A Decade

I have always found the matter of deciding when a decade starts rather picklish. One hand, as a programmer, I count from zero, and, we celebrated the new millennium in 2000. Then again, there was no 0 AD in the Gregorian Calendar (but there was one in the Hindu Calendar).

Trivial affairs of notation these?

I think I'll go with 1 AD as a starting, and 10 as an ending. This would mean I celebrated the millennium and the start of a decade differently, but who cares? You live the millennium (at most) once :-P.

A decade ago, in 2001

• We had just shifted to India from Singapore. My brother and I got an almost double promotion, given the difference in starting dates.
• I was 12.
• I had learnt BASIC through a book lying at home. Any program that required more than two nested for loops was complicated. (It still is, but that is more because, there is often a better structure for the program at hand).
• I was extremely happy with a program that "animated", by displaying a /, |, \, -, successively with a delay.
• My favourite books were Enid Blyton, and the Hardy Boys. I liked The Five Find-Outers a lot.
• I was already on the Harry Potter bandwagon. I still remember getting scared of the thickness of the Goblet of Fire though. It took me an entire week to finish it.
• I used to spend a lot of time thinking. Just randomly thinking.
• I had heard of IIT, but had no idea of what it was.

In the last ten years, due to the support of my parents, my brother, and my friends, I was fortunate enough to get a lot of things I wanted, and some that I didn't (like this girth around my waist. :-/).

I have some of the most awesome friends (batchmates, seniors & juniors) I could have imagined. They have blatantly told me when I have been stupid, and acknowledged when I have been sensible. Some of them were responsible for what I consider to be one of the best decisions I made at IIT - pursuing a minor in literature.

I probably grew the most in the last ten years, than I will in any ten from now. The twenteens, they say. Life ahead looks a lot more serious than ever before. Having fun is a priority people soon forget, apparently.

Wish you all a happy holiday season.

Changes

Life changes. We all know it does. In fact that's probably the one invariant.

Changes hit you hard when there haven't been many in the last few years. They hit you harder, when everyone (and everything around you) is changing, but you have to stay put.

Seeing those voids physically can be the hardest of them all. Seeing those tiny things that haven't changed, those people left behind, when many have moved on, is heart wrenching. Who could have ever imagined that it would be so difficult?

The web helps bridge gaps, and connect people, but things will never be the same again.


I see a caterpillar on a branch today.
Tomorrow it is a butterfly.
Life does not stand still.
Only thoughts and memories do.

To when we meet again, if we do.



A tribute to the class of 2010, IIT Madras.

P.S. I hope we duals have the strength to continue on.

Effort, success and failure.

Three videos (speeches, lectures, call them what you may), have deeply influenced me over the last year and a half. I might to an extent call them life changing.

The first is Randy Pausch's last lecture, "Really Achieving your childhood dreams". It is about realising what you want, how to get to what you want, and how to stay motivated.

The second and third are TED talks that try to define success, failure, and how one might ideally deal with these notions. These are by Elizabeth Gilbert, and Alain De Botton.

Alain's talk, I discovered only yesterday - but it has helped confirm ideas I had formed from the other two.

These along with If, by Rudyard Kipling stand for what I believe to be a modern attempt at understanding effort, success and failure.


And with this, I hope to begin a new year.

[1] Rakesh Pokala recommended the Elizabeth Gilbert talk to me.
[2] The Alain De Botton talk, I chanced upon because of KV Mohan, who has written about it very well here
[3] I really liked the essay "A fast car and a good woman", by Raymond Martin as well. But I am unable to find an accessible online version.


A happy new year to everyone!

On On, even if I cant.

From a bird's eye view,
it seemed like water breaking
through and through,
the fate of the nation.
Though not a bird was I.

Mosquito nets outside hang
washed from wither days,
after room cleaning's fang
bit through time I had.
No mosquitoes in winter time.

A half packed suitcase
lies open in the room.
Hurry left its trace
as the owner packed.
Though no place to travel.

Of life and room is said,
the above in a pensive voice.
Fences and boundaries tread,
only to return home.
Soon. Sooner.


Melancholy. Solitude. Quiet Joy.

The importance of twice: Airtel

I am a Vodafone customer when in Chennai, for the last couple of years. I find their service rather warm. I have even called them up at midnight, once when I had my sim lock my phone, and they responded quite graciously. During my internship here in Hyderabad, I decided to get myself an Airtel number, since most of my friends here use Airtel. The process was rather straightforward, like I expected. The service however, has left a lot wanting.

One would think the competition in cellular networks in India is high enough to keep the market competitive. I was disappointed by Airtel's bonus cards first. You have to pay more for local calls @ 60p a minute. Not just that, one does not have free (or nearly free) calls from Airtel to Airtel after 11pm, for a reasonable price. Things one normally expects from a cellular provider.

Today, however, was the limit, really. I needed to top up my phone for talktime. I was doing this for a first time with Airtel. Who would have thought it would be different? Turns out it is. Airtel takes the customer number just once, and I seem to have typed it in wrongly, hitting an 8 for 0, which was not really visible on the vendor's phone either. That's it. Once. And I lost all the money I had paid for the topup. All I could do was to blame the vendor for not enlightening me about this issue. All he could do, was to then tell me that Airtel is about the only network which does this.

That really beats common sense -it really does. People live life today in a hurry. They need to topup/recharge the cell phones on the go. And in such a situation allowing such a huge opportunity for a very possible human error is appalling. As I see it, Airtel only benefits marginally from this. I'll have to topup again, so they get twice the service charges. So, in the long run, both the customer and Airtel stand to lose. Unless of course, Airtel takes topups/recharges to invalid (or out of network) numbers as well. With an effective 9 digit cell phone number (the first is a fixed 9), the chances to make a mistake are huge.

Airtel should ask the customer his/her number twice. They really should. And the change, in my opinion is not too difficult for them either. These topup facilities look like server side software. That is, the vendor sends a request to Airtel, and Airtel replies with the next dialog, "Enter phone number:". The vendor enters that, and Airtel sends the next dialog. Server side software is low cost to fix, for obvious reasons. Even if this is not server side, Airtel should probably take an initiative from now on.

This just beats common sense. Or uses probability to make money. I am not sure now which it is.

A Review : The Inheritance of Loss

"The Inheritance of Loss", Kiran Desai's second novel, won the man booker prize in 2006. It is needless to say, a very descriptive and picturesque novel. The choice of words at several places is about as perfect as one can get. Into the second page itself, the reader is faced with the pleasure of reading sentences again, purely for the language.

" The caress of the mist through her hair seemed human, and when she held her fingers out, the vapor took them gently into its mouth. "

The novel revolves around the theme of immigration, and displacement. It tries to talk about the difficult issues of leaving one's homeland, the alienation that sets in abroad, and the reaction of the "natives" to this displacement. The novel is probably best understood in a post colonial framework, where one keeps in mind the effect of the decades of the British Colonisation.


Set mostly in the town of Kalimpong, the novel alternates in narration between the happenings there, and those of an illegal Indian kitchen servant in New York. The characters are shallow, and to an extent, flat. But their day-to-day lives are portrayed brilliantly. This is however, not without a good amount of completely irrelevant banter, which plays no role in either the progress of the plot or the character development. In several places, one also finds it a bit too verbose. The verbiage regarding defecation, for example, could have been left out, and not mentioned in such explicit detail, so many times.


One also does not know the novel is ending; it just does, leaving the reader in an unsettled state of mind. The reader learns not to ask too many questions - neither answers nor more details are provided, and at times the issue is completely side stepped after having an initial plunge.


The second reading is far more fulfilling; one does not expect much either from the plot or character, but tends to take a laid back approach to enjoying the literary skill of the author. All in all, it not a must read, but certainly an enjoyable one, especially for those with enough time, and not too demanding of a plot or concrete character development.

When we can, we don't. When we want to, we can't.

A cartoon, I recently drew for the hostel creative writing entry.


P.S. My first cartoon that took less than an hour to draw :)

The Burden of Expectation

Sometimes, people say yes, when they do not really mean it.
Sometimes, people say things, without thinking about them.
Sometimes people mean things, but it gets lost in the variety of things they have to do during their existence.
Sometimes people mean things, but do not really think about how the things they do affect the things they mean.
And sometimes, it is just one of those other times.

Sometimes, the things involved are big.
And sometimes the things involved are small - as small as a smile.

Sometimes, things work out.
Sometimes, things do not, due to valid reasons.
Mostly, however, expectation is just a burden.

Always, I burden expectation, and it, me. 

(Just Another Rant Post).

Where is Jamuna with their Canoe?

It is that time of the year again, and Mandak is flooded. Pretty badly. Legend goes that the 2005 flooding was worse than this, for several reasons, including the time, and severity of the floods.

Our batch has been the lucky one. We evaded the flood last year. :)

The current sophomores are in IIT lingo, "plain screwed". They had the floods at one end, and BT 101 at the other. Several of them shifted base to rooms on the first and second floors.

Enough Talk! Photos on Flickr.

(Thanks to Lappy for his Canon Powershot).

Post Lan

Me, like everyone else is slightly pissed with the LAN ban that the senate has passed recently. Yes, only 1200hrs to 2359hrs access to LAN on weekdays. I was vetti (without the net, of course), and decided to write this spoof. Yes both of the typical press, and the insti. So here it is. (Posting from the DCF)



A mile for mail.

Students of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, now have to walk almost a mile every morning to access the world wide web. Yes, you did hear it right! It is IIT Madras, and it is the Internet.

Sources reveal that various technological constraints have been placed on these students, arguably some of India's brightest. They now have no access to the Data Network from their rooms during the morning hours. This move was reportedly taken keeping in mind the low attendance in the morning classes. They are hence constrained to a fixed ten-hour-a-day usage. We, from Whines Yeow, proceeded to interview a few of these students.

"In a world which is becoming more and more net friendly - we even use google to store phone numbers and use online dictionaries, it is almost inexplicable that the institute can place such a ban", said one Kiran Jhopdiwala who wishes to be anonymous. Another said, "Today, morning, I got up to continue some simulation project I was doing. And I could not even download a matlab addon till two in the afternoon." Yet another student said, "Yesterday, I had gotten up in the morning, and merely wanted to wish Abhinav Bhindra congratulations for his olympic gold, (through CNN IBN), and yaar, nahi kar saka. I felt so sad, ya."

The saddest is probably that of one student who said, "Today, being Independence day, I got up early in the morning, and got dressed. I then wanted to sing a few patriotic songs. However, I had forgotten some of the older ones that I used to sing in school. I switched on the computer to Google it, but alas, there was no access to the Internet. I walked nearly a mile to my
department, before I downloaded them onto a thumb drive."

Several students say that their schedules of getting up early in the morning,to study, or merely browse online encyclopaedias have been severely affected. As one student put it, "If the IIT administration is concerned about students gaming in the morning, they should disable the LAN, while allowing access to the Internet. I almost missed the chance to reply to a professor in the US, for my future studies."

While the Indian Government's move of increasing information access in rural areas is laudable, it is sad that students at places like the IITs suffer. Even we, the common people have twenty-four hour net access these days. Restricting access has never been the solution to any problem.




I end with
Vigorously stabs about the research and design department with a file. (8 across)