Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Ashok and I started gym-ming together, knowing that left to ourselves, we would never go to gym; we, therefore, banked on our ability to pull the other person to gym with us.
Now, after four months, Ashok pays about Rs. 300 per day for the gym, and I pay about Rs. 20 per day for the same gym.
Surprised! Here is how it is done. In the last three months Ashok has visited the gym approximately six or seven times. Given that we pay Rs. 600 on the completion of every calender month, that makes Ashok spend Rs. 300 per session.

Friday, November 03, 2006


I hate to put pictures up in my blog simply for the reason that they take up too much time to load. My idea of a webpage is that it need not be flashy but it should provide me with the required information without my having to wait for too long. Anyway, this is not what I'd like to write about in this post.
This post is about Keshav's cartoon about the indian economy which appeared in the Hindu today. So, you see, I couldn't have done anything else but to paste this cartoon in my blogpage.
As IT grows, so does the divide between the rich and the poor. Every now and then we hear the slogans of "India Inc." and "India Shining". Is the availability of the fruit kiwi in food world the index of India's shine? Or is the stock exchange a mirror of the true India? IT, or all these multinationals provide jobs to a miniscule fraction of people in India. I agree that it brings in a lot of capital to India, but this capital remains in the hands of the select few.
Its a pity that communism did not work.
Ironically enough, I was seeing this cartoon on my laptop's TFT monitor.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

The newspaper read "Good Morning Bengalooru" (Gosh, I still can't spell it, and perhaps, I don't want to spell it that way). Karnataka became more Suvarna today. Kannada language was enriched today. Today is a proud day for every Kannadiga.
I fail to understand what changing the name of a city has to do with Karnataka becoming Suvarna. I'd rather say that it is a sad day for Karnataka. I wonder how much money must have been spent to change the name of Bangalore (which sounds so good) to Bengaluru. Where did this money come from - the tax payer's pocket. There were so many ways to spend this money in a better way, but alas, all they decided to do was to change the name. Vote bank politics. First, make the Kannadigas feel that their culture and language is under threat, and then, do something to make them feel more secure. That will fetch you votes. At the same time destroy the country.
Come to think of it another way, does it really fetch votes? I mean, the number of votes is constant, and every party is lobbying for the same thing, every party plays the same partisan politics - give more quotas to SCs and STs, change the name of Madras to Chennai, Calcutta (I still love the name Calcutta and I refuse to use the name Kolkata - yes, I am a Bengali) to Kolkata and Bangalore to Bengaluru. So if one fine day, all parties suddenly decide to stop doing partisan politics -- now note here that I'm not asking these parties to work dedicatedly and sincerely for the betterment of the country, but to do something which won't harm their vote bank and satisfy me and many others like me as well -- none of the parties will lose votes; rather they would get a chance to gain more votes because if they stop doing partisan politics, India, some day will become a super-power and poverty will be reduced. More money will flow in. More money means more guns. More guns in the hands of thugs will enable the same parties to do more rigging during elections.
I don't understand why all these political leaders don't have the common sense to understand that their election budgets are, in a way, restricted by the Indian economy. If the economy grows, their election budget will as well.
Make me the prime minister. I will, at least, rule the country with common sense, if not with sincerity and patriotism.

Sunday, October 29, 2006

Its Sunday today, and after a long time, I am not at my aunt's place on a Sunday. Sunday is mostly meant to be a holiday - I reckon this is Europe, or more specifically Christianity's gift to the world. Perhaps, it was originally a mandatory holiday to allow people to go to church and pay due respects to Rome's authority.
Over the centuries things haven't changed much. I'm not talking of people still going to church on Sundays. That context is meaningless in today's world - only a ritual everyone does for old times' sake.
The real essence of Sunday today lies in consumerism - the very thing that drives the economies of the world. Six days a week you strive hard in your factories to make the things which you are 'told' you need, and on the seventh day, the same factories give you a holiday for you to go and buy what you produce.

Friday, October 27, 2006

My colleagues say that I really think out of the box. I disagree with them. My ideas are as down to earth and as normal as they can be. I don't know what made them brand me as an out-of-the-box-thinker, but the other day my ideas almost had all of them fainting on the floor. I only said that they should design the next Power machine with a robotic arm which spanks the user on the head and says "you idiot" when he types an incorrect command, grabs his head and makes him read the automatically opened manual page. Read the f***ing manual. Now, really, I don't think this idea is as much out of the box as the idea of eating rice with a pair of chopsticks.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Finally we are moving to a new house tomorrow. This house that we are living in now is no better than a dungeon - perhaps a prisoner rotting in the dungeons of a medeaval knight, as described by Mark Twain, will find me a little better than him, but again, that would be debatable. Bangalore is a city blown out of propertion, a city trying to become what it is not, trying to become what it can perhaps never become, trying to become what it should not become. It shows everywhere - the way people talk, the way houses are built, the way the roads are designed, the way people drive their cars, the way offices are designed, so on and so forth, the list will be endless. No one bothers about the laws, nor does anyone have any of the civic sense South Indian people were revered for earlier. People drive over dividors, ride their bikes into footpaths. While building houses people don't follow the regulations, but save a lot of construction cost by having a common wall for two houses.
Enough of cribbing. I am finally moving to a house in which one knows whether its the day or night when the clock shows 12 AM.

Monday, September 11, 2006

I haven't updated my blog in a while, and I guess it is ok not to do so. Writing is something that should not be done as a profession; when one is asked to produce words on demand, at best a soulless beauty is produced. My uncle once told me, to write something, one should be like a glass filled to the brim, the convex surface of the water above the edge, and then a single drop more is enough to serve as a trigger to spill all the water over.
One may argue that it may not be so - columnists produce columns at regular intervals, and even Ruskin Bond published beautiful stories in the Telegraph every week. We forget one thing, how often different people feel varies widely, and it was not necessary for Ruskin Bond to follow a routine and write one story every week. He had the liberty to write his stories and keep them for later use.
The only people, who, I grant, can do something at regular intervals and still produce something soulful are cartoonists.

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Now one can write blogs by using mail. Isn't it wonderful? This is my first attempt at using this feature.

Monday, August 28, 2006

Ustad Bismilla Khan Ji died a passed away days ago. Ustadji, single-handedly, took up a folk instrument having its origins in Persia in his hand, and turned it into a classical instrument - such was his genius, such was his devotion to music. The demise of Ustadji has left Shehnai crippled.

Listening to a record of Ustadji, I remembered listening to an interview of Ustad Vilayat Khan a few years ago where he said, "Thumri gaane ke liye allah miya ek alag dil dewe." Ustad Bismillah Khan Ji was the only person had that "dil" when it came to the world of Shehnai. The heart of Shehnai has stopped beating.
We were talking about attitude recently, and a senior of mine, who has just completed his masters from an IIT, expressed his disappointment at the attitude of students in IIT; the students who are the brightest minds in the country, the students who are to be the future of the nation. He would get really frustrated seeing them leave the lights and fans switched on all the time. In his hostel, there was a toilet flush which would keep flowing, if, after use, the knob was not manually turned the other way round, and amazingly, there were very few students who would take the 'pain' of doing this simple thing. My senior put up a notice in the toilet drawing attention to the problem and listed the simple solution. Nothing changed.

In contrast, another senior of mine narrated another tale about the attitude of a four year old child. He was travelling by a train in Germany by which a four year old girl and her father were also travelling. The girl was licking an ice cream cone in her hand when the ice cream fell on the floor. Silently, the girl took out a polythene bag from her father's bundle, picked up the stuff from the floor and put it in the bag. She then took her handkerchief, wiped the floor with it, put the handkerchief in the polythene and replaced the polythene back in her father's bundle. And all this while, her father took no notice of what the little girl was doing and kept looking out of the window.

Friday, August 25, 2006

Isn't it rather strange that an attention seeker like Janis Joplin would sing a song like "Me and my Bobby McGee"? It is even more strange that she sang these few lines in the same song :

Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose
Nothin', that's all that Bobby left me, yeah
But, feelin' good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues
Hey, feelin' good was good enough for me, Mm-hmm
Good enough for me and my Bobby Mcgee

And in another song, she sings in a very atrocious voice, which, obviously is to draw to herself the attention she always seeked in her life :
This is a song of great political and social importance

Oh lord, wont you buy me a mercedes benz ?
My friends all drive porsches, I must make amends.
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,
So lord, wont you buy me a mercedes benz ?

Another time, a photographer wanted to shoot her, and she started stripping. The photographer explained to her that he would rather have her with her clothes on, but she stripped anyway, and that photograph is, till date, the most famous photograph of Janis Joplin.

Ironically, a few months before her death, it is said, that someone told her, "We actually liked you."

Though this be madness, yet there is a method in't.
I don't believe in an object oriented world. I guess even Bjarne Stroustruppe didn't. True. Ada is a true object oriented language, and philosophically complete, but did it succeed? I know they coded in Ada for a long time, I admire its philosophical beauty, but it was more or less useless.

Even Bjarne never believed in object orientedness, or did he? Unfortunately we will never know. But rumours do go around that he didn't, and he even gave an interview to the IEEE ridiculing what he himself created - C++.
http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/Invention_of_Cplusplus.shtml

But again Bjarne Stroustrup denies it in his webpage and he says http://www.research.att.com/~bs/ieee_interview.html is the real interview. I don't know. Maybe even he was under too much pressure from the Software Engineering world to deny ever having given such an interview. Who knows. There are Titans, Zeuses and Neptunes in the Software world who wouldn't let anyone escape with ridiculing what has kept the industry going on for years. Not even the man who started it all.

I did a little bit of experimentation with Java. Its really nice to code in java, I agree : it makes you lazy and produces a program which takes a million years to load and get started up. You never realize how much every function (or whatever is the OO equivalent of it) costs. You just don't understand, and don't bother to find out, because you are spoiled.

They always tell you, don't do too many mallocs : does anyone know why? Most people don't. How many programmers today care to open the source code of malloc (now don't tell me that you don't have the source code : get the glibc code)? I am afraid there won't be many.

Now I know you'll say why don't I ask everyone to go back to the days where everything had to be written in assembly. Well. Assembly is too difficult. And the bloody thing gives nothing. You just spend your time in the nuances and forget what you are actually trying to do.

Some day a revolution will come. We will go back to text mode. I will wait till then.

Thursday, August 10, 2006

I have two mailing lists - one is called 'forward' and I forward only decent mails to this list, the other is called 'forward-safe' and I forward any uncensored explicit mail to this mailing list. The other day, after I forwarded such an explicit mail, a colleague belonging to 'forward-safe' walked up to my desk and said with a sparkle in his eyes, "One day, you'll put 'forward' instead of 'forward-safe', and that is where all the fun will begin." I guess his wish will never come true.

Monday, August 07, 2006

Last week was particularly busy for me; after a week at home, as it is a lot of work had piled up, and if that was not enough, new work arrived to make me feel more 'needed' in the company. It is needless to say that I was going early to office and returning late. I had to spend the Saturday in office, and was planning to spend yesterday (Sunday) in office too, but getting up at seven, I felt drained and felt the crushing need to go back to sleep.
I was actually enjoying the pleasures of procrastination under my blanket when the cellphone started beeping announcing the arrival of a friendship day greeting from a not-so-close friend who was bulk sms-ing to all the contacts in her phone book a message she had received from someone else.
Darn friendship. Dash friendship day. I feel like an Al Capone for some time. "Where is my tommy gun?" Not finding it, I gently take my hands to my head and uproot a bunch of hair from my fast balding scalp. Still dissatisfied, unable to be a capone, I decide to become a raging bull and try to ram the wall down with my head, but the pain that follows soon restores to me my senses. I remember the words of Sri Sri Ravishankara. I take slow deep breaths. I feel myself calming down. I feel one with the universe.
Next, I pick up the phone, dial that friend and wish her "happy friendship day", and follow it with an inaudible "dash you and dash your friendship day."
Thank you Airtel. Hope you do good business on independence day. Or is there a special day before the fifteenth?

Thursday, August 03, 2006

I found out yesterday that putty supports full screen mode. Now I can telnet/ssh to my favourite *nix machines and press alt+enter. Abracadabra. Everything that reminds me that I'm using a windows vanishes. The old world charm of text-only mode returns. I am transported back to the age of chivalry, where knights lanced each other to kiss the hands of ladies who wore corsets and those beautiful dresses. It is so romantic ;)

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

I get brilliant ideas and then they fade from my mind was that I can't read anymore so. Yea but I want to read.
It doesn't take much to tell a Bush joke. And I actually quit doing it. It is like topsoil on fertile ground. You know they are just magnificent jokes. But I told in concert in which I was telling i won't tell you. and the audience just howled. And then I got a really beautiful from a conservative man and he said it hurt the feelings of the people who he was with so badly that they had left the auditorium. So I wrote him and said thanks for turning the light on, you know, that doesn't really help that stuff. He would say, excuse me Gandy, and then I would tell a joke. And then I read "Bush On The Couch" and if you haven't read its really helpful.. no serious.. to find out about his little sister who died when he was something like eight she was 3 and they played a lot together, I guess they were very close. But that secretive family never told him why little by little she was getting weaker and why he should be when they played... then she would be gone for longer and longer time obviously to the hospital but they never told him. So the first he knew... By the way the day after the little girl died the parents went golfing. And i think thats a wall of denial thats all it is. And then they came home and George W was waiting to see his little sister and she wasn't there and they told him "she's dead". so thats enough of a trauma really to set off this whole mentality because he never could look at it never could get any help with it. His mother's hair turned gray and he started to "you did. You're white". And she went into terrible depression and he stayed in there and he tried to cheer her up which could explain also some of his behaviour. So I stopped hating him at that point. I still turn off the TV when I see his face. but I stopped hating him.

Joan Baez
Camp Casey, Crawford, Texas, 21/08/05.
Hyderabad, my beloved city, looked even more beautiful from the air. Like a brooch of gold and white diamonds. The sight was so beautiful that I didn't mind the the fact that I wasn't travelling by the lowest possible fares.