There and back again

Friends, R-Landers and Countrymen

2012-03-07T00:37:00.001+05:30

Let's face it. I have not, in a long while, addressed the woes of my malnourished blog. On the face of it of course, the time stamps on the last few posts don't indicate an awful demise , but this is indeed a case of slow starvation. I have not written a small fraction of what I mentally designated as post content when I had been cycling to class or waking up after dozing off unintentionally in the afternoons or wanting to destroy the world in the middle of a Kinematics of Machines class(more on this later) or doing what I do best - acting busy with a laptop in front of me, a dozen tabs open on my browser and a dozen applications open simultaneously which I take a jolly long while to decide among and end up staring at the screen (like the one below) that appears after pressing the windows key. Precisely then, I had Ctrl+Ted on my browser again, opened blogger, typed out a few lines and let the tab join the unenviable list of inactive tabs that I consider offensive to close. And this,in short , I believe ,is how I came about having a string of drafts that I started at different times over the last two months. No doubt the world has now lost access to a minefield of wisdom all thanks to a dissuasive feeling of unconcern for my forever-to-be unfinished posts. However, I decided to complete one of them, without bothering to change how I started it making it absurd in that 'now'/'here' might or might not refer to current spacetime coordinates.

This is a spur-of-the-moment post. I was trying to do my discrete math tutorial sheet which I have got to submit later today and looked up to see the only work of art that adorns my otherwise plaintively bare walls. This small deviation from austerity was a gift from Rose and Sneha, my two dexterous friends who stay on my floor. In an undeserved deluge of generosity, they made very pretty wall posters, with appropriate captions for all of us. Mine reads "Keep calm and Sing" and has a sparkling quaver on top. I will put up a picture later. (later then is later now also). Here are the rest:

I would have just been lost in the beauty of the poster had it not been for an inconsiderate intrusion by a stray thought.

I believe no one has been able to accurately measure the speed of thought transitions but I think they are imperceptibly fast. In truth, I have no idea what exactly the stray thought I wanted to write about then is and after employing my sherlock-like skills of deception, I was two paragraphs into a paper on "Investigation of a complex space-time metric to describe precognition of the future" when I realized I was lost and came back to writing this again.

Nevertheless, I do very well remember the context in which the thought occurred, the drawer I put it in.
I don't intend to be very cryptic, but I will state without giving clear reasons that I won't bring it up again, whatever I wished to write about. I was about to jeopardize all the friendships I have built with people with one hell of a cynical post bordering on misanthropy. No, I have never ever hated people and everyone's lying when they say they do. I am obviously glad that I didn't articulate all my "spur-of-the-moment" thoughts into this terrible blog post that would have marked the end of social relationships and made me look like a veritable swine. Instead, here I am, letting my post take a meandering course but never so much treading on the interdict.

It all resurfaced when I heard my swaranjali audio playback. Obviously the people who congratulated me on my performance have either never heard South-Indian classical music or were too kind to admit the truth. I, a few minutes after listening to the recording, was shaken out of reality, flooded by an unhealthy diffidence, confused about fundamental truths of life and simply too thunderstuck to stay awake. So, as is only logical under these circumstances, I slipped under my quilt without further ado and had terrible nightmares. No prizes for guessing what, in essence, my mental response to the "Keep calm and sing" poster is these days. Past experience reveals that a few hours or probably a day is sufficient for me to bounce back to normal and live the life of a stud, when I am dealing with these colossal revelations of my failures and inabilities. A lot of time has passed since I played listener to the blare I produced on stage and so this post is spared some extreme forms of pessimism. If you don't believe me, I started writing this:

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*This post is a risky proposition. Risky because I might not like the fact that I wrote it in the future and most certainly, you wouldn't like reading it. Then, why write at all? That's because I can't think of why not.

When I got off the stage with that ridiculous smile on my face,I knew I wouldn't like it. I didn't quite believe that I would loathe it altogether.

I am currently typing and backspacing sentences because I can't decide on where to draw the line when it comes to criticizing myself and on a freely accessible webpage.

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I usually begin with the premise that I am wrong or should have done better. So, starting here, why was I even provoked to write that supposedly misanthropic post? I succumb to the acerbic compulsions that stem from within, and meticulously follow this weird train of thought I am often led into these days.

Compared to how I sounded on stage, I probably sing better in my sleep. An emphatic conclusion that I am surely the kind that flops when it matters is thereby inevitable. Then, I am mentally seeing screenshots of myself after different exams (two bad attempts at JEE, for one). I would just have to obviously choose a better way to work instead of all this whining. I eventually do cheer myself up some way and am usually quick to realize I crib in vain. And it should have all ended here with me going to the lab or propped up against the wall, book in hand. But, that almost never happens. Instead, I am ridden with dreadful angst. I now wonder if you would think I am making no sense or worse I am experiencing some sort of clinical depression and write on my blog to get help from readers. There are four ways I react to these misgivings. One, feel horrid and do close to nothing about it. Two, find out where , why, how, get into the sundries and then feel miserable. Three, just continue with whatever work I am supposed to be engaged in all the while strongly believing that I am a complete loser. Four, and this one is recent, tell myself I wasn't that bad after all and I probably set the bar too high.

Just to be clear, Way Four is heresy. My catechisms for life tell me that I am absolutely mistaken. I believe that I am kidding myself when I believe I believe the things I repeat to myself over and over. But, aren't all inertial frames are equivalent? Since one can never tell one's own properties from any experiment performed within one's frame, why would I be wrong to assume I am probably not that bad? I would just be accepting that a contingency is true to suit my case. But, I won't be right either. I sometimes think it won't matter much if everyone thought so too. If it was accepted as a universal standard that everyone can safely presume they are as good as will make them feel good about themselves while that there might be a strict dichotomy between their presumption and the truth mustn't be forgotten. The possibility that the dichotomy might not exist is what keeps confidence from being farcical. It might be a sad truth to come to terms with but this isn't meant to diddle you out of all your beliefs, acknowledging this proposition surely won't plunge your life into a nihilistic continuum. There is still room for joy and pride born out of achievement, for pomp and vanity born out of victory, for an everlasting urge to learn and better one another. You behold no king simultaneously accepting the fact that you won't make one ever. your best bet is to become comparatively superlative and that makes for a good reason to work for. Yet I know many people who won't hear a word more of this. Why not?

I am trying to add dependencies to a scala project on Intellij Idea (scala plugin on eclipse just didn't do it for me) and haven't managed to find out how. I am new to the IDE and I don't know how to use it. And then, bright chaps at SO tell me how to and it works like a charm. When I spend one day running a hello-world in one IDE in one language, that my pace is insufferably slow makes me nervous and edgy. I am irked at how I am a laggard at SDSLabs, how little time is left for finishing up work, why I have been slow and missing deadlines. I am, for want of a better word, amazed, when I realize that I might learn, a few more programming languages, some more kritis , more about the special theory of relativity, how to implement bloom filters, to enjoy death metal, to cook, why Greece faces an economic crisis, to ride my bike with no handlebars, to make conversation with introverts, to solve fractal equations, to read political literature, the rules of football, which is better- meanshift or lda, whether daylight saving should even exist, to apply the paradox of backward induction to the competitive game among Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon ,Hindi ,how git works among other things just as surely as I will never ever learn a thumping number of things that strike my fancy. Instead of using all my waking hours to achieve that self-gratifying point along the learning curve each day, I submit to self-indulgence that cruelly takes up a lot of my time.

That's why I ask "why not?" Because when there are none that don't have tiny slips in concentration that cost them unduly, when there is no one that doesn't always perform as well as possible when tested, when there are none that understand nuances at a glance, when there are none that act fast , process faster and produce gargantuan output, I wouldn't feel low. So, if the universe conspired to accept the proposition, I would be a happy loser, seeking camaraderie in failure. In the end, I am not relatively disadvantaged if I start working at any point. Of course, such a world is not a lie. It's still a world where the geniuses stand aside, the naturals are easily told apart, but for all others, it's a confused mess of strengths and work really. Billions of years after light passed through one side of a black hole, if you can still choose which side it indeed passed through, isn't it ludicrous to hope for that which has not yet come to pass or who knows, might never? Hope is quite antithetical to reality. It's an advanced choice experiment that pays in terms of happiness.You believe in yourself, work, get better and derive from every success, happiness, which is at the kernel of working to get smarter and learning more. The essence of this might extract out into a circular argument: Be successful to be successful. There it is, a time-tested solution to the problem , a surefire entrance into the circle of happiness, an initial assumption whose truth increases with reward, a cushioned fall-back for greats and laypersons alike, the power to talk of work incomplete, the justification for rashness, a time variant, the greatest reassurance mankind gives to itself, the right to ignore past experience and invest belief in nothingness , the authority to defy the fact that observation dictates results-Confidence. Truth or lie, unfounded or well-reasoned, deserved or undeserved, it is better to keep confidence in confidence.

P.S. Sincere apologies to Rose , Sneha , Priya and Chandana whose artistic works would have been the subject of this post had I not rambled on about some lame crap.

Ustad Salamat Ali Khan

2012-02-02T23:09:00.002+05:30

you remember the regular post I was talking about? It's not this one. Well, last year Kartikeya , an immensely talented chap I know from the music section, posted a certain youtube video on facebook, that I will remember watching forever. I did remember that I heard something, not in the least bit ordinary, but couldn't recall the tune or the musician's name. Whenever it popped up in my mind last year, I made a brief search of Kartikeya's profile and more recently, out of desperation, thought of using this . That the Pakistani musician had an "Ali" in his name did cross my mind and that it was a vintage video with a concert-like setting , recorded from a black and white TV set. That clearly doesn't do much to reduce the sample space for search. I am totally running short of time today and I probably have to reduce the number of hours of sleep for tonight. Besides, I like to post on my blog leisurely. Also, I planned on writing about this before anything else, but telling you that I re-discovered the video today when the topic came up incidentally somehow gained precedence over all the unmet deadlines and pre-planning of post order. you get the cue. Some things are so extraordinary that they are best left without being crowned with other adjectives and attempting a description of.
On reading the wiki article on the huge family of musicians ,each of whom were endowed with musical skills of such measure as will be realized to be superlative on playing an audience to for a second and hearing of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Mujahid Mubarak Ali Khan & Party for the first time,(*may be they are pretty popular here in North India, not among the majority of people ,of course,whose tastes include the Times of India in newspapers, Chetan Bhagat in authors and a million foreign brands they cant pronounce in clothing), my mind was simply blown away.
Listen to the paternal uncle of the celebrated artist Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and brother of Fateh Ali Khan:

* I would have rephrased that and expressed my opinion in a polished manner, but since I don't have enough time, I can't be bothered and I don't care enough to edit submitted posts. Also because what's said is not completely untrue either.

How Flipkart made my day

2012-01-24T17:08:00.000+05:30

I am writing another regular post but an urgent need to post just came up about two minutes ago.
Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy is said to have had the largest private book collection of his day, with about six hundred volumes. Present day order dictates that the then impressive number 600 isn't very awe-inspiring now what with the ease of collection of e-books. I personally know people who still buy classics and suchlike to add to their collection, and even if I weren't sparing, I wouldn't think it's a smart move.

I am no book scout, not a book rat and gadgets don't enjoy any impunity either. Although I admire sleek-looking ipads and enjoy looking at these, I have never really wanted one of them. The sad absence of demand is because of the missing "desire" element and so, the willingness to spend and affordability are completely out of question, although these factors are easy to take a guess at.

Since I don't plan to drag on the subject and take you to the back of beyond because of other preoccupations , the point is I don't collect ANYTHING just so that I have a "collection" which I can stare at everyday / create a use for. So, my life doesn't involve waiting for ,i-phone5 but surely does, its review. I have said earlier, my phone is an antique but totally doesn't confuse me in any way. Mostly, the habit of giving an elaborate prelude to everything I have to say take its toll on me, either by diminishing the impact on the listener or the sheer length of the prologue-time kills my own excitement which I would initially consider unthinkable to let pass without sharing with anyone.

In this case , though the excitement is not gone, work beckons. I find my way around hinterland and get to the purpose of this post, the one exception to my general rule of materialistic thriftiness, to my usual nonchalance to new goods in the market, to the equation limited ownership makes with happiness. This is what it is:

I had one item in my wishlist on amazon and flipkart and waited for the opportune moment to buy it. This wait approximately lasted for one and a half months and ended today. The item of importance was in stock on amazon before but after reading so many lines on the same topic, you wouldn't be surprised when I tell you I ordered and cancelled about 5 times and thought of ways to reduce shipping costs by asking some relatives etc to bring it from the US and even for a moment (one disgraceful moment) considered buying lesser alternatives. Finally, the D-Day arrived and when I saw this mail,

an instant plus the time taken to load the page is all it took to order. I'll have to wait 8 business days to sing the welcome song for my new kindle fire case, but I don't mind. After all, "buying cheap" makes you feel better than saving. I am so glad my desperation to own this did not insinuate into a rash decision to buy it earlier for a higher price because now an abiding period of self-content follows after making an economical buy of that "one" item I badly wanted.

If you find this for <708, don't tell me unless you hate me.

yes, now, it's time to return to normalcy again and do useful work.

2012 is in.

2012-01-01T00:00:00.000+05:30

Hello Folks! In a crazy test of my typing skills, I am making a super quick post to wish everyone a safe and successful new year. Three minutes to go, I can hear the mad squawking in the name of DJ night. Half an hour ago, I was wishing I won't get to sense the bloodthirst right at the start of the year, but life indeed gives you lemons. Even as I pretend to ignore it and the excited screeches accompanying it, I am mentally making resolutions for the year and hope to be a better person this year. Alright, time to perform my new-year-midnight ritual of reading a few lines of my current favorite book . Buh Bye.

Long Sigh, Perpetual Grouch

2011-12-20T18:49:00.000+05:30

We are in the middle of a sudden cleaning operation on old cruft that has been gathering dust for many years. I am forced to make a quick post because I discovered some pretty hilarious scribbling/doodles/poems hidden among tons of garbage that once meant the world to my sister and me. My sister, always credited to be the more informed sibling , seems to have collected newspaper clippings of random events during the 1990s and wrapped them up neatly with proper captioning. Those were the days when the folio came as an occasional supplement with the Hindu, when we both made greeting cards for all the festivals during the year, when I played geetams on a small casio keyboard, when I thought I would one day be an astronaut, basically when I was smaller and pudgy. Just one quarter of our yesteryear treasures were uncovered and promptly disposed off. The rest of the miscellany that actually belongs to me and from before my teens, shall remain untouched at least for over a year until she decides to purge us of it all. I don't really get down to do these things myself because that would mean working. Anyway, A "project" on French Open 2003, one on Dr. Abdul Kalam, record notebooks of various sizes and some greeting cards later, I found a piece of paper, containing huge block letters in backscript. This along with two full pages of illegibly crowded writing , also in backscript,among some organic chemistry notes, written sometime in 12th standard, probably.
I could have put the picture here but I am back in R. At the end of the sombre ranting, written most mournfully, I had suggested to myself that I should stop talking forever and seal my mouth with super glue. Below was the structure of super glue (ethyl cyanoacrylate). I laughed at what an amusing goof I had been three years ago, when I saw it, but come to think of it, I am no different now. I crib indefinitely like some cockamamie old woman and managed to get unspeakably bad grades this semester.
A new year's 'round the corner, you say? *On the millionth attempt at writing this sentence, I shall obsequiously do the encouraging-inner-voice's bidding and say , "well, yeah!".

*if I may add, that's a self-referential sentence and I like pointing them out. This one is one too.
P.S. Second half of the post written and the entire post published on the 30th.

Free and Open-source

2011-12-14T19:45:00.001+05:30

When I came back to myself, I realized kindle fire may be tablet-technology overkill. Well, this may be a slight exaggeration and unfair even, but a well-reasoned determination, nevertheless**.
So, before I came back to myself, I registered the kindle, thought of a name for a good long while and edited it on the amazon website. It's a different matter that I ultimately named it "Nisha's Kindle" but the mood was that of excitement, albeit temporary.
If truth be told, the opinion of amazon that I had previously was limited and of someone who has never used its services. Half an hour into my first visit to amazon.com didn't help with a good first impression. Ten years ago, one couldn't have dreamed of having the whole world of books , millions of videos, music, movies , TV shows and comics, all a click away and more importantly, all for free. Alright, what I have in mind is so artless that ol' Forrest could have put it across in these simple words:

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world

Just when I discovered that a bunch of free kindle books shipped by amazon are all old classics a book-seller in pondy bazar wouldn't mind giving for free and with benefits such as the characteristic smell of old books, I checked my email. It said, "Welcome to Amazon Prime". I rushed back to the site to uncover what I expected was lying in wait: All three "benefits" of amazon prime are for users in the US only. (There is a discount on shipping and a marginal discount in prices. I remained unaffected because I didn't intend on buying anything anyway).
Why this pointless accusation against a private profit-making service that has every right to name whatever prices it wants? I could instead download pdfs for FREE from library.nu , convert them for FREE to .mobi files and enjoy all the freebies no lesser*. I am doing precisely that while simultaneously wondering WHY exactly someone would buy off amazon that that others do/can find for FREE. May be there is something about gifts and possessions I still can't quite figure out.
It also just occurred to me (read kept occurring to me every watch out meeting this semester be it a discussion on editorial/techila/cartoon strip) that "Free and Open-source" is a beautiful concept in itself. Blogger is free, email is free, youtube is free, browsers are free, wikipedia is free, the OS I am using right now is free , github is free ,why, open source softwares have pervaded every field from Math to healthcare . Free and open to all. Rice and TVs in Tamil Nadu are free, if you vote for the right party, making your choice depending on what you want for free. But, that's not what I am talking about. My degree of prudery doesn't permit me to comment on the repercussions on different variables, on shifting to some kind of gift economy***.
Information goods , when obtained for free, leave a piquant feeling in the mind. And it only feels right that knowledge goods be transferred into a giant cesspool that's accessible to anyone and everyone. Billions of users across the world contribute lines of code to software that everyone uses. One could see change logs and follow the development of any open-source software. (Of course it's not as simple as it sounds). There's no catch*. This is an age when provision of information/services for free is the definitive goal of producers to an extent that it 's reason enough for trying to get the best in the market.

And as for my kindle fire, It shall remain my good companion as the first and most probably the last device I ever owned, (my phone can be spared the embarrassment of being called a "device". But, my good ol' phone continues to serve me well) till it lives out its natural life.

* Of course , sometimes conversion to .mobi might not deliver a convenient file, good enough for reading. But, you see, there is a fair trade-off here. And reading pdf files ,as they are, is about as comfortable as reading on a laptop screen.
** One can experience the pleasures of book-reading on an LCD screen but there is no 3G, silk is not all that fast, the OS is some kind of customized android and more importantly, it has very limited memory and no SD card slots. But, it allows access to amazon's cloud storage (hence the restriction on memory) and is at least a wifi-enabled device.
*** Neither can I guess the consequences of a bitcoin economy.

Small steps make way for a big change

2011-11-02T12:21:00.001+05:30

At times, Somaly seems to have survived her nightmare childhood unscathed. But the scars still run deep. Nights are especially difficult for her. As she drives through Phnom Penh’s chaotic streets, she confides that she still has nightmares and rarely gets more than three or four hours’ sleep at a stretch. “I cannot get the girls out of my mind,” she says. “They are my girls, victims like me.” When asked if she fears for her own life, she responds, “How can they kill me if I’m already dead? They killed me a long time ago.”

Reader's Digest carried this article many issues ago. For someone who only deems the magazine as a travel companion and is not a subscriber, I have been able to recall articles on appropriate occasions, surprisingly many times. For instance, when I visited this link , I just knew where to begin. So, Here goes:

Not a month ago, 285 girls, who had been called 'Nakusa'(or unwanted) in Mahrashtra were rechristened. The world has always been caught in a dirty imbroglio when these events come to light. A woman is raped every hour in the country and the indictment rate is staggeringly low. The media plays the sensational-izer as well as it neglects the role of the accuser. The politicians , many of them uneducated , are caught making not the very best of remarks about women's issues, on a daily basis . Media soundbites that play throughout the day inform us of the downright disgraceful 'comments' and the 'controversies' , but none of this changes the appalling statistics concerning crime rates against women.

The urban educated women have better odds of finding justice than those who live in obscure rural areas, mostly unaware of their rights. Around half a million women experienced rape or brutal sexual assaults during the Rwandan genocide and millions of others in Afghanistan, Iran, Congo stoically endure deplorable acts of violence and oppression. A small percentage of these cases may have been brought up in the international courts of justice but the fact that women, world over, are a persecuted lot, is not a new one. Having said that, there are still many who need to be sobered up. Reprehension for the way women are treated, justice for the victims, provision of equal rights and opportunities for the little girl and ensuring her development, may undeniably be problems that require political intervention. But given the speed of governmental activities, the universal laxity shown towards 'action' against women's issues, the onus is on us to help the girl child.

For a movement with no apparent leadership, with a complicated agenda and demands, ' Occupy Wall Street' has been highly successful so far. As the movement becomes two months old, I can't help but wonder at the strength of the educated middle class and their ability to express their dissatisfaction, if any, now and earlier in time. Considering the current scenario, a massive peaceful movement to help adolescent girls by educating them and providing with opportunities to grow is not a far cry from here.
There is no doubt that educating girls marks the end of poverty. The key is to have a movement roadmapped for mobilization of all nations.

I stand for a world where girls have equal rights , are educated and never discriminated against. Although I believe a big revolution with measures by the governments is the only way to create paradise, I would like add, in the same breath, that it's possible for each of us to make a difference.
I don't think I can lead a revolution but I can help in educating one girl. That will eventually make a difference. Play this video.

I show my support to the girl effect and earnestly hope it multiplies by 600 million.
With conscious volition, a fundamental change, in our mindsets and the milieu in which a girl is brought up can be created. Show your support by spreading the word, helping little girls in your own way, condemning acts of discrimination and investing in girls' education.
Making a better world is well within our capacities.

Thanks.

Nisha.

Deepavali and Postary

2011-10-26T13:17:00.000+05:30

Hello Blog! You now have a competitor. I started to use postary.com that's meant for people who have already performed dirges for their blogs or might in the future. Also, it's for other people who just want avenues to quickly post something that's longer than 140 characters and not viewed/liked/commented on by a gazillion fb users (fb-ers, anyone? 'Twits' sounds very natural.)
I owe Abhay one for this and the routine web/tech-education feeds that he is always chock-full of. Do check it out - http://postary.com//twitter/nisha_rivendell/its-deepavali-today .
So long and Happy Deepavali.

P.S. The title might sound nothing short of lame but I kinda like the sound of it.

Vim for Scala , Ruby

2011-10-22T19:09:00.000+05:30

Getting to start writing one bit of code takes me infinite time. Mostly because, I would have to install new software and that would require cloning from git , unpacking and setting variables etc. I end up googling or searching on stackoverflow and at the end of the day, whatever I intended to install and start using, typically doesn't work, leaving me feeling all stupid and inefficient. Anyway, before I waste more time, I will quickly tell you how to extend your support features on vim ( especially for scala), in case vim is your preferred IDE . Scala plugin in eclipse is pretty unreliable and moreover, vim is just faster and easier for light-weight coding.

On searching, you might find this link. https://github.com/hallison/vim-ruby-sinatra ( especially for sinatra ).
And, this one:

https://github.com/vim-ruby/vim-ruby

You could read the install markdown files to know how to automatically add the specified files to your vim folder.

But, a better thing to do, would be this:

The default config folder for vim is ~/.vim . You usually don't have one. So, if all you want is syntax highlighting and support, don't bother setting $VIM in your .bashrc file. For including syntax highlighting, trying to copy language.vim files (ruby.vim or scala.vim etc) to /usr/share/vim/vim73/(syntax/compiler/indent/ftdetect etc) might not work.

Here 's an easier way:

use this as your .vimrc file ( create a new file with this name in your home directory. vim automatically loads the .vimrc file each time it's used. )

set nocompatible "Not vi compativle (Vim is king)
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
" Syntax and indent
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
syntax on " Turn on syntax highligthing
set showmatch  "Show matching bracets when text indicator is over them

colorscheme delek
" Switch on filetype detection and loads 
" indent file (indent.vim) for specific file types
filetype indent on
filetype on
set autoindent " Copy indent from the row above
set si " Smart indent
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
" Some other confy settings
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
" set nu " Number lines
set hls " highlight search
set lbr " linebreak
" Use 2 space instead of tab during format
set expandtab
set shiftwidth=2
set softtabstop=2

( taken from stackoverflow)

Now, create a .vim directory in your home folder and simply copy paste the files with the same directory name from the extracted tarball from the vim-ruby repo for ruby . For Scala, look into your scala directory. scala.vim files are available in the misc/scala-tool-support/vim directory. (version >2.8.x)

So, now, type away in vim with proper indentation and syntax-highlighting.

Bye.

Unknown Destiny

2011-10-12T01:05:00.000+05:30

Yesterday morning I had found my cycle punctured when I had already been running late to class by five minutes. Irked at my cycle's betrayal, struck by the sudden realization that I had no time for an afternoon nap, having the accuser in me smirking at the guilty while mulling over how nothing useful had transpired during the vacations, I was convinced that that was the best time for apocalypse. In fact, I was so convinced that I removed the otherwise pointless drawing sheet with very ugly views of die-casters, acting as a sun-shield, from my head, in a move to encounter whatever, head on. Stumbling feebly across the road, there was a puny little kid, who, in a series of serendipitous events, was evading being hit by vehicles honking and zooming past her.

She seemed too little to even stand firmly on her knees and as one would expect, the bystanders were too busy to care. I noticed, while crossing the road, how a few of them spared the wailing kid a benevolent smile and walked past very kindly. Minutes later, the mother, visibly shaken, came to collect the kid, seated on a small bunk in the security guard's chamber inside KB and crying her eyes out. I walked to the mess leaving this particularly voluble guard to enter into an expected soliloquy.

R, like all the other places in the world, has its lot of desolate and needy people. More than a year ago, I met an elderly man, bent with age, staggering along the corner of the street. As we walked back to where I presumed his house was, he spoke slowly of was and when and I politely nodded whenever he paused. Perhaps talking to someone who had no clue what he was saying was the closest he had got to a conversation, in days. I spotted the same old man walking alone months later. It was bitterly cold and a passerby, a godsend, offered him a ride when I had been looking around helplessly, holding him to provide balance. Perhaps, I was thinking while having lunch, I could manage a few brilliant replies and even engage him in a lighthearted conversation in Hindi, if I see him around now. I chuckled at the bazinga.

I poked around the spoon in a plate of dal and rice, pensively for a while. One of the reasons, people- me , you and everyone, can't be bothered with societal change, is that we believe there are 'others' entitled to do it. If the kid had got under a car, it would have been most unfortunate. Surely, *someone* must have noticed her. Security guards and the callous mother are to blame. Given that the kid looked pitiful in rags and with snot on her nose, I wasn't very excited when I picked her up. Besides, the world is full of mishaps. Misfortune turns around in a vicious cycle no one has the power to reason with or stop altogether. And of course, hasn't Rand asked us to immerse ourselves irreproachably deep in our own business ? Didn't she say, altruism is nothing to be proud of and on the contrary, selfishness will make you a paragon of virtue? Never mind what she actually meant, never mind if the context was entirely different. After all, in a world where half the people thinking 'Anna is India' haven't read through the propositions of the lokpal bill, understanding weird philosophies isn't a common trait . Everybody is a classy theorist on social issues. Giving a rupee to a child begging on the street is bad encouragement . Buying a candy from Aunty's Burger shack is not very morally incorrect , but, what happens to a million other hungry children? There are other fascinating, tenable justifications that sprout out of the highly empirical mind.

Whatever the reason for nonchalance is, if the world's providence is dictated by its karma, making post-apocalyptic plans doesn't really seem inappropriate.

And this is not an empty rhetoric

2011-09-04T17:26:00.000+05:30

Firstly, You may consider it the single biggest insult to the lamest poem ever written, if I called the lines below, a poem. As you already know,I don't write poems. But, you see, reading http://wona.co.in/blog/?p=31 made me realize I have something to say on the subject . So, I chose to use my nice upgraded blogger account, which I have, not very regretfully, ignored in a while, for the purpose. Then again, you might think a 10-minute-exercise-in-writing-crap is not better than 10-minutes-not-spent-in-writing-crap, to which I say, "to each, his own". Bye for now.

You may have seen the purple cow,
Chances are, its presence nigh escaped you.

You may never have seen the purple cow,
No, that doesn't strike a chord with me. Read Verse 1.

You hoped to never see the purple cow.
Make no mistake, Wasn't it way better than you 'd expected?

You may be impervious to the purple cow,
Well, may god save you.

But, I can tell you anyhow,
if you are the purple cow,
You are the purple cow.
And, this is not an empty rhetoric.

You are most unwelcome

2011-08-06T18:50:00.000+05:30

Having stoically observed Murphy's law at work since I woke up this morning, I wasn't exactly too excited to see an uninvited and an aye - unwelcome visitor to my room especially when it decided to announce it's arrival by scurrying over my hand and into my cupboard. Yes, 'It ' was this ugly 4-inch member of the Sphenodontia order , that has given me gooseflesh on many an unpleasant occasion, has dared to provoke that high-pitched squeal from my throat that beings higher up the scale of evolution haven't.

I swore loudly after allowing the lizard to make itself at home in my wardrobe and bolted. I paced up and down the lift and when I landed on the ground floor, I summoned the warrior. And, so, we went up to my lizard-infested dwelling. These lizards are f***ing drama queens, I tell you. The elegance and intelligence with which the warrior operated stunned us( Ms.Perelman and me) as much as her bravery.

The reconnaissance hardly took her time. We spotted the creature cowering behind this brown cardboard box . The warrior's eyes immediately scanned my table for a weapon. A few blank notebooks strewn about recklessly, a winnie-the-pooh pen stand among other useful items justified the choice of a poor black umbrella for the job. But, even the two girls cringing in fear and watching the action from a safe distance, could sense its ineffectiveness. So, with lines of distress written all over my face, I took the lift again, believing that Tanya of the second floor was in the possession of a broom stick. No, our grand plan didn't involve using the broom stick for flying, because the reptile in question wasn't a dragon. I came back up unsuccessfully when Priya said: "She has the weapon. Just Watch!" and then turned her attention to the field.

Cutting the LONG story short, the three of us, stood against the parapet, after the little hide-and-seek game , staring straight ahead and shaking our heads in repugnance. After a while, I managed - " Sneha, I don't know how to express my gratitude...".
A few minutes later, I stood painfully looking at my room that had just been turned inside out by lizzie-powers, and resolved in silence to rearrange quickly, bathe and finally embark on the journey I intended to make in the morning. It was prevening then and my laundry afternoon turned out to be catastrophic.
It doesn't require terrific intelligence to realize that ONE functional washing machine will just wash, wash and die if 623 people are lined up to make it wash at the same time. Call me a whiny kid if you will , but, dividing your entire afternoon into twenty-nine-minute time slots in which you occupy yourself with a variety of activities including staring at Dream houses , and visiting that pointless washing room every time hoping to catch the machine in its moment of freedom doesn't make for self-gratification.

While I was grumbling in my head, Ishika passed by. "Lizard?" she inquired. I let out a sad sigh. "I have learned to live with them." My eyes welled up with tears of admiration.

Anyway, when you do actually turn up to do some work and instead end up chronicling this kind of a day, you might just fall into an inaccessibly deep mine of dissatisfaction. I wish I could tell you what happened next . Instead, I could let you know that I am currently exclaiming, "Ah, the ways of this world". Believe it or not, a rat is running around in the lab right now. Oh, god, will this day never end?

Self-indulgent Rambling- It all ends

2011-07-11T21:27:00.000+05:30

Notwithstanding the caveat the title provides, I see that you are game for anything that I might have you read. Well, All I can tell you is that, given the quiescent state of this summer vacation and my abysmally poor reading habits, you can't expect me to have much to say. But, this, like all other activities of an unabashedly jobless life I have been leading, is an act of self-indulgence. I considered for a moment to give this post different titles- "5 seemingly unrelated things that I want to tell you about", "5 seemingly unrelated things you might want to relate", "5 seemingly unrelated things that are actually unrelated" , "5 seemingly unrelated things that don't change the world" and so on. But obvious reasons such as, sounding like a cracked.com article which might later make agents of cracked diss me in the prospective article "N inept people(?)who can't write the most shitfaced article on cracked", made me come up with another title.

You probably know that someone observed clicking the first links iteratively starting with a random wiki article (by that I don't mean just a random wiki article) may ship you to the page on mathematics / philosophy. You have been using a similar paradigm to correlate by pressing links iteratively in your mental repositories. You find connections faster than clicking links on wiki with a 60 Mbps connection (in Tokyo, Perhaps) . I know better than to shoo away one or two readers that have reached here( Bravo!) by drawing weird connections between Why I considered these 5 things to be blog-worthy and epistemology. But, in case you don't know how I do that, and are irked at poor camouflages to fake claims, like the one about tuna fish and relativity or String theory or something in Angels and Demons, you haven't read The Return of the me. So, good for you. I shall directly skip to the main content without further ado.

3. A chat , a few days ago, reminded me of how I have never listened to unforgiven 3 , although I had heard of its existence and taken quite a liking to unforgiven 2. The song, which didn't release as a single, has a piano riff at the beginning. It's not the average guitar solo, or the piano at the beginning or the commendable job of the bassist with the rhythm, but the enthralling voice looping in the baser notes, that made me listen to the song many times over. A bewitching voice hitting plain notes with unmistakable precision might make an average song in terms of instrumentals( I don't know enough to understand intricacies) get a second chance from the listener. But, the rule doesn't apply to low quality music that comprises of unexpected notes stringed together for no reason, that people can compose in about two minutes. (Just to be clear here, I am talking about these bands and others that produce other grades of music, incomparable, according to me, to Classical Music).

Lest I sound like someone trying to draw comparisons between the Hindu and the Times of India while being an illiterate, I shall get back on track and say that the song is competent enough to be unforgiven 2+1.
But, the "forgive me.." part at the end may give the impression of a solemn apology for the mediocre music they may have made in the past.

4. Speaking of +1s , I am not going to review G+ because everyone 's done it already and I kinda didn't bother doing much with it except pop people into circles whenever I deem necessary on getting notifications. But, the web abounds with, stories of how Zuckerberg is/was the most followed user on G+ or how you can use huddle to group messages on plus or some rather interesting stuff about plus ,linux-style (http://captnemo.in/blog/2011/07/07/linus/) . Every service google launches is ex post facto given its large empire and plus is no exception. It stands to reason then that google, the established web monarch, can seamlessly integrate a minefield of their own features like buzz and gtalk into plus and look a lot more geekier.
So, early analyzers (http://xkcd.com/918/) may be left to eat their own words. Or may be not.

5. In one of my few HS-102 classes last semester, I was battling sleep valiantly (the classes were held at 8 a.m.) by writing down some profound stuff, that looked quite indistinguishable from the behavioral sciences notes everyone in the immediate vicinity seemed to be writing down on dictation (except not so grammatically incorrect). It was about how Holden, in the Catcher in the Rye , rightly understood human behavior and thoughts at the inner most layer as well as at the epithelial. The book is a revelation in that it recognizes the white elephant in the room (phony behavior) which most of us like feeding bananas to and are happy to live with, embracing the benefits. Now, that may be judgmental. And there's an another elephant in the room, the quality of being judgmental. May be that's me passing anthropological judgments. Or, may be I am just entering an infinite loop. Aborting...

6. While partitioning the array might itself take more loc in an oop language, the code for a quicksort taking the first element as the pivot would be
qsort([]) -> []; qsort([P|Rest]) -> qsort([Fpart || Fpart <- Rest, Fpart<=P]) ++ P ++ qsort([Spart || Spart <- Rest, Spart >P])
(in Erlang) and that looks almost like writing down the algorithm mathematically. Even for somebody like me who is "hello world"-ing in functional languages, it's pretty apparent that they are far different and more advanced than oop languages that we learnt "model the real world". Among the few reasonable analogies I have made , this one must find a place : functional languages share the field with oop languages in much the same way as OS es that use the linux kernel do with Windows.

Indolence is something that grows stronger and more persistent in cases where the afflicted doesn't shake it off. Or it may be because of its incessant grip that it's impossible to force it to beat it. Anyway, the point is when you can't drown yourself in useful activity and as a result can't sound very informative or not have a lot of useful things to tell others, you might think it's swell to talk about current hashtags that everyone doesn't seem to have had enough talking about. Although it is an almost accurate description of the situation here,You could pretend this is a disclaimer with all the salt for 7. because I am not trying to do what I just told you about.

7. So, July 15th is officially the end of the Harry potter saga (in our country). I read in the papers that some fans couldn't help shedding tears at the world premiere of the last movie. Relax people, (Spoiler Alert!) Harry doesn't die in the last part. He kills Voldemort. Anyway, giving satire, exaggeration and lameness,their well-deserved rest for a few seconds, I have to say that I feel grateful for having grown up with Harry.( A nine year old cousin I met a few days ago,was shivering with excitement as she made me stack trace how Harry becomes the owner of the elder wand which I finally did after struggling to remember details. As we both animatedly discussed on, I noted with pleasure that I was born at a good time).
You might want to read entire posts dedicated to Harry Potter that sound more like a fitting tribute to our dear spell-caster that a fan would approve of.

P.S. Now you know why I started numbering from 3. There are, incredibly, a few more things to add but I am in no mood and observed that the purpose of this post will be defeated if I forced myself.

For want of a better title, "Wordy or concise?"

2011-06-17T23:13:00.000+05:30

"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man."- Sir Francis Bacon

I was once told this by a master of literature, a gifted orator who always manages to hold an admirable percentage of his audiences in rapt attention, regardless of their ability to appreciate the subject and the amazingly high degree of enthusiasm they exuded towards language, art, philosophy or the umbrella subject of his well-delivered discourses, with vivacious words, a deeply felt passion for language, witticism, his intensely animated enunciation coupled with occasional, exaggerated diction that heightens the comic value , strikingly humorous countenances most scrutable when ruthlessly satirical and simultaneously funny.

In stating that the man is a natural for the sort of work that is ideally required of teachers of language and communication, I would say, going a little further, that he is one rare soul one would, feel honoured to have met and been an audience to, and present the same status to, in one's mind, as the Beatles among musicians, a Picasso among artists, only, not in terms of popularity, and at least in comparison to the middling assortment of people one encounters in one's life . He spoke extemporaneously , while teaching a course that did not so much call for his skills as his duty to appear for the class, to a fare-thee-well, so much so that, jogging a memory as bad as mine*, reveals a collection of one-off remarks and little pieces of information he gave during his many such classes spent in talking spontaneously about various subjects, with a grace of an artist.

During one such lazy friday afternoon**, he revelled verbally in the beauty of the quote, awarding it a great many epithets, articulating verbose phrenological remarks on the profound understanding of life , universe and everything and more specifically of the purpose of humans and the protocol designed for them, that must have given rise to such a euphony of a saying, praising its impeccable construction by pitching it against different possible versions of the same thing, and concluding that the parallel structure (the three parts without reiterating the word "maketh") makes the simple message about the classical steps to man's education, all the more phenomenal.

In my mind, which I would have liked, to have been very alert and absorbent, but, wasn't so, on the account of being preprogrammed to remain in suspension during lectures, an impression that I was receiving my first proper lesson on the beauty of being concise, was beginning to form. The true test to a writer is imposing a cap on the expense of words. It must be within reason, then, that a man, like the professor, bowed before a concise statement and decided to spend an hour of his life elucidating to a bunch of to-be-engineers ,who couldn't care less, that it's quality lies in its ability to deliver, without as much as slightly digging into one's vocabulary.

Deliver unequivocally, and without the tiniest hint of doubt, with a few well-chosen words , a classical idea, that an ordinary mind would require much more complex literary resources to conceptualize. The charm of a few good words stringed together in an intelligent fashion but nevertheless providing some food for thought, is inevitable. A quick short repartee or a even a tautology like this one-***"You have nothing to do when you have nothing to do" can have a greater impact than a long-winded message , supremely tedious and seemingly endless.

But, this didn't settle in quite well. What of , the love we have for the prolix , of wordy prose , rather enviable in length , in no hurry to reach the point, but of unmistakable clarity only to the zealous reader, of the esoteric, that declares in a cryptic fashion, that , that a more proficient of readers can comprehend and appreciate and a novice struggles to grasp in one furtive glimpse? Well, What of them? Wordy or crisp, one can always sense good work when one sees it. Moreover, short stupid sentences written in an impulse invariably reek of poor quality(See Pointless, for instance) while long unruly ones with no definitive direction give one the same sensory perception.

In case you know me, you would know better than to ask me how, when I tell you, that this small debate, plays a metaphor for larger ones like this one: While someone who doesn't talk of her/his ventures before she/he is able to provide results and even then, doesn't really blow her/his own trumpet, is considered humble and is usually appreciated, doesn't someone who makes no secret about what she/he is planning to accomplish, even to people who aren't even indirectly concerned, deserve some appreciation for taking, the weight of expectations along with the task at hand, not to mention, destroying the idea of enjoying failure,if that happens to result, in private? she/he, just to clarify, doesn't include exceptional people who don't exactly face failures. Between these two contrasting qualities,Which, is of better quality?

*- Perhaps, it's easy to remember a few good things (that's why good things were called memorable ,as an afterthought) especially when they happen to be almost coinciding spatially and temporally with a series of bad things.
** - see *. I could have just had a single asterisk that redirects to the same place, from both places, but I just like putting more *s.
***- good one, Shantanu.

And Another thing, the title, although doesn't look like it , was chosen ,after a good amount of contemplation, as the best allusion to the confusion expressed in the post regarding verbosity versus being concise.

Pointless

2011-06-14T00:58:00.000+05:30

May 24th,2011

I ventured to go out of my house today. This is more of what I would like to write in a diary than in a blog. But, I have never maintained a diary except during a pensive summer period at the end of class 8. I would scribble in a frenzy every feeling I had without inhibitions. So, My mother sent me out on an errand. Staying on the main road as I do doesn't necessitate a long walk in the scorching heat in search of an oasis with rasna in it. I walked a few blocks to this shop that sells tang and rasna among other things.

Just as I stepped out of my apartment, however, I noticed, not very surprisingly, a group of, well, vermin. Feeling grateful to my mother's persistent badgering that resulted in me carrying a black umbrella (I am not a big fan of umbrellas. They arrest your hands and are especially annoying in windy conditions and if they are yellow- yes, I did watch up to the fifth season of a certain drab sitcom that had in it some fishy stuff involving yellow umbrellas), I just walked away quickening my pace.

" 'you thought you were so clever, with your books and poems.

What good are all your smarts to you now? What's keeping you off the

streets, your smarts or me?' What turned Laila's stomach the rest of the night was that every word

Rasheed had uttered, every last one, was true."

There are more than half a dozen ways to react when you sight vermin:

1.you feel queasy and want to run away.

2. You are bold enough to ignore them and wise enough to get away from there as soon as you can.

3. You feel like a damn weakling , just curse the situation and then decide to get away anyway and resolve silently to blog about it, as though that helps.

4. you silently make note of their faces, run home and return in your Batmobile.

5. Since you are the bureau, the vermin feel queasy and run away.
6. you are not a superhero and yet either due a gross overestimation of your physical strength or a lack of interest in saving your skin, you get in a fight with the vermin, who might have otherwise not even taken notice of you.
7. You might say-"vermin ? nobody is vermin in this land of goodness. "
8. you might have remained under house-arrest all your life and so , unless they have broken into your house, you didn't have a chance to meet them.
9. You trick them into saying their names and without enquiring further, just write the names in your notebook, screaming maniacally ,"EXTERMINATE", as you do so.

June 13th,2011
The problem with writing stuff in installments is obvious : data loss. You can't quite remember everything you wanted to include and instead end up including some new stuff that is not relevant enough to be considered a product of the original thought process.Consider this one an example. I have always been happy and it would be unpalatable if I complained or pretended to understand what many must have undergone. I have no idea. I don't want to talk about helpless,unfortunate women. I don't want to pretend like I am the one who cares the most. I find the idea disgusting. I am afraid of strong words. I am not a feminist. Obsessing over sitcoms, over The Lord of the Rings , makes sense. But, not , talking about women empowerment. I don't want paralipsis in my speech or writing. Is it very important for people to know my stand? No. Is my stand on things very important in the first place? No, Its not. Not when I am not doing anything about what I appear to care about. I hate to sound listless. I hate people who talk endlessly about issues others have but shy away when it comes to real action. The fourth most dangerous country for women (after Afghanistan, Congo and Pakistan) abounds with people of this kind. I shall at least never join them. I prefer being pointless to disgraceful.

Hyperspace

2011-06-03T23:16:00.000+05:30

Holed up in a circle, Mr.Triangle was, for being a petty thief.
One day, A bizarre event occured , much to his immediate relief.
What he saw, where he went, he did not quite know,
he was wistfully feeling the infinite edges of his gaol, when, lo!,
the confines that surrounded him suddenly vanished without a trace,
He was exalted to firmaments that nobody would ever grace.
And, the paradisaical journey ended almost in a trice,
denying him a chance to comprehend or acclimatize.

One by one, the flatlanders came to learn,
and many a time did they,contemptuously , his tale, spurn.
"How did you escape?Tell us the truth!", they would demand,
and lay him out in lavender and reprimand,
Every time he related the miracle in distress.
But,about people's incredulity, Mr. T couldn't care less,
For, he was certain what he had seen that moment,
was prodigious and no mean event.

Eerie shapes seemed to instantly change form and size,
Did he, he wondered, somehow, rise?
As he lay mentally recounting the journey upward,
anarchy reigned over him and his emotions became wayward.
To rid to himself of this psychological trauma, he needed to perceive,
To explore the hidden worlds and to receive,
the grip on reality and that diminished the vitality of all else.
Even the fear and hatred that he fought hard to repulse.

The wise young lady, Ms.Ellipse, out of the blue ,
offered an explanation and came to Mr.T's rescue.
"The changing shapes you saw were part of a whole,
beings that dwell in lands to which we have no parole.
Rest, my friend , for , most beings who see the third axis,
believe that what they can geometrize is all that exists.
That was not theophany.", said the wise and young Ms.Ellipse.
Mr.T understood that, impalpable higher dimensions are neither inventions nor relics,
They exist and are imperative to explain the laws of physics.

33 lines of some crap. Some poets (bad ones) force-fit words into this mess with a rhyme scheme. An example is me. Actually,I am not even a bad poet, I am not a poet, you know that now, dont you? .

The Return of the me

2011-05-24T15:22:00.000+05:30

May 19th,2011

It's been a few hours since I got home. Calling it a long journey would certainly be an understatement. Blogging about Delhi, the horribly hot train journey , Bangalore , Misty or my impending doom is not my intention. One cant expect any travel literature from someone as lazy as me and describing this arduous journey. The last leg of the journey, however, gave me the urge to blog. More significant and bloggable things have indeed taken place, but, writing is difficult. More so, for me and all my ilk characterized by sheer laziness.
Another reason for letting many bloggable events pass without condemning them to an immortal life in a blog post, is that there are too many of them. And, my strange way of reasoning. If I choose to write about something, I am choosing to ignore the other things. Its quite funny how I never really liked essay writing , for the same reason. Writing books or diary entries, on the other hand, can proffer a chance to indirectly mention things that may not be under the purview of the actual material. Actually, there seem to be several glitches in choosing the sufficiently bloggable matter. When I am about to settle on one, I have , in effect, concluded: "Okay! Let me blog about this one because this comes off as an appropriate fit among my blogposts".
This conclusion, however, has begged the question. I may have to digress here slightly and clarify that that doesn't mean raising a question. All those who shake their heads vigourously in censure at wrong usage of words or phrases, can seek solace from their brethren at http://begthequestion.info/. Anyway, coming back to the point, the sentence is a logical fallacy unless I use an axiomatic approach. That is, I could just assume that certain attributes of an event are sufficient to consider it bloggable. Such premises could then remove the fallacy. But, as it turns out, I am not a foundationalist, for these kind of arguments that don't form the basis of our epistemological understanding of math or science.

That leaves me with a few choices to explore. One of them is coherentism. To elucidate, in case, a particular event, for example, my early , uneventfully extended trip from roorkee to chennai, seems like quality bloggable material, the qualifying parameters would be coherence with my opinion of bloggable events. Owing to my indiscretion , inexperience or other unknown factors, my set of opinions about bloggable events which was to form the reference set seems to be covered by a thin layer of dubiety.
Another point against the approach is the simple proof by Bertrand Russell, which cogently works for cases where the set of beliefs itself is inconclusive: " since both a belief and its negation will, individually, cohere with at least one set of beliefs, this means that contradictory beliefs can be shown to be true according to coherence theory, and therefore that the theory cannot work".

So, I have logically, almost exhausted, the approaches to prove the selection of one bloggable subject from many competing ones. There is just one way left and that is the regress argument. So, here goes: Proposition 1: I feel that my early trip to chennai is something to blog about.
Proposition 2: I usually love talking about my mistakes and rant indefinitely. ( The "early" trip refers to the fact that I came back without waiting to check my ete marks and for the first time, there could have been a change in my math paper. sigh.)
Proposition 3: P2 validates P1.
Proposition 4: According to coherentism, P3 is valid.
Proposition 5: I accept P4.
Proposition 6:I accept that P4 validates P1.
Proposition 7: I accept P6.
Pro...
.
.
.
.
.
Proposition n(say 100000): I accept P(n-1)(say P99999)
.
.
I am stuck in an infinite regress. Actually I would nt be noting down these propositions in a notebook till I die(and to all those who wonder what I do at home all day,like my mother, this is not the answer), the way A-kill-ease did because I might decide P4 is inherently false given my predicate on coherence(See the previous paragraph). So, on what basis did I choose to blog about ... well.. this pile of tosh that I have typed out? Interesting question. We just do things with our lives and blogs without definitive reasoning. At least I do . I would love to claim otherwise though. Perfect logic strikes me as THE most beautiful thing in the multiverse. But, even as I reckon so, I lose confidence in my opinion or my previous analyses and judgments. For instance, What according to me is the most beautiful thing? Nature , people , Science? Even if I decide on that, would one associate Perfect Logic with them or should I alter my standpoint on logic?
Anyway, just in case someone wants to know what caused the original impulse to blog, It is the travel by auto from Chennai Central to my house. The auto driver seemed to be afflicted by a serious case of common cold. An extremely serious case that required him to spit out the phlegm at an alarmingly frequent rate. An extremely alarmingly frequent rate that I pondered about using it as an effective trail to reach my house if only the blinding heat didn't engage its powers of evaporation or if it wasn't to be trampled on by like a million tires. I am not very emotional about the city and don't celebrate wildly on Madras day , but , of course, I feel good about certain aspects of it, like anybody who is born and brought up in a place would about the said place.
Coming to the point, just getting off the train started reflecting the differences as compared to the two other places I had been to recently- Delhi and Bangalore. Reflecting , quite literally , on my face from this giant mirror, first , the unbearable heat and then the rest. The exceedingly civilised, decent bunch of good-natured auto-drivers incessantly running after innocent looking people with frail mothers and impossibly heavy luggage, proposing comfortable auto-trips at extremely affordable rates. When we finally gave in and settled in a yellow three-wheeler, I could feel the same giant mirror shining educative light on my face on appropriate occasions and happenings. First, the ritual speeding, brilliant contemporary tamil music, a select choice of appropriate abuses exchanged between drivers and, the silence. Very quiet autos that move stealthily through the roads with the elegance of elves. But thats enough about autos and the spit, goondas and others that tread the path of chivalric principles. Enough about hundred million sappy mega serials that extend indefinitely and enjoy mass viewership. When the music season comes, there is no better abode for a rasika. And when you look at a jolly company of thathas enjoying a routine pleasant walk to the same temple clutching a copy of The Hindu, when your old neighbour aunty who runs into you at a supermarket realises how grown-up you look and reminisces about those days with genuine fondness , you lose the grudge you had against that cheeky old mirror after all. Bottom line: I am home .Poor Grades.

2011-05-22T13:24:00.001+05:30

Her intelligence was unrecognised,
Her prudence wasteful,
To many such squalid beasts,
This world has played host,
Until every dream crushed heartlessly,
Until every tearful plea met with mirth ,
has tasted its revenge,
the vendetta shall go on.

The Dive

2011-04-17T16:22:00.000+05:30

I am sitting on the edge of my bed, leaning against the window, staring out impassively as the rain soaks up the solar water heater panels lined up in large numbers on the KB terrace. The last few days have set my thoughts on a variety of implicit , abstract observations. I was just subject to an irksome interruption by Ms.Perelman informing me of her upcoming journey to the CC in the third floor(Where else?). Well, she just woke up to a beautiful morning weather and an oily breakfast served to her room. It is beginning to get warmer. Just as I am about to explain the aforementioned observations, a distasteful intervention by her again. An unsuccessful journey it had been, as expected, and the internet craving provoked her enough to embark on a journey to the ICC.
Ah, time to draw the veil over my window. It is getting sunny. May be the impetus to delve deeper is lost. Gone with the rain. Do I go to the ICC right now? No, I would eventually have to move, but now is not a good time. Not for the dive either.

Unjustified

2011-03-26T15:36:00.000+05:30

Aruna Shanbaug wanted to say something,but couldn't. Ultimate terror arrests you, you cant speak. Those moments of sodomy must have stretched across eternity. It must have be any unremarkable day of work for her. She must have had no idea that she was to be subject to such depravity that day. She must have had no idea that she would continue her existence in a catatonic state for more than three and a half decades. Hail the landmark judgement.I so wish something had averted the act. I wish something had meandered her life to take a smooth course. I wish she had reached home safely that day. I wish the criminal had never been born in the first place. I wish she had continued to live like everybody else. I wish she had had a chance to become a famous nurse, regarded highly for her integrity.
Karma, rebirth and this hypothesized cycle of pain and suffering are baseless doctrines. What greater scheme of things do the hardships undergone by her complete? Do the rest of us just live in gratitude because we weren't the chosen ones? I don't think so. We don't condone the torture she goes through every passing minute. We don't endorse these high-handed attempts at explaining things away. Do we just pray that nobody else shares her fate? Do we just pray that we remain comfortable insofar as it is possible to compose poetry and blog posts on wretched souls? What do we do?

Untitled

2011-03-22T22:18:00.000+05:30

It is midnight and yet the audience demand an encore. A small girl has been sitting among the old bespectacled maamis, who are fervently nodding their heads to the music well-past their serial time. She is too sleepy to evade the aficionados guessing the raga with the first inkling the artist gives away.Her deductions revealed in a small voice only to her mother obligates a rude stare. This comes at a time when the rasika is gently adrift in the sea of impossible variations and chivalric swarams characteristic of the raga. This would be one of the many such precious occasions in which she revels in the luscious note that warp drives her to a forgotten paradise.
She looks on wide-eyed as the artist speaks of years of saadhakam that justifies the chance for a performance at the sabha and the critique in the morning newspaper. Later that night, while the artist descends into a sea of admirers, the mother takes the sleeping kid home.
Many years later, this would happen again. And this is where this little story here dares to tread the road not taken usually by stories. The aforementioned little girl would not be playing star this time. She would sit, yes , with her mother, among the audience as the emotions kindled by the ragas rush through her. She would look impassively towards the stage and at those with admirable raga-identification skills. The mother and daughter would get home, each of them enjoying the exquisite sound of rain. And there she goes, Turn the Page.