Against Corporate Junk Food

Anti Corporate Junk Food

One would have thought that with the arrival of a new computer, half my reasons to rant will disappear. One might also wonder at a person whose main rants are against silicon based objects (pun fully intended). However, and this is a big however, there are always things to rant about. In fact, at some later point, perhaps a blog on the uselessness of ranting, and then maybe another on the therapeutic values of ranting. Anyway, I have something new to howl about. Corporate Junk Food.

There are these companies which provide pretty lousy, mostly unpalatable and sometimes really unhealthy junk food to students/working people/other hurried life forms at medium to unreasonably high prices. Now don't misunderstand me here; I perfectly well understand the reasoning behind grabbing a burger from a MacD and running to class in the morning. People in the US of A are health conscious to the point that if there is a reasonable alternative within a day's drive, they will not eat at a junk food outlet. What completely drives me up the wall is the opposite attitude back home.

True, most Indians want to come to the US and if they do will die happy (why??), and anything 'phoren' carries the stamp of respectability. But MacD's???!!!! I mean, come on people, get a grip. You guys had several thousand recipes going at a time when the only primates on the North American mainland were those on trees. There is no such thing of lasting value in 'American Cuisine'. This is a civilization whose greatest invention is a blinkin' Cola!!! Understand this: food as defined here is something which gives you energy and keeps you going. FOOD as defined back home is an experience!! Think! Lachha parathas! Paper Dosas! Hyderabadi biriyani! Shorshe bata ilish machh! And intelligent Desis think that its 'cool' to hang out at a MacD and eat burgers. This, ladies and gentlemen, in a sentence summarizes the decline and fall of eastern civilization.

My friend Qi was telling me how hip Chinese folk pay big money to go and eat at a MacD, in fact, pay substantially more than the equivalent cost at, say Ann Arbor. I ended up thinking that hip Indian folk (read 'braindead losers with more money to spend than one should reasonably have') do the same. This is just plain sad. With good money in their pockets, these people do not have the good taste (and good sense) to avoid junk food. For these unfortunate nouveau rich fools, a nice Saturday evening out with the wife and kids involves a trip to a MacD where the idiot man of the family shells out big bucks for the privilege of feeding his equally idiotic offspring and wife oily French fries (which are neither French nor fries) and some really shady meat tucked between two slices of not even freshly baked bread.

And why this sudden rant? Well, some git on orkut has just created a community dedicated to a new MacD in Hyderabad!!! The ghost of the Nizam's chef is probably spinning in his grave!

About the tigerrrrrr

About the tiger.

My orkut profile claims that I am busy taming the tiger. To make things somewhat more clear; my boss has recently bought two new Macbooks for the lab. I am using one of them. The mac OSX.4 is called Tiger. And trust me, it needs some taming.

So coming around to this topic. My blog frequently deals with the love-hate relationship I have with my computer. With a Windows, all I have is a hate-hate. With a Linux, its a love-hate,which sometimes becomes a hate-love. Go figure!! Anyway, the new Mac OS is built on a commercial strength UNIX foundation. Which gives you the power of the command prompt. And that, of course is the entire point of the machine..

But the command line, or the shell comes with a few quirks of its own. Any UNIX machine can be a smart speed demon, in fact, my labmate D looks upon his Mac (and this is a bloody 2 processor G5 monster) as the next best thing after Starship Enterprise. But these machines are bloody finicky. Its not quite as simple as firing up Media Player and then hunting for files. The UNIX filesystem lets the experienced user do almost anything. It also acts as an apparently unsurmountable barrier to the novice (read Akash).

The biggest stumbling block is when the shell refuses to run a certain command for you. As in, tells you that you are barking nuts. Instead of pulling out my hair (which is currently not too easy, me having gone from longhair to skinhead) I used to go camp outside our IT expert's door. Now he has just shown me how to set environmental variables. Which may just be the cure to half my problems.

You don't know half of it. Right after getting the Mac, AND being told that the .cshrc has a path set for me to be able to run Matlab, Mathematica and all those good things from the prompt, I sftp'd a totally different .cshrc from a linux machine in. You know, the usual shortcuts, aliases.. and of course,now nothing works!! Panic. Go down to the expert. Get him to open up the .cshrc and freak out. 'Where did all this stuff come from'.. well, more egg on my face.

Regarding computers, there are two conflicting statements in my life:
1.A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
2.Practice makes perfect.

just laughing here

I was reading in the bus stop this last Monday. I do not usually read at bus stops, but this one was rather well illuminated. And to say that I do not read at bus stops will be telling the truth, but not all of it. So what was I reading? Mot science related anything, in fact. I was reading 'How to be good' by Nick Hornby. Of late, I have been carrying some current reading material around for commutes. This may give you the impression that every one of my waking hours is used to the full. That is not the case.

So, I was reading at the bus stop. (Is it 'at' or 'in'?) There was this Asian bloke hunched over his laptop. (In the US of A, 'Asian' means of Mongoloid extraction) Now he may have been finishing a presentation, or checking on a calculation. Or he may be reading Sardar jokes (which happen to be the Desi equivalent of Blonde jokes; point to note: I don't know if there is an Asian equivalent of Blonde and Sardar jokes) Or he may have been watching some really shady XXX stuff. Who knows? And who cares, for that matter.

Anyway, I suddenly laughed aloud. After having read a rather funny passage (something involving deep marital discord, but let that pass for now) This bloke looked at me with quite visible alarm and sort of shifted away. Which was a little difficult to do without actually integrating into the brick wall, but he tried anyway.

Which brings me to a very fundamental problem. What is wrong with people laughing aloud in public? I mean, it was just a perfectly ordinary laugh, one that may be forthcoming from someone reading a funny book. It was not an evil chuckle, or what is infinitely more disturbing coming from a guy, a giggle. Nor was it a guffaw (something approaching, what we call an 'Attohanshi' in Bangla) Just an ordinary laugh. And look at the reaction I got!!

calcutta buses

Buses in kolkata.

City buses in Calcutta, or Kolkata are mostly owned by private individuals. Whenever a regular, or a minibus says 'mayer aashirbaad' on the side (which means 'blessings of the mother') it usually means that the bus has been purchased with funds embezzled from some Durga Pujo budget (Ma Durga, of course being the Ma in question..). Well, coming to the topic of Calcutta buses. Calcutta, to begin with, is one of those few places I have been to where it is sunny enough so that you sweat copiously, while it is also raining. Don't ask me, I just live there. And when it rains, it bloody well pours.

Buses are put together rather shoddily. In fact, it is a miracle that many of them run. When it rains, the water dribbles into the side channels by the edges of the roof and splashes to the road. Theoretically. What actually happens is that some of it comes straight through those holes in the roof which have escaped the owner's eye (or in some cases,his wallet). Some of it comes through those channels mentioned, but by some peculiar magic involving surface tension and maybe quantum mechanical tunneling, finds its way into the face of the unfortunate bloke sitting in the last window seat. And of course, when it rains, the windows are shut. Which means you can't see where you are. And if you think you know how crowded a bus can get, you have no clue. I have traveled in buses where the pressure of people getting off at some stop just simply carries you inexorably towards the exit and off. Sometimes you are squished so tight that you are taken off your feet and simply hang suspended in midair between people. Right, so when the windows are closed, you have no idea where you are. So you strain to hear what the conductor is saying. And before you ask, no, we do not have those funky electronic devices in which a polite female voice says that you have arrived at North U and Fletcher.

May and June are particularly evil months. It is hot to the point that the tarmac on the road starts softening. Not kidding. I once spent a summer traveling to the BITM for a computer course. Gawd knows why. Not that I learned anything. Or maybe I did. Well, that is not the point. I hung on to the support rods near the roof when I couldn't get a seat. Which was most of the time. And the roof got soooo hot that the part of the heat transmitted itself to the support rod, which was, after all bolted to the roof. And part simply radiated off the roof. Inwards. With the net result that after riding in the bus a couple of times, my knuckles turned a peculiar shade of mostly black.. and the skin took on this leathery.. dead look. As if it had been burnt. Which, of course was exactly what happened.

Having said that, it is a miracle that the few million commuters actually get to work every day in the city. Creaking, bursting at its seams, forever on the verge of collapsing in utter chaos, the transport system in Calcutta manages. It makes very little sense to the uninitiated, but it is streamlined to maximum efficiency with minimum, and sometimes zero resources. And of course, everything has a reason. The autorickshaw line at Tollygunge stretches to pretty much half a kilometre at 7 pm on a weekday. And that is where a chaiwallah, a paan-beedi wallah finds takers. Somehow,it all makes sense.

Why I do not like chain forwards

Stupid things people do online.

Now don't get me wrong here. I am not saying that you shouldn't do whatever it is that you do on the internet. Fine by me. Its a free country the last time I checked. But what really gets my ire, makes me angry and want to reach out into the screen, grab your foolish head, pull it out and scream obscenities are chain forwards.

Type 1: Lame arse chicanery: “my baby is dying of cancer/leukaemia/cystic fibrosis/she has a tail cos I am an incestuous bastard(for reference read A Hundred Years of Solitude) and AOL/Yahoo/Google/Microsoft/IBM/my neighbourhoof panwaala has agreed to give me a cent for every time this mail is fwded.” It costs nothing to fwd it, and you, my dear simpleton go ahead and do so cos you have this big list of people whom you have never called/ written to in the last two years, but shite! You fwd stuff to them!! Get wise. There is no one out there tracking how many times the mail gets fwded. Think about it logically. If AOL or anyone else felt like giving a cancer patient money, they would just go ahead and do so. Sure, they would also milk it for all it were worth, but not by sending chain fwds.

Type 2: click on this or die. Detailed explanation typically comes with a pic of Diane/Lucy/Shweta whoever.. a normal college girl who pissed off an evil spirit who then ate/raped/killed her. If you don't want the same to happen to you, please click and fwd to your ten best friends. Again: what nonsense is this? Go see the Ring for reference. Such things may/ may not exist. I do not dispute that, but for crying out loud, don't fwd it to me. I am NOT your best friend.

Type 3: variation of type 2: click on this/fwd to ur best friends and ur heart's desire will come true. If you do this in ten minutes, you will be married to the female/male/horse/dog/alien of ur choice. If you do this in one day, the aforementioned creature will contact u direct. Again, for those people sad enough to require help from the God of the Internet to fulfill their heart's desire, please keep me out of it.

Type 4: the only passingly decent kind: typical numerology. Add/multiply/divide something by something so many times and watch the pattern in the numbers. Sometimes, this is interesting.

Type 5: the very worst. Answer the following questions related to colour choices/ numbers, write down the name of the person you think of when u read the following.. and go thru the list.. and such and such is the person of ur dreams, such and such is the person you will hate.. yadda yadda yadda... Again, why bother? If you feel the need for divine intervention in your daily affairs, go to your temple/church/mosque/gurudwara/synagogue whatever and communicate direct with the higher being (read God/Shiva/Buddha/Allah/Ra) of your choice. This is called “prayer”. Do not incorporate the internet in your daily worship to gain divine favour so that you can sleep with or stay awake with your favourite human/animal/alien. In particular, I do not care a rat's arse about your love life or lack thereof. Do not send me stupid brain dead forwards which ask me to do any of the above, or variations of the same. If you can find the time to write me a personal mail, I will surely find the time to answer it. If you cannot, then kindly delete my name from your fwds list.

something awful rises again

Something awful rises again.

I saw a programme on skinheads in the US last night. It scared me. The creed they preach is one of unending violence and blood on the streets. Their's is a marriage of the Swastika and the Klan. They say that their race needs to be defended from encroachments made by other people, usually of different colour. What seems to be the heartening thing about the whole affair is that there are greater numbers of decent folk out there who view such people as an aberration.

Now I have to account for the fact that I suffer from the same middle class ennui that plagues most of the world, and that I view any journey upward as through legitimate channels and not by blood. But there are people out there, poor disenfranchised people for whom there is no affirmative action, people whose jobs have been outsourced and who do not have the education to get white collar work. What about them? Who is to blame for their lot? Is it the ubiquitous brown skinned or slant eyed people in whose countries their factories are being relocated? Or is the white/brown/black/yellow people who sit in corporate boardrooms and decide to shift the factories?

People talk about the 'creation of wealth'? How is wealth created? By building more cars that people do not need? Does wealth really trickle downstream or is the economy simply busy sucking money and giving it to the already bloated creamy layer? I don't know the answers, but I suspect that they are much more horrific than I can imagine.

movies and movies

Horror movies and horror movies.

There aren't too many movies that can scare me. I have no serious objection to being creeped out; in fact, I welcome it. Well, I do raise rather strenuous objection to copious amounts of ketchup on the screen and lousy visual effects, but that is it. I will be happy if people make really scary movies. So let me talk about some that scared me. The Exorcist didn't quite get there. Maybe it was because I saw it with a bunch of friends, and the effect of horror is much, much diminished with company.

Horror old style, as exemplified by Hitchcock has an appeal which transcends improvements in technology. This is not a characteristic of too many western movies. But something like Birds has an touch to it which remains to this day.

Inspiration from the east: my personal introduction to eastern horror movies started with the Ringu. Now this is scary! There have been endless debate by experts whether the remake (Ring) is a greater movie or is Ringu. For my money, I would say that the original Jap version has more scare value. But maybe that is because I saw it first and when I finally got to see th remake, the conclusion was pretty obvious. But even accounting for that, here is some perspective. There is a certain quality in easterm movies, which is perhaps inextricably linked to eastern culture and the way people think. The persistent fatalism which is seen in so many Indian movies (although scarcely in the context of horror) is something that the west has not understood. The west has reigned by the strength afforded by science. The ability to bend nature to the will of man is fundamental in all that the west has accomplished. Thus, perhaps the very nature of submitting to forces far far greater to be fought, perhaps even comprehended is not something that goes across very easily. To be specific; Ringu offers the perspective of being steadily and inexorably drawn to something terrible, but completely inescapable. The Ring merely tries to do so. Fails.

Shohorebrishti

Why shohorebrishti?

About once every two weeks, my batchmate K and my friend C ask me what is the meaning of the word 'Shohorebrishti.' I tell them. Then, two weeks later, they ask me again. One may think think that this is an insidious plan to slowly drive me crazy. But then, what is new about that?

'Shohor' means 'city', and 'brishti' means 'rain.' Thus, the name of my blog is 'rain in the city.' Now again, why such a name? Well, I chose the name from one of Suman Chattopadhyay's songs. Suman happens to be a modern Bengali poet and singer. There is, of course a school of though which maintains that he is nothing more than a pretentious idiot. I tend to disagree.

Suman represents the best (though certainly not the first) of the 'Jibonmukhi' singers. 'Jibonmukhi', again stands for 'turning back to life'. This is where the question of being a pretentious idiot comes in. A friend had once described Jibonmukhi songs as 'simply talking about getting up in the morning, going to work, being yelled at by the boss, coming home, watching the East Bengal - Mohunbagan match, having a late dinner and falling asleep.' His contention, being that there has to be romance in songs and in poetry. The counter argument, is that there is romance in life, it is just that one has to look for it. Shohorebrishti is an attempt to do just that. Well, it is also my rant against things I dislike, which is most of the world. But then, you get the general idea.

Jilipi Utsav!!

Jilipi Utsav

Jilipis, or Jalebis, as North Indians call them are a concoction of sugar and Gawd knows what else.. here is a quote from Wikipedia:
“Jalebi (is a sweet common in India and Pakistan. It's hawked all over city streets (street food). It is easy to make, consisting of deep-fried, syrup-soaked batter in large, chaotic pretzel shapes. Jalebis are mostly bright orange in colour but are also available in white and best served warm and dripping. Jalebis when served cold have a minor chewy texture, with a crystalised sugar "crunch". Jalebi is sold at the Halwaishop, or the traditional sub continental sweet maker. The southern Indian lookalike is jangiri.”

Birida, the chieftain of our C-Mess group instituted the tradition of the Jilipi Utsav. (Utsav means festival) To clarify matters, the C-Mess group, also called the 'Hoi Hoi Sangha' was constituted by a bunch of grad students who lunched and took their afty tea at the C-Mess. Birida, (I will explain in some later post why he was called Birida) was the de-facto, and de-jure Samrat, or king of the Sangha. He once proclaimed from the rarefied air accessible to his six and a half feet height that we should get Jilipis after tea, and that was how it all began.

The Utsav took the form of a few of us, typically Birida himself, Debu, Usmanbhai (Suman) and urs truly cycling down to Mathikhere to a shop called Mahalakshmi Dhaba. A Dhaba is a very cheap, eatery, typically seen on highways, and they cater to truck-wallahs, and the occasional brave regular city bloke on a drive as well. There are very few Dhabas in South India. I should have mentioned that Dhabas were originally a Punjabi creation. However, the Mahalakshmi Dhaba was that rarest of rarities, a Dhaba in the middle of a city in South India. They serve a rather smashing selection of parathas, excellent samosas and fabulous Jilipis. The Jilipis and samosas come piping hot off the kadai. This, we grabbed and headed back for campus. The problem was that if we were unsupervised, the Jilipis would be somewhat... less in quantity at the point we arrived on campus. Hence, Ruchira-di decided to come along to supervise the purchases, or sent along some female representative. I don't quite know why, but the girls were, by default assumed to be more trustworthy.

Now, sitting on the carrier seat of a cycle is at best, a somewhat painful proposition. When that cycle is executing fast turns, hopping over speedbreakers (which decorate the streets of Bangalore in profusion: to no apparent effect) and duelling with insane autorickshaw-wallahs, riding on the rear seat can be quite a character building experience. All too often, I have seen Ruchira-di get off the cycle with eyes still tightly shut and mumbling what I can only assume, are prayers. There are other disadvantages too: one gets the metal carrier imprinted on one's behind.

Such problems solved, we finally got the Jilipis to the waiting crowd. At which point, there was something like a feeding frenzy of sharks. People hit with fists, elbows, claw and sometimes bite to make off with the most Jilipis. I have seen grown, educated, and one might imagine civilised wimmen fighting over a chunk oh hot Jilipi. Hunger sated, you find some ten odd people standing around looking peculiarly satisfied, licking the syrup off their hands.

Road trip- sleeping bear dunes

We went on a road trip this last weekend. Nope, the weekend before this. We is Chamaree, S Karthik, Bharath, Katerina and urs truly. The itenerary called for us to start at 3 in the morning. We started at 3.30, which is quite commendable. Karthik put, amongst sundry other things, a cricket bat in the trunk. To what end, I still don't quite know; our schedule didn'r leave much time for cricket. It was only much later that he realised that he had not packed any cricket balls either. I mention this en passant, as our trip was a constant struggle between stellar management by Chamaree and Bharath and attempts to f- things up by the rest of us.

Bharath had a folder with maps and directions (wow!). I just vaguely knew where we were going. So there we were, six audio cds loaded in to the cd changer which was in the dicky and hence totally inaccessible. Now one might imagine that it is not possible to get bored of hearing the same songs with six audio cds. Well, it is. I will stay away from playing Rang De Basanti for the next few months, at the very least.

About four hours worth driving got us to Sleeping Bear Dunes. These are big sand dunes by the shore of Lake Michigan. There is some kind of a local legend associated with them; a mama bear was swimming across the lake to escape from a forest fire with two cubs. The mama bear made it to the shore and fell asleep. The cubs didn't. The cubs are now two islands off the shore and the mama bear is the big dune. Ok. That is a lot of sand. We started climbing it. Righto. Before we got started though, Katerina couldn't understand why in the world we wanted to climb it, 'its just a lot of sand, why do you want to climb it?' We said 'that is the point, because it exists', and started climbing. Ever tried climbing soft fine grain sand barefoot? It looks easy, but it isn't. Expecially since the slope is pretty demanding. We thought we would just race up. It made for pretty hard going. After a while, we were all wheezing and clutching at our lower backs and going 'oh shite!' But we made it over the rise of the dune. Only to discover that after a flat stretch of some 300 metres, there was another slope. Ok, no point going back now, so we legged it up this slope too. After a bit Katerina joined us. The view from the top was pretty spectacular. Then we started the descent. This was much easier. Right upto the point when Karthik wanted to roll in the sand. Now there has to be a reason why I abandon my own good sense and listen to stuff like that. I just don't know it yet.

Important advice: while rolling downhill on soft sand, stretch out your arms full length, so that you have very little moment of inertia about the short axes of your body. Keep your mouth closed. Keep your eyes closed. Do not carry anything in your pocket. I had my cellphone. Which is one of them nifty Samsung slider models. Well, for DAYS afterward, it didn't slide: it made a horrid grating scraping sound as I pushed it open. And Karthik lost his brand new Moto Razor. But found it again.

After doing the dunes, we went on a 'scenic drive', which translates as lots of trees and some good views of Lake Michigan. Nothing much. Except, for what was literally the high point of the trip. There is this observation nook high above the shores of the Lake, which stands 450 feet above the water level. The wind there is SOMETHING! It carried sand from the dunes and smashes it into your face, shoves it down your ears and throat and embedds it inextricably in your hair (thankfully, I have a crewcut, the others suffered). A brief walk from the relatively sheltered treeline to the exposed observation platform left me feeling like I had been sandblasted. There are notices which urge you to NOT attempt climbing downhill. Maybe on the next trip...

We drove into some random itsy bitsy leetill town into a Taco Bell for a brief lunch. Shite, I felt like I had sand in my DNA. Lunch was equal parts chicken burrito and sand. We then drove on towards Mackinac City. Sometime in the late afty, we got to this absolutely beautiful old fashioned town called Charlevouix. Its named so after a French bloke (obviously!) and was once a very active port in the Great Lakes circuit. Now, its a gorgeous tourist and summer resort. The guys wanted fudge and random chocolate based stuff. I was sufering from withdrawal symptoms. It had been close to 36 hours since my last hit of coffee. I found a tiny coffee shop called the 'Woolly Bugger' (everything in the town comes with an attchment to something fishing) and asked for something cold with lots of caffeine and whipped cream. Various cravings satisfied, we explored the lighthouse (which had all kinds of peremptory warnings to stay clear) and the harbour entrance. Lovely place. Have to go there again sometime.

The curse of the Bhattachary(y)as.

The curse of the Bhattachary(y)as.

In the first week of college I was teamed up with Jishnu Bhattacharyya for the Honours lab as well as the Chem Pass lab. Little did I know that this was to be a three year long experience in character building. Jishnu is one of those really smart people who are very good with theory, but lousy with experimental setups. I am one of those more lab oriented people who like doing stuff and leaving the differential equations to someone else, in this case: Jishnu. So, the partnership was a very good one. To this day, I am thankful to Jishnu for clearing up concepts the way he did. Early on, we discovered that there are three kinds of lab philosophies:
The first: get the setup done. Look at someone else's data to make sure you are properly calibrated. Take readings. Get them checked. Go to the canteen. By and large, this was what people did.

The second: fake the setup. Look at someone else's data. Fake the data. Leave. Sit down with a calculator. Back calculate all the readings with a believable margin of error. I am glad to report that most of the guys who did this (and girls) and pursuing great careers in theoretical physics.

The third: destroy the setup. Rebuild it from the ground up. Any loose wires? Lets rip them out to see what happens. Lets try crossing these wires and BOOOM! What if we increase the temperature a bit more? Aha, so this is the pinchcork which holds the vaccuum? Interesting.... Well you get the drift. This philosophy was uniquely ours.

It is on record that every single apparatus we touched in the first two years broke down. Every single one of them. In fact, we took two and a half months (as opposed to the normal one and a half weeks!!) to investigate a CR circuit starring a very high capacity capacitor. And in the end, our results were messed up, cos the monsoons started and the capacitor changed value with the increased air humidity. Optics was another nightmare. The Lamp, Scale and Mirror arrangement behaved much like the 'Pyar, Ishq aur Muhabbat' in that rather corny movie: never lined up to satisfaction.

Quite understandably, our travails in the lab became widely noticed, and people began whispering about 'the curse of the Bhattachary(y)as'. What noone ever understood was that we were, in fact, having a great time! As a postscript, I must note that the University of Calcutta has replaced some of the more hideous experiments which we agonised over. We believe that it is in no small part due to our demonstration of the very hideousness of those experiments. Talk about leaving lasting impressions!!

sandwiches

Sandwiches for Lunch.

Methinks an alternate career as the owner of a sandwich bar is not a terribly bad option. I am a big fan of the club sandwich (although I think it is badly overpriced). My own sandwiches (my standard lunch) are regular no-frills grocery bread toasted with a filler of some kind of turkey-daal mishmash, or maybe a rajma/moong daal based thingummy. Takes no time at all to put together (of course, the filling must be made beforehand). An extra sizzle is added by a layer of Jalapeno cream cheese.

Bread keeps for a long time. The current loaf was crushed by someone putting a bag on top of it. That is why my sandwiches this week will have a peculiarly misshapen look. It was quite a fight getting it into, and then out of the toaster this morning. Looks strange too.

inn liew of anne apologie

at some point in th enot so distant paste, i have realised thta my posts are hideously ungrammaticalle and suffer from absoluetly atrocioux spelling. plese attribute this to olde wurlde charm, a lousy keyboard, an even lousier habitte of typing with two phingers and a thumb. and a certain reluctance to use spellcheck or any one of those wunderfulle tools devised for us lesser mortals by hus Gatesness.

Chingri Machh er Malai Curry

I once read a story which ran like this: a bloke was resting in the shade under a tree. Another bloke comes up and asks 'what are you doing?'. Now, a digression may be in order to talk about the stupidity of one who comes upon someone ersting and asks what is he doing, but well... The hero says that he is taking a siesta. The other bloke says, 'why are you resting, when you could be working?'. The hero asks 'what do you mean?'. The bloke goes on to explain: 'well, you borrow some money, buy an axe, and chop some firewood. You sell that, make some money, buy another axe, and emply someone to chop firewood with you. You expand slowly, until you own a fleet of trucks to transport the firewood and then you become a rich man'. Pat comes the reply, 'and then?'. The bloe is nonplussed. He says, 'and then, you can sit back and relax'. To which our hero replies, 'and what do you think I am doing right now?'

Get the drift? We had dinner at my place this Saturday. Sort of a mini-Bong get together with others as well. So Jishnu made an aloo posto. Now there was a certain amount of debate on whether the aloo posto should be watery and runny or whether it should be thick. Apparently the Ghotis like their aloo posto watery and tha Bangals like it thick. Which makes no sense to me, cos my Ma is a Ghoti and she makes a thick aloo posto. But the point is that there was aloo posto. I had made a rather shady daal and aloo dum. Arnab made a pretty good beguni (Calories mean nothing to a Bong). And the star was Shilpi who made an awesome chingri machher malai-curry. I mean, that rocked!!

So here is the point. We Bongs are a pretty useless race. I mean, no industry, useless in business, haven't featured in national politics for .. ever! But then, there are redeeming features. Like chingri machher malai-curry. This is one of those things which make me feel intensely parochial. What is the point in making megabucks and building funky machines if your lunch is a miserable burger?

Hogenakkal

Hogenakkal.

Remember the song 'Dil Hai Chhota Sa' in the movie Roja? There was an absolutely magical shot of an oarsman steering his flat-bottomed boat in a tiny river which flowed through a ravine. Well, this was filmed at a place called Hogenakkal which is near the Karnataka and Tamil Nadu border. This place is in the middle of the formerly infamous Veerappanland.

The Physics Dept. Association (pda) had organised its 2003 picnic at this spot. This was some three hours by a rather ramshackle bus from the institute. Kanhaiya, Amit, Jayanta, Vij and others started dancing in the middle of the bus. This was a rather strange thing to see. In a bit, I had also been dragged up front by my batchmates.

After we got there, we rented these little flat bottomed boats (with oarsmen). After navigating for a few hundred metres downstream, we were told to get off. We then had to lug these boats down a few hundred steps hewn in the rock. That got us to the bottom of the ravine, bypassing the otherwise somewhat bumby route over the waterfall. The walls of the ravine have been eaten by the water to create some really bizzare structures; little nooks and alcoves all over the place.

After a while, we saw a really strange sight: a shop on a boat. Selling pepperimints, chocolate, snacks and cola. Talk about ingenuity! We 'beached' maybe three kms downstream and immediately started multiple games of “catch and dunk the juniormost student.” Lunch was random stuff, but anything would have tasted great. We explored the river valley quite a bit, almost drowned a couple of times, climbed up a series of rocks to look directly over a waterfall, and generally had a ball.

One thing I should mention: Sohini took along a couple of hoola hoops, which were put to good use!!

another historical post

useless thoughts at 5.19 in the afternoon, just prior to rushing off to the medschool to listen to an hour's worth of biochem

most of us have a love hate relationship with our computers, now this might take the shape of actually spending friday night in front of a glowing
screen, or the other extreme of "answer me, you monster!!" while smashing an office chair on it...

well, yes, i was just thinking about the different reasons why a powerful wireless enabled laptop is better than a girlfriend.. (sometime later, i will
let you know the difference between a girl friend, a girlfriend and a gurlefriend)

so here goes:
laptops have better shelf life than girlfriends, they hook up faster, with the latest versions of password protection, they are totally loyal (except of
course to teh charms of a serious cracker with a 16 node cluster who dreams in binary), laptops, unlike girlfriends, dont cry, never sulk (unless they
are windows, here is a point, all these comments are for non windows platforms, if you have a windows laptop, then u had better get a girlfriend), you
can take a laptop to a beer party (but spilling beer on it is a definite no no), yes, ur laptop doesnt mind u surfing the net at 3 am, especially the
kind of surfing u wouldnt want to do in the department at 10 am.. and so on....

incidentally, i bond with an ancient huge sgi irix, i do not own a laptop. and i am single.

phones and alarrums at night

One night at the motel.

We went on a trip this last weekend. We is C, B, K1 and K2. Only initials here. K1 got his laptop along. Now, a word about the laptop (yes, its relevant!!). This laptop, was, at some point in its career a fast new machine. Now it takes something like the half life of a naked proton to open iTunes. But, hey, a laptop is better than none! Anyway, the first night on the trip was spent at a motel. A word about motels. Traveling in the desh is mostly on trains, with the occasional hotel, yatri nivas and dharmashala (yes, I have stayed in all of the above). The arrangements can and do vary from the very spic and span and efficient to the hilariously incompetent and really really dirty. The US of A has an impressive network of highways, and traveling by car is usually a much better choice. Hence, the motel. These range in type, affordabality and also survivability from the Bates Motel to the one we stayed at.

The one we had booked into was outside St. Ignace, a wee town by the lake in upper Michigan. Very picturesque. After freshening up, K2 crashed and voted against dinner. The rest of us piled into the car and went looking for a suitable place to eat. Now, all said and done, I am all for these tiny pretty towns. The only thing I have against them is the lack of places to eat at midnight. The concept of the 'dhaba' has not caught on here as yet, in spite of the many Punjabis here. Strange. So we found a pizza place, had 'dinner' and got back. Meanwhile K1 had left his laptop with the motel guys and asked them to setup the wireless internet connection. Yeah! Cool! They did too. Then, of course, every man jack wanted to check mail. And did too. Me being the last. Now that is not necessarily a bad thing. Except, of course when you are a very light sleeper and there are snorers around.

Yes, snoring. This, I suspect, more than anything else, more than having a lousy job, or being lousy at the good job leads to breakups. I mean, why would one willingly condemn oneself to a LIFETIME of bad sleep? Not love, for sure! So, just when I amabout ready to shut down the computer and doss down (me on the sleeping bag on the floor) I hear this vague rumble. My first reaction was 'where is the earthquake??' Then I realised that it was one of the sleepyheads begining to snore. And a might irritating snore it was too. Started off with a low frequency rumble that climbs in both pitch and volume until it sounds like someone is backing a noisy car up. And then abruptly, its gone! I wait with bated breath, hoping, against hope that it won't come back. But guess what, snores are like .. are like .. ok, no analogy found.. snores are evil things that don't stop. I briefly wrestle (mentally) with the idea of locating the offending person and quitely suffocating him/her with a pillow. But better sense prevails (why?). Anyway, somehow I doze off.

The next thing I remember is a bloody loud alarm going off. Those cellphone alarms are the most offensive. An old fashioned wind up clock is loud, but not offensive. A radio clock tells you the weather and stuff. A cellphone hits you with the most unnatural bizzare sounds when you are at your weakest.. dogs barking, crickets chirping, and what sounds like a blinkin' chainsaw overlaid on the sound of a jumbo jet revving up. Yes, that is what a f-in polyphonic ringtone does to you. Set at maximum volume. I got up. I was too woolly headed to figure out where the phone was. I saw what looked like C making her way to the dresser and doing things to the phone. It stopped ringing and I dozed off. Five minutes later,it rang again. C got up, did stuff again, and it stopped. Then five minutes later, it went off again. C did her little thing with the phone. Anotehr five minutes, it rings again, this time from somewhere near my head. C, in her infinite wisdom has parked the phone near my head in the fond hope that I will be able to save the situation. Now, I would like to say that this is because I am a reliable bloke whom people depend upon, especially girls in the middle of the night who have evil cellphones. But that is not the case.

I was cursing. Rather fluently. In three languages. (when I get really worked up, it becomes four languages). At that point, I was an ace away from wreaking serious vengeance on the owner, if only I knew who it was. I debated furiously whether to rip open the metal insect screen on the window and throw it as far as I could or to simply go to the toilet and flush the damn machine away. At that moment, C who was also up, and I assume as mad as I was whispered that, 'its K2's phone, I keep switching it off, but it turns itself on again'. I figured that the only way to stop it is to actually disable the alarm. Which worked.

You know what's really interesting about this entire episode? The owner of the phone slept like a bloody log through the pandemonium!!

shopping - a male perspective

Shopping: a male perspective.

The desh has not been a market driven economy for decades. I was lucky enough to grow up at a time when malls and multiplexes were still a distant nightmare. We had shopping complexes which were a few hundred shops crammed into something the size of a matchbox. We Indians have long mastered the art(no sorry, the physics) of suitably twisting space so that we can fit more people into a given room/building/city/country. And got dragged there by my ma as a kid. I hated those places. As in loathed and despised from the bottom of my heart. But did I have an option? Nope.

Anyway, cut to may years later. In college, on my way to being independent. Dragged to shops by friends. Guys buying stuff is simple. Pick the right colour = 2minutes, find one of the right size = 1 minute, checkout = 2 minutes. Thats it!! Girls shopping is an entirely different thing. Its educational. As in, prepares one for ordeals which involve infinite patience. My standard reaction to such shite was to stand outside the store and smoke. Here is a typical case study:
Gurle: 'Is this colour right?'
Me: 'yes'.
G: maybe something more.. summery?
Me: yes
G: I like this print, but isn't it a little loud? And It doesn't go with my skirt/pants/shoes/hair ribbon/handbag/cellphone.
Me: Ok.
G: This is definitely it!!
Me: Fine.
G: Oh no! Its too large.
Me: Ok.
G: Maybe that one over there. (pointing to something another customer is trying on)
Me: Yes.
..............(after some negotiation)
G: They just sold the last one they had in that colour.
Me: Fine.
G: You are not helping here!!
Me: Yes.

The problem with this situation is that after ten minutes my brain kicks into autopilot and I respond with a preset list of responses which are 'yes, fine, ok, that is lovely, of course it suits you, absolutely, perfect!!, yadda yadda yadda'. And then, I iterate through this list. But sometimes, I come up with the wrong responses. An example:
G: Does this make me look plump?
Me: Absolutely!!
G; What????!!!!!

Get the idea?

fortune cookie

Death by fortune cookie.

What is a fortune cookie?
Wikipedia sez: 'The fortune cookie is a cookie with a piece of paper inside with words of wisdom or prophecy, sometimes served at Chinese restaurants throughout the United States and Canada.'

Ok, that makes some sense to it. Chinese food back home takes on a wholly different taste due to the addition of spices suited to the Indian palate. And there are no cortune cookies. One would assume that you do not want/need your fortune told. We have fakirs for that anyway. But yes, fortune cookies. My acquaintance with these things is relatively new. Not being a great fan of Chinese cooking, it is only when all other options fail that I have had to eat Chinese food only to be told something like 'Honesty will bring rich rewards'. E^n????

So to a brain as garbled as mine, naturally the fortune cookie suggests itself as a device with endless possibilities for subversion. Imagine the propaganda value!! Ages ago, I was reading the memoirs of an Allied bomber pilot who spent three years in a POW camp after being shot down over Germany. He whiled away idle hours by raising bees and releasing them to fly away with tiny messages tied to their legs. The messages were on the lines of 'Hitler kaput'... well, you get the idea...


Anyway, imagine what one could do with an infiltrator in a fortune cookie bakery. Just substitute those silly messages that one gets with something like 'you will be strangled by rice noodles (hakka, not gravy)' or 'the path to your success will be littered with the bodies of your loved ones', or to change note 'long live the penguin!!!'...

Like i said, endless possibilities....

another old late night post

meanstwhilst i am making some slow progress in the use of mathematica for solving matrix mechanics: any self respecting physicist uses mathematica as
naturally as breathing. soem physicists, like me, are computer illiterate to the point of not being able to use mathematica like i should: i mean, any
problem which cannot be solved by pen and paper does not deserve my attention. but then, that is an attitude which can be maintained by the likes of
feynman and dirac, certainly not poor lil' me: 'umble we were, 'umble we are, 'umble we shall be. i am almost certainly off track with the mr. micawber
line, but it seems rather apt. shit that was mrs. heep and not micawber.... i have by david copperfield in knots!

that is what comes out of being a physicist who cant do computation instead of pursuing my true avocation and being a junior grade municipality clerk
moonighting as a history professor and secretly writing that great novel.

anagrams

what they say about an idle mind...... is true:
anagramise "biological physics". we get "phobia clogs sicily"... my motto!

quotes

The great advantage of having a reputation for being stupid: People are
less suspicious of you - FWH

Corollary: There is also great advantage in actually being stupid. I just
haven't figured it out yet.

Prophecy

Sometime ago, I decided to finish each sentence with the phrase 'according to the prophecy'. That made conversations so much more interesting. Take an example.

Someone at the bus stop: Do you know when the #2 will be in?
Me: 7:15, according to the prophecy.

Someone in the coffee room: Where is the low calorie sugar?
Me: Low calorie sugar is usually in the cupboard, third rack, according to the prophecy.

Batchmate: So when have the scheduled the physics prelims?
Me: Sometime in early May, according to the prophecy.

random post during fall break last

aah yes, beer and blogs.last night nishant and sibashish walked in and said that they would like the pleasure of my company at their apartment.. turns
out that my stellar conversational skills, my incredible sense of humour, my rough and ready wit, my vast stock of brilliant jokes, anecdotes and
stories were not in demand. my cooking skills were. hence i adjourned to their place armed with a pack of french fries (to be fried) and a wooden
"haatha". we left a note for my esteemed roomie suggesting that he join us. and before i knew it i was frying french fries with extreme diligence (the
diligence prompted by free beer).

now a few words about american beer. i have not had all kinds. i have just had a few brands. they uniformly suck. which means they are bad! there is
nothing like a bottle of kingfisher. there are certain people i know who believe in something called Jaguar (the catchline being 'its a different
animal') but i think that a beer should be a beer abd not pretend to be a wine. its like a guy putting on a skirt (which doesnt make sense except in
scotland where they dont have beer anyway, the tilt is more towards fine whiskey). hence, let the jaaguar live in peace in the jungle, let him not make
his way amongst us civilised people. ok, back to american beer, it tastes like piss. warm piss. unless it comes out of the fridge, whence it tastes like
cold piss.

but beer is beer, and as with wimmen, u cant be chosers, the woman u want u cant have the ones available leave a bad taste and sometimes aheadache to
boot. so with beer flowing, the fun started. after going thru a few music files really rapidly, we decided to get unhappy about the Desh by putting on
Swades, and then Border. we all sat around feeling unhappy at being separated from the nonexistant 'gaon' (seriously, a city of 1.5 crores is not a
gaon), the nonexistant 'peepal ka pedh' or 'bot gachh' the very much existant parents, sibling(s) and cat(s), also the nonexistant girlfriend.

then someone started a round of toasting our respective ethnic groups. so we toasted the punjabi's (well, we laid off the sardar jokes for a while, if
that counts as toasting), then we did toast the biharis (nishant told us that the bihar battalion was one of the first to take a peak in kargil, so we
drank a toast to them) then it was time to toast the bongs, and we got stuck, cos we neither have a battalion, nor a prime minister... so we ended up
toasting 'machher jhol' which is enuf of a brilliant creation to put the bongs into the history pages.

then jaskirat (jassi) started telling us about the difference between Jats and Jaats. the subtle points escape me at this moment, but he is one and
definitely not the other. like i said, i dont quite know enuf to go on.

then i left and went to rahulda's place. where he offered me another beer. which i accepted with alacrity. this was a better form of beer. and he also
gave me an orange. the peels of which i am not very sure where i dropped. and he asked me to read and criticise his blog. which i did. i mean, tea
leaves swirl in the sink, they dont churn in the sink. why would they churn, unless the sink was blocked? which, incidentally happened to his two weeks
back, but he argued that tea leaves would churn and not swirl. i tried to show him reason, through logical arguments with literary beauty and angular
momentum. but some people just cant take good advice. its still churn and not swirl.


and here i am, in lab, on fall break, babysitting some work.

random post discussing random issues from aeons in thepast

dancing, chanting and other tribal customs.

i am thinking about suitable names for my first novel. i have yet to figure out a good plot, or even a mediocre one, but i am looking for names. all i
know about the novel is that its not a romantic story. it might be a travelogue, but i am rather sick of writing those, an di am sure that my long
suffering friends are sick of reading/skimming through/pretending to read them.

ducks, geese and hungry grad students.

i was talking to an old college friend last night when she said that she feels liberated in the us of a and that freedom even at the price of being far
awy from home is worth it. that is rather paradoxical, isnt it? freedom always comes at the price of being far away from home. but what i really fail to
comprehend is the pushing against walls. why have i nnever done that? or have i? and pushed for so little a time and with such little force that it went
entirely unnoticed, even by me? some people spend a lot of time and energy breaking free of the shackles imposed by their parents, peers, the
doodhwalla, the kakhima next door and other such figures of childhood authority. but as far back as i can recall having an opinion, its mostly been
reactionary. not in the western sense, perhaps, i mean i am certainly pro choice, i somewhat favour same sex weddings, and a recent little survey i took
shows me up as that kind of a bong i always hated and never wanted to become: a 'left-liberal'. how entirely prosaic! how nice to spend the rest of my
life periodically straining against chains, secure in the knowledge that i cannot break them, and indeed, if they were broken, then my cosy existance
will be the first to be wiped out.

and the eternal curse is that there is literally nothing that i will/can/might do. this is begining to sound like a series of grammar forms from hell.
the world is really made, or was made by people like ford (henry, not harrison) who made cheap cars, or by lenin, or by samrat ashok, or by j n tata.
the highly overrated middle class has done nothing much except to stabilise itself like a dry piece of leathery meat between the bread in a sandwich.
dammit, middle class people cant even make decent sandwiches. the last halfway decent sandwich i had was at the corner of new market (calcutta calls
this place the new market, but it was built in the Raj times, so thats something else to chew on). my father showed me this wee litle shoppe which had a
coupla brawny 'canning line types' (which would be a description of the place and people who compose calcutta's low income workforce) who did some crazy
things with a few pieces of bread, some onions/cucumber/cheese and a little bit of intermediate looking meat (the kind where part of the challenge is
figuring out what animal it came from by the taste!) and it was great!

Biochemistry in the time of Devi-Pokhho

something that i had written shortly before a biolchem midterm in the first semester.

the timing, was just before Durga Pujo

thou shalt not fear
the evil testmakers,
thou shalt not shed a tear
at the wisdom of other test takers,
thou shalt be martyred
on thine vicous alter of biolchem,
and thy cenotaph shalt read
''twas not my cuppa, i told 'em'


in a better life, my ears would still be ringing with the musics of mahalaya, i would be ironing my best 'panjabis' for shoptomi, ashtami and nabami,
the natok group would be running around like a bunch of crazies looking for last minute props, and my dreams would involve many many fish cutlets and
lots of biriyani.

instead, here i am, shuttling between class, lab, teaching and dreading a test at 7 pm today.

my life sucks with the force of a thousand vaccuum cleaners.

cynicism saves from disillusionment?

A friend who has long maintained that I am unnecessarily cynical just told me that cynicism saved from disillusionment. I wonder how much merit there is in such an argument. A cynic is necessarily an observer, he is never a participant. Participants in the rough and tumble are liable to get hurt. A cynic who stands apart and observes never gets hurt. But then, he never knows what it is like, does he? And here is the dilemma that we are all presented with. Does the dysfunctionality of others present a problem that must be corrected by direct action, or does it merely remain as a conversation topic and something that people write blogs about? And who am I to judge and find others lacking when I am merely human? So is the cynical observer just a coward? Or is there a measure of intellectual detachment which must be maintained?

Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux is a cynic who commits hideous crimes with spectacular aplomb. All that he does is justified because there can be no sympathy for people, nay, a people which has lost its innocence and come so far that it does not even recognise that loss. Yet, when Verdoux experiences personal anguish in its most brutal form, the detachment, the veneer of sophistication, all of that is lost.

To each his own. As for me, I am a gedankenexperimentalist.

working here and there

We set up a series of experiments which will crunch for five days last night. Working on a V800 is quite fun. The machine is pretty nice and well behaved. It was also a lot of fun, cos I got to drive a bit. Always appreciate that. We were done by around 11 pm. At the institute this would when we would pop into the lab and gather forces to go down to the tea board. This would also be the time at which we would run out of cigarettes, and would raid labs nearby. And then gather more people from the condensed matter, EPR and noise labs downstairs, we would make our leisurely way down past the Faculty Hall to the tea board. But this place not being the institute, I went home.

barbecue

This Saturday was quite fun. I started out with my usual trip to the library, except that this time, it was on my newly acquired cycle. For some reason, markin people seem to call a 'cycle' a 'bike'. That makes no sense, since to my meager understanding, a bike is a petrol guzzling chick-wagon.

Whatever. Library trip done, I went down to the lab. No, to make matters perfectly clear, I am not one of those unhappy souls who itch and go into withdrawal symptoms when away from the lab at weekends. I used to be, though. But pray do not be deluded into believing that hours put in translates into productivity. It might, if we were all call centre employees. But then, that, I believe is the fundamental problem. However, again, I digress.

My friend J is graduating, and she had asked me to a barbecue at her place. In attendance was her whole lab (that is a lot of people + families). So this was the markin barbecue that I have attended. I must say, its an excellent way of spending a lazy Saturday afty. We played frisbee for a bit, the kids had loads of fun, the food was smashing. All said, a great afternoon.

unfurnished rooms and samurai

Betrayal, murder and revenge in the Scotland of the early 17th century. I saw a stage production of Macbeth last semester at the League. Some pretty good acting, some really good action and crisp delivery kept the audience riveted. The lighting was somewhat spotty, though; I would have used two spots to track the leads, and maybe a single focused light for Lady Macbeth's soliloquy 'all the perfumes...'. But I digress.

The point of this is to ask some basic questions about the was some movies are made. Let me, by way of a disclaimer say that I am a longterm Kurosawa fan. He was definitely one of the best things to happen to movies. Seven Samurai is movie that towers above its more recent ripoffs in sheer style and scope. Yojimbo takes one man (the great Toshiro Mifune, for whom there is one and only one comparison: Eastwood. No, on second thoughts make that NO comparison) and throws him at the wolves. The wolves,in question being the dastardly (I have always wanted to use that in a sentence) honchos of the two rival ganglords in a remote town. In a different century, Mifune would come out guns blazing. Here, the pyrotechnics are replaced with some fast swordplay. But scene for scene Sergio Leone would have appreciated the face-off between Mifune and his enemies down to the last detail. But the dialogue delivery! Ye Gods! Do the Japs really speak that way. Every line is delivered in the same guttural, yet staccato style. Nothing changes, from line to line; every sentence seems to come from inside the stomach and bellowed across a street.

I have another bone to pick with Kurosawa, and indeed all Japanese movies of that generation. Why are all the rooms so bare? Is furniture considered to be passe in Japan? The only furniture in one of the 'royal chambers' in Throne of Blood was a blinking samurai sword. I mean, you cannot sit on it for sure!

Somehow, that makes the movie a tad less enjoyable.

bricks

Bricks.
Brown bricks.
Many brown bricks.
Infinitely many brown bricks.
All around me.
Rising up to the ceiling.
And becoming the ceiling.
Not infinitely many brown bricks.
For a cell 3m by 3m by 2m.
And a window 10 cm by 10 cm.
There should be eight thousand three hundred and ninety eight bricks.
There are eight thousand, three hundred and ninety nine bricks.
I can reach four thousand, two hundred and one bricks.
As could those before me.
And I can read what they wrote on those bricks.

restraining orders for physicists

Restraining orders for physicists.

Someone was telling me about restraining orders yesterday. Specifically, the fact that this bird had a restraining order imposed on this bloke who worked in the same building as her. Which made it a tad difficult for the bloke to get about his daily life.

This got me thinking. When they say that one cannot approach within 100 mts (ok, yards, in this unmetricised backwater called the US of A), do they mean scalar distance or vector displacement. I mean, X may have a restraining order against Y. Its fine when they are on level ground, but what if X happens to occupy offices or an apartment which are one floor above that of Y. what then? Do we measure straight vectorial displacement through the roof/floor, or do we measure scalar distance measured by walking through the corridor and through the stairwell? Do judges think about that? This appears to be a serious loophole in the law.

There are several other cases which must be considered. What if X and Y have cabins on the opposite ends of a spaceship 110 mts long. Fine, the 100 mts restraining order is not being violated. But when the spaceship is moving at a speed 'v' wrt any inertial frame (say, the Earth), then following the Lorentz length contraction formula, the apparent distance seen between X and Y is 110/(sqrt[1-v^2/c^2]), where 'c', of course is the speed of light in vacuum. The speed at which the restraining order will be violated ACCORDING TO EARTHBOUND OBSERVERS can be easily calculated as 1.35146 times c. Thus, common civil law will have to subject to substantial correction as and when (if) hyperluminal flight is achieved. A brief caveat: X and Y will not observe the length contraction in their own reference, i.e, that of the spaceship.

There could be other situations where 'straight line distances' simply do not apply. What if X and Y were in the immediate vicinity of a huge gravitational sink (such as any ordinary, or garden variety black hole)? There are no straight lines left!!


I am not sure that the law will take cognizance of such obvious lacunae, but any self respecting physicist will think about all of these if ever subject to a restraining order.

desk

Things on my desk:

Two note pads, both half full.

Five papers/reviews. Three read. Two unread. None understood.

Coffee mug. Full. As always.

One pen.

One temperamental computer.

One ink eraser.

A box of paper clips (some genius in the past had taken the trouble to link all the paper clips together in one long chain).

Three paper clips.

Paper napkins from a sandwich joint.

Two random pieces of metal of completely unknown provenance.

I refrain from drawing conclusions. The reader is free to.

one fienne morning

Imagine getting up one fine morning and forgetting how to switch the alarumm clock off. And then realising you don't really know what those flashing red digits on the clock mean. Imagine that your roomie switches on the radio and you don't understand what the announcer is saying. In a moment, you realise that your roomie is speaking to you, but all you hear is just gibberish. Somehow you get through the morning, and by a succession of benevolent miracles you make it to the office. At which point, of course, you are totally stumped, flabbergasted and at a complete loss.

Well, thank heavens that does not happen too often. But it did to my computer a while back. I am one of those people for whom the 'journey has more meaning than the destination'. To make the point clearer, I am not a linux sys-admin. I am, but a lowly user. There are three 'dot' files native to any user. The .login and the .profile files compile when you log in. The .cshrc compiles every time a terminal is opened. Mine didn't. It is pretty much like complete insanity. Turns out that it was just a minor 'script error', whatever that means! But ours not to reason why, ours but to compile and cry.

roomie and shopping cart

My roomie is normally a silent individual. now note that silent can come with a bunch of other adjectives, some of which are pejorative, some praising. A few examples are: 'strong and silent', or 'silent, saturnine', or 'silently vengeful'.. well, you get the drift. Anyway. The esteemed roomie (hereafter referred to as ER) is none of these things. He is simply, silent. (sorry, I could not resist the alliteration). Sometimes, however, the pent up silence expresses itself in rather interesting aphorisms, and sometimes, even more interesting actions. At which point, I am usually happy at being a spectator, for such experiences broaden ones horizons, and one walks away a better man. Sometime during a work break in the coffee room, we all happened to be discussing the possibility of a road trip to UP (not Uttar Pradesh, Upper Peninsula), and someone mentioned that we do not have any free time apart from weekends. And ER came up with 'the problem with weekends is that they come only once a week'. Get the picture? A very fresh perspective on life, this kid has.

The other evening, we were at the bus stop seeing off a senior after an afternoon of cricket. There was a supermarket shopping cart nearby. On impulse, ER climbed into the cart and asked to be pushed around. I was still busy assimilating the fact that this bloke, was, in fact, in-side the shopping cart. Well, pushed around he was. To the accompaniment of the sound 'whee'!! It was nice to see. I wish I could show you pictures of this, but maybe next time.

the blog

Once upon a time there was a man who decided to create a blog. He did. He wrote things there regularly. He was more faithful to the blog than to his wife. He cared for it more than he cared for his dog Spot. He visited it more often than he visited the pub where his friends hung out after work. The blog thrived on such care and attention. It grew with each post. At first the posts were weekly, then daily, then hourly. After a while, the man found himself uploading his work related files into the blog. Who would care to read tax spreadsheets for five counties? Well, the blog didn't object. It just accepted everything the man could upload with the same satisfaction and posted it. The blog grew and grew with each post. And the more it grew, the hungrier it became. The man grew tired of posting entries into the blog, but he could not stop. And when the man ran out of ideas, journalnotes, spreadsheets, even high resolution pictures of supermodels, he tried to sign out. The blog snarled at him. The man started in surprise. And the blog ate him.

phone company

Screwed by the phone company.

This is a rant. If one had sense, brains and even the slightest conscience, one would be a farmer. If one had creativity, one would be a poet. Sometimes, if one had courage, one would be a mountaineer. I fail to understand the combination of qualities which constitutes the mentality of those sodding sons-of-romulans who make up the so called 'executives' in any private company. The specific company i was dealing with (may they rot in hell) sells phone cards for Germany on the net. Well, I needed one, looked at the choices and made what I had assumed was an intelligent decision. So after selecting my card, reading the fine print (or so I thought), I checked out and paid by credit card. At which point my web browser died. It has a habit of doing this. If I were slightly, even slightly paranoid, I would imagine that there was a bloke hidden away inside the CPU who knows just what to do to make me scream, rant, stomp and pull my hair out. The last is a little difficult at this point, as I have about the same amount of hair as a Jawan in the second week of boot camp. And to put things in perspective, I work in a one person office. Hence, the ranting and stomping. But, this is not a blog about my computer. That particular entity deserves its own periodic homage. Yes, after getting Firefox up and about again.. (seriously, any more of this nonsense and I will start using Windows), I find that I am set up to make the payment. I do. At which point, they say that someone wil call me up and then and only then do I get my PIN. Which makes not much sense to me. Speaking to customer care people to me has the same appeal as walking barefoot through a desert and finding out that the only oasis which has water is surrounded by a moat of camel crap. Well, I did talk. Got my PIN. Tried to call my sis. Failed. Called customer support (crikey, people do this for a living??), and was told that I have to dial some code for international access. I did. FINALLY got through to the sis. And before the call starts, the system told me that I had 25 minutes to call. Which didn't make too much sense. I mean, do the math: 5$ card. 2.5c/min= 400 minutes. Ok? But I went ahead with the call anyway, and got promptly cut off at 25 minutes. At which point I call customer support and the conversation went like this:

Me: Hello, I have a problem.

Random Lady at the other end: How may I help you today?

Me: Well, I would like to know what is the calling rate per minute on my card.

RL: Could I have your name and address please?

Me: Could you just tell me the calling rate?

RL: Could I have your name and address please?

Me: Fine .......

RL: And your phone no is?

Me: ........

RL: And the last four digits on your social security no are?

Me: ........

RL: and your listed email ID is?

Me: ..... and before you ask, other identifiers: I have a duck tattooed on my arse.

RL: Thank you. And how may I help you today.

Me: By telling me the calling rate on my card.

RL: That is 2.5 c/min.

Me(with the prickling of my scalp telling me that I am close to something climactic): So why did my card cut me off after just 25 minutes of calling?

RL: Were you calling a landline or a cellphone?

Me: A cellphone.

RL: Well, Sir, the call rate for a cellphone is 20c/min.

Stunned silence.

So to sum it up, tricked, swindled, bamboozled, hoodwinked, ripped off, duped, fooled, misguided, misinformed, bilked, deceived, defrauded by the phone company.

chef's log

chef's log: stardate 1655589.

the enterprise passed through a teeny wormhole the other day. i keep telling these people that they should give me some advance notice before pulling a stunt like that. the livestock simply shits all over the pens. give me time to sedate them!! naah... sons-of-klingons!

confessions of a former beedikhor

Me, smoker. Apun suttebaaz. Aami beedikhor. Was. Tha. Chhilaam.

There is something fundamentally wrong with the Bengali genetic makeup. Bengalis tend to be lousy at sports, awful at managing their own businesses, pretty much amount to nothing at national level politics and are slowly degenerating to a second rate race. I don't quite know what holds the race together except for the deep rooted conviction that we have got it right, and everyone else is messing up. That, and the fact that 6.7 out of 10 Bengali men smoke. (Ok, I just made that statistic up, but there is some truth to it.) There has to be a reason why India's largest tobacco company is based in Calcutta. Yes, so we smoke. Like bloody chimneys, I may add.

I stayed away from this great habit until university. Sometime around the third question in some gawd-awful Qmech homework set, (that time when a cup of tea from the late night cafe by the gym is the only chance u have of making it till 4 am) I found Anirban puffing way to glory outside. Well, that was my first pull on a cigarette, any cigarette, in fact. And that happened to be a Charms. Now this is not something for the uninitiated. People who smoke Charms are pretty much skating on the edge. This is the point where a sutta becomes something above and beyond a social thing; you smoke because you must. Because, without the fix of nicotine, you can't function and start calculating eigenfunctions which are not orthonormal.

Some months later, I found myself in the same position, can't face a day without my morning cigarette. And i was fortunate enough to have as my closest buddies, a bunch of hardcore smokers. To also have as my labmates, a bunch of smokers. To have as my neighbour in the hostel, a smoker. To have, in effect, smokers all around me. Quitting wasn't a viable option. And who wanted to quit? Those were happy days.

teaching

We were sharing teaching experiences. J had an interesting story to tell. She once taught a semester of Pre General Chemistry at a community college. A community college is halfway between high school and college in the US, comparable to a diploma college back home. And Pre Genchem is a course that is taken by people who want to go into things like nursing. J's class was full of mostly middle aged people. She walked in and said that she was the instructor. So all these people were amused at the sight of a girl, probably as old as their daughter claiming to be their teacher. Riddikulus! At first there was laughter all around. Then, when she walked to the podium and started pulling out the text, the laughter changed note and became somewhat nervous. And by the time she started, the class was deathly silent. As she told us, that first lecture was rather uncomfortable.

At the end of the course, she asked the students to give her some feedback. A forty something gentleman came up and said that he had THE suggestion to improve her teaching. Apparently, when she turned to the board to write, her shirt would ride up and show a leetil bit of skin which he found profoundly distracting. And his brilliant suggestion was 'Longer shirts!'

memorial day weekend

Ummmm.. memorial day weekend. Not quite so boring ever since we started playing cricket...

i saw batman begins on friday night... liam neeson put up a pretty good show.,. But I missed the point of destroying Gotham City. This is what happens when scriptwriters are underpaid and all the money goes to the special effects people. Saturday was spent playing cricket down at the Fuller Park and then watching 'The Sting'. Now the game was pretty sad, but then, we all need practice, lots of it.. and its not like I am in great shape to run all over the place either. The movie was awesome. This is what movies must be like, and regretfully are not, these days. Sunday, again, was cricket, and a movie. The cricket was ok, the movie, was just passable.. 'The Spiral Staircase'', rather melodramatic and with a weak plot.

the evil computer again

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
The only way to learn is by experimenting.
Do NOT press the red button.
Aphorisms which have become part of our lives. A suitable combination of them applies when you take an enthusiastic bloke and let him tinker with the .cshrc on a linux. One of the things not to do is to put an alias in the .cshrc which will change a basic command, such as >cd. Well, i did just that, and after compiling the .cshrc, i couldn't figure out for the life of me why >cd didn't work. Silly.

more on my evil computer

my computer does not generate sound. as in, i dont even know if it has a sound card. don't get me wrong here, i am a linux user,, not an admin. to be an admin requires knowledge, and more than that, courage. i lack the first for sure, and i make up for the second in sheer foolhardiness at times. why can my computer not generate sound? it behaves like an obstinate child who won't talk. i mean, are you really autistic, or do you just like giving me a hard time? in the meantime, i do have an ancient SGI (i mean ancient.. look SGIs are really cool and all that, but these days any decent PC or a mac can generate the same level of graphics at much less the cost. so these hulking brutes just stand around with a footprint like Godzilla and the performance of Stuart Little. as far as i am concerned. this contraption exists only to play me sound. now there snazzy things like iTunes and Winamp out there. you have 10 band equalisers, shuffle, crossfade and the rest. SGIs play SOME formats, do not recognise may respectable mp3s, and play stuff in single queue. they suck!!!!!!!!)

my evil computer

computers can be intuitive. my boss indicated to me yesterday that we may be getting new computers. it was as if my linux somehow sensed it and decided to be extra nasty for whatever time it has left to be nasty. its favourite trick is to kill firefox without warning. silently and deadly. somewhat like a commando strike, in fact. and the best time to do it is when i have written a LONG and IMPORTANT mail and am just about to send it. or a blog. that is why i have picked up this strange habit of copying the text every two lines or so. could i BE more paranoid?

its other favourite trick is to make 'open office' a misnomer.. as in, i open 'open office', i write something, i turn away for a moment, i turn back, and it's 'closed office'. as in died without a beep.

Detroit

The capital of the auto industry. This city traces its history back to 1701 as a fort established by a French officer called Cadillac. Rings a bell?

• History of Detroit


• http://www.historydetroit.com/>Another History of Detroit

Well, the graduate school had set up a day trip to Detroit and decided to go. It is something like an hour's drive to downtown Detroit near the waterfront. We were given little maps and told to not stray awya from the paths marked. So we legged it down to the waterfront. A pretty nice view of Canada on the other bank, with the Windsor Casino as the biggest landmark. There was a memorial dedicated to the brave men and women who operated the Underground Railroad which helped African American people escape slavery. Detroit was one of the jumping off points to Canada and freedom. The thing about this leetil walk downtown is something that still gets me here. The lack of people. On any given Saturday morning, any Indian city the size of Detroit will be, quite literally, teeming with people. Call it an anthill complex, call it what you will but here it is.

While walking downtown, we were accosted by a homeless/destitute/possibly mentally ill bloke who said some things about Indians making their own cameras and not eating beef. The connection escaped me. This brings me to another topic which puzzles me. The US of A is indeed a land of opportunity. This is the world's largest economy, there is more space than one uses and there is a functional social security system. Poverty in Asia means something. When you take away a bloke's job, you are, in effect, condemning his family to death by slow starvation. That is not the case here. Ok, so I do not really buy it when financiers talk about the 'creation of wealth'. To begin with, define wealth. How does one define something as intangible as wealth, except, maybe as material possessions which are indexed in value to some noble metal. But then, we cannot create wealth. We can merely move it around. And furthermore, in each 'cycle', there will be some 'frictional losses'. All we can do is make sure the cycle runs and runs as smoothly as possible so that the losses by attrition are minimised. But there will always be people who slip through the cracks. The point here being that the cracks are much finer here than in the third world and it is possible to carve out a life if one is willing to work to it. Why then, do so many people leave school and pick up guns? I do not have the answer to that, and what I fear is that the people whose opinions matter, do not either.

Anyway, we came to the 'eastern market' for brunch. Brunch was an omlette, a large one with corned beef, veggies, hash browns and a side of toast with marmalade. Heavy! The restaurant was crowded something awful and I guess I know why. The eastern market was like a somewhat posh Gariahat/Yesvantpur. But wholesale markets cannot be that much different, and this one brought back memories of home.

There was a shop which sold nuts. All kinds of nuts. It was full of nuts of every description. A Kabuliwalla would have walked away with a happy soul. Another shop advertised itself as 'Spices of the world', and it came pretty close. I picked up some Italian pasta seasoning. Yet another shop advertised sausages of all kinds. It beggars description. A meatlover's paradise.

After spending sometime there, we hopped into the bus for the trip to the Arts Institute. Now there are museums and then there are museums. Science museums, I like. History is also good. One loves looking at broadswords, tapestries and mummies. Art befuddles me. Show me a nice painting and I will say that it is great. Show me daubs and streaks and ask me to find meaning and I am flummoxed. I know it is old fashioned, but I believe that art should speak for itself and not necessarily need an explanation. The kind of painting that needs a note attached to tell you what you are supposed to be seeing appears to me as slightly silly. And the fact that people spend good money on that kind of stuff, well, it is better than spending it on nukes, so why not?

That was Detroit. Later, with a smaller group and no time restrictions, another sightseeing trip perhaps...

Theorists

My sister is a theorist. That may well be one of the reasons why i chose to be an experimentalist. Anyway, she was at a neighboring institute for some sort of a symposium. And with the supreme arrogance of a theorist, she tells me that 'there were hardly any talks on physics. All we heard was a number of experimentalists.'

really silly questions

The other day we were at a restaurant. Now I realise that sometimes people wait for other members of their team to turn up, and it does make sense in that context. but not here. At this point, we means the two of us. And the bloke comes up asks, "table for how many, Sir?".. Yes, thats a smart question. I should have come back with, "just one, I plan to stand and watch", or something to that effect. But then, my new year's resolution of 1999 was to be a nicer and more polite person. Part of that resolution was to not verbalise all that I think. I am still working on it.

Then cut to today morning. Me at the bus stop. Bus not there, perhaps a little late. Note that this stop has only one bus coming by. Its not Gariahat. Its not Jadavpur. It has one bus coming by every twenty minutes or so. Young lady I vaguely know (which means we have been introduced and I have mentally classified her into that big tray marked "Boye gyachhe") comes up asks, "Has the bus come by?". Now in which plane will that make any sense. If the bus has, indeed come by, I would be on it. The relevent question, of course, would be "How long have you been standing here?". And again, I wanted to say, that yes, the bus has come by, and I decided to wait for her. But that would lead to a world of trouble

stupid computer

towards the end of a rather long blog on the detroit trip, firefox died completely. with the blog. unsaved.

two weeks ago

i spent the most boring week i have lived through in recent times... now during semester, i typically have two homeworks, labwork, about forty odd prelab reports to grade, experiments to teach, presentations to complete and the like. and somehow, things fall together in place, and it all works out. the last week of april was the transition between labs. this was the most boring week in a long time. semester work was over and done with. there is a limit to how many times one can check mail/orkut/yahoo etc etc. now that i am back and with a clearly defined set of things to read, yes, life has meaning once more!!

there seems to be a rather large number of adaptations of comic book tales to the big screen. the most famous among this would perhaps include the lara croft franchise. now, a scantily clad jolie pouting while the baddies empty magazine after magazine and do not hit her has its adherants, but i am not one of them. i saw sin city last night. i was quite impressed with rodrigues' work. the fringe is breaking into the mainstream with a vengeance. once upon a time, people like tarantino and rodrigues would be relegated to the back shelves and the more off beat artsy theatres. times have a-changed now... and one has such wunnerful movies like sin city hitting the screens and making it big.

back

back. semester closed, prelim done. got to earn my bread and butter now. well, bread and stale margarine, at the very least.

all for the want of a horseshoe nail

The electron moved down the wire. Moved is not quite the word here, it jumped from one potential well to another. Rather, it existed at one potential well, then ceased to exist and simultaneously was born at another potential well. We can work on this a little more. It existed at two potential wells at the same time, teetered between them in some mind twisting way, which we will not go into (because it is mind twisting) and decided to go forward instead of stay back. This, it did because of something called the Uncertainty Principle, something built into the very fabric of the Universe. The next electron did exactly the same. So did the one after it. And the next ten million. But the one which came along after those ten million, teetered .. and fell backwards. The tiny current in the transistor stopped flowing. The transistor which amplified a much larger current; stopped working. The larger current stopped. A switch turned itself quietly on. A microchip embedded in the heart of the satellite fried itself in the voltage surge that followed. The transmitter unit of the satellite died. The satellite(and since we are spending so much time talking about it, it seems fitting to use its given name: Solar Dynamics Relay-1, or as its designers had affectionately nicknamed it, the Sod) itself was fine. All its observation units, the analysis computers, the navigation was perfectly fine. The transmitter simply copped it. As a result, it was unable to relay the data which it accumulated back to the relay satellites which peopled the utterly vast space between Earth and the satellite(ok, fine, the Sod). The billion dollar project was written off because Mama couldn’t hear a chirp from her baby and Farside observations near the solar atmosphere without knowing where to look is somewhat more complicated than looking for a needle in a haystack.

Most ancient civilizations revere, love and fear the Sun. And quite rightly so, for one never knows what that big ball is cooking in its belly. This time, it happened to be a rather intense burst of high energy particles and radiation. So intense, in fact that it would toast everything this side of Mars. Sure, an early warning would help, one could build bunkers and live inside the ground; at least for the few days that the solar storm would last. But such an early warning could only come from, yes, the Sod; who was screaming his electronic heart out to his makers. Who couldn’t hear a darn thing. Right on schedule the gazillion tonnes of fusing hydrogen bubbled to the surface of the Sun, and the astronomers had a field day, collecting all the data they would need for ten years of analysis and a couple of hundred PhDs. With the data came the radiation. People in the tropics started dropping in a few hours. Those at higher latitudes lived a few days. Nightside was protected, but the disease spread without end. And in a month life disappeared.

He looked up from his tea, and saw in an instant what had happened. It was too late to change anything, and anyway, His own rules wouldn’t let him. He would just have to start all over again. “And this time, no Uncertainty Principle!”

taxes

i do not object to taxes. let me make that clear right at the outset... i like taxes.. i mean, without taxes, no clean water, no roads, no universities, no space stations, but i digress. what i strenuously dislike(again, not object to) is the presence of such a complicated tax system.. something has been mentioned on this, that is the necessity of a complicated tax structure as the government grows ever so bigger and more amorphous. sure, sure, Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s , but would caesar be happy with one third of the rice from my fields? so much nicer than filling out form 1040, attaching schedule NR, W and 1, and calculating the adjusted gross income...

frankly, this is too much trouble for what little they pay me, and what they take away from it.