I'd love to have answers for,  I'm not quite looking forward to having a repeat of such a dream!

Once there lived a rich man who was justly proud of his cellar and the wine therein. And there was one jug of ancient vintage kept for some occasion known only to himself.
The governor of the state visited him, and he bethought him and said, "That jug shall not be opened for a mere governor."
And a bishop of the diocese visited him, but he said to himself, "Nay, I will not open that jug. He would not know its value, nor would its aroma reach his nostrils."
The prince of the realm came and supped with him. But he thought, "It is too royal a wine for a mere princeling."
And even on the day when his own nephew was married, he said to himself, "No, not to these guests shall that jug be brought forth."
And the years passed by, and he died, an old man, and he was buried like unto every seed and acorn.
And upon the day that he was buried the ancient jug was brought out together with other jugs of wine, and it was shared by the peasants of the neighborhood. And none knew its great age.
To them, all that is poured into a cup is only wine.
-The Old, Old, Wine by Kahlil Gibran, from the compilation 'The Wanderer'.

How often have we walked away from opportunities, fearing that we are not prepared to give it our best?
How often have we given up on situations, thinking them to be hopeless, only to have picked up the thread much later, often due to external compulsions,  at a much later stage, and realized that it had never really been a lost cause? That if only we had not given up hope in the first place, there was so much more that we could have done, the hastily-put-together effort in the end bearing witness to that fact?
How often has the fear of failure crushed our hopes and nullified our ambitions, before they even took shape?
How often have we been guilty of holding back the best in ourselves, thinking like the man with the old, old wine?
How many times have we had thoughts and ideas that would have been wonderful had we shared them, but which never got to see the light of the day because we felt that they were not good enough to be shared?
What is that invisible standard that we try to live up to? What is it that holds us back from being ourselves?
How many of us fall prey to that 'Hundred Percent' myth,  telling ourselves that if we can't put in the full hundred percent, we ought not to put in anything at all?
The people who have really contributed immensely to any cause would never done so with the full knowledge that they were giving their hundred percent.  In fact, had they worried about how successful they would eventually be with their contribution, they might not have contributed anything at all. 

In the movie 'Schindler's list', when the Jews who survived Hitler's state-sponsored terrorism gather together to present Oskar Schindler with a gold ring (made out of the gold from their tooth fillings),  Schindler is shown breaking into tears.
He bawls like a baby, asking himself aloud how many more lives he could have safeguarded, if only he'd given up luxuries like his golden badge and his car. The point is,  he got these doubts after he'd already been recognized as a hero for his yeoman efforts. Schindler never started out thinking that he'd save thousands of human beings from certain death. He'd probably have been unnerved, had he started that way. 
If we want to do anything, anything at all, whether it's painting a picture, or preparing for an exam, singing in public or doing our bit for the society,  it's better to stop thinking about how successful we'll eventually be.  Eventual success or failure will come along eventually.  Let's just go ahead and do what we can, today.  Wait, isn't that the gist of the advice that was supposedly imparted to a depressed Arjuna, by Lord Krishna, in the Bhagavad-gita? Do your duty without any expectations as regards the results? hmmm.
Religion and religious texts aside, it certainly pays to go back to the roots, to look well within ourselves. That's what I feel.

My desk at my workplace is usually cluttered with things, but having finally gotten around to clearing it all up just the day before, I was expecting to see a hermetically bare, white desk surface when I got there this morning. However, this morning, the desk was not bare, as I'd left it: There was a red envelope sitting on that desk,  waiting for me.  I knew immediately that it had to be the card which Donna aka had said she'd mailed to me, on the 10th of this month.  A quick glance at the recipient info the front and the sender's address on the back confirmed that it was indeed my mail and yes, it was from her! Oh, was I excited! It'd been ages since anybody had actually written me a real, postal mail of the paper and pen variety and I'd just begun to worry a little, wondering whether the card had been lost in transit! However, here it was, right there on my desk, delivered just fine! I quickly found a paper-knife and cut it open eagerly, and my! I found myself looking at a beautiful card with a wonderfully warm, handwritten message within! Donna, you really made my day!  I wish you a wonderful Christmas and a very happy new year too!

First of all, sorry about the preachy tone of this post. Second, the content of this post is NOT child-safe, so be warned. Third, after reading this post, kindly reshare, if you feel it’s worthwhile.

It was a comment conversation on Anita’s lj , about a year and a half earlier that introduced me to the person I now refer to as the 'one and the only Deepa Mohan'. In her own words, she has 'Completed another circuit around the sun without being flung off the planet' and her friends, admirers and fans alike take the pleasure of wishing her a very happy birthday.

  On the 16th of October, 2011, thirty three year old Dan Wheldon began his day with a lot of hopes. Having obtained a slot in the season finale Indicar race, he was a man who stood to gain a lot of attention from racing teams and a bonus prize of five million dollars, US, if he managed to win the race.  For a man who had been twice crowned champion at Indicar, he'd been down upon his luck, of late, as he did not even have a steady racing position in any of the racing teams.

Wheldon had been offered a seat at Andretti Autosport for the next season, but there probably was the fear that it too could peter out, if he didn't have a strong performance against his name. Truly, for Dan Wheldon, this was a make or break race.  While the money would have done very nicely indeed, for the out of job father of two, a strong finish was a much more realistic and achievable target.

The race started without giving any inkling that it was going to be marred by tragedy and controversy. Within half an hour of the race start however, a rival's car seemed to suffer a technical glitch and slowed down all of a sudden, in the middle of the fastest part of the Las Vegas motor speedway, leaving cars hurtling down the banked track with no escape route.  As the cars started colliding with each other and forming a huge pile of twisted metal, Dan tried his best to avoid the stricken cars in his path and very nearly succeeded too, but fate had other plans for him, on that day.  His car's front left wheel rode up the rear right wheel of a paralyzed car in front of him and instantly became airborne.  With virtually no runoff area having been provisioned for, his car flipped over, mid air, and crashed into the concrete and steel catch fence with fatal consequences, for Dan. He was rushed to the hospital but could not be saved. In all, fifteen cars were involved in the pile up which left many drivers injured, but for Dan Wheldon, it was a crash he failed to walk away from.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, the organizers have been coming in for some serious flak. While it may be argued that all forms of motor sports are inherently dangerous, it becomes the responsibility of the organizers to ensure that spectator thrills don't come at the cost of driver safety. Experts have time and again voiced their opinions and concern about the lack of several necessary safety norms in Indicar for a really long time, but had until now been rather conveniently ignored. In stark contrast with Indicar is the sport of Formula One (F1) whose organizers go to great lengths to ensure driver safety.

While F1, today, is one of the safest sports around, it has not always been so. It took the deaths of two racers, Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna, who died on consecutive days during the dreadful race weekend at Imola, Italy, in 1994, to lead to the changes that have made modern Formula One racing as safe as we now know it to be. Hopefully, the death of Dan Wheldon will lead to similar changes in the world of Indicar racing and prove that his death did not come in vain.


Roland Ratzenberger (4 July 1960 – 30 April 1994)


Ayrton Senna (21 March 1960 – 1 May 1994)


Daniel Clive 'Dan' Wheldon (22 June 1978 – 16 October 2011)
Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

Weekends mean different things to different people. To me, they generally are endless repetitions of mundane chores. Wash clothes and hang them dry,  sweep and mop up the place, clean the sink, kitchen table, the loo, if it needs to be cleaned, shave if in the mood to appear presentable, shower, eat, click desperately at the TV remote, hoping that something interesting might happen to be on air and to finally give up realizing once again that nothing on TV is ever to your liking when you want entertainment, watch a movie that I’ve already watched a gazillion times, on the PC, play computer games till I get bored silly, curl up with a novel….ah, in short, nothing ever seems to happen on weekends.

It was to kill boredom and get some fresh air that I went up to the terrace of my building and I caught sight of several kites flying high in the sky. Oh yes, it was quite windy and the kids in the neighborhood were busy flying kites. It brought back memories of my childhood, watching my cousins flying their home made kites, memories of my helping my cousins grind glass to a fine powder which is essential for the preparation of kite thread, called manja in local parlance.  The glass powder was essential for both defensive and offensive purposes, for kite flying was not just a quaint pastime, but also a fiercely competitive sport.  The minute a kite graced the sky, other kids who wished to compete would get their own kites into the sky and despite the skies being so vast, a battle for air supremacy would break out in earnest and my cousins were very sportive, despite being ferociously competitive. They believed in the no firststrike policy, I guess.  They never threatened the kites of others, but were more than happy to oblige if anybody was foolish enough to engage their kite in a fight.  The duration of the fight itself would depend on the skill of their opponents, but it rarely ever lasted long.  Not once did I see my cousins lose but I suspect that what I admired more was the fact that despite being so skilled, they never, ever, bullied other kite flyers. I stayed on the terrace for quite a long time.  The kites disappeared as the skies darkened ominously. I could see brilliant bolts of lightning  arcing across the skies with increasing frequency.  I counted the seconds between the lightning flash and the rumble of thunder.  It was still distant but closing in, all the time.  I tried to snap a picture of a lightning bolt, but though I was able to sight several wonderful bolts, I didn’t manage to get any of them on camera. The rain drops, big and heavy, started pelting me and I reluctantly went back indoors, back to my weekend monotony.Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

I've always enjoyed typing fast and I've even blogged about it in the past.  However, typing  anything on a mobile phone is a totally different proposition. I'd tried posting to lj by typing away on my old Nokia phone using the t9 dictionary which was very useful considering that the the alternative was to type the 'a' key thrice just to get the 'c' character! That sucked!  While t9 certainly simplified things, it was still quite clunky.

When deciding which phone to buy, the keyboard was one of the factors that I gave a lot of importance to.  Having never used a device devoid of a physical keyboard, I did have a lot of concerns, but after checking out the phones myself, I realized that I could be just as fast, even without a physical keyboard.While typing on the virtual qwerty keyboard was not difficult, I was still not entirely happy with how fast I could type until the day my friend Sumeet dropped by my place.  He saw me struggling to be quick on the phone's keyboard and asked me if I'd not tried Swype.

His phone came preinstalled with this tool called Swype and he showed it to me. It seemed nothing short of blackmagic, the way it worked! It showed a virtual keyboard much like the one I had, but that was where the similarity ended. You could trace out the letters of the word you wished to use, in a continuous path, and the software used probability and dictionary searching to come up with the words that you may have intended, with the most probable word being preselected for use! Also, you don't have to manually enter spaces as the program is smart enough to figure out word-breaks and add spaces wherever necessary! How cool is that!

Right then, I knew that I'd found the solution to my typing woes!  While my phone did not come with Swype preinstalled, I found out that it could be downloaded on other phones and promptly proceeded to get it on my own! The software works like a charm, but what I'm not clear about is the nature of the license for this software.  Is it trial, as a friend suggested it was, or is it free as in gratis? If any of my readers use Swype, I'd love to hear your thoughts about it.Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

Advertisements, for most of us, are those annoying things that interrupt us as we are watching our favorite program on the television.
It’s quite rare that we get to see an ad which is so entertaining that we don’t really seem to mind the interruption, but it’s all too common to come across ads that irritate us.  One ad which gets my goat is of a popular cellular network provider and it goes like this. A teen girl proudly proclaims that she is going on a date with a fellow teen (who shows up in a flashy car).  The hero of the ad is another teen,
who secretly admires the girl in question, and comes up with an idea to ensure that the Romeo in the car doesn’t get cozy with the girl he is after: he presents her with a swank new mobile phone, equipped with the cellular providers’ data services.  The girl is so hooked to the phone that the
Romeo with the car gets nothing but the cold shoulder.  Nice idea, or is it really?
Now there might appear to be nothing wrong with this ad, especially for people outside of India, but to better understand why I'm not a fan of this ad, let's consider a couple of facts.
All around the world, teenagers date and it is perfectly normal for kids in India to do it too. However, all over the world, to the best of my knowledge, teens also work part-time, waiting tables, working in supermarkets, going on newspaper-routes and the like, earning money to take care of their own expenses, at least in part.  How about in India ?  Oh, no, no, no!  In India, it is considered to be the duty of the parents to provide for all the expenses incurred by their
darling children.  It's been so, practically for ever, barring exceptional cases.  That was how it was for me as a kid and that was how it was for my dad, and his dad.   Most of the kids in India grow up never having worked for pay, before they land their first job, after the completion of their studies. Till the child graduates, it's generally the parents who foot all expenses incurred by the child. This peculiar fact probably explains why studies receive so much attention in India, and also the fact that the vast majority of kids who go to school also graduate.  The West has the concept of dignity of labor while we in India don't.  The average child does not grow up to wait tables, tend the bar, drive trucks or work at the gas station.  It's those kids whose parents could not afford to educate them or those who were too dumb to make it through school who work such jobs.   In the west, I believe it is  common to find people who pick up such jobs as they were disinterested in education, while in India, there can be no such thing as being disinterested in studies.  Unless one is mentally retarded or one's parents cannot afford to put them through school, it is assumed that the child WILL finish his/her graduation and will then commence working in a respectable job.  Oh, in case you didn't already realize, being a truck driver or a gas station  attendant is NOT considered to be a respectable job if one happens to hail from a 'respectable' family.  To avoid digressing further, let me just say that kids in India don't work: their parents provide for them.  When I was a student, I had but to ask my parents for money, as and when I needed it. Of course, the need had to be justified and I couldn't do anything that I wanted with it.  I never got  any fixed pocket money either, and it was so with all of my friends.
So, how did my friends and I manage dating expenses ? What dating expenses ? We were students who were not supposed to be dating anyway for we were
supposed to be doing nothing but studying and we didn't date. Upon completion of our studies, we would land good jobs and then our parents would find
somebody nice for us to get married to and get settled down with.  See, no need for dating! For those of you to whom it sounds like extremely outdated
thinking, I totally agree with you. For those of you who read this with disbelief, I can assure you that it is perfectly true.   The fact that our parents provided us with everything was always going to be used as a psychological weapon to rein us in.  Harsh discipline and capital punishments only leave one bitter, but emotional binding works wonders, depending on which side you are looking from.  Not only was dating frowned upon, it was positively taboo.  Only the really adventurous souls, the reckless ones and of course, the wrong-ones did it.  I once shook a girl's hand in one of those fancy club-handshake ways, in school, and promptly got a call to my teacher's chambers where she took it upon herself to try and explain how I was deceiving my parents and going against the norms of our great society.  I was as much a rebel then as I am today, and I  immediately took it upon myself to express my indignation against her ravings which only enraged her that much more. Anyway, I always felt that we ought to have more society approved freedom and a more lenient view towards dating. The approval of the society would
make dating enjoyable to everybody and not just those who got a kick out of grabbing the forbidden fruit. Enter the next generation and it was plainly visible that they were not going to be held back by emotional restraints, as we used to be.  I remember badgering my father to buy me a personal computer when I was nineteen and a mobile phone when I was twenty.  These requests were very reluctantly granted, after subjecting me to lengthy debates about necessities and luxuries, in life.  I now saw the next-gen kids using same tactic with great success, for getting themselves greater freedom, regular pocket money, enough money for dating expenses and so on.  And they dated like they were compensating for all their
predecessors who could not.  Now, parents know and have started to accept that their children date.  It's even possible that some of the parents know
and have accepted that their children are sexually active.  Wow! Our society has come a long way from the medieval era, it would seem, but has it ?   It is great to see the kids of the next generation enjoying far greater freedom, but has it made them think about how they themselves can be more
responsible people?  They certainly managed to get the freedom to date,  but now surely they will also be thinking about working part-time, to pay for those additional expenses ? Oh no.  Why bother with uncool things like working when whining works so well ? The kids seem to whine more, and their parents seem to give in more and more. Son: Dad, I need a car as all my friends have cars. 
Dad: Okay sonny. 
Daughter: Dad, I need thirty grand as I need to buy some designer clothes.  All my friends wear only designer clothes and it would be humiliating to be
seen wearing commonplace clothes.
Dad: Hmmm, okay darling. 
Son: Dad, I need twenty grand to buy a girl who is not even my girlfriend, a phone.
Dad: What ? Why ??
Son: Come on dad, the other guy is trying to impress her with the new car his father has gifted him.  My car is three years old!  I can't compete!
I need to at least give her a cool new phone, to stay in the hunt, so what's it going to be ? A new car or fifteen grand ?
Dad: Ok, ok. You got me there.  Here you go, twenty grand.
Son: Thanks dad, you are the best! Are most of our generation-next nothing but whiners ?
Has it become a case of the cure being worse than the disease ?Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

Here’s wishing a very happy birthday! A quirky poster on lj, I strongly suspect that his blogging style came to the notice of the people who eventually went on to start Twitter!  A warm friend who always speaks his mind and wears his heart on his sleeve.  Have a great birthday, buddy!   Looking forward to the pics and your own post later in the day!Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

Ever since I got myself a new phone, I’ve been exploring a lot of things, including Facebook which I’d always shied away from.  Probably the extremely busy look of fb did not appeal to my minimalist tastes earlier and it is probably why I like the Android app so much more than its regular counterpart.  Still, its early days and I just hope and keep my fingers crossed that people don’t start throwing stuff like sheep and invites to try my hand at this game or that community, at me!  Speaking of minimalistic tastes, that’s also the reason why I love lj so much: its powerful, the folks are great and its so plain.  Along with fb, my interest in posting on lj has also seen an upswing because the Android application for lj is extremely simple to use.  Hmmmm.  ‘Old wine in a new bottle’ is quite a good idea sometimes!Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

I was watching a movie called ‘Just like heaven’, in which a character uses the word ‘Righteous’ where one would expect ‘Right’.  When I thought about the usage, I realized that it was not exactly used out of place.  I looked up origin of the word ‘Right’, wondering whether it was after all a truncated version of ‘Righteous’ and found something interesting.  The earliest usage of the word ‘Right’ , in old English, dates to around the year 900 and means among other things morally correct and straight.  It also is related to rectus, and hence to erect, and of course, to erection!
The word ‘Righteous’ is actually derived from ‘Right’ and not the other way round.  It originally meant ‘Right-wise’, meaning all that was right.   Now, what is interesting is that the moral part of the correctness is no longer associated with the word ‘Right’, as it now is more commonly used as a synonym to ‘ Correct’.  When a question paper says ‘Circle the right answer’, it’s actually referring to the correct answer while ‘Do the right thing’ actually means the righteous thing.  With the word ‘Righteous’ almost disappearing and the moral aspect getting dropped from ‘Right’, one can’t help but wonder if conscience and morals are slowly dying out in a language where words like awesome can now be used as an adjective to describe anything.   Consider again, the word ‘Freak’.  www.etymonline.com has this to show:
Freak (n.) 1560s,”sudden turn of mind,” of unknown origin, perhaps related to O.E. frician “to dance” (not recorded in M.E., but the word may have survived in dialect) [OED, Barnhart], or perhaps from M.E. frek “bold, quickly,” from O.E. frec “greedy, gluttonous” (cf. Ger. frech “bold, impudent”). Sense of “capricious notion” (1560s) and “unusual thing, fancy” (1784) preceded that of “strange or abnormal individual” (first in freak of nature,1847). The sense in health freak, ecology freak,etc. is attested from 1908 (originally Kodak freak,a camera buff). Freak show attested from 1887. The verb meaning “change, distort” goes back to 1911. Earlier, “to streak or fleck randomly” (1630s). For a word that is in active use by the younger generation, it’s certainly old!  However, from ‘Freak of nature’, it has evolved much.  Consider the following sentences.
1) A freak accident left five dead.
2) Shoaib Akhtar works up freakish pace when he bowls.
3) My mom will freak out if she sees the telephone bill.
4) Let’s freak out.
5) You are freaking me out.
6) Sachin is friggin awesome! What seems clear is that the actual meaning of the word hardly seems to matter as long as it seems to be popular.  Why else for God’s sake is the word ‘like’ used to fill in pauses? If there were to be a speech in English by somebody like the former prime minister of India A.B. Vajpayee, (who was notorious for his pauses mid-speech) and all the pauses were changed to the word ‘like’, you will come up with something that would seem like the work of gennext.   and I have often discussed the evolution of the English language and she points out that it’s something that has been changing constantly and will continue to do so.  It most certainly will, but what seems disturbing is the manner in which words with specific meaning are getting unceremoniously dumped while new, one-size-fits-all words are being embraced.   Incidentally, when I was looking up word origins,  I came across an article which spoke about the need to know the real meanings of words in order to fully understand works like the bible.  At this rate, we will probably see works like the bible rewritten only to ensure that it is can be followed by a populace which is really too dumb to follow classic literature. Will the coming generations read about the ‘Three smart dudes’ who visited infant Jesus, I wonder.Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

The thing about death is that nobody wants to think about it though it is all around us.  I got a reprieve from death or grievious injury, just last night, and the manner in which the whole incident unfolded could well be funny, had it not been so terrifying. After a less than fruitful day at the office had stretched to 2330 hours, I was riding my bike back home.  The traffic was sparse and I made good time.  I was barely a kilometer away from my residence and I was looking forward to hitting the sack.  There was a lone car on the road, heading in the same direction as I was, ahead of me.  As the car was not moving fast, I decided to pass it and closed the gap.  Now, I was probably preoccupied with thoughts about the disappointing day at work, but I’d still seen that there was no lights headed my way, as I prepared to pass the car, but before I could pass, the driver of the car suddenly veered left.  Now, I’d increased my speed in order to pass the car and was wondering why the car veered off, when the cause for the sudden move presented itself: it was a charging cow, horns and all.  It was probably just meandering on the road, as us commonplace in India, when it got spoiled/angry for some reason. The absence of street lights on that stretch made things tricky, but the car ahead had completely blocked the cow from my view.  It would still not have mattered, but for the fact that it was charging now, in my direction.  The left side of the road was in a bad shape, to compound my woes, but skidding/falling off the bike seemed a lot better than getting skewered by the cow’s horns.  I pulled away, but the cow was too close already. Her horns caught my rearview mirror which stuck out some way, and sheared it clean off.  Had the metal been stronger and provided more resistance, I could have been knocked right off, instead I only felt a twitch, and I was able to regain my  balance and managed to pull away.  The car ahead of me had seen the whole thing and had pulled over to the side and enquired whether I was ok.. I told him that I was only shaken up and went my way. 
Looking back at it, it does seem a bit funny, getting charged at, by a holy Indian cow, but it was anything but funny when I was living those seconds.  I shudder to think what might have transpired if I’d even been fractionally slower, but I suppose that is what life is like, at times.Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

hmm.. I see more than one app on the Android market, for an lj app.  I made the previous post with a third-party app which seemed to be more popular that the official livejournal app, but then, I thought I’d give the official version a try too, and here are my thoughts. I feel that the other app, by a company called Sensical, is a lit faster at loading, but is also a good deal lighter when it comes to features.    The official version seems to have all features or at least almost all features offered by lj.  You can choose the profile pic to be used, your mood, location, song.. blah blah..you can also use lj cuts, reference fellow ljers… the works, but I suppose if all that you wanted was to put up a quick update, the app by sensical seems to make more sense. Any other mobile ljers out there? If so, what app do you use and what are your thoughts about it?Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

Nicholas Cage plays the role of Castor Troy and has a younger brother called Pollux, in the movie Face/Off. Until today, I didn’t know that the characters were actually named after stars, the two stars that seem near to the moon, and this I got to know thanks to Google Sky Map, which is now installed on my new Android phone.  When I asked around for popular Android applications, one of the most recommended apps was Google Sky Maps. Intrigued, I proceeded to install it and have since then done a fair bit of star spotting with it. Here’s how it works: if you have a gps enabled device such as a tablet or a smart phone, Google’s Sky Map program fetches your geographical position from gps, accurate to within three metres. It the calculates the angle at which you are holding your device of choice. Based on those parameters, it then proceeds to render the positions and names of various celestial bodies, and it is surprisingly accurate!  The weather was rather overcast on the day I installed the app on my phone. Despite the cloud cover, I was able to spot a rather unusually bright ‘star’(it turned out to the planet Jupiter). Early this morning however, the sky was perfectly clear and I could see a great many stars. With Sky maps, I was able to identify the aforementioned Castor and Pollux, Sirius, Betelguese, Rigel…It was a lot of fun! 

As a kid,  I was always fascinated by Hollywood hackers deftly typing out insane amounts of stuff in what seemed to be no time!
I always wanted to emulate them, but  touch-typing seemed to be something beyond me.  My short and relatively stubby fingers would just refuse to perform the complex acrobatics across the keyboard.  Just when I’d all but resigned to remain a two-finger hunt-and-peck typist for life,  I read about the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard Layout.   It intrigued me,  to say the least,  and before long,  I was practicing with Dvorak. 

The start was slow,  but I believed that this was not beyond me,  unlike querty was.  I was able to quickly learn up and before long,  I got to a speed which was roughly the same as that of my two-fingered technique with querty.   I decided to make the plunge and switch layouts for good.  I set up my home pc with Dvorak as the default layout.  I did evaluate the ramifications of using a non-standard keyboard,  but then,  found that the Dvorak layout has support is just about every operating system.  All I would need to do was to change the layout before I used a system.  Not very convenient,  it may seem,   but the happy fingers beckoned! 

With a little practice,  I started gaining in speed and accuracy and started leaving my classmates trailing in my wake (the same guys who used to show off their fancy typing skills on the Querty layout).  By the time I went to NCST for my PG Diploma,  I was a seasoned Dvorak user and man, at NCST, it really paid to have a good typing speed as we had to often type out long programs within very limited timeframes as part of what were called ‘Machine Graded Programming Tests’.  I’ve now been a Dvorak user for well over six years now and I can tell you that it’s great.  My fingers need to move a lot lesser than it would have to with Querty and I’m told that dangers of repetitive stress injury are also lessened somewhat,  with the Dvorak layout.  So,  how fast am I, really ?  I decided to check for myself,  and below are the results!



In case you are interested in finding out how fast you can type,  you can use check it out by visiting http://speedtest.aoeu.nl

Even though the cricket world-cup has been hogging the televisions and conversations of most of the country,  for me,  the real sporting action was going to kick off yesterday, when the Formula1 season of 2011 got underway.
As with practically every new season,  this one heralded quite a few changes in the rules section.
The 107% rule has been reintroduced.  For those of you who don’t know what it means, it means that once the top qualifying time has been set,  all remaining drivers would have to be within a 107% of that time.  This is a rule that ensures that you don’t have cars on the grid which are very hugely different in their capabilities.   This was no doubt prompted by innumerable instances the previous season which had cars which were running more than 4-5 seconds off the pace of the leaders which meant that the slower cars kept getting in the way of the faster ones,  over and over again, sometimes with disastrous consequences as you can see in the video below.  Mark Webber,  getting a bit impatient in overtaking a back-marker goes flying (not exactly what is meant by ‘Red Bull gives you wings!).



The other significant changes this season are the reintroduction of Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS) which was last seen in 2009.  This allows a part of the energy dissipated during braking an F1 car to be converted to electrical energy which is stored in batteries and can be used by drivers to get an additional boost of speed, when required.  There seems to be a system in which drivers can now adjust the angle of their rear wings too,  when driving,  as if they didn’t have enough buttons to press while driving their a**es off.


So, how did the first qualifying session go?  Not without too many surprises as Sebastian Vettel got the better of everybody else,  but I must say that I was disappointed to see Michael Schumacher not making it to round two of qualifying, which meant that he would start the race from 11th position.  

The race itself started rather soberly,  considering that the Australian GP is one of the races where the rush to make it to the first corner on the opening lap itself sees many drivers getting shunted out.   Though there were not half a dozen cars making a hasty exit,  one of the backmarkers did crash into Michael Schumacher thereby all but ruining his race.  This is the danger of being in the midfield instead of being ahead of everybody.  Vettel had no such trouble as he started off from pole position and seemed to be in a race of his own,  with only himself.   Michael’s teammate Nico Rosberg was taken out by Rubens Barrichello who had an extremely forgettable day,  littered with mistakes and which finally ended in a retirement.   On the positives,  Sauber rookie Sergio Peres seemed to make no mistakes at all and drove an astonishing race in which he made only one pitstop in a race in which every other driver who finished completed two or more stops, and managed to finish in seventh position,  earning himself six points.   In fact,  such was his control that at one point,  it looked possible that he might  actually get past the McLaren of Jenson Button!  While it’s too early to say whether he is championship material or not,  he certainly seems to have the right stuff and I look forward to watching more of his racing this season.   Also, full points to Vitaly Petrov who rose to the occasion in the absence of Robert Kubica, and finished with a very strong third place on the podium,  ahead of a charging Fernando Alonso who had to settle for fourth place.

Here are the full results, courtesy www.formula1.com

<h2>2011 FORMULA 1 QANTAS AUSTRALIAN GRAND PRIX</h2> Provisional Results <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" class="raceResults" summary=""><tbody><tr> <th>Pos</th> <th>No</th> <th>Driver</th> <th>Team</th> <th>Laps</th> <th>Time/Retired</th> <th>Grid</th> <th title="Points">Pts</th> </tr> <tr> <td>1</td> <td>1</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Sebastian Vettel</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">RBR-Renault</td> <td>58</td> <td>1:29:30.259</td> <td>1</td> <td>25</td> </tr> <tr> <td>2</td> <td>3</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Lewis Hamilton</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">McLaren-Mercedes</td> <td>58</td> <td>+22.2 secs</td> <td>2</td> <td>18</td> </tr> <tr> <td>3</td> <td>10</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Vitaly Petrov</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Renault</td> <td>58</td> <td>+30.5 secs</td> <td>6</td> <td>15</td> </tr> <tr> <td>4</td> <td>5</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Fernando Alonso</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Ferrari</td> <td>58</td> <td>+31.7 secs</td> <td>5</td> <td>12</td> </tr> <tr> <td>5</td> <td>2</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Mark Webber</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">RBR-Renault</td> <td>58</td> <td>+38.1 secs</td> <td>3</td> <td>10</td> </tr> <tr> <td>6</td> <td>4</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Jenson Button</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">McLaren-Mercedes</td> <td>58</td> <td>+54.3 secs</td> <td>4</td> <td>8</td> </tr> <tr> <td>7</td> <td>17</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Sergio Perez</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Sauber-Ferrari</td> <td>58</td> <td>+65.8 secs</td> <td>13</td> <td>6</td> </tr> <tr> <td>8</td> <td>16</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Kamui Kobayashi</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Sauber-Ferrari</td> <td>58</td> <td>+76.8 secs</td> <td>9</td> <td>4</td> </tr> <tr> <td>9</td> <td>6</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Felipe Massa</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Ferrari</td> <td>58</td> <td>+85.1 secs</td> <td>8</td> <td>2</td> </tr> <tr> <td>10</td> <td>18</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Sebastien Buemi</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">STR-Ferrari</td> <td>57</td> <td>+1 Lap</td> <td>10</td> <td>1</td> </tr> <tr> <td>11</td> <td>14</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Adrian Sutil</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Force India-Mercedes</td> <td>57</td> <td>+1 Lap</td> <td>16</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>12</td> <td>15</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Paul di Resta</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Force India-Mercedes</td> <td>57</td> <td>+1 Lap</td> <td>14</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>13</td> <td>19</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Jaime Alguersuari</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">STR-Ferrari</td> <td>57</td> <td>+1 Lap</td> <td>12</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>14</td> <td>9</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Nick Heidfeld</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Renault</td> <td>57</td> <td>+1 Lap</td> <td>18</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>15</td> <td>21</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Jarno Trulli</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Lotus-Renault</td> <td>56</td> <td>+2 Laps</td> <td>20</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>16</td> <td>25</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Jerome d’Ambrosio</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Virgin-Cosworth</td> <td>54</td> <td>+4 Laps</td> <td>22</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>Ret</td> <td>24</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Timo Glock</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Virgin-Cosworth</td> <td>49</td> <td>+9 Laps</td> <td>21</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>Ret</td> <td>11</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Rubens Barrichello</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Williams-Cosworth</td> <td>48</td> <td>+10 Lap</td> <td>17</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>Ret</td> <td>8</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Nico Rosberg</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Mercedes GP</td> <td>22</td> <td>+36 Laps</td> <td>7</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>Ret</td> <td>20</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Heikki Kovalainen</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Lotus-Renault</td> <td>19</td> <td>Water leak</td> <td>19</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>Ret</td> <td>7</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Michael Schumacher</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Mercedes GP</td> <td>19</td> <td>Puncture damage</td> <td>11</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>Ret</td> <td>12</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Pastor Maldonado</td> <td nowrap="nowrap">Williams-Cosworth</td> <td>9</td> <td>+49 Laps</td> <td>15</td></tr></tbody></table>

I’d come down (gone down ?) to Bangalore on work.  I was through with the official part of the tour on Friday, which meant that I had the weekend to spend with my family and probably catching up with any friends who could be caught up with. 
The high-point of the trip was catching up with  .
Now,  Deepa and I just manage to get these flowing conversations going,  with great ease,  and our conversation steered towards the mess in the IT world.  I pointed out a parallel with the IT mess and an Arthur Conan Doyle story, a Sherlock Holmes mystery in fact,  ‘The Red-Headed League’.
The parallel is like this:

The Red-Headed League (TRHL) : A guy gets an offer he cannot refuse: get paid handsomely for doing practically nothing (copying out entries from encyclopedias onto plain paper)
IT Scenario: An Engineering degree holder from any stream (civil, architecture, automobile, electrical, electronics, IT, mechanical, chemical  and all of their combinations) gets a handsome salary for doing practically nothing (adding up to the bench-strength of the organization).

TRHL: The guy suddenly stops getting paid.
IT Scenario:  The graduate gets laid off.

TRHL:  The guy gets miffed that he is no longer getting paid for doing what he was doing (nothing).
IT Scenario: Same as with RHL.

Now,  Deepa and I were discussing about what was more depressing:  people getting into jobs without even bothering to see whether they would be happy/content with the jobs or people getting used to the idea of getting paid for doing nothing and actually looking upon that as a right.

Deepa remarked that she had never thought about  Doyle’s THRL in this context.  We then got around to talking about other things.  A long walk,  a tasty and refreshing cup of ‘baitu’ coffee later,  we were sitting down doing more talking when suddenly Deepa asked me about what exactly it was that I’d told her to which she had commented that she had not viewed it in that context,  and for the life of me,  I could not remember it either.  We both tried to retrace the conversation-tree, but to no avail.  We consoled each other that it might just come back to us later, and it did. 
Am I happy that it came back to me ? Yes.
Am I relieved that it came back to me ? Very.

Now, here comes the poser:  Why is it so easy to forget things which we actually enjoy/enjoyed,  bits of conversations,  entire periods in time which used to be so much fun, while remembering with excruciating detail every insult and slur that came/comes our way ?   I wrote about Pain sometime back and about fearing to tread into the recesses of ones’ own mind  sometime prior to that.   I guess we remember all too well that we have our bottles of Pain hidden away in some back alleys of our mind  but don’t always remember where exactly they are hidden away.   That could be why some of us are scared of dwelling inside our own minds.  I ought to know:  I’m terrified of exploring my own mind, at times.

Is Pain a physical substance ? Does it have a chemical composition ? A physical structure ? If at all Pain has a physical structure, I guess it must be a gas, for it has a lot of properties which are identical to those of gases. Pain, like gases, can be compressed and bottled up. Pain can also expand to take up all available space. Pain could grow to occupy your whole mind, your whole life even. Or it could be bottled away and relegated to a dark recess of ones’ mind, with the hope that the seal on the lid never comes undone.

Disclaimer: Lots of tech jargon When I bought myself a personal computer late last year,  I had a lot of things on my mind,  but one thing stood on top, dictating all my choices:  it had to be a gaming station! It’d been a whole lot of time since I’d freaked out with games like I used to, back in my college days.  My first ever PC had set my father back by around INR 39,000.  During those days,  I could boast that my PC not only had support for DDR memory, but it ALSO had, surprise, surprise, an Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP)! I’d got 256 MB of DDR memory in that baby and man, was I happy!

I was watching this movie called ‘Just like Heaven’  in which a character who is a psychologist is seen talking to a friend who has been something of a recluse for over two years,  ever since the passing away of his wife.   The psychologist  is asking his friend, the protagonist,  to go out more often,  meet more people and be more socially active. 
His dialog goes thus "Look around you, see this? This is the world, join it! Stop swimming around in your own mind. That is a dangerous neighborhood that you should not go into alone."

How often do we do the same thing?  Do we realize the implications ?  The mind can indeed be a dangerous neighborhood,  if one is all alone,  or seems to find himself/herself so.

This one is about a tale from the Arabian Nights bearing the same name as the subject of this post.  It’s one of my favorite tales. 

</strong>
The tale concerns a very poor fisherman who quite by chance happens to 'net' a sea-creature one day, a merman, if you wish.
The merman promises the fisherman a handsome reward, if only he is allowed to go in peace.  The fisherman complies and gets his promised reward.  Further,  the merman strikes a deal with the fisherman: Each day, the fisherman was to procure the best of fruits that grow on dry-land, which was out of the reach of the sea creatures, and give it to the merman, who would pay him in precious stones for each such consignment.  This arrangement was to cater to the request of the King of the sea creatures, who desired to eat fruits that grew on dry land. Both parties were very happy with the arrangement and it went off without a hitch for several days.

One fine day,  the merman invites the fisherman to pay a visit to the underwater world.   When told that the merman's magic charm would allow the fisherman to breathe underwater, as he would be able to do so on land,  the fisherman doesn't hesitate for a moment.  After all,  he was extremely curious about the underwater world.   After chanting a secret charm in a strange tongue,  the merman leads the fisherman deep underwater.  Needless to say,  the fisherman is astounded by the beauty and sights on the underwater world.   Presently,  they come upon a procession of  undersea creatures who seem to be celebrating some grand event.  The creatures are singing and dancing and rejoicing.   The fisherman inquires whether it's a marriage party to which the merman replies in the negative.  It was a funeral procession of a dear friend.  Now, the fisherman is very perplexed.   He tells the merman that he finds their customs very strange and that,  on earth,  people beat their chests in agony and anguish when a loved one passes away.   The merman flies into a furious rage upon hearing this. 
"What can be a more joyous occasion than one in which one of us goes back to our beloved maker? You cry and lament when you should celebrate with unrestrained joy? You and your race are too ignorant to even deserve our friendship and hospitality !" shouts the merman and in a thrice,  the fisherman finds himself tossed out of the water, back on to dry land,  never to hear from his sea-creature friend again.

When the fisherman narrates his tale of woe to a friend and bemoans his misfortune at having lost such a rewarding friendship over a matter as trivial as laughter and tears,  his friend consoles him, but points out that  laughter and tears are really no trivial matters.  Even seemingly trivial matters such as laughter and tears may be matters of great importance,  even the very roots of entire philosophies and schools of thoughts,  to people. 
Tale Ends

Why do I like this story so much?  Because though it seems to be very simple,  I think it is extremely profound.  Often,  in life,  we come across situations in which the reactions of certain individuals or groups of individuals to certain situations/incidents just do not seem to be justified or proportionate.   Instead of trying to place ourselves on moral higher grounds or labeling them ‘abnormal’ or ‘absurd’ or worse,   we should probably reflect on whether it was really a case of ‘Laughter and Tears’.  Your thoughts?

Yesterday was bitwise 2011,this year’s edition of an annual computer science fest which includes things like online puzzles and the main course,  a programming contest which attracts some of the best of talent from many parts of the world.  It was the second time I’d signed up for the contest but it was the first time that I would actually be participating.  I’d signed up the previous year too,  but had to do a no-show as something had come up at the last minute which meant that I could not participate.  Yesterday, though,  I ensured that I would participate.
Though the rules allowed for teams of three,  I was all alone.   I wasn’t looking for glory or even any recognition.  I just wanted to figure out where I stood.

The competition started off and I soon began to hope that I’d prepared more.   To cut a long story short,  I did come up short,  though it was not a total washout as I had fun coding up two versions of combination generators,  one of which still needs some work.
Programming is both an art as well as a skill.  Just like any skill needs practice and constant polishing,  programming too needs practice.   The art part means that there are some things that you are innately gifted with,  the flow of logic for instance,  but when you are rusty,  you often tend to doubt yourself,  even where you need not,  and such an approach only means that you while away precious time,  and in a competition like this where time comes at a premium,  you really don’t have much to while away. 

I had fun though.   I hope to take part the next time too,  but with better preparation and strategies.    I felt I really could not give my best yesterday and that is something i intend to correct at the first given opportunity.  

Today is Valentine’s day.  Oh,  I forgot to mention that I was coding away till the wee hours of today (I only went to bed at 6 AM. ) and that means that when I woke up,  I was not exactly feeling Valentinesy.   I dragged myself to work and now am about to wrap up and sign off from another day at work.   I saw  ’s Valentine card which was really nice and that’s when I realized that it was Valentine’s day today.
 And oh,  though the subject line mentioned odes to love,  I guess this post doesn’t contain any.  Not that I’m bitter or unhappy or anything.  I guess I’m just tired.  And probably quite sleepy too.   Have fun,  all my readers and may you all have a lovely St. Valentine’s day.

Okay, people! I have an update!  I bought my first Transformer toy! Having grown up as a kid,  wondering what that peculiar toy truck that could be twisted to form a robot was all about,  it was only after I saw the movie Transformers as an adult,  that I realized what the toy was actually about!  The toy was a version of Optimus Prime(now 20+ years old and still in pristine condition!), one of the key characters of the Transformers storyline.   It must be a collector’s piece today and worth quite a bit of a fortune on ebay! 

A rather lame gimmick to attract attention no,with the  title of a post containing heartbreak diaries? However, this post is not going to be anything about heartbreak, for I’m not heartbroken.  Truth be told, I’ve been in too much of a daze induced haze to feel much of pain.  The fact that my examinations came up at a convenient time (or inconvenient, depending on point of view) meant that I had virtually no time to even reflect, gather my thoughts, scattered emotions or anything else before plunging headfirst into the rigmarole of preparing for an examination.  For the record, it’s the examinations of my fifth semester of MCA, with one more semester separating me from a degree that I’m only acquiring to claim that I’m possess a masters degree.  Did my knowledge improve due to my taking up or attempting to finish this degree?  I guess not, but then, I was pretty sure from the word go that gathering knowledge was not what I was looking to accomplish when I signed up for the degree.  There have been way too many examinations that I have not taken with any degree of seriousness and I had no intention of adding the examinations of this course to that list but then,  I guess I have a problem with working on things that do not seem to interest me.   Or it’s a damn intelligent excuse to avoid having to study, and I’m so convinced by the lie of the excuse that I’ve begun to believe it myself.  Either ways,  I don’t seem to be able to take these exams too seriously.   The fact that I seem to be able to clear (I have been able to clear so far) these exams with a little over a few dozen hours of ‘study’ seems to trivialize the whole exercise further.   To give a new take to a Groucho Marxism,  I should probably not be signing up for degrees that even I can pass with ease! 

I’m done with three of these farcical exams and I have two more coming up: tomorrow and the day after.   
Considering that I used the word heartbreak in the subject of this post,  a few updates on the relationship front is required.  
I’m well on the way to recovering from whatever pain that I went through.   I had a couple of epiphanies that helped me realize the futility of trying to flog a dead horse, to use a cliche, and I’m much better off now.  I’m really glad that I have the kind of friends that I do.   deponti   of course deserves special mention.  I’m so glad I ever met you.   You are a rock.  

 One of my other lj friends has found what appears to be lasting bliss relationshipwise and I hope things turn out golden for her.  I don’t name her here because I leave it to her to make her own announcements, as and when she deems fit.   I would just like to say that I’m very happy for her.  
I’m going to wrap up this rather oblique post to grab dinner and get back to the preparation for the farcical exam tomorrow.  To all my friends,  each and everyone of you is irreplaceable.  I owe you a lot more than you can imagine. Though I hope that you never have to go through any tough times, if you ever do,  I hope to be there for you as you have been for me.  Peace!

I’m not a fan of social networking sites.  Having said that,  I still have accounts on orkut and facebook, though I rarely use them.  While I feel the former is rather juvenile,  I find the latter pretty intimidating.. A dozen views, a feature called ‘Wall’ that I found so hard to understand that I had to admit that it was aptly named.  Several times in the past,  I have logged in to either facebook or orkut,  checked the updates only to see a few messages from people complaining that I never respond.  I usually dash off a ‘I don’t use blah blah much at all, so don’t take it personally’  message/reply/scrap/whatever you want to call it and think about the futility of even having these accounts.  I have thought about deleting these accounts several times but then, I invariably happen to find a long since out-of-touch friend or two and end up getting intrigued and staying back.

<!--
	@page { size: 21.59cm 27.94cm; margin: 2cm }
	P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm }
-->
</style>  <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I have updates about my relationship status and I'll be posting about it soon, but this post is a reflective one, about one of the many matrimonial proposals that came my way, only to go nowhere.&nbsp; Only, this one went nowhere really fast!<br /><br />I'd had a conversation lasting all of three and a half minutes with this girl at dad's insistence and it had ended abruptly because she had to leave to join her friend on a crucial shopping expedition.  She said we could probably speak later.  My phone is generally unreachable when I'm at my desk and this girl decided to mail me after trying my number without success.  The mail read thus: <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><strong><em>Hi prashanth,<br />&nbsp; how r u hope ur 5n ,nd sorry i could n't speak 2 u properly in the noon, actually it was ma lunch break nd my colleague was forcing me 2 accompany her so plz dnt mind okay:) yup then i ve sent a request 2 u in gtalk.. take care cya:)</em></strong>  <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Now, you might question whether it is really fair on my part to judge a person by their writing or language skills <strong><sup>*</sup></strong>, but for me it was clear.  This was not an sms or a tweet but an email!  I wouldn't have minded poor language but this was no language!  If anything gets my goose, it's smsese, and if anybody  sends me an email in smsese, I see red.  Clearly, this person was so addicted to texting that she could not even decide where it was appropriate and where it wasn't.  <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">My mind cut to the future and I imagined my wife sending me a message/mail like this:<br /><em><strong>Bb n8 k. Tkg 2 dctr. Ttyl</strong> <sup>**</sup></em>!&nbsp;  (Baby not feeling ok.  I'm talking to the doctor (over phone? in person?)/taking him/her to the doctor.  I'll talk to you later).&nbsp; Way too ambiguous and far too taxing on my brain to decipher it. I immediately cringed.  I knew that there was no way in the world that I could ever connect with somebody like that.   A casual look at her orkut profile and group subscriptions (she'd sent me an invite) confirmed my fears.  I sent her a mail saying:    <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><strong><em>Hi! &lt;name&gt;,</em></strong><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><strong><em>Thanks for your mail. I did see your orkut profile and I don't think we have anything in common.  I wish you the very best of luck in finding somebody compatible.</em></strong><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><strong><em>Cheers,<br />Prashanth.</em></strong><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><strong><em>PS: Do you always use sms language even in email? Please don't take it personally but I found it very distracting and even irritating.</em></strong>  <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />I got this mail from her in reply:   <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><em><strong>Alri8 5n no issues wish u d best 2 bye!!</strong></em>  <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">My mind seemed to shout at me &quot;I rest my case!&quot;.<br /><br />* <lj user="deponti"/>&nbsp;was initially critical about my judgment too.<br />** This was a message I actually composed and sent to <lj user="deponti"/>&nbsp; to convince her why it was not such a trivial thing after all!&nbsp; She agreed it was non-trivial!</meta></meta>

I wish there was a way to nominate chronic email offenders for being criminally insane: and a way to put them away for good. I lost my employee ID card yesterday and promptly sent a mail to the (un)concerned authority (UA), only to receive nothing in reply.  Nothing.  No procedure to be followed..  Nothing.  Thin air.  Frustrated,  I went to the person in question today,  only to be told that my mail was  received barely an hour ago.  Now,  I know more than a thing or two about our email system (that’s an understatement: I’ve myself contributed heavily to it’s overhaul).  It’s as slick a system as they come.  It might not have a fancy graphical user interface, but it rivals the best in the business in efficiency.   Now, this ticked me off mightily.  Having full faith in the system and the people who keep it up,  I took UA on: I said that I could fetch the logs that would show the delivery when I thought it would have been delivered.  UA proceeded to call up my colleague, the mail admin who confirmed that UA’s account was over-quota, and the delivery indeed had taken place less than an hour ago.  

This is a survey.  Read this post for as long as your interest holds,  and then go to the last part,  where you can find out who you really are!

Here’s a groaner:

Q) What did the male centipede say when it saw a female centipede it liked?
A) What a beautiful pair of legs.. a beautiful pair of legs.. a beautiful pair of legs…

Now here comes something worse: (Don’t say you were not warned!)

Q) What did the male programmer centipede do, when it saw a female centipede it liked?
A) It wrote the following program:
<pre> int main(){ int i=0; for(i=1;i<101;i++){ printf("What a beautiful pair of legs!\n"); }

LockOn: Modern Air Combat,  fondly referred to by its fans as LOMAC.
This post is dedicated to   who had referred to his passion for a cricket game (and his exploits, with it!) on a post of his where I’d told him about my exploits with this game.  I think it’s a stupendous game,  with extremely attractive graphics and very highly realistically modeled physics.  I suppose this game is next best to actually flying those beauties.  See for yourself!




Just after take off, in my favorite bird, the Sukhoi 27.



My targets,  a group of four heavily armed Sukhoi 25 fighters.  They look menacing, but they haven't spotted me yet!



Uh-oh.. They have just spotted the Alpha-predator of the skies: Me.  This is where they try dumping their stores (weapons) to become lighter and more maneuverable, in a desperate attempt to try and survive.



They find that survival is not an option at their disposal.  As Max Payne said "They were looking to buy some sand for their hourglass.  I was not selling them any!"



A close up shot of one of my victims.  Amazing damage modeling, I think.



The view from the cockpit.



This is me, evading an AMRAAM missile, fired by a worthy opponent,  the USAF's air-superiority fighter, the F-15C.  I live to continue flying.  That's bad news for our friend in the F-15C!



Ah.. our 'friend' is hit.. but he's not out.  Timely deployment of countermeasures ensured that he only lost an engine as opposed to everything.



My response? Two words: Fox 2!



Our 'friend' has ejected.  A smart decision.



Victorious,  I turn back home. 



Ever wonder what it looks like to the pilot's eye, to see the ground coming up to meet you ? This is what it looks like.



This is what it looks like when it's much closer.



Ladies and gentlemen,  thank you for flying Chengi-Air.  We hope you have had a pleasant flight and will fly with us again!

There was a time when almost all the posts on my blog used to be F1 related, but I guess priorities changed, and I realized that my friends were not exactly as enthusiastic about F1 as I was! I guess I only posted one F1 post this year,  just after the start of the season,   and so,  I guess it’s fitting that this post comes,  just after the conclusion of the season.

It has been a very interesting season,  right through.  Michael’s comeback did not exactly go as his countless fans would have hoped for,  but one had to be practical:  he was coming out of a two year retirement  and two years of progress in Formula One is not something you can afford to lose touch with.  It’s the greatness of the man that enabled him to manage to come close to matching and on occasions, surpassing the pace of his vastly younger teammate.   Knowing Michael,  I guess he will be back much stronger next year.   As his bosses at Mercedes have not so subtly indicated,  it could be curtains for Michael’s career,  if he does not up his ante,  but Michael enjoys challenges and I hence look forward to a great season from him,  win,  lose or retire.  

Sebastian Vettel emerged the champion this year,  at the end of a truly outstanding season.   The fact that Sebastian never led the championship table,  until the last race clearly indicates that it was a topsy-turvy season which saw as many as five contenders to the title. 
The Redbull team,  with almost equally matched teammates in Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber and the McLaren team,  with former champ Lewis Hamilton and reigning champion Jenson Button seemed to have it all between themselves,  till Alonso decided to throw his own hat into the ring,  with a few incredible race victories,  and a controversial one,  in which his teammate,  at the insistence of his team,  gave away the race victory to Alonso,  by slowing down and allowing the latter to pass him.  

Controversy or not,  Alonso was back in the contention and the fact that Redbull was not indulging in Ferrari-like team-orders (giving preference to one driver over the other) meant that they ran the serious risk of handing over the driver’s championship over to Alonso,  something that very nearly happened,  but fate had to intervene again,  and the luck that Redbull and Sebastian Vettel did not seem to possess came to their aid,  when it mattered the most.   Vettel had done his own cause immense good by taking pole position (first place) in qualifying,  a feat that finally led to him winning the title.  A freak accident involving Michael Schumacher,  which ended his largely lacklustre season, and Vitantonio Liuzzi meant that the safety car was deployed,  an event which triggered off a slew of pit-stops by drivers who would have an indelible impact on the title aspirations of Mark Webber and Fernando Alonso.  

At the end of the race,  Vettel finished first and Alonso,  who could never get past the Renault of Vitaly Petrov ended up making some obscene gestures at the latter,  but it must be said that  Petrov,  a rookie,  did an incredible job and produced a faultless race.  The fact that he managed to hold back a two-time world champion in a faster car behind him for the better part of the race indicates the skill of this young Russian.   I expect to see a lot more of this guy in the years to come.
The season has ended.  It saw a lot of controversy over allowing back-markers who ran several seconds off the pace of the leaders to compete,  it saw the end of fuel pit-stops,  it saw a new points system,  it saw controversial moments,  moments of heart-pounding action,  incredible anxiety and ended on a wonderful note,  giving the world the youngest ever Formula One champ, in Sebastian Vettel.
I certainly look forward to the next season  which even includes  an Indian Grand Prix  which is going to take place in the newly constructed circuit at Delhi. 

The festival of lights.. It came and went.  It means a lot of things to a lot of people.. To the street dogs and cats,  it’s a nightmare that unceasingly comes to visit them annually!  To me,  it meant an extended weekend,  good food (courtesy the Diwali dinner hosted by my landlord),  crackers bursting at ear-splitting noise-levels,  a phone inbox full of messages by people who have not messaged,  called or even emailed in ages and a bit of nostalgia,  remembering the Diwali celebrations from my childhood.   Here are a couple of photographs.   Night time + antiquated mobile phone camera = grainy photos,   but I guess pictures do convey a lot,  so here they are,  for your consideration!




A Diwali reveller getting into the act on a typically smoky and paper-ridden street.




A ‘color-shot’ lights up the night sky.  Guess I got the timing just right.



A squib does to the ground what the ‘color-shot’ did to the sky. 

Here’s a bunch of my favorite ‘movie-lines’.  I love them so much that I’ve watched these movies several times, just to catch these lines!  Please embellish this post with your own favorites.  I’d love to know what your favorite movie lines are!

1) Kill Bill -Volume 2

(as he speaks, Bill is making sandwiches for BB and himself.)
Bill: You know, sweetie, Mommy’s kinda mad at Daddy.
BB: Why, Daddy? Were you being a bad daddy?
Bill: I’m afraid I was. I was a real bad daddy. Our little girl learned about life and death the other day. (to B.B.) Wanna tell Mommy about what happened to Emilio?
BB: ….I…killed him.
Bill: Emilio was her goldfish.
BB: Emilio was my ‘goldfiss’.
Bill: She came running into my room holding the fish in her hand, crying, "Daddy daddy, Emilio’s dead." And I said, "Really, that’s so sad. How did he die?" And what did you say?
BB: I stepped on him.
Bill: Actually, young lady, the words you so strategically used were, "I accidentally stepped on him." To which I queried, "Just how did your foot accidentally find its way into Emilio’s fishbowl?" And she said, "No, no, no. Emilio was on the carpet when I stepped on him." Mmm. The plot thickens. "And just how did Emilio get on the carpet?" And Mommy, you would’ve been so proud of her. Heh. She didn’t lie, she said she took Emilio out of his bowl and put him on the carpet. And what was Emilio doing on the carpet?
BB: Flapping.
Bill: And then you stomped on him.
BB: Uh-huh.
Bill: And when you lifted up your foot what was Emilio doing then?
BB: Nothing.
Bill: He stopped flapping, didn’t he? (BB nods) She told me later, that the second she lifted up her foot and saw Emilio not flapping, she knew what she had done. Is that not the perfect visual image of life and death? A fish flapping on the carpet and a fish not flapping on the carpet. So powerful that even a four-year-old with no concept of life or death knew what it meant.
(a new scene: Bill is tucking BB into bed.)
Bill: You loved Emilio, didn’t you?
BB: Uh-huh.
Bill: Well, I love Mommy too. But I did to Mommy what you did to Emilio.
BB: You stomped on Mommy?
Bill: Worse. I shot Mommy. Not pretend shooting like we were just doing. I shot her for real.
BB: Why? Did you want to see what would happen?
Bill: No, I knew what would happen to Mommy if I shot her. What I didn’t know is when I shot Mommy what would happen to me.
BB: What happened?
Bill: I was very sad. And that’s when I learned, some things, once you do, they can never be undone.

2) Forrest Gump

You know, it’s funny what a young man recollects. ‘Cause I don’t remember being born. I, I don’t recall what I got for my first Christmas and I don’t know when I went on my first outdoor picnic. But, I do remember the first time I heard the sweetest voice in the wide world.

3) Scarface

I never f*ked anybody over in my life that didn’t have it coming to ‘em. You got that? All I have in this world is my balls and my word, and I don’t break ‘em for no one. You understand?

4) V for Vendetta

Evey Hammond: Who are you?
V: Who? Who is but the form following the function of what and what I am is a man in a mask.
Evey Hammond: Well I can see that.
V: Of course you can. I’m not questioning your powers of observation I’m merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is.
Evey Hammond: Oh. Right.
V: But on this most auspicious of nights, permit me then, in lieu of the more commonplace sobriquet, to suggest the character of this dramatis persona.
V: VoilàIn view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin van-guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.
[carves V into poster on wall]
V: The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous.
[giggles]
V: Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it’s my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.
Evey Hammond: Are you like a crazy person?
V: I am quite sure they will say so. But to whom, might I ask, am I speaking with?
Evey Hammond: I’m Evey.
V: Evey? E-V. Of course you are.
Evey Hammond: What does that mean?
V: It means that I, like God, do not play with dice and I don’t believe in coincidences.

5) Rocky Balboa

Rocky Balboa: You ain’t gonna believe this, but you used to fit right here.
[taps on the inside of his hand]
Rocky Balboa: I’d hold you up to say to your mother, "this kid’s gonna be the best kid in the world. This kid’s gonna be somebody better than anybody I ever knew." And you grew up good and wonderful. It was great just watching you, every day was like a privilige. Then the time come for you to be your own man and take on the world, and you did. But somewhere along the line, you changed. You stopped being you. You let people stick a finger in your face and tell you you’re no good. And when things got hard, you started looking for something to blame, like a big shadow. Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get it and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done! Now if you know what you’re worth then go out and get what you’re worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain’t where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that ain’t you! You’re better than that!

6) Life is Beautiful

What kind of place is this? It’s beautiful: Pigeons fly, women fall from the sky! I’m moving here!

7) Kill Bill -Volume 2

Bill: As you know, l’m quite keen on comic books. Especially the ones about superheroes. I find the whole mythology surrounding superheroes fascinating. Take my favorite superhero, Superman. Not a great comic book. Not particularly well-drawn. But the mythology… The mythology is not only great, it’s unique.
The Bride: [who still has a needle in her leg] How long does this shit take to go into effect?
Bill: About two minutes, just long enough for me to finish my point. Now, a staple of the superhero mythology is, there’s the superhero and there’s the alter ego. Batman is actually Bruce Wayne, Spider-Man is actually Peter Parker. When that character wakes up in the morning, he’s Peter Parker. He has to put on a costume to become Spider-Man. And it is in that characteristic Superman stands alone. Superman didn’t become Superman. Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he’s Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red "S", that’s the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears - the glasses, the business suit - that’s the costume. That’s the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent. He’s weak… he’s unsure of himself… he’s a coward. Clark Kent is Superman’s critique on the whole human race. Sorta like Beatrix Kiddo and Mrs. Tommy Plimpton.


All quotes, barring #1, courtesy imdb.com.  #1, courtesy  www.whysanity.net

The other day,   was asking me whether I didn’t click photographs any more.  It was only when she asked did I realize that  it has been a really really long time since I’d even had the urge to click a snap!  Not that I’d been a button-happy shutter-bug earlier, but I used to click snaps a lot more frequently a couple of years back.

As I was ruminating on our conversation, I chanced upon some cows ruminating on their cud!  Seeing them, I remembered an old joke and decided to incorporate both  the joke and my thoughts about photography into a post here and so, here it is!  I couldn’t get close to the subjects because it’s a snake infested area and I’m quite scared of them critters, so this snap is the best that my antiquated mobile phone could manage, under the circumstances.


So, here’s the joke!  It’s an old one and I just cast  and myself into it!

 (me aka Ga): Look Ri, a bunch of cows!
 (Deepa aka Ri): Herd, Ga.
Me: Heard of what, Ri?
Deepa: Herd of cows, of course, Ga!
Me: Of course I have heard of cows! Why do you ask, Ri?
Deepa: Ga! I meant a cow herd!
Me: (puzzled) Why should I care if a cow heard? I didn’t say anything offensive to them, Ri!
Deepa: Ayyyyoooooooo!
Me: (shakes head sadly,  wondering why women have to be so hard to understand)

Below is the mail I shot off to the customer care id of Reckitt Benckiser India, the company behind brands such as Dettol, Mortein and Vanish, about a terrible experience I had with one of their products.  Read on!

Dear Customer Support Team at Reckittbenckiser,

I bought a 225 ml cannister of ‘Mortein Gold All Insect Killer’ with batch number AIK0047 and date of manufacture 04/2010 yesterday, i.e 24th October 2010.  It was in sealed and untampered condition when I bought it. This product mentions clearly, on the front side, that it ‘Kills mosquitoes AND cockroaches’. 
You see, I bought this product because my 450 sqft flat has a cockroach problem.  The accommodation in question is not only small, but is also very sparsely furnished AND is a new construction i.e it does not have cracks and crevices.  Keeping this in mind,  I thought that a 225 ml cannister would be more than sufficient to rid my flat of the cockroach problem.

Since I don’t like inhaling insecticide fumes, I sprayed ‘Mortein Gold’ liberally, in all the cockroach-ridden areas i.e kitchen shelves, underneath the sink, cabinets,  etc, before leaving for work.  I immediately saw the pests (cockroaches) emerging from their hiding places.  I assumed that the insecticide was working, and that I would come back, at the end of the day, to a cockroach-free home.  Apparently I was mistaken.  Very seriously mistaken.

When I came back, I could not find any dead cockroaches.  Oh, they’d not vaporised.  I was optimistic about that possibility, but I just had to look under the kitchen shelves to be convinced that they had not vaporised.  They were alive and well.  There was the odd cockroach moving around sluggishly, but most of them very looking quite normal, and unaffected.
You see, dear customer support team,  when I bought a cannister of ‘Insect Killer’,  I think my intentions were clear: I wanted to kill the insects.  I did not want to treat the insects to an enjoyable (or otherwise) stupor, at my expense.  To put it quite plainly,  I was not trying to host a party for them, to get them drunk.  Nor was I trying to annoy them mildly.  I was trying to kill them, and your much advertised product DID NOT do it's its job.

You see,  when I wanted to buy an insecticide,  I did not want to buy just any product: I wanted to buy one which was a trusted brand,  one which would do it's its job effectively and still be safe for me.
For the record, when I came back home and saw those healthy cockroaches, I blasted them with some more of your ‘Mortein Gold all Insect Killer’ and the cockroaches did die: when I used three to four blasts of the insecticide, spraying it directly onto the cockroaches.  I have gone through the accompanying booklet but I don’t see it mentioned anywhere that I have to spray the insecticide directly on top of the cockroach, for it to be effective.  Now, just for one minute think about the absurdity of it all: If I am to find and then neutralize each cockroach in my flat, using your ‘Mortein Gold All Insect Killer’, could I not just use a broomstick instead and be assured of results, and save on the money and the anguish over the product not working?

You might find this letter of complaint quite amusing, funny even,  but let me assure you that I don’t think it is funny at all.  I have spent good money buying your product, and it DOES NOT work.  And I want an explanation.

Your extremely aggrieved and irritated customer,
Prashanth Chengi.

The subject line is the translation of the refrain of an old Kannada song,  a song which has been one of my all time favorites.  I'd pinged   on chat and after a few minutes of silence from her end,  I was humming Yelliruve (Where are you?) to myself,  the first words of my favorite song.  That's when I decided to check it out on youtube.  It brought back memories of my childhood (when I'd seen that movie for the first time) and when  finally came online,  I told her about the song an sent her the youtube link too.  She wrote back to me saying that she really liked the song and wanted a full translation too! 
I love the song very much and thought that I'd love to translate it for a friend.  I thought I'd post the link to the song, the lyrics as well as my own version of the translation of the song, so here goes!   The song, and this post are dedicated to  



Bayalu daari - Elliruve (Lyrics)

    Yelliruve manava kaaduva rupasiye
    bayakeya balliya naguva huvada preyasiye
    bayakeya balliya naguva huvada preyasi neenu yelliruve
    manava kaaduva rupasiye

    1. theluva e modada mele nee nintha haagide
    nagu nagutha nalinalidu nanna kugidanthide
<div class="im">    seruva ba agasadalli yendu helidanthide
    tanuvella haguragi teladuvanthide, haduvanthide
    cheluve yelliruve manava kaaduva rupasiye

    2. kannalle olavena geethe neenu hadidanthide</div>    ninnaase athiyagi thuraaduvanthide
<div class="im">    hagalallu chandrana kaano bhagya nannadagide
    chandrikeya cheluvinda bhalu bhavyavagide, bhavyavagide
    nalle yelliruve manava kaaduva rupasiye</div>    bayakeya balliya naguva hoovada preyasiye
    bayakeya balliya naguva hoovada preyasi neenu yelliruve manava kaaduva rupasiye.


Where art thou, the beauty who haunts my mind,
You, my lover, who hast become the smiling flower on the creeper of my desires,
You, my lover who hast become the smiling flower on the creeper of my desires, where art thou,
Oh beauty who haunts my mind!

It seems as though you are standing atop these gliding clouds,
It seems as though your laughter is playing and calling out to me.
'Come, let us unite in these skies', my mind seems to be saying..
I feel so light that I feel I can float and sing..
Oh beauteous one, one who haunts my mind, where art thou?

It seems that you have sung the song of love, only with your eyes!
I'm drunk on my overflowing desire for you…
(Thanks to you) I have the privilege of seeing the beauty of the moon, even in the daytime,
Your moon-like beauty has made my life beautiful.
Oh lover, where art thou? The beauty who haunts my mind..
You, my lover who hast become the smiling flower on the creeper of my desires,
You, my lover who hast become the smiling flower on the creeper of my desires,
Where art thou, oh beauty who haunts my mind..

If you are reading this post because I left you a link to this post as a redirect on some social networking site AND don’t want to read about dangers posed by social networking sites,  you can directly skip to the last section of this post,  under the heading ‘Detour’.
if either of the two conditions are not met,  you can go through the full post!

Today was another one of those rare days when I logged into my facebook account.   Couldn't help wondering why I still keep it,  considering how less I use it.   I also get the odd 'You never reply to my messages/wall postings blah blah.. and will continue to do so for as long as I keep the profile and not be active.  I heard from somebody that you can't truly delete your account,  that it still stays archived on facebook's servers or something like that.   Makes one wonder when a casual comment/status update will come back to haunt you even ages later!  A random google search often pops up interesting and sometimes embarrassing information which brings us to that ever-alive question:  Do people even realize the importance of things that they say or put up on sites? 

It's nice when somebody 'remembers' your birthday thanks to an update on a social networking site,  but do people realize that the same information can also be used by scamsters and fraudsters?  I registered onto a Formula 1 racing related site just to express my solidarity to a particular team and to probably post a couple of entries on various topics related to F1, and what did I get?  A bunch of offers for paid sex from other 'members' and the biggest shock:  A google sweep showed all my personal details including full date of birth right out in the open!  Thanks to the website's don't-care-a-damn attitude towards user privacy and information security,  my details are probably going to be available on google forever (or for the duration for which google maintains it's cached entries).  My details would still not disappear even if I deleted the account in question.  Do people realize this when they post all manner of information on the net?

When anybody joins a mailing list,  an online forum or a social networking page,  they ought to do so with full understanding of its implications on privacy.  A site might not tell you that any and all information that you put up on their site,  including on your so called 'private' profile may well be available to just about anybody who knows how to use a search engine.   Be informed!  Ignorance is not always bliss.
Wait a minute!  In the previous paragraph,  I said "My details would still not disappear even if I deleted the account in question".
How is that possible?  Aren't a user's details along with his/her entire account supposed to just disappear into a blackhole the minute he/she presses the 'Delete Profile' button and confirms?  That's not how it really works. 

Search engines like google 'cache' results of earlier searches and certain random sweeps.  Have you ever wondered how it is that what you have posted in a mailing list or on a blog makes it to google?  Or for that matter how google finds anything at all in the first place?
The short and sweet explanation of how it does is something like this:  Search engines like google have automated programs called bots (sometimes referred to as spiders) which keep roaming around the internet,  'sampling' and sometimes storing complete backups of all information that they come across,  online.  Thanks to the fact that these search providers often have fantastically humongous 'data storage' capabilities,  they can virtually remember everything their bots ever encounter.  Often,  it's possible to access all contents of a website,  even after the website itself has ceased to exist,  simply because many search providers provide access to 'cached' information,  a snapshot of data taken at some point in the past.  Now that you know this,  how can you better protect your privacy? 

1) Don't ever provide information that can be used by scamsters/fraudsters to defraud you.  Do you list your date of birth?  Don't! Your real friends would know,  and the scamsters need not know.  It's better to have a few less birthday wishes than having your bank account emptied out!
2) Don't indiscriminately sign-up to sites.  Join only those sites/mailing lists which handle data-privacy and information security in a mature and professional manner. 
3) Fudge data wherever it is required by the site but not really supposed to be important for the site.  If a  site does not allow you to create a profile without mentioning your date of birth,  just put up a fictitious one.  It's better to have a few people thinking that you are trying to be coy about your age than having your bank account emptied out!
4) Important note on 'privacy options':  Sites like livejournal allow you to set privacy options on individual posts,  but this comes with a risk when incorrectly used:
If you originally posted a piece with 'public' security and later converted it to 'friends only' or 'only me',  the search engine bots may have already beaten you to it!  You might be thinking that your data is visible only to your friends or only to you,  but it might be available to just about everybody.  When in doubt,  go for a higher level of privacy:  You can always relax it later;  vice-versa is NOT in your hands.

Detour

I often think of deleting my profiles on all sites barring lj,  but there are certain advantages in letting them remain:   A long-lost friend might just encounter my facebook/orkut/some other site’s page while actually looking for ways to contact me.  It would be nice if I could redirect him/her to my lj! :)

Here’s the list of my memberships on social networking and my activity status:

1) I’m on Facebook and I barely ever log in.  If I log in and see a message from a friend(s),  I just redirect them to my lj.
2) I’m on Twitter and I barely ever log in.
3) I’m on Orkut and I barely ever log in.  If I log in and see a message from a friend(s),  I just redirect them to my lj.
4) I’m supposed to be on hi5.. I don’t use it.
5) I’m on flickr.  I use it very infrequently: only to post comments on photographs uploaded by friends.
6) My profile probably exists on picasa.  I don’t use it.
7) I’m on linkedin and I barely ever log in.
7) I’m on livejournal.  A lot!  When I’m not posting,  I’m reading my friends` blogs.  I might not post a comment or a post each day,  but I’m around.  Drop me a comment and I WILL get back to you.

If you were cursing me for not promptly responding to your messages on any of the above-mentioned sites (barring lj) AND managed to find this post,  I hope you’ll stop cursing me!  Hey, now that you are here and patiently read this post,  you know how to get in touch with me!

If you were cursing me for not accepting any invitation to subscribe to a ‘new’  social networking site,  stop cursing me and completely give up on me.  I already am a member on more sites than I’ll ever use and I ignore all invites to any new sites,  not just the ones you send me!

If you just came over here looking at a ‘redirect message’ of mine AND are wondering what’s so great about lj,  stop wondering and start up your own journal!  You’ll probably come to love it as much as I do!

If you enjoyed this post  OR  thought that it was an utter waste of your time going through this post  OR  have any questions,  drop a comment!

I happened to chance upon this poem,  one I had penned several years ago and thought I’d put it down here,  before I lost it. 

Bitter Happiness


The Lord blessed man
With the never drying horn;
Filled to the brim,
With the potion of Happiness,
'twas to keep man eternally happy.

When Adam bit the Apple,
The potion turnd bitter, vitriolic..
But the horn retained its gifts;
The gift of regeneration
And the now bitter ale. its magic.

Since then, man has only drunk
Shallowly, from the precious horn.
Shallowly, if at all, on account
Of the ale's poor taste.

All men? Nay. All but the Wise Sot;
For he still drank deep
And got drunk on Happiness,
Drunk on Trancendental Bliss.

-PC

With the F1 season having started this month,  an F1 post was not going to be long awaited, on my blog, so here it is.
This year brings lots of significant changes, both in terms of rules as well as in the contenders.
This year does away with mid-race refueling, so that means there are no longer nail-biting fueling strategies as every driver carries enough fuel to complete the whole race (or they have to hope they do!).  The points system also has undergone a major overhaul considering that there are more teams, and hence more cars on the grid.  For a long time, it was expected that there would be 26 cars from 13 teams on the grid, but the last minute pull-out from US F1 team mean that there would only be 24 cars on the grid, this year and they all vie for the first ten point-earning positions, at the end of each race.  Unlike the format, which till last year rewarded only the first 8 finishers in the 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1 manner, this year’s rules award points to the first ten positions as 25-18-15-12-10-8-6-4-2-1 meaning that the advantage of winning a race is that much more apparent.  While last year’s second position finisher would have just 2 points lesser that the winner, the difference is now 7 points. To put that in a more clear perspective, here’s a scenario:
If driver A finished 1st in five races with driver B in 2nd position in all five races, their points would be 50 and 40 respectively.  Technically, it would require driver B just one 1st position finish with a 0 point finish for A for the two to be equal on points.  This year, the same scenario would leave driver A on 125 points and B on 90 points after five races and even a 1st place 25 point finish for B with a 0 point finish for A would still leave A in the lead, with 10 points, making the message very clear: If you want to win the championship, you have to win more races. It might be recalled that in the 2008 season,  Massa lost the championship to Hamilton, despite having won more races.  That would be impossible under the current rules.

Michael's comeback:-

It's been two races now,  the opening Bahrain GP and the Australian GP and how has Michael fared so far, in his comeback after nearly three years outside F1?
Michael was slower than his teammate Nico Rosberg in all sessions of testing at Bahrain, was slower in qualifying and finished one position lesser, four seconds behind his teammate.   At Melbourne,  he was faster than his teammate in all practice sessions and qualified just behind his teammate, albeit under difficult traffic conditions.  In the race, he was unfortunate to get hit by the spinning car of Fernando Alonso which left his car with a broken nose cone, right on lap one.  Despite the additional pit stop and a rather slow scheduled pit stop,  Michael managed to grab one point by finishing 10th, five places behind Nico who had a largely uneventful race.  Does it mean that Nico is fast? Yes.  Does it mean that Michael is no longer fast enough? No!
The fact that a driver as hard working as Michael Schumacher was working with a team with as much funds as Ferrari meant that he could be that much more competitive.  With Ferrari owning their own racetrack and having ample funds at their disposal,  Michael had the luxury of almost limitless testing, something that he used to hone his skills and develop the car to perfection, on his way to collecting five of his seven titles, with Ferrari.  He now has a much tougher task, given that testing opportunities are extremely limited (under the new rules) and that his car is brand new,  not to mention that he is coming back after a 'retirement' which lasted all of three years.  Under the circumstances,  I'd say Michael has done incredibly well.  Knowing how hard Michael pushes himself,  young Nico Rosberg better be ready for a whole new level of competition starting right within his own team!

Who's looking good:-

Sebastian Vettel is the hottest driver around, it appears, this season.   After having led the race for more than three quarters of the race distance in the first race in which he was forced to settle for fourth place after his car developed mechanical problems (a busted spark plug!), he was the race leader for more than half the race distance at Melbourne too, before his race was cut short by a braking related failure.  Though he only has 12 points in comparison with Fernando Alonso's 37 and Massa's 33,  this is the driver I tip to take over the championship this year,  though Jenson Button will be much fired up, especially after collecting the win at Melbourne.

Felipe Massa seems to have left last year's horrific accident that saw him miss the whole second half of the season well behind him, and seems to be more hungry than ever.  With two time world champion Alonso as his teammate, he really has to up his ante to be able to nurture hopes of a title, and this he seems to be doing in a way only he can.

Fernando Alonso, the ever cool Spaniard, the master of tyre management and car development seems to be in pristine touch, but will have to fight hard to keep himself ahead of his own teammate while the rest, barring Vettel and Schumacher are not even in his league.

Michael Schumacher, the real genius that he is, is back and he is beginning to look good, but would take a long time to get the development of the car to start going the way he wants it to.   He ought to be competitive within the next couple of races, but how competitive he can be and whether he can fight for this year's title is something which is too early to call, at this point.

Kamui Kobayashi, the youngster who made the most of the two appearances that he got due to Toyota's Timo Glock being injured last year, is back with BMW Sauber.  I don't think this guy is a flash in the pan like other racers from Japan like Takuma Sato and Kazuki Nakajima.  He seems to mean business and it will be interesting to watch him grow.

Other drivers whom I'm keen on watching:  Bruno Senna, Sebastien Buemi and Karun Chandhok.  They are not here by chance.  Let's see if they can make it work.

Incidentally, it's the second time in Formula 1 that an Indian is present on the grid, in the driver's seat.  After Narain Karthikeyan's foray with Jordan, it's now Karun Chandhok in Team Hispania Racing, so "Go Karun Go!!!"

It’s been three years, two months and twenty two days now since I started out with a ‘Hello World! first post on LiveJournal and today, I post my 100th entry. (takes a bow) I dedicate this century (the only kind of century somebody like I can attain! :D ) to all the readers of my blog without whose support and encouragement this blog would have long ceased to have a special meaning.

Sifting through my drawers, looking for something, I came across numerous mementos from my past..including a poem I’d almost forgotten that I’d written. It was inspired by a Panchatantra tale I suppose. Here it is:

A test of true love

A flightless emu and a brilliant white pigeon,
Fell in love with each other.
The flight loving pigeon yearned for the skies,
But the thought of dashing the emu’s heart,
Kept it bound to the ground.

Said the emu, to the pigeon,
Oh! my love, shear off those wings
That threaten to take you away from me,
That tempt you to take flight,
That I may rest in peace,
With my love by my side.

This the pigeon selflessly did,
But was that love?
Had the love been really strong,
The emu would have taken to the skies.
True love, my dear, is a cruel teacher,
And he calls for many an adjustment,
But it is his imposter-brother who calls for compromise.

-PC.

It’s not often that a guy like me feels quite at a loss for words, but today is one of those times. To be more specific, I have lots of words, many of them big, superlative even, but one feels that they just don’t measure up to the task. I watched Avatar.

Google has once again prevailed over all and sundry. Even as rumors of Facebook getting ready to challenge Google’s gmail began to float in the air, Google delivered Buzz, which looks to be a certain Twitter killer. Why should I log in to another site to use a service that only a small subset of my friends use, if an existing site which is already an integral part of my online life offers the same features, albeit better designed, promises to be more robust, does away with silly things like character limits and makes it possible for virtually all of my friends to stay connected with me? It even allows me to hook up with my twitter account which means I’ll continue to stay in touch with all my tweeple friends.

Each day spent vertical is a blessing goes a saying and so, it’s a nice feeling to see another year roll past and a new year roll in. Birthdays and new year days are times when one feels happy for just having made it through all the tests and turmoils that the previous year saddled one with.
Year 2010 promises many changes and challenges, on the work front, on the personal front and even on the entertainment front. At work, I’m gearing up for new responsibilities as I’ll be personally looking over a yet to be formed team which will focus on bleeding-edge R&D in HPC. On the personal front, I hope to continue to be regular at the gym and get into a much better (read as leaner and meaner!) shape. I also have a sneaky suspicion that my single days are now in extra-time, an end seems to be somewhere, just around the corner. On the entertainment front, my all time favorite Formula 1 driver, Michael Schumacher is back! This time around, instead of the familiar red livery of Ferrari, he will be donning the silver of Mercedes. I have always rooted for Michael and largely, because of Michael, Ferrari. I loved the professionalism demonstrated by the Ferrari crew, race after race, coming good even when the chips were down.

Veteran Kannada film actor Vishnuvardhan passed away in the early hours of 30th December 2009 upon sustaining a massive heart attack. Vishnuvardhan, originally called Sampath Kumar was an extremely talented theater artist who caught the eye of maverick theater and movie director Puttana Kanagal, who set about grooming the youngster for the silver screen. It was Puttana Kanagal who gave young Sampath Kumar the screen name ‘Vishnuvardhan’, the name by which countless fans would know him by. Vishnuvardhan made his silver screen debut in award winning Vamshavruksha, but it was his starring role as an angry, egoistic and highly opinionated young man in Puttana Kanagal’s ‘Nagarahaavu’ (Cobra snake) that won him rave reviews and kudos from just about anybody who was a somebody in the Kannada movie industry. The movie went on to become a smash hit and won Vishnuvardhan the first of his many screen awards and acclaim.

the_little_sasi was the person who urged me and many of my batchmates at NCST to start blogging, and in particular ljing , so it’s sad to hear from him that he has ‘retired’ from lj. I certainly hope it’s only a sabbattical, but with Sasi sir, you can never really hope for things like that. He’s usual pretty final about things he says he’s final about. also says he’s done his last lj post and again, I hope he will reconsider. At times like these, when you usually start reconsidering whether you yourself ought to continue on or just hang up those creative ‘boots’, an incident at the breakfast table this morning gave me a new name for my blog, one that seemed apt and witty. I was discussing the advantages and disadvantages of a project proposal with a colleague when I uttered ‘Pros and Crons’ instead of pros and cons, a mistake that evaded my friend’s attention but not my own. I had a hearty laugh and told him that I now knew, after more than two years, what I wanted to name my blog. That incident and a conversation with my usually immovable and enigmatic boss later, here it is, my few known readers and (hopefully) many unknown readers, the new name of my blog: Prose and Crons -A sysadmin+writer’s journal about things geeky and not. For the benefit of my non-techie readers, crons or cron scripts are a Unix/Linux user/administrators way of achieiving order in chaos, a magical way of ensuring that system related tasks just happen on time, whether you are around or not, as long as your machine is running. I wish I could write cron scritps for my life!

Even as I was about to pack up for the day, I found that another colleague had still not left. When I asked him how come he was still around, he said he had been speaking to somebody on the phone. When prodded further, he said the words that sent me into uncontrollably hysterical laughter. His words, I quote “I was speaking to a third-class friend of mine!” He meant that he had been speaking to a friend of his who had been his classmate in class three but English being a ‘punny’ language, it took on a wholly different meaning!

In just a few hours, I’m all set to officially turn a year older. The primary purpose of this post, on the eve of my birthday is to ensure that I have a few ‘Happy birthday’ wishes on my birthday as opposed to ‘Belated birthday’ wishes in the days to come. Not that I don’t mind the belated messages (better late than never), but there are few things more pleasant than knowing that you are remembered on your birthday. Ok ok! That’s enough of shameless plugging for wishes for my own birthday! What does the day really mean to me?

Is it a coincidence that wedding vows rhymes with wedding woes? Or is it some kind of advance warning system? People often go through the motions of a wedding according to their customs and it is a well known fact that a lot of people make up their own vows, adding a touch of personal touch to the process. Do wedding vows also have fine print? When one says ‘.. in sickness and health…’ is it to be taken at face value? Or is just an exercise? Questions, the answers to which my unmarried friends would be looking too.  Hopefully, my married friends would be able to shed more light on the matter, but then again, are these questions far too relative to have empirical answers?

An online friend of mine died after battling with cancer for a while.  This was the second online friend of mine that I lost to cancer.  And in both cases, I had been out of active touch with them for a while, as often happens with online friends.  I only hope she didn’t suffer much, but from what I got to know, unfortunately that was not the case.  May her soul rest in peace. 

On the F1 front, after Felipe Massa’s unfortunate encounter with a flying automobile spring belonging to Rubens Barrichello’s Brawn GP car, it was revealed that Massa was out of danger but that he would be out of action for a while.  The news that Michael Schumacher would be getting into Felipe’s car was a pleasant surprise and a dream come true for Michael fans like myself, but it remained just that - a dream, as Michael felt that his own fitness was in doubt as he had not apparently fully recovered from a bike accident that he had sustained earlier in the year.  Much as I rued Massa’s accident and the fallout, especially since he was in great form and the car was getting better, I was very keenly looking forward to seeing Michael in action all over again, but I guess I have to settle for rooting for Luca Badoer, Ferrari’s test driver for years and years.  I hope he can grab a surprise result or two and make the best of the limited opportunity that has come his way.

<div style="text-align: left;">On the Swine flu front,  I see people all around me wearing masks of different shapes, sizes and colors, whether they are effective or not.  Refreshing the ndtv.com page has become something of  a ritual that we seem to take part in religiously as we scan for the latest updates.  We dread to see the toll increase, as it has been doing over the past few days, but know in the heart of hearts that an increased number of infections and deaths is a certainty.  People are doing everything to keep the dreaded virus at bay, be it wearing more than one masks at the same time to sniffing on camphor and eucalyptus oil!  One wonder where this is really headed…. whether and when it will come to a stop.</div>

Ok.. This post is prompted by  ’s nudges! I’ve been procrastinating about writing, and that too about this piece, but I finally decided to come out of the closet!
The hunt for a bride for me is officially on, despite the dampener being the recession and all that! For my parents, as is the case with every parent, I’m the best and they just can’t understand why they just didn’t find the perfect match for me as soon as they set their minds to the task! Firstly, my parents were almost sure that I had already found somebody for myself, though dad had his doubts (‘he has brought one too many nice girl home: indicates indecision and lack of success = still single’). When I said there wasn’t anybody, dad gave me that ‘I bet its your fault none of those nice girls decided to settle for you’ look while mom said her silent thanks (‘thank you god for not putting me through The test’ ).  

So, how’s the progress been so far?
The boy doesn’t want to leave his job in Pune for atleast another two years = Strike one.
The boy works for an R&D institution = ridiculously low pay = Strike two.
The boy only has a bachelor’s degree, that too a BCA! = Strike three and out!

Most of these have been encounters I have not even had the pleasure of actually encountering, but there have been a couple of gems. I spoke to a girl who wanted to know more about me. We chatted online.

Prospective bride (PB): What do you do?
me: I work for an R&D institute. I’m a systems administrator.  My group manages a supercomputing facility.

PB: How come you are in Pune, though you hail from B’lore? This (B’lore) is the IT hub right?
me: Yeah, but I’m in a specialised field, called High Performance Computing.  Not too many opportunities in Blore in HPC, especially with my current level of experience.

PB: Oh.. so you don’t plan to move to B’lore anytime soon?
me: Nope.

me: What do you do?
PB: I work for a stock brokerage firm.

me: Wow.. so you must be a wiz with stocks?
PB: Yeah..

me: So you must be investing in stocks too?
PB: Yeah.

me: You good at picking the right ones?
PB: Yeah.. so good infact that I bought my own car last month with my earnings..

me: oh… that is great….

me: Say, you have a car and all.. what if your prospective husband can’t afford a car?
PB: Well, he must!!! That’s a basic requirement!

me: Well, I can’t afford one.. A car is not even high on my list of priorities…

<awkward silence>

me: Hey, it’s great chatting with you….
No-longer-prospective bride (NPB): yeah… let’s be friends… and wish you luck with your search..
me: You too!


Sheesh!

With Massa’s mystery problem which resulted in a retirement and Kimi’s sudden show of affection towards the wall,  Ferrari’s cup of woes overflowed on a day on which the Brawn GP cars stole the thunder.  Rubens Barichello, the most seasoned F1 driver on the circuit, was quite fortunate to finish second.  He drove his brand new but rather battered Brawn GP car across the chequered flag behind team mate Jenson Button after Sebastien Vettel and Robert Kubica, running strongly in second and third positions respectively took each other out of the race.  With the stewards ruling against Jarno Trulli,  Ferrari’s arch rival and defending world champion Lewis Hamilton ended up reaping six invaluable points in a race of attrition. 

India is the perfect example of unity in diversity, a melting pot of race, religion, caste, creed and languages.  Remember lines like these and others that were thrust into our sleepy heads back in school ? Why, they meant a whole lot more than marks on offer for emptying that on the exam paper.. It was something that we could take pride in and celebrate..

Have you ever thought back at those lines that we read and drank deeply of ? Where is this unity in diversity ? It’s said that individuals cannot corrupt the whole, yet when we come across Raj Thackeray openly threatening to bash up Biharis and even more openly carrying out his threats,  we can expect this unity in diversity thing to wake up in our dormant minds and oppose what we see right? Irrespective of whether where we hail from?  Hell, no.. I see young Marathi colleagues of mine (read educated and professionally qualified youth) whom I don’t really know in person, having Raj Thackeray’s mug-shot set as the desktop wallpaper.  I dread to think what would happen to me if they here me talking about what I really feel about him.  I didn’t see collective disgust pouring out of people when unspeakable atrocities were carried out. 

Many of my own friends cheered when Muslims were slaughtered in Godhra and they said they got what they deserved.  They had it coming.  I didn’t know what I was to feel.  I certainly didn’t feel like remembering the lines from our school books then.  

Is there anything at all that we are united in?  All of India united over something? Yeah… I suppose our defeatist attitude.  We have such a tremendous sense of believe in fate and destiny that we don’t feel the need to do anything for that destiny to be shaped into reality.  We don’t succeed and what do we do? We just shrug our shoulders and put the blame on destiny. 

I came across a quote by Gandhi on my friend  's blog:

<p align="justify" style="margin: 5px 10px; line-height: 150%;">"I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]. Will he [she] gain anything by it? Will it restore him [her] to a control over his [her] own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions?
Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away."

Now,  who are these poor people that I need to imagine while thinking about what I want to do or not ? And pray how are their lives supposed to reflect any change in my decisions?  I'm a system administrator and a conscientious one at that.  It's my concern to see to it that my facility operates without a hitch.  How the hell would a poor homeless guy on the road be affected whether I do my job well or not ?  It's something I can't even begin to comprehend.  Now, had I been in a communist state, my salary would have been snatched away towards a gazillion causes I didn't even know existed and I probably would have been only slightly better off than that homeless guy on the street, and even that is not to be taken for granted.  At least that's the idea I got after reading Ayn Rand's  'We the people', a caustic account about communist Russia.   

Rand writes about qualified engineers not being employed just because their parents were private businessmen (bourgeois) or because they did not belong to the communist party.  Are we living is such a society? Thank God Communism or it's tattered remains remains only in parts of India and not the whole of it.  Are we not the best nation on the face of the planet for having the best of culture and traditions and a tolerable governance?  Or is that a myth?

We have our problems with governance but when you see a picture as stark as the one painted by Rand, one feels we are on paradise.  Nobody stops us from achieving whatever it is that we set our hearts upon.  In the movie 'The Pursuit of Happyness', Will Smith's character wonders how Thomas Jefferson knew to include the word 'pursuit' in the declaration of independence.  The actual line in the American Declaration of Independence says
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of  Happiness."

Don't we often revile the Americans for their lack of culture ? Their lack of family values? And pride ourselves on our culture and heritage.. And still they could come up with such a gem while we couldn't.  
Even after more than fifty years of our own independence,  we don't believe that we can get what we want by stretching ourselves.   Reservations are required to help bring up the downtrodden.  Downtrodden?? Who are we trying to kid?  Those who are downtrodden continue to remain so while those who are reaping the benefits of lower academic cut-offs and subsidized fees are the ones who zip around town on the latest two-wheeler in the market or better yet, an imported SUV!!!  And what of these downtrodden?  Will they ever reach out and come up?  No, how can they? Their fathers and grandfathers could not.  It's destiny that dictates that they can't come up.  


Once a poor man, always a poor man.. anybody who questions their fate is a heretic.  While a few raise themselves above the squalor and stench of their gutters, most prefer to remain right there.  I have seen people of South Indian origins selling vada pav and chai in 'kopchis' (little thatched roof/tarpaulin covered hutments) in Mumbai, facing up to the strong-arm tactics of Raj Thackeray and his kind, the corrupt police officers who demand steep haftas (bribes) to allow them to operate, and still make enough money to not just sustain themselves, but also to help their families and relatives back in their native places.  I met a Bihari paan-shop (betel nut) owner who said he was sending money back home where his son was studying law! 
Are these people exceptional human beings? Or are they just going in pursuit of happiness which is what every living human being ought to be doing?

We are so used to attributing our failures to destiny and what not that we even express keen surprise at times tinged with jealousy when we come to know that a person succeeded in getting out of the rut.  A typical exchange would be like this:

"Do you remember that xxxyyy?  The guy who used to borrow my spare slippers to wear  to college?  The guy who used to beg me to give him my old clothes ?  I saw that guy in a Honda City the other day!  He saw me, but did not even salute me! The gall of him! He just waved cheekily as he sped away!"
Now, here is a guy who lent a needy man slippers he would not wear, and clothes he would have thrown away and expects the other be subservient to him all his life!  Such is the attitude our own loved ones just one generation separated possess. 

And that Gandhi quote that set off this entire blog post..  Why the devil should I worry how my actions will affect the anonymous poor ?  Do they worry about how their own actions and non-actions will affect their own lives? About how they can get out of their own rut if they try ? Poverty is something that can be shaken off, but what cannot be shaken off is their firm belief that they can do nothing about their own suffering.  It is this very thought that unites most of us Indians.

I saw this on shrads_m ’s blog and loved it.  And did a ctrl-c, ctrl-v, except for the actual quotes! I also reduced the original number of 20 movies to 10 (I didn’t have twenty favorite movies!) Hope you like this meme. Here’s how it works:

1. Pick 10 of your favourite movies.
2. Go to IMDB and find a quote from each movie.
3. Post them for everyone to guess.
4. Strike it out when someone guesses correctly, and put the title of the movie and who guessed it.
5. No Googling/using IMDB search functions. That’s cheating and it ruins the fun!

These then, are the quotes from my favorite movies.  Happy guessing!

1. From the moment we enter this life, we are in the flow of it [the time]. We measure it and we mark it, but we cannot defy it. We cannot even speed it up or slow it down. Or can we ? Have we not each experienced the sensation… that a beautiful moment seemed to pass too quickly… and wished that we could make it linger ? Or felt time slow on a dull day… and wished that we could speed things up a bit ?

2. What kind of place is this? It’s beautiful: Pigeons fly, women fall from the sky! I’m moving here!

3. I never fked anybody over in my life that didn’t have it coming to ‘em. You got that? All I have in this world is my balls and my word, and I don’t break ‘em for no one. You understand? That piece of st up there, I never liked him, I never trusted him. For all I know he had me set up and had my friend Angel Fernandez killed. But that’s history. I’m here, he’s not. You wanna go on with me, you say it. You don’t, then you make a move.

4. I’d like to share a revelation I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to another area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus.

5. No, you’re wrong Stanley. Thousands die every day for no reason at all, where’s your bleeding heart for them? You give your twenty dollars to Greenpeace every year thinking you’re changing the world? What countries will harbor terrorists when they realize the consequences of what I’ll do? Did you know that I can buy nuclear warheads in Minsk for forty million each? Hell, I’d buy half a dozen and even get a discount!

6.  You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you.  He never wanted you.  In all probability, he hates you.  This is not the worst thing that can happen. We don’t need Him. Fk damnation, man, fk redemption! If we are God’s unwanted children, so be it!

7.  I know you hurtin’ and worryin’. I can feel it on you. But you oughta quit on it now. I want it over and done with. I do. I’m tired, boss. Tired of bein’ on the road, lonely as a sparrow in the rain. I’m tired of never having me a buddy to be with, to tell me where we’s going to, or coming from, or why. Mostly I’m tired of people being ugly to each other. I’m tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world every day. There’s too much of it. It’s like pieces of glass in my head all the time. Can you understand?

8.  You know, it’s funny what a young man recollects. ‘Cause I don’t remember being born. I, I don’t recall what I got for my first Christmas and I don’t know when I went on my first outdoor picnic. But, I do remember the first time I heard the sweetiest voice in the wide world.

9.  You see, I’m a musician of sorts on my way to give a very special performance.

10. We live among its people now, hiding in plain sight, but watching over them in secret, waiting…protecting. I have witnessed their capacity for courage, and though we are worlds apart, like us, there’s more to them than meets the eye.

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine in which we were discussing ambitions amongst many other things and  here’s a transcript of that conversation which revolved around the importance of fame and the need for acceptance/getting noticed.  I’m reproducing the transcript here with her consent and as promised,  I’m leaving her name out, so she is just noname(nn).



nn: leave it yaar… let me first become something in life……

me: and what is that something, nn? Is it a definite goal or a horizon without an end?7:30 PM nn: fame, money ect etc…..
<div> me: To what end, nn?</div><div>7:31 PM Is fame as important as life? nn: well…tell u once i get these two…

</div><div> me: Some of the people who do the greatest acts in their lifetimes don’t get fame..</div><div>7:32 PM Rudolf Diesel, after whom the fuel is named, the inventor of the diesel engine was not even recognized for his invention till after his death.. he died in poverty..</div><div>  and fame is something that Rakhi Savant can get if she parades semi-naked on a show..</div><div>7:33 PM Is fame more important than achieving something worthy of fame?</div><div> nn: lol….

</div><div> me: No seriously..</div><div>  which aspect of fame are you after?</div><div>  The aspect of doing something great, or getting noticed for it?</div><div>7:34 PM nn: tough to answer….

</div><div> me: It shouldn’t be…</div><div>7:35 PM ask yourself..</div><div>  if you would do things going out of your way for the benefit of people, even if you don’t get the recognition..</div><div>  or whether you just want to be a page 3 celebritity..</div><div> nn: well m not rakhi sawant nor diesel..

</div>7:36 PM me: I always thought you were a confident and ambitious person, nn..<div>  Confident people don’t need to hanker for fame..</div><div>  After all, what is the meaning if somebody recognizes your work or not?</div><div>7:37 PM Will it change the effectiveness of what you do?</div><div>  Steve Waugh comes down several times to India to help underprivileged children and NGOs and he does it whether the cameras are clicking or not..</div><div>7:38 PM nn: well… i dont know abt othrs..wht they did n wht they not.. i jus want to get noticed ..thts it….

7:39 PM me: What drives that desire, nn?7:40 PM nn: donno

me: You are a strong person, nn..</div><div>  you don’t need somebody to endorse that you are so..</div><div>  So I don’t understand this need to get noticed..
7:41 PM nn: no…m not… i think all useless things……

7:42 PM me: and where is the happiness here? If ten thousand people say you are a great person you fell happy? Vindicated? What if the next day twenty thousand people call you a b***ch? something worse? Is that when you start thinking that you are worthless?               nn: LOL…dont make me think too much prashanth….
 </div><div>7:43 PM me: Not at all, nn..</div><div>  You should be the index of yourself…</div><div>  and not allow somebody else to make a judgment about you..</div><div>  You should know your worth.. and not let somebody else push it up or pull it down at will..</div><div>7:44 PM </div><div>  Nobody is perfect, nn..</div><div>  nobody is fearless</div><div>7:45 PM Nobody is free of temptations.. nn: i know yaar….

</div><div> me: nobody is full of virtue..</div><div>  but every single person has to have faith in oneself..  nn: :)

</div><div>7:46 PM me: You are a great person, nn.. and you should not feel the need to get it endorsed by a group to realize it..</div><div>  Fame is what insecure people aspire for..</div><div>  They think it’s a cloth that can cover all the bad patches..</div><div>  hide it from public view.. nn: hehe,,,,</div><div>7:49 PM so u tell me…wht should be done….

</div><div> me: Aspire to do great things, that is a worthy ambition nn..</div><div>  What is fame? Money?</div><div>  They are no goals..</div><div>7:50 PM Money is still a good goal..</div><div>  For you need money for everything in life..</div><div>  but fame? that is a silly pursuit..</div><div>  not unless you believe the fame can propel you even further.. you and your cause that is..</div><div>7:51 PM nn: hmm…. well m nothing now….so want to become something first…..

</div><div> me: that’s not at all true..</div><div>  If you have nothing now, you can never be anything, nn..</div><div>  I’m being very blunt, sorry for that..</div><div>  But you need to realize that there is latent potential in you..</div><div>  That’s not nothing..</div><div>7:52 PM If you don’t have talent, potential, you will go nowhere..
 nn: hmm

</div><div> me: Everyone of us has something..</div><div>7:53 PM But many think they don’t have anything. … and that’s when they go down in life..</div><div>  I might not be earning a fat pay-packet today, but I know I have potential..</div><div>  I believe that I can manufacture my own opportunities to come up even further.. that’s not nothing..</div><div>7:54 PM My bank balance may be nothing, but I’m NOT nothing..</div><div> nn: :) thts very much true wht u said abt u…

</div><div> me: And it’s true about you too, nn..</div><div>7:55 PM There is only one type of respect that really matters in this world, nn..</div><div>  That is self-respect.</div><div> nn: :)</div><div> 
me: I don’t need somebody to tell me that I am worthy of their respect before I respect myself..</div><div>  nn, you don’t need fame..</div><div>  You need self-respect.</div>

  

Then said Almitra, "Speak to us of Love." And he raised his head and looked upon the people, and there fell a stillness upon them. And with a great voice he said: When love beckons to you follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you yield to him, Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you. And when he speaks to you believe in him, Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden. For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning. Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun, So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth. Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself. He threshes you to make you naked. He sifts you to free you from your husks. He grinds you to whiteness. He kneads you until you are pliant; And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast. All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart. But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure, Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,
Gibran, through the voice of ‘The Prophet’, on love.  So simple, yet so profound.  So ‘unmathematical’, yet believable..  Every single time I read it, I feel I notice new words and meanings.  Time and again, I have believed that I have mastered the mantras of love and relationships and that I have been successful in putting together my own blueprint for love, a chart of where to tread and where not to, to succeed in finding love while avoiding the painful traps along the path, but every single time I have been made to realize the futility of these mantras and formulas.  Love takes us on a rollercoaster ride, a completely unpredictable one at that, unlike any man-made rollercoaster ride.   One cannot truly prepare for what one cannot anticipate, and so it is with love.  One just has to be willing to face all the challenges and the queasiness that comes along, if one gets on the ride.  I dedicate this post to a friend of mine.

You can find the complete works of Gibran which are now in the public domain, over here.

It’s been two mails to the admins of lj so far and on both occasions, the ads have disappeared for a few hours, only to come back like a bad penny.  This is nothing short of spamming! I’m going to continue my crusade to get these ads removed from my page, whether there is support from my friends or not.  I’m going to bombard lj with my petitions to remove these ads till they respond.  My friend Atul was talking about a satyagraha to take this on.. while I feel that it was a pretty dramatic suggestion, I think the situation actually merits it.  I’m not going down without a fight.

Dear all,

I don’t know how many of you have observed this or for how many of you this is true, but of late, all of the ad slots on my blog have been taken up by ‘Advani for PM’ ads.  I noticed this on blogs of quite a few friends on lj too.  A friend who happened to read my blog for the first time wanted to know since when I started promoting Advani’s campaign!
Let me tell you why I think of these ads as a slur and a malicious act.

A lot of my posts are about Formula One and hence my blog often has ads related to Formula 1 merchandise, tickets, hotel reservations and the like and I have no complaints about it.  This is the reality of targeted advertising and we often welcome it, as by principle, one will not see unrelated and inappropriate ads.  I don’t write about the fastest means of increasing the length of certain anatomical parts with pleasurable results and ergo don’t expect to see ads promoting such solutions on my page. 

However,  since each and every one of us has been exposed to targeted advertising, we tend to associate the ad somehow with the content which belongs to the author, and maybe even with the thoughts and feelings of the author.  It is at this point that this particular ad-campaign becomes inappropriate and even malicious.  I hate politics and politicians in general and use my blog to highlight their foibles whenever my blood boils and I certainly would not want to use my blog to promote politicians of any color, caste, creed or nationality, nor would I want to happily sit and watch my blog being used for such a purpose.  I know we don’t enjoy the privilege of deciding the actual ads which go on, when using a free version of lj, but I hope lj won’t resort to using such means of advertising which is no different from spamming.  Livejournal does give us a means to provide feedback about the ads that are posted on our blogs. This is the link.  I have made my opinion on the matter very clear and hopefully, the ads, which to me are repulsive, will be removed.   If you truly endorse and welcome this manner/content of advertising, well, you don’t have anything to do, but if you feel as I feel, I request you to take a minute and fill in the feedback. 

Dev D is a totally modern take on the novel called Devdas authored by Sarath Chandra Chattopadhyay. While the original novel and the spate of movies it inspired over the years all showed the protagonist wasting himself to his eventual death from alcohol abuse after being unable to come to terms with his unrequited love for his childhood friend Paro, Dev D in a refreshing change. The novel has been given a complete overhaul which it needed to stay relevant with respect to the ultramodern and cosmopolitan lives that it’s intended audience lives in a modern India.
A very enjoyable movie, and unlike any other version of Devdas, it has a happy ending! The complete review is on my other blog.

For the longest time, I have wanted to own one of them, but I guess it had just not happened.  When I had the moolah, I was not in the mood and when I had the mood, I didn’t have the moolah and now, when I least expected it, I got one, and that too as a present from dad!

While reading the autobiography of Samuel Langhorn Clemens aka Mark Twain,  I came to know that while he was a cub reporter in a newspaper, he had ran his own obituary in the paper, just for kicks!  I wondered then and I still wonder as to how one can find humor in what is so clearly a morbid topic.  While a lot of people talk about death and dying in the lighter vein, few are those who haven’t squirmed when discussing death of their own selves or that of loved ones. 

I had been intending to write about them, but I guess it was Peeyush’s post about watching three movies that gave me the push! I did one more than you, so there!!!

‘Pearls before Swine’ by Stephan Pastis is my favorite cartoon!  I’ve loved other cartoons in the past, but this one has that extra something for every mood of mine!  Here are a couple of clips and do they convey something or not! You be the judge of it!


<div class="header-title">Pearls Before Swine</div><div class="header-subtitle">by Stephan Pastis
 </div>


<div class="header-title">Pearls Before Swine</div><div class="header-subtitle">by Stephan Pastis
 </div>

Mumbai got bombarded with terrorists and escaped from further damage due to the bravery of our commandos, and how do the politicians treat them?  The by now infamous ‘Dog-lover’ Achuthanandan abuses the parents of slain Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan, others play it down as ‘minor matters’ while the hapless Prime Minister thinks that the best he can do is offer to offer his resignation!

In a totally topsy-turvy race in Japan,  the top three lines of the final driver-board read thus:
Fernando Alonso
Robert Kubica
Kimi Raikkonen

The race saw much drama, as early as the first lap, with David Coulthard veering off with a mechanical problem and crashing heavily into the wall, safely away from the track and the other cars.  Race over for DC, but the real drama was shaping up ahead in the order as Lewis Hamilton closed the door a tad too late on a charging Kimi Raikkonen, an offense which brought about a drive-through penalty for the championship leader, but more was to come.  Lewis ran too wide, lost positions and got into a tussle with Felipe Massa.  Massa committed a braking error to give Lewis an easy overtaking, but was too impatient and decided to take the position right back.  Massa drove aggressively but Lewis was in no mood to give up his racing position resulting in Massa touching Lewis and causing him to spin, the incident bringing up Massa’s own drive through penalty.  Lewis lost out as the spin caused him to wait for the remaining cars to pass him, and that, combined with the drive-through penalty that he had earned earlier and had yet to serve meant that he did not finish on points. 

Massa, after taking on a lot of fuel in his routine first stop and serving his own penalty came up in P13, just one position ahead of Lewis and produced some stunning overtaking moves and a string of fastest laps to come up to P8 and was set to finish higher when another disaster struck.  Sebastien Bourdais, after his final stop exited the pits and tried to hold off Massa who had got almost half a car ahead, touching Massa in the process and sending him into a mini spin, the only consolation being that Bourdais did not take Massa out of the race  The incident is still under investigation and the eventual verdict will decide whether he trails Hamilton by 5 points or 6, but it appears to be Bourdais’ error and may earn him a penalty which may or may not benefit Massa.  Massa took his final pit stop rejoining in P10, brought about another fastest lap made one more on track overtaking, crushing Mark Webber clinically,  and clinched the final points position to stay in a position from where he can put pressure on Lewis in the remaining races two races.  The biggest gainer was Robert Kubica, ever the dark horse, as he collected 8 points, finishing behind Fernando Alonso and as a result now trails Lewis Hamilton by just 12 points, meaning that at least technically, he is still a contender for the title while having a more realistic chance of finishing in second position.

The current championship standing:-

<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" summary="" class="raceResults"><tbody><tr><th>Pos</th> <th>Driver</th> <th>Nationality</th> <th>Team</th> <th>Points</th> </tr> <tr> <td>1</td> <td> Lewis Hamilton</td> <td>British</td> <td> McLaren-Mercedes</td> <td>84</td> </tr> <tr> <td>2</td> <td> Felipe Massa</td> <td>Brazilian</td> <td> Ferrari</td> <td>78</td> </tr> <tr> <td>3</td> <td> Robert Kubica</td> <td>Polish</td> <td> BMW Sauber</td> <td>72</td> </tr> <tr> <td>4</td> <td> Kimi Räikkönen</td> <td>Finnish</td> <td> Ferrari</td> <td>63</td> </tr> <tr> <td>5</td> <td> Nick Heidfeld</td> <td>German</td> <td> BMW Sauber</td> <td>56</td> </tr> <tr> <td>6</td> <td> Heikki Kovalainen</td> <td>Finnish</td> <td> McLaren-Mercedes</td> <td>51</td> </tr> <tr> <td>7</td> <td> Fernando Alonso</td> <td>Spanish</td> <td> Renault</td> <td>48</td> </tr> <tr> <td>8</td> <td> Jarno Trulli</td> <td>Italian</td> <td> Toyota</td> <td>30</td> </tr> <tr> <td>9</td> <td> Sebastian Vettel</td> <td>German</td> <td> STR-Ferrari</td> <td>29</td> </tr> <tr> <td>10</td> <td> Timo Glock</td> <td>German</td> <td> Toyota</td> <td>20</td></tr></tbody></table>

Yesterday I turned another year older, and made it to the club of people a quarter century and older! We (my flatmates and me) were supposed to go out to some Dhaba to celebrate, but the plan was postponed as they had their exams from today.  They were busy cramming away for the exams and I was checking my mail and listening to some music when it struck 12 on the night of 5th. My flatmates suddenly brought out a cake, lit the candles and we had a nice candle blowing, cake-cutting/cake-smearing act.  It was nice, probably only the third time I was having a cake on my birthday!  I kind of remembered my school days when I didn’t even get the chance to wear new clothes to school and distribute sweets as my birthday was right after the beginning of the October holidays!!

At the risk of sounding cliched, I have to say that today’s F1 race, at Monza, threw up a few surprises.  The first disappointment was when Sebastien Bourdias of Toro Rosso couldn’t get his engine started. The kid must have been heartbroken, considering that he had fought hard for his 4th place start - ahead of the likes of Felipe Massa and Nico Rosberg, not to mention Robert Kubica, Kimi Raikkonen and Lewis Hamilton.

The second biggest surprise was that Heikki Kovalainen, who was looking so good in the qualifying, was expected to make shortwork of the Toro Rosso of pole-sitter Vettel, but that never happened.  Right from the word go,  Vettel drove like a man possessed, and started building up a lead steadily.  When he crossed the start-finish line for the final time, still the race leader, he was so excited that he was at a total loss for words, but his gestures from the cockpit of the car conveyed the feeling: He was overjoyed.  A well deserved victory for the young German driver who nows holds the record for being the youngest ever driver in Formula One to win a race. It was also Scuderia Toro Rosso’s first ever win.

Massa tried his best to move up, but a poorly timed pitstop meant that he came out right at the back of almost the entire grid, as he had not been able to distance himself enough from the rest of the runners before pitting.  Result? Massive slowdown, as he had to carve through the field, in rain, with unrelenting spray from the cars ahead of him.  The biggest gainer however was Kubica, who executed his single stop strategy to perfection and got a podium finish. The second biggest gainer was definitely Hamilton who clawed from 15th on the grid to 7th,  taking home two points, just one lesser than Massa.  At one point, Hamilton was running as high as #2, before his first pit stop.  He had been fuelled right to the finish, but the drying track meant that Hamilton had to make a further stop for intermediate tyres.  But for that second stop, Hamilton might even have won the race.  Massa won’t be shedding tears for that !!

Having seen the last race, one would have expected Kimi Raikkonnen to produce some spirited driving, taking a few risks, but that was not to be.  He simply seemed disinterested, and went through the motions, finishing 9th, and without points, for the third straight race.

The standings now:

<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" summary="" class="raceResults"><tbody><tr><th>Pos</th> <th>Driver</th> <th>Nationality</th> <th>Team</th> <th>Points</th> </tr> <tr> <td>1</td> <td> Lewis Hamilton</td> <td>British</td> <td> McLaren-Mercedes</td> <td>78</td> </tr> <tr> <td>2</td> <td> Felipe Massa</td> <td>Brazilian</td> <td> Ferrari</td> <td>77</td> </tr> <tr> <td>3</td> <td> Robert Kubica</td> <td>Polish</td> <td> BMW Sauber</td> <td>64</td> </tr> <tr> <td>4</td> <td> Kimi Räikkönen</td> <td>Finnish</td> <td> Ferrari</td> <td>57</td> </tr> <tr> <td>5</td> <td> Nick Heidfeld</td> <td>German</td> <td> BMW Sauber</td> <td>53</td> </tr> <tr> <td>6</td> <td> Heikki Kovalainen</td> <td>Finnish</td> <td> McLaren-Mercedes</td> <td>51</td> </tr> <tr> <td>7</td> <td> Fernando Alonso</td> <td>Spanish</td> <td> Renault</td> <td>28</td> </tr> <tr> <td>8</td> <td> Jarno Trulli</td> <td>Italian</td> <td> Toyota</td> <td>26</td> </tr> <tr> <td>9</td> <td> Sebastian Vettel</td> <td>German</td> <td> STR-Ferrari</td> <td>23</td> </tr> <tr> <td>10</td> <td> Mark Webber</td> <td>Australian</td> <td> Red Bull-Renault</td> <td>20</td></tr></tbody></table>
Table courtesy: www.formula1.com

There was much drama in the three qualifying sessions at Monza which was dominated almost completely by rain.
The Ferraris were having a tough time and so was the McLaren of Championship leader Lewis Hamilton while Heikki Kovalainen seemed to be in a zone of his own.

Q2 started rather sedately, but before long, both the Ferraris, the BMW of Robert Kubica and the McLaren of Lewis Hamilton were in the relegation zone. Kubica made it to P10 only to see Felipe nuzzle in under his timing. Hamilton spun in his attempt to get out of relegation, and the writing was on the wall. Would it be Kimi or Felipe who would go through? Kimi was more than a second off the pace of Felipe, meaning Felipe was the only Ferrari in Q3! No Hamilton, no Kubica, no Raikkonnen. Some Q3 this was going to be!

Q3 started but the conditions were as unpredictable as ever. Massa suffered a lockup on his way to his eventual P6 while Sebastien Vettel took a surprise pole position, much to his and the entire Scuderia Torro Rosso’s unbridled joy.

<h2>FORMULA 1 GRAN PREMIO SANTANDER D’ITALIA 2008</h2> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" summary="" class="raceResults"><tbody><tr> <th>Pos</th> <th>No</th> <th>Driver</th> <th>Team</th> <th>Q1</th><th>Q2</th><th>Q3</th> <th>Laps</th> </tr> <tr> <td>1</td> <td>15</td> <td>Sebastian Vettel</td> <td>STR-Ferrari</td> <td>1:35.464</td><td>1:35.837</td><td>1:37.555</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>2</td> <td>23</td> <td>Heikki Kovalainen</td> <td>McLaren-Mercedes</td> <td>1:35.214</td><td>1:35.843</td><td>1:37.631</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>3</td> <td>10</td> <td>Mark Webber</td> <td>Red Bull-Renault</td> <td>1:36.001</td><td>1:36.306</td><td>1:38.117</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>4</td> <td>14</td> <td>Sebastien Bourdais</td> <td>STR-Ferrari</td> <td>1:35.543</td><td>1:36.175</td><td>1:38.445</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>5</td> <td>7</td> <td>Nico Rosberg</td> <td>Williams-Toyota</td> <td>1:35.485</td><td>1:35.898</td><td>1:38.767</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>6</td> <td>2</td> <td>Felipe Massa</td> <td>Ferrari</td> <td>1:35.536</td><td>1:36.676</td><td>1:38.894</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>7</td> <td>11</td> <td>Jarno Trulli</td> <td>Toyota</td> <td>1:35.906</td><td>1:36.008</td><td>1:39.152</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>8</td> <td>5</td> <td>Fernando Alonso</td> <td>Renault</td> <td>1:36.297</td><td>1:36.518</td><td>1:39.751</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>9</td> <td>12</td> <td>Timo Glock</td> <td>Toyota</td> <td>1:35.737</td><td>1:36.525</td><td>1:39.787</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>10</td> <td>3</td> <td>Nick Heidfeld</td> <td>BMW Sauber</td> <td>1:35.709</td><td>1:36.626</td><td>1:39.906</td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>11</td> <td>4</td> <td>Robert Kubica</td> <td>BMW Sauber</td> <td>1:35.553</td><td>1:36.697</td><td> </td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>12</td> <td>21</td> <td>Giancarlo Fisichella</td> <td>Force India-Ferrari</td> <td>1:36.280</td><td>1:36.698</td><td> </td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>13</td> <td>9</td> <td>David Coulthard</td> <td>Red Bull-Renault</td> <td>1:36.485</td><td>1:37.284</td><td> </td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>14</td> <td>1</td> <td>Kimi Räikkönen</td> <td>Ferrari</td> <td>1:35.965</td><td>1:37.522</td><td> </td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>15</td> <td>22</td> <td>Lewis Hamilton</td> <td>McLaren-Mercedes</td> <td>1:35.394</td><td>1:39.265</td><td> </td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>16</td> <td>17</td> <td>Rubens Barrichello</td> <td>Honda</td> <td>1:36.510</td><td> </td><td> </td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>17</td> <td>6</td> <td>Nelsinho Piquet</td> <td>Renault</td> <td>1:36.630</td><td> </td><td> </td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>18</td> <td>8</td> <td>Kazuki Nakajima</td> <td>Williams-Toyota</td> <td>1:36.653</td><td> </td><td> </td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>19</td> <td>16</td> <td>Jenson Button</td> <td>Honda</td> <td>1:37.006</td><td> </td><td> </td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>20</td> <td>20</td> <td>Adrian Sutil</td> <td>Force India-Ferrari</td> <td>1:37.417</td></tr></tbody></table>
Table courtesy: www.formula1.com

The last five races have been more of a roller-coaster than anything I have seen in a long time.  After Felipe Massa’s lucky victory in France, the British GP was the absolute low-point. It was a wet race, and Massa seemed to go back in time when he was a spin-happy disastrous rookie with Sauber.  Massa, after spinning no less than six times, finished dead-last, finishing 13th out of the 13 who finished the race. Massa, who before the race didn’t have many memories worth remembering about Silverstone, ensured that he didn’t create any in this season either! Kimi Raikkonen wound up a poor show for Ferrari, coming in 4th, behind the beleaguered but never-say-die old horse, Rubens Barrichello’s Honda.

Hockenheim was a race largely dominated and affected by the horrendous crash of Toyota’s Timo Glock.  Massa seemed to have the race very much in his control when Timo Glock had his accident.  Nelson Piquet, who had just come out of the pits seemed to have got a gift from the gods, as just about everyone dived in to the pits while he kept going.  Massa seemed good for second place until a rampaging Lewis Hamilton caught up with him and passed him, making Massa look like a rookie in the process. With a car that was definitely off the pace and with faltering grip, Massa even had Heidfeld breathing down his neck, but managed to hold on to third place and 6 points.  Kimi finished in the same position he started, number 6.

The Hungarian GP seemed like Massa’s all the way, but that was not to be.  Having started in second position, he pulled off a stunning first corner overtaking of Lewis Hamilton.  It seemed like payback time for Hockenheim, and Lewis had no answers forthcoming. After dominating the race almost completely, Massa’s F2008’s engine blew up with just two laps to go. Ah, heartbreak for Massa, manna from heaven for the under-fire Kovalainen who gleefully accepted  an unexpected victory. Kimi held on to 3th place, earning 6 invaluable points for himself.

The European GP was a perfect race for Massa as he completed the perfect triple - pole position, fastest lap in the race and race victory.  This time around though, it was Kimi Raikkonen’s F2008 that went up in flames in the closing stages of the game, depriving him of valuable points.

Belgian GP:  Qualifying saw the Ferraris and McLarens arranging themselves in a staggered formation. Hamilton, Massa, Kovalainen and Raikkonnen.  Kovalainen had a dreadful start, slipping from 3rd to 13th, on the opening lap while Kimi seemed to be on fire. Despite having a clearly faster car and a new engine, he seemed to almost edge Massa while leaving him past.  Massa survived the scare and Kimi was now in 2nd postion.  In the same lap (lap 2), Hamilton spun on a wet patch and Kimi did not need a second invitation. He grabbed the race lead.  From there on, the top two were always well ahead of the remaining runners, the lead changing only during pitstops, and that too, ever so briefly.  Towards the end, Kimi seemed to have the race in his kitty, but rain and Hamilton had different ideas.  The showers, which occured with only three laps to go caught everybody in a fix. Too little time to get a change of tire, but the conditions seemed too treacherous on slicks.  Kimi slowed to a crawl, Hamilton took a gamble.. and passed.. almost.. before Kimi closed the door on him.  Hamilton, instead of going over the grass, cut through the escape route and came out ahead of Kimi. Now though he slowed to allow Kimi ahead, he hardly lost momentum and he overtook Kimi promptly in the next corner.  It was this move that attracted the race stewards attention, and later punishment.  Now Kimi, last years world champion and a driver rated very highly by a whole lot of people, was in second place and could have chosen to hold on to his 8 points, keeping in mind the treacherous conditions, but he didn’t.  He pushed like a man possessed, slammed into Hamilton’s car from the back, took the lead as Hamilton spun, and spun himself off giving the lead back to Hamilton. Even at this stage, Kimi could have held back, but he did not.  He stomped on the gas, something he should not have done on the super-slippery surface.  Result? Another slide, but this time, into the wall.  Game over for Raikkonnen. Massa, who had realized the danger had cut back his pace and continued to cruise gingerly and picked up the 8 points which were to be Kimi’s.
Unwittingly, Kimi had been of a great help to Massa! Before the Belgian GP, the two teammates were just separated by four points, but with Kimi’s DNF, Massa added 8 more to that gap.  Nick Heidfeld, who took a big gamble by changing to intermediates with just one and a half laps to go, saw that this gamble paid off! When everybody were crawling across the surface to avoid spins, Heidfelt blazed past them on his intermediates and claimed the third place on the podium!

Within hours of the presentation ceremony, the stewards released their verdict: Hamilton was slapped with a 25 second penalty in lieu of a drive-through penalty that he would have had to serve, had the race gone on longer. This meant that Massa now collected the full 10 points, which would have been Kimi’s, had he only kept his head, and his cool. 
Now that Kimi is 19 points away from the tournament leader Hamilton and 17 away from his own team mate and with just 5 races to go, it seems like it is the end of the line for Kimi’s title hopes, but then, he rode his luck last year.  Let’s see what this year has in store!

<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" summary="" class="raceResults"><tbody><tr><th>Pos</th> <th>Driver</th> <th>Nationality</th> <th>Team</th> <th>Points</th> </tr> <tr> <td>1</td> <td> Lewis Hamilton</td> <td>British</td> <td> McLaren-Mercedes</td> <td>76</td> </tr> <tr> <td>2</td> <td> Felipe Massa</td> <td>Brazilian</td> <td> Ferrari</td> <td>74</td> </tr> <tr> <td>3</td> <td> Robert Kubica</td> <td>Polish</td> <td> BMW Sauber</td> <td>58</td> </tr> <tr> <td>4</td> <td> Kimi Räikkönen</td> <td>Finnish</td> <td> Ferrari</td> <td>57</td> </tr> <tr> <td>5</td> <td> Nick Heidfeld</td> <td>German</td> <td> BMW Sauber</td> <td>49</td></tr></tbody></table>

The Canadian GP of 2008 in the F1 calendar was held yesterday.  It was a race filled with drama, heartbreaks, accidents, errors of judgement and unlikely winners!  Sounds a lot like the plot of Bollywood masala movies huh? You bet!

Trust Prashanth Chengi to do something as outragious as making a new, new year resolution in June!  Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing!  I’ve been trying to turn over a new leaf, and I have been successful to some degree.

One of the most important changes is my management of time.  Though my boss was quite happy with my enthusiasm for work, he never did approve of my working late into the night-  and worse, coming in late to work.

I have been working on my ‘punch-in’ times for the past couple of months, and with the exception of a couple of days (not a couple of dozen, just two to three), I have managed to be in time to catch breakfast at the C-DAC canteen and start work, at normal hours, like most normal people.  What I still was not good at was leaving on time.  I don’t stay back to impress people or whatever, but it has become like a habit.  Even when I was at NCST, I used to work myself to exhaustion, without even taking proper breaks.  Be it my obsession with cracking the MGPTS (at which I succeeded), or my pet project, I used to work myself to sheer exhaustion.  Looking back, I feel that if I had kept normal hours, I could have achieved more in less time, as the brain does slow down after a point, but I was too hot-headed, egoistic and crazy back then to think about such things.  I had to finish a certain module, and that was it.  I just had to.  No matter what.

I used to tell myself that I would lose the flow and stuff like that, to convince myself that I was doing the right thing by keeping crazy hours and working without even breaks for sleep.  Over time, it sort of became a habit.  What I would observe was that I would get the results at the end of a marathon session (often achieving things in two nights what most would take a week for) but I now realize that it was not really worth it, as I was causing a lot of damage to myself.  I used to be so exhausted as well as elated at the end of such marathon sessions that I would lose all my steam.  I would feel that I had achieved the impossible and I would sort of become complacent.  Also, I would need to sleep at least one straight day to feel normal again, and even after that, getting the energy levels back to the optimal levels was the challenge.  How did I tackle it back then?  By not even taking that one straight day of rest!

Looking back, I think that was absolutely crazy, suicidal even, but then, that was how I was.  I remember that unshakeable lethargy and lack of energy that set in after I successfully completed my COOS project, almost singlehandedly.  It was like I had exhausted all my batteries, my life-energy.  So bad was it that I was just not able to pick up my tempo to work on my CNET project.  Result? Our team got great marks in the COOS project but flunked out of CNET.  So much for planning and execution!

Even here at NPSF, I have been doing much the same thing.  The fact that I sustained a broken relationship seemed to further justify my crazy work habits.  I was working it out of my system, was my justification, but I now see it as nothing more than plain stupidity.  I love my job and my responsibilities and I revel under the tremendous expectations that my boss and seniors have out of me, but if I work myself to exhaustion and fatigue each day, coming back the next day with equally high spirits will always be difficult.  Suddenly, the work I used to love was beginning to seem stressful.

I have finally realized that I need to conserve myself, that while enthusiasm is an asset, it doesn’t equate to over-working.  I will henceforth  take a break when it is needed, go home at civil hours and come back the next day, well on time, refreshed and enthusiastic.  So, my dear readers, this is my new, new year resolution. 

I’ll push myself to the limit, but will pack up my work and leave at a civil hour, sleep the same day (and not in the wee hours of the next!), wake up fresh the next day and enjoy my work to the fullest extent. Amen and good night!

Six races down the Formula One lane, this is what the championship table has to say. Rather tight isn’t it? Any Formula One buff worth his salt will not venture forth with predictions about who will get to take home the driver’s championship, but what has happened this year is worth closely monitoring. With the decision to remove traction-control systems from the cars with effect from this season, the scales have been tipped more towards driver skills rather than machine capability, which was what F1 was mostly centered around, in the past. The other significant change, although a year old, is the uniform set of tires for all cars. Michelin and Bridgestone were the two tyre manufactures who supplied for rival teams, and apart from the cars and the drivers, races used to won and lost by the rubber on the cars. Some tracks favored Michelin better will Bridgestone reigned supreme on other tracks, often taking the focus off the driving skills of the drivers themselves. Now, all cars run on Bridgestone, so it is one factor less that can turn things upside down. However, drivers accustomed to Michelin were crying hoarse last year, saying that they had difficulity adapting to the new rubber, but it has now settled down.

Here’s my analysis of each of the top five drivers and their cars:-

Driver: Lewis Hamilton
Team: McLaren Mercedes
Races: 6
Wins: 2

Last year’s rookie turned hero. The first black driver to race in Formula One, he made a sensational debut last year, with his first eight races yielding podium positions (finishing in the top three). He was so successful that he managed to almost completely upstage his senior and fellow driver at McLaren, two time world champion Fernando Alonso. He made a rash of mistakes towards the closing stages of the championship to end up losing the championship by one single point. The expectations were very high from Lewis, and he started off with a win in the Australian GP this year only to be upstaged by the Ferraris of Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen who picked up two races each. He came back with a bang in the Monaco GP, where he survived a punctured tire to win in a rain interrupted race. He got lucky with his pitstops and the timing of the safety-cars, but he showed a lot of nerve. He is now the tournament leader and is looking strong. McLaren are backing him to the hilt and are showing signs of being able to come up with a car that can match the pace of the Ferraris. Definitely a contender for the title.

Driver: Kimi Raikkonen
Team: Scuderia Ferrari
Races: 6
Wins: 2

Last year’s F1 world champion. Goes by the nickname of Iceman. Aishwarya Rai can be defined as a master of facial expressions when contrasted with the expressionless Finn. Known to be very reserved. Some even say selfish. I say he is fast, but much overrated. He lacks the ‘mechanical’ skills to setup the car, the skills the legendary Michael Schumacher possessed. He does not seem to mingle with the race engineers and seems very aloof, a big minus point for any driver worth his salt. He won the championship last year, rather unconvincingly, by a single point. He was the tournament leader this year till Lewis Hamilton pipped him in the last race at Monaco. With his teammate hot on his heels, Kimi has to contend with competition within his own team as well as outside it. About the car, Ferrari are the fastest on the circuit, at the moment and they seem to be moving from strength to strength. Is Kimi a contender for the title ? Yes. For the moment.

Driver: Felipe Massa
Team: Scuderia Ferrari
Races: 6
Wins: 2

The underdog at Ferrari. He first had to play second fiddle to the legendary Schumacher and last year, despite several brilliant performances, was reduced to supporting Kimi Raikkonen’s bid for the title, due to bouts of carelessness and bad luck, which cost him race positions and points. On his given day, Massa can be unbeatable, but is known to be error prone. He has thrown away perfectly good starts and possible wins due to what is called ‘moments’ in F1, moments of carelessness and/or lack of concentration. A case in point is the Monaco GP this year. After starting the race from pole position, he was confortably in the race lead, till he made a mistake and aquaplaned off the track, handing over the race lead to Robert Kubica. It was this mistake that cost him the race win. He eventually finished third. He is now just one point behind his teammate Kimi Raikkonen. Time and again, Massa has out-qualified Kimi, but has not managed to be quite as consistent in the actual races. Massa seems to be more determined to prove his credentials this year than ever before, and may prove to be too hot to handle for Kimi, and the others too. He is also gifted in the art of setting up the car, much like Michael Schumacher.  He is fast, aggressive and a bit crazy. He is my personal favorite contender for the title.

Driver: Robert Kubica
Team: BMW Sauber
Races:6
Wins: 0

Robert Kubica is the dark horse and the silent mover. When everybody was backing the likes of Hamilton and Raikkonen thanks to the flamboyant personalities and performance, Robert was quietly picking up points. Though he has not won a single race, he is in the fourth position, just two points away from his nearest competitor Felipe Massa, and just six points shy of the tournament leader Lewis Hamilton. This says a lot. Here is a cool customer who is ever watchful, rarely makes mistakes and pounces with glee the minute an opponent makes one. The pace of the BMWs is not exactly great as they are almost always trailing behind the Ferraris and the McLarens, but even that is changing. With a pole in the Bahrain GP and a second position start in Australia, he has proved that he can more than challenge the pace of the dominating Ferrari and the McLaren cars. Though it is too early to make predictions, he is a good contender for the runner up to the title.

Driver: Nick Heidfeld
Team: BMW Sauber
Races: 6
Wins: 0

Nick made a much talked-about entry into F1 as he broke in without completing the mandatory testing experience required, on account of his fabulous records in F3, where Narain Karthikeyan (anybody still remember him ?) used to be a somebody. He has shown flashes of brilliance, but has not really been able to deliver consistent results. He is the beginner of the midfield. He is already twelve points adrift of his teammate and immediate competitor, Robert Kubica, and is not showing any signs that he is going to change the order of race leaders, anytime soon.

“Udyogam Purushalakshanam’’ goes an old saying (translatation: Employment is the defining virtue of a man) . I’ve been more busy than I can ever remember, and I’m enjoying it.   At NPSF, each day brings new challenges and learning opportunities.  I have been principally in charge with our (C-DAC Pune’s) contribution towards the euindia grid. Managing a cluster is a tough task and a grid, even more so.  Be it a problem with bugs in the installation scripts or services that mysteriously conk off and refuse to restart, I have had my hands full, doing fire-fighting, but it has been fun.

My responsibilities got a slight digression recently as C-DAC employees are being deluged under massive amounts of spam.  Since my boss also heads the SANG team that is in-charge of mail administration, the ball came into his court.  As I had spent some time understanding Sendmail’s arcane rulesets and hacking through it’s source, my boss assigned this task to me.  I had to acquaint myself to MailScanner, an opensource mail-security package which allows easy integration of multiple anti-virus as well as anti-spam tools. It uses Spamassassin, another opensource software for spam-detection. MailScanner also allows use of multiple virus-scanning tools in series.  In our setup, we are using ClamAV , a free antivirus.

Here’s how it works:-

MailScanner runs two instances of Sendmail on the host machine. The first instance accepts mails for local as well as remote delivery, and just queues it up in a special queue (/var/spool/mqueue.in).
MailScanner users Real-time Blackhole Lists (RBLs) as well as DNS blacklists to check whether the mail has been sent from any known offenders. These lists are very exhaustive and are constantly updated.  Next, after ensuring that the sender is clean (or not present in the black-list, yet), MailScanner delegates the job of further scanning to Spamassassin, which does a scanning of the contents of the mail and assigns it a spam score. If the score is below the threshold of what is considered to be spam, it is then scanned for viruses and other dangerous content. Enter M/s ClamAV, Avast et al. Once the mail has been deemed safe, it is put into the standard mail queue (/var/spool/mqueue) by MailScanner, where the other instance of Sendmail picks it up and does the delivery to the final recipient.

USP of Spamassassin:-

It has to the Bayesian filter. Spamassassin makes it possible for it’s spam-scoring technique to be adaptive. It can ‘learn’ what kind of mail is ‘normal’ to us and what is not, by analyzing our mail. All we need to do is bunch all our spam mail in one lot and all clean mail in another (yeah, it takes a bit of effort) and ask it to learn from it. The Bayesian filter needs to be fed at least 200 clean and 200 spam messages before Spamassassin allows the filter to change it’s perception of what is spam and what is not. This is very beneficial as without such orientation, a spam-filter may mark a lot of genuine mails as spam. The objective of a spam filter is not so much in detecting spam as in not marking genuine mails as spam (false positives). Spamassassin claims figures of about 95 % spam detection with a 0.06% chance of false-positives. Nobody likes spam, but nobody likes missing out on important mails either. Techniques like using Bayesian filters make the task of effective spam detection much easier.

If any of my readers has been using or is acquainted with MailScanner or any other opensource email-security/anti-spam suite, I would love to hear about his/her experience and/or observations about it.


   

 

I have never believed in forwarding forwarded mails in the name of staying in touch and so, when it came to wishing my favorite people on the occasion of a new year, I decided to club my friends into groups and wish them, with at least a couple of lines for each person. I have emailed those people whose ids I had and have requested others to do the forwarding for the remaining people! (forward with a difference, huh? ;)) I’m putting up all of the greetings here for posterity besides wishing the friends that I have made right here on lj. Here goes!

<div text="Gang@Surana (past and present continuous!)" class="ljcut">My colleagues@Surana Gang (past and present-continuous)

Radha madam: Ma'am, I take pleasure to wish you the first. Have a fabulous year in 2008. Do stay in touch and mail me snaps in case you decide to take off to Egypt or some other exotic place sometime soon! How is Kinga, Rachana and Anju? Say hi to them, your parents and Ramya from me.

Rashmi aka RPK: I trust you and Surya will have no shortage of surprises thanks to Surya Jr in the days to come! Have a wonderful year ahead!

Asha madam and Mamatha madam:I heard both of you had additions happening to your respective families. A pity I could not meet up with you when I was down in Bangalore. Do send me snaps of your little ones. Have a great year ahead and stay in touch!

Priya: Long time no hear! How are you? Do stay in touch. May 2008 be a satisfying and generous year for you!

Surabhi: Have fun, but stay in touch with reality and your priorities. I dedicate a stanza of the song 'Eye of the Tiger' by Survivor, to you:

So many times, it happens too fast
You change your passion for glory.
Don't lose your grip on the dreams of the past
You must fight just to keep them alive

Have a great new year in which your aspirations and dreams come true.

Mythili madam: How are you? How is Tushar? He must be quite a lot more naughty now, or has he quietened down? Stay in touch and have a great year in 2008.

ASR sir: Happy new year, 2008, to you and your family sir. My last two mails to you went unanswered. Maybe you are too busy, but please do keep me in your thoughts. Please do stay in touch.

Ravi sir: Havanur sir ge Prashanth maaduva namaskaaragalu. Nimage haagu nimma parivaarakke Hosa Varshada Haardhika Shubhaashayagalu, Stay in touch sir!

Ranganath sir: Wishing you and your family a very happy new year. Madhuk (hope I spelled the name right!) must have grown up quite a lot now. Do send me his snaps and stay in touch! I received your new year greeting. Many thanks.

Venugopal sir: How are you sir? You must have thought that I have forgotten about you, but you and your sense of humor (especially the Musharraf and Bill Gates jokes) are unforgettable. By the way, I'm typing even this letter in Dvorak layout, which was such a fond favorite of yours!!!! Please stay in touch. Have a fabulous new year in 2008.

The unlike-twins aka Shadakshari sir and Mouli sir!: Twins on account of their sharing their workspace in such close proximity and still staying the best of buddies!! Shadakshari sir and Mouli sir, I miss you both. May your blessings always stay with me.

Malini madam: If there were two people that I really admired in all of Surana college for their sunny disposition and never-say-die-spirit, one would be Chandramouli sir (above mentioned) while the other, without any doubt, would have to be Malini madam. Malini madam, you have brightened many a day of mine during my short stint at Surana with just your smile and I'm sure many, many others at Surana feel the same way about you too. Have a great new year madam and continue spreading the cheer. I'd love to hear from you.</div>


<div text="The Faculty and non-teaching staff gang@NCST (past and present-continuous!)" class="ljcut">The Faculty and non-teaching staff gang@NCST (past and present-continuous!)

Sasi sir: Warm wishes for a fabulous new year sir. Your posts on lj have become far and few between and it's an understatement to say that your posts are missed.

Ripul sir: Have a great new year sir! We (the NCSTians now at C-DAC Pune) still recollect with love, the passion with which you taught us. Please stay in touch.

Rahul Upakare sir: I strongly suspect that you have made much more of an impact on your students that you realize yourself. We really were and are fans of yours! Have a great year in '08.

Sreekanth sir: You hardly ever wasted your words, but were there to help, when help was most required. Warm new year wishes to you, sir.

Chintu sir: The motivator. Was always around with a patient ear and a helpful word, pushing people to perform more. Sir, wish you a great new year in 2008. Stay in touch.

Apoorv Sharma sir: The innovator. Be it the language improvement sessions that he conducted in the evenings for those weak in spoken English or his zeal in handling projects, he was refreshingly different, Sir, have a great new year and stay in touch!

Naveen Kumar sir: One of the most amazing listeners I have ever come across. He could listen to a student's gripes and grouses for extended periods of time paitiently and in the end, offer incredibly insightful inputs. Thanks for being there for us sir. Have a great new year sir.

Naveen Balakrishnan sir: A source of inspiration and a role-model for many of us to work harder. Linus Torvalds is quoted as having said 'Talk is cheap; Show me the code'. I'm sure Naveen sir lives by that line. Sir, have a fabulous new year.

Joju sir: Sir, if I have less fear for Mathematics today, it's only because of you. Thanks tons and have a fabulous new year!

Rekha madam: The ever smiling, ever helpful person who could take away all the headache of official forms and course details in a second and make you feel better in an instant, with her smile. Thanks madam, for everything. I was not feeling well enough to come to Mumbai for the last requiz, but I'll be bothering you soon for details about the next one. Have a great new year!

Sonali madam, Saroj madam and Birje sir: The number of times my friends and I have exasperated them by coming late for breakfast/lunch/dinner is countless. Though they did lose their patience on a couple of occasions (we pushed them really hard!), they went out of their ways to make us feel at home. They are amongst the sweetest and most genuine people I ever encountered. Sonali madam, Saroj madam and Birje sir, my heartfelt wishes for a fabulous new year for you! I look forward to meeting up with you and eating from the canteen when I next come to NCST.</div>


(more to come)

I was trawling through blogs of my friends’ friends (God, I must be having all the time in the world or what??!) when I came across a mention of a meme. Intrigued, I looked up the word on http://dictionary.reference.com. It said “ meme –noun a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes”.
Interesting. Well, it involved requesting for a random letter from which you make a list of the five things that are your favorites (commencing from the letter of course!) I requested <div class="ljuser">shrads_m</div> and she graciously gave me the letter ‘H’, so here I am!

1) Here I am: The song by Bryan Adams which was the OST of the movie ‘Spirit - The Stallion of Cimarron’. I loved the movie and loved the song. I listen to it whenever I need a pep up.
2) Holmes, Sherlock: The super-observant super detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As a kid, I was so impressed by his adventures that I even wanted to become a private-eye someday!
3) Hardy Boys: The other crime-solvers that I was crazy about. It was the Hardy Boys books that got me hooked to reading novels. I used to read them cover to cover and as many as two a day during my holidays, borrowed from the public library. Since then, reading has always been a favorite pastime.
4) Harate - Kannada expression meaning banter and gupshup. A pastime as dear as reading. When alone, it is reading and when I have company, it’s Harate aka yakking away to glory!
5) Humongous: One of my favorite adjectives. Big is never big enough, until it’s humongous. Whether it’s to describe the appetite of my friends when I take them out on a treat or the size of Rakhi Sawant’s … um, ego, ‘Humongous’ is the word!
Many thanks to Shrads for passing on this meme to me. If anybody’s interested to play this game, here’s the deal:
INSTRUCTIONS:
- Comment and I’ll give you a letter.
- You have to list 5 things you love that begin with that letter.
- Afterwards, post this in your journal.

Christmas eve. Brings back lots of nostalgic memories, like these below:

Hometown visit and leisure overdose
The visit to my hometown was nice while it lasted and now, the hangover has passed too! Work had been silently piling up on my desk while I was away and suddenly, it seems that I’m neck deep in work! Not that I’m complaining though. The thing with holidays, vacations and hometown visits is that one tends to overdose (and overdoze??). The result of all that oding is that I now want a break from breaks, leisure from leisure. My boss was delighted to find me in such a state and promptly welcomed me back with more work!!! I have gone back to working on the grid. We are in the process of becoming a contributor to the euindiagrid, one of the two major grids in India, the other being Garuda. Even as work on the euindiagrid is in progress, my boss has set his sights on the Garuda grid and sees me playing a key role in that initiative. I’m looking forward to that. The learning potential is practically endless.

I’m sorry
On a sadder and more regretful note, I was supposed to help out a colleague of mine from C-DAC Bangalore in his own grid related efforts, but a personal setback put paid to the plans to help him out. I have not even been able to give him a proper explanation and I dread to think what he will be thinking about me. I hope to get back to him and tender a full explanation and an apology as well as an offer to help him out as best as I can from where I am.

I’m happy
Back at office, my juniors have completed a first round of training exercises and have begun to work on small real-time assignments. I really love the concept of real-world real-time assignments as small as they may be, they give the solver the satisfaction that his code has been put into real use. If one contrasts it with an assignment for the sake of an assignment, there is no comparison whatsoever. I already see the change in their outlooks and attitudes as they come to grips that they are now expected to start contributing actively. I love NPSF!

I’m hopeful
At the C-DAC canteen (grandly called the C-DAC Roof-top pavilion) where I take my lunch and dinner most times, I was approached by a canteen assistant and a security guard to help them with their English speaking and reading skills respectively. Today, I exchanged casual banter with them in English, translating the words into Hindi over dinner. I also asked the security chap (Satish) to read the sentences written on my identity card, which he did a pretty good job of. Satish is way ahead of the other guy (Jeetu), in that he can read and write all the alphabets of English correctly and is even able to latch on to the pronunciation of groups of characters. I have asked him to commence reading English newspapers and write down the spellings of the words that he cannot pronounce. I’m sure he will have a long list initially, but he seems to be a fast learner. I hope Jeetu too picks up things from Satish. I’m hopeful that these two guys will learn to read, write and speak English to a decent extent before long.

Hi! all. I’m back. The vacation from LJ was nice. I’m currently in my hometown Bangalore, attending a conference on Free and OpenSource Software (FOSS.IN).
It’s a nice feeling to be able to eat home cooked food and sleep in my own cot, in my own room. It was quite a while since I last visited home. I plan to use this trip to catch up with all the people with whom I’ve been out of touch in a while. My nephew has grown quite a bit taller since I last saw him and my sister has finally succeeded in shedding a few pounds! Mom and dad were happy to see me too (I hope!) I met up with my best friend from college with whom I share a birthday (Rakshit Simha) and went out for a beer with him. He was quite happy to have finally landed a job. I also caught up with my friends from school and college (Vinay Sharma and Ravindra). I met up with my good friend and former colleague Surabhi Bhandari and caught a movie with her - Jab We Met. We loved it.

FOSS.IN

I’m meeting people with a lot of ideas and dreams about the future of their OpenSource ventures. A person presented photographs and a video clip about a project involving schoolchildren in a village called Bijra in West Bengal. It’s heartening to note that people are finding time, energy and enthusiasm to do things which are not directly related to their own wellbeing. Today is day two of the convention. The first two days are designated as project days in which people present their projects or project proposals related to opensource technology. Most of the projects were based on localisation. We had a person presenting a package management solution for computers which were not connected to the net. It exported the package information file which could then be imported into a machine with an internet connection. That machine could then download the required packages (the dependencies checked by yum) and the files put into a tar ball. The tar ball just needs to be installed onto the recepient machine to complete the update/installation.
Tomorrow is going to be more interesting with topics ranging from kernel hacking and virtualization.

Bangalore

Bangalore has changed quite a bit since I last saw it. So many new shops, malls, and buildings have come up that it was quite difficult for me to even recognize a few places. I almost got lost quite close to my own house!! The traffic too is now much worse that it was when I was around last. My dad has bought a new twowheeler (Honda Dio) which I’m now using to commute to and from the conference venue. Currently, Bangalore is celebrating Bangalore Habba (Bangalore festival), a fornight long annual celebration of everything the city stands for. The venue is on and around the famous M.G.Road. Each day has a differnent theme, like for instance, it could be a musical celebration on one day with people performing everything from traditional music to rock shows while it could be painting or pottery on another day. I hope to attend it and maybe pick up a few knickknacks for posterity. I had once got a pencil sketch of myself with my then girlfriend done, during a Bangalore Habba. I still have it and it brings back a lot of fond memories. That’s Bangalore and Bangalore Habba for you! Maybe I’ll put up a few snaps soon.

No, this is not a goodbye to lj, a la <div class="ljuser">peeyush</div>, but more like a holiday from blogging. I have come to a point where in writing posts for my blog has become a chore, and a tedious one at that! (I don’t know how anybody who reads them would feel!) So, this is Prashanth Chengi, taking a little break from the blogosphere. Hope to come back refreshed and recharged, with new ideas and experiences to share with everybody. Till then, Tata!
(Takes a bow)

Prelude

Lunchtime is something memorable out here at C-DAC. Usually my boss Dr Sandeep Joshi, my seniors, Swaroop Sir, Ajit Mote, Rishi Pathak and myself, lunch together, either at the C-DAC staff canteen which bears the exotic name ‘C-DAC Rooftop Pavilion’  or at Aniket, a restaurant that is right across the main building. Conversation at times is related to technical topics, but is mostly non-technical. We discuss books, movies, jokes and the like and have a really nice time over lunch. Today’s discussion started out with King Khan getting on the wrong side of BCCI and from there, the topic veered to Om Shanti Om. Sandeep sir who has watched the movie seemed to have liked it and was entertaining us by narrating snippets of the story, the kind that goes unnoticed by many, like the case of a spotboy who hurriedly jots down a line about love spouted by Shahrukh Khan. That spotboy, the movie implies, went on to become the director of a hit romantic movie, using that same line as the punchline of the movie. I leave it to the readers to guess the identity of the director and the movie! That definitely seemed like a nice, original joke, not overtly offensive to anybody, the kind that is a rarity these days.

That movie snippet reminded me of a couple of scenes in the movie Forrest Gump. In one scene, when Gump is running and is being followed by his fans, one fan steps into a pile of dog-poop. Gump consoles him by saying that it happens. The man gets inspired by the situation and supposedly goes on to print the now famous ‘Shit Happens’ bumper sticker! In another scene, Gump tells one of the people who are listening to his story that his accountant invested some of his money in a fruit company. And the name of the company? Apple Inc!!! Jokes like these are really so mild, yet so filled with humor. Such a contrast from the over-the-top and crass humor from the likes of Jim Carrey and Rowan Atkinson.

Being funny is a very serious business said someone (I think it was the famous stand-up comedian Bob Hope) and it is absolutely so. Movies and books these days seem to more and more frequently employ over the top histrionics in the name of comedy. If Johnny Lever was over the top, I have no words for Rajpal Yadav’s attempt at humor.

Laughter and the challenge of laughing at jokes that are not funny!
 
What about the thousand and odd laughter shows that are perennially on air and the comedy gurus like Shekhar Suman? I think they have lost their judgement and senses thanks to all the money pouring in, thanks to the laughter mania on television. I have seen several so called entertainers resorting to cheap double-meaning lines and downright vulgarity in the name of humor, and it is downright irritating to see Navjot Siddhu laughing like his life depended on it, even if the joke which supposedly caused it was not even remotely funny! I miss the days when Shekhar Suman was in his prime and delivered oodles of humor in his serial Dekh Bhai Dekh. Even ‘The Great Indian Comedy Show’ (the precursor of this utterly unfunny Laughter Challenge) was far better. Probably the challenge is in spotting what is funny about all the jokes that do the round. And what about originality? What is that? We see these so called entertainers ripping off jokes from famous joke-books or forwarded mails that do the round on the internet, remix them with new names and/or change the genders and spout the so called ‘original comedy’. Bah!

Is there still hope for comedy lovers?

Fortunately for lovers of good comedy, new need not always be a bad thing. Sendhil and Goundmani were renowned comedians in Tamil movies, but over the years, they had lost all originality and had degenerated to the extent of only using expletives and physical slapping/kicking/punching in the name of comedy. With their unceremonious and inglorious exit, in came Vivek, a superb entertainer. He uses smart wordplay and tongue-in-cheek puns which are in good taste to create laugh riots. Paresh Rawal too is a class apart in Bollywood, indicating that all is not hopeless in Bollywood. However, a comedian can only be as good as the director, as a director with a poor sense of humor can only bring out weak jabs and stabs at humor, even by employing the best of comedians in business.

Ek Chaalis Ki Last Local, one of the lesser known releases of last year was bang on target with its humor sequences despite having a relatively unknown director and supporting cast. Gives hope to people like me who appreciate refined humor and abhor histrionics and gimmickery in the name of humor.

I lit up the last cigarette that I had, before leaving for my room from office, only to stub it out halfway. No, it was not a result of <div class="ljuser">peeyush</div> ’s passionate plea for the sake of the environment, but because I would want to light up again once I’m home as it’s really chilly out here, and I would not be having anything to light up!!! Nights in Bangalore would be chilly in Nov-Dec, but Pune is chilling me to the bone. Spending the last one year in winterless Mumbai has not helped my cause any. Brr! I have half a mind to stay overnight in office, only to escape having to cycle all the way back home in this cold weather. The cycling will no doubt bring out the body heat, but the blast of cold air in the face is something that I can well do without!

Once upon a time, there were three guys, two Americans and a Red Indian (tribal native American) lost in the middle of a desert. The sun was scorching hot and they had spend hours trying to find their way, when one of the Americans commented how hungry he was. The other promptly agreed that he too was very hungry and asked the Red Indian whether he too was hungry. The Red Indian answered in the negative and they continued on their quest to find their way.

After some time, they chanced upon a small eatery where they decided to refresh themselves and ask for directions. When the three started to eat, the Red Indian ate twice as much as other two put together, surprising the others. It was then that they asked him how he could eat so much when just a while ago, he had told them that he was not hungry. The Red Indian shrugged and told them that out in the desert he did not bother to think about hunger and food as there was no food to be had, while now there was food at his disposal so he was eating to his heart’s content!

Often, we think about things that are not in our control. Feeling hungry is obvious. The Red Indian was not God, not to feel hungry without food. It’s just that he chose not to think about it as there was nothing he could do about it, whereas the others were thinking about food and making themselves more miserable. When there was food to be had, he lost no time in out-eating them. Moral of the piece, if there is any? Think where and when required and not as a compulsive habit.

My friend , <div class="ljuser">v4veens</div> has written an interesting post on her blog about her shopping experience and how she felt she ought to have planned it better. Sasi Sir (<div class="ljuser">the_little_sasi</div> ) has commented on the blog saying that there must be a limit to the amount of pre-planning that we must do, as there are only so many things in our control. Beyond that, I feel it’s just a waste of precious time.

I have not watched the movie ‘Beautiful Mind’, about the life of the great mathematician John Nash, but I have heard that it describes his battle with paranoid schizophrenia. He is supposedly shown deliberating back and forth for a really long time, just to come to a decision whether to drink coffee or tea. I mean, is that the kind of a decision that is extra-ordinary? It was not the last cup of beverage that he was consuming in his life time or something. This kind of behavior is perfectly common in the case of schizophrenics, but many other people, those not suffering from any such conditions, spend hours upon hours coming to decisions that they are not even empowered to take! Ultimately, the just opt for whatever comes their way, but still the amount of thinking that they do is phenomenal! I’m not saying that we should not think at all. On the contrary, thinking is very essential, but it must be in moderation. And if one is thinking about something that one has very little or no control over, he/she is just wasting time.

 Both the television and print media have lost most of the respect and value associated with them. In a senseless bid to attract readership/TRP, the media is going all out to find juicy scoops and even utter rubbish, as long as a celebrity is visible amidst all that rubbish, to get to the top of the pile of junk.

Friends have sought your keen ears, To whisper many a secret. Many have felt strengthened, By your warm and reassuring hug; Many tears have been wiped away, By your gentle but firm hands, And smiles have bloomed on faces, As a reflection of your own.

One of my favorite actors, Hugo Weaving, playing the part of Agent Smith in Matrix says the famous words “There is no escaping reason, no denying purpose”  What is this purpose? Often, we tend to get frustrated when things don’t go the way we thought it would, when the most elaborately laid out plans collapse without as much as a tiny warning, yet the inspired people seem not to lose their idea of purpose while the lesser mortals give up. Back in my schooldays, we had a lesson in English about King Robert I of Scotland (Robert the Bruce).  and how he learned an invaluable lesson by observing a spider. After being beaten soundly by the English for six times in a row, the demoralized and disheartened king ran away and hid himself in a cave where he had an epiphany. He watched a spider weave its web, over and over again, refusing to get disappointed no matter how many times the frail web gave way. The spider kept laboring away and rested only after completing its mission and the king, who was watching this lesson unfold in front of his eyes, drank from it deeply. He knew that he had a mission. He had a purpose. He gathered his forces again  and with his new-found enthusiasm and spirit, was able to whip up a frenzy within his troops who fought with all their bravery against the English and secured a famous victory for Scotland.
Purpose is what can keep us in the hunt. No matter how many reversals of fortune dog us, if only we have belief in our goals and remember that we have a purpose, nothing can stop us.

I turned yet another year older on the 6th of October. I went back home on the evening of 5th, after completing a marathon 34 hours at my work-place (Leaving aside the trips to the coffee-machine, breakfast, lunch, and the loo, I was working away!) I was totally exhausted and slept a dream-less death like sleep till my flat-mates woke me up to wish me with the customary birthday bumps! Then it was the turn of a few of my friends to wish me over the phone and it kept me busy, groggy as I was, over the phone. I went back to sleep shortly and woke up in the morning.  Sought blessings of my late Grandfather, my idol. Ate breakfast. Went back to sleep. Woke up and had lunch and went back to sleep. Woke up in the evening and started planning for the party. Three bottles of beer, a full bottle of rum and a full bottle of whiskey were some of the things on the shopping list! My friends surprised me with a wonderful cake. After the cake cutting, the spirit levels of everyone went soaring, literally as well as figuratively!!! My senior from NPSF, Rishi, also made it to the party. It was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, my friends were too drunk to take good photographs! Since almost all of us lived in the same flat (with the exception of Rishi), nobody had to drive home after all that drinking. Rishi who was relatively sober insisted on going home and we allowed him, after he passed a score of sobriety tests (US-police style!!!) . It was a really memorable party, and while I don’t have many photographs, my friends managed to snag a few good video clips (which does not call for a steady pair of hands!) which might find their way here, some day!
One of the best gifts that I received however was an entire blog post, dedicated to my birthday, from <div class="ljuser">v4veens</div>

I have a friend of mine  (<div class="ljuser">prajnahegde</div>) who is often at a loss as to what to write in her blog, though she is otherwise full of thoughts. It used to be that way for me too, but not anymore. Once you get out of that phase wherein you really look around for something ‘blogworthy’ to blog about, blog-posts keep rolling by. Did anybody say ‘What about quality?’ My answer? What about it? Does it even matter? When I started writing my first blog , I just wanted it to be a private blog, not for others to read, but as I started to blog and go through the blogs of others, I felt that it would be a good idea to share it with others. Whether others read it or not, it still doesn’t have any effect on my writing as  I write what pleases me, but in case somebody does like it, it’s nice, isn’t it? I get inspired by other bloggers and if somebody likes my writing, it’s just passing it forward. The following blog is what originally started as a comment on a blog post  of a friend (<div class="ljuser">v4veens</div>).

Women are not the only set of people who are mysterious and unpredictable. Men are so too.
I have had my share of relationships that did not work out and I have come to realize a few things about women (and us men), thanks to these relationships (Probably the only positive thing to come out of them!)

Women:-

1) If there is something that women don’t want to talk about for whatever reason best known to them, they will not talk about it, no matter who you are and how necessary you feel that they share it with you.
2) They have a style of logic that men have a lot of trouble comprehending, so they believe that it is better kept as a secret from us men!
3) Every itsy-bitsy thing (itsy-bitsy thing for us men!) is part of a plan for them!
4) Nothing is simple and straight forward. They are firm believers in ‘The Butterfly Effect’  and actually behave in ways that seem to be purely illogical to us men, but again, their actions are just pieces of a huge jig-saw puzzle that we are not even aware of!!

There is a lot more, but this post is just a gist. Similarly, I have analysed my own behaviour (and that of my friends) when I was/ they  were into those failed relationships and have come to the following conclusions.

Men:-

1) Most men have a tendency to incorrectly estimate the level of maturity of their loved one. While many under-estimate it, a surprisingly high number actually over-estimate it. The percentage of men who get it bang on target is 0 to 0.5 in my opinion!
2) More men are inclined towards commitments and stable relationships than women tend to believe.
3) Men are the weaker sex, when it comes to emotions. (Yeah, this is THE TRUTH! I have seen my friends go to pieces over broken relationships while their exes have been happily going about their shopping and normal activities with more cheer than ever!)
4) Extention of the previous point: Men take a much longer time than women, to nurse a broken-heart.
5) Men attach the success of a relationship more strongly to their egos than women do. This is probably the reason why a man broods over a broken relationship, even if the woman was a terrible companion!

The T20 format seems to be here to stay with people waxing eloquent about it, left, right and center, but it is really such a nice thing after all? The T20 series has brought about a lot of changes in attitude, outlook and has evinced mixed reasons for all sorts of reasons. It is said that controversy sells and T20 proves that right, several times over. Firstly, for the harried Indian Cricket Team which was copping flak from all quarters and reeling under the sudden announcement of relinquishment of captaincy by Rahul Dravid, the winning of the T20 championship was just what the doctor ordered (or was it doctored ??? my uncle Shri Raghunath certainly feels so, but I don’t take any stance on that!) Whatever it was, the team is now reaping accolades and riches, but not everyone is happy for the men in Blue. For one, the hockey players are feeling very blue (or is it green, with jealousy?) that they are not paid as highly for their achievements as their cricketing counterparts. Lets dissect their claims, remove all traces of political bullshit and then reexamine their claims.

The past couple of days have been very interesting and informative.  Working hands on with a grid, although experimental and problematic, is a great learning experience. To make matters worse, we are having this workshop on the campus of National Centre for Radio Astronomy (NCRA) Pune and not at C-DAC, due to constraints of space and several other factors that I cannot as yet fathom! Apart from the facility, we had to also use some of the machines of the lab at NCRA, but were under severe constraints about their use. The constraints meant that we were not supposed to do any local installations of the client software for the grid middleware that we had used to set up the grid. To make matters even more difficult, glite made it mandatory for even the client machine to run on Scientific Linux and not on any other flavor of Linux. We had come up with an idea (my boss, Dr Sandeep Joshi’s idea) of using a diskless setup in the lab. The plan was something like this:
1) Install the different componets of the middleware for the grid known as gLite, on to systems specifically chosen for the purpose (machines belonging to C-DAC, over which we had supreme powers!)
2) Install one of our machines to act as a server for the diskless clients (machines belonging to NCRA)
3) The NCRA machines would fetch the Scientific Linux kernel image from the server over NFS.
4) The diskless client, now running Scientific Linux and using an NFS mounted partition on the server for the purpose of data storage would import the display from another server running the glite user interface (the GUI).
5) These diskless clients, unknown to the user, would also function as the worker nodes for the grid. We also had four dedicated worker nodes, keeping in mind the tendency of users to do crazy things on a grid, including turning off their machines (like they are accustomed to doing at home!) in spite of our asking them not to do.
5) Users would have to use this GUI to fire jobs on the grid.
6) We would be able to monitor the status of the queues, system resources of the individual components of the grid as well the entire grid on the whole, from our master console, through a 16 port KVM swich (an extremely useful gizmo that allows a sysadmin to monitor upto 16 machines and work on them using just one keyboard, mouse and monitor. Howzaaat? Without this, we would need to have a mouse, keyboard and a monitor for each one of those machines. Just think of the space saved!)

Unfortunately, things did not exactly go as we would have wanted it to. The system administrator, Alessio Terpin, who came down from ICTP, Italy, to assist with the setup would have nothing of our setup and so, we were forced to do some minor installations on the NCRA machines. We installed VMWare on to them (a tool to run virtual kernels on a machine. Using this, one can create an illusion of several machines and even have them running on unique IP addresses which can even be pinged from a physical machine. User mode Linux, for the geeks out there. The grand-daddy of the Virtual CD-ROM software that gamers used to do away with the problem of pesky games demanding that the cd be in the tray for the game to proceed! There, only a cdrom was spoofed, here, it is an entire system!)
Alessio worked his magic on the machines and the clients were also configured to act as the worker nodes. We had a lot of teething issues with the grid and often had to combat pesky problems without the liberty of simply rebooting the machines, as that is the first thing that a grid system-admin will have to remember. Users have their jobs running on the grid and they cannot just be terminated because you have goofed up somewhere.

The whole exercise has taught me a great deal and I just can’t wait for our machines to come back home to C-DAC, where we will do further experimentations on it and hopefully make it fit enough to be put to production use. Once it enters production (if it does, that is), it will no longer be a test-bed for experiments but a reliable platform for users to submit their computing-power hungry programs. It’ll be fun.

We at NPSF-SANG, C-DAC Pune, are in the process of setting up our own local grid, one with complete functionality of a grid. Here, I give a brief description of the key tems related to high performance computing (HPC) and the work that we do, as well as an overview of the EUINDIA Grid project. All terms are overly simplified to cater to lay-man levels of understanding.

I love the song Laree Chooti from Ek Chaalis Ki Last Local. It is aired occasionally on MTV Kickass or on channel V, the only programs that I watch or rather listen to on TV. Yes, I do listen to the TV! I’m usually still in the mission to grab some extra winks when my early-bird flatmates will be up and going about. They usually turn on the TV and continue with their activities and I just take in the song and increase my count of zzzs though the z’s will be in lower case, now that the proper upper-case ZZZ sleep is over! I love listening to this particular song. It sort of peps me up. My colleague, Rishi downloaded the song and scped it to my account and I lost no time in getting it onto my phone after which I have listened to it a gazillion times! The movie itself was extremely enjoyable in spite of which it didn’t do too well in the box office. Maybe my perception of a good movie is not shared by the common public. One more piece of evidence that I’m not in synch with the crowd. I really have given up trying to fit in. I mean, if I really have to do something, pretend to like something when I don’t, do something that I’d rather not just to gel with the croud, I’d rather stick out like a sore thumb. No compromise on that one. I call a spade a spade without trying to transform it into anything else. I believe that polical correctness is to be left to the people who are predictably the masters at it, the politicians. However, when these people make the mistake of being politically incorrect, it often leads to resignations being demanded and national furore, fights and slugfests in the parliament and what not! I’m luckier that way you see. The maximum that would happen in my case is that an individual incapable of appreciating the fine lines that I skate upon might get offended and my typical reaction? Dear Mr Over-sensitive, you are most welcome to get irritated. In fact, it is a pleasure!

The past week has been an interesting one for me. I wrote a poem after nearly two years and I now find myself doing something else that I love and haven’t been able to do in a long time. Read. I found ‘Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance’ in the office cupboard. Not sure who it belongs too, but I mentioned it to me boss and borrowed it. I have commenced reading it and it seems to be an engrossing read. The book sees to it that my bedtime is further pushed forward by a couple of hours at least, every night, but I don’t mind. If I didn’t have to go to work tomorow and the day after, I would have curled myself up in bed with the book for company and read it cover to cover, with just the most essential breaks in between! I love reading!

Three new members have joined our team and I now find myself in a learning plus teaching mode!! I need to learn the things that have been assigned to me (currently I’m learning about a middleware for grid computing, called glite (pronounced as jee-lite)) as well as oversee what they are learning, as the other seniors are more than busy with their own work. Too bad, I can’t make it to Mumbai tomorrow to attend the get-together of our batch of FPGDST, at NCST, Kharghar.

I’m a Formula 1 buff, and a hardcore one, at that and have lots of friends who either are equally passionate about it or couldnt’ care for less. I have a few friends who are interested, but are not very knowledgeable, as they don’t regularly follow the sport. Well, it is to this last set of friends, as well as anybody else who might be interested to know what F1 is all about, that this post of mine is targeted, so if you are interested, you may read beyond this point.
<div class="ljcut">Formala One is the highest class of motorsports that comes under the purview of the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile). Right from the Pre WWII era, F1 has existed, in some form or the other, but it got its proper nomenclature and structure only after the second world war. Jaun Manuel Fangio was the driver who ruled the roost in those days, the record books suggest. While I for obvious reasons don’t know much about Formula One era of those days, I have been watching F1 from 1994. Ayrton Senna was a major idol of mine and I was heartbroken to see him crash and subsequently die, during the San Marino Grand Prix of 1994, a race that had already claimed one other life, that of Roland Ratzenberger during the previous day’s practice. Since then, only one person has come even close to being the genius that Senna was, and that man goes by the name of Michael Schumacher. Many of the people say that Michael was responsible for making the sport a boring one, due to his marked superiority and tendency to win more races than anybody else! This is like saying that Pete Sampras made tennis boring with his incredible run of five straight years at the top. Many of my friends seem to find nothing very interesting about a car spinning around a track and doing it over and over again, at high speed, but if speed were to be the only thing that mattered, probably the sport would have truly been more boring.

Let me give you the basic information about Formula 1, as it exists today. Formula 1, unlike what many people feel, is not an individual sport, but a team sport. As many as eleven teams participate in a race and each team is limited to having not more than two cars per race. Each team has its own cars, powered by engines of varying capacities and capabilities, though falling within certain guidelines and limitations set by the FIA. Teams like Ferrari, McLaren Mercedes, BMW and Honda, to name a few, use their own engines for their cars while the other teams use engines bought and refitted according to their needs. Cosworth is a leading engine maker and has powered many teams. One might be tempted to say that since the engines are not the same, the sport is not really fair and to an extent, it is a valid argument, but how it benefits the spectator and the sport is that all the teams compete first with themselves and then with the others to come up with the best of technological innovations and improvements, many of which find their way into the road going cars manufactured by the same companies. Many of Ferrari’s and McLaren’s breakthroughs on the racing track have been incorporated into their road going cars.

So, what are the things that decide who wins the race? Here is a checklist:

1) Car
2) Driver
3) Race director
3) Pit-crew and technicians

The car, obviously, is on the top of the list. The faster and better the car, the greater are the chances of winning. A good car is not just one that is the fastest, but also one that is reliable. A typical Formula 1 engine revs to up to 19,000 RPM and even a loose gasket or washer in the engine can mean a fiery engine blowout. A good car is one that is not only fast, but doesn’t fall apart, before crossing the finish line.

 A good driver can push a car to its limits and sometimes, beyond it and still get away with it, and many a time, a good driver can get better results from a mediocre car than an average driver with a super-car. Drivers like the Late Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher have demonstrated time and again that competing and winning is possible, even if you don’t have the fastest car on the track.

A race director is one who figures out the strategy for a race, for each driver of the team. Strategy? What strategy, you might ask. Formula 1 is a thinking sport. The timing of pit-stops (the stops that an F1 car has to make for fuel, replacement of broken parts, tyres, etc. and oh, by the way, F1 cars will have to stop some time. No car can make it from the start to the finish, wthout stopping even once), how much fuel to carry (if the car is fueled full, it can stay in the race longer, but the added fuel means added weight and it might prevent it from being fast. Remember that thousandths of seconds matter in F1! Conversely, a lightly fueled car can be much faster, but cannot stay out for long. It will have to pit soon for fuel) are all crucial and can make and break the race for a driver. It’s very common to see the difference of a few fractions of a second between cars finishing first and second! Such is the extent of competition. The race director is the guy who plans out all the strategies and even plans for contingencies like rain, adverse traffic conditions (yes, they too face traffic jams!) and accidents (a part of the sport).

The pit-crew and the technicians are the backbones of a team. The technicians and mechanics are the ones who fiddle around with the car to help extract the last ounce of power from the engine and tweak it for various special requirements. Formula 1 races take place in different countries and each track is totally different. While one may have lots of fast corners and straight lines, others may be winding and curvy. The technicians fine-tune the car for each circuit.
The pit-crew are the mechanics that service the car when it comes in for a pit-stop. Formula 1 pit crew can change all the four tyres of a Formula 1 car and even add a considerable amount of fuel and flag the car off, in just about five seconds, and this is not an exaggeration. This is the level of perfection and precision that they display. As many as twenty mechanics form the pit crew and each one of them is designated his/her work and that is what they do,  perfectly, to the last detail. A mistake on the part of the pit-crew will most definitely result in a driver losing his position or even the entire race.

It is a combination of these above described factors that decide whether a team or driver loses or wins. There are as many as eighteen races in a year that decide the championship. There is one award for the best driver and one for the best constructor (team) that is awarded at the end of the year (championship season).

The first three positions are known as podium positions. They carry 10, 8 and six points respectively while those finishing in the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth postions earn 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 points, respectively.

I know explain some of the jargon associated with the sport:-

Qualifying: One day prior to the race, the drivers take part in the qualifying rounds in which the drivers try to set the fastest time around the circuit. The person who takes the least time to go around the entire circuit is the fastest and will get to start the actual race in the first position, the second fastest starts in the second position and so on.

Pole position: The first position on the race track, held by the person who achieved the best time in the qualifying round, is known as ‘pole position’.

Lapping: The leading cars often go so much faster than the cars at the back of the grid that they come up behind the cars in the last positions, ie one full circuit length ahead and are entitled to be allowed to overtake the slower cars. This is known as lapping. In such a scenario, the car being ‘lapped’ will
not be allowed to block or stop the faster car from overtaking it.

Yellow Flag: In the event of an accident, the drivers are shown the yellow flag, ie caution signal. They are to watch out for debris on the track, if the accident has left any, on the track. Overtaking of cars, other than lapping, is not permitted during the yellow flag period. After the track is deemed to be safe for racing, the normal status is restored.

Safety car: In case of serious accidents involving several cars and/or lots of debris on the race track, a safety car is deployed. It leads from the front and all cars are to follow it at a discrete distance. No overtaking or changing of positions is permitted during the safety car’s tenure.

Downforce: The downward force on a car, mostly decided by the tail which works like an inverted airplane wing. It provides the car good road grip as well as prevents the car from becoming airborne at high speeds.

Slipstream: The region of lesser air resistance, just behind a car in front. If a car stays in the wake of another car in front of it, it can go much faster than what it normally can, as it does not face the air resistance. The air is cut through by the car in front. The flipside of the slipstream is that the car driving behind will have lesser downforce and the lack of air means that the car will get heated up more easily too.

Slap and Dash; A really quick pitstop for just enough fuel to last the car till the end of the race. I have seen slap and dashes taking as less as four seconds!

These and many more. I will update this post as and when I feel like adding more things. Feel free to pop questions. I would love to elaborate them on this post too.





</div>

I know it is rather late to be wishing Onam, considering that the day just has another few hours left in it, but then, I thought better late than never so here it is: A very happy Onam festival to all the Mallu friends, faculty and seniors of mine at NCST and elsewhere. Whether NCST ever will get to celebrating Republic Day and Independence day with the tricolor flying on the campus is something that I don’t know, but Onam certainly is a colorful event on the campus. Last year around, Messrs Rahul Upakare, Hari, Sreekanth and many others had gotten together to create a magnificient masterpiece of Rangoli. I wonder what they did this year. Would anybody clue me in?

What do you do when a person seems to be readying to be preparing to leave the workplace but is not exactly leaving? What would you do if you want to wish him/her a good evening/night but don’t want to, in order not to seem rude? Use the Non-Blocking Goodnight wish!!! Just like a non-blocking system call just tests the condition and gets on with whatever else it needs to do without seeing the event through, you can issue a non-blocking goodnight! Howzzzzzaaat!!! I wished my boss a non-blocking goodnight and continued with my work! It produced a big smile from him too, when I told him what I called my greeting!

It will be a while before I’m a full fledged member of the team out here as there are so many things that I have to learn and catch up on. The server room is a place which is a perfect example of order in chaos, what with the absolute abundance of cables snaking all over the place, connecting the gazillion gizmos around, and mind you, this server room is but an glorified storeroom! The place where the real action is, the actual Param server room is now vacant; empty in readiness to host its new occupant, the as yet unnamed, as yet unbuilt 10 Terflop+ supercomputer, India’s most powerful yet. Things will get immensely more interesting and complicated once that beast becomes operational, so I have to use this time to get prepared for what lies ahead! Definitely exciting and all that but the challenge is also in staying motivated and on the job, even in the absence of people to guide. Mollycoddling doesn’t happen here and the seniors, while extremely helpful and friendly have their hands full too, making me think ten times before approaching them with a doubt or a problem. More about my job and progress later! Love you all, Cheers, Prash Chengi.

Ever since I found livejournal, I have lost almost all interest in other social networking sites. It’s been a while since I updated my other blog too. I had not logged into my orkut account ever since it was banned at NCST (barring the couple of times I asked my friends who were logged in through proxies to show me my scrapbook! - not a holier-than-thou thingy or whatever.. I had begun to lose interest even before it got banned) and out here at NPSF, though there is no such ban in place, there is simple no interest to do so. I logged in a couple of days back and found that most of my ‘friends’ on orkut too had got bored of sending me scraps and not receiving any in return and had stopped doing so altogether! Good for me, I thought! Anyway, I did update the info about me with my blog url and a message saying that I can be reached on my blog. Others keep sending me invites to jhoos, hikut, hi5, yaari, facebook and God alone knows whatever else, but I’ve had enough of all their kind. If you have seen one, you have seen them all!

 For person to person communication, there is such a thing as email (which most of my friends seem to use only to send stale forwards of forwards of forwarded mails) and if there is something much more important and urgent, there is always the phone!  For everything else, there is LJ! How I wish the others start ljing too! Ankit Dangi (<div class="ljuser">dangiankit</div> ) is one guy who is very much in touch through the blogosphere and today, I got a friend invite from Rajesh Agroya aka The Numero Uno NCSTian  (<div class="ljuser">rajeshagroya1</div>). Welcome to LJ, Rajesh! I miss you man, and our late night walks to grab boiled eggs, the times we spent in the lab…. I see that you have not yet started your journal, but once you start off, there is no looking back! This is the place to be! 

Yesterday had a horrifying shock in store for me. I wok e up with no clue to what was going to happen in a few short minutes. I saw my friend off to work, brushed and shaved and went to take my bath. The water was hot so I bent to pick up the mug to mix some cold water, and it was then that it happened. An excruciating bolt of pain went through my lower back, as if somebody had driven a knife deep into my flesh. Uh-oh, a muscle catch, the kind we often sustain while climbing a bike, I thought. It would go away if I changed my posture, I thought and proceeded to do the same. Only there was more pain and more bolts of pain. I was seeing orbs of different colors swimming before my eyes. I thought I would black out. With great difficulty and in a lot of pain, I grabbed a towel and woke up my other flat-mate who was fast asleep and told me what had happened. I lay down on the bed and the pain just refused to go away. My friend brought a water bottle filled with hot water and put it on my lower back and started kneading gently. It felt better and I tried to move a bit to the side only to get hit by another bolt of pain. I gritted my teeth and just lay down. It pays to have two doctors in the family, I thought as I remembered my sister and brother-in-law, both practicing doctors in Bangalore. I asked my friend to get my mobile phone and I dialled my sister. I told her about my predicament. She fired the regular queries: Had I been lifting anything heavy or doing anything strenous? I replied in the negative and gave her the low-down about how it had transpired. She thought that it could be a case of a muscle spasm, but it might just merit further investigation. She prescribed a muscle relaxant drug to be consumed and a topical gel to be applied. My friends went to fetch it. I applied the gel and settled down into bed, after calling up my senior at work and informing him about my inability to turn up for work. After about an hour, I had some wheatflakes and milk, served by my flatmate, bedside. I slipped into a near delirious sleep, the kind I have never slept and continued sleeping well past lunch time.

When I woke up, the first thing I did was to try to move slightly. The pain was still there, but it was not like knives this time. I ate the noodles that my flat-mate had prepared, still in a lot of pain. I had to take three to four breaks as I could not sit up continuously. I fell back into the bed and slept. When I woke up again, it was late evening. I moved around in bed and found that I was able to actually move! I was even able to get out of bed. The stiffness was still there but I now had mobility! I saw that I could sit on a chair, get up and even go down on one knee, and this to me, was a lot. We take things like walking, bending, sitting, getting up and moving for granted but when our ability to do these simple tasks are taken away from us, it is hard not to feel a sense of panic. It is times like these that triggers our love for life, love for physical fitness. The one year I spent at Mumbai without getting much of exercise came back to my mind. How I wish I had taken better care of my health. I do realize that it is still not too late. I intend to take better care of my health now.

I took another dose of the medication (its a five day course) and slept after eating dinner. I woke up this morning with a lot of stiffness, but no pain. I still have limited mobility, but after the horror of yesterday, I’m happy to be able to move. Happy is an understatement. My sister has told me that the pain and stiffness will take some time to completely disappear and that I must take better care of myself. She has also advised me against cycling for a week. In the meanwhile, if any readers of my blog have any suggestions of herbal remedies especially something that can be locally applied instead of consumed, I’m all for it.
Health is really wealth and I remind my fellow bloggers the same and also urge them to ensure that they give physical fitness as much importance as they give their jobs, if not more.
Take good care,
Prash.

It’s the 60 anniversary of an extremely noteworthy date in history. Almost to the hour, it was on this day, 60 years ago that India became independent from British rule and took baby steps into the big bad world, all on her own. My grandfather was not a freedom fighter, a social crusader or even a closet rebel, but he was great in his own right. He was a person who despite being raised in conditions of abject poverty changed all that by the dint of his own hard work and rose to the rank of an Assistant Executive Engineer in the Central Public Works Department, then run by the British. His life story is one that makes for fabulous reading and I promise I will write more about it on another occasion, but for now, let me not meander. My grandfather always said that the actual achievement of independence was but a minor problem and that several issues far bigger but far more ignored existed, that threatened to stifle India, after she got her Independence, and my grandfather turned out to be right.
<div class="ljcut">
While at NCST, I was going through a book titled ‘India Unbound’ by Gurcharan Das, a book that belonged to my good friend and voracious reader Nandan Nadkarni. The book straight away gives the reader the following impressions:
1) Gurcharan Das knows what he is talking about.
2) The politicians, with Nehru in dead centre, led India into the doldrums with their near-sighted policies.
3) Gurcharan Das is not a fan of Jawarhar Lal Nehru!

The last point is especially obvious, but jokes apart, the politicians (with a few notable exceptions) have done everything that they possibly could to destroy the Indian economy, but we have survived(to what extent is a totally different issue).
My grandfather was a civil engineer and had been involved in several prestigious projects and even had the honor of working alongside the great Sir M Vishveshwariah, and he knew what he was talking about when he said that the British were superior planners. To them, whether it was building a road, a railway line or a bridge, the task meant hiring the best of brains to do the planning and design and the best of workers to turn the concept into reality, and the results are there for us to see, even to this day. A couple of years back, when the contractors hired by the inept municipality corporation of Bangalore started excavation work in order to lay the foundation of a flyover, they discovered a network of sewers that were running underground. What takes the cake was that it was still in almost perfect condition and was very much in use! The pathetic municipality officials did not even know that the sewer system existed! It was laid by the British. Dismantling the sewer system without making alternate arrangements would mean that a part of Bangalore would be flooded during the next rainy season. It caused a big flutter, forcing the miserable excuses for officials to go into a huddle to plan the next move, leading to further delay and expense for the taxpayer, and this is by and large the state of affairs in every state in the so called ‘Independent Republic of India’.

We do have examples of amazing wonders of construction like the Kashmir-Leh highway (currently the highest motorable highway in the world) and the suspension bridge at Krishnarajapuram, Bangalore, but these are the exceptions and not the rule, and we need not have a smug expression of achievement on our faces on their account. Why were the British by far better planners? For one, as I have mentioned earlier, they just needed to recruit the best of people and while doing that, they never had to think about what castes and communities the candidates belonged to and whether the reservation criterion would be met by their selection. A team selected on basis of their abilities will perform and one in which the members have been selected due to other considerations will not. As simple as that. Are we really independent? Have we really made India better than what might have been if the British had continued to rule over us? That is a question that each and every self-respecting Indian will have to ponder over.
</div>
Oh, by the way, I know for a fact that NCST aka C-DAC, Mumbai will not be having a flag hoisting on campus, even though it is Independence day. You might even want to read this post of mine. Why? Some achaic government red-tape and organizational inertia. I will be attending the flag hoisting ceremony though, at C-DAC, Pune, where I’m working now.

I read a witty definition of nostalgia recently: the feeling experienced on realization that the past and events in the past were not really as bad as they seemed, back then!!! I find this so convincing! It’s really so and I have realized it time and again. The best and easiest experience that each and every one of us would have gone through is that during our schooling, the current class would be the toughest ever for us, yet the same subjects and problems seem like a joke during the next year. It just goes to prove that our learning abilities are astounding. Studies prove that even brain cells stop growing in profusion after a certain age and then regression sets in but there are a great many examples of late bloomers all around us. It just means that there is hope for each and every one of us, whether we have been prodigiously talented or otherwise! Experience will eventually teach us the right things!

The day I decided to opt for NCST Kharghar instead of NCST Bangalore as my first preference, in spite of having both options before me and my hometown being Bangalore was a great day! I’m not a guy who believes in fate and destiny and stuff like horoscopes and forecasts, but I do get the feeling every now and then that sometimes, things really happen for a reason. Like the ‘Maqtub’ that Paulo Coelho writes about in his best-selling book ‘The Alchemist’, sometimes, fate, if you may call it that, conspires to help you. Had I not made that decision to move to Mumbai, C-DAC Pune would never have happened. And even before that, had it not been for a chance conversation at my cousin’s place where I was talking about my future prospects, I would not even have taken up the CST exam, the gateway to the FPGDST course. It was my cousin Sanju’s wife Divya who told me about CST. The forms were on sale at Alliance Business Academy in Bangalore, where she was working. She brought it to my notice and I jumped at it. Having gotten an option to choose the centre, something told me that it would be a good idea to opt for Mumbai. Having spent all my life in Bangalore, I thought that an experience of outside home-turf would be a good idea.

Hi all! I have commenced work at NPSF -SANG (System admin and networking group, National Param SuperComputing Facility, Pune). From what my boss has outlined, freetime is a thing of the past (Man, am I glad that I watched all those movies with my friends, at C-DAC, Kharghar! ) Luxury would mean working on my pending project of FPGDST (Sasi sir, I hope you are reading this and sympathize with me, some!) Work seems to be extremely challenging and interesting and I’m really glad that I made it to here. Now it’s up to me to be able to stick around here! More about my job later! Cheers, Prash.

Back in my primary school days, I used to be pretty strong in Mathematics. In fact, it was my favorite subject, but somewhere down the line, during my high school, I started to detest and fear mathematics and it has been so ever since. I flunked my 12th standard math paper and had to sit out a year. I had taken up the supplementary exam and had done well enough to guarantee a pass, but I still had to wait for about 8 months before the new academic year started. I just couldn’t sit at home all day. I set out one fine day, looking for a job. I went to the posher side of Bangalore (my home city). First stop was Nike Sports Station. I walked in, asked for the supervisor and told him that I was on the lookout for a job. He politely told me that the did their hiring through some agency and not in any other fashion. So much for the first try, but I was not going to be upset over that. I hit another couple of shops on Brigade Road, but without much success. I then went to Music World, where I seemed to have better luck. The supervisor there even gave me an interview (I had gone prepared, and even had my Resume with all of six or seven lines about myself!!!). I could have easily landed the job, but for the fact that the supervisor observed that I was not yet 18 (Dang, I was just a couple of months short of that magic figure that supposedly meant a lot of things!) but he politely told me that he was obliged to follow the rules and he offered to take me on after a couple of months (whether he meant it or he was polite, I cannot be sure, but I feel it was the former). Whatever it was, I was still without a job and was running out of places to go to.<div text="What I did next..." class="ljcut">Type your cut contents here.I decided to head back home and when I was quite near home, I saw this huge red board that proclaimed ‘Food World’(a famous supermarket chain). I went in and repeated my carefully rehearsed lines. I told the super that I would be free to work for at least the next six months or so. The manager was impressed. I also told him about my age, but he was apparently undermanned and was willing to overlook my age. He in fact just asked me to mention that I was 18! My heart was pounding! On one hand, I was happy that I had landed a job while on the other hand, I was feeling like a criminal! The super said that it was just a formality and that he would take care of it. He explained the job profile and the dos and the don’ts. I would be in charge of manning the fruits and vegetables section (FnV) and would be responsible for the cleanliness of the stands, removing of stale vegetables and fruits from the racks, replenishing stocks, indenting for fresh stocks and the like. I would also be required to assist with the unloading of stocks when they arrived. My shift was in the evenings from 4.30 to 10 and would be paid a INR 1300. The stocks would invariably come at closing time and we would often be busy unloading the stuff till about 10.30. I started my job and learned the ropes really fast. Before long, my boss felt that I was being wasted in the fruits and vegetables section, as the customers would pick up what they wanted to buy without really requiring any assistance. At that time, the cafeteria in that outlet was registering losses as it was not all that popular and the super thought that with my English skills and smooth talking, I would be able to do better than the guy who used to man it. This meant that I had to receive cashier training as the cafeteria was a one man operation. I had to take the order, heat up the stuff or hit the coffee or tea button and serve the cup, collect the cash and tender the change. Now, I had a fear of math and this job essentially meant that I had to do a lot of counting and mental calculations, but I still managed to learn the ropes. However, I was going to harshly tested during the weekend when the crowd would be large. And it was the first weekend of the month. First weekend=biggest crowd in supermarket terms for obvious reasons. I was swamped by what seemed to be like hundreds of customers, though in reality, they were about fifteen to twenty of them! I was struggling to keep track of who ordered what, who had paid and who had not and what not! The super saw that I was not in control and sent the regular cashier back to assist me. He quickly brought the situation under control, but it was quite a blow to my ego! Later in the day, I would get a further shock when I counted the day’s take. It was short by more than a hundred rupees. Apparently, in all that rush, I had forgotten to collect money from a customer or a couple of customers. I was totally crestfallen. The shortfall meant that I had to pay up from my pocket. My colleagues consoled me and told me that it had happened to them initially too, and that I just needed to learn to be more careful. Over time, I not only became more careful but increased sales tremendously and succeeded in building up my own list of repeat customers! It was fun. During the day, I signed up for computer classes for which I paid for myself, from my salary and worked the evenings. Before long, the six months were up and my boss was not at all happy to lose me, but when I told him that I was heading back to college, he was quite happy and sent me with encouraging words. A couple of my regular customers even wrote me farewell wishes on tissue papers and signed them for me!!!! I still have them. Sigh…. and that was what my first job was like and thanks to <div class="ljuser">peeyush</div>, I got an opportunity to relive all that!
</div>

It's that time now, time for Goodbyes and keep-in-touch messages, hugs and handshakes. A year has rolled by and we the students of FPGDST, batch of 2006 at NCST, Kharghar are through with the course,for better or for worse! I know this is like tempting the tempest and risking the wrath of Sasi Sir (<div class="ljuser">the_little_sasi</div>), but as he himself has observed in his blog, the course was not the same for everybody. While a handful were dedicated right through, displaying superhuman endurance levels, the less special folks including yours truly could only product the odd spark of peak performance of the standards expected of all the participants. What should I say? Is the course only for an elite few who either know everything that is taught out here before hand or for people who as I described earlier, have superhuman endurance levels? The ability to take failure after failure and still not get it to affect one's morale for instance is one such special trait that is required for people who wish to be really successful in this course. I was able to see people polarizing into different factions pretty much immediately after the course took off in right earnest (which was around the day one of the course!)
I describe the factions and the key dramatis personae belonging to these factions below:
 <div class="ljcut">The Super-Performers Faction: These people have from day 1 appeared supremely confident and have managed to produce the results to back their appearances.
 
Sumit Modi: The most conspicuous of them all. Also most vocal, holds the record for the most number of questions raised in the class sessions. Several times, one got the feeling that Modi knew more than the faculty members teaching the subject and this was a feeling that one suspects, was shared by some of the faculty members themselves, though I will refrain from naming them. Also came across as being supremely over-confident and arrogant, but I later discovered that he was really a great guy who didn't mind acknowledging that he was comfortable with certain subjects and topics (sometimes, he even acknowledged knowledge in subjects he was not really comfortable but thought he was anyway, but that is another story! That was what Modi was like!). Another thing about Modi was that he was one of the most helpful guys around. Never said no if anybody wanted help. He was a great at teaching too. Maybe he should at least moonlight as a teacher, someday.
The Million Dollar Question (Doubt):How can his date of birth be 1984 if he is qualified with an MSc and has nearly two years of work experience? I suppose the NASA moon controversy has explanations that are easier to grasp!!!
Placed in: NV Soft

Amarnath Chatterjee: The least conspicuous of the first faction, at least initially. Dada, as he is affectionately referred to by friends, is almost the diametric opposite of Sumit Modi. Though equally prodigiously talented, Dada likes to lie low.
In street racing, people are wont to paint their rides in the most garish styles, showing off the labels of the performance parts that they have used and also many a time, those they haven't used, but some people prefer to have a totally bland looking super-car. It serves two purposes. It doesn't attract the attention of law enforcement and causes rival racers, especially newbies to underestimate the car's prowess, with disastrous consequences for them. Such cars are called 'Sleepers'. Dada is the Sleeper of NCST. He constantly understates and underrates himself, probably to confuse his rivals (if there are any!). His histrionics appear to be as far removed from actual humility as Modi is removed from total silence in class.
While I'm a great fan of his for his levels of endurance and unwavering discipline, his deliberate attempts to underrate himself are a tad irritating. Actually, very irritating.
Critical Opinion: He is as genuine as Raghunandan's new-found hair! More on Raghu later!
Placed in: I2 Technologies

Rajesh Agroya: Another sleeper, but not in the Dada sense. He literally used to sleep his way through most classes, but a first-rate student and incredible hard worker. Sasi Sir had once asked us what he thought would be a rhetorical question: Whether there was anybody in our midst who had read at least one of the books provided to us, cover to cover. Rajesh had and raised his hand in answer. The question was not a rhetorical one, after all! Probably Amarnath had read books cover to cover too, but he would be the last person to admit to it. As if it would would 'paint' him for a laser guided programmable missile to strike!
Rajesh, I feel, falls between Amarnath and Sumit. Unlike Dada, he acknowledges everything he knows, and with confidence, but  he is more levelheaded than Modi and is not overconfident. A Mr Nice Guy. You can read more about him and also see the mock newspaper write-up that I came up with when he topped CST-2007: http://prashanthchengi.livejournal.com/3358.html
Placed in: I2 Technologies

Ankur Kapur: An extremely talented individual. Has oodles of experience in the field of animation and computer generated art. Used to work along with his cousin(s) at their jointly owned animation studio. Very brand conscious, you can see him decked in only branded jeans and T-Shirts. One of the toppers in the batch of 2006, he is confident but not arrogant. Very good pal of Sumit Modi. He attributes his low grades in the second quarter (low by his standards!) to the many hours that he spent playing Age of Mythology on his laptop with pal Modi. A stickler for discipline and methodical yet out-out-the-box thinker (almost an oxymoron, huh? That's Ankur for you)
He was one of the candidates to be selected for C-DAC Pune, but Vistaar stole him away. C-DAC's loss is Vistaar's gain.
Placed in: Vistaar Technologies

Suryaveer Singh Chauhan: One of the most steady performers in the course, he has not allowed anything to distract him from the course. Most unassuming of the super achievers.
Placed in: CapGemini

Satish Kumar Sinha: The man who triumphed against all odds. With a Bachelor's degree in arts and an incomplete MCA, he was the bunny as far as placements were concerned. He knew that very few companies would allow him to participate in their placement visits and he had to make those few chances count. A top-notch programmer, he knew that his chances were great if he got through NV Soft, a company that hardly bothered about a candidate's antecedents, as long as he could deliver the goods. Satishji as he is affectionately known, gave his best shot and it proved to be enough to get him into NV Soft. Here was a man with a thousand to one odds and he came through. One of the toppers in the course too. Unfortunately for him, despite his excellent programming skills, he was only able to clear one of the two MGPTs that he had to and so will have to try again next year to get that coveted FPGDST certificate. My best wishes to him.
Place in: NV Soft

Sameer Mhatre: The localite who begged to get away from C-DAC, Bangalore because he missed home cooked food and friends. Phenomenal performer. Has solved more than 20 MGPT problems from previous years apart from all the self-assessment assignments. The only guy to have solved so many problems. Achieved the unique distinction of clearing two MGPTs in a single session. He also narrowly missed out clearing all ten MGPAs. He managed to get 9.
Phenomenal programming acumen and work ethic. Can single-handedly take on tough projects and still come out winning.
Placed in: Internet Trends

Oscar Dom Victor Castellino: The baby-faced, uber-cool, multi-faceted melting pot of talent. A fabulous singer with avid interest in Physics and Mathematics, he seems to take to programming with the ease with which a fish takes to water. He not only equalled Sameer Mhatre's incredible record of clearing both MGPTs in one session, but also achieved the feat in only about 40 minutes! Two MGPTs cleared with more than three quarters of an hour to spare! Wow! This is one super special guy. Vistaar is lucky to have him.
Placed in: Vistaar Technologies

Udit Sharma: The most unusual of the super achievers. Cool-dude, super sportsman, playboy and a smart-worker, all rolled into one. A complete package. 'Work while you work and play while you play' & 'Work hard, party harder' are his slogans.
Placed in: NV Soft

The 'Students Who Flattered to Deceive' faction: These are students who have performed well, but have lacked consistency right through the year.

Ajay Bhosal: King of Placements. The guy who almost singlehandedly gave direction to the placement activities on behalf of the student placement cell. It came at a heavy cost: his course completion. Though he was a good student, he missed out on too many classes and so couldn't give his best.  He himself was one of the last guys to be placed. Just another testimony to his belief in putting the rest ahead of him. Ajay, we are deeply indebted to you.
Placed in: Hewitt Associates

Deepak Kumar: Hard worker, disciplined student. Has quite a high GATE score to his credit. Though capable of topping, he had lost all interest in the course and would just prepare for aptitude and interview questions. He spent his free time by scaring the members of the ICPAAACCLBSWCJ faction (described in detail further below) about how nobody would get placed if the placement activities didn't get started off. He ate, drank, slept and talked about companies and campus visits. Oh, and he would talk about ISKON too, and in alarmingly fanatical tones. Scary.
Critical Opinion: Religious fanatic. Chronically jealous of people who could perform better.
Placed in: Wipro InfoTech

Vimalendu Shukla: Started very promisingly with successes in the MGPAs. Could come up with sharp solutions to problems. Great programming skills. Had cleared all modules till the second quarter. Third module onwards, he seemed to lose interest. He went home for an extended period of time and was never the same enthusiastic student, again. Was too bothered about placements too.
Critical Opinion: He got what he wanted, a job, but he could have done much more.
Placed in: E-Mphasys

Tapas Gupta: Meticulous student. Hard worker. Great pal of Vimalendu. Quit the course midway to join TCS.
Placed in: TCS

Prashanth Chengi (yours truly!): 8 out of 10 MGPAs, good COOS project. Has solved 16 MGPT problems of the previous years (probably second only to Sameer Mhatre) and 26 out of 30 Self-Assessment Assignments. Had to work almost all alone on his COOS project as one of his teammates, Sunil (placed in Nextstep) was down with malaria and the biggest help the other, Brijesh (placed in Wipro InfoTech),  could do was to leave him alone! Failed to juggle the CNET project alongside COOS and so failed. It came as a big shock to him and caused him to go into a shell and things seemed to go downhill eversince. Also had the bad luck of getting caught every time he dozed off in a boring class, unlike Rajesh Agroya who seldom got caught, despite sleeping through most classes! Cleared the MGPT quota though. It was immensely satisfying, but his chances of getting the FP certificate seem rather slim.
Critical Opinion: Extremely moody. Unpredictable. Academic underachiever.
Placed in: C-DAC, Pune

The 'I-can't-perform-at-anything-and-couldn't-care-less-but-still-want-a-cushy-job' faction (ICPAAACCLBSWCJ): As far as strength in numbers go, they were by far the biggest faction. During the initial class sessions, we got to know this: Not everybody who asks a lot of questions is really smart (with Sumit Modi being the exception)
and not everyone who is silent is dumb. However,  the onset of the MGPAs made matters pretty clear. While many people were genuinely disappointed and unhappy at their failure to clear the MGPAs, members of this faction had already begun to put their hands up to get counted in. They were not even interested to attempt the problems and even went on to bunk the MGPAs.This was at the very beginning of the course when even the most hardened and cynical students would be having some semblance of enthusiasm. Their actions were inexplicable at first. Others even thought that they were just bitterly disappointed, but over time, the truth became obvious: they were plainly disinterested. They became more and more recognizable as the days went by and left nothing to doubt when it was time for the projects.
Their typical activities: Solve aptitude questions for most of the day, watch TV and surf the net.
Critical Opinion: Who cares?
Placed in: Some quit the course, some lucked it into companies, often by using unfair means and some are still yet to get placed.

The Love-Birds faction: This faction is one that has representation from members of almost all factions. While one or two of them made no bones about it and were dignified and discrete, most others were almost eyesores. The badminton court-side, the parked vehicles, the corridor between the lobby and the canteen  and the meeting room were their regular haunts. One couple were unfortunate enough to be spotted by a friend near the Utsav Chowk, indulging in some extremely heavy petting. My friend even went to the extent of shouting out to them, leaving them stunned and at a total loss of words! At least they had had the decency to put a healthy distance from the campus! I chided my friend for having spoiled their cozy moments together!
Critical Opinion: High eyesore value.

Now we come to the final part of this post, the list of winners of  The End of the Term Awards (EOTTA)

The Oddball of the Year Award goes to: Ajay Kumar Mishra, who claimed to be a nuclear scientist. He claimed that he had developed a bio-mechanical system to diffuse a hostile nuclear war-head before it could detonate. Also a self-proclaimed playwright and song-writer.
He once tried to get Anil, the canteen cook to help him sell a song written by him. When I asked him what he could do if the person used the song and failed to give due credit to him, his words were:
Boss, samandar mein se koi ek ya do liter paani nikaaltha hai, samandar ko nukhsaan hoga kya?
(Boss, if a person removes a liter or two of water from the ocean, is the ocean impoverished?)
I was speechless. I still don't know what to say!

The Transformation of the Year Award goes to: Raghunandan, who after donning a hair-piece is practically unrecognizable! Good for him!

The Most Avoided Conversationalist Award goes to: Raghunandan again!!! He is capable of making even the most patient of people want to tear their own hair out by the roots! Even the eminent Professor Keshav Nori figures in the list of Raghu's victims! and if rumors are to be believed, even Sasi Sir is terrified of him!!!

The Atrociously Horrible Attitude of the Year Award goes to: A snooty, arrogant,  and utterly egoistic, not to mention unsuccessful at the course unnamed female. She reportedly asked one of the volunteers to supply her answers to the questions of the aptitude paper of one of the visiting companies. The volunteer rightly gave her a piece of his mind instead!!! Obnoxiousness personified! Yuck! Good riddance to bad, bad, rubbish!!

The Jugad Specialist of the Year Award goes to: Brijesh Kumar, for his uncanny ability to come up with quick-fix solutions.
Placed in: Wipro Infotech

The Encylopedia of NCST Award goes to: Saurabh  Rana aka Captain Rana. Prodigious general knowledge, outstanding memory even for comics read years earlier! A big fan of Phantom and it's creator Lee Falk.

The Internet and Email Good Practices and Habits Award goes to: Ankit Dangi, the talented guy who now wants to enrich the field of research with his efforts. Expect only the very best of messages and mails from him. One doesn't need a spam filter if everyone is as cautious with mail forwarding as this cool dude.
Placed in: Iris India

The Most Successful Serial dater on Orkut Award goes to: Shailesh Pratap Singh. No further details required!

The Sanjay Dutt look-and-walk alike Award goes to: Nitin Arora. Dude, watch out! They might dump you into prison too, if you continue to ape his mannerisms!

Most Loyal Customer of the Year Award (Sponsored by HotPot, a local restaurant) goes to: Nandan Nadkarni. That restaurant will probably fold up without Nandan's patronage! Also one of the most verbose guys around and a phenomenal TT Player.
Placed in: CapGemini

The Best Dhoom 2 Imitator of the Year Award goes to Saswata Choudhary, for his death-defying, gravity-mocking stunts that he has a penchant for performing,on his trusty LML scooter. His eventual placement will be the movie stunt industry's loss and software industry's gain!

The Bejan Drinkswala Award for Dumb Predictions goes to: Pranav Prasad, for his infamous prediction regarding placements : "A dark future is waiting for all of us".

Weirdo of the Year goes to: Yet another unnamed female student, known for only speaking in monosyllabic grunts and using full sentences only when fighting with someone, right through the year. God save us from the likes of these!

The Kid of the Year goes to: Naren Bhatia, the teenaged blue-eyed boy of NCST, FP batch of 2007.

And last, but certainly not the least,

The King of Good Times Award goes to: Vinod Raina, for his awesome attitude and never-say-die-spirit.

God bless us all! We survived NCST and everything that it dished out to us! Congratulations to all of us who achieved whatever we wanted to do and the very best of wishes for those of us who are yet to achieve them. We now look back and cherish the good memories and try to forget the not so good ones,(though remembering not to forget the lessons learned). This is Prashanth Chengi, signing off from the computer lab at NCST.
 

</div>

Loss of a gold ring that also had a lot of sentimental value attached, failure to take advantage of the Re-MGPT, restarting of Sudarshan Kriya that I learned back in 2005 when I did my basic course in the Art of Living Foundations’ ashram in Bangalore, getting more health conscious, struggling to come up with a proper project as part of my academic requirements at NCST… the month of March has been quite a mixed bag for me. Beware of the ides of March was the message delivered to Julius Caesar from the famed Oracle at Delphi, but not just the fifteenth, but the entire month has been a topsy-turvy one for me, but the high points have been there too, thankfully. I had stopped practicing the Sudarshan Kriya, the healing breathing exercises that I learned at the Art of Living course, but I realized that it could come in handy in reducing my stress levels out here, and also perk me up somewhat. I have been practicing the Kriya for the past week and while there has not been any miraculous effects, I feel much better now. The tenseness and sensation of being on the edge is no longer there. I now am relaxed and eager to perform. Hopefully, the feeling is not a flash in the pan!

Yesterday was a big day for us in NCST. No, it was not some examination or even a company that had come to recruit us. No, it was not an MGPT. So, what else can be big, on the austere campus of NCST??? Well, it was a picnic. Yes, we at NCST headed to a picnic at Bordi, a beach on the Maharashtra-Gujarat border. I was a five hour bus journey to the spot. We left here at six and reached there at about 11. The waters looked inviting and the people were more than charged up for a full day of fun, however I was not exactly in the best of spirits. Moody person that I am, mood swings are something that are not new to me. I had just spoken to a friend in Bangalore, one that I have set my heart upon. I was pleasantly surprised when she called, as her calls are very few and far between.

CST-2007 results rolled out today. Lots of happy faces, some grimaces. I made it to 88%, an improvement from my previous attempt of 67%. My good friend Rajesh Agroya became the topper with an incredible 99%. I was so happy for him that I squeezed out some creative juice out of myself, stuff that had been dormant for quite some time now, and came up with this spoof news article. I thought it looked good and so decided to put it up on Livejournal for posterity. How is it?