Bittersweet Symphony

Love this song by the Verve. A part of it was used in Bluffmaster.

The whole song

Cause it's a bittersweet symphony, this life
Trying to make ends meet
You're a slave to the money then you die.(True, very true)
I'll take you down the only road I've ever been down
You know the one that takes you to the places
where all the veins meet yeah

No change, I can't change
I can't change, I can't change
But I'm here in my mould
I am here in my mould
But I'm a million different people
from one day to the next
I can't change my mould
No, no, no, no, no, no, no,no,no,no,no,no(fading away)

Well I never pray
But tonight I'm on my knees yeah (not really)
I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me, yeah
I let the melody shine, let it cleanse my mind, I feel free now
But the airways are clean and there's nobody singing to me now

'Cause it's a bittersweet symphony, this life
Trying to make ends meet
Trying to find some money (somebody) then you die
I'll take you down the only road I've ever been down
You know the one that takes you to the places
where all the veins meet yeah.

Words' worth

Had posted this a few months ago...then took it off because it was adding too much entropy to the Universe.

There is a great deal of verbal communication in the world today. Letters,phone calls,emails,chats,blogs(:P)...an infinity of words.

I for one believe that the best communication involves zero or a minimal amount of words.

What a million words of commiseration could not do...a sigh and 6 words did.
It felt like an arm round the shoulder ...and all those wise men and women with their words did not realize that that was what I needed.

A few friends and a completely different topic had me laughing on the worst day of my life.

No amount of words can do what one look into the eyes of a friend trying desperately to hold back her tears did.

I went out for dinner once by myself...a couple sat on the table facing me.
The girl was trying to hold back her tears. The guy sat opposite her,not eating ...just looking into her eyes...almost soothing her...not one word was said.
I smiled.

The Grass was Greener...

Met Ankur, Prasanna and Paresh this last Saturday.
Had a lot of fun...but I must admit I was also a bit sad.
There is something about meeting old friends, exchanging notes on who is doing what, gossiping(if that is what you call it)...it makes you look back at how you were when you were with them.
It was great to meet them because very rarely do you get a group of friends together that can understand precisely what I am going through...undoubtedly my closest friends.
The same jokes were back, the mimicry, the leg pulling over how sincerely I attended 12th std classes while these ppl goofed off.
It reminded me of those days 6-7 years ago...the innocent belief that if you were smart, worked hard then luck would not play a role...that doing beautiful mathematics was the purpose of life, that physics was the highest in intellectual endeavour.
Where is that cheerful belief, that innocent confidence??

It takes old friends to remind you of who you were, who you are and what you are turning into.
Maybe I can prevent the cynicism from creeping into me any further.
Maybe I can find my 'Return to Innocence'

Last September Ankur wrote this.
I can identify with the emotion...Thanks for everything guys!!

An old song that fits the mood ...
"Koi lauta de mere beete hue din".

Time.

This is my life's song right now...wasting one day at a time getting nowhere.

TIME - Pink Floyd

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but its sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the english way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say

Coorg tripping...

Kanna planned a trip for us to Coorg with stay at the Club Mahindra resort in Kodagu valley.
Amazing 3 days...LOADS of FUN!!!!!!!

Won't write much since a picture is worth a thousand words...I'll let the photos do the talking.
A few B&W pics for "effect".
For the full album visit my Picasaweb page.

The Rematch

In 2005 two 'not-so-great','undeserving' English teams won the greatest prize their sport had to offer that year against 2 Champion sides:
In May Liverpool beat Milan in the Champions League final in what was called '6 minutes of madness' or something like that.
In July and August of the same year England beat Australia 2-1 in the Ashes with a lot of luck.
It pained me to see Warney and McGrath bowl their hearts out on the last day of the 5th Test as the Englishmen drudged their way to a draw and an Ashes victory.
That day I predicted they would get Whitewashed the next time they went to Australia.
The hunger was visible in the Aussies, in Warne and McGrath, in Lee and Ponting and Hayden and Gilchrist to make up for loss.
I had predicted a whitewash, a whitewash it was, Australia thr"ASHES" England.

Now Milan have a chance to get even...and a 5-0 scoreline would just ROCK!!

FORZA MILAN!!!

But it rained

April 11th 2007.
It rained at night here in Bangalore.
I was reminded of some of my favourite Pink Floyd lines:

Outside the rain fell dark and slow
While I pondered on this dangerous but irresistible pastime
I took a heavenly ride through our silence
I knew the moment had arrived
For killing the past and coming back to life

I took a heavenly ride through our silence
I knew the waiting had begun
And headed straight...into the shining sun

Failure

Used to see this ad when the NBA matches were shown on Star Sports and ESPN.
Amazing ad...by the Greatest.

Might sound familiar.


I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career;
I've lost almost 300 games;
26 times I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot...and MISSED.
I've failed over and over and over again in my life.
That is why...I succeed.

Watch it here:

you-tube

Amazing ad

Chennai tripping...

Had been to Madras last weekend (extended by the Ugadi holiday). Read an IEEE paper on the way to and fro (woe the life of a PG student).
Those 3 days were heavenly though...Kanna picked me up in his car. Met his amma and paati after a long long time. So much has happened since I last met them.
Early Saturday morning we went to Besant Nagar beach...and I realized again how much I love the sea.
My first view of the Bay of Bengal. Lots of coffee(the best I have ever had...so much for coffee board). Quite a bit of food as Prasanna's family joined in the crusade to increase my weight.
A performance by Kanna's Sir ...heavenly.
2 by prasanna himself...excellent but marred by extrinsic events both.
Photos of the sea:
The first 2 I converted from color to grayscale for what I felt was "effect".

Laptopping

This Wednesday i got my laptop.
Dell Inspiron 640m.
Intel Centrino Duo processor 1.6GHz
1 GB RAM
80 GB HDD
DVD writer.
Win XP and Fedora Core 6 installed on it.

It rocks!!

Can you keep your emotions in check?...

You Have Your Emotions in Check

You are an incredibly stable and happy person. Ever consider being a therapist? You have figured out how to keep a positive outlook, no matter what. You don't have an easier life than anyone else. You just have figured things out a little more.

Can You Keep Your Emotions in Check?

Founder's Day at IISc

3rd of March was celebrated as Founder's Day being the 168th birthday of J.N.Tata.
The main building was decorated with an amazing flower decoration.
Here are some photos that I took in almost amateur fashion.
Had to run behind the butterflies and take pics at full zoom...so those pics might not be very good quality but then..."Bhavnaaon ko samjho"

Motivation...

Found this on Sinu's laptop.
A very nice thought...something I remind myself everyday.
The source of my pain and my focus at the same time.
A really interesting,motivating thought.

SOMETIMES THERE IS NO NEXT TIME,
NO SECOND CHANCE,
NO TIME OUT.
SOMETIMES...IT IS NOW OR NEVER.

Carpe Diem...

On my visits to Mumbai I have noticed one thing...I am out to make the most of every moment I get to stay in the place I proudly call HOME (ME MUMBAIKAR!!).
Be it talking to my mom till 2 am the night I land there or 3 visits to Shivaji Park in 16 hrs literally.

This last time I thought...Hell!! I should be living my entire bloody life like this. Making every moment count, having fun all the times I can. It also reminded me of the dialogue that precedes one of my favourite tunes, the Gateway Theme in Bluffmaster.

Tumhe aise kitne din yaad hain Roy,
pehla suit...pehli salary,
jab tumne ek ladki ko pehli baar chhua,pehli baar chooma,
.
.
.
jab pehli baar tumhaara dil dhadka Roy!!

CARPE DIEM BABY!!

As INERT as Radon...

That's my gmail status right now.
About a tenth of the year is gone and apart from finding out about something called the Radon transform and adding more air-miles going to Bombay and coming back,I have achieved NOTHING.
(Also read: Radon)

Had an assignment about the properties of the Radon transforms and my mind went PHUT!!
Could not think anything...sat there blankly staring at the screen for about 10 min, that's when I thought of this status message.

What's wrong,I dunno...just lost it I guess.
Not just the mental sharpness but also atleast a bit of the Motivation I guess.
Just no enthu to work or figure these things out.
Thanks to Anoop, my labmate, without whom this assignment would not be completed.

Need to get out of this rut...get back on track.
No clue how to do that.
And I won't even react much.

interesting thought...

Found this on a webpage about wavelet transforms...you never know what you will find where.

At the beginning of my journey, I was naive. I didn't yet know that answers vanish as one continues to travel, that there is only further complexity, that there are still more interrelationships, and more questions.

Robert D. Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: a journey to the frountiers of anarchy, Vintage Press, 1996

When Genius Failed...

The latest book I have read is titled "When Genius Failed" by Roger Lowenstein.

It is about the meteoric rise and equally spectacular fall of LONG TERM CAPITAL MANAGEMENT. A hedge fund by nature,it had on board star traders from Wall Street and Merton and Scholes(Nobel Laureates) whose work forms the basis of all modern finance.

With such a stellar cast and the backing of all the major banks on Wall Street LTCM had all the right credentials to make it big. Their trades were cold,calculated bets based on MATHEMATICS. Their behaviour in the good times brings only one word, repeated many times in the book, to mind:
HUBRIS!!

George Soros, in a lecture in IISc, said that ours is the age of fallibility.
Human beings tend to do irrational things. It is LTCM's inability to include this human factor in their trades that contributed greatly to their fall apart from their
(over)confidence in their "models".

All in all, a very good read though the Rs. 500/- price tag is a bit of a pinch on the pocket.

Looking forward to Hannibal Rising.

NUMB3RS

This is my favourite TV series while I still watched TV(along with the Star Treks). In the pilot episode itself math is used to track a serial murderer.

Somewhere the assumptions go wrong and it all blows up in their face (only to be sorted out later ...obviously).
Was watching this episode as I waited for the clock to tick down pending my departure from home on 31st December.
Liked this dialogue between the Mathematician Charles Eppes and the physicist Larry Fleihnardt that I wrote it down.
CE : Larry something went wrong and I don't know what. Now it looks like I can't even think.
LF: Let me guess...you tried to solve a problem involving human behaviour and it blew up in your face.
.
.
.(will not bore you with the rest of it)
AND THIS IS MY FAVOURITE PART

LF : And Charlie, when you're dealing with human problems there's going to be pain and disappointment. You got to ask yourself IS IT WORTH IT?

Aired on November 12th,2005 on AXN in India.

Complimentary function

While we may want to keep our feet firmly on the ground in the face of the sweetest,diabetes-inducing compliments...in my lonelier times I tend to reminisce the kind things people have said to me.
These are not necessarily when I have done really well...but each one of them touched my heart.
Sometimes these people did not even know how much they touched my heart.
The people shall not be named . Some of them know me, some think they know me and some really do know me.
1) July 26th,2K5.
On the famed Matunga Z-bridge. Having walked through waist deep water and being drenched to the bone I am contemplating the task I and a classmate just achieved and how to get home with minimum damage. I am,as sportspersons would put it, 'in the zone'. And she comes up with:
" Nissim, you look like a saint...absolutely expressionless".
I think of this as a compliment...dunno about you.

2) Semester 7. Assignments flying all around. DComm assignments being finished hurriedly.
I sit there, close my eyes and focus myself. A classmate comes up with:
" You look like you don't have any problems in life." NO COMMENTS!!

3) In a chat (probably online):
" That's why your eyes are so deep...there's a part of you thats out there for the world to see. Then there is an entire you hidden from the rest of the world."
Point taken and compliment too.

Still Falling over backwards

Arjun Singh has his own way after all. The BILL is passed in LS. The peoples' representatives, representing the 27% 'majority', decided to give the go ahead to the reservations.
As promised in the previous post...here are some poignant statistics from Arun Shourie's book 'Falling over Backwards'.

KERALA Medical admissions:

CATEGORY RANK
General < 412
OBC < 1752,2653 for different 'grades(is it?)'
SC < 4409
ST < 14,426.
My only comment...WTF!!

Karnataka Medicine admissions:
CATEGORY RANK
General < 540
Reserved categories < 40,799 different categories of reservations.

A personal experience...engineering admissions 2001. I go to VJTI and find that general is one column and there are infinitely many reserved category columns.

SC, ST, OBC, VJ1(Vimukt Jaati), VJ2, VJ3, NT1(Nomadic tribes),NT2 and some other things also.

Jharkhand engineering admissions :
Reserved category candidate getting admission to engg...PCM score
P = 2/100, C = 1/100
Another one: 4/300.

GOVERNMENT SERVICES have had reservations for long:

In Delhi, a general category person joined in 1957. Everyone agrees he is fairly efficient and good at his work. Currently serving under a lady BORN in 1966. Promotion upon joining, superceding others on the basis of caste...leads to such gross injustice.

One final statistic: consider the people who joined the public electrical services in Karnataka in 1982-84 as Asst. Engineers.
General category engineers will not be promoted to the post of Executive Engineers till 2012-2014.
Reserved category engineers got the same in 1991-93.

Meera Kumar wants to implement reservation in private sector too.
Is this where we are going?