Economics, Mathematics and Philosophy

I have realized in the spate of the recent realizations that ......Economics, Mathematics and Philosophy.... originate from the same source. It would be very abstract to talk about it like this, and people would be really bored to learn about it. Philosophy can be divided into

1. Metaphysics :--- the Axioms or the core values of your life
2. Epistemology :- the science of deduction and logic... basis of mathematics
3. Ethics :- The science of behaviour during a social interaction... small scale or large scale... basis of economics
4. Politics :- The science of making policies in order to govern such a society
5. Esthetics :- The science of art. (there may be a typo here... but i am too lazy to look up)

Although I am slowly coming to terms with Politics, although Esthetics is kinda outa bounds for me rite now. To make things easier let me state this. I have found that it is in a tree that the idealist capitalist philosophy exist. It just exists in nature. Its when the concept of socialistic ideals just dissolve into pure capitalism. Will post more on this soon.

The obvious we may never realize!!!!

It was cold!!! So cold that I could feel the weight of the blood in my arms and I could feel the cold of the rain taking the heat away from my eyes. I could somehow feel the presence of life within me and the absence of it outside. The difference was stark, yet incomprehensible. It was the most obvious, yet so inexplicable. It was nature, with all her beauty, teaching me the lesson that we as humans should have learnt, or rather would have learnt and forgotten. I slowed my pace and felt the rain, with its cold fury. I decided to feel life by feeling the absence of it. I slowed further down, like a horse trotting on a new found road, after galloping through the unknowns. I was getting wet, I was shivering, and that was the willing fee I was giving mother nature for making me feel life once more. What I felt was something I felt before I learned to speak, and hence I have no words to describe it. What I felt was something that I forgot before I learnt to speak, and therefore those memories cannot be described. What I felt was bliss, such a bliss that cannot be parelleled with anything that I have ever felt before in my life from the time I could talk. Then I saw something that gave me the meaning of the deluge of the feelings that I felt at that time. A small plant wedged between two big rocks. It was convoluted and bend, because of the rocks that It was surrounded and covered with. I felt it never had a chance to grow, yet it had small flowers on it. Moreover it had all the leaves which were somehow made to face the Sun. And there it was, enjoying the rain!!!! I just could not help myself thinking about a song by Dana Mase called "A Little Light" which I came across a few years back. It ends like this:

Like a flower reaches the sun through the concrete and the rocks I'll reach with my foolish heart So give me light, let me grow, you never know, you never know, How far a little light will go.

I stopped. I felt the weakness in my knees. I could feel my heartbeats. I did not, however, feel the rain. Isn't this the way we should live? Shouldn't we live according to our nature, no matter how ever convoluted and negative the surroundings are? Isn't this called fighting for the values that one stands for? Isn't this called Integrity? Isn't it sooo natural!!!!!! No matter if its roots are in concrete the plant still looks for sunlight. It still looks for its survival and happiness. Shouldn't we also look for our own happiness. Isn't that the natural purpose of one's life... his/her happiness. Isn't such a thing called quest or purpose of life? A plant never depends on another plant for its journey of seeking sunlight. Doesn't this mean that by nature the human happiness should be defined in an objective manner and not a subjective manner? Happiness is objective and never subjective, it is within you and it is the sole purpose of your life. This is the natural way to live and the purpose as finding the happiness within you. Life is not only beautiful, its wonderful!!!!!!

Gimme an eFFing break

Now this post is crib. But it is a variety crib. I am trying to crib in a different way. Let me start. Around two months ago my paresnts were telling me about Bindu. Parents: Bindu is going to Singapore every other month on an onsite... and she is getting paid well too. Me: Which bindu, what bindu, where.. what? (totally confused) Parents: My brothers wifes .... .... ..... ..... .... .... ... (some 100 relatives in between) sister. Me: Oh ok gr8 for her. Two weeks before: Parents: Raghav is getting X.XX lacs and he is being offered an onshore opportunity. Me: Which Raghav, what raghav, where? what? The rest you can figure out right. Why do you have to go abroad to proove yourself. Can't you stay in India and then proove your worth. Wouldn't it be more noble than all the causes.

Ignorance + Tolerance + Gandhi = ?

This is a trite thing to shout and start a post. But did not someone say sometime that

Tolerance is one of the values that is central to Indian Culture.

Or let me take the liberty to quote Gandhi himself

Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.

There are three terms here.

1. Democratic Spirit
2. TRUE Democratic Spirit
3. Tolerance and Intolerance

All this is all so rosy and sounds really great. But where does one draw a line. Say suppose we have a toteliteraian ruler (like Hitler) and suppose we are the victims (say Jews). How should one act if one is a staunch follower of Gandhian Ethics .. If ever such a thing ever existed. George Orwell in his well written essay(by well written I meant to say a very critical review of Gandhi and his actions) contemplates precisely on this. Here are his words:

"What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?" I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of evasions, usually of the "you're another" type. But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer is on record in Mr. Louis Fischer's Gandhi and Stalin. According to Mr. Fischer, Gandhi's view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which "would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence." After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly. One has the impression that this attitude staggered even so warm an admirer as Mr. Fischer, but Gandhi was merely being honest. If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way. When, in 1942, he urged non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it might cost several million deaths.

Now let me look at the non-violent action which Gandhi proposed. If u have to be tolerant to something. That something should be vicious enough to kill/destroy you. What Gandhi says is just don't attack it back.. TOLERATE even if it kills you, even if it rapes you. Which means to say that we should never fight. We should turn ourselves into being a MASOCHIST when confronted by a SADIST. We should be willing victims. We should accept the enemy AND HIS ACTIONS. So that one day the enemy will get fed up and give up. We should never attack. We should tolerate with the enemy, at the cost of our self-esteem, we should tolerate the enemy, at the cost of our integrity, we should tolerate the enemy at the cost of our own lives. This philosophy seemingly gave India its freedom but it did one more thing, which the congress has managed to hide very effeciently, it has destroyed India.(the subtler point here is that u may say that integrity is in holding the Gandhian values.. a claim which I refute) .In short Gandhi asks u simply to give up your self esteem (if u have it) and fight using the lack of it as a weapon. The argument is that this is HUMANE way of fighting. A deep thought would show that it would kill as many people as it would in any bloody war. The enemy may stop killing, if he has some humanity in him. What if he is ruthless.. like Hitler, or say like the Japaneese. They would have wiped India clean of its people. His philosophy worked only in India and with Indians because of only one thing. Tolerance is a euphemism of cowardliness. It is another word to say that we do not have the balls to do. It could also be put as lack of self-esteem. A quality which I should say defines an Indian(there maybe 10% who are different). If u see a person without a self-esteem. I would say that there is a 90% chance that he is an Indian. Gandhi, inherently or intentionally, realized this and used precisely this as a weapon against the british. The british more or less used him to their purposes. which could be seen all over history. For example Gandhi could have prevented the hanging of the Great Bhagath Singh. Why did he not do that? Weren't the british wrong in hanging the Great man. So whats wrong in taking to the british and non violently preventing the hanging of the Great man. The answer is simple :- He would have questioned his delicate philosophy,infront of his impotent mass of followers, had he done that. He would have send wrong signals to the british. Which he did not want to happen. Which could have been due to his tolerance, in the sense I was talking in the previous paragraph. It was this lack of self-esteem that later became the Banner "TOLERATE", tolerate both your enemy and his actions. This was the magic mantra that many impotent Indians(i would say 99% of them) were waiting for. They did not have the guts to fight, nor did they have the self-esteem to fight. All that Gandhi asked them to do was to protest against the british without fighting, means without ever having a feeling of self-esteem or in other words, fighting without integrity. This is the least of which anyone could do. And so the Gandhi Concept spread like wild fire. That was the Dominant Philosophy so that our people could hide their impotency behind the concept of tolerance. This is exactly the kind of impotency that George Orwell suspects in Gandhi. Let me quote the relevant lines.

Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for "non-attachment" is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is "higher". The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all "radicals" and "progressives," from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.

Note the word incompatible. Orwell is trying to make a distinction between a Mystic and a Rationalist. The fun is because 90% of India was/is ignorant (illitracy driven ignorance or literate ignorance), nobody cares to think that there is no rational basis for Gandhi's arguments. If the concept of God is taken away from it, then it tumbles down like a piece of domino cards. Gandhi integrated the concept of mysticism and suicidal idealism and injected it into the minds of ignorant people. Those who REALLY fought for independence, the great saints, like Mangal Pandey, Bhagath Singh, Subhash Chandra Bose were termed as fools..just because they had the Integrity to say that an enemy had to be treated like an enemy. They were treated as fools because they said that they will die fighting, if they have to die anyway then fight and die. They were treated as fools beause they believed that independence should be attained from within the human mind and not when someone(british/enemy) leaves us alone. They were rational minds, who believed in Independence, and not MASOCHIST who took all the beating and begged the enemy to leave them alon after being raped. They were men of Integrity, and they stand like mountains rising out of the sea. Such a person is still called a fool in India. However those Great Men were men of action and not inaction. Unfortunately the values that they stood for were literally wiped off by congress' 50 years of destructive socialist rule. I believe that if there wasn't a Second World War :- We would have been still under british rule. The congress has been able to fool the Nation for 50 odd years, because people are ignorant and tolerant. We tolerate corruption, which has now become synonymous with the word Government. We tolerate rape. We Tolerate feudal people. We call our products as inferior. We believe more in American brains than in Indian brains. We ARE Ignorant, Impotent. That's what we are ... Ignorance + Tolerance +Gandhi = MESS P.S:--- A mystic is a person who calls himself superior by defining some ideals which can never be acheieved. Example:- True Democratic Spirit

Have sex n make science....and err, some entertainment

I found this.... from abi's blog here. I thot i would have loved to be a part of "Have Sex:- Make Science program". The point here is that most of the men who participated failed to errr *blush*, perform. Means some even did not even manage to have their penis standing up even though they were cuddled up with a female inside an MRI scanner. The funny thing is they had to get it up and running by using Viagra.... Soooo sad, i feel kinda bad about those men there... i mean called on to do such an important assignment and hey my johnny(or dick or whatever u may pet name your penis as), aint feeling like standing upto it. Tch Tch.... impotency is sometimes subjective. I have heard of men who could perform wonderfully with certain women.. and would fail miserably with his own wife. The pics are interesting!!have a look One ,Two. Pic one left me wondering where the penis is... well look carefully... Thou shalt find it!!!! Hint:- the male pelvis is on the lower right and the female's is on the upper left. Who the f*** am I, you may ask, a sexologist? No, but i am (s)extremely interested in knowing more about this wonderful function of the human body. Talking of which we have some people exploiting it as Harini sees it. Well yes... it is plain cheap dirt pot of a journalist(if such a psycho deserves to be called that way) who could think that this will sell. Just shows how kinda screwed up people think, or do they? If they did then the column would not be there at all.. After all..sex sells....everything is commercial. ;-)

Getting drunk!!!!!

I am an occasional alcoholic.... means my alcohol intake cycles (if ever there is some term like that) are periodic(periodic is a redundant term, as there cannot be cycles without periods ;-) ). And i think that I could calculate the fourier transform of my alcohol intake graph. It would look like having a fundamental frequeny(or a dominant frequeny) of 3 months. but obviously a lot of rippling because after everytime i get drunk heaily the next 1 month is totally dry.. this causes a high transition in time domain of the alcohol intake and this causes the frequency domain to ripple. Which i think would have bored you to infinity/oblivion if u do not know what Fourier did long time ago!!. If you do not know about it then just know that it is just the same thing that happenes after ejaculating, u just dont feel like being in there anymore. Talking of which Uma here and here has nice posts on the fact that sex aint all that bad... only thing is Indian culture which distorts it too much... just correct Uma... thats exactly what i believe and follow (:-)). Coming to the answer of what-is-the-point-of-this-post expression that you all may be having while reading the above? I got drunk on saturday. It wasn't my drinking record on the amount. But however it was the drinking record of sorts. As i gobbled up 375 ml (that is half a bottle) of Smirnoff Vodka without water... Just like that. With No aparent reason. I was not happy and i was not sad. I just brought the bottle because the place where i usually buy liquor from have a credit card policy that they will accept cards for purchases only above 100 bucks. I did not have enough money with me to buy the usual Quarter bottle smirnoff(90 bucks). So i had to use a credit card, which meant that i had to buy something more than a quarter... so i went for half bottle smirnoff. At home there was this wonderful movie called "Anger Management" somethng that i wanted to watch for a long time. I sat with the chips that I brought, and opened the Vodka bottle. Started drinking it dry(thats without water,,, as it is... also called 'on the rocks'). I remember watching the begining of the film when Adam Sandler gets jacked on the plane. After that i had one more peg dry. Could see that i was not able to concentrate much on the jokes. There was an interval of 50 seconds after the joke that i understood it and laughed. But... I could understand romantic scences in the film instantaneously. Adam Sandler hugging his girlfrind... OOf!!! could not bear the thougts and the feelings of hugging my ex. I remembered those few days I had with her. Those deep embraces. *sigh*. The same thing I saw a couple doing infront of the chennai consulate. Seems both of them were going to the same college and that both of them got their visas cleared. The embrace was deep, loving and so so romantic. Older generation indians who were standing their started fussing like hell. I just watched, remembering the last time I did that. The last time i just embraced my ex-gal like that. The last time i smelt my (ex)gal's shoulders. The last time I tenderly kissed them. *sigh* I started to miss the 'Scent of a woman'. Coming back to my drinking habits after digressing this bit. I was seeing the deep embrace, and so i became sad about missing that typical 'girly' smell, you get when u are in a deep embrace. In went another 90 ml...dry. Then I could see TWO Adam Sandlers instead of one. I knew that i was getting drunk. I was getting hungry as well, this was the thing that got me even worried. I decided to make a bulls-eye out of the 6 eggs that I had brought. If you all suspect that I would have forgotten to turn of the gas and that my flat would have caught fire, then you were just about thinking something that almost happened. I turned the gas on.. went searching for the matches... thankfully kept over the "bhagvan ka picture" which after getting drunk i was trying to search for. Finally i found the matchbox. At that time i realized that it was an automatic gas stove. u just have to press the knob and turn... whoosh.. the fire will be on. I went into the kitchen with this new gyan... turned off the knob.. and then turned it on again.... i was expecting a-whooosh-and-a-flame but what came out was a-BOOM-and-nearly-kitchen-on-fire thing. HOLY SHIT... the flames were so f***ing big... if u know what i mean. I turned sober instantaneously.. wondering which numbers to dial. Thankfully I was not wearing anything on my upper half. If i was i would have been a fireball. ALso i took care not to open my mouth...who knows... Vodka is flamable. This is what i did.. i RAN out of the kitchen. straight into the bath... i do not remember whether anything caught fire really.. but i put water all over my body... went back in half senses to see the flame burning there.. and not the fire... Well... I did thank god... assuming that he existed for a moment. I sobered myself up. Went for the thavi(thats what u call the pan in mallu).. Put it on the stove., poured some oil. Broke the first egg.. Put it.. it was the best bulls-eye egg i have ever cracked. Broke the second one.. put that too.. the third one i was just about to reach it when i fell down and the egg cracked on the floor. something went into my eyes. I put water into my eyes and then remembered that the fire was still on. I switched it off.,... but a bit late. the bulls-eye was a bit over cooked but ok. Then i remembered about the film. Went there.. saw another passionate embrace... went crazy...back to the kitchen.. ate up everything on the thavi which was very very hot. Drank some more... made sure that the gas was switched off. Then went and sat infront of the TV. Some ad was going on. 3/4 of the bottle was over. I decided to drink the full bottle. When the movie came back I saw three or four Adam Sandlers. More than that i could see that the frame rate was reduced a lot. I could see frames in say 10 second intervals... nothing in between. Someone came and banged on the door... wasn't able to open it. Then i remember that I did a Bottles up routine. The whole bottle went up in the air. I had finished my triumph on 375 ml Vodka. Then I could hear wierd singing.. which i realized was myself trying to hum along the movie tunes. I could not see anything beyond 1 metre... and there was occassionaly someone who switched off the lights. Then after sometime(i dont know how much time) Blackness.......... I woke on sunday with pain everywhere... including my head... thats where it hurt the most. The whole day was a waste. Just was cribbing about why I drank,, n all that shit. Someone told me that in theory a flap of a butterfly wing can whip up a storm in the pacific ocen because of chaos theory. I believe its just those small things that matter when life takes wierd turns and gives u the expereiences of sorts. Had they been taking credit cards for any amount.. i would have brought a Quarter bottle.. which would have saved my saturday and sunday. I have decided atleast that I should give up drinking *completely* now. It has given me more hardship that anything else. But i still miss those deep embraces *sigh* :-).

Blogonomics

Blogonomics would certainly be a part of any internet study in the future. The logic for the whole thing is simple. I will post more on the economic aspect of it later, let me make it short and sweet for now. Suppose you write such great stuff that a CEO of a mid size company visits your blog and spends say 30 minutes on it everyday. The blog may be free and it may not be giving you any 'returns' by way of publication. However you are returns are in the time that the CEO feels to spend on your blog.30 minutes of his time per day would amount to an average guys salary over a month. This concept need not be only applicable to the CEOs visiting your blogs. It can also be any other person. Therefore we can considered the time spent on your blog as the worth of the blog and hence it is the representative of the value generation aspect of your publication. This concept was taken from the book build to last although i have to mention that, in the book there was a totally different context in mentioning the same concept. What happens when there are a lot of people spending a lot of time on your blog? It is naturally assumed that you create some sort of social value.You create some sort of social interest, which makes people come to your blog again and again and again. What happens when you succeed in the above? You then start on to create some solid economic value out of blogging. People pay you money to write stuff. People pay you to comment on their blogs/website. Thy pay you to advertise their stuff on your blog. In short there are as many aspects of economics in blogging as there are conceptes in economics as a whole. More coming soon!!!!!

The purpose of blogging

before continuig on the Part 2 of my Story let me assure u ppl that i am not here to blog seriously... atleast as of now!!! The strangest thing is that there is no pupose for this blog, It has no life, It is not build to last, in the sense that it has not been built at all. Earlier the name of the blog was "Null Pointer" but since then I have found out that there was another Null Pointer, thanks to Debashish ;-). I had to change the name of the blog in order to preserve its uniqueness. I always used any media I could lay my hands on to crib, and so the blog was just another media to crib and rant, and hence the name. the Blogging world is extensive, it has all kind of charectors... and for some people eventhough the aim of blogging... or the utility of the blog may be very well defined the path to achieve the 'minimum critical mass' required to push ideas may not be there. In such case one has to start slowly, take the small steps, find some measning and purpose in what u do, get the critical mass and the time/value factor on your blog.. push it forward. Even if u stray here and there initially.. i dont think will make much of a difference. I would want to improve my grammar. Eventhoug i know that the words i deliver have the required punch in them there is however no grammatical stress, which makes the meaning altogether distorted. Ultimately I would want this blog to rise and play a part, both in what i want to do in my life and also to serve as my mouthpiece to the world. Lets replace the Roman Emperors shout :-"Let the wars begin" to :- "Let the blogs begin!!!!!!"

Eureka!!!! I am a reader again!!!! (Part 1)

I have discovered reading again!!! However it is by a concious choice that I have decided to take on reading. It is not an accident. I used to read voraciously b4 my 10th standard, not petty novels and 'Harry Potter' stuff. I used to read encyclopedias, which told me great stories about how man invented methods to fly, how the stars shine, about black holes and quasars and about space ships that travel close to the speed of light. These things used to spark my imagination and used to be the subject of my dreams. The imagination that still is with me and has helped me to understand somewhat complex mathematical constructs and also helped me in understanding most of the math by just imagining about the equations. This habit was so built into me that I used to do poorly in the class due to this addictive reading habit. However sometime during my mid 10th standard eduacation I had to leave this habit in order to concentrate on studies. The reader can note that until my 9th standard I was a failure in studies. My dad had lost all hopes of making me studious and the class topper, a concept which I consider extremely stupid then and now- i considered it stupid then because I knew how much of math the class topper knew, i consider it extremely stupid now because I know that class topper is never the way to measure a person the concept is as stupid as concept that the worth of a man can be measured by the money he has. Now I used to fail in 5 subjects out of 8, and pass in mathematics and science. This was the case until my 9th standard. In my 9th standard I surprised everyone,including myself, by becoming the school topper. I had prooved my worth infront of everyone and most importantly infront of my dad. I got confused on what was the sudden change in attitude of everyone around me, i was being treated with respect, for which I was sure that I had not changed a bit in my core values, which were in my subconcious. After that I was scared of loosing out that respect and the worth/value that I gained. My reading and imagination was put in the cold storage. This habit of reading and then imagining was soon forgotten by me and I was into getting more and more value for myself by becoming the topper repeatedly. There is a quote by some guy whose name i don't remember (but will get it soon) Its something like this.

The diffcult we eventually realize but the obvious we may never do.

I forgot that I was a kid who once loved science, who imagined himself flying to the stars, who build big laboratories in his mind. The kid who loved math, and more importantly, who could imagine math. There were some sparks in me which we still there. As, bits and pieces of my old life remained, like my childish nature of questioning anything. My parents never cared about that quality, neither did they think about how could they nurture this latent talent.It is a fault from their part but I cannot complain about them because they were brought up in such a pathetic conditions that I dare not imagine those times. Ultimately when time went by I realized the difficult part :- I had to do stuff that I don't like in order to get the class topper position in everything I do, something which I realize now was outright stupidity. I never realized the obvious part:- I had to do the stuff that I love in order to be happy and satisfied, and in order to grow. I had to awaken that part of me which was in a coma for a long long time. I stopped reading general books and was fully into my entrance coaching in my 11th and 12th standard. I grew sick and tired of some stuff. The question "Why?" which helped me to become so imaginative made me me ask "Why Me?". I started to rant. I started to get out of touch with myself. I started to crib. Somehow I managed to get into engineering, and took the more mathematical field of Electronics and communication engineering. My engineering life and my second crush around that time pushed me into reading more. This time more into novels and stories about great heros. Since my crush used to read novels, I too decided to catch up and become totally rocking. However within such a raze of novel reading was the fact that I was trying to find meaning in my life. Unfortunately the meaning should have been the most obvious thing in my life. Two years, 12 Osho books, 10 swami X books later I delved into one of my relatives book collection and found a novel:- The Fountainhead. In the publishers note it was written(i cannot exactly remember):

Read the story of a Highly controversial architect, who has a tryst with the society and his flaming love affair with a woman who tries to destroy him.

I started reading the book and from the first page I was always thinking that the hero Howard Roark was a fool. Why did he leave college? and that too a top one. Why he did that is obvious to any human being who loves his work. I did not realize it. Why did he not emotionally react and destroy Peter Keating? It is obvious too, but i did not realize that. Why was he in love with Dominique who, as told in the publishers statement, was trying so hard to destroy him? That is obvious too, but i did not realize it. I was finding Peter Keating as a hero and I just could not digest the end. I really did not understand Howards court statement. I did not know that had put the Howard Roark in me to sleep and then was off to be the class topper in everything I do. However the book did spark the imagination in me and I started asking the question "Why?". Why did he let himself to be thrown out of college? Why did he love dominique? Why did he never compromise?. My crush broke down around this time. I was devastated, and almost left to myself to lick the wounds of that time. I started to read Fountainhead again, because I just couldn't read any other book which the word love was present. One fine morning I got the answer for many of the "Why?"s. Roark never compromised because he was in love with his work. He was in love with his work because doing work gave him immense satisfaction. He was brilliant because he loved doing his work. Doing what you love to do is the key to happiness and satisfaction. Satisfaction never lies in compromise. It lies in intgrity. The thing that makes people die for values. In Martin Luther Kings words:

Life aint worth living unless you have something to die for.

The next two years of my engineering I was trying to find something that I could die for. It was a difficult and scary question to ask, because if the answer was not in what I was doing then my life would be hell. The answer was obvious, awakwen the sleeping kid within me, but i never realized it. At the same time I started to have intense discussion on Signal Processing, with one of my friends. My interest grew in it because of its mathematical nature and because I somehow found it easy to imagine the math that was written in the form of equations. The kid within me was already awakening. I had stumbled upon the key to my life just like I stumbled upon "The Fountainhead". I soon found that I could solve problems in Signal Processing using what I learned and I loved the intense satisfaction that I got when I solved problems. At last the tipping point had reached. The kid was half awake. i finished an entire signal processing book in 3 weeks. I was soo happy. To be continued!!!!!

Advice to myself

U dont have to be rude to proove a point. Most uncomfortable situations can be dealt away without foulness.

No words... only tears

I am shocked to the core. I am feeling sick, shocked to the core. The only reaction i have is tearful eyes. There are simply no words in me to explain or to rationalize. I bow down and just say few words softly to the hurt souls...."Sorry!!! Wish I could have done somethng". Have a look if your heart can take it. Horror Stuff1 Which was kind of repeated here(but mildly) Stuff2 The latest Mumbai verison of this thing can be found in the following Stuff3 and Stuff4

y blog

Pills here has a nice post on why he blogs. This is a good post both literary wise and content wise. It got me wondering however, about why am I bloggin. Well tis like this... i started a blog faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar back in July 2003, coz it was somethng exiting and new and FREE :-)) Now i fell its kinda floating. i don't really know what theme to post. I do what i love to do. I love to write as well, write and NOT type... i am lazy to type. Typing just oozes out the creativity out of me. It makes my brain search for the keys on the keyboard and stuff and that creates an interrupt to my thinking process. This destroy the pure thought flow that I enjoy in my writing. Writing about something interesting(interesting to the blogger i mean) presupposes that you know something interesting and that means you have to update yourself with interesting stuff everyday. This requires a lot of reading. Blogs like this one are simply show the sheer brilliance and level of awareness of such a writer. I hope to be an aware writer someday. I am sure that this blog shall find a path. and the next article that i would be posting would be written first and then it would be posted online.

Quote of the Day

No comments :-)

Calendar Calendar on the wall Who is the timeliest of them all!!!!!

This is my calendar http://www.icalx.com/html/lakshmikanth/month.php?cal=USC For the next few days i shall be posting what is my day to day activities on this calendar... do check it out.. if u are a timeliness freak then this could possibly be more addictive than blogging.

Me,Marina Beach and the beggar.

I was in Chennai this Sunday. The weather was harsh, hot and humid. I could taste my sweat even in the wee hours of the morning. It was tough to sleep there after getting used to the Bangalore weather. From whatever little experience I have of Chennai city, I have considered it as a highly unhygenic city. I hated to travel around, just because it was too damn humid and hot which makes me sweat profusely, and I hate myself when I sweat. Finally I got bored of sitting idle in my room there and decided to get out and go somewhere. We -I and my parents- decided to go to the Marina Beach. It is a famous beach, I think that it is the longest beach or something like that. We reached there at sometime during the sunset, which was happening in the west side beaches i.e. behind the Marina Beach,which is an east side beach. I was at Marina for the second time in my life. It was the same place that I had seen almost three years ago. A sea of people, enjoying discussing, fishing, doing business... what all and what not!!!!!!!!! We got out of our car and we started walking towards the beach front. I could feel the stench of dead fish, and the smell was quite obnoxious. I started thinking :- "What a shitty beach!!!! One cannot even breath here.. Just look at all that beggars around. Look at all those shops selling the cheap and unhygenic stuff. Oops there comes a beggar in my direction" At around the same time someone just nearby was thinking a bit loudly :- "Isn't it a lovely beach!!!!!" I changed my mental gear into deep-thought mode. I was thinking deeply, pretty much unaware of my surroundings. The beggar came asked for money and went off without getting it; I did not know that. The humid wind was blowing too fast; I didn't feel it. The question in my mind was this:- Did i have a choice? A choice between feeling bad about something and enjoying the good things that come along with the bad. Can you do both at the same time? Can we feel bad about something and feel good about it at the same time? Is feeling good and bad about something a choice in one's life? Later sometime I decided to discuss this with KhelNayak. Mr. Amarnath was -as usual- very crisp and curt in his response :-)) . He said it was because of this 'don't-mind-and-enjoy-the-good-of-it' attitude that we see all this dirt happening. We are forced to learn to live with such things. I agree on that totally. I thought some more on it and came to realize a subtle issue in this whole game. I did not ask the question whether we should mind or not. I am just asking a question whether we have a choice of not feeling bad about it. I am not asking people to ignore it! One need not ignore an issue which one does not feel bad about. One should definitely act in order to make things better, but should some bad feeling about something be the motivator to make it better, Or is it inherently something different that makes us act in order to make something better. If the answer is 'No' to the question of Whether one has a choice of feeling bad one some issue... then we become beggars.. don't we? Because beggars don't choose Think about it. I think I am close to find an answer to this.

Bad week and hence no more posts till July 16th

The last week was the most amazing weeks in my life. This week is the most important week in my life and hence most tense. So i shall post anything only on July 16th Let me try to stop myself from falling into the 'obssessive compulsive blogging' disorder

A great week

Last week was the best times in my life. I was able to figure out the real meaning of a particular set of differential equations Linear differential equation. Through this i was able to derive the meaning of 'e', by deriving the limit equation of 'e^x' by first principles. Another real joyous moment came when I was able to figure out the complex exponential from the first pronciples 'e^jx' where j = sqare root of -1. Also I was able to link up the concept 'e^jx = Cos(x) + jSin(x)' which is called Eulers Formula. The funny thing is that pythagoras theorem was everywhere in the derivation. Will publish the results soon here. Just wait until I make them in some comprehensible format. I have found a deep link of the complex exponential fuction with the laplace transform. That will soon be published here. Update::: understanding IS geometrical

Visa Interview

I have a VISA interview at the Chennai American Consulate. I have a feeling that i would not make it!!! I am freaked out!!!

Shocking Shocking!!!

Dear O Dear!!! This means my admission records are hacked!!!!!!!

A murderer's blog

Blogging The Fifth Nail I came accross a guys blog who had murdered a family in Idaho, US. U can read more on the WIRED news report here.

FUBAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

FUBAR This is my friends which i totally agree... More on this later..

Terrorism in ancient and mordern.

Charu has posted a few links here, which could be helpful to all people who are affected by the London Blasts. I have always had a view that terrorism did exist in the past, but it existed in a very unorganized and random manner. I am getting a bit scared as to where terrorism and the world is heading to. For example in medival Kerala there were suicide attackers called 'Chavers' who used to go right in the middle of a hostile community and fight until someone from that community sawed the 'Chavers' heads off. This was however not very common. There was a similiar thing in Ireland too, so also in France. They were suppressed in History because it was twisted by people who wrote it. Also these incidents were statistically rare and were not recorded. Now the picture is changing. The terrorists have build up a terrorist economy, where money and value flows into the network and an organized effort can be made to create chaos. It is like a big company now, whose business is terrorism. Are we heading to a third world war????

Watch the Gujarat Police commisioner in action during a flood

I dont usually post office forwards in my blogs but this just stands out of all the usual crap. I mean, Just LOOK at it!!!! Aint this amazing!!!

Scene: A flood affected area of Vadodara, Gujrat

Cast: Joint Commissioner of Police, K. Kumaraswamy, riding on the shoulders of a Constable to save his feet and trousers from Flood Water!!!

Source: The Indian Express, July 2

Caravan Gets Stuck as Dogs Bark?

LOONEY TARANTULA: Caravan Gets Stuck as Dogs Bark? Well this poor guy became shikhar of work hazards. Especially in the indian context... more in an expanded post later.

Women in Kerala in the near past

I read Harini's post about a futuristic concept called Handmaid I decided to post my comment to that post on my blog. Have a read.

You have left me thinking about the Kerala Society.

Some years back, there was this rampant custom among the Nambudiri ‘clan’ who would associate(sexually) with a woman of a lower caste(mostly Nairs), this was called sambandham. The institution of marriage at that time caled ‘Veli’ allowed a Nambudiri to have multiple sambandhams. Most of the ‘women’ in sambandham were 13 year old girls, whereas the Nambudiri himself would be more than 60 years of age. I always consider this an institutionalized rape, but I never think the girls would have thought that it was rape, They would have considered themselves to be lucky for being fucked by a rich Nambudiri. While being drawn into the contract of sambandham they would know what exactly is in store for them.

The subtler part here is whether the girl would have had an opinion of NOT associating with a Nambudiri, if there was such a girl then I would consider her to be raped by the customs. However the general rule in those times was that a girl never has the rights to her life. The KEY to her life is in associating with a man. The mans ‘power’ is her source of protection. So I guess 99.9999% of the girls would have volunteered to be associated with a nambudiri.

When I used to hear such stories from my mom about such customs, I would just Imagine how the sexual part between a 13 year old lean girl and a 60 year old fat man would be. One has just to change the words in the book and instead of travelling forward into time to view a handmaid you can travel backwards and view a girls mind in Sambandham.

My red ‘pawada’ (skirt) is hitched up to my waist though no higher. Below it the Nambudiri(Commander) is associating(fucking). He is associating with me physically as a matter of divinity(What he is fucking is the lower part of my body). Eventhough I don’t feel anything; I am supposed to be blessed by this association and therefore I should feel happy.This is what I expected when I associated with him.(I do not say making love, because this is not what he’s doing. Copulating too would be inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved. Nor does rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for.)

Even though some people (who still believe in ‘Brahmin Supremacy’) would try to justify this i believe they were horrific crimes against humanity.

I used to hear some old tales(puranas) from my Grandma.From whatever little of what i know about the Puranas I dont think anywhere there was a woman treated like someone in sambandham… this sytem was not mentioned anywhere. Though women were lower to men in making choices, even in the ranks of the gods and godesses, they were always considered to be powerful and could make some choices. For example Gandhari, Kunti in Mahabharat. Sita in Ramayana. They were power houses and were very very respected(even now). I consider the Krishna devotee Meera also to be a woman of independent choice and also very powerful.

One knows what is the status of women in the present and in the near past. But what was the status of women, during the time of say Ashoka the great? If they were treated with respect and had the right to take decisions and make independednt choices, then we have a BIG question in our hands.

What made Indian society change? from one that respects women as its members to something that USES women as a utility.

The answer to this question will be something that will have a cure in it, for the present society.

Women and blogs::: truly informative

I found a great resource on the net... will just suit my need :-) Women and blogs This is gonna help me a lot ;-)

Horrified to the CORE

What the f*** is happening in India? I got this from Hemangini

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Train to Chennai

I wrote out this blog post in my head long before I was anywhere near a computer, and funnily now when I sit down to actually write it, whatever happened sounds like the narrative I've been unleashing on people not a real incident at all. I took the night train to Chennai Saturday night for a friend's wedding. I was travelling alone, and happy to have the Upper Berth of the three tier compartment. My mum came to see me off and worried, as she usually does, about the occupants: "That guy looks shady", she said, pointing to the occupant of the other Upper Berth but I brushed it aside as paranoia, reminded her I'd been travelling alone on three tier since college and then, once the train left, went up and straight to sleep. It was hard to sleep, despite the sheet covering me. I was restless and tossing from side to side. The guy in the Upper Berth next to me appeared to be jerking off, but I ignored him. Finally I drifted into a light sleep till about one a.m. when I felt something brush my foot. I moved my foot well under my sheet, thinking 'Funny, I didn't think I was tall enough to be extending out of my berth'. Then, about three in the morning, the lights are off, it's deathly quiet, the guy in the Upper Berth next to me (I haven't noticed him much so far, since I'm not wearing my lenses or glasses) gets restless. He wakes up, goes down, shuffles around, then comes back up and just sits still on his berth. Next thing I know (and I'm half asleep, crouched in my usual foetal-sleeping position facing him) he reaches out and touches me, between my legs, with the end of his foot. I start, jerk my hand out and push his foot away, so he withdraws immediately. I think (and why, why, why do women always do this) he must have made a mistake and just been stretching or something. Lots of people stretch their leg, unintentionally touching the other berth. I tried to drift back into sleep, thinking of an FIR I had filed earlier, on grounds of harrassment when a Maruti car, messing with mine as I was driving, eased up to my car, lightly bumped it and then veered away, it's occupants hugely amused that they had shaken me. The cop station, where I was offered tea and then commented upon, "You are so thin, yet so brave, Madam", proved more harrassing than the incident. My mind was running through that incident. Also it struck me as sort of unfair, in that deathly quiet compartment, that everyone would be fast asleep while I was left uneasily awake, wondering about the intentions of the man next to me and having to be on alert. I wanted to turn away from him, but in the back of my head an alarm bell had rung so I didn't. At 3:30 a.m., my Upper Berth neighbour reaches and touches my breast. I don't know what he was expecting. That I would simper coyly and turn away? That I would ignore him? Encourage him? Mind boggling possibilities. I'm hugely sensitive to men touching me, often stopping calling people who even casually throw their arm around me (it's just a thing I have), so this was trauma for me. I was up like a shot; my mind blank in my half-sleep and all I did was scream. It was strange, thinking back on it. I wasn't angry, I wasn't yelling expletives, or hell, even sentences or words. It was just like an animal-in-pain screaming. Shrill, loud, repetitive. No words, just screaming and screaming till the lights were flicked on, people hurriedly woke up, the TC came running. Upper Berth man says loudly aggressively, "Kya hua? Kya hua?" ("What happened? what happened?") and then slowly words formed in my head; the shock, the outrage, the sense of violation was replaced by a hysterical screaming, "Kya kar rahe ho?" ("What are you doing?") Again and again and again. The TC, sensing Upper Berth Man's apparent complete shock turned to me, still shaking in my berth. I could barely see anything, compounding my sense of disorientation. "Madam, you must have been dreaming," says the TC. No one else is talking. I realised in an instant that the whole episode could quickly turn against me. Everyone would be annoyed at being woken up by a silly, hysterical girl, the Upper Berth guy would be glad to evade responsibility, the TC glad to avert a potential nuisance. So I calmed down. "Sir," I pointed out, in my best English, "This is not the first time tonight this has happened. This man has been repeatedly touching me." "Are you alone, Madam?" "Yes, sir." I think that's what did it. Upper Berth man was yanked down, the Railway Cops (they had come by too, by this time) grabbed hold of him, and the TC told me to come down and write out a complaint. The Man began begging for mercy. "You are ruining my life," he told me in Hindi. "Please forgive me." Then, in English, "I could not control myself." Like a Saamna editorial. I told him to stop touching me again. I told the cops to hold him back. I wrote in shaky handwriting something that resembled a complaint, on the back of the TCs name sheets. I was unsure what to write so I wrote coyly: "A man was touching my private parts". His baggage was pulled down and, still begging for mercy, he was led away. I went up to sleep. No one else in all the people who had gathered said a word either to each other or to me. I tried to sleep, felt a little tearful, found I couldn't text the one person I wanted to, and finally fell into restless sleep till 5:15 a.m. when we reached Chennai. I thought it was over, but the TC was back, and told me if I wanted to file an FIR (and I was sure I did) I would have to come to the police station. I told him I'd join him and waited for the compartment to empty. No one had said a word to me in all of this, which was fine, I didn't expect them to, but as they left the train, everyone passing me would look up, glance at me and then move on. It was horrible. I felt guilty somehow. For waking them up, for having screamed so much, for not just shutting up and going back to sleep, I suppose. As I left the train, the Man was outside, hands folded, begging some more. I walked with the TC, the Man behind us, surrounded by Railway Police. Someone else came up to me as I walked and said in a low voice, "Madam, treat me like your brother, I am a member of the public. Have mercy on this boy, madam, he has come to do a Railway exam. You will ruin his life Madam. As a member of the public, I appeal to you, Madam." I'm not a very angry person, so I didn't feel angry. I felt annoyed. And tired. Whose side was everybody on? "Where were you when this happened?" I asked him. "Sleeping, Madam." "What did you do when you heard me?" "I came running, Madam." "And then?" "And now I request you, Madam?" I can't follow this kind of argument especially not after a night like the one I had had. "I'm not in a particularly good mood," I said, "please go away." He did. The cops were waking up at the cop station in Chennai Central. Buttoning up checked chirts, joking sleepily on their walkie talkies. I was asked to sit, the Man thrown on the floor by me. The cop on duty was told what happened. He broke into Tamil. "You've come for an exam and this is what you do?" he asked the man. Man spoke no English, he was from Bihar. Another cop wandered in flicking a long cane stick and walloped the man, making large swishing noises. I felt like in a scene from Maximum City. I was made to file another complaint. The Man kept reaching out to touch my feet, "Ma, ma," he kept saying. In Hindi, 'don't ruin my life.' It's funny how everything becomes familial when a woman is concerned. The Member of the Public was my brother, my molester calls me his mother. My identity is submerged in this larger social structure. Soon I have another identity: The Hindu journalist. Every time I was referred to after that, I was The Hindu journalist. In Chennai, it's a very big deal. The Man is taken off into the lock up and half and hour later a woman cop shows up. I'm taken into another room, where she offers me boiling coffee from a thermacol cup and suggests, somewhat deferentially, that I should reconsider pressing charges because (again), "You will ruin his life Madam." I tell her in Tamil that, as a woman, she should understand my feelings. "I feel strongly about this," I say. She apologises and agrees that I could do whatever I thought best and she would facilitate. The Sub Inspector now arrives, I file a third complaint with many details (such as his name: Sanjeev Kumar, age: 28 and address: Madhubani District, Bihar). At 10: 30 I have to return to meet the Inspector. On my way to his room, I pass the Man in lock up. I cannot bear to look at him, I haven't throughout all this, except to notice two rings he wears on his two last fingers of the left hand, but my friend points out he is cowered in a corner, shirtless. In instances like this, you feel (or atleast I did) a huge overwhelming feeling. For me it was outrage. At his audacity, more than anything, and the fact that I could not call a tiny berth my own without someone impinging on that space. But when you want to respond with an equivalent grand gesture, such as filing an FIR, imprisoning the perpetrator, the system stalls you. In a devious way. It's not hard to do, it's just long to do, complex to do. Hours to wait. For Sub Inspectors, TCs to attest, women police, Inspectors, and I found out at 10: 30 am when I returned with a friend, some two hours just to make handwritten copies of the FIR. It's so exhausting and annoying you want to walk away, wash yourself, get food and sleep. That's how the system breaks you down. Through triplicate copies, not any direct refusal to do your bidding. Anyway, Sanjeev Kumar has been booked under Sections 354 and 509 of the IPC and under the Prevention of Harrassment of Women Act, 1998. It is a non-bailable offence for 15 days, during which he is in a remand facility. After which he needs someone to furnish a bail warrant; the bail amount is minimal. And then the hearing will be in a few months. I haven't decided if I want to come down from Delhi all the way for it. Everyone I told this story to, had a story of their own. My friend's tummy was rubbed up and down till she woke up, another woke up to find two hands on her breasts, my aunt woke up to find a man had straddled her, my mother woke up to a man running his fingers down her body... everyone has a story. I called my mum after I left the cop station the first time. I said, "Do you think I over-reacted?" And this other voice in my head laughed at me, and our society. A strange man, touches you twice in the middle of the night, and your greatest worry when you screamed and complained, is, "Did I over react"?! And some... almost, guilt... when people kept telling me I'd ruin his life, and when they looked hostile at my screaming. Some amazement that no one said a thing to me after the man was taken away, all happy elderly couples right beneath me, middle aged women beneath my berth. Not a word. Cops wanting to dissaude me. Some inexplicable class-consciousness feelings toward Sanjeev Kumar - "You dirty, low caste man touching me" - this is too uncomfortabe for me to believe I was thinking like that, but it happened so I record it. And now, some satisfaction that he is locked up for 15 days. Update: I took a flight back, like a wuss. And I felt like I was doing sort of a disservice to all the people who couldn't afford to buy their way out of a situation, but I just couldn't bear another three tier overnight journey. Really.

posted by Mangs at 10:02 PM

Here is a simple geometric proof in algebra

This is something invented by Euclid to explain (a+b)^2 = a^2 + b^2 + 2ab

Lindsay Davenport

For me the wimbledon was won by both Davenport and Williams.... Both deserved it.. all the way... If Davenport won i would be sad for Williams loosing. Now i am feeling really sorry for Davenport!!! Anyways Keep it up girls!!! Davenport is 6'2 and 29 years of age..... can i call her a girl???? :-) The commentators were certainly doing so!!!!!