shohorebrishti

Danger words

2012-02-07T16:59:00.002-05:00

I am compiling a list of words which sound the warning bells. Whenever you hear someone use such words, you can tell that they have been, or would very much like to go to business school. Further assessments about their character, legitimacy of birth and suchlike might follow, but that is mostly up to you. My job is to present you with the words. Here goes.

1. Leverage: should be used in a context which involves pulleys, chains, and machinery. Not in finance. Especially not in finance. If you use it in daily conversation, chances are you might have brought on the Great Recession.

2. Incentivize, also incent: an example: "we should cherish the for-profit college model because when executed well, it can incent a much greater focus on learning outcomes." Makes sense, in a certain perverse way. Only people espousing for profits are likely to use words like "incent".

3. Synergy: a douchebag word if ever there was one. Interestingly enough, finds its roots in Greek.

4. Team Player: a circle jerker. Also one with no responsibilities and a 401k.

Red Tails

2012-01-23T16:37:00.003-05:00

A film by George Lucas about the Tuskegee Airmen - the first US Army Air Force unit made up entirely of African American. Does anyone remember the mid 90's made for Tv film - "the Tuskegee Airmen"? Yeah, didn't think so. I remember Laurence Fishburne putting up a bravura performance in it. Far superior to what I saw in Red Tails.
Also, while we are at it, why does Terrence Howard always look as if someone kicked him in the nadgers, took his lunch money and his 401k and buggered his aunt for an encore? I mean, has that man ever played a happy role?
So, back to Red Tails - fantastic action. Fabulous sequences of aerial combat, but completely let down by one dimensional characters and dialogue that sounded like it came straight from the Commando Comics. And the music - dear Gawd... remember Glory? Remember the rousing music. Well, now imagine the opposite. Amateurish, at best.
All in all, a rather mediocre effort. Probably put together with the best of intentions. But hardly worth your time.

Of bootloaders and boiling seas

2012-01-12T14:32:00.003-05:00

Bootloaders. What, pray, is a bootloader? Oh you are not sure? Here, read this. Now, in the normal course of events, when your Windows system does something terrible, you usually pray that your backup DVDs are not lost, or your trusty passport drive is still alive and well and thank your lucky starts that its just the last week worth of porn (sorry, work) which is lost. You might buy (beg/borrow/steal) an install disc and voila! Back to lolcats! With a Mac, well if you have Applecare, good for you. Or else, it might just be a 1500$ hit. Now with most flavours of linux, there usually is a way.....

That way goes through the bootloader. This is something that makes strong men curl up and cry. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to rid my computer of the unused Ubuntu partition, and extend Win7 to the liberated space. I also have a Kubuntu partition (totally useful, with tonnes of data). Anyhoo, I did something horrid to the MBR and it refused to boot into anything. Back in the day, I would have enlisted the expert help of mah boys Padala and/or Nandi, or gone seeking the sage advice of Tony the Wise (our sysadmin, a person of Godlike powers). These days, well.. I was forced to walk the path alone. Until helped by Kamerad Kovalsky! Another one of them Wizards.

So... short story shorter - hard disc recovered, and I think I am slightly better equipped to do this myself the next time around. Woot!

Dream sequences

2012-01-12T14:25:00.003-05:00

I dreamed last night that I drank a small quantity of some sweet wine, very viscous. I remember wondering if it was Imperial Tokay, and whether in my previous life, I had been a dawg. Rather appropriately, this dream seamlessly segued into my father instructing me in hushed tones that some high personage in the Imperium, possibly the Queen - had passed away. And that he was convinced that there was a mole hidden deep in the heart of the Geological Survey - and I had to bring him some files from Registry so that we could make sure. It was rather trippy. There might have also been something about a gangster driving a Mercedes W140. Although, it should have been a W201. I might need help. I am dreaming of Tokay and Cosworth engines.

Don 2. And hopefully the last.

2011-12-24T12:17:00.003-05:00

Don2.

The Khan in what looks suspiciously like cornrows. Also him kicking the everloving shite out of many, many baddies. Who else bought that? Ya' know what, I am going to be all systematic an' jazz and write out a list of all that was not well. Here goez:

Cornrows. Cornrows and shades and rivergoing powerboat (have you no consideration for the fishes, what with your 400 hp motor an'all?)
Fighting. Like serious fistfighting. But what would look convincing if done by Brad Pitt and even more so if done by Hrittik, looks uber fake when done by the Khan. Granted, Farhan, the wunderkid diro does much to make it look even summat realistic. But it fails. The Khan should spend less on botox and ask Hrittik to lend him some sixpacks.
Car chase through the strasses of Berlin. A Toyota SUV chasing a late model Hyundai. In Berlin. In effin' Germany. In the land of bimmers and mercs and audis. Is that sacrilege? Yes it is.
The plot. With gaping holes like a fishing net. Still, this was better than Ra-One.
Irani fighting. Uncool.

There were many things which were right with this fillum.

Priyanka Chopra. That official uniform with the shoulder holster. Hawtness. Try asking Amisha Patel to pull that off.
The car chase. Again. Wasn't too bad as car chases go. Even ended up with a medium sized pileup in front of the Brandenburg Gate. Seeing as how Indian movies are all about the armchair tourism bizness, this one did quite well.
Irani acting. Very cool.
I am conflicted about this one. Whenever a SWAT or GSG9 type of team heads out, the blokes are all in bulletproof Kevlar flask jackets and shite. The dames are in tank tops. So, here Ms. Chopra, in her substantial hawtness, has about half the body armour she should be wearing. On the other hand, tank top. See, tough call.

The verdict - if you like the Khan, go see it. Otherwise, don't bother. Also, when will they make films which are do not revolve around a superstar? And in that same breath, thank goodness, this did not have Salman.

Ship names

2011-12-23T17:47:00.000-05:00

Aah, whimsy strikes again. Inevitably, whilst in the can. And this time, brings a quartet of names. Names suitable for Shipminds (Culture). Or bands. Or cars. Here goes:
1. Mrs. Darcy
2. The Princess of Blandings
3. The Bespoke Semicolon
4. Occam's Salon

Economics and ecologies

2011-11-11T11:26:00.002-05:00

This is something that other people, far cleverer than your truly have thought of - however, it is always worthwhile to put some random thoughts down. Consider an economy as an ecology. Most economies will begin as primitive ecosystems - where meagre resources (basic chemicals) will be traded amongst almost lifeless entities. And economies, just like ecosystems, given the right mixture of resources (nutrients) and conditions (an energy surplus, moderate stability in the environment) will evolve. As they do, more complex traits will emerge. At some point, the barter system of trade will become something more sophisticated. A common currency of trade might emerge. In the living world, this is, mostly chlorophyll derived carbohydrates. There will, of course be primary producers, like farmers - or in the biological case, plants. Almost everyone else will use the primary product (crops/carbohydrates) and act as middlemen. At the same time, there will be continue to be niche markets and niche ecologists, such as the lovely anaerobic bacteria which help in fermenting any number of things we love to eat and drink. Think also of the tenacious little buggers (like my old friend Thermus thermophilus) surviving absolutely extreme conditions in volcanic springs like any Glen Beck viewing survivalist who wants nothing to do with trade treaties.

And as every economy grows, it creates a surplus. With a sufficient surplus, there comes the opportunity to do more than merely eke out a living. There will be people who do other things - which, in turn can accelerate the rate of development. The first person to make a wheel was perhaps greeted with the same derision that the first sea-dweller who liked hanging out on beaches was subjected to. There might even be a critical mass, a tipping point for every economy and every ecology after which the rate of growth increases and increases.

And inevitably, in both systems, there will be predators. And there will be predators of predators, superspecialized creatures which usually represent the current peak of development in that system. But such apex predators can only survive when their footprint, their constituency, or simply put, their garden isn't wiped clean. If these predators kill everything that sustains them, then the whole system collapses. Probably examples are many current deserts. (side note- does the goat count as an apex predator, when protected by the benign hands of humans?)

I leave it to your active imagination to think of hedge fund managers as apex predators in today's economy and why their untrammeled greed can lead to the undoing of a functional economy which has taken a long time to build up.

But, before leaving, two links which are the reason I started thinking about such things: the first concerns the use of cellphones as a barter system in Africa - which is a new economic development - and should merit close study. The second is a podcast by Kaspersky's people on frauds in the cellphone economic system. The predators have arrived.

Guest post - on building a tech base

2011-11-09T12:41:00.001-05:00

Guest post from the Statesman.
All content belongs to the Statesman, Kolkata - but this is worth reproducing here.

From body shop to hi tech

8 November 2011

The tendency of India’s government and its industrial sector to play safe when it comes to technological invention will prove disastrous in the long run if more emphasis is not put on research and development, writes arunabha bagchi

A new controversy regarding IIT graduates made headlines recently in India. It was sparked off by comments made by Mr Narayan Murthy at the IIT 2011 Global Conference in New York while ruing the poor quality of recent IITs graduates. His contention was that the quality of students gaining admission to the IITs had deteriorated over the years owing to overemphasis on coaching classes. Chetan Bhagat, a well-known writer and an IIT graduate, hit back, wondering how could someone, who ran a “body shop and calls it hi-tech”, make such sweeping comments.
While Bhagat’s observations about Infosys were just as candid as Mr Murthy’s take on the quality of recent IIT graduates, the point worth exploring is whether the perception that IT bellweathers such as Infosys are no more than mere body-shops and not really pioneering centres of technological excellence holds good or not. Newspaper articles and books churned out by American and Indian presses would give a layman the impression that Indians are giving a tough competition to Americans in the technology race with only the Chinese still in the reckoning. Japan and Europe already seem to have disappeared from the picture. A glance at an article titled Special Report: Technology in India and China that appeared in the 8 November, 2007 issue of The Economist, made it clear that outside of the pharmaceutical and software sectors, India finds hardly any mention. Our technology handicap in other sectors of the world economy cannot be more glaring. What is also surprising is that while the article lauded the remarkable success of the Indian pharmaceutical industry and had special words of praise for Biocon, to name a few, it pointed out: “Few Indian firms are creating drugs, rather than recreating them.” Furthermore, according to The Economist, exports of indigenous software comprised a tiny fraction of the Indian IT industry’s total service exports. Most telling was the comment of the then head of the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), Mr Kiran Karnik: “…companies are either born as product companies or as service companies, not both. Scribes want to become better scribes. To be a poet, you probably need to be born as one”. This is likely what Bhagat had in mind when he had reacted to Mr Muthy’s comments. Why should we then bother about the deteriorating quality of IIT engineers? The truly bright among the IIT graduates should be busy inventing products for companies in the West. Perhaps the not-so-brilliant ones would serve India’s interests better!
How does one then reconcile this scenario with the barrage of good Press that the “India story” seems to be enjoying? Well, it would seem that this had been made possible by a twist in the tale provided by desi and phoren business gurus. They put the thrust on “innovation”, as opposed to “invention” to forecast India’s continuing high growth in the foreseeable future. Roughly speaking, innovation has three levels: “know how”, “know why” and “invention”. “Know how” means learning and tweaking the production process, better quality control, making slight adjustments to the technology already in use and adopting other minor measures to improve business performance. “Know why” involves delving into the technology in use and improving the design by trial and error. This is commonly known as “reverse engineering”. The third level, of course, is genuine technological invention. In fact, a subtitle in the 8 November, 2007 issue of The Economist suggests: “A new way of mixing existing technologies is also innovation.” The argument often advanced is that India has unlimited potential in this broad area of technological innovation.
In fact, the World Bank and other organisations advise India against making large investments in technological inventions. A report put out by one such organisation argues that traditional companies in India are so inefficient that just improving the functioning of a vast majority of them in order to bring them to the level of the few well-run ones would increase India’s production by five-fold. So, the World Bank and other moneybags of the world recommend that India remain in the “know how” stage and protect the impressive growth rate witnessed during the last decade without disturbing the status quo. But, given India’s lack of “inclusive innovation”, this growth model is bound to hit a wall in the medium term. International experts do not advise India to even dabble in the “know why” stage of innovation. The argument is that the “know why” stage does not give much of an immediate return though it is, of course, an essential step to reach the invention stage that guarantees an enormous return ~ something enjoyed by the developed economies. India is warned again and again that any policy favouring investment in invention would be very expensive, highly uncertain and unnecessarily stressful.
So, how does India fare by international standards in the matter of technological innovation? The World Competition Index: 2011-2012 prepared by the World Economic Forum puts India in the 38th place in the field of “Innovation” ~ way above Pakistan but nothing to write home about. A closer scrutiny makes it clear that India would have done far worse but for the economic meltdown of the former USSR and some Soviet bloc countries during the 1990s. But India is advised to remain optimistic. For any country, optimism of such a nature is derived from its level of “technological readiness” or, the current state of human resources in a country deemed necessary for successful absorption of new technologies. Another glance at the World Competition Index: 2011-2012 made it clear that India has very little to be optimistic about for the simple reason that it ranks 93rd under the head “Technological Readiness”. In fact, in terms of both innovation and technological readiness, India is doing no better than Indonesia ~ a country that is rarely mentioned by business gurus.
India’s poor performance in technological readiness is a very serious matter and needs a separate discussion. It will be appropriate at this stage to recount India’s efforts to develop innovative technology since Independence. Even before Independence, top Indian scientists had been making plans. The final strategy adopted was two-fold: to develop strategic technologies and to help foster indigenous technologies for both capital and consumer goods through import substitution. The first strategy led to the birth of Bhaba Atomic Research Centre (Barc) and the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro). The success of both Barc and Isro is now well known. The only pity is that the technology developed in these centres did not appear to have much of a spin-off effect on the industry as it happens in developed countries. To implement the second strategy, diverse government-run research centres were set-up under the aegis of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). Research undertaken in these centres had only a marginal impact on the private sector. Big companies catering to sheltered markets were not particularly interested. And, import substitution efforts resulted in horrible inefficiency, obsolete technology, shoddy products and the license raj.
There was also a parallel effort by the government to create a technologically-trained workforce by setting up a number of IITs, complemented by National Institutes of Technology and other engineering colleges. India’s best and the brightest were attracted to IITs because of their world-class facilities. Some of the IIT graduates went on to become highly-successful engineers and scientists abroad, mostly in the USA. The opportunities for successful invention offered by the Indian industry were, however, limited. So, in effect, India eventually gave some very expensive gifts to the West. No wonder, IITs received universal acclaim and the attention of multinational corporations.
With economic liberalisation, efforts were undertaken by the government to provide fiscal incentives for research and development (R&D) in the private sector at the expense of R&D in government-run research institutions. As such, one would expect the private sector to invest more in R&D in the new economic climate. Expenditure on R&D as a share of the gross national product (GNP) is an important indicator of a country’s level of innovation. In the case of India, this share steadily increased from 0.17 per cent in 1958-59 to 0.98 per cent in 1987-88 and thereafter started declining before settling around 0.8 per cent. This confirms the general perception that India’s technology remains primarily in the “know how” stage, despite the fact that huge profits made after economic liberalisation by Indian companies have given them the wherewithal to move into the “know why” stage. We know that Japan, and later South Korea and Taiwan, deployed the “know why” strategy extremely successfully in the years following World War II. It would seem that the only exception to the rule has been delivered by India’s pharmaceutical industry that has clearly crossed over to the “know why” stage.
While writing this article, I tuned in to the BBC World Service just when the presenter was announcing that Europe’s first satellite-navigation (sat-nav) spacecraft, developed as part of its Galileo mission, had been launched into orbit. This sat-nav system is Europe’s answer to the GPS system ~ developed originally for defense, and now used widely for civilian purposes all over the world ~ put into orbit earlier by the USA. I recalled that at the planning stage of the Galileo mission, the USA had put every conceivable pressure directly and indirectly through Great Britain, to dissuade the European Union from going ahead with the mission. The argument advanced was that the GPS system was available to everyone for free and to try to develop an alternative system would be very expensive, highly uncertain and unnecessarily stressful. Sounds familiar? The stance of European Commission’s Vice-President Mr Antonio Tajani, as reported on the BBC website could not have been clearer. “Galileo is at the heart of our new industrial policy,” Mr Tajani said once the separation (of satellites from rockets) confirmation had come through. “We must commit very strongly to Galileo. We need this; this not entertainment. This is necessary for the competitiveness of European Union.”
When will policymakers and business leaders show the same determination in India? To not move our focus beyond the “know how” stage in order to play safe with economic growth will prove disastrous in the long run. Our nuclear and space research must find a resonance in the industrial sector. Even more important is to develop an indigenous defense industry with a strong research base. The civilian spin-off of defense technology would give a big boost to new inventions and the private sector can play a major part in this endeavour. Indian business houses must spend far more on R&D than they do at the moment. The ultimate key is in forming a research triangle involving universities, government-run research institutions and the private industry so that India’s “Innovation” ranking climbs steadily. Only then will India be able to shed its “body shop” sensibilities and put its economy on the “hi-tech” track.

The writer is ex-dean and professor of applied mathematics at University of Twente, The Netherlands

Ra-One

2011-10-29T02:42:00.003-04:00

We Desis don't do subtlety. It does not come naturally to us. Melodrama has always been, and will continue to be a big seller when it comes to entertaining us. Hence 'jatra'. Hence, also our enormous love for bling, be it in our clothes or our houses. Hence, also the Punjabi word 'shosha' - the meaning of which I leave you to find. Not that I am against any of the above. Oh wait, I am. That is why I feel compelled to to take some time away from sleep to write this review of Ra-One straight after returning from the late night show.

The one sentence summary - this movie sucks giant, hairy balls. Avoid. At all costs.

However, since I have subjected myself to this ordeal, I will tell you about what you should miss. This movie is about a viddy game archvillain jumping the barrier from the digital world to the real one, and the superhero doing the same to save the day. The superhero is, of course woodenly acted out by our beloved Sharook Khan. SRK delivers his best post ki-ki-ki-ki-Kiran acting here - straight from the HART - by which I mean the viddy game's Hertz Analog something Transmitter. Yes, the movie is full of such technobabble. Of course the nice thing is that it references EVERYTHING. Yeah, really everything. If, for some reason you have been completely oblivious to the movie and pop culture milieu of the last twenty or so years, fear not. Messrs. SRK and company have taken it all, shoved it into a giant blender and served you a cocktail which has the same aftereffect as a New York mugging.

The whole thing about the HART being part of the villain (Ra-One) and the hero (G-One) and has to be integral to the bloke in orde for him to be vanquished smacks of different flavours of the "shaitan ki jaan us pinjre mein band tote mein hai". Apparently the budget was 150 crore Rs. That is what - 30 million $? A lot of money. And you can tell where it has gone. A liberal application of bullet-time Matrix style shows up. As do shades of Terminator, and of course Iron Man. But the actual philosophical underpinnings - well they might have well been derived from the David Cronenberg sleeper eXistenZ, and also from the rather awful Virtuosity - where a cyber villain Russel Crowe battles Denzel Mr. Eternally Righteous Washington. All of that has been updated here, and very slickly done, all the way down to a Tron style lightcycle.

The masses have not been forgotten. The great Rajni makes a surprise appearance, and what I really liked - Munnabhai comes in - but not to peddle 'Gandhigiri'. Kareena is her usual ravishing self - and there is a song and dance routine which is almost worth sitting through. Seriously, there are very few wimmen who can look like that one in a sari. My 'watch this!' scene was when Kareena was powersliding a bloody huge Volkswagen Panzer, um.. sorry, Touareg for what seemed like 6 or 7 turns. Speaking of which, this was the first movie in which I have seen a veedub Phaeton. Methinks that most underrated of overachieving German exec saloons will now be sold in the Des.

But then again - what is completely lacking in this movie is a marginally competent storyline and good dialogue. The emoshuns are ladelled on nice and thick. And the music changes gear like a suburban mom suddenly placed in a racecar. This is supposed to cue you into the current emoshun. Bang, bang, dishum, dishum! And then, suddenly a wailing mandolin informs you that it might be time to turn on the the tears. The screen-changes and lines have all the finesse of a sledgehammer. Typical Bollywood blockbuster.

Bottom line, avoid this. Bollywood has a long way to go and shelling out money for tripe like this will only encourage them to produce more movies where everyone gets a paycheque except for the scriptwriter.

PS - the best acting, by far in this movie, and I mean by miles is by the obviously gay transit security bloke at Heathrow who almost wants to see all of Sharook's piercings. Bemused? Don't be - I am sure someone has put this scene on the web. Me-also-thinks that this is a not-so tongue in cheek reference to when the SRK was strip searched at Newark Liberty Airport. Go Jersey!

PPS - ladies, Arjum Rampal takes his shirt off. You might like that.

Battleship New Jersey

2011-10-23T20:33:00.007-04:00

This day is propitious. Or it was, almost six hundred years ago, for the British. For on the 25th of October, 1415, in a recently ploughed, rain muddied field in an entirely undistinguished place in France called Agincourt, the English won a battle. The English monarch, Henry V's inspired leadership and exhortations aside, this battle was won by the English commoner, in the form of the most effective European artillery of the time - the longbowman. And in turn, this battle was lost by the nobility of France, their knights in armour - the very flower of French society and the natural leaders of their state. The event lives in memory through the words of the bard himself. This is where the 'Band of Brothers' speech on St. Crispin's Day comes from. But that is not why we are here. The reason for this extremely complicated start to this discussion is because this battle heralded the end of the age of chivalry and the beginning of a process which I can only describe as the democratization of war itself. Armor would not show itself to be superior on almost any European battleground for more than 500 years, when these two former enemies would join hands at a place called the Somme. But for the moment, Agincourt had shown that heavily armoured knights were easy targets against the massed firepower of poorly paid common archers.

The naval parallel is almost too easy to make. Battleships are as the armoured nobility of the high seas. When these capital ships engage, the engage as did the knights of yore. They move in close and slug it out like heavyweight boxers magnified a billionfold and encased in unbelievably thick armour. Smaller ships, like minnows, get out of the way of these orcas. The art and science of battleship warfare came to its stunning climax off the coast of Jutland in midsummer 1916 where the two greatest fleets in modern history, the British Grand Fleet and the Imperial German High Seas Fleet met, and sought to annihilate each other.

With this engagement, the day of the battleship was over. Unfortunately, no one had mentioned this to many of the naval strategists of the world powers. What few doubts remained about the obsolescence of battleships were put to rest on a Sunday in December 1941 by the Japanese. The future belonged to carriers and now, as we know it to submarines. But battleships continued to be built, if only for the remaining years of WWII. And they continued to be marginally useful as giant gun platforms, but as smaller vessels increased their firepower, even this role was usurped from them. Still, the very word "battleship" evokes a very special feeling - that of awe. With that immense scale, that terrifying firepower, battleships were the last titans of the ocean - when they fought, the heavens stood still and watched.

In the days following the debacle at Pearl, the US Navy scrambled to replace the losses it had suffered. The Iowa class of capital ships formed part of that plan. The USS New Jersey was commissioned in 1943 and saw service throughout WWII in the Pacific. Later it was decommissioned, then recommissioned in time for Vietnam, the mothballed again, then brought back - well you get the picture. Suffce to say that this was one of the longest serving battleships ever and was probably the last such vessel to sail the seas. Today it lies moored quietly off a pier on the Camden waterfront, just across the river from Philly. This was where I spent my Sunday midday with my friend Rudra - and I have a few pictures to show for it. Here goes.

Images, images

2011-09-27T15:39:00.002-04:00

The beginning of every interesting piece of art is a canvas. This is especially true in the world of storyboarded cityscapes rendered in hypercontrast as Robert Rodriguez does. There are other ways of going about creating art and putting it down on film though.

Some auteurs have managed to think of every frame as a canvas in itself - and have spent loving hours (sometimes years) in turning such frames into masterworks. Examples? Certainly. Ray's Pather Panchali, Sergio Leone's Once upon a time in the west - remember Harmonica's thousand year old face, enduring and indestructible like the mountains which framed him? And yes, remember also how a camelback rider suddenly appears in the view on the far left of a huge, huge, vista - they called that 'the anvil of the sun', in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia.

The very best of these works have told beautiful stories, and have used fantastic imagery to imprint those stories into our consciousness. But sometimes, the story takes second place to the canvas. A fabulous example of this is Refn's Valhalla Rising. This is a ponderous work, which creaks under its own burden of self importance.

Every frame is created with the utmost care. Vivid nightmares of colour appear, to be washed away by the everpresent mist. There is a long and arduous Rime of the Ancient Mariner chapter, save that there is no albatross, and no redemption. The violence is sporadic, but always threats to break loose. And the soundtrack. Dear Gawd, the soundtrack. The use of harsh guitar tones from an obsessive compulsive strummer you cannot see - mixed in with the sound of a heart beating. This, frankly is baiting. Very skilfully done, effective, even - but not subtle.

There might be a story here. Who knows? Depends on how psychotropic your last indulgence has been. But this will leave you shaken.

A bunch of crazy sites

2011-05-12T15:59:00.000-04:00

About tipping http://15percent.tumblr.com/

ABout the best dads in cinema http://www.brobible.com/bronews/advice-cinemas-greatest-bro-dads-supercut

Guest article: Ghosts of Bretton Woods

2011-04-20T16:55:00.001-04:00

From today's Statesman, Calcutta edition - no copyright violation intended, its just that you guys do not maintain archives - and this article deserves to be read and re-read.

Ghosts of Bretton Woods
In A Global Collective Action Trap
andrew sheng
LAST week I attended the second annual meeting of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) in Washington Hotel, nestled in a beautiful snow-capped valley, in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. In 1944, the historic meeting on the international monetary system was held there. The British delegation was led by Lord Keynes, the foremost economic thinker of his day. The US delegation was effectively led by US Treasury adviser, Harry Dexter White. Even though all the Allies attended the meeting, including China and India, it was essentially a debate between the declining superpower, Britain, and the rising superpower, the United States.
Keynes understood full well the problem that Britain faced as the issuer of sterling. Since Britain was running large current account deficits because of the two world wars, she was having a tough time maintaining sterling as the main reserve currency. By the end of the Second World War, the US emerged as the dominant global power, since she ran large current account surpluses by supplying food and raw materials to Europe in exchange for gold. To avoid the Triffin dilemma, Keynes argued for the creation of a new international currency, called Bancor that would not be related to the issue of a national reserve currency.
The Triffin dilemma is the problem that the issuer of the global reserve country had to continually run large current account deficits to meet the liquidity needs of the world. In the short-run, the reserve currency role benefits from an “exorbitant privilege”, since the issuer country could pay for its imports by printing more currency, whereas non-reserve currency countries could only import by paying in foreign currency.
However, Harry Dexter White rejected the idea of the Bancor because he did not like the idea of the issuance of global currency by a global central bank. Instead, the idea of the Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) was adopted, where the SDR was a reserve unit of account, which could only be created through the exchange of national currencies with the issuer, the International Monetary Fund. As the dominant IMF shareholder, the US could reject the issuance of SDRs, thus ensuring the US dollar remains the dominant reserve currency.
There is common confusion that the SDR can eventually become a reserve currency to replace the US dollar. It is a unit of account between the IMF and the member-countries, but it cannot be used for international payments. Currently, it is issued to member-countries to increase their foreign exchange reserves. However, when the member-country needs foreign exchange, it must exchange its holdings of SDR with the IMF in four component reserve currencies, namely, the US dollar, the euro, sterling and yen.
Thus, the components of the SDR can change, but the reserve currency role remains national, not global.
Keynes was right. Sixty-seven years later, the US had become the leading global borrower, whereas the net lenders are Japan, China, Germany and the oil producers, creating what is now called the Global Imbalance.
Last year, the Italian central banker, Tomaso Padio-Schioppa gave a speech about the international monetary system, called the ‘The Ghost of Bancor’, because the idea of Bancor was killed in Bretton Woods 67 years ago. Mr Padio-Schioppa, who had a major role in the creation of the euro and became a member of the Board of the European Central Bank, unfortunately died early this year. Interestingly, he equated Bancor with Banquo, the Scottish king who was murdered by Macbeth, in the famous Shakespeare play Macbeth. As is well known, Macbeth met three witches in the forest. They predicted that he would murder his king, Banquo, and become king, but he would be succeeded by Banquo’s successors.
Keynes conceived the idea of Bancor as the steward of the king (gold). But the replacement SDR has yet to emerge as an effective replacement for neither gold nor the US dollar. At the heart of any global currency (issued by one country, a number of countries or the IMF) remains the Triffin dilemma: what is the hard budget constraint to prevent the global currency issuers from printing too much money and, therefore, creating global inflation?
The ghost of Bancor basically says that no national central bank or a global central bank, can resist the temptation of printing too much money.
Currently, the deficit countries blame the surplus countries for saving too much and the surplus countries blame the deficit countries for printing too much money. The reality is that it is the current international monetary system that is flawed. We cannot return to the gold standard, but a fully flexible system of fiat money is also not desirable.
We are in a global collective action trap, where everyone must share a burden of being part of the global game. The difficulty lies in how to allocate that burden in a fair manner.
My humble opinion is that the crisis of fiat money is due to excess consumption financed by excess leverage. That excess consumption is also the fundamental cause of global warming, as natural resources are depleted, while fiat money keeps on increasing. No one likes to use gold because there would be price deflation which would automatically cut down excess consumption. That is too painful, so everyone still keeps on printing money by passing the pain to savers and future generations.
If there is more and more quantitative easing (money printing) and less and less natural resources in a shrinking world, should we be surprised that gold and oil prices keep going up?
Who speaks the truth, the ghost of Bancor or his successors, the current reserve currency issuers? Perhaps it is the witches in the misty forest, the shadow banking system. That story will be revealed in the next article.

Perl grep = fat?

2011-04-20T12:43:00.003-04:00

I present for your perusal this webpage which sez summat about ze Perl grep function. Also, it comes with an advert for reducing ze tummy. Why? Implicit assumption that anyone interested in perl will be pasty faced, eating Doritos and fat?

So, about Last.fm and other online players

2011-03-31T12:31:00.002-04:00

My laptop has gone kablooey. After 5 years of more or less loyal service (yes, Deep Thought, we shall not speak of that one time. Or that other time. Or the third time, when I had to enlist the assistance of our Godlike SysAd at Ann Arbor). [They hire good people at the U of M. And I have always held that while 'one should never meddle in the affairs of sysads, for they are subtle and quick to anger' - the man we went to was like the White Wizard reborn].

Anyhoo, the dear old Macbook having gone the Vashangshi jeernani way, I have decided to invest in a desktop. Prolly (and yes, do gasp) from Walmart. Apparently they sell nice computer deals - Athlon X2. 5 Gigs DD3. ATI Radeon and also 1TB. Sounds good, no?

But my music collection, as eclectic and awesome as it was has also gone to the great beyond of randomized ones and zeros. Hence, last.fm also this cool project called Bollywood Production (go ahead, Google it.You know you want to). But as clever as Last's algos are - in that it can send from one member of the 27 club to another in 3 steps or less - it more or less screws up with Desi music. Why else would Kishore Kumar radio start playing Bhangra. Yech!

The Cosworth

2011-02-24T11:16:00.002-05:00

So, here I was about to start muh car and pull of the lot when I espied a Merc opposite me. It was an old, low slung, rather nondescript looking car, with those straight lines and right angles that so fascinated the misguided designers of the seventies and mid eighties (and I am not just talking about the people who, say designed the Eldorado - this was an affliction that crossed continents as a whole generation of designers forgot how to draw curves. Apparently, Volvo was the last to recover.) Anyway, something, a sixth sense perhaps, told me to take a closer look. I legged it over and spotted a muscular spoiler, almost Evo-esque in its aggressiveness. And then I saw the legend.

190E 2.5-16

And my mouth went slightly dry.

Which was about when this bloke strolled up with a questioning slant to his eyebrow. I asked him if it was his ride. He responded in the affirmative. I then asked, somewhat hesitantly, if it was the Cosworth. His jaw hit the blacktop with a dull thunk.

Now you, worthy reader are prolly familiar with the TopGear episode when the Hamster talks about future classics and rambles on about the Cosworth. No? Ok, here, take a look.

Back to the story. So this bloke is rather tickled that I recognize his Merc for the beaut that it was. He was kind enough to give me a dekko under the bonnet. Aah, the loveliness of it. Just a 2.5 litre straight-4, but what an engine! Remember this was made by Cosworth which made a name for itself making those awesome Formula 1 engines which dominated the entire field. The reason why Merc wanted this car was because they wanted to ace the World Rally Championship. But then, around that time, another game changer came out. This happened to be the Audi Quattro. In its turbocharged shadow, the E190 had to be relegated to track and touring racing, where, of course it took the DTM. This was also the car that brought AMG into the Mercedes fold.

So, long story short, bonded with said bloke over his 190E. And then he tells me that his other car is a Delorean. A bloody Delorean!! I wanted to know if he had ever pushed it to 88 mph. He hasn't. Yet. Well, time to go build him a flux capacitor.

Citius, Altius, Fortius

2011-02-23T09:42:00.002-05:00

I have long salivated over stuff that moves fast, turns corners violently and generally looks badarse. For the longest time, this led to a deep fascination with things that fly. Thus, the Supermarine Spitfire. The plane that is frequently, and erroneously, referred to as the plane that won the Battle of Britain. It was not. The plane that did win it, was the much underrated, Hawker Hurricane, and the equally (then) underrated (and in hindsight, unmatched) brilliance of Air Chief Marshal Dowding. But, here, for what it is worth, is the Spitfire. Is it a coincidence that the most beautiful things that fly, created either by the hands of Gawd, or men, are also the most deadly?

Tax cuts and how the media talks about them

2010-09-17T11:23:00.003-04:00

I am not an economist. Neither am I a journalist. However, I understand that the perceptions of people are moulded by media. This much, I imagine you will agree with. So when you read an article like this one, you wonder why the coverage appears to be so biased.

Consider this section: "While about three-fourths of Democrats favor raising taxes on the rich, about half of independents and nearly two-thirds of Republicans oppose the idea. Support for cutting everyone's taxes exceeds four in 10 people in every region of the U.S. except the Midwest, where one-third back the proposal. Even among people earning under $50,000 a year — mainstays of the Democratic Party — 43 percent want to continue the tax cuts for all."

Would that not have been better written as
"While about three-fourths of Democrats favor raising taxes on the rich, about half of independents and nearly two-thirds of Republicans oppose the idea. 6 in 10 people in every region of the U.S. favour ending the Bush tax breaks. In the Midwest; 7 in 10 people favour ending them. Among people earning under $50,000 a year — mainstays of the Democratic Party — a majority of 57 percent want to end the Bush tax breaks."

Just a thought.

Visa blues

2010-08-12T13:42:00.002-04:00

OPT - visa

quite a quagmire of paperwork and timings. Officialdom (sigh)

The best of Science Fiction

2010-08-02T13:46:00.002-04:00

The best of Science Fiction. This is a tall order. Who defines the best? In a field as subjective as literature, who draws arbit margins and delineates the awesome from stuff like Twilight? The answer is, I do. As do you, my dear reader. Anyone has the right of judgment. Of course, I will then judge what you have judged, and probably laugh at your choices, especially in hard SF.

But enough proselytizing.
The Hugo and Nebula awards are considered the two most prestigious awards in SF writing. They are the Nobel prizes of true geekdom. There is a small and very exclusive list of books which have been graced with both awards. Check it out. I am making my way through this list. And being rather impressed with what I am reading here.

The Rain

2010-07-21T19:11:00.000-04:00

There was a brief sotto voce rumbling of distant thunder. I looked up to realize that the rains have arrived. Our lab has huge windows, which are usually covered up by these industrial grade pulldown curtains which I have come to loathe. Sometimes, however, in the early evenings you can see the sun go down somewhere just over the horizon; and the sky turns every hue of crimson and red as if the setting sun had told had come up with a particularly risqué joke.

The rain means something special to those people who live or lived between the tropics. For most of us it signifies relief from the killing heat of summer. On a more prosaic note, it means the difference between a good crop and penury for all too many of my countrymen.

But, I do not wish this to turn into a political diatribe. There are enough people spewing vitriol (and oil) at the moment without me having to add to them (I am looking at you Joel Stein).

Rain, as I was saying is special to me. I always view (or have viewed) rain as cha-pakoda-adda weather. Perhaps, I should explain that. Cha is tea. Not the refined milkless-sugarless tea that I usually drink. Cha is a milky, sweet concoction served best in tiny earthenware pots called “bhanrs”. A “pakoda” is a deep fried mixture of onions, chillis and sometimes giant peppers coated in chickpea flour (besan). It tastes of heaven. Adda is what we Bengalis are perhaps forgetting to indulge in (there has to be a correlation between the decline of adda and the rise of heart attack rates and divorces). Ok, adda is a strange mishmash of discussion, mixed with a dash of debate, flavoured with old fashioned gossip and rounded off with some very tall story telling. It is a very Bengali thing. Most other Indian ethnicities are waaaay more hard working than us, and have never discovered the joys of adda. I have been told that apparently there is something approximating adda in the coffee shops hidden away in the bazaars of Istanbul and Cairo. If I ever get to visit these great cities, I will let you know if people there, do indulge in adda.

Our man Nandi refers to this kind of rain as ‘suicide weather’. Hmmmm.

I finished watching this wunnerful fillum called ‘Wake Up Sid’. It has Konkona Sensharma who is, in my humble opinion, one classy lady. Up there with the always delectable Nandita Das. Beautiful performances flesh out this fillum, even from the actors with bit parts. In fact, especially from them. And, of course, the fillum revolves around the rain.

Which brings me to the fact that I am going out to enjoy some of the rain. Bye.

Rajinder Puri on India's internal security problem

2010-04-11T13:00:00.001-04:00

From today's Statesman:

Special Article

10 April 2010

The enemy strikes
Invisible War Becomes Visible

By Rajinder Puri

DURING the last half decade this scribe wrote almost two dozen articles related to terrorism. One article in January 2007 was titled “India’s Invisible War”. It started by stating: “India is in the midst of an invisible war. It is an unrecognized war.” Well, the war has become very visible now. Over 70 policemen killed in one Maoist ambush compelled even our media, besotted with sports weddings and Bollywood brand ambassadors, to take note of the attack. Newspaper headlines blared: “This is war!” Stirring words! But is terrorism being recognized for what it really is ~ undeclared war against the Indian state? Do people who lightly toss around the word realize the implications of fighting a war? Wars are fought for conquest or for survival. India is fighting for survival. To triumph it must be prepared to pay whatever price required. For an effective war against terror there are six aspects that should command attention.
First, the government must recognize the enemy. The enemy is not Maoism or jihad or separatism. There is authentic evidence of terrorist groups with avowedly different aims assisting each other. That suggests all groups are branches of the same trunk. One Congress leader reportedly said: “While terrorists are basically sponsored by foreign powers… Naxalites are our own misguided indigenous people.” This is the kind of nonsense to be discarded. ULFA leaders, Kashmiri separatists and Maoists are all indigenous. Both ULFA and Maoist leaders get sanctuary in China. Both are aided by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Now even foreign-funded Hurriyat leaders, acting as the voice of Kashmiri terrorists, are openly seeking China’s help. The Pakistan army is nothing but a clone of the PLA. It has discarded the army culture it shared with the Indian army bequeathed by the British. Pakistan army generals are into big business. They have access to independent funds like their mentors in the PLA. Like the PLA they control politicians, not the other way around. The government does not have to state that China’s PLA is the mastermind directing all wings of terrorism in India. It has merely to recognize this truth. It should ask itself why Chinese hackers accessed secret Indian government documents dealing with Maoists and North-east insurgencies.
Second, there must be law and order reform. Insurgencies in India may propagate different grievances. They all have the same aim. They serve their foreign master by destabilizing India. There may be sincere dupes committed to a cause serving these outfits. They are manipulated by their commanders who serve the PLA. When the enemy has a unified command, can India afford to have split command structures? Parliament and government must immediately establish a central federal agency empowered to fight insurgencies throughout India. This agency must have its own independent intelligence network in all states.
Third, there must be economic reform. Human rights activists mistakenly assume that Maoists fight for economic justice. If the grievances of tribals were removed the Maoists would seek another issue. However legitimate the grievance ~ whether related to identity, language or economic deprivation ~ the insurgency is predetermined. Grievances are not the cause of insurgency, but the excuse. That is why the government must remove all legitimate grievances regardless of insurgency to decrease the nation’s vulnerability. Economic disparity and lack of governance in India are horrendous. Out of 602 districts, 165 are affected by Maoist violence. This is not surprising. The World Bank’s poverty line for India is set at Rs 1400 a month. If this is accepted there are 700 million Indians below the poverty line. There are also 700 million below 35 years of age. The unemployed number 300 million. At present a mere 5 million new jobs are created every year. Over 70 per cent of the population is rural. Less than 30 per cent is urban. The publicized benefits of economic reforms are limited in the main to the English-speaking class in urban India. With or without insurgency, are such conditions tenable? A massive stimulus package for rural employment and infrastructure from resources acquired through disinvestment in cooperation with trade unions is imperative.
Fourth, there must be governance reform. Political parties collude with terrorist outfits in order to garner votes. Terrorist penetration of the government makes nonsense of secrecy in intelligence. In Andhra huge consignments of rockets manufactured in Tamil Nadu were seized. These were meant for Maoists spread across five states. In Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra police stumbled on huge catchments of crude RDX bombs meant for nationwide distribution. Can such factories operate without some official connivance? Can government owned State Bank branches continue to distribute fake currency that facilitates terrorism without official complicity? Can such lax governance fight terrorism? To stem this rot one is led to the fifth aspect.
Fifth, there must be systemic reform. Two basic reforms are vital. The Constitution must be followed as written to allow the President who is above partisanship, who represents Parliament and all assemblies, to exercise due authority assisted by a full-fledged secretariat. The proposed federal agency to fight terrorism, along with various other bodies, should be made accountable to the President. That will eliminate collusion between vote-seeking politicians and terrorist outfits. This will not violate the Constitution but implement it. At the same time genuine Panchayati Raj as directed by the Constitution must be established. To achieve it, a new primary police tier accountable to the assembly of the urban or rural panchayat must be created. Basic law and order and security entrusted to the primary local body will ensure effective monitoring of suspicious activity in each locality. This primary police force could become an invaluable intelligence source for the anti-terrorist federal agency utilizing cyber connectivity.
Sixth, there is need for foreign policy reform. The government must follow the law of reciprocity while dealing with all nations. It must talk bluntly with America, China and Pakistan. This week a hotline was established between New Delhi and Beijing. President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao emit positive vibes. That is not enough. Neither of them ever served in China’s army. Are their intentions translated on the ground by the PLA? Are they more effective in dealing with their army than President Zardari and Prime Minister Gilani are in dealing with Pakistan’s army? India does not need words but deeds.
The enemy does not aim for revolution in India. Revolutions strengthen nations. The enemy seeks to balkanize India. It is the people of India who should seek revolution as suggested by these reforms. It is not enough to defeat the Dantewada Maoists. The goal must be to secure India against all subversive terrorism fomented from abroad.

The author is a veteran journalist and cartoonist

Union Square pillow fight + veselka + yakitori = awesomeness

2010-04-05T12:07:00.002-04:00

I will only use lolspeak from now. So I hope out of the metro at union square, and there is this epic pillow fight going on on saturday. So i wade into the crowde.

With my SLR held high ovah muh head

clickety clickety all the way... i get bopped on the noodle many times with pillows

someone rips their pillow open and suddenly da air is full of fine cotton

oh fuck, mah allergies jus went inna overdrive/

oh noes!

den i sees a bloke with a rolleiflex

epicness

and this bloke rips his shirte off and gets into a bare kunckle fight with people with pillows

imagine bringing your fists to a pillow fight. musta been irish.

den somehow i am smack in da middle of the da fight and i get effin chakravyuhed by a bunch of screamin chicks. with pillows.

i somehow struggle out of there with my glasses askew, but camera intact. my lungs coated with a fine deposit of cotton fibres. And then went into a random bookstore and found a cheap copy of the complete Yes Minister. New York rocks.

Trolled by the cryoscopic effect

2010-03-13T09:10:00.003-05:00

Refers to the depression of the freezing point of a solution due to the presence of some solute, or impurity. This does not depend on the nature of the impurity, just on its relative amount w.r.t the solvent. So, this means that the equivalent amount of potassium chloride and sodium chloride will lead to the same depression of the freezing point of water. Which is, of course why the put some salt in the water pipes in North East India, where it is cold. Also why they put ethanol/glycerol as antifreeze in car radiators.

Here is the Wikipedia page. Observe that the cryoscopic constant of water is K=1.86 C/M. Assuming a van't Hoff factor of i=1 for glycerol, for a 20% mass/vol solution, that comes to a comcentration of 2M. So, the maximum freezing point depression should be about 4 C. Which means that the cell stock should have thawed at -4C. And when I grabbed the cells from the -80 C freezer, I should have scraped some off and stuck them back in pronto. Not left them on the benchtop (on ice) for five minutes where they thawed out. I tried blaming the croscopic effect, but the calculation shows that without the depression of freezing point, the stock would have thawed out at 0 C, as such, it did at -4 C. And they should have not thawed out more than, say -70 C.

95% personal stupidity
5% being trolled by the cryoscopic effect.

Where did the 12 Monkeys come from?

2010-02-28T09:58:00.002-05:00

I was recently made aware that Terry Guillam's 12 Monkeys is derived from an older work. Of course, the theme of time travel from a post apocalyptic world into the past is not new.. it has been explored in the literature rather extensively. But 12 Monkeys was a rather nice piece of work. Bruce Willis pulls off one of those confused roles which he seems to fit so well in, and Madeline Stowe is quite delectable as the psychotherapist trying to help him. But the cake goes to Brad Pitt, around whom the entire film revolves.. aarrr.. go see it yourself.

So.... 12 Monkeys was inspired by, and gathers a certain part of its compositional aesthetic from an older film, called La Jetée, a 1962 B/W film which was composed almost entirely out of still shots! Some of those shots were undoubtedly painstakingly staged, some others, I am not so sure. But the film is something worth watching. Reminds me of another experiment in cinema which I have spoken about earlier here.

Which camera

2010-02-24T12:49:00.003-05:00

Sometime this year, I will be flipping a lot of cash (presumably enough to buy a couple of kidneys on the black market) over for a camera and some associated paraphernalia. I have a few choices. But before that, let me talk about what the dream-wishlist.

The Leica M9. Just released. An astonishing 18 MPixels in a full frame 24X36 mm sensor. The legendary Leica M series construction. And of course, the ability to use any number of prime lenses from the Leica Summilux/Summicron/Elmarit series. All the way to the ultrabright 0.95 Noctilux 50 mm lens which goes for a cool 10 thou... This belongs to a type of camera called a rangefinder. The principle of operation is very different from an SLR. No swinging mirrors or anything like that. This leads to a much quieter machine which is discreet. Something that a master of street photography like Cartier Bresson apparently loved. Here is some of his work. One of his most famous photos, the man jumping over a puddle was taken with an M3. But the point remains that Leica's are quite insanely expensive. Not for me.

.. to be continued

Office suites

2010-02-23T20:06:00.003-05:00

I feel the need to express my disappointment at MS Office. The version on the lab iMac is the Office for Macs 2008. The Powerpoint package is somewhat unstable and crashes easily. This has happened to me before, but I was usually running multiple things and Office is something of a resource hog. But this iMac was running almost nothing else, just a Safari window. Strange? Yes.

But that can be dealt with. Coming from the Linux world of OpenOffice, which is nowhere near as snazzy as Office (but gets the work done), I am used to hitting Ctrl-S or Cmd-S every ten seconds. (Back in the day, OO used to crash ALL the effin time). HOWEVER, and this is a huge lifesaver, OO has a file recovery system which kicks in when you restart the suite, and should recover your files from the last autosave. Does MSO not have it? Am I missing something here?

Movies lately

2010-02-20T17:33:00.002-05:00

So, I ended up seeing "My Name is Khan" with a couple of labmates a week ago. Our man Kaushik told me that this movie "sucks arse". Not true. It is not horrid, just ambitous, but does not really make it. It was a treat to see Kajol again after a while... she has aged rather well, methinks. Shahrukh Khan is stuck doing his "Kikikikikiki Kiran" act again. I mean, this bloke finished optimizing his acting skills in the mid 90's with Darr and has been putting the same shite out for the public ever since. (sorry Rachna). And for some unknown reason, the Indian movie going audience laps it up and comes back for more. Also, Karan Johar believes in force feeding emotions down your gagging throat, so there is also more of that. But for all its tackiness, this fillum does challenge several important questions today... such as the perception of Muslims in the West, and tries to do a good job of it. But there was too much of Forrest Gump meets the 40 Year Old Virgin there for my liking.

3 Idiots was quite nice. Aamir Khan doing his usual awesome act. This guy is so versatile that all our desi actors should take lessons from him. Mahadevan and Sharman somethingortheother bloke were pretty cool too. But the cake goes to Bomman Irani for another absolutely wunnerful role as the college principal. And the Chamatkar speech is something to enjoi.

For what leetil it is worth

2010-01-17T17:58:00.004-05:00

Happy New Year ya'all. 2009 has been an' gone. What do I have to show for it? Well, for one thing, several of my friends moved out of towne. That felt awful. Perhaps that is what happens to everyone. Does it? Tell me, what is worse... missing friends, or not really having any and not knowing the difference? They say that some things you only start appreciating after they aren't there any more. That category certainly includes people.

My last few days in Michigan went by in a blurry. (This is a made up word which is "blur"+"a flurry"). Please cite me whenever you use it. Pradee p babu came by to defend his thesis on the 7th of December. He stayed at my place over the weekend and totally wowed me with his awesome presentation. Here is a picture of both of us not workin'

The day after Pradeep's defense, my boss wanted me to talk to this guest speaker.. who just happens to be one of the world leaders in the field I work in. That was scary. Then it was time for my own defense. Our man Nandi made the following poster... note that he should have been prepping for his own predefense research proposal, which was scheduled for the very next day....

Sara made a FB event for my own shindig. Complete with Nandi's awesome poster. Milan came down from NY to participate in the general fun. Pradeep, of course had stayed back for a couple of days to effect his thesis revisions and chuck rotten tomatoes at me. And then, before I knew it, the big day was upon me. I started out by trying to iron a shirt with the heater set too high and almost set the place on fire. After this early disaster and minor hiccups such as retrieving my committee evaluations from the graduate school half an hour before he scheduled time, and so on.. we were finally there. The talk went (I think) rather well, although I was pretty much in a state of terminal panic just before. I puked all over this bloke taking a shite in the men's room and said 'muh bad'. No, I didn't, I was just channeling 8 Mile. Our man Smith attended in a Three Wolf Moon shirt.

Anyhoo, a whole lotta phrends came down to cheer and much fun was had by all. Thanks. Really. Then the closed doors session began, and the gloves came off. That was effin' brutal, I don't mind tellin' ya'all. But they passed me with minor revisions ( I think the only person who did not get those "minor revisions" was Robert Oppenheimer). And then much merry making happened.

More updates later...

Gautam Chattopadhyay. Always.

2009-11-19T14:48:00.002-05:00

Jibonmukhi, about which I may have written earlier is the return to realism movement in Bengali music. Perhaps the best proponent was Suman Chattopadhyay. I am not sure what that eccentric genius is up to these days (some people say politics..?), but it might not be out of turn to describe him as the voice of not a generation (see, no cliches!) but rather as the poet of an age which lived in the portentous shadow of changes which would eventually overwhelm everything familiar. But for the moment, the hand was stayed, and a people walked home together in the late afternoon sun knowing only that the evening would pass, bringing a dawn which they would not recognize. Suman belonged to that age. And you are a wee bit confused. But this is not about Suman, this is about an older musician called Gautam Chattopadhyay. The late seventies was a confused time of riotous colours, bell bottom pants (they came to India somewhat late) and the angry, pathetic, remnants of yet another failed political movement. And in music, for a brief moment, the wonderful romances where the hero and heroine run around trees or sing along in a Shikara on the Dal lake... these romances were also becoming a thing of the past. Soon enough, the Dal lake in Kashmir would echo with the crackling of assault rifles. But this was, just another day. And no one, really no one was holding his breath.

Gautam Chattopadhyay came together with a small group of like minded musicians and wrote Haay Bhalobashi, and suddenly this was different. This bloke wrote about what you felt, not what you were supposed to feel. Mahiner Ghoraguli was the first true Jibonmukhi band, on either side of the border. And people walked out on him. After a few years, he faded into obscurity.

Then, Suman and Tomake Chai happened. The rest, as they say, is history. But for some of us, even if we weren't actually there, Gautam Chattopadhyay's afternoon still lives on.

We had a Halloween party

2009-11-05T13:24:00.002-05:00

A Bengali Halloween party. Also known (for slightly confusing reasons) as Bhoot Chaturdoshi. It was rather awesome.

The awesomeness of the new B-school

2009-10-26T17:23:00.001-04:00

The B-school has a new building. I was enjoying an afternoon constitutional the other day when I decided to make a slight detour and take a dekko inside the building. Snazzy. Uber snazzy.

More credit card fees?

2009-10-20T18:57:00.001-04:00

Apparently, BoA is planning to impose extra fees on people who pay off their credit card loans before the interest period kicks in.

Thesis writing, Shutki machher jhal

2009-10-13T18:25:00.003-04:00

Is a very uphill task. You certainly know of a certain Frodo Baggins who started his dissertation under Gandalf the Grey, a wise tenured PI. That story is detailed here. So, I visited the bigsis at Urbana. Did you know that city is the home of Miss America 2003? There, I have improved your day somewhat with that leetil factoid. Also, I made Shutki Machh with dried fish from the Chinese store. Here are a few facts about Shutki Machh.

It is made with dried, salted fish.
The original recipe is Bangaldeshi.
I am part Bangladeshi, at least by lineage.
The best prep of Shutki is the low-on-gravy-high-on-chilli version. This is also called the 'Jhal'.
Shutki machher jhal is usually mind-shatteringly hot and spicy. As in your insides will melt and your read end might think it is a Kilimov RD33 afterburner.
Shutki stinks to high heaven. People of a delicate disposition, and of a genteel upbringing have been known to faint whilst walking past a place where they were just drying out Shutki.
The same people will fight each other to eat more Shutki. But they cannot make it.
Trade secret: soak said dried fish in hot water for a while. That will kill some of the stink.
Bigger trade secret: the process of cooking will drive your neighbours out of their shantys (Shutki is rarely cooked in American Suburbia or any random Manhattan co-op).
Shutki is sometimes made with Loitta fish. Here is a recipe. Here is another.

I moved

2009-10-05T21:55:00.002-04:00

About a month ago to this new place. Packing up was hard, and I had a very Jerome K Jerome moment. Here is a pic to go with it. The only thing missing is, you guessed it - Montmorency!

Busy... busy..

2009-10-05T21:49:00.000-04:00

Tail end of my PhD. Working hard. No time to blog.

This is what happens when you have a pissed of crystallographer

2009-08-19T17:27:00.002-04:00

Half a million dollars worth of research down the drain, not to say several the possibilities of several PhDs. This woman has a lot to answer for. Details follow:
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_13108834?nclick_check=1

Reddit on relationships

2009-08-13T14:17:00.001-04:00

1. Reddit is full of losers. Read this thread to find out why.
2. I am one of them.

Yes! Prayers can also be outsourced!!

2009-08-12T16:40:00.000-04:00

To India, where else?

What meteor shower?

2009-08-12T14:27:00.002-04:00

So, I found myself standing out in the parking lot, trying to block out the glare of the halogens with my hands. And then suddenly a meteor streaked by. I legged it upstairs and pulled my camera out. And drove off on Pontiac Trail to find a spot where there would be no pesky ground level lights. And no meteors. None at all. Disappointing. But then, on second thoughts, today meteors, tomorrow Triffids. Perhaps it is better this way.

captcha of the day

2009-08-07T11:08:00.002-04:00

10 wildly historically inaccurate movies

2009-08-07T10:58:00.001-04:00

(mostly pertinent only to Hollywood)
are here. Observe that our man, Mel Gibson makes it to the list thrice. As SouthPark would have it, it hurts, it hurts!

Lakshya, Dhoom and Dhoom 2.

2009-08-06T12:20:00.004-04:00

There are Hindi fillums and there are Hindi fillums. I have often wondered why really good Hindi cinema does not get the attenshun it deserves and why crap floats up to the top and makes so much money. A case in point is Drohkaal, a cinema I have already blogged about. A more recent example is Lakshya, which is based on the 1999 Kargil war.

Briefly, a slacker finds his way into the Indian Army through the proverbial series of unlikely cooincidences. The discipline of the Indian Military Academy proves too much for him to handle and he decides to quit. Except that he just goes AWOL. When he gets back home, he is greeted by (in sequence): relief (his mom), disapproval(his dad) and contempt(his girlfriend). Something inside him goes, quite audibly 'click', and he heads back to the IMA. His CO takes him back, but not before hammering out a very well deserved punishment. They say that the life of a GC (Gentleman Cadet) at the IMA is harsh to the point that after graduating as Second Lieutenants, these young men find life at the LoC(Line of Control in Kashmir) quite relaxing. This is what our protagonist goes through, and after graduating, he is promptly posted to Ladakh (the highest battleground in the world, where the Indian and Paki armies have been facing off for 25 years). His regimental CO is the venerable Amitabh Bachhan who in one of his most masterly understated roles yet, points out to the youngster at the unit welcome dinner that "one billion Indians sleep secure in the knowledge that you and I are awake, and watching over them".

Prophetic words, for shortly afterward, in the spring of 1999, an Indian goatherd spots armed men sneaking across the LoC. Afghan mujahideen, backed by Paki Special Services Group and the Northern Light Infantry had built fortified bunkers on our side of the LoC. The Indian and Paki forward commanders have long had a gentleman's agreement to collectively withdraw from the border in deep winter, a time where both sides lose men to exposure and not bullets. The Pakis, not being gentlemen, decided to use the opportunity over the winter of 1998 to move men and materiel over the LoC. This started the Kargil war, where over 500 Indian officers and men died. The Pakis admit to losing 350 regular Army soldiers. Unofficial estimates put the number of Paki and mujahideen dead at above 3000. Perhaps we shall never know how many people fell in the snow. But what is known and recorded by scribes from the front was the immense bravery of the Indian Army. The Indian officer ethos is summed up in the simple words 'follow me'. The disproportionately high officer casualties suffered in the taking of Tiger Hill and Tololoing came from brave young men leading from the front.

Lakshya means 'goal' or 'objective', and the objective of our hero in the film is an unnamed hill, which is a Paki artillery observation post. Was it Point 5353? It is never mentioned in the film. We share our hero's desperation as he leads his team in an almost sucidal assault up a sheer cliff. Lakshya was a rare film, one that showcased bravery and sacrifice without ever descending to jingoism. And Indian audiences rejected it at the box office.

In return, Bollywood gave us movies like Dhoom and Dhoom 2. Both of which are lame and brain dead. And people loved them. We deserve that shite that is served to us in the name of cinema. Before leaving, check out these clips from Lakshya:
1. IMA graduation
2. The unit welcome
3. The ascent

Drohkaal

2009-08-03T17:06:00.002-04:00

The Naxalite movement/revolution/terrorism scourge (take your pick here) has been a major issue in the Indian political stage for several decades. In 1994, Govind Nihilani directed 'Drohkaal', (literally 'The time of revolution'), which is a film about the battle between Naxalites and the police in an unnamed Indian state (Andhra Pradesh..?).

I am not going to delve into the politics of the issue. But the film... dear Gawd. That was brilliant. The way the interrogator, Abhay Singh (Om Puri) sees himself folding to the will of his enemy, Bhadra (played by Aashish Vidyarthi) is nothing less than the best of le Carre. The story hinges around two double agents in Bhadra's terrorist cell. Their controller is DCP Abbas. Then Bhadra is himself taken in a chance encounter at a highway checkpoint. But to the consternation of Abbas and Abhay, Bhadra appears to be pulling strings from inside his cell. Bhadra proves to be totally immune to interrogation, and matters suddenly escalate when he orders a hit on his interrogator's family. Loyalties blur and every other man who wears a khaki uniform could be working for the other side. This is a hauntingly powerful film which does nothing to prevent the feeling of rising hopelessness which we share with Abhay Singh, and to a lesser extent, Abbas (Naseeruddin Shah). A movie to watch and think about.

WTF Iowa?

2009-07-23T10:50:00.002-04:00

The world's most pointless city

2009-07-20T15:45:00.006-04:00

Is Dubai. This city, not Manhattan or London is the cruel face of unfettered modern greed. But first, a bit of history. Several hundreds of millions of years ago, gigatonnes of zooplankton and algae were buried under a settling sea and underwent endothermic reactions to create what we know as petroleum in that region of the world we call the Middle East. In the last couple of millenia, a band of feckless nomads wandered into that desert and claimed it for their own. Said nomads then spent the next few centuries plundering each other's tents. Early in the twentieth century, that most intrepid and rapacious of all the European colonialists, the British found a use for them. They decided to turn these camel riders into a weapon against what was probably the longest lived Muslim nation ever: the Ottomans. The war ended, and the British left.. well sort of. They came back when they found oil. And that began the greatest historical example of an entire people becoming parasites. It is merely the value of oil, and the epic coincidence of those nomads wandering on this particular piece of soil that makes the Mid East the battleground and the promised land that is is. But for the machinery of extracting oil (not even refining it), there is scarcely an ounce of industry there. By industry, I mean both the noun and the verb...

What passes for society there is a collection of xenophobic and misogynistic laws that some apologists call 'culture'. And wealth. Wealth beyond measure, wealth beyond imagination, but only for a select few. And the former nomads love to show off their wealth. They have constructed the world's most luxurious hotels, indoor skiing ranges in the middle of the desert and countless other temples to greed. Sadly, Universities, research centres, schools of engineering and other such trivialities have been somewhat ignored. Who needs PhDs and patent offices when you can have indoor skiing ranges, right? Just as long as suburban soccer moms keep insisting on driving their Escalades and Explorers to malls, petrodollars will keep flowing, and with it, this bubble of prosperity that Dubai stands on will keep expanding.

The dirty underbelly of this colossal construction business is what happens to the migrant workers who actually build skyscrapers. These people are poor workers from India, China and many other parts of South/South East Asia. They are the subhuman detritus left by the expanding bubble Arab hubris. What keeps them there? Certainly, China and India are not 'forgiving' economies. Making a living in modern India is not easy if you are not a software engineer. But for all our considerable demerits, we have just voted a passably decent government into power and we have the most egalitarian Constitution ever written. In a brief conversation with a Kuwaiti kid who goes to school in the town I live in, certain matters of perception become apparent. He thought I had studied at some posh 'English school', as he put it. When I told him that I went to a government school which charged my folks a pittance (and does not charge girl students anything at all), he was taken aback. My point is that India and Indians, for all that we have going against us, try! Emiratis are perfectly happy to sit on their bloated arses and have essentially slave labour working their streets and Caucasian engineers keeping their power plants running. That is not a sustainable economy, neither is it a sustainable country. And when the bubble collapses, as it inevitably will, this arrogance will be remembered.

Article: Sordid reality behind Dubai's gilded facade

Cambridge

2009-07-20T12:38:00.003-04:00

Kalyan and I were hopping around Harvard Square, looking for a suitable pub. It was drizzling with that half-hearted melancholia that I have always associated with North American rain. The hour was half past six, and the summer residents of Cambridge, graduate students and other bums were making their way wearily home. We found this tiny pub which actually had some garden seating. The equally tiny waitress was nice enough to clean up a table for us. We sat back and the pils gradually brought in this blissful feeling of well being. The first three songs played (off the tiny waitress' iPod) were a Metallica, a Queen and an Eminem. This piqued my curiosity. I ambled over to the bar and demanded to know if she had flicked my playlist. We struck up a conversation about the relative merits of Eminem and why Kanye West is awful... and then I felt that abandoning Kalyan to his beer was not nice, so I headed back. Then, the next thing I know, this bloke is at our table and wants to know where I am from. 'Michigan', I reply. 'Michigan? Fuck Michigan!' says he.... to which I raise an interrogative eyebrow. He lets me know that he is from Connecticut, and I should know that people from the Constitution State have issues. (I did not know this for a fact). Anyhoo, our friend (turns out to be a local pastry chef) hands me his iPod in a spirit of cross-broder cameraderie and insists that I listen to Eminem's latest album, which, I have to confess is not that good.

Just another reason why I like Cambridge. Oh, and that tiny waitress with tha rad playlist is Nepali. Practically Indian, except for a few mountains.

Cussin' takes the pain away

2009-07-13T10:08:00.000-04:00

I fuckin' knew it. Now the BBC has backed me up.

Economic reality and the decline of machismo

2009-07-12T23:41:00.002-04:00

One of my friends posted this article on FB today, which I think you should give a read. The main thrust is that the declining economics of today will herald an age where traditional 'manual labour' jobs will decline drastically, leading to massive societal upheaval. The model of the male breadwinner is going, fast. Will this lead to better equality for the genders? Or will this create a backlash which will only worsen things where they are already bad. Read on.

What happens to a society where the gender balance is disturbed? Some of those questions are addressed here, and here. India is particularly vulnerable to this. The gender ratio is 0.97 (ie. 970 females for 1000 males), which is disturbingly low. Further, India is split by a gender divide, where the Northern states have a shockingly low ratio of females to men. This does not correlate to education or prosperity, as some of our most prosperous states, such as Punjab and Gujrat are the worst offenders. But the implications are scary. Female abortions are the norm in modern India where a male child will bring 'happiness' to the family. We are heading for massive trouble.

Awesome women, chapter 1: Hedy Lamarr

2009-07-10T14:25:00.004-04:00

This should become a recurring post.. about the most awesome wimmen who have ever lived. Yeah, the list is long and will have everyone from Enid Blyton to Rani Laxmibai to Marie Curie. But lets start off with Hedy Lamarr, possibly the only person ever to be described as a scientist-actress. Hedy was an actress who was not afraid to take up risque roles, very daring for someone of her Jewish Austro-Hungarian lineage. And then she co-invented the first form of frequency hopping, which was intended for homing torpedos, and is today seen in in most forms of radar guided interceptors. Pretty awesome, nein? Here, look at some pictures of her.

Need band members

2009-07-09T15:50:00.003-04:00

We are looking for a couple of guitarists and a percussionist. The band is a spectroscopy themed band. Experience in spin physics is required. We welcome solution and solid state spectroscopists with open arms. Ability to write NMR themed songs is a plus. A few possible names for the band are below. Please contribute suggestions:

The Hard Pulse
The Hartmann Hahn Condition
Fermi's Golden rule

Drones for the PAF?

2009-07-07T14:22:00.001-04:00

Such a bad idea!

UNIX, beer and photography

2009-07-04T17:44:00.002-04:00

This last week has been lots of work. As, I have to do, if I am to publish, defend my thesis and graduate before the big crunch. But what if UM becomes creative and gives me more than just a PhD? Yes! Abstruse goose has the answer!!

In the middle of all this work, I have pretty much missed out on the summer festival. Such a phookin' loser. But, I legged it out late yesterday and found an old friend, who has moved on to awesomer things (a real job, a family, etc). So happy for him! And then Smith and Ronnie toddled along, and the evening was spent in some low light photography, the pursuit of beer and knowledge. Allow me to explain the last bit: Smith and I decided to ask people around us if they used UNIX. We got asked if we were engineers. (no). The most hilarious answer was from this huge heavily tattoed bloke... "UNICKS? What's that? I just like pu*sy"

Things to do at your thesis defense

2009-06-29T11:57:00.006-04:00

This is the first of what will hopefully turn into a series and bring me the kind of fame which has so far eluded me, in spite of me being a fifty feet tall firebreathing dragon with an elven blade in my right hand, and a Shigemi tube in my left hand. Wearing RayBans. And a three wolf moon tee-shirt.

Anyhoo, the list follows: please add to it as you see fit.

Begin every third sentence with the phrase 'according to the prophecy'
Respond to questions with a full throated 'you want the truth? YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!'
Rap out the thesis defence
Liberal use of jazz hands
Employ a mariachi band to provide accompaniment to the more intricate points of string theory/hard condensed matter/large protein studies
Invite Robert De Niro as your 'special friend'. Failing that, Jack Nicholson. NOT EDWARD NORTON. NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.
Spike the coffee
Have a friend dressed in a dark suit sitting near the back of the room taking down the names of people who come to the defense. Start a rumour that he is from Homeland Security/MI5/IB/BfH/Mossad/FSB/whichever security-intelligence agency calls the shots in your part of the world
Reward your thesis committee members with candy for asking particularly tough questions
Ask Jon Stewart to introduce you

Summer festival at Ann Arbor

2009-06-28T20:45:00.000-04:00

Website.. find out more!

More travels and travails.

2009-06-28T20:38:00.002-04:00

After the Keystone experience, I found myself gallivanting around the NY area last week. Ok, not gallivanting. This was a rather important trip, careerwise, that is.. and I am glad that I was able to pack in some meeting old friends in that time as well. The people who came over to the US at roughly the same time as when I started my PhD are now finishing their postdocs and looking for jobs, any of them back home. But some of the people who stayed at home for their PhDs are now looking to come here for their postdoc work. Which is nice, from my point of view.. the North American continent can sometimes become a lonely place..

Important news vs not so important news.

2009-06-26T14:42:00.002-04:00

Michael Jackson copped it last night. Today's CNN webpage looks like this:

Apparently twitter was overwhelmed by MJ's death and people tweeting abt it. Seriously.. wtf? In an alternate world (inhabited by the Onion), things could be like shown here. You tell me... do we have our priorities straight?

VW accounts for female drivers

2009-06-25T11:19:00.004-04:00

Explaining the wurlde, one Venn diagram at a time: a Michael Bay film

2009-06-24T13:42:00.003-04:00

Egg sketches and photos

2009-06-23T15:13:00.000-04:00

Here. Enjoi

Me back

2009-06-22T13:13:00.003-04:00

The last two weeks have been very exciting. Two weeks ago, I was at Keystone, Colorado, presenting our lab's research (on behalf of my boss, I should add, who was at a conference in Croatia). Presenting the whole lab's work, and not just my own was rather terrifying. It was very exciting to see that our work was very well received. Keystone itself is a wunnerful place to visit, with beautiful vistas and great hiking. After the morning of the talk, we (I was fortunate enough to become friends with a great group of peers) we drove up to the continental divide, which was at 11990 feet, and then legged it up to the nearest summit. That was lung-bustingly painful, but awesome. Then we drove back, at which point someone pointed out that I should have a poster. I was totally unaware that short talk presenters were also supposed to have posters. Who knew? Anyway, I slammed together something with a giant Post-it and a few marker pens. Which turned out to be quite a hit. The next day was even awesome-er, with more hiking. The conference ended with a party at which there was some dancing and cartwheeling. Yeah...

Life imitates art.. sort of.

2009-06-12T21:12:00.002-04:00

The novel USS Seawolf, by Patrick Robertson has as a central plot theme, the USS Seawolf, a nuclear submarine colliding with the towed sonar array of a Chinese Navy (PLAN) destroyer. Today, I read on CNN that a Chinese submarine had collided with the towed array of a US navy destroyer. Hmmm...

Quantum LolCat

2009-06-11T22:52:00.002-04:00

Back from Colorado

2009-06-11T15:18:00.003-04:00

The conference was awesome. I had the opportunity to interact with some really great researchers, especially with this comp-bio group out of Pittsburgh. We (our lab's work) was very well received, and I got a lot of great personal feedback. The high point of the meeting though was making friends with a bunch of great people who will probably be members of the scientific cognoscenti (read: people who will review my future papers, [massive dose of optimism in that there will be some future papers]). Yeah, great time.

I was especially excited to see that progress in coarse grained modeling and elastic network studies on fairly large proteins. And this one talk on GroEL by Horovitz which blew me away with the coolest FRET experiment I have ever heard described.

Nepotism in America - gasp!

2009-06-02T17:24:00.001-04:00

But it happens, apparently.

After the apocalypse

2009-06-01T15:40:00.003-04:00

Is there a Malthusian limit to humanity? There might be.. there have been many Mad Max type speculations about a post apocalypse world. It won't take much - the breakdown of structured society will render life somewhat difficult for most of us. Do you wear spectacles? Goner. Contacts? Best of luck. Got cavities? Yeah, not much good for chewing antelope meat.

What, am I grossing you out? Well, go see Terminator Salvation and laugh at what they have managed. This movie sucks and is a waste of time and money. What always bugs me when I see something like this is where do their food supplies come from? I mean, are there these giant stores of canned food that they have tapped? A decade after Judgment Day, there has to be someone farming! Or else, where do they eat from? Unrealistic shite.

I do recommend seeing Children of Men, because it has a much more realistic portrayal of how society might endure, amidst breaking down in the face of an extinction level crisis. It certainly helps that it also works as a great metaphor for our fractured times. And that it was written by P D James and has Clive Owen and Julianne Moore. Speaking of Moore, she also starred in a very weird movie called Blindness, which is about.. .blindness. That is all I will say, because you should see it and form your own opinion. Ciao.

Of people nice and not so nice

2009-06-01T15:34:00.004-04:00

There are those bus drivers who will accelerate away from a bus stop while you are wheezing your last 100 m dash to get there. Sometimes they will look at you, and then speed away. Sometimes, they will do this in the dead of Michigan winter. Coming from a mega-urban sprawl in India, I am used to dealing with a not-very-friendly public transport system, but some people deserve to be flogged for being socially evil.

Then, there are other people like the one bloke who was on his last run after midnight and actually went out of his way to drop me off (his was the last bus running, and it didn't quite go near where I lived). Yeah, we ended up chatting about his experiences growing up as a Midwestern farmboy. Nice person. Helps to keep your faith in humanity.

Oh shite! Aka biogas.

2009-05-23T20:09:00.002-04:00

Crap is a great source of energy, if only we can get it out in a useful fashion. So, this article appeared recently which lists many measures in the US. Good reading. But, hang on, if you are Desi and about as old as me (pushing 30).. then surely, you remember the old "biogas lagwao re bhaiya.. biogas lagwao" viddys on Doordarshan..? Hmm, a quick search revealed this page. Yeah, I have some time on my hands right now to be thinking about random shite.

A beautiful example of time lapse photography

2009-05-18T11:04:00.002-04:00

Time lapse is when you show a series of photos at a speed much faster than you took them. This can be done by simply "speeding up the reel" in old film video cameras, or by pasting photos taken with wait periods into a video. It is the opposite of high speed photography. Time lapse viddys of the night sky are particularly wonderful. Here, look at this one: tell mw what you think.

Some new pictures from California

2009-05-17T00:50:00.004-04:00

Photographs taken with a Canon Rebel XTi. Lenses: Canon 28-135 IS, 70-300 and 18-55. Postprocessing on Gimp. Thanks to Krishnan for loaning me the camera.

Insane lenses, cameras which bleed awesomeness and cost as much as the National Debt

2009-05-16T20:53:00.007-04:00

I thought since it has been a while and then some, since I have written anything about photography, I should be back. There have been elections back home and people dying just south of the border. With any such event or conflict come the reporters. Some call them the vultures of war. But it is true that in many cases they do a job that is difficult, under the most extreme conditions. And many of them never make it back. So, what about the tools they use?

Lets start off with the age old Leica rangefinder series. This has been the darling of serious (read well funded) news agencies in the early postwar years. Built like a phookin' tank, the M series brought a revolution to the 35 mm wurlde. The M pedigree continues in the sleek M8.2. Ragefinders are different from SLRs in that there is no mirror. Focussing is achieved by optimizing path length through a beam splitter. In practice, you turn a knob until two images coincide. There are fewer moving parts and hence rangefinders are quiter and more compact than SLRs. But SLRs are more versatille. Here, read this comparison.

Leica also had an SLR lineup, (which they developed with Minolta, the company that gave the wurlde the first SLR with an integrated autofocus and lens drive) the R series. But being Leica, they decided that they were too awesome for autofocus, which everyone and his grandmother has had for about 25 years. Then, they went in for a collaboration of sorts with Olympus, Panasonic and Sigma in the Four-thirds system. Except, they built one DSLR and essentially went to sleep. Oh, and they did promise a 14-150 mm ultrazoom which is not very easy to find.

Now, it seems, after much soul searching, Leica has come up with a new SLR series, the flagship being the S2. This promises to be close to medium format quality. Which will give the Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III (yeah, a mouthful) quite a headache, and maybe Mamiya heartburn for its ZD medium format cameras. Medium format means larger film size, or larger sensors and is only for you if you have lots of cash to drop, maybe work for a fashion magazine or a high end porn studio and are as serious about resolution as an erection problem.

Now a leetil aside on Leica being all icky with the Four-thirds gang. Come on, Olympus is the only plucky guy putting out great cameras out there with this standard. I use an E-500 myself, which is simply lovely. They have a pro grade E3, a semipro E-30 and many, many prosumer models. Much better bang for the buck than any APS model SLR. And they have such wonderful lenses!

But lets step aside from this discussion of camera bodies and talk about a couple of lenses which have caught my attenshun. I have mentioned the Leica ultrazoom already. You would use the ultrazoom for daily "street" photography. This would be a walkabout lens with a zoom range of 10-12x. Nikons 18-200 mm antivibration lens is a runaway success. Ken Rockwell loves it. You probably will as well. This is awesome for news photography. Canon had no equivalent for a long time. But that is about to change. With this lens and an EOS 50D, I imagine you could goo up against a D300 and win, especially in static frames. But the ultrazoom lens market will have changed forever with the introduction of Tamron's 18-270 mm. This is available in EOS and Nikon mounts (typical!) and goes for less than 590$ on Amazon (not a plug). In your face Nikon/Canon! Bear in mind that point and shoots these days have 22x zoom and sell for half that of an SLR body. A good photographer with a decent P&S can get better results than a newbie with a pricey DSLR.

But more on lenses. The brightest Canon EOS lens is the 50 mm f1.2. Pricey and awesome. Nikon's brightest is a f1.4. Still awesome. Leica has an f 0.95 Noctilux lens for its M series. Yeah, breathe in and out slowly while your heart rate comes back to something decent. You can probably shoot handheld in candlelight with that piece of glass. Which means, its time to wrap up with the story of one of the fastest lenses ever made used by Stanley Kubrick.

Open question: should genes be patented?

2009-05-13T13:37:00.000-04:00

Read this CNN article and then decide.

An open letter to John le Carre, and a word about his latest novel.

2009-05-04T23:08:00.002-04:00

Dear Mr. Cornwell,

I have admired your work for many years. My father first introduced me to George Smiley. I then became friends with Guillam and Connie Sachs. I hated Tob Esterhase and pitied Lady Ann for being a fool. And I developed a sneaking admiration for Karla.

I have spent many pleasant afternoons debating the relative character defects of Smiley with the only comparable character anyone else has written: Len Deighton's Bernard Samson, also of the SIS.

It has been perhaps fifteen years since I first opened a le Carre. My tastes in literature have evolved. But my admiration for you has only grown.

A Man Most Wanted leaves something lacking. I must apologize for saying this. Firstly, as Robert Heinlein had once put it to a fan "you never wrote to me about all the books you liked, and now you are writing to complain about the one you didn't!" Guilty. Secondly, you, of all authors have nothing left to prove. But this latest work is very flat in comparison to the many coloured, nuanced writing that has made you so famous. Just an opinion. A respectful one.

I hope to keep reading your novels in the future. May you enjoy good health and happiness.

Akash, a fan.

The awesomeness of Rajnikanth

2009-04-28T16:57:00.000-04:00

The Matrix has nothing on this!

This was too hilarious to pass up on

2009-04-28T08:14:00.003-04:00

Please tell me that I am not the only person who finds this funny.. it appeared on my Facebook RSS today.

The Tax Return of the humble Indian politician

2009-04-27T13:06:00.002-04:00

I have copied here, an article from The Statesman, Web edition. This is rather interesting. It does appear that our politicians have little or no wealth, as they don't seem to pay much taxes. But that does not prevent them from ostentatious display. Read on.

A tale of stellar omissions

Vijay Thakur
NEW DELHI, April 26: Is buying property in the national capital region way beyond your reach? Are taxes eating into your hard-earned income? Such “aam aadmi'” concerns do not bother candidates for the Lok Sabha elections if the affidavits submitted by them to their returning officers while filing nomination papers are anything to go by.
Take the case of Mr Rahul Gandhi, the Congress leader projected as the party's prime minister in waiting. He can let you into the secret of owning property in the south Delhi area for as little as Rs 4.40 per square yard or a mere 49 paise per square foot.
For those with tax blues, it might be best to seek some advice from Mr LK Advani, the BJP's prime ministerial candidate. In his affidavit, he has not mentioned paying income tax, wealth tax and property tax in 2008-09. All this when he was the leader of the Opposition, drawing a fixed salary, and owns movable and immovable assets worth over Rs 3 crore (not including his spouse's assets of over Rs 50 lakh). The RJD supremo, Mr Lalu Prasad, whose family owns 36 immovable properties, does not fall in the purview of wealth and property tax, according to his declaration. However, Mr Prasad and his wife, Mrs Rabri Devi, owe the income tax department an amount of Rs 26 lakh, which they contest.
Mr Rahul Gandhi has informed the Election Commission that he owns a 4.692 acre farmhouse in Mehrauli which is worth Rs 9,86,244 as on March 31, 2008. This means his 22,700 square yards of land costs only Rs 9.86 lakh. At this value, the price per square yard of his farmhouse would be approximately Rs 4.40 or 49 paise per square foot. However, if property dealers of Mehrauli area are to be believed, Rs 10 lakh would not fetch even a 25 square-yard plot in any inhabited colony of Mehrauli which has water, power and other civic amenities.
Mr Gandhi's affidavit further contradicts his own claim. He has submitted that he is paying property tax of Rs 78,000 per annum on the farmhouse whose value is only Rs 9.86 lakhs. Similar is the case of the Congress president, Mrs Sonia Gandhi, who declared that the approximately 15.75 bigha plot of agricultural land she owns in Sultanpur village and Dera Mandi, is worth a mere Rs 2.19 lakh as on March 31, 2008, that is Rs 14,000 per bigha. Even barren land in remote areas of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh or Punjab is not available at this price.
Mrs Gandhi has also got her hands on some inexpensive jewellery. She claims to have 2,518 grams of jewellery valued at Rs 11,08,100, or Rs 439 per gram. Mrs. Gandhi also owns 88 kg of silverware valued at about Rs 18 lakh. Mr Advani has Rs 67.56 lakhs in banks and financial and non-banking institutions, another Rs 1.6 lakh of jewellery, and house and apartments worth Rs 2.35 crore. Yet his assets declaration states that he has paid "NIL" income tax, wealth tax, or property tax for the assessment year 2008-09. "If a candidate has written "NIL" in these columns, it means he has not paid any Income tax, property tax and wealth tax," said the returning officer of Gandhi Nagar. "We are not here to check the veracity of it. It is in the public domain, if anybody has any problem he is free to approach the appropriate authorities," the returning officer said.
Even income tax experts find it difficult to digest that a person who has assets of over Rs 3 crore and is earning a substantial salary as leader of the Opposition, has not contributed anything towards income tax, wealth tax or property tax.
"Before commenting on it, we need to see what he has submitted in his I-T returns. One can certainly make lots of tax saving investments, donations, or show expenditure. Without seeing his returns details, we can comment little on it," said Mr Rajesh Kumar, director of finance in a public limited company.
The RJD chief, Mr Lalu Prasad's declaration is similar to Mr Advani's. His family, including his wife, sons and daughters, own more than 36 residential, commercial or agricultural plots. Yet they have not paid any income tax, wealth tax or property tax for the assessment year 2008-09, the affidavit submitted by Mr Prasad reveals. He, however, owes the I-T department Rs 16.26 lakh while Mrs Rabri Devi owes Rs 9.79 lakh.
The story is no different for leaders of other political parties with only a few abiding by the letter and spirit of the Election Commission's model code. The EC might have made the disclosure of assets mandatory for all contesting candidates, but the real picture is not clear as candidates seem to be taking advantage of "technical/legal loopholes and jargons" to hide the actual worth of their assets.
The EC, however, washes its hands of the declarations made by the candidates. "Our job ends after we receive the affidavits from the candidates," said a senior official of the Commission. "The candidate has to declare the assets to the returning officer and we put it in the public domain. If anybody has any objection they can approach the returning officer concerned and file a complaint to the appropriate authorities," said the official.
The EC does not evaluate the declared assets, but since it is in the public domain, the concerned government department may take the initiative to check if the candidates are indulging in tax evasion and take punitive action, the official said.

The Tracey Fragments

2009-04-20T14:07:00.001-04:00

Is a truly awful movie. Do not see it. Please

Just cos this is too effin' awesome to believe

2009-04-20T14:05:00.002-04:00

Can you make a short action movie with no movement? This guy can!

Creation Science Fair

2009-04-13T10:13:00.002-04:00

Read on here. It sounds strange, but give it a shot. I am not sure which emotion it evokes in me: pity or horror.

An old student

2009-03-24T15:19:00.002-04:00

I ran into one of my old students today. She told me, somewhat apologetically, that she hadn't majored in anything 'remotely scienc-ey'. But she has found a job (quite a feat at this moment, I am given to understand) and will graduate and move out shortly. Is this how teachers feel when they see their students spread their wings and move out, full of enthusiasm and vigour, ready to conquer the world? Perhaps. I am not sure. But I think I will have many more opportunities to find out.

Rain

2009-03-24T15:13:00.002-04:00

Shohorebrishti, the name of this blog means "rain in the city". It relates to a song by Suman Chattopadhyay, from his album 'Jatiswar'. I want to present here, this guest post from today's Statesman, where this writer (Tanya Ghosh) remembers the rain. At times reminiscent of Gerald Durrel and also Anita Desai, this is a wonderful little article.

One monsoon day

Tanya Gupta
Memories are funny. Of the billions of experiences, only a handful remain embedded in our grey matter. If they are pleasant, they are a source of comfort on difficult days. If the memories are not really wanted, they continue to haunt us, casting a shadow on happier days.
A remote small town somewhere in West Bengal. The skies darken, the clouds rumble and women scurry to remove clothes hung out to dry.
Children, asked to help their mother, are excited at the urgency of the task. Those too small to reach the clotheslines are asked to shut the windows. In older houses that have seen better times, women and children put pails in areas where the roof leaks.
Even the breeze seems to anticipate what is coming and its quality changes, carrying smells that become sharper and travel quickly. The smell of rajnigandha with a boring English name, tube rose, the night blooming jasmine (raat ki rani) fill the air with their strong scents. And then, without waiting for the mass of humanity to be fully prepared, thunder crashes somewhere and large drops of water fall on the dry earth. As the ground starts to grow moist, it gives off a smell that is elemental and primordial. Wet patches quickly grow and the ground becomes wet and sticky.
And the rain now comes down in all its fury. In the open field, boys take off their shirts, and a ball appears from nowhere, they kick it back and forth casually; and then someone shouts, two teams form and the game starts in right earnest. Players run across the field, with bare muddy feet, exhilarated to be fighting the elements and playing the good game. It is a moment perhaps they will remember and cherish later on in their lives.
In most houses, the focus is also elemental, but it is on food and not sport. “Monsoon snacks” are prepared. Young girls sit in the veranda and chat; then one sings a line of a song, the other runs in and gets a harmonium, and suddenly there is song, and if spirits are high, then even dance. Hot snacks arrive and for the moment all the senses are satisfied!
A little girl visiting her grandmother’s looks wide-eyed at the torrents of rain falling on the earth. The rain falls and falls and it does not seem that it will ever stop.
The boys finish their game and go home triumphantly to a scolding from their worried mothers (“if you fall sick now you can take care of yourself”), the girls finish their chai and singing and pack their instruments up and go inside. The buckets holding rain water have been replaced twice.
And yet the rain continues to fall. The girl wonders what will happen if it does not stop! She goes to sleep. When she awakens, the rain has stopped. The girl peeps outside.
The street is flooded but the rain water has stopped just short of the first step to their house. Any more rain and the house would have been flooded!
Her grandmother tells her what a good idea it was to build their house a little higher than everybody else’s ~ it was built for the monsoon.
The girl doesn’t pay much attention; instead, she imagines the house floating away in the sea, for miles and miles, she imagines building a boat and exploring the huge garden, which is now a large lake; she imagines monsters lurking in the water, the “monsoon monsters” she calls them.
He grandmother sees her looking out and forbids her to go outside. Putting the little girl in her mother’s charge, she goes off for her afternoon bath. As soon as she is gone, her mother turns to her, and says: “So what are you waiting for? Let’s go!”
The girl’s eyes open wide. She says: “Really?”
And off they go! The little girl has never been in a swimming pool and this is so much better! Her mother tightens her sari around her and holding the girl’s hands firmly, steps into the water.
Water is up to the girl’s neck. Perhaps the next twenty minutes are some of the most blissful moments for the little girl. From imagining underwater monsters, and walking around the once-familiar garden to “Mum, I am swimming!” It is an unforgettable monsoon day.
Soon, it’s over. They hold hands ~ a woman who is still a girl at heart, and the little girl ~ and return to the house.

Possible newspaper headlines

2009-03-17T17:17:00.002-04:00

So I had this wicked idea: take two or three headlines from CNN/BBC/NYT/W.Post/WSJ or whatever your daily fix is, and parse them into one headline. make it wicked. Ok, so maybe the idea is not original, but hey, contributions welcome!!

Here, let me start off with:

Executives at AIG who received bonuses above 1 million $ will not confirm belief in evolution!

A love story and nothing in particular.

2009-03-14T20:58:00.002-04:00

The time traveller's wife is a wonderfully written book about a bloke who travels back and forth in time, without any control. It is dressed up as science fiction. But I think it is the most beautiful love story I have read in a long time. And that includes that one time I read a Helen McInnes all the way through expecting that it was a spy novel, only to finish it and realise that there wasn't a single spy there at all!

Also saw Bunuel's Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie. I am so confused!

Provoked. Not impressed.

2009-03-14T20:49:00.003-04:00

The title of this blog is rather ambiguous. Could I be provoked, but not impressed? Certainly. This is about the British film about a Punjabi housewife in England who is beaten and abused by her husband for 10 years, and finally burns him to death. The protagonist is played by the beautiful Aishwarya Rai. This woman is ethereal and angelic. Unfortunately, her acting follows in the finest traditions of the Keanu Reaves school. Her abusive husband is acted very ably by Naveen Andrews (damn, he gets in bed with Jodie Foster, and now this?!?!?). When she is in jail, her case is taken up by a women's rights organisation, spearheaded by Nandita Das. This was rather sad, Das is such a great actress, but she comes across as rather lame. The direction was simply bad. Lousy script, bad dialogue. Important story, which needs to be told, but is not told properly. But try to see it.

DNA

2009-03-10T08:10:00.002-04:00

Turns out that the DNA used for coding the protein I am working with is damaged. We made a single residue mutation, which seems to have worked, as per the sequencer. However, there are several other insertions and deletions. These lead to frameshift mutations, among other things. That might explain our recent misery in getting the protein to behave.Well, back to the lab again....

BBC Booklist

2009-02-27T12:36:00.001-05:00

This has been doing the rounds on Facebook, so I thought I should put it here, along with some comments:

The game is like this: The BBC figures most people will have read about 6 of the 100 books here. Instructions: Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. Tally your total below.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen ( )
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien ()
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte ()
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling ( )
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee ()
6 The Bible (Not the whole thing. I will. Some day.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte ()
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell ()
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ( )
10 Great Epectations - Charles Dickens (Read an abridged version as a kid)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott ()
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy ()
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller ()
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Most of the good plays, some of the lesser plays, many of the sonnets
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier()
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien ( )
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks ( )
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger ()
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger ( )
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot ()
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell ( )
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald ()
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens ()
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (Couldn't get past a few hundred pages )
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galay - Douglas Adams ( )
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh ()
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky ( )
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck ()
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll ( )
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame ( )
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ()
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (What can I say? They liked abridging Dickens for Indian kids )
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis ()
34 Emma - Jane Austen ( )
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen ()
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis ()
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini ()
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere ( )
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden ()
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne ( )
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell ()
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown ()
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Still haven't finished this one )
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving ()
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins ( )
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery ()
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy ( )
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood ()
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding ()
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan ()
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel ()
52 Dune - Frank Herbert ()
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons ()
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen ( )
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth ()
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon ( )
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (, and yes, I did read the original)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huley ()
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon ()
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ()
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck ()
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov ( )
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt ()
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold ()
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Aleandre Dumas ()
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac ( )
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy ()
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding ( )
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ()
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville ( )
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (, again, the real thing)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker ()
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett ()
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ( )
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (No, but did read "Portrait of the Artist." and bits and pieces of "Dubliners")
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath ()
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ( )
78 Germinal - Emile Zola ( )
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray ()
80 Possession - AS Byatt ( )
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens ()
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell ( )
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker ()
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ( )
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert ( )
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry ( )
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White ()
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom ( )
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (; so they have the complete Shakespeare, but only "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes?" That's a bit odd. And I have read them all! )
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton ()
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad ()
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Eupery ()
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks ( )
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams ( )
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole ( )
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute ( )
97 The Three Musketeers - Aleandre Dumas (, unabridged if Librivo counts)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare ()
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl ()
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo ()

My comments on the list:
disclaimer:

The BBC apparently thinks people are uneducated gits.
The people who concocted this list are pretentious prats. This is why: Yeah, too heavily biased towards Jane Austen, then the presence of Dan Brown is either someone's awful joke or someone's awful joke. Also, Dune. DUNE!!! If you wanted to put in SF in this list (which it lacks by miles, I should say, putting far too much weepy nineteenth century material instead, has the BBC not heard of Asimov/Clarke, or even their homegrown Brian Aldiss? Hmm... other notable omissions would be And Quiet Flows The Don (while we are on depressing Russian authors), and maybe Idiot.
And do allow me to suggest John le Carre's 'The Quest for Karla' (3 books about the SIS), also two of the canonical antiwar novels written: The Cruel Sea by Monsarrat and Len Deighton's opus 'Bomber'

Mutual incomprehension

2009-02-27T12:22:00.001-05:00

When English speaking people do not understand something, they say 'its Greek to me'. What do Greeks say? Or Germans? Or Tamils? If you have ever wondered about such things, then this article will be an interesting read.

C's thesis defence, and other such things.

2009-02-27T12:10:00.005-05:00

Chamaree defended her thesis. It was great.

There will be cake. Not a lie.

Featured above: the nailpolish incident:-
------------------------------------
Me: dude, you have no shoes on.
Chamaree: Yeah, I know. Check out the nailpolish.
Me: dude, this is your thesis defence! wait, what nail polish?

Citing Jonathan Colton and Portal for "Still alive". Very apt in grad school.

When the rich become too rich...

2009-02-19T15:40:00.006-05:00

If I remember correctly, there was a line from 'The Good Earth' which went.. 'There is a way. When the rich become too rich, and the poor become too poor, there is a way.' These words, authored by Nobel Laureate Pearl Buck might be applicable in the current world. Read on.

Men's forum booed down

2009-02-16T10:10:00.000-05:00

Read here.

The secular fabric of India (and how it is being slowly shredded)

2009-02-13T14:30:00.003-05:00

The incidents in Mangalore, a week or so earlier have put us to shame. Well, not really. Here is a quick summary: certain (Hindu) blokes took violent umbrage at (unwed) women dressing in Western clothes and drinking in pubs and consorting with menfolk. Are we really surprised? The supposedly evil Western influence on our society is not new, nor unanticipated. Many, if not most Indians dream of visiting, and perhaps settling in the wondrous land that they perceive 'Amrika' to be. Successive governments in the last two decades have sought business and cultural ties to the West. Such is the measure of our 'success' that the word 'Bangalored' has entered the lexicon as what happens to a job when it is outsources, and Indians now send upwards of 80,000 students each year to the US, more than any other nation. But with this will come the intermingling of cultures and what was once considered profane will perhaps merely be frowned upon.

But allow me to hypothesize something. The wave of prosperity that our ties with the West have brought us are really linked to a tiny urban fraction of India. Noveau rich, you might say. And like most new entrants to the party, they would like to participate more than wholeheartedly. More loyal than the king, so to speak. And so they have embraced the worst of what the West has to offer with no regard for the virtues of self reliance and ingenuity which has made the US what it is. Thus, we have low rise jeans, tank tops and pubs. And eventually, perhaps, we will also have bling and Glocks. But what we have bypassed, and will perhaps never have is the vision of Messrs. Hewlett, Packard, Ferdinand Porsche and Steve Jobs.

So the wealthy of India continue their dalliance with the West, unmindful of the smoldering anger of our country's poor, whom we have forgotten. Them, we have sold down the drain by numerous trade agreements which fetter our farmers, by selling agricultural land to contractors and shooting poor people who dared to protest and by selling all the PSUs, instead of trying to make them profitable. Is it surprising, then, if fundamentalists, be them of any faith, can now recruit from the poor and the dispossessed? My friend R told me that everything in India is done to oppress women. I disagree. We have had a miserable record in many respects. Remember sutee? But things are changing for the better, if slowly. The danger is India will be torn apart as the urban rich waltz faster and faster to some Faustian copy of what they perceive the West to be, while the poor lie oppressed and forgotten.

The other thing I wanted to talk about was free speech. This is what Johann Hari said about free speech and how standards at the highest level are being subverted by diplomatic and cultural arm twisting, especially by the Islamic nations. How there are two standards and the media must never transgress by judging conservative societies by a liberal yardstick. This was reprinted in the Statesman, a respected national daily published in Calcutta. To my shame, this immediately resulted in the good (Muslim) citizens of Calcutta protesting (violently). The Statesman has since apologized (why?), but its editor and publisher have been taken into custody. This is what Johann Hari said about the reaction. Read what you will into this. In my opinion, this is another symptom of the cancer that grips our society. The existance of double standards (read the Indian civil code) and the subjugation of women are two equally hideous faces of the same disease. To cure one, you must also work on the other.

The 20 facebook profile pics for blokes

2009-02-06T12:19:00.001-05:00

explained by this blog.

Guest post: Malgudi and its place in the world of words.

2009-02-05T13:44:00.001-05:00

From today's online edition of the Calcutta Telegraph.

THE DIGNITY OF THE SMALL PERSON IS IMPORTANT

W.H. Auden and R.K. Narayan have steered Alexander McCall Smith in the direction that his writing has followed

Returning, then, to the question which sparked these observations on influence: what has influenced me? The answer that I usually give is a brief one — my principal literary influences are that great poet, W.H. Auden, and that great novelist, R.K. Narayan. These are the two writers who, I think, steered me more than anybody else in the direction that my writing has followed. To this list I might add a stylistic, linguistic influence which I think was extremely important for me — the Book of Common Prayer, that great liturgical masterpiece that was used in the Anglican Church, including the Anglican churches in India, and indeed the Episcopal Church of Scotland, until it was largely replaced by the arid forms of modern liturgy. The Book of Common Prayer, alongside the Authorized Version of King James VI of Scotland and James I of England, gave great linguistic richness to the English language. The powerful Cranmerian prose of the Book of Common Prayer must have formed the deep linguistic patterns of many writers raised in observant households.

How did I get to R.K. Narayan? Well, I think that I can detect the outlines of the path that led me to that happy meeting. As a boy, I obviously had no experience of India. I was, however, born and spent my childhood in one of the last corners of the Empire, and so it is not surprising that I was exposed to Kipling. Now I know that there are many who have a low opinion of Kipling, and I do not wish to enter into the debate, but the fact of the matter is that some of my earliest reading was of The Jungle Book and the Just So Stories. Mowgli and Kim were very real to me, and I also remember being utterly entranced by Kipling’s story, “Rikki Tiki Tavi”, which I read so often that I could virtually recite it word for word. How painful it is to think back to those lost days, when one remembered the exact words of what one read — it is hardly possible to do that later in life.

But there I was reading Kipling’s Indian tales and being drawn subconsciously into a relationship with a country that I had never seen. India was to me a great, infinitely exciting place — I knew the names of the cities and could point to then on a map, and I had, no doubt, all sorts of exotic ideas about this country. That, I think, was the germ of my literary engagement with this country, even if it was planted by a writer now regarded as very old-fashioned. Of course, this was nothing unusual — there must have been vast numbers of people who were attracted to India in this way, just as today there are so many people who find themselves drawn to America through the powerful influence of their films. We feel that we can know a country although we do not know it, or only see it on the printed page or in the flickering images of the screen.

As a young man, my engagement with literary India continued to be somewhat unusual, mediated as it was through the work of a writer of the Indian diaspora, who rarely wrote about India itself, and by a writer who, having married into the country, came to it from outside. These authors were the Nobel laureate, V.S. Naipaul, who wrote about India in the Caribbean, and the remarkable Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who lived in India for many years after her marriage. Then, fortunately, my reading took a more authentically Indian turn and I discovered the works of R.K. Narayan. I think, in fact, that I had read one of his books before the principal discovery — The Man-Eater of Malgudi was my first exposure to his writing, and although this book made an impression, it was not until a bit later that I found myself engrossed in the rest of his books. The effect, though, was profound, akin to my later discovery of the work of that sadly neglected English writer, Barbara Pym.

Now if I developed a taste for reading about India through the work of R.K. Narayan, what were his early influences? Narayan has left us a fascinating autobiography, My Days, which gives us an insight into his boyhood. He was, as you know, the son of a headmaster, and obviously in such a household he came into contact with a wide range of reading matter that arrived on his father’s desk for the school library. “My father,” he wrote, “ did not mind our taking away whatever we wanted to read — provided we put them back on his desk without spoiling them, as they had to be placed on the school’s reading room table on Monday morning. So our weekend reading was full and varied. We could dream over the advertisement pages in the Boy’s Own Paper or the Strand Magazine. Through the Strand, we made the acquaintance of all English writers: Conan Doyle, Wodehouse, W.W. Jacobs, Arnold Bennett, and every English fiction writer worth the name. ... Through Harper’s and the Atlantic we attained glimpses of the New World and its writers.”

From this it is clear that the influences which were playing a part in his literary development were many and varied — something which I think in due course showed up very clearly in the nature of his writing. R.K. Narayan enjoyed the great gift of being able to see the universal in one small slice of humanity — the occupants of a single town. How much of that gift came from his boyhood reading — from his voracious consumption of the literature of cultures in which he was at the same time both insider and outsider. The world of Wodehouse’s extraordinary country houses was very far from the world of his father’s school in Mysore, but it is this dissonance, surely, which gives the writer the insight he needs to describe the universal. For wherever we are, the small things of life are the same: the jealousies, the ambitions, the frustrations, the human striving.

And it is Narayan’s ability to capture human striving so perfectly and poignantly that I think has most deeply influenced me in my own novels. As a young writer, he of course knew what it was to strive after something and to find it seemingly unattainable. It was while he was still a student that Narayan purchased a copy of a book entitled How To Sell Your Manuscripts. He was not a particularly good student, possibly because he was too busy writing, but inspired by this book he sent his manuscripts off to London publishers, only to experience that rejection that almost all writers must face: the letters back saying that the publisher regrets that he cannot in the current climate, etc etc.

Narayan sent the manuscript of his first novel, Swami and Friends, to a series of London publishers, but to no avail. Then his first publication came — in the pages of the humorous magazine, Punch, no less — and it brought him the then handsome fee of six guineas. He now became a journalist but continued to send out manuscripts without success. The manuscript of Swami was still doing the rounds in London — still unsuccessfully — and Narayan wrote to a friend in London who was sending it out for him. If it came back again, he said, his friend should tie a heavy stone to it and throw it in the Thames. Fortunately, the friend did not take this advice, but continued to show it, eventually to Graham Greene. It sat on Greene’s desk for a while and then he read it and passed it on to a publisher with the recommendation that it should be published. That happened in 1935 and it was the launch of Narayan’s distinguished career as a novelist. In all he wrote fourteen books, each, in its way, a little gem.

The central themes that you find in a Narayan novel — the portrayal of the hero or heroine who strives to be something, perhaps unrealistically — is for me an immensely powerful theme, and one that is full of comic possibilities as well as great human grandeur. Life in this world is, for many, not easy: the barricades are not always in the right place, people do not always understand what it is that we really want, our abilities are not always as readily recognized as we would like them to be. But in spite of all the limitations that we have, we still have our dignity, which is so important to us. That is what Narayan teaches us — that the dignity of the small person, the apparently insignificant onlooker on the great dramas, is important. He helps us to sympathize and to understand. And he shows us, too, that in these small strivings of everyday life, there is the larger story of humanity’s potential for both kindness and unkindness.

One does not need a large canvas to portray all this. Remember Jane Austen, who famously said that she painted miniature pictures on tiny squares of ivory. She did. Nothing much happened to her characters — they led restricted lives in which the major question was often whether they would meet and marry a particular man. Yet these tiny squares of ivory are really great canvases that say a lot about what it is to be human. Similarly with Narayan’s novels, in the small events of their lives we see the big issues written large. And these issues are revealed in a clear narrative, in limpid prose — something that is not always evident today in contemporary novels. Narayan can ramble a bit, but he rambles clearly — if that is not a contradiction — and of course real life rarely goes from A to B without digression and excursus. In that respect, rambling may be considered a virtue from the social realism point of view.

When I wrote the first novel in my Botswana series of novels — The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency — although I may not have realized it then, I now acknowledge that I was heavily influenced by Narayan’s example. I proposed to write about a woman in a smallish town; I chose for her a friend and assistant who had strived very hard to get where she got in life; I chose to make Mma Makutsi inordinately proud of her performance in the final examinations of the Botswana Secretarial College, where she achieved the hitherto-unheard-of mark of 97 per cent; I chose to make the society in which they lived an intimate one, in which reputation and status was important — all of these being typical features of the Narayan novels. Was I consciously imitating? No, I don’t think I was. The influence was, I think, more of that subconscious nature that I have alluded to earlier on. And so when a journalist interviewing me some years ago said, “Your novels remind me rather of the work of R.K. Narayan”, I felt a momentary surprise and asked, “But how do you know that?” — not realizing, perhaps, that this was not just a random, co-incidental insight on the journalist’s part, but something which was fairly obvious to anybody who knew both bodies of work.

What of Narayan’s reputation today? There are, of course, fads in the growth and decline of literary reputation; authors can be in favour one moment and then in the next, people may be heard saying, “Why on earth did anybody bother to read him or her?” Such is the fickleness of the public taste. I am not sure how extensively Narayan is read these days in the UK, for example, but I can say that when I mention him to even quite well-read friends, many of them confess that they have not read him. This upsets me every bit as much as when I hear that friends have not read Auden. The remedy, of course, is always at hand — an appropriate edition thrust into their hands with an earnest imprecation to read it as soon as possible. I hope, though, that there will be a revival of interest in Narayan’s novels in the United States. A couple of years ago, I was privileged to be invited to write an introduction to two new re-issues of omnibus editions of his novels, published in New York by Everyman’s Library. I was delighted to do this, and I have hopes that the inclusion of these books in a large and widely-circulated list in the US will introduce new readers to this very great writer.

If there has been a central theme to this lecture, it is this: that India has, through a number of writers writing in English since the late 1930s and up to the present, made an inordinately vital and significant contribution to the body of world literature written in English. I have tried to show, through an examination of my own experience and through an instance of literary influence, one writer upon another writer, how this affected my own work in a major way. In making this contribution to world literature, we outside India have been immensely enriched by the subtle, gorgeously human, and beautifully written prose which your writers have given us. Long may this process continue, and if Indian writers continue to win all the Booker prizes ad infinitum, then that will surely be richly deserved.

Alison, by Jack

2009-02-05T10:15:00.001-05:00

A person's life in photographs.

GM crops and India's suicide belt

2009-02-04T16:07:00.002-05:00

The region of Madhya Pradesh in India called Vidarbha is one of the hottest regions of the country. It is located almost in the centre of the subdontinent. It is also now called India's suicide belt. The reason is genetically modified, or GM crops. Monsanto, the US based supercorp which trades in seeds and agricultural products is using India as a a test ground for GM crops. These seeds are sold at much higher rates than traditional seeds. To make room for them, government seed banks and other sources of traditional seeds arebeing displaced. GM seeds require much more water than traditional varieties. In India, where electricity and water is not always guaranteed, GM crops fail. Leaving the farmers in terrible debt. At which point they commit suicide. As simple as that. Of course, if the crops succeed, then the farmers reap rich harvests. But it increasingly appears that our government has sold the poorest of the poor down the drain. Yet again. The truth of the matter is that Western corporations can afford to treat the rest of the world with such awful callousness only because they are always able to find brown/black people who will happily sell their own families away for a few dollars or pound sterling. It is these people whom we end up electing to positions of power who are, in truth responsible for ruining lives.

Read this article on the GM crop related suicides.

What is a PhD worth today?

2009-02-02T09:45:00.002-05:00

This is a question I ask myself every so often. Good answers are not forthcoming. Let us take a short look at the context of this problem. In the India of today, certain jobs are highly paid: the software industry, banking/finance. One might say that the Indian economy has finally come of age. But the other side to this 'success' is that all other professions are being sidelined. To the extent that it is now increasingly difficult to the point to being impossible for, say a high school teacher to buy a flat in any major city. Forget houses, only the rich live in houses in urban India. Small businesses are being run into the ground by large conglomerates. In effect, much of our nation is being Walmart-ised. The other side of easy, but well paying jobs straight out of college is that the more 'staid' professions, such as 'proper' engineering; just does not have any takers. As a result, our industrial production is dropping in overall quality. And the diversion of trained minds to relatively well paying, but not intellectually demanding jobs (call centres, anyone) is in my opinion the equivalent of the nation shooting itself in the head. The price we will pay for adopting the worst of Western values without thought is that we risk becoming a client state for the powers that be. But coming to the initial topic, what is a PhD worth? State salaries are not too high for research staff. Industrial research is a new beast in India. But in the larger context discussed above, these two articles talk about miscalculations by policymakers and the larger malaise gripping the entire university system, although from the US perspective. Good reading.

1. Don't Become a Scientist!
2. Doc'd - economic disadvantages of graduate education

"It's not coincidental that 1928 was the last time that the top 1 percent took home more than 20 percent of the nation's income."

2009-02-02T09:42:00.001-05:00

This essay from the Post talks about much of what is wrong with allowing wealth to flow upwards.

CLASSE TOUS RISQUES

2009-01-28T12:04:00.002-05:00

CLASSE TOUS RISQUES: a French gangster flick about a man on the run with his two young children. The script is very competantly worked, very tautly strung, hardly a moment wasted. Lino Ventura plays the protagonist, intensely aware of the noose inexorably tightening around him. Jean Paul Belmondo is awesome as Stark, the only friend our hero has. Decent camera work, score more often silent than not. But the real winner is the script and the strong performances. One can see echoes of the performances in much later works from Miller's Crossing to Last Man Standing.

Gimme a drink now!!

2009-01-28T12:02:00.001-05:00

Sweet and wonderful pikchures of animals drinking. Water.

Is global warming now irreversible?

2009-01-27T11:50:00.001-05:00

Read this article.