A word about Universities.

Universities exist to explore the boundaries of knowledge and pass on some of the same to young people. Or so they say.

There are several caveats to this:

Universities need a lot of funding to function: especially the experimental sciences. Funding is usually forthcoming from the government, and to a lesser extent, private enterprise. Private entities will always take their pound of flesh: any benefits coming out of research performed will go the the funding entity. In those happy circumstances when individuals donate monies to universities asking for nothing in return, things are different. The West has long has such philanthropists. People like the Rockefellers, Andrew Carnegie, and in more recent times (also, in relation to UM) Stephen Ross and Alfred Taubman are people who have really made a difference. Indian schools have rarely been as lucky. Certainly, in colonial times, Rajahs have donated huge sums to education and in more recent times, people like the Tatas have done their bit. But for the most part, Indian businessmen rarely seen the point in funding education.

It is perhaps this and other factors which have led to education being viewed as a service industry more than anything else. For a country which churns out tens of thousands of engineers each year most of whom are employed in turning the wheels of the global techno-economy, the highest one can aspire to, from a middle class background is the monetary security which comes with a decent B.E or a a B.Tech.

The price that we have paid is that the basic sciences, the social sciences and the humanities have been neglected to an extent which is criminally irresponsible. And now that everyone has woken up to the spending power of the slightly better off people in the Third World, we have education fairs sponsored by Australian and British diplomats set up stalls and woo Indian students who have the moolah, but not enough brains to make it into the IITs. At this point, of course any self respecting Indian student looks down his or her righteous nose at a non Oxbridge degree, from anywhere else in the Commonwealth.

For all that is purportedly ill with the US system, the quality control system in place is perhaps far more effective than elsewhere in the English speaking world. But, say what we will.. in an era of dwindling budgets (where is all the bleedin' money goin'???!?) all schools are defaulting to a business model of imparting education. And of course, academics are screaming bloody murder. The question remains: can we put a price tag on education, apart from the one the student chooses to put upon it himself? Yes, we can, and the figure runs into the tens of thousands per semester. The recent appointment of a controversial candidate as the President of the University of Colorado has made waves.

Here is what I think: academia could do with some reform, but more often than not it is the administration which holds all the cards. Amongst the schools I have seen, there is only one place where it is clear that the administration holds that its job is to smooth the life of the faculty and students. This is the Physics department of the Indian Institute of Science. At the end of the day, viewing Universities as part of the worldwide service industry devalues the one thing which makes us most human: the pursuit of knowledge... for as Tennyson put it in "Ulysses":

'And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.'

Travel tips

How to make sure that you and your luggage get to the same place. An expert's advice is here.

Saraswati Pujo pictures are here

See this link..

Also, I decided to include these two pictures, which I have also loaded on Flickr, along with their captions...


I was indulging in some stage photography at the Mitali Saraswati Pujo cultural programme last weekend. During the Sarod recital, this leetil kid who was fast asleep in his pram woke up and decided to go take a walk. He strolled up to the stage and then stood enthralled by the music. I saw a wonderful photo moment here. Before his grandma could wise up to the fact that he was off and put him in the pram again, I had to take a picture. So I folded up the tripod and sat down on the ground so that I was actually below the kid's eye level. I opened the tripod at minimum extension and waited for my moment. The problem was that he was so close to the stage that I knew it would be impossible to frame him and the performers at the same time, atleast not with the lens I had. So I crossed my fingers and waited. Sure enough, in a couple of minutes (which feels like much longer with the eye on the viewfinder) he turned slightly. Then I waited a wee bit longer until he turned around completely and took this shot.

Really want to go to this place.

Check out...

About computers

Turns out that I am a git. Also turns out that my laptop is playing silly buggers with me. The battery problems which it louvvs to display around me magically disappear when I take it to the SysAd. Treachery! Also turns out that by means of using a Microsoft keyboard with a Mac (which makes me mildly schizo in the middle of the workday), I inadvertently turned on the magnification function (how??!?!?!?), and hence thought the display card was on the blink. Yeah. shite happens!

Why read?

It must be a coincidence: last night, I finished watching 'Farenheit 451', a cinematic adaptation of Ray Bradbury's novel by the French avant garde director, Francois Truffaut... and today, the first eye catching article on reddit was this: The Dumbing Of America

So... what do we say to this... it is certainly not a uniquely American phenomenon. The plain fact is that multimedia resources have so far trumped print media that any comparison on the impact that they respectively have on an average citizen's life is ludicrous. F-451 is the temperature at which paper burns.. this film is about a dystopian future in which there is music and TV and even interactive TV (which is a reality at this moment), but no books. Books are viewed as evil, as they cause unhappiness and sow the seeds of elitism. Anyone found hoarding and reading books will be punished and the books burnt. And during the relentless execution of his tasks, one of the enforcers begins to doubt the system. Anyhow, I will not talk about the entire plot, I would much rather you went ahead and read the book.

We have witnessed a systematic dumbing down of all popular media, be it news or entertainment. As we move towards a more machine driven society, it becomes all the more necessary that humanity acquires the wisdom to transcend this technological adoloscence. Alas, I don't believe that 9 second sound bites on our most respected news channels and the persistent apotheosis of delinquent celebrities is doing anything toward that goal.

Topological thoughts during office hours and what they lead to.

My boss asked me to take a visiting scientist out for lunch. This gentlemen works in a well known group at Harvard. We had an excellent lunch and then, as he had lived in Ann Arbor years ago, spent a short while walking around Central campus. We got back, and I started working on this thing I had been tweaking yesterday. The script works fine, things are just peachy.

In the meantime, my hard working laptop, a beautiful Macbook has been screaming for attention. It refuses to boot off the battery, a problem I have been pretending does not exist. Might be a motherboard issue. Anyway, today it decided to grab my attenshun by refusing to connect to the external monitor properly. Any movement of the mouse makes the whole display shake. It made me seasick. So I moved to a fairly old, but well behaved Linux machine.

Then things went wrong. I started randomly thinking about the old 'how many road must a man walk down', and then thought about Mobius strips, and then about the Koningsburg seven bridges problem. If this chain of thought is difficult to follow, don't be surprised.

So I started to try solving the Seven Bridge's problem. Now obviously, there is no solution to this problem,but let me just direct you to an excellent page which discusses this. Then a student who I am helping with some work walked in. We started talking about his work and before we knew it, it had been quite a while and our visiting scientist's seminar was over and done with.

That was pretty bad.

The Operating System Jihad

If you have ever been friends with people who are hooked on a particular operating system and hate and despise any other, you will know what I mean by OS Jihad. Simple admission here.. i used to be a Windows hater... I mean, it is ubiquitous, it is easy to hate it. I won't claim to understand technology... to me computers are black boxes.. but here is my take on things:

Windows is convenient, it is everywhere. But it is like taking the bus, you get to where you want to, but sometimes not on time, and you may get shoved around a bit. But everyone uses it, and it is not too expensive.

Macs are awesome. They are custom limos which will take you anywhere and in great comfort too. But they are bloody expensive.

And then there is UNIX. Sorry, there ARE UNIX. Which can range from a jury rigged Fedora system, which I would liken to the DeLorean running on plutonium in 'Back to the Future' to a standard implementation like Solaris 10, which is like Starship Enterprise.

I think it is simply wise to retain familiarity with all the systems out there so that one can work on whatever platform is around at the moment. But some people disagree. The comments on this blog entry are worth reading for an example of the heated debated which arise when OSs' are debated.

And this long article is an excellent history of the development of the personal computer. Definitely worth a read.

At the end of the day, perhaps the wisest comment in this context was made by my friend Pradeep: 'there are no bad users, there are only bad interfaces!!'

What do you mean, I can't have it?

The US is probably slipping into a recession as I write this, and one of the main reasons for this appears to be the sub prime lending crisis. In layman's terms, this means that banks and other moneylenders have been lending money to people who can probably not afford to pay them back. This has lead to widespread that the moneylenders have overstretched themselves and they way to recover is to withdraw funding from the worldwide investments that they have made. Which would spread the pain all over the world instead of just the US.

Now what did things come to this? The credit history of an individual is a fairly important barometer of his personal future. This is the only country in the world where the following conversation would make sense:
A: I want to buy a car.
B: So you need a loan.
A: No, I have the money. I have saved up for five years.
B: So, now you should take a loan and return it in a year.
A: Why?
B: To improve your credit history, obviously!
A: Why do I need to do that?
B: So that you can get a loan easier!
A: But I don't need a loan.
B: But you may, later.


Right, something is seriously wrong here. Let me try to put my finger on it. I don't think people in this country have ever heard of the word 'austerity'. Simply put, the culture of the US appears to be one of immediate gratification and continuous consumption. The old idea of 'saving up for something special' seems to simply not exist. Hence lending agencies. Hence, people overspending and transferring debt from one credit card to another. And speaking of which, what is the deal with so many different credit card products anyway? I personally think this whole crowded market full of different lending products is just a minefield waiting for the unsuspecting and naive consumer.

Anway, I want to finish with this story about a lady who lives on a 2500$ a month disability payment, and went ahead and leased a 100 000$ BMW with a fake credit application.

Saraswati Pujo and beyond...

The Greater Bengali Community at Ann Arbor (I just louvv putting the capitals in) put together this year's Saraswati Pujo on Saturday. Pictures will shortly follow. Right now, I am still recovering from the event... I have always been a big fan of this particular Pujo.. ever since the Institute days. This was something that we had put together back then.. and it is of course the thing to do for a group of students. This time, we did maintain all the glorious traditions of the Pujo including the "late night e labour-dewa," the "uposh" on the day of the Pujo and finally the "parking lot e dnariye counter e dhumpaan kora". Yes, all the way.

Explaining the wurlde, one Venn diagram at a time: softwares

Towards Empire

This Scottish gentleman, Iain M Banks has been one of the most prolific writers of the last two and a half decades, or so. He writes science fiction under the pen name of Iain M Banks and literary fiction under the name of Iain Banks.

I have so far only read two of his novels. The second is 'Excession'. The first is the 'The Algebraist', which deals with a multi-species pan galactic civilization in which much of the current economic and military concepts and ideals hold true. In a sense, it is merely a vastly scaled up empire, but fundamentally no different from any contemporary or historical civilisation that you may care to mention. Transport over huge interstellar distances are achieved by tunneling through artificial black holes called 'Portals'. The construction and maintainance of these Portals is extremely difficult, and they are as jealously guarded as any Roman highway through barbarian territory would be, or National Highway 1 through Kashmir is guarded by the Indian Army. Peace is guaranteed by the overwhelming superiority of the 'Summed Fleet', the strong arm of the political structure, which is called the 'Mercatoria'. Mercatorial forces are always engaged in low intensity conflicts at the periphery of the controlled Galaxy with breakaway populations which do not wish to join the Galactic mainstream. A parallel
may be drawn to the last decades of the Galactic Empire by Asimov (think of the Prefecture of Anacreon). The wildcard in this tableau happens to be the 'Dwellers', who live in gas giants. Theirs' is a very widespread and immeasurably old civilization. While their very age almost guarantees their technological superiority, their enormous lifespans also give them what is almost contempt for pretty much any other short lived species, whom they term 'Quick'. This translated into a couldn't-care-less attitude towards the Mercatoria and the rest of the Galaxy. Banks brings all these participants together in a beautifully complex mileu, rivalling anything that our twin gods of SF have ever dreamed up.

More will follow....

Funny Indians?

Everyone knows that Desi's take themselves waaaay too seriously. Indians have little, or no sense of humour at all. Apparently that is changing. There is this bloke called Russell Peters, a Canadian born Indian (a contradiction in terms, you think? Maybe we will call him a CBCD. I am SURE you know what that would mean. Hint: what does ABCD mean?). Anyways, I think Peters is funny, but only to a point. His act pulls on all kinds of racial stereotypes (a fairly common thing in stand-up comedy: the truly worst and quite disgusting example is Carlos Mencia). But Peters has a gift for comedy, far better than Mencia and he manages to get across to the audience with his imitations of different accents. Check him out here.

This new bloke just appeared on my radar, called Papa CJ. UK based, and nowhere near Peters, but he may get there.

Its Monday!!

Yeah, big fat hairy deal.. the gawd-awful joke of the previous week is :

Q: All the molecular dynamics people of the world get together and have a big party. What do you call the event?

A: 'The Penalty Function'.

Young Karthik's much more intriguing (and raunchy contribution): 'The Scoring Function'.

Some people have such amazingly complex minds.

This dude, great friend of mine, extremely smart fellow... well, I messaged him 'ki korchhish', which is Bangla for 'what are you up to?'

Here is what he had to say:
whats up

re: "ki korchhish", does that translate to a "whats up", or a "what the fuck do you think you're doing"

regardless, the answer is "i dont know"

Green Patches.

Someone sent me a 'Green Patches' invite on Facebook. Apparently, it has something to do with stopping global warming. Without going into a discussion about Global Warming (see, I think the topic deserves capital letters), I wonder how just joining a group on facebook (note small letters here) will help. I don't really see how. Ok, I appreciate the general effort in that it is good to educate people about issues affecting the environment, but I doubt that just being on Facebook and creating a community will help. My point it that it might assuage whatever latent guilt there is in people who might actually make a difference without making that difference. By the way, Green Patches was the name of a short story by Asimov which did make quite an impact on me, a long time ago.

Life is a recursive sequence....

as seen here.

Fast food ... ughh!

Yeah, last night was rather interesting... I went to Jorge Cham's talk at the Graduate School.. so he was here about 2 yrs ago, and as he pointed out.. although the talk was very similar to the previous one.. if we were here last time, we should have graduated by now. That hurt. A lot.

Anyways, I got an autographed book, the 3rd one 'Get Scooped'.. and got a couple of points personally cleared up by Jorge. Turns out that Tajel is of Indian origin, she went to Berkeley for her undergrad, and her name is pronounced 'Tejal' from the word 'Tej' meaning 'strength' in Hindi/Sanskrit/Bengali. Hmm... that had me thrown, for a fairly long time, I had Tejal down as either Egyptian, or Turkish or Iranian. I wonder why..? Anyway, I told Jorge that we need less of Cecilia and more of Tajel. Nothing against Cecilia, but I just happen to like Tajel.

Ok, next.. saw Fast Food Nation... this is based on a well received book written some time ago. An excellent film from the director of A Scanner Darkly and School of Rock.. the fast food industry depends on huge meat-packing firms which in turn are labour intensive industries and employ illegal immigrants in sometimes dangerous conditions. All of the different themes in the film: the quality of food, in a strange way mirroring the quality of life (I usually hate that term, it seems that it hides more than it says) and immigration.. all of them get to the same point.. that the price that we have paid for living in an industrialized era is that our comfort comes at the price of someone else's hard work.. really things have perhaps not changed much from the early days of the Industrial Revolution ...


But is there a simple solution to these and other problems.. I believe there isn't. We have all been led to believe, by our media, our government that endless prosperity is just around the corner, nay it is already here, the moment we jump on the bandwagon. It isn't. There are no free lunches. The things which hold true in physics also hold true in human societies.. endless consumption means that someone is starving.

When people own people..

A rather longish time ago, I read a short story about this bloke who had sold himself to a corporation. The deal was simple enough... he had some time free to himself each week, that would not be taken away from him. He could do anything he wanted to, except for things that might be damaging to his body; which was after all, owned by the corporation. He had been paid a huge sum for selling himself: it just happened that he couldn't think of any good way to spend all that wonderful moolah on his free time.

Interesting situation.. there are people in the UK who plan to implant criminals with little microchips which will help track their movements and eventually help to set up 'crime free zones'. I wonder where this will end?

Makes sense, doesn't it?

Smart may not be smart after all.... my friend Young K sent me this very insightful article written by none other than the great Isaac Asimov himself... I thought I should put it here:

What Is Intelligence, Anyway?
Isaac Asimov

What is intelligence, anyway? When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a big fuss over me. (It didn't mean anything. The next day I was still a buck private with KP - kitchen police - as my highest duty.)

All my life I've been registering scores like that, so that I have the complacent feeling that I'm highly intelligent, and I expect other people to think so too. Actually, though, don't such scores simply mean that I am very good at answering the type of academic questions that are considered worthy of answers by people who make up the intelligence tests - people with intellectual bents similar to mine?

For instance, I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was. Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles - and he always fixed my car.

Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I'd prove myself a moron, and I'd be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.

Consider my auto-repair man, again. He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me. One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: "Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails. He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand. The clerk brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering. The clerk brought him nails. He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left. Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man. He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?"

Indulgently, I lifted by right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers. Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, "Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them." Then he said smugly, "I've been trying that on all my customers today." "Did you catch many?" I asked. "Quite a few," he said, "but I knew for sure I'd catch you." "Why is that?" I asked. "Because you're so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn't be very smart."

And I have an uneasy feeling he had something there.

Refer: http://www.haverford.edu/writingprogram/Asimov.html

Shite has a way of boomeranging!!

Yeah, shite has an awful way of coming around and hitting you in the face.. something that is very apparent of late.

I have been following the pre election rumbling with some amusement, fueled, as always by the pithy observations of Jon Stewart. Obama? Clinton? Guiliani? No idea... here is a wishlist for what the next American president should embody.. understand that this is a foreigners' point of view. Feel free to disagree:

Not slaved to big business. The current economic model is one of appalling inequity, yet it contains within itself the seeds of a model of great promise.

Not isolationist. Not imperialist. The mistake that most administrations make is either to think of this continent as an island which can turn its back on the world, while everything goes to hell and breakfast. Not true. The other mistake that they make is to chew off a huge problem and solve it by giving weapons to the wrong people. Arming people does not help. Give them rice and wheat instead, and maybe some antibiotics, perhaps some drinking water resources... get the picture?

Think green. Small planet, no other options if the ozone layer just disappears. Think public transport, think smaller families, think hybrids, think lesser energy consumption.

Everyone can be here! Homosexual does not mean immediate danger to the traditional family.

Friendship is possible. Food is a good thing to share: nothing makes for the appreciation of another culture than a love for their mutton rezala, or a pad-thai and peanut sauce. Start somewhere: people would like to get on with their lives without being bombed/starved/strip searched at airports. There are so many good things to do. Go to the Vasant-Habba at Bangalore and watch an artist inscribe your name on a grain of rice for you. Take a trip with a friend. Chances are you will discover something more than just the place you visited. Now, we couldn't do that if we bombed all the nice places to dust, could we? Hence, scrap the weapons.

Thought for the week.

Debugging a problem or an issue in research is a rewarding experience. So, what happens to the happy endorphin driven euphoric feeling when you realise that the bug you spent so much time fixing is of your own creation. In other terms: the smart bloke in me is always being slowed down by the dumb-arse, also in me.

Robert De Nero does an excellent turn as director of 'The Good Shepherd'. This film is about the origins of the CIA, its roots in the brotherhoods fostered at Ivy League schools and tempered in the work of the SOE and the OSS duing WWII. Matt Damon has not matured as an actor... he is just naturally good at portraying taciturn men with zero expression. That is what his character was... and he plays it to perfection. A discussion is to be found here.

I walked past the Diag yesterday, it was cool, not cold and there was a promise of rain in the air. There was a girl who walked by, whistling 'The Lonely Goatherd'. I found that very nice.

Are people really paying attenshun?

A long time ago, SMSs were free in India, specifically to the Hutch cellpheun network. I once spent an evening SMSsing prime numbers and maybe even a Fibonacci sequence to everyone in my directory. The assumption being that even 1/r^2 diminishing of wave amplitude, there might be aliens out there who are monitoring the 8 GHz band and will decode my signals as signs of intelligent life.

I thought it was a slightly fun thing to do, and I was bored. Now there are people who are apparently crying out for attenshun, and help all the time. In certain extreme cases, they do such horrible things as slash their wrists. But what is it in the immediate world that we live in that ignores people to the point that it drives people to such extremes? Could there be alternatives? Surely..

So why do people ignore the small things in each other's lives which make each day slightly special? Second question: are there so few things in people's lives that can be valued? Third question: how valuable is a person's time that it can be spent appreciating things another person loves? Fourth question: at which point does the question 'will you spend time with me looking at painting/movies/walking in the snow/watching the Democrat debate' become an imposition? When does a person become an attenshun grabbing whore?

Our SysAdmin rocks!!

There are few people as good as troubleshooting crazy problems like our SysAdmin. He is the man. Its a terrible pity (for the dept in general, and me in particular) that he is moving on to bigger and better things. They are looking for a replacement... big shoes to fill.

The Pakistani conundrum.

Benazir is dead. We don't know who killed her. The man who ostensibly rules Pakistan, General Musharraf has asked Scotland Yard to help out with the investigation. Forget all this. Why is it that the subcontinent can never seem to digest democracy for more than a few years without a serious case of the hiccups?

This is probably a relevant question at a time when the catchphrase for a lot of powerful people appears to be 'spreading democracy'. Let me theorize for a moment. Good decisions of governance are made, or should be made on the basis of carefully weighed economic and statistical data. Hence, government should be run by technicians, just like a powerplant. Except that all decisions must be simultaneously moderated and supercharged by a person who has the twin capacities of compassion and vision. Such people are truly rare: they are the ones we call Statesmen. One such person was Bidhan Roy. Pandit Nehru was close to being one. Al Gore might well be one. But unfortunately, such people are hard to find.. it seems to be a paradox in that the people who are best qualified to govern are the least willing to do so.

Our only option appears to be to elect the people most willing to climb to power. And herein lies the second dilemma: it is wise to fear those for whom power itself is an end; it is better to pick those for whom power is a means to an end (hopefully a benign one).

Is there such a thing as a ruling class? Clearly, yes! It has been apparent that only those people who are immoral, amoral, or define their own morality are capable of leadership. Such people are bred and trained by the upper classes, or are thrown up from the lower classes. It is rare to see the moral and restrained middle class to produce leaders of strength. It has been the subcontinent's misfortune that the last few decades have not produced leaders of note.

to be continued..

Whatever works...

it has been a fascinating turn of the year... some good science.. some not so good experiences... and some truly weird ones.. there are some things to understand and appreciate:

1. i will forever look up the spelling of weird. this e-before-i thing just befuddles me.

2. board games... are simulations of what happens in board rooms... someone recently stated that 'its not a negotiation unless the other person is crying'. i am not very happy living in a place where this is the stated philosophy. in ways more than one, i still live in the happy old 80's calcutta/college street environment: there is a point where being competitive is simply not cool. rather paradoxically, i never spent any worthwhile time in college street in the 80's: so the time and place that i mentally live in, perhaps never existed, outside of my immediate imagination.
continuing on this theme... i despise people who cannot live without playing a game of one-upmanship with everyone around them. i pity people who cannot live without conflict, and need a clearly defined enemy to motivate their existence. i respect vegans. i abhor people who consume without producing anything, whose only happiness is from climbing the ladder of material possession. they are unfortunate. even more unfortunate are those people whose bellies are full and who are adequately clothed, but who have never stopped to look at the skies, who have never sung a line, or read a page of a book which wouldn't help them immediately. these are the most unfortunate of all.. where their souls used to be, there are merely bottomless pits of avarice.

3. Young Sethu has invented an improved version of the Vodka Chettinad. Ingredients: a shot of vodka, twice that volume of ginger ale, a dash of lemon. Mix and stir, slice a hot chili longitudinally, so that the seeds come bursting out... add to drink. Stir. Finally, add a slice of freshly cut ginger. This drink is officially known as the Vodka Chettinad 'Shivaji' .. in honour of the great Maratha warrier and the recent Rajnikant starrer film.

4. Tom Clancy really can't write good character development.

My winter break

Some pictures from the Christmas week trip.

Are here.

Whiskey and Trekking: back from the mountains with stories to tell

Yeah, me back from ze mountains of Virginia. a place called Whitetop.. so bloody remote that it lies within the 3% of US soil not covered by cellphone service. And, no, they do not have internet up there...it was a pretty awesome time... and let6 me just tell you two things and wrap up for now... :

1. do not drive a Chevy Trail Blazer: that is an SUV which handles like a cow (although in all fairness, this is the only SUV I have driven.. perhaps all SUVs handle badly).
2. if you drink copious amounts of whiskey at night and dance, and then climb mountains the next morning.. the whiskey will seep through every pore in your body.

The nature of physical theory.

So, the question being asked here is whether physics and the laws of nature are just tidy bookkeeping in nature, or are they here for some other, perhaps higher reason. Paul Davies, from the Arizona State University speculates about the nature of physical theory, and complains that at the core of rationality, as exemplified by science, lies a firm belief that the Universe is ordered and comprehensible. Such a belief is not too far removed, perhaps, from believing that the Universe was coughed up by a huge fish, or that the world sits on top of a huge turtle, or perhaps even that it was made by a nice old white man with a huge beard (think a Caucasian Rabindranath Tagore) who rested on the 7th 24 hr cycle.

The problem is again one of the chicken and the egg, what was it that breathed fire into equations, to borrow someone's very picturesque phrase? This discussion carries a lot of weight, including amongst others, opinions by Weinburg and Hawking. Well, I don't know what to think.... personally, I feel a mechanistic view of the Universe is all we can achieve... any further beyond that, and we begin questioning the whole reason for existing anyway, and that leads to ruinously long coffee hour discussions.

Magic Bus?!?!?!?!!?

The University runs a free bus service. Good.
The free bus service runs at all odd hours, long after the city bus service has packed up and gone home. Better.
The University operates a service called 'magic-bus', whereby GPS systems on buses locate them on a map/line and the webpage tells you when the next bus at any given stop will arrive. Awesome!
This service is down on a Saturday night with a snowstorm on its way, I have to finish this experiment and get home, and the city service has packed up hours ago. Yeah, bad.

My oh my, its almost Christmas week!!

And here I am in the lab at 9 on Sat night... (this is a recurring theme in my liff, and hence, my blog). Anyhow, I decided to give Tom Clancy a chance.. normally I am very leery of technothrillers.. and war fiction, in general... but hey, the man is popular.. must be for some reason. Quite well written, but still, regretfully, merely a technothriller. The greatest war novel of the last half century, and perhaps of all time is probably 'Bomber', by Len Deighton. This is a book that I had dissected with immense care (both literally and figuratively) about 17 years ago. I would like to find and read it again.. and see what I think, two decades later. Anyways, we are done with teaching for the semester (well.. the sem itself is almost finished).. so that is a load lessened. The building is to be evacuated at midnight for some major overhaul of the ventilation system. I guess there can't be more than ten people in the whole building.. (there are usually a thousand).... yeah.. Sat night.......

How can we save the world?

I found out recently that Honda has released the Civic GX which runs on compressed natural gas (CNG). CNG is mostly methane (CH4), which has the highest calorific value amongst all hydrocarbon fuels. That means, gram for gram, CNG delivers more punch than petrol or diesel. CNG technology has been around for a while now... Several third world countries have started moving towards CNG technology because it is cheaper than petrol/diesel, and also because it is a cleaner fuel.

This might require some explanation... unlike petroleum, which is mostly available from oilfields in the Mid East, natural gas is more widespread. It does not take very advanced technology to convert regular Otto cycle (petrol) engines to CNG engines. It is clean, because it is chemically very simple: it burns to give out water and carbon-dioxide. Fossil fuels burn to give these, and a whole array of complex hydrocarbons including some pretty toxic ketones. Leading to pollution. Then, we have "antiknock". This is something that helps engines to run smoother. It can be just alcohol, or tetraethyl lead. Of course, it wasn't alcohol for the better part of a century, because anyone with some potatoes and a still in his backyard can make alcohol.. and hence antiknock. That would go against commercial interests, and forget about lead pollution in the air. It took legislation(and the fact that catalytic converters sort of curl up and die in the presence of lead) to enforce the use of unleaded fuel. CNG has none of these problems, and neither is it as volatile as, say hydrogen. But CNG is a politically bad fuel.. one that would reduce the world economy's shackled down relationship with oil companies. Hence, the First World has never seen it fit to experiment in this technology. Except that now... there is Al Gore and his Nobel Prize... times are a-changing, and trust the innovative Japanese to come up with clean technology.

I remember the hullaballoo when the Indian Government decided to start using CNG in cars and buses. It took a Supreme Court verdict against various transport unions to enforce CNG usage... but the turnaround has started, and the results are already visible in New Delhi. The other metro cities are catching up, and this is one field in which India (and Pakistan, and Bangladesh, too) are leading the world. Surprised?

Superhero journal - techsupport

The daily work of a superhero is difficult, I kid you not. Well, just yesterday, my computer got hacked. I mean, seriously, would you take a superhero seriously if his PC got hacked? (Ok, I used two 'seriously's' in a sentence, sue me, I went to superhero school, and I did not major in language.) So, anyway, I find myself on the pheun with Superhero Techteam, and that conversation did NOT go well....
Me: Hey.
Superhero Techteam Bitch (hereafter referred to as techbitch, or TB): ei.
Me: I have a small problem here.
TB: yesh shar?
Me: WTF?
TB: yesh shar?

brief interlude while I curse the God of outsourcing...

Me: Here's the thing.. everytime I try to check my Superhero Network Evildoer Update, the browser goes to this weird blue screen and I get this message "stick your head up the penguin's arse". Any ideas?
TB: Ish your computer turned on, shar?
Me: WTF? Are you listening to me?
TB: Yesh shar, what O-esh are you running?
Me: O-what?
TB: O-esh.
Me: DO you mean OS?
TB: oh yesh.
Me: Panorama X (dumb broad.. but said sotto voce)
TB: yesh shar, Panorama eksh has thish problem, but we can fiksh it. Eashily. There is a pyanch you have to download, let me gibhe you the link.
Me: I have to download a. .. what?
TB: A pyanch shar.. it ish a short of shoftware update.
Me: You mean a patch? (screwball.. also muttered)
TB: yesh shar, you are right.. a pyanch also means a shcrew, but there ish no ball!
Me: ...! Ok, so I need the patch.... and then?
TB: that ish all shar, the pyanch will cover the shecurity hole... ash they shay, a shtich in time shaves nine.

Dear me.

The point of view problem in any relationship.

I love theorizing about all kinds of shite. No, actually, I do not... I might if I ran a pathology clinic or had something to do with natural fertilizer.. but I suppose you get my point. I frequently talk (usually at length) about optics, economics, politics, random flicks and many other things ending with 'icks'. Ok, that was what.. two bullshite jokes in 3 lines? Sometimes I exceed myself..... Ok, getting there.... anyway, I have here, for your perusal, two opinions on relationships, one clearly written by a slightly damaged bloke, and the other from a bird. I am personally not taking a stand.. no I am... and it is as follows:

WTF!!!!!!!!!!

1st post:

"What Happened to All the Nice Guys?"

---

Date: 2007-11-19, 3:52AM PST


I see this question posted with some regularity in the personals section, so I thought I'd take a minute to explain things to the ladies out there that haven't figured it out.

What happened to all the nice guys?

The answer is simple: you did.

See, if you think back, really hard, you might vaguely remember a Platonic guy pal who always seemed to want to spend time with you. He'd tag along with you when you went shopping, stop by your place for a movie when you were lonely but didn't feel like going out, or even sit there and hold you while you sobbed and told him about how horribly the (other) guy that you were fucking treated you.

At the time, you probably joked with your girlfriends about how he was a little puppy dog, always following you around, trying to do things to get you to pay attention to him. They probably teased you because they thought he had a crush on you. Given that his behavior was, admittedly, a little pathetic, you vehemently denied having any romantic feelings for him, and buttressed your position by claiming that you were "just friends." Besides, he totally wasn't your type. I mean, he was a little too short, or too bald, or too fat, or too poor, or didn't know how to dress himself, or basically be or do any of the things that your tall, good-looking, fit, rich, stylish boyfriend at the time pulled off with such ease.

Eventually, your Platonic buddy drifted away, as your relationship with the boyfriend got more serious and spending time with this other guy was, admittedly, a little weird, if you werent dating him. More time passed, and the boyfriend eventually cheated on you, or became boring, or you realized that the things that attracted you to him weren't the kinds of things that make for a good, long-term relationship. So, now, you're single again, and after having tried the bar scene for several months having only encountered players and douche bags, you wonder, "What happened to all the nice guys?"

Well, once again, you did.

You ignored the nice guy. You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy. You laughed at his consideration and resented his devotion. You valued the aloof boyfriend more than the attentive "just-a-" friend. Eventually, he took the hint and moved on with his life. He probably came to realize, one day, that women aren't really attracted to guys who hold doors open; or make dinners just because; or buy you a Christmas gift that you mentioned, in passing, that you really wanted five months ago; or listen when you're upset; or hold you when you cry. He came to realize that, if he wanted a woman like you, he'd have to act more like the boyfriend that you had. He probably cleaned up his look, started making some money, and generally acted like more of an asshole than he ever wanted to be.

Fact is, now, he's probably getting laid, and in a way, your ultimate rejection of him is to thank for that. And I'm sorry that it took the complete absence of "nice guys" in your life for you to realize that you missed them and wanted them. Most women will only have a handful of nice guys stumble into their lives, if that.

So, if you're looking for a nice guy, here's what you do:

1.) Build a time machine.
2.) Go back a few years and pull your head out of your ass.
3.) Take a look at what's right in front of you and grab ahold of it.

I suppose the other possibility is that you STILL don't really want a nice guy, but you feel the social pressure to at least appear to have matured beyond your infantile taste in men. In which case, you might be in luck, because the nice guy you claim to want has, in reality, shed his nice guy mantle and is out there looking to unleash his cynicism and resentment onto someone just like you.

If you were five years younger.

So, please: either stop misrepresenting what you want, or own up to the fact that you've fucked yourself over. You're getting older, after all. It's time to excise the bullshit and deal with reality. You didn't want a nice guy then, and he certainly doesn't fucking want you, now.

Sincerely,

A Recovering Nice Guy


2nd Post.

Why "Nice Guys" are often such LOSERS

You hear it all the time: "He was such a NICE Guy, and she's such a Heartless Bitch for dumping him."

I get letters from self-professed Nice Guys, complaining that women must WANT to be treated like shit, because THEY, the "Nice Guy" have failed repeatedly in relationships. This is akin to the false logic that "Whales are mammals. Whales live in the sea. Therefore, all mammals live in the sea."

If you have one bad relationship after another, the only common denominator is YOU. Think about it.

What's wrong with Nice Guys? The biggest problem is that most Nice Guys (tm) are hideously insecure. They are so anxious to be liked and loved that they do things for other people to gain acceptance and attention, rather than for the simply pleasure of giving. You never know if a Nice Guy really likes you for who you are, or if he has glommed onto you out of desperation because you actually paid some kind of attention to him.

Nice Guys exude insecurity -- a big red target for the predators of the world. There are women out there who are "users" -- just looking for a sucker to take advantage of. Users home-in on "Nice Guys", stroke their egos, take them for a ride, add a notch to their belts, and move on. It's no wonder so many Nice Guys complain about women being horrible, when the so often the kind of woman that gets attracted to them is the lowest form of life...

Self-confident, caring, decent-hearted women find "Nice Guys" to be too clingy, self-abasing, and insecure.

Nice Guys go overboard. They bring roses to a "lets get together for coffee" date. They try to buy her affections with presents and fancy things. They think they know about romance, but their timing is all wrong, and they either come-on too strong, too hard and too fast, OR, they are so shy and unassertive, that they hang around pretending to be "friends", in the hope that somehow, someway, they will get the courage up to ask her out for a "date".

They are so desperate to please that they put aside their own needs, and place the object of their desire on a pedestal. Instead of appreciating her, they worship her. We are only human, and pedestals are narrow, confining places to be -- not to mention the fact that we tend to fall off of them.

They cling to her, and want to be "one" with her for fear that if she is out of sight, she may disappear or become attracted to someone else. A Nice Guy often has trouble with emotional intimacy, because he believes that if she learns about the REAL person inside, she will no longer love him.

Nice Guys are always asking HER to make the decisions. They think it's being equitable, but it puts an unfair burden of responsibility on her, and gives him the opportunity to blame her if the decision was an unwise one.

Nice Guys rarely speak up when something bothers them, and rarely state clearly what it is they want, need and expect. They fear that any kind of conflict might spell the end of the relationship. Instead of comprimising and negotiating, they repeatedly "give in". When she doesn't appreciate their sacrifice, they will complain that, "Everything I did, I did for her.", as if this somehow elevates them to the status of martyrs. A woman doesn't want a martyr. She wants an equal, caring, adult partner.

Nice Guys think that they will never meet anyone as special as she is. They use their adoration as a foundation for claiming that "no one will ever love her as much as I do." Instead of being a profound statement of their devotion, this is a subtle, but nasty insult. It is akin to saying to her: "You are a difficult person, and only *I* can ever truly love you, so be thankful I'm here."

The nice guy -needs- to believe that he is the best person for the object of his desires, because otherwise his insecurities will overrun him with jealousies and fear. The truth of the matter is that there are many people out there who can be a good match for her. We rarely stop loving people we truly care about. Even if we no longer continue the relationship, the feelings will continue... But love isn't mutually exclusive. We can (and do) love many people in our lives, and romantic love is really no different. Though he may love her immensely, there will likely be other people who have loved her just as much in her past, and will love her just as much in the future. The irony of it all is: "Who would want to go out with someone who was inherintly unlovable anyways?"

More than loving the woman in his life, a Nice Guy NEEDS her. "She is my Life, my only source of happiness..." YECH! What kind of a burden is that to place on her? That SHE has to be responsible for YOUR happiness? Get a grip!

Another mistake Nice Guys make is to go after "hard luck" cases. They deliberately pick women with neuroses, problems, and personality disorders, because Nice Guys are "helpers". A Nice Guy thinks that by "helping" this woman, it will make him a better, more lovable person. He thinks it will give him a sense of accomplishment, and that she will appreciate and love him more, for all his efforts and sacrifice. He is usually disappointed by the results.

This ultimately boils down to the fact that Nice Guys don't like themselves. Is it any wonder women don't like them? In order to truly love someone else, you must first love yourself. Too often Nice Guys mistake obsession for "love".

Get this Guys: INSECURITY ISN'T SEXY. IT'S A TURNOFF.

You don't have to be an ego-inflated, arrogant jerk. You just have to LIKE yourself. You have to know what you want out of life, and go after it. Only then will you be attractive to the kind of woman with whom a long-term relationship is possible.

Oh, by the way, I personally think that every relationship requires any combination of the items mentioned below:
1. Point of view gun: when fired at someone immediately causes that person to understand your point of view.
2. Total Perspective Vortex: (pronounce the capital letters please) a device which really makes you see and understand your place in the Universe. Powered by a piece of fairy cake.
3. A linux terminal with a really high quality keyboard. And tetris. Any arguments running above 5 hours will be decided by highest score on tetris.

Nice guys?

I think this is what a lot of wimmen need to hear.

XKCD rules!!

Thanks XKCD

Big bro is here

look at what is cooking for the 2008 Olympics...

Sci Fi List link

here..

Reviews of science fiction stories...

A few things to start off with... in the purest form, science fiction is philosophy, and has very little to do with stories which involve the blowing up of spaceships. The object of pure SF is to contemplate the changes that continued scientific innovation will bring upon us, and the role of humanity in particular and the Earth in general in a possible larger milieu. 'Hard' SF is usually written by people of a scientific bent, and concerns itself with the immediate changes due to radically new science emerging within a few lifetimes from now. Hard SF dovetails into sociological commentary where we see speculation into how humanity might be fundamentally changed, not just in observable technological ways, but in the far more subtle ways of thought. Indeed, at one point, one asks in such works if humanity remains recognizable as humanity any more. Asimov, Clarke have pioneered the field of hard SF. The masterworks in this field are 'The End of Eternity'. by Asimov and Clarke's '2001: A Space Odyssey' and 'Rendezvous with Rama'. Then we have purely social commentary.. where the future is used merely as a backdrop for making statements about the nature of socio-political-military environment and which direction it might evolve in. The best known among such works is Orwell's '1984'. Other very influential works (and sometimes nastily reviled) are Bradbury's 'Farenheit 451', and Heinlein's 'Starship Troopers'. Then we come to the subcategory of 'disaster SF'- this is quite self explanatory. The best representative of such works is Wyndham's 'The day of the Triffids'. People will find echoes of Triffids in many well received films like '28 Days Later'. Brian Aldiss had described Wyndham's work as 'cosy catastrophes'.. a very unfair judgment, in my opinion. And finally, we bring ourselves to the last category under examination: 'immediate' SF: which deals with changes within a perfectly recognizable society, but still much more advanced than ours.... one of the best here is 'Doomsday Book', by Connie Willis.. interestingly the only authoress mentioned here. I should say that her works display a degree of scientific understanding equalled by the giants.. Asimov and Clarke, but a degree of compassion which hard SF tends to avoid. The greatest of SF writers is the one who worked across such genres, in fact, before such genres were even created.. HG Wells. 'The Time Machine' is the first, and still one of the greatest speculative works ever.

Robert Jordan's 'Wheel of Time', Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' are not SF. Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' is also a political commentary beyond parallel. But to understand the extent of Huxley's genius, one must read his last work 'Pala'.

And, to complete this little review... the single greatest work of science fiction ever written is 'Nightfall', a short story written by Asimov when he was 22.

Henry Fonda not at his best.

For some people, the greatest filmmaker ever has been Sergio Leone... yeah, yeah there are the greats like Satyajit Ray, Kurosawa, Fellini.. yadda, yadda, but the one who worked with style and flair beyond comparison was the man who gave us the Dollars trilogy. And, one would argue that his greatest film ever was 'Once upon a time in America'... which had Henry Fonda in a role people could scarcely imagine him doing... a cold blooded, brutal killer. So, the point of this entire para is to talk about the great Henry Fonda... and how I was disappointed in seeing 'The Long Night', a shallow melodrama, at best and a cheap tearjerker at the worst. The only redeeming thing about the movie... which revolves around a man who has taken another man's life.. yeah, quite obviously, for louvv is a partially redeeming performance by Vincent Price. Avoid.

Ebooks....

I don't like reading books on a computer screen.. apart from the eye strain involved.. I simply love the luxury of sitting back with a well thumbed old paperback. There is that absolute joy of reading which I associate with everything that comes with reading. Back in the old days, this used to be an afternoon trip to Gariahat, or a day trip to College street (or more usually, bunking some classes while at Presi) and rummaging through second hand bookstores. The world's best second hand bookstores are at College Street, Calcutta, especially that amazing stretch, between the College Street Market at one end, and the Ashutosh Prangan of Calcutta University at the other end. For me, that has been my Kabah, and my Benares. That was a holy pilgrimage which I made every day for three glorious years, and I hope to go back to at some point in my life. But these days, it is merely an occasional trip to the District Library, or more normally, an online search on the amazing library at the University which does the job. I must say, for all the convenience, the zero cost, there is something missing.

Amazon plans to offer digital books... a sort of hybrid laptop like device which will mimic a real book, except that the content will be electronic, stored in a disk and displayed on a screen. And this device will communicate with e-resources, and 'update automatically'. Very convenient. But also somewhat scary.

Now, any vision of an Orwellian future scares me as much as anyone else. The fact is that the ubiquitous nature of mass electronic media has made the world a much smaller place, but also a much easier place to police. In this context, I would like to think that the battle between the forces of stability (governments of every description) and the dissenting folks should always be a finely balanced one... if it tilts too far in the direction of anarchy, then we have a breakdown of that which seems to stifle.. and if it falls too far in the other direction, then, why, we have 1984.. all over again. It is in this fine balance that society can live, breathe and even move its arms and legs a little. It is against the overall matrix of homogeneity that the radicals can think of themselves as such.. for if the radicals take the day: they will, in their own time become the same sated bourgeoisie they despise so much.

Hence, while I think that the juggernaut of technical innovation cannot be stopped, it should be met by equal counter-innovation which prevents any form of control over content from becoming absolute. Hence, I raise a toast to the makers of the iPhone, OS X, Vista and other beautiful innovations. and also to the people who spend their time hacking the guts out of them. Finally, here is what some people have to say about this new 'book'.

Snow, grading blues, work and other things

have come together to make me feel a leetil bit under the weather.. pun fully intended. But, I fully intend to bounce back with astute observations about the economy. and words of wisdom for the governments of the day (which, somehow, they always seem to ignore). But in the meantime, here are a few thoughts.. I caught a bit of the Republican CNN Youtube debate... and while Rudy Giuliani comes across as the most reasonable man amongst the GOP lineup, one wonders whether he is the man for the job. On the other hand, my impression of the Democrat race is that Obama might be the right person (observe the use of the gender free term), but compared to Clinton, he is a lightweight. But, back to the GOP, some people just plain scared me... I understand that abortion is a sensitive issue, and it would be nice if people never came to the point where they had to extinguish life. Having said, I think it is important to repair the social fabric which makes teen pregnancies, broken families all too common... but in the short term, abortion should be accessible to whoever needs it, It appears that many doctors in this country do not prescribe birth control medication on request.. because it goes against their faith. This, in my book, is a violation of professional ethics. Anyway, abortion, taxes, illegal immigrants and an unnecessary war. For the most powerful nation in the world, it is a luxury to have 'problems' of this nature, as opposed to the more real problems of widespread HIV, malnutrition and continued war in many other parts of the globe.

Now I have a reason for feeling happy....

Common points between Narendra Modi's Gujrat and Buddhadeb Bhattacharya's Bengal?

THE COMMUTWITS’ TRIUMPH - Nandigram is supposed to have taught the reactionaries a lesson

Writing on the Wall - Ashok V. Desai From the Telegraph of 20th Nov, 2007. Apologies for copying your article.

In Godhra, some people detached a bogie of a train in February 2002, locked in the passengers and burnt them. The perpetrators were never conclusively identified. The Hindutwits claimed that the murderers were Muslims, and called for retribution. It started the next day. Hindu mobs killed thousands of Muslims, looted and destroyed Muslim businesses, and in three days, turned Muslims into the new scheduled caste of Gujarat — poor, deprived and maligned. In Nandigram, some people forced local supporters of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) to leave, destroyed bridges, dug up roads, and isolated Nandigram from the rest of West Bengal. No one knows who they were. It is widely believed that they were local villagers. The CPI(M) said they were members of the Trinamul Congress, Naxalites, or both, and called for retribution. Armed commutwit mobs invaded Nandigram, killed and wounded hundreds, destroyed their homes, and turned them into the new scheduled caste of West Bengal. This is not a coincidence; it is transfer of the technology of violence. In the Eighties, the BJP was exasperated; however hard it tried, it just could not get itself elected in any numbers, let alone come to power. And there, in the east, was CPI(M), an equally committed, ideologically-focused party, which simply could not be driven out of power. How did they do it? The Hindutwits diligently studied the secret of communist hegemony. They worked out that the secret lay in the creation of a captive mob. Till the Sixties, West Bengal used to be India’s most industrialized state. It was the home of the jute industry, India’s largest industry next only to textiles. It was a leader in engineering; in those days of import substitution, anyone who could not get a machine or a part headed for Calcutta, where workshops could reproduce the most complicated engineering goods. Then arrived bulk handling and cheap plastics. Pourable goods such as cereals began to be transported in containers in the United States of America. Railways acquired new wagons to transport containers; the first container ship was built in the US in 1956, if I remember right. Soon, bulk transportation spread across all the oceans, and increasingly along railway lines. And if small quantities of pourable goods had to be stored, plastic bags were more sturdy than gunny bags, and gave better protection. So over the Sixties and Seventies, life slowly seeped out of Calcutta’s jute industry. And the slump of 1965 hit its engineering industry hard. That was when the CPI(M) found a niche amongst the embattled industrial workers. Citu started organizing them; it developed the technology of bringing them out in processions and paralysing Calcutta. It taught workers to abuse and attack managers. In a pyrrhic victory, it drove industry out of West Bengal, but captured the unemployed workers — and young men who never had any jobs. They became the CPI(M)’s foot-soldiers. They developed a rough-and-ready social insurance system: they intimidated and collected money from whoever was making a living — shopkeepers, hawkers, farmers, whoever wanted a peaceful life and could pay for it. If the victims belonged to the Congress, so much the better. Within ten years, the musclemen taught West Bengal that it was unprofitable to belong to the Congress — and that supporting CPI(M) minimized costs. This is how the commutwit monopoly of power was created in West Bengal. Having learnt this technology, the Hindutwits reproduced it in Gujarat. In every village, every community, they collected musclemen and set up branches. But in one respect, they had it easier than the commutwits. Gujarat is more commercialized and industrialized than West Bengal; there were many more rich men to tap, and, correspondingly, the tribute to be collected from each was smaller — so small that many of them would not mind paying. Besides, many of these rich men could be asked to give jobs to the faithful, in which case those believers did not have to be paid a dole at all. But how were those moneybags to be persuaded that Muslims were their enemies? Right into the Nineties, 600 tons — 600,000,000 grams — of gold used to be smuggled into India. So was most of synthetic cloth. So were thousands of watches. All these goods used to be loaded into fast boats in Dubai, carried across the sea, and land on Gujarat’s coast. They were a source of great convenience for consumers fed up with the rigours of the socialist state, and a source of prosperity for those involved in smuggling and selling the goods; most of whom were Muslims. Once in a while some smugglers were caught; their names were predominantly Muslim. Sometimes the smugglers fought and murdered one another; those caught were again Muslims. Thus there arose an impression in Gujarat that Muslims were smugglers and thieves. So when the Hindutwits offered to sanitize Gujarat of the Muslim criminals, they found ready clients. When they removed Muslim competitors from business, their services were all the more appreciated by Hindu shopkeepers. When the commutwits sanitized West Bengal, they created an economic desert. When the Hindutwits sanitized Gujarat, some flowers went missing, but business continued to bloom. This is where the difference lies. Year after year, Gujarat grows faster than West Bengal. West Bengal, once one of the richest states, has fallen behind until it is just about average today; Gujarat, once average, has advanced upwards. No ruler of West Bengal who attends meetings in the South and North Blocks of Delhi, who can read figures, can ignore West Bengal’s decline. That is why the commutwits are in a hurry. But they cannot bring back the capitalists whom they scared away in the Sixties. Nor can they tolerate the emergence of thousands of small industrialists, for whom trade unions would be anathema. What would be compatible with Citu’s prosperity? Obviously, industries that pay workers well. So the commutwits’ first answer was information technology. They laid out the red carpet for IT moguls. Some came, but on the whole they preferred the South; it has a huge output of graduates with good English, and they do not mind people from other states coming in. So today, West Bengal’s IT employment is still in thousands — no higher than that of Gujarat. Now the commutwits have thought of big industries like steel and car-making. These require large tracts of land, and the commutwits are determined to clear land of obstructive human beings, however much blood they have to shed. The Hindutwits think that the post-Godhra riots taught Muslims a lesson; the commutwits think that Nandigram has taught the reactionaries a lesson. And if it has not, they will teach it again, in battlegrounds galore. Mamata, take guard! Each lesson will reduce the number of industrialists that would be prepared to invest in West Bengal; Buddhadeb will have to travel ever farther to find an investor. But it is a quest in the right direction — for making West Bengal India’s richest state. It may take some time, and many lives, but so what? Revolutions cannot be made without bloodshed. In the meanwhile, the prime minister will continue to monitor the situation closely — from Moscow, Washington, Cape Town, from his eyrie on Race Course Road.

Look, now they define who is a Hindu!

From today's Statesman..

London school defines a Hindu

Indo-Asian News Service
LONDON, Nov. 20: Britain's first state-funded Hindu school has come up with a unique definition of “practising Hindus” as part of its admissions policy ~ those who pray daily, do voluntary work at temples, follow a vegetarian diet and don't get intoxicated.
The school, named Krishna-Avanti Primary School, is located in the London borough of Harrow, which has the highest concentration of Hindus in any council in Britain: 40,000. The school is promoted by a charity organisation called the I-Foundation.
The admission process has started for the intake of the first batch of students in September 2008. Places are limited to 30 and are expected to be heavily over-subscribed. The official faith advisor to the school is Iskcon UK, which will advise on aspects of how the Hindu faith can be integrated and taught within the school. According to the admissions policy, among the criteria to be used while considering applications are: “Looked after children from Hindu families, 10 nominations by Bhaktivedanta Manor of practising Hindu families, children from practising Hindu families, children from Hindu families who are broadly following the tenets of Hinduism."
According to the policy, "broadly following" the tenets of Hinduism is defined as: at least monthly visits to the temple, attendance of key festival programmes (Diwali, Janmashtami and Ramnavami) at a local temple, following a vegetarian diet and avoidance of intoxication.
Asked if children of Hindu families who preferred non-vegetarian food or may not be ritualistic Hindus or who followed traditions within Hinduism that went against the school’s definition of practising Hindus would be ineligible for admission, a spokesman of the I-Foundation told IANS: "The rules do not exclude anyone who does not qualify under the criteria. The policy is not meant to exclude people... Under the rules of funding of faith schools, the school is obliged to have a set of criteria for admission that is relevant to the faith.”

I don't think that Hinduism is a doctrine driven faith which needs to be regulated like many others are. As a Hindu who does not mind the occasional tipple, I object most strongly to a bunch of Iskon people to tell me whether I am a 'suitable' Hindu or not. This is straight an easy route to giving imperfect people, untrained in logic, dialectic and philosophy the power to pass judgment over their peers. Hindu priests have long been a revered group, who guide in matters of the spirit (pun totally unintentionally). This will make them no different from their Christian and Muslim brethren. That is regrettable.

The sky is falling!! Privatisation woes.

Our national carrier is suffering from the blues. There is competition at all levels: the premium segment of the market has been captured by Mallya's Kingfisher Air and the discount ticket business is dominated by Air Deccan. Amidst this looming crisis, Air India, already losing money each day indulges VIPs and other fluff. This is part of the reason why they are bleeding so much money. I include here, two Statesman reports:

http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=1&theme=&usrsess=1&id=176956

and

http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=1&theme=&usrsess=1&id=176957

I have the following suggestions:
1. Make VIPs pay. Stop giving perks to MPs, MLAs, their cousins, mistresses and Board Members of the airline.
2. Start a rationalised fare structure with complete internet booking facilities. Cut out the middlemen.
3. Reduce turnaround time at airports. This reduces terminal fees. If people cannot turn up in time to catch their flights, screw them.
4. If you want to run a premium segment, then do so. But brand that differently, make sure that if people are paying four times what the discount fares cost, they should get their money's worth.
5. Stop treating company Directors like gods. They can pay for their own rented cars: stop proving limo services.

Lastly, this is the most radical solution: allow all longterm employees to buy into Air India stock via pension funds/provident funds. If one is literally invested in where one works, one will work a little better. And steal less.

And if Air India cannot make a difference in, say a year... let Laloo Prasad Yadav take over. He did it for the Railways, he can do it for Air India as well.

Zap!!! The EMP Strikes Back (and featuring the return of the Shelby GT500)

So... here is the deal, cops might try to use a contraption which delivers a powerful electromagnetic pulse that disables the electronic systems running in a criminal's car and (hopefully) brings said criminal from 200 mph to a coasting, slightly impotent halt. So... apart from the immediate problem.. what if the EMP zaps the electronic steering and not the engine... then you have a car chase turning into a Michael Bay production on the I94...... well, what about shielding?

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19699/?a=f

The skin depth for microwave radiation is about 0.8 um for Aluminium. That means that an EM pulse at 10GHz will decrease to 1/e of its original amplitude within 0.8 micrometers of an Al sheet. So, painting the interior of the car, or just the housing for the CPU with a 4 um think Al coating will do the trick. Incidentally, this was seen during Broken Arrow where a powerful EM Pulse generated by exploding a nuke underground zaps a helo out of the sky. Radical.

Concert pictures.

I have already posted some of these pictures.. but it is time to post the whole lot of them...
concert pictures are not the easiest to do: the lighting is either too dim or harsh and unflattering. For danseuses, motion is what is the essence of beauty in the narrative form of dance. Motion is also the bane of a photographer working under dim light. But then again, it can also be used to great effect, when motion blur is used as an artistic tool. But I can go on about technicalities for ever. Let me just finish by putting up the links to the three concerts and performances over the last couple of weeks.

Swaranjali 2007, an ICMD show.

Rhythms of Hope - an Asha Ann Arbor concert featuring Odissi exponent Ms. Sreyashi Dey and a Sitar performance by Mr. Rajan Sachdeva accompanied on the Tabla by Mr. Amol Khanapurkar.

Vatsa Vaani: a concert by the Indian Classical Music and Dance(ICMD) Group at UM for the benefit of PACE, a group which raises funds to provide education and community empowerment amongst the underprivileged in India.







Many thanks to...
1. Asha Ann Arbor
2. PACE and Inner PACE
3. ICMD, UM
4. Ms. Sreyashi Dey
5. Mr Rajan Sachdeva
6. Mr Amol Khanapurkar

Waay too much work..

Oh dear me, this has been a very hectic time... all around fun, teaching, several birthdays, photographing concerts and other fun. Also a certain amount of protein spectroscopy and a fairly huge amount of grading. But the most fun part was watching Tarantino's 'Deathproof' and Rodriguez's 'Planet Terror'. Go see them if you haven't.

Submarine movies.

I have not seen Das Boot. I have heard that it is Wolfgang Peterson's best film, and possibly the greatest submarine film ever. Having said this.... my personal favourite so far is probably Crimson Tide.

But this has much to do with my personal admiration for Mr. Washington as an excellent actor (although somewhat stereotyped.... Training Day was such a refreshing change..), and the fairly decent support by Gene Hackman. The music accompanying was good enough to sometimes distract from the palpable tension.

My second favourite.. with a certain amount of thought is Hostile Waters. This was a made for TV movie (HBO films, which has made other very watchable movies like the 'Tuskegee Airmen'). With a surprisingly good cast.. Martin Sheen as a USN commander and Rutger Hauer as an anguished SSBN captain who is forced to make decisions which will certainly kill his men, but avert a potentially greater disaster.. this movie hits very hard. It is worth thinking about the Kursk disaster in 2000 when the pride of Russia's submarine fleet, an Oscar II class ballistic missile nuclear submarine went down with all hands in the Barent's Sea. Hostile Waters brings to your mind the horrific claustrophobia and the ever present feeling of being entombed with the carriers of death.

Why this discussion? Because I am going to watch 'The Hunt for Red October' tonight, frequently called the best Hollywood sub movie.

Of parties, pictures and movies, of looking at cars and thinking about binary search as a tool for finding a girlfriend.

This has been a totally crazy weekend, with an equally crazy week before it... last week I bummed out after running close on to one and a half days of experiments with a crummy lock on ze spektrometer. Needless to say, I was suitably morose. Anyway, the experiments have been run, this time, properly (I hope).. so the advancement of science has not been delayed too much!! The weekend before last, I was taking pictures for the ICMD concert.. and the link is here.

The 30th evening saw my friends Rachna and Pradeep drop in at 11.45 and demand to be entertained until midnight, at which point I was to cut a birthday cake and celebrate. It had been a horrific day with labwork and teaching, and I am sure it was not a leisurely day for my friends either. Moral- I have great, wonderful, precious friends.

The 31st saw my roomie Young Saumen having organized another cake party with a whole bunch of youngsters... yes, at this point its worth mentioning that I turned 26 last week. Not a happy event... apart from the failed experiments.. there is the overwhelming realisation of a life mostly filled with pedestrian achievements... to wit, Asimov had published his greatest work, 'Nightfall' when he was .. what 21? Lawrence Bragg was a joint winner of the Nobel prize at the age of 25 for his work on XRD. Alexander started his conquest of most of the known world when he was hardly into his twenties. Chandragupta Maurya defeated this exact same Macedonian Empire and created the first unified Indian Empire when he was 20. I am in graduate school, for what looks like a large fraction of eternity. There is something relativistic about this.. my friends in the real world have jobs, usually on their second jobs by now. Well, apropos the previous statement.. I have good friends. There are nice things.

Anyway, we had a fairly large potluck with all these friends on Friday night.. which went on into the wee hours of Saturday. The food was pretty uniformly excellent... as was the 'surapaan'. Saturday was devoted to looking at cars and Nandi discoursing upon the use of binary search to look for girlfriends. But much more on that later..

Recent news and views.

So, I ended up watching Nick Cage in 'Lord of War'. Now there is nothing remarkable about Cage's performance.. in fact this role was remarkably reminiscent of his role in 'Weatherman'. He is competent and does a first person narrator role quite well. But nothing great. The script was pretty nice, however. Some really nice cinematography, or rather good editing. Pretty face Ethan Hawke has brought nothing new to his Interpol agent character.. there are shades of Precinct 13 as well as Training Day in his acting. The real star of the movie is Jared Leto, who plays Cage's troubled and cocaine addled brother; the only person with something resembling a decent character, which he brings a lot of life to. See this movie: quite an eye opener about the worldwide gun running business.