Random Notes in a Random Life

A Decade

2010-12-31T18:48:00.005+05:30

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

2010-05-17T10:57:00.004+05:30

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.

2010-01-01T00:39:00.001+05:30

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.

2009-12-10T23:52:00.001+05:30

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

2009-06-04T10:03:00.003+05:30

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

2009-04-09T23:40:00.000+05:30

"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.

2009-03-24T23:00:00.000+05:30

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

2008-11-29T20:50:00.000+05:30

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?

2008-11-28T12:51:00.001+05:30

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

2008-08-15T12:12:00.000+05:30

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)

The week that was

2008-05-12T21:31:00.000+05:30

Finally, the rough semester has ended, and back at home I am. A quick update on the happenings over the last week should make up the post.

BT & I were one of the first CS junta to leave insti, freeing ourselves from the shackles of the DCF. This felt extremely satisfying. Waking up to people updating their logs. ^[1]

I finally sat down and made myself a customised linux repository before I left, to recover from crazy experiments / the usual grub-fiddling^{[Citation Needed]} of mine. I used aptoncd, which worked brilliantly. :)

Played Max Payne for the first time. (Yes, I know). My brother introduced me to it. I like this slow motion thing a lot. Also made me realise that I have not been addicted to any game (and neither am I to Max Payne) since Fifa99 and Street Fighter Zero.

Have consigned myself to watching IPL during the nights. Though the concept of the IPL is completely against my principles, methinks there is a good possibility that it could grow into something big - especially if the BCCI agrees to include it in their calendar.

Fell in love with Yes, Minister. Gosh! It is amazing. :)

Just noticed that my Lyrics.net have changed their site layout, which causes my GetLyrics to get everything but the content of the lyrics. Should sit down and change the regexp sometime.

Getting used to the new Shaastra Logo.

Wrote a piece of code to solve one of those^[2] problems. Mentioning it since the python version was 124 lines, and the C version was tantalizingly close at 131 lines. Either I am writing bad Python Code, or extremely good C code. :D

Realised that the semester put me into a code-lock up mode. Could not stop coding till yesterday.

Aaj Tak is currently (on "लो में उड़ चला!") making field's day of another one of those Chris Angel moments. He apparently flew from the terrace of one building to another. Aaj Tak believes it. It (the journalist) further states that the automobile and transport industry would not be sleeping tonight. "What if everyone could fly?". OMG! What is the world coming to?

Have at least 5 concrete things to blog about - including the way kids react these days. Do not feel like it.

Finally, the biggie :

As I was fixing the home computer yesterday for some loose connection that kept switching the display on and off, I switched on the computer with the box open, and my Hard Disk somehow moved. The reading head pin got displaced and started making scratching noises. The media is scratched. I took it to at least 3 shops, in Aditya Enclave and Chenoy Trade Centre, and all of them said it was not possible to recover ANY data. The sound it made was pretty much its death knell. One and a half years of effort and customisation goes down the drain.

All the work; all the support scripts I had written to make life easier; all the arbitrary notes and ideas; all the written posts and articles that I hoped to publish or one day put up on this blog; my private PGP key; all the $HOME/.* customisation; my entire hand picked and ID3-tagged music library; all the work for my previous co-ordships, TFE etc.. ; the priceless goofup folder of screenshots of people making the obvious mistakes on their webpages and on chat; my entire math collection; all the movies and sitcoms for the summer - all gone.

Some of these things can be replaced given enough time, a few of them cannot. It is funny how life can catch you so unguarded. Thankfully, a little bit of my work lies on the CSE Server, or has been mailed to others. Gmail will remain my one salvage.

I have been getting used to the idea. I can choose to look at it as a disaster, or as a pre-emptive warning for the BTP/MTP years to come. I choose the latter. The glimmer of light, is the chance to buy a new hard disk, and my parents allowing me to upgrade my RAM.

So, my Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 with no less than 11 partitions of your 250GB, I bid you goodbye. R.I.P

[1] - http://www.cse.iitm.ac.in/~cs260 . My log can be found at http://www.cse.iitm.ac.in/~spranesh/cal.html

[2] - NP Complete problems, using Dynamic Programming.

Cartoon Cartoons!

2008-04-15T13:10:00.000+05:30

Firstly, about this blog. No, it is not retired. And no, neither will it be updated often. I want this to be a purely creative blog, with little or no technical references. I plan (yes, Naveen, I still do) to start a technical blog really soon - start of this summer, maybe? I plan to put up things here only if they are creatively worth it. The other blog (probably a wordpress one) should get updated regularly though.

Let us face it. As a second year student in the CS Dept at IIT Madras, I do spend a LOT more time on tech/comp things than otherwise. A technical blog will be a reflection of this very fact.

Why not integrate the two? I feel content should be separated, whenever they can. Maybe in the long run, I will realise otherwise.

Coming to the post, I have this habit of drawing XKCD - like cartoons, every once in a while in classes when I get bored. A significant part of my last 10 or so pages of my B slot notes last semester is filled with such cartoons or quips. It was only recently, that I decided to "digitalise" some of them. Late last night, I got another idea for a cartoon, and couldnt find any book nearby. I decided to digitalise it straight away. I forwarded it to a few people, who gave me a fairly good response. So I decided to put it up here.

The previous cartoon here was removed by the author for fear of being misunderstood. He has put up a new one.

Click on it for a better view

The comments section has been refreshed (except Hula's)

And the author feels that this falls under creativity and not tech. :)
So, tell me how it is.

(All photoshopping done with the GIMP :) )

----------------
Now playing: Led Zeppelin - Stairway to Heaven (as always :) )
Current Addiction : http://krishashok.wordpress.com

On One Line posts

2007-11-17T16:17:00.000+05:30

Following the recent trends of one line posts (and, in this context see this), I have learnt that for some people,

I don't remember = I don't feel like remembering = I don't want to remember ;

Heck, this also means, that I think I have finally grown out of the "I-don't-want-to-talk-about-it" shell.

\n

Dependency Issues

2007-10-22T12:22:00.000+05:30

Firstly, my apologies for general readers, in that the audience this post caters to is limited - the geeky.

I have been contemplating on starting another technical blog (which shall be updated regularly). This blog is only for the creative faculties - and hence does not have a sense of regularity and schedule attached to it. Even in the case, that I owned a technical blog, I would be tempted to put this post up here, for I would "tag" it under creativity.

Last night, after dinner, I was discussing with BT (Gautam), the credits system at IIT - Delhi, where one supposedly has more than 45 % of his credits as free electives. This led us, rather naturally, to issues like student independence, liberty, and the administration's trust on students being able to choose for themselves. By taking such a move, IIT - Delhi has thrown issues of course dependence into the students' hands - which we feel (felt) was a good thing.

Obviously, this led us to (for the 382nd time) the large number of Absolutely Not Required (ANR) courses for a Computer Science student at IIT - Madras - from workshop to py101 (which I call ph101) to Chemistry and Thermodynamics. Everything depends on a lot of not required courses here.

So came about this idea. I tried this on my Linux box.

And then I heard a beep.... And my screen went blank.
:)

Click on it to get a closer look.
Click here to read what the terminal says.

Life : An Update

2007-09-15T21:26:00.000+05:30

It's been quite some time since I last posted. I thought I should drop in to leave an update on my life.

This semester has been very different from the last. Things have been far more organised in all senses. The courses seem to make much more sense, the people teaching you seem to care (at least, it is not a mass lecture with 500 other people), and best of all, people around me seem to make sense. :)

All the goings-on in my life have left me with very little time to spare. But, I have found time to do most of the things I want to. A sizable portion of my free time has been spent in customising my computer (my Ubuntu box). I have been learning things to say the least.

Some Brief Updates:

Memorable Movies Seen:
The Devil wears Prada
Two for the money
Thank you for smoking
Man of the Year

Freshmen : This year has been a drab. A couple of freshers complaining in Ganga, some Godav freshie's mother flying down all the way from Pune at 11 in the night on an hours' notice... we have seen it all (at least all of this side). The interaction has been far less than last year. I am not just telling you. I was a fresher last year - I know! :P.

Deutsch : Ich lerne deutsch. (That's all I can say for now :D, if you leave out absurd things like Das ist ein Elektroherd. Das ist eine Lampe. Das ist eine Landkarte von Deutschland.)

The Rains : The mighty rain gods have spared us (@ground floor of mandak) so far. Hope things continue this way for at least 5 more months. ( :D)

Quizzes (the acad one) : Notably more peaceful than last semester, although lady luck seems to have eloped. :(

Quizzes (the other one) : QFI shifts out of IIT-M. So we just have the odd session of quizzing once in three weeks, thanks to the IIT-M quiz club. Three Cheers for PoTA.

Writing : Yes I do still write, and yes it is creative. But if you do a word count on all my files, you will come up with statistics like these :
if : 934
i : 643
for : 480
while : 345
See what I am getting at? If you don't, the 5th item in the list is int - 157.

That's not to say I do not write verse or prose anymore. I do, but the quantity has a taken a slight setback.

Web page : The cs.iitm.ac.in server is refusing to show my uploaded files. Several file permissions have been checked, several complaints filed, some helpful response, but no success at the end of the day. I have almost given up. There seems to be a problem with the public_html folders of our entire 2006 batch. Maybe when n (>2) people start complaining, they might look into where the glitch is. Till then, googlepages will be my preferred domain of choice.

Stories : I heard one hell of a cracker recently. Thanks SK! :).

Goodbye Anfield. For those of you who did not know, Anfield has been one of the most stable and reliable hubs on Direct Connect here in IIT-M. Plagueboy is shutting it down. Though I neither know Plagueboy nor any of the other admins well, I do feel sad that Anfield will no more greet me everytime I fire up DC++. Hopefully, we find some sort of a replacement soon.

And finally, the SVAP (* Vocabulary archiving Project) is on. Vasanth is doing most of the collecting. We help filter it. Some of them are true gems. Can anyone beat "jiggly wig"?

That's all I can think of right now. I should be putting up more structured, creative, posts soon.

* obviously refers to a certain someone
--
Pranesh

P.S. I have gotten so used to the double dashes, that I cannot avoid them. Double dashes indicate the start of the signature in an email. (That's the part the gmail greys out. )

My website is up.

2007-06-27T10:26:00.000+05:30

My website is up here. It is currently being hosted on the googlepages domain because I cannot upload to the cse server from outside the institute.

The page should be moving here by mid August.

I hope you find the website interesting, and please do leave your says and suggestions at the wall.

A Trip - Back!

2007-03-02T22:04:00.000+05:30

This was written on my recent trip home. As circumstances would chance, I was alone at home for a while. The brain got rattling, and out came this piece. I choose to post the first draft itself, with no editing, for it came from the heart.

As the poem indicates, I was waiting for something to happen, with quite some intensity. I do not think many people will relate to this. Those who do, I hope, would have found this piece worthy of the 5 minutes of time they spent. The single quotes indicate puns or something slightly deeper.

I leave this adopted attached home,
among trees, fawn, and latent amnesty,
going back to the roots that made me
who I am, in what was then, to be.

I come to fulfil a 'sole' purpose,
to find a part of mine that is not 'in me',
I must forge and fuse after the search,
hurry, I cannot, waiting the solitary key.

Care, concern and like blood, I find,
Glad, I decide to wait and tire out patience,
the two days that seem to separate,
and in reality the four years that draw the fence.

Shortly, tired of waiting, I ask myself,
the question that has burdened many,
spared so few, and broken many faiths,
"Is this worth it?" - the tabooed felony!

The mind given the chance to elope,
shows its infidelity. Running through fields
valleys and hills, my control oh-so-drunk,
watch thy intellect torn to scars and peels.

Egress! Oh, diffidence! Question rightly so,
what that makes thou, and what that doesn't,
Expose the faults with the stab, with the draw out,
kill the happiness and the pleasant.

I then turn to think, "What would be
the world, it's purview and everything
that is in it, if there is nothing between
the candy and the adamant baby?".

Saarang - The 'Fore'play and the Five Point Experiment. A fresher's view....

2007-03-01T22:02:00.000+05:30

The moment we stepped foot on campus in our first semester (yes, our left foot - just like Neil Armstrong), the first thing that we were given by the hostel office were complimentary "Live a Saarang - 2005" T-shirts. Talk about early infusion of the spirit! And yeah, thank god, they were at least hitting us above the belt, literally, at least. Every 'interaction', session with a senior ended inevitably with, "Machaan, don't go home for Saarang."

So come the second semester it was normal if you were all excited about Saarang as a freshman (ok, ok, i shall use the term freshie, as I am concerned about the female readers of my blog. Please do leave comments just to confirm my faith that I am addressing a non-empty set!). Besides, with MoodI@IIT-B having just gotten over and the snide remarks from the seniors, "MoodI? Ha! MoodI to Saarang is like Tamil Rap to 'Hell Freezes Over', da". (Need I say more too?), we just could not wait to get our hands on Saarang, or should I say 'a hands-on Saarang" for some ;). Besides, we were going to live and witness the build-up as well, something our friends at B couldnt.

Cometh a fortnight before the holy event (yes, I know, the Saarang logo reminds you of Holi and Garnier!), we could clearly see a lack of general enthusiasm, comparing it to the Shaastra we had experienced. Both the External Publicity T-shirts (which were god-level - or should I say? God-father level...), and volunteerships were difficult to come by. Vol-ships were far fewer in number than Shaastra, and it was nice if you could get your hands on either one a t-shirt or a vol-ship (not a vol!).

I ended up being a Saarang news-letter volunteer, a vol-ship that I thoroughly enjoyed. It was real fun looking at Saarang from a news-letter member's point of view. Neither were we thrown at too much, nor did we just sit and laze around. Right from Point-1 to Point-5, being a part of the Five Point Experiment (that's what it was called) was real nice. Then, there was the added benefit that I only had to observe and write, both of which I love doing. It was nice keeping one's ears open for the Quotable Quotes and even nicer to if something you overheard/contributed had made it to the next day's edition. It was fun penning down (alright, typing out) articles from a cynical point of view, yet being appreciative of an event when we felt so. the greatest benefit of all was that you could attend all the events you wanted to, as the newsletter only worked late in the night, and in fact, cover them. This gave me loads of time to look around Saarang. This was not all though. With a friend of mine finding himself very busy thanks to last minute commitments, I offered to fill up for him at his Speaking Events vol-ship whenever he wasnt around. Ah! First row seats at every speaking event and the shared joy of reporting about these events.It would take me five long blog posts to go through all that Saarang was, and therefore I shall restrain myself.

The Saarang enthusiasm did catch on though, 'four nights' before the fest. There were preview shows by the bands from IIT-Madras at the Himalaya Lawns, (which has now become THE place to hold night events in a chilled out amosphere under the gorgeous night sky) funny, interesting, and silly IPs hitting the notice board, and then there was the Day-Zero Newsletter which brought a whole lot of laughter (and inspired me to apply to be a part of the Five Point Experiment). Saarang suddenly looked as vibrant and radiant that the seniors had promised us. I personally accredit most of the last minute ebulliance to three things (in order of importance) - the Day Zero Newsletter (it was filled with all the zest and the zing that we freshers were hoping for), the Himalaya Show, and co-ords feeling the pinch of needing to live up to the already typed out bullet points in their resume.

Describing its festival in all its glory and feminine beauty with mere words, simply cannot be done. I urge you to come down here for Saaran 2008 and "Live-A-Saarang" yourself. Besides, I was so thoroughly enjoying myself and so high on coffee all the time (for all the late nights) that I dont exactly very vividly remember all that was. I do choose to direct you to this, however.

I sign off with a question that struck my friends and me, when we read this in the newsletter,
"Someday, when I grow up and be a father and have two kids, I shall name them Shaastra and Saarang." - a very nostalgic fourth year on the verge of tears on the last day of Saarang.
What would a very nostalgic fourth year@iitb call his kids? MoodI and Techfest?

P.S. I have been overjoyed to discover that mine is not the worst blog in existence. There is at least one worse blog - The Saarang Blog.

Ramaiah Contri Blog started!

2007-02-27T22:24:00.000+05:30

The Ramaiah Contributory blog has finally been started! Its here! Only members can read it. We dont want gossip in the wrong hands, do we?
This blog is for all those people who were in the 2004-2006 batch at Ramaiah. Entry by invitation only. If you are from this batch and are not a member yet, do mail me at spranesh@gmail.com . I will get in touch with you as soon as I can. I know that my blog is suffering lack of attention. Too much time, and some other things have cropped up this semester. Do watch this space for more in the days to come.

Top 20 Songs

2007-01-20T10:16:00.001+05:30

This was an article I had written long long ago, and had kept it from being published, due to lack of time. I eventually even forgot that the article existed in my drafts, till I stumbled upon it today, on some other reason. So, without further introduction, here it is:

I have my Thursdays off, courtesy, some tinkering with the schedule and some overloading on Wednesdays (Seven Straight Lectures! :( ). Jobless as I am, I thought I should put up my "Current Top 20 Songs". The genre is mainly Rock, or Indipop. Classic Rock enthusiasts will find this list incomplete in many ways. This is mainly due to my upbringing in which I was introduced by people around me to present day bands. Each of these songs have an emotion attached to it and that is probably why I have not been able to grow out of them. This also means that the ordering I have imposed in this list, generally goes for a toss depending on my mood.Obviously, this list is an ever changing one, and new songs keep making their entry. I do believe, however that, most of these songs will stay for quite some time.

Bands like Greenday, Nirvana, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and Strings do strike a deep chord with me, but I have tried to limit their presence in this list to a maximum of 2 or 3 songs.

1. Duur - Strings
2. Californication - RHCP
3. Boulevard of Broken Dreams - Greenday
4. Smells like Teen Spirit - Nirvana
5. Clocks - Clodplay
6. Hotel California - The Eagles (I can hear classic rock enthusiasts saying, "Whew! Finally!"
6. I'll Be There for You - The Rembrandts (Yes, the F.R.I.E.N.D.S Song)
7. There She Goes - Sixpence (I love the lead's voice!)
8. Dhaani - Strings
9. Aadat - Jal
10. Doorie - Atif Aslam
11. Bhula Do - Raeth
12. The Man Who Sold the World - The Nirvana Rendition of the David Bowie song.(MTV Unplugged, New York)
13. Right Now - Van Halen
14. Snow(Hey Oh!) - RHCP
15. Here Without You - 3 Doors Down (This is my current favourite and is a very new entrant to the list, maybe 15 days old!)
16. Jane Do - Strings
17. Superstition - Stevie Wonder (This has gained a huge fan following in our Wing!)
18. Stairway to Heaven - Led Zeppelin (so low in the list? well, not many emotions attached to this!)
19. Nothing Else Matters - Metallica
20. The Reason - Hoobastank

My current favourites in this list are 15, 10 and 11. I know I will get a lot of flak for this post, but then again it is but a personal opinion.

P.S. With life being close to perfect, I cannot think of many more things to blog about. That is why, this jobless, aimless post!

I do think most of these songs are a must listen, well, at least, once!

A penny for my thoughts? I hope not.........

2007-01-17T16:25:00.000+05:30

This is something that I wrote during the last semester. I stumbled upon it a few days ago when I was flipping through the last few pages of my last semester's physics notebook (I am shocked that I actually had one for the last semester!) in desperateness of escaping the boredom that hits me in class. It is a very short article, maybe short enough to be called a paragraph, one of those things I write quite often. A re-read through the article made me relate to it, a whole 3 months on. I liked what I had written too, so here it is on the web.

Here I am, in CRC 103, with a physics lecture in the faint background. Dels keep appearing and the polar unit vectors are but like conjunctions, in a mathematically flooded world. I normally would not complain about the Mathematics, but this was supposed to be a Physics lecture and the physical significance and reality in those equations were crying, waiting to be acknowledged and noted. It is dizzying, to say the least. I ask myself, "Is this what I came here for?".

The academics here are mostly less than thought provoking, the students often unwilling to learn, courtesy their new found freedom and the six-figure pay packet that awaits this drunken high of 4 years. Courses matter alright, but only for credits. Intuition is a tabooed foresight. Equations, numbers and lecture slides are what matter. Finally a number must be stamped, a number that decides one's calibre . After all, one must be condemned to nothing but a floating-point number, mus'nt he? Equations are learned (by rote, obviously) hours before the quiz to rot away into oblivion minutes after. The Maxwellian Equations are important, but only so as to be able to substitute billions and zillions of E's in the electrostatic case, Del X E = 0, and indeed, to appear astonished, and say, "Lo and Behold!, the right hand side is zero!"

Then, one can get billions of marks and billions of credits and a get a Ten minus epsilon number stamped on his head.Then, one can be satisfied and have a sense of achievement. After all, that's life isn't it?

One of my friends wanted me to make this article stronger, but that I think would be being unfair. I wrote what I felt then, not a penny more, not a penny less. This semester has indeed showed me signs that this article can be very wrong. For once, I hope I am very wrong!

A Poetic start?

2006-12-27T18:41:00.000+05:30

I was recently inspired by a senior of mine to rekindle my long-lost spirit of poetry writing. I thought a good first step would be to write a short poem on myself.

My previous attempts at poetry, when I was much younger, on topics like Fear, Darkness, Wolves, led many to imagine that I had/have suicidal and dark tendencies. Thus, I postpone such topics for a (much) later time.

This is my feeble attempt at the rejuvenation.

I wake up to the moonlit sky,
hoping to find a cause for this Life I lead,
wishing time and again, that Fate were not so shy,
and, thereby, allowing me glimpses of what I seed.

The stars twinkle, as if to tell me,
'Look what joy beholds our childish play',
enticed, I set all caution free,
knowing the world can wait another day.

I join the game of Hide and Seek,
hoping to learn the secret - one of blissful peace,
that Nature wishes to give us,the meek,
and yet, at the slightest doubt of intention, flees.

I feel this poem reflects, subtly, on my reactions to and opinions on certain situations rather well. In fact, this has become a part of my new 'about me' column on orkut.

Note 1: This is my second, successive, blog post, which defies the norm set till now. But then again, I am between Christmas and the New Year (reminds me of an old Saarang JAM topic(rofl)) , and so, exceptions are but the rule.

Note 2: I am open to criticism, of all kinds.

'Go, Ogle', they say, and I did.

2006-12-25T10:40:00.000+05:30

Google's popularity just keeps increasing day by day. This may mean money to two people I really respect, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, but like Naveen pointed out, the semantics aren't quite matching up to the growth. Here is one website that makes a really good use of Google's inability to semantize results! This site constructs sensible sentences on what it can learn about the search phrase through Google's Search Results.

A googlism for Pranesh yields :

pranesh is also relatively new to usqnet
hm.. I am, i guess.. what is usqnet?

pranesh is currently director of human resources at yahoo
Wow! I would love to be!!

pranesh is keen on the job
I am? hm.. Google doesn't know of my chemistry assignments yet.

pranesh is super on the ball with all sorts of reminders
I know I have this problem with reminding people in a elegant way, but google knowing of this?

On these , well, No Comments!!!
pranesh is the younger brother of aashish khan(?)
pranesh is sahir (?)
pranesh is familiar to and beloved of bay area audiences
pranesh is playing drone and caitlin is wailing softly(??)

Inspired by this, we had a hell of a time 'goolism'ing all our friends names. Obviously, the ego has a part in everything and sooner or later, I was asking 'What is IIT?' on googlism. A long list shows up, some of which include :
(P.S. i do know that IIT is also Illinois Institute Of technology and I have made sure to semantically distinguish between the two!)

iit is heaven and iitians are gods.
Boy! I would love to second this motion!

iit is building a tool that will drown
not unexpected!(hm.. this reminds me of another blooper i was telling someone just yesterday!)

iit is
wtf? was that censored by google?

on these I have no comments :
iit is easy (the true/false value of that statement would depend on its context)
iit is 1318(???)
iit is 1040(???)
iit is located two blocks on the left (not where i am sitting!)
iit is mild and follows a self
iit is the birthplace of spic macay (?)

I am simply in love with the simplicity of this idea and the sheer fun value it gives!

While I am at this business of making fun of Google, do check this out as well. I found this yesterday and even after a nights sleep, I am at a loss to see through the whole thing. The first time I read it, I felt it was a spoof. A second reading added more sense to the whole idea. Someone enlighten me!
P.S. I wouldn't mind working at the lunar base, with a whole lot of low cost servers, 34 other engineers, 2 message therapists(wow!) and a Sushi Chef!! (By the way, I am qualified in the sense that I can spell Britney Spears. ???. Check this out!!!)

And continuing this tradition of mine of ending with the ads on the telly, I must say one ad that really caught my eye is the 'Huggies ka "Waterfall!" wala ad' (The single and double quote hierarchy a part of PERL?). It definitely is more creative than the other ads on TV and has a lovely, inncoent, situational humour at its heart (as opposed to the slapstick ones I see these days).

I started blogging to improve my writing, and I don't think I did my cause complete justice in this post. But Oh well, its Christmas! Happy holidays and an enjoyable MI!!!

Update : P.S. I realise two hours after the post that Google is also an anagram of the "Ego Log". And just for the record, I love Google for all the integrability and the lightness of its applications.

Happy Xmas!!!

2006-12-25T10:35:00.000+05:30

A Merry Christmas and a Happy new Year to everyone!!!!
(reminds of me an old Saarang JAM topic though ;-) )

Btw, Its the 25th here. Blogger has failed to realise I am in India!!!!

An apology

2006-11-25T22:51:00.000+05:30

To all the people who visited the site the last time I mailed people about an update(Oh Boy!!! I am desperate, aint I??) here are my apoologies for not finding the article:
Write the article I did, about something I felt strongly. The post was published too. I gave it to a friend to read.. and he reconfirmed that it may not go down well. Three cups of coffee and a reread later I had to agree.... and so went the article into the bin.

The Oktoberfest at IITM and Other stories. NOT by Enid Blyton.

2006-10-24T12:26:00.000+05:30

Its been a VERY long time since the last post. To do justice to the sole 3 readers i have (me,myself and I), this long lapse does deserve an explanation.

Firstly, right after the last post came Shaastra(IITMs techfest), the only ISO-certified techfest in India,blah,blah,blah..... Shaastra was fun, fun and even more fun. As a fresher(or a freshie team), it was certainly heartening to reach the second round of the Math Modelling(an oxymoron?) contest. We finished in the top-4(thats a nice way of saying fourth) in the physics quiz. I could keep writing about the accolades,(pssst... i dont have any more) but it would bore the 3 sole readers to death. The best thing about Shaastra was probably the fact that there were for once a lot more people on campus. That sacred counter that touches two a week was hitting a hundred very often. Have personal standards dropped?;-)

Shaastra's SOE(spirit of engineering) event(s) seems to be cursed, especially the WTF(???)-Want To Fly. The plane was flying beautifully on its test-flights, but come the final day, with all the fanfare, the trumpets, the T.V cameras(and the accompanying female jouranalist ;-) ) (did i forget the Holy Priest?), all the plane did was sit there and grin. Yup, you guessed right, at the reporter. It refused to take off and wanted its fair share of 'air time' on T.V. And hence a lesson was learnt, never be like the plane and go shooting P.J.s around. I do pity the sophomores who slogged long and hard to build it. The only mistake they made was, they modelled it after Bajaj Pulsar....definitely male....(i can hear you saying , Now, that was a Desperate Joke). I told you, I dont shoot PJs around anymore, just DJs.

Shaastra also reintroduced me to that Creativity that has been long suppressed, with the introduction of IIT-Madras' version of the MIT Hack. First there was the lowering of the treble when Shaastra was declared open, so that our Co-Curricular Affairs Sec, Tusshar Ujjwal, had this kinda female voice, when he said " I declare Shaastra Open". Then there was the Video Conference with a nobel laureate, where every once in a while, Sesame Street would start playing. And then finally, there was this great, big Escher Knot,(yes 3D) the symbol of Shaastra, made solely out of playing cards and scissors(no glue,etc.. whatsoever), that was found hanging from the top in the middle of the IC&SR audi(for those respected junta who came here for counselling, thats where our counselling happened). Now that reaffirms our artisitc talents doesnt it. (Considering the 10th class incident where my math teacher mistook a circle I had drawn for a rectangle. Sob...Yes... The class WAS in splits)

As soon as Shaastra left, we had Quiz Week-2. The mug-toll was far less than Quiz Week 1. The reason : a coupla courses got cancelled. Do ask me sometime and I shall tell you about the successful, devious plans made by some to get these courses cancelled for the rest of the sem. The sad part, though, is that we still have to write the End-Sems for these courses. This, obviously translates into MUCH more time Studying.

I had to go home for Diwali in between quiz week 2. Did Enjoy a whole lot. It was a rather short trip though.(hm.. I can hear someone saying "Oh No! Not this Again!"). Yes , Murphys law did hold. The train was late, by a freaking one whole hour. So landed in IITM just 15 mins before the quiz started. Did make it in time though. How? Thats a looong story, that involes 2 cycles and a bus.

Thats about it. Oh yeah, there was also a whole lot of Gen-faart, a whole lot of fun, some back-stabbing(doesnt involve us freshies), a whole lot of, well, everything. And as I say goodbye, I must think about the last time I saw the telly. At Home. How can these ads get so dumb? especially the XBOX 360? Will it now displace the million dollar question, "Why Pepsi T.V ? "??

IITM Lingo

2006-09-28T21:58:00.000+05:30

The saying goes" To communicate, is not merely just to understand one another, but to give an intiutive feel to the conversation". Two months at IIT Madras has taught me most of the lingo there is and has even made me and a friend try our hands at inventing new ones.

The very joy of expressing what one wants to say in those two or three holy words is the joy that beckones when one finds lingo knocking at his doorestep as a fresher on campus. An equally important factor is the need to understand things around you, right from the conversation you are eavesdropping on between two fourth-years while sipping the cold coffe(elixir) at guru, or to nderstand IPs(Viola! our first piece of lingo-meaning Internal Publicity)(note:Ubuntu(read version for human beings) version is notices on the hostel notice board). So like most things around us-we complicate them to make them look cooler.

The very first thing that I learnt here was the word"junta". Everyone(well, except profs, for that eternal fear of cupping...) is referred to as junta. CS junta, IITM junta, basky junta, give-up junta, stud junta, well, you get the picture. This word truly gives me a democratic feel for the set up here. It makes one feel that he/she(?)(inspite of the pathetic ratio-we do tend to wander,dont we?) has a right in the matters here. The word junta can be used in degenerate cases too, eg. 1 junta 2 junta, some junta told me(when referring to some guy)....

The next thing an IITian should be worried about is RG or relative grading. The relative grading system here implies that someone else studying would mean less grades for you and vice-versa. A much dreaded word, RG, it has made many a junta(hazaar?) plan to hide others' books, cycles(so that X turns up late for the quiz), and even changed batteries in alarm clocks(well, for much the same reason...). Haazar is yet another word that is picked up from hindi, and is our replacement for IITBs "infi". It is usual to say haazar work, haazar pain, etc.

" r der " is probably THE catch phrase in IITM. It catches ones attention and makes him read the sentence completely. Is it the dreaded "class r der" or the even wors"Quiz r der" or is it the much awaited "grub r der" or better still, " style r der".

The point is, lingo is something that we cannot live without and is something that will pseudify IITM junta. "pseud? whats that?", i can hear you say. pseud bascially means cool, and since pseud should have a pseud spelling, we have 'pseud'. 'Pack' this conversation, shall we? And thats where 'pack' comes from. Pack class, Pack meet, Pack topic, and most used of all(at least in quiz week) pack gen faart. Gen faart is as one would guess general gossip with no obvious aim.It sometimes even leads us to surreal pedastals of arguments and dizzying heights, for eg. there was one on the word hypothetical. And contrary to the real life anology a gen faart can be very inviting!!!(especially during quiz week.)

So like the monkey(nps junta would get this) i am, I realise a flaw(halfway through the whole article)... if i could categorically list all lingo used here in IITM , it wouldnt be so diverse, would it? And giving it a second thought, lets just pack the whole thing. Maybe one could just GI.(google it)

An end to Quiz Week 1...

2006-09-16T01:20:00.001+05:30

Quiz week 1 is finally over, well, almost, for we, the all-pervading, CS junta(if I could be informal enough to say that) have our PMT pushed off to sometime next week. Quiz week 1 was marked by several notewrothy (and a larger no. of silly) incidents.

Its amazing to see how the facet of IIT Madras cascades from one end of the spectrum to another.Quiz Week marks its arrival by the sudden emergence of seriousness on many a jovial face. Rooms shut, doors bolt, blogging stops, Lit Soc takes a temporary halt... well, what not, suddenly the monkeys seem very incomprehensible. The academic aspect of IITM suddenly becomes so much more apparent. We finally remember that.. Hey there IS something called studying (education?hm..).And finally is reflected that eternal fear(among we freshies at least..)

One week to find them all(sleeping junta),
One week to screw them,
One week to catch them all,
And in the darkness(of knowledge) cup them.

The most notable things are the nights before each quiz. First, a very sustained effort is made to know what the portion is, and then what to leave out and what not to. The slumbers in classes and the many proxys suddenly seem a not very good thing to have done.Life in its harshest reality stares down on you while the terror of cupping breathes down your neck(well, it isn't so bad, but..). Then comes the so called consulting when you visit another friend to talk about Integrals or Divergence or even Errors, but at the fag end of the 2 and a half hour conversation, you realize that you have ended up on guitars, or on college fests or better still, on Elisha Cuthbert.

There was quite a lot of fun and nostalgia involved as well, right from our late night addas while eating mug noodles about our old times at some place called ramaiah or our late night freekick pratice sessions every time we would leave the hostel computer room. There were times when everyone would dream of the haazar free time after the quiz where they could relive the butterflies fluttering, blackbucks chasing spotted deer and that amazing feeling of lying in our bed staring up at the ceiling with NOTHING on our minds. And then there were quizzes which were easy, normal, and some in which you could end up with a total negative score(LOL...We had to write that one sitting on the floor outside the Class Room Complex all 267 of us. Hey no prizes for guessing who the prof was.)

Suddenly just as the gust comes, it leaves, and today after the last quiz there was some gaping hole in me. Nothing to worry about(well at least for another 10 days) and no portions to figure out suddenly left most of us high and dry.

And so the restless soul decided to catch Lage Raho Munnabhai(at a theatre not near US). We went there as usual after a detailed analysis of the various theatres giving weightage to various factors and finding the CGPA(something the ID assignment taught us well..). The factors included, AC, size of screen, cost and most importantly the CROWD.Anyway,the SCENE there didnt live up to the expectations. Too much party language? Well life is a party sometimes. The movie by the way was Fantastic(with the capital 'F').

And so here I am at the end of quiz week 1, with a blank mind(which would have probably reflected in this article) and trying to enjoy life till terror strikes again.. Quiz week 2.

Feynman may be god but i am not far behind....

2006-09-07T20:42:00.003+05:30

Life does the strangest things.... sometimtes u keep wating .... and keep waiting... and sometimes things move so quickly that you literally have to gasp......

With quiz 1 coming up shortly one would be wondering what I am trying to do (does blogging get u extra marks in some CS course??? lol...). I am inspired to say "There is no time like NOW to satrt something". Well on a philosphical scale, there is no time like anytime.... Here I am trying to post my first article and hoping.. yup hoping with crossed fingers and legs(too bad i cant cross my tounge...) that i have something witty to say.....

I have been online for the past 4 and half hours non stop(a new record of sorts....)hoping that someone turns up online... (like most things I do, in vain)... now 4 and half hours refreshing orkut or waiting like that puppy at the doorstep of Yahoo! msg bores you. and so I thought "THOU SHALT READ PHYSICS"(well at least for not failing the course...) and read it I did...obviously interrupted by some online friend or the other everytime i manage to identify one of those greek symbols that lie around everywhere.... and here i am ... after 4 hours of referring to many a greek dictionary I understand what a conservative field is(now dont let that put you off... as the name suggests these fields are traditional ones that rarely attack any creature who minds his own business...). Deep inside me is this satisfaction that I can now identify pi, theta, phi,alpha,.....etc...
So one day when i become famous and win the (Ig)nobel Prize and someone asks me how i thought of my ingenious equation.... i am going to be prepared...(feynman worked out equations in strip bars didnt he....)
"Well, I did my work waiting for a girl...."