This is what gives modern art a bad name.

Yeah, so I believe I have already talked about my extremely underwhelming experience at the Andy Warhol museum when I visited Pittsburgh a few weeks ago. If I haven't here is the summary: most of the work, represented as 'pop' art was puerile and rather pointless. A lot of it was commercial (as is everything else, but let my cynicism not marr your happiness), and utterly trite. Most of the photographs presented were technically mediocre and artistically worthless. This is my opinion and if anyone is willing to make a valid case and prove me wrong: go for it. But I do stick to one basic argument: if a work of 'art' cannot stand by itself and needs an accompanying page of explanation in order to garner any appreciation, well, then it shouldn't be called art.

Incidentally, The Warhol also had sculptures by Ron Mueck. These were truly breathtaking. Mueck's work spanned a range from a 'self sculpture' of his sleeping face to a huge newborn baby. We also got to see a video of Mueck at work. Again, it was very obvious that there was nothing slapdash or irreverent about his work: every square inch of every one of works speaks volumes about perfectionism, both in thought and in application.

Now, let me talk for a moment about a movie called 'The Shape of Things'. This has Rachel Weisz playing an art student whose thesis is a person; or rather the deconstruction/reconstruction of a nerdy bloke with whom she carries on a relationship.

And finally, we now talk about the news article which provoked me to write this blog in the first place: the Yale Daily News carried this article about an arts major who impregnated herself artificially and then induced miscarriages. She proceeded to document this process and will now present this as an exhibit, which will feature videos of the forced misscarriages as well as blood from the process.

High art? Or crap? Who is to decide... the point, I believe is that society needs art as much as it needs construction workers: but there are lines of human conduct which should not be crossed. Not unless one is supremely confident that the results will be sufficiently compelling. And such confidence can only come from a supreme belief in one's own abilities to see further than one's peers. Unfortunately, all too many people, perhaps in the throes of a delayed adolescent rebellion against.. society, authority, an absent father, have taken it upon themselves to show us what art is and how the boundaries of sensibility should be redefined. Unfortunately, I find it difficult to believe that they have the necessary ability. Perhaps this disenchantment comes from having my feet too firmly planted on the ground and a very middle class, pedestrian sense of establishmentarism. Perhaps. Either ways, I believe that it is necessary to be exceptionally well at playing within the rules of the game, before you choose to break them. Being iconoclastic is easy: but measuring up to the canon in any field and being judged worthy, is I believe of greater import. This is why I am skeptical about modern art.

John Stewart is right!!

Ok, so why are we talking about this? It would appear that in American politics, being an 'elitist' carries horrible connotations and such a person can never lead the people. Why not? There seems to be an innate assumption that a person who is not 'one of the people' cannot lead them. Well, haven't you heard of the bell curve? Or of a Maxwellian distribution? On second thoughts, you probably haven't heard of the Maxwellian curve. To put it simply: the whole point of electing a leader is to find a person who is better than the rest of us and better suited to guiding the nation. That is a fact that seems to have escaped the political pundits in this country. Sad. Stewart is the ONLY person who has said that he would like a leader who is 'embarrasingly superior' to him. Surely that makes sense, doesn't it? Or maybe you would have just another git in the most important political office in the world making shitty decisions, or rather being manipulated into them.

Democracy is great, but leaders are not supposed to be ordinary! But I don't think that argument is going to pass muster with any number of bigoted, populist fools out there. Well, all I can say is that if you morons do not have the sense to elect decent leaders, you deserve the
shafting that you get!

Calvin? Calvin! CALVIN!!!! NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

yeah.. see this...

Wheeler passed away yesterday.

John A Wheeler was one of the giants of theoretical physics. He pioneered the use of the S-matrix formalism, worked with Bohr and contributed to quantum gravity. Richard Feynman was his graduate student. The canonical text on GR: 'Gravitation' was co-authored by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler. Read this obituary here.

Why a baggage claim carousel is a metaphor for life itself.

Here are the points which I think justifies my claim:

1. It goes round and round.
2. You wait in eager anticipation for what is yours.
3. People will elbow you in the ribs to get closer to the carousel.
4. If you are a decent bloke, you will help the elderly, the frail and the infirm pick up theirs'. For your trouble, you might just miss your article as it swooshes past.
5. Someone else might sneak in and grab your bags.
6. Sometimes it looks like everyone else has got theirs' and you are still waiting in line.
7. When yours' finally turns up, it might be scuffed, dented, or just totally wrecked.

3.10

Once upon a time, a man called Sergio Leone took a man who spoke in a hoarse rusty whisper and made him the Man With No Name. The capitals must be pronounced. This was Eastwood at his finest in the Dollars trilogy. Except that there were greater things in store. The question to ask was: what happened to the man with no name? The answer was given by Eastwood himself in what was possibly one of the two greatest Westerns ever made: 'Unforgiven.' Here, the darkest side of what a man could become was the theme... violence fathers more violence... and those who have chosen to walk in shadows can never truly come into the light again.

Unlike the westerns made before.. including the epic 'Once upon a time in the West', Unforgiven shows that the cycle has no end.. that redemption is just another futile dream.

Now, after almost two decades, there is another western worth the name. '3.1o to Yuma' comes with two awesome names: Christian Bale and Russel Crowe, both of whom are truly awesome talents. The storyline is simple indeed: Crowe plays Ben Wade, a notorious outlaw who has been captured, and now his gang wants him back. Bale plays Evans a poor rancher who has joined the posse guarding Wade. The real surprise though is Ben Foster who plays Charlie Prince, one of the truly greatest villains to ever grace the screen.. perhaps right up there with Henry Fonda in 'Once upon a time in the West'. And that is saying a lot.

The Jonathans of this world

Jonathan Livingston Seagull was one of my early heroes. His creator, Richard Bach has remained one of my enduring touchstones of many things which must be done, but not easily.



Have you ever seen a seagull take to the air? He spreads his wings wide, does a quick hop, skip and jumps into the air. The seagull is unlike many other birds. Unlike the beautiful birds of prey, he does not circle far overhead in solitary wait. Again, unlike sparrows or pigeons, he does not find it within himself to consort with humans.



The loneliness of the seagull is a very special one. He may choose to skim the waves at dawn with a few friends, but come evening, he usually waits quietly for the waves to come in. And when they do, he flies off.. answering a call that we cannot hear. Perhaps, like Jonathan, he appears far away, at a place where mere wings cannot take you.

Lies in your living room

The pervasive influence of the advertising industry cannot be denied. That they can have a seriously deleterious effect on the ability of a kid to distinguish between a reliable source of information and something that is a lot of just nicely packaged lies is also obvious. But what is to be done, especially now that very few parents have the time to attend to their kids properly and use the TV as a parent/babysitter surrogate? This article talks about a parent who tried something different.. and it worked!

yeah, amongst other things

I was going to blog about our Pittsburgh trip over the weekend, but this caught my attenshun and I don't have too much time. Let me summarise this: Islamic law (Sharia) reportedly frowns upon interest gained from money in a bank account. So, Lloyds TSB provides 'Islamic banking' services which include zero interest savings accounts. The BBC reports here. For comparison, here is the webpage of the Islamic Bank of Britain. I just want Terry Pratchett to incorporate this into his next work. Something is fundamentally skewed with this turn of events. If I may make a suggestion, there are many people in the world who can use some largesse: why not directly send the income derived from capital belonging to our Muslim brethren who would wish to abide strictly by the 'no interest rule' to Muhammad Yunis' Gramin Bank?

Ewwww dirty UNIX!!!

why geeks love UNIX...


who | grep -i babe | talk; cd ~; touch; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; make clean; sleep



also.. someone posted a random thread on reddit asking 'how many people randomly type ls into their terminals when they are bored?' The replies are here.. it is very strangely interesting to read them.. but I mainly found the following comment hilarious..

"I hate it when I'm not in vi.

It's such a nice place."

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.