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?

Sabka Katega

Rediscovered this gem by bodhi tree (XLRI) recently.

SABKA KATEGA...

What brought us together might remain unspoken,
what held us together might be worn off and broken,
even if your way was different as I felt was mine,
now i want our paths to cross waiting for my time.

http://xlkikudiyan.blogspot.com

Different kind of mugging...

We are all used to mugging for exams...and with the Matrix theory midsem on 31st Oct my Sunday was spent mugging for it and watching India waste an excellent start.
I left for IISc at about 7 pm...and experienced for the first time in my life...THE OTHER THING CALLED MUGGING.

As I walked to the bus stop...2 ppl accosted me and spoke in Kannada.
When I indicated that I did not know that language one of them asked me to follow him to "the Station". These ppl were obviously not policemen...so I refused.
Then he grabbed my neck and started pulling me with him as I pushed him away.
He then tried to strangle me and in this confusion we both fell into the gutter by the side of the road.

He apparently wanted my cell phone...I think the other fellow was afraid people might turn up and had already run away. This guy kept up his choking and clawed away at my face with his nails. I punched him a couple of times and pulled him away with his hair.

I will not claim I bashed him up but I did not let him beat me either. He finally managed to pull my Nokia 6030 phone out of my hands but as he was getting out of the gutter people has arrived on the scene. I grabbed his leg to not allow him to get away. The people caught him and I fairly easily convinced them that he was trying to steal my phone as opposed to his claim that I was stealing his phone.

Then came the most 'satisfying' part of the whole thing...seeing the bastard getting bashed up by the public. He lay motionless on the ground not responding to all the punches and kicks flying at him.
I was told to call the police...but by the time i met my aunt and got back to the place where people were holding him down ...the people had grown tired and left and so had that bastard.

I have bruises on my face and had to have an anti-tetanus injection...but satisfied that I did not give in to him.Maybe if I was better built none of this would have happened...I think he realized that " The size of the dog in the fight does not matter...what matters is the size of the FIGHT IN THE DOG."

The Brother summed it up in one sentence as he very often does..." Worried about you,but proud of you."

Status update

This post might add an infinite amount of entropy to the Universe and I don't care...
it starts out to answer a question that a few people who 'sort of' know me have asked over the past couple of weeks.
It pertains to my status message in gmail and yahoo IMs which reads "How I wish ...how I wish you were here".
The answer my friends is blowing in my mind.

It starts in a lab in IISc...I am doing my Digital Image Processing assignment.
Strangely,the programs I write seem to be working. The weather outside is fine...bright sunshine yet not hot or humid.
If I want I could download some of my favourite songs from the net and listen.
I am enjoying myself...I am happy I am in IISc.
Life's Good.
I am about to tell myself
" ...what a wonderful world!".
Just then a thought crosses my mind.
It triggers a chain reaction of thoughts that end up in bleary eyes and an unspeakeable,immeasureable guilt.
Only one person in the world has said it to me in so many words...only one other person I have told in so many words about it.
Neither of them is with me right now.
Maybe one day I will come to terms with this...till then whether gmail says it or not
this is my status message.

That's all people...that's all.
It all is said in this one line:
" How I wish...how I wish you were here".

I've learnt that...

Came across this blog a few months ago...and had posted it on the yahoo grp too.
It belongs to this girl called Meghana (http://virtualscribblings.blogspot.com).

I loved some of the 'claims' made in that post and I think I can add a few of my own.
I've learnt that...

...most of the stuff is all in my head and how I view it is my prerogative alone.

...there is no shame in tears, but you still don’t want the world to see your vulnerability.

...sometimes being alone helps you disentangle your intricacies, but you secretly wish there was a shoulder you could lean on.

...prayers don’t guarantee miracles, but they still heal certain wounds.
(expressly disagree...prayers dont help according to me)

...every emotion doesn’t need words for expression, you can feel someone's care through their eyes.

...unless you learn to be your own emotional anchor, you cannot be one to someone else and someone else cannot be one to you.

..at the end of the day it doesn’t do to sit and mull over what I’ve achieved coz there’s still a long long way to go.

...how the smallest of instances achieve significance and seem magnified in light of a few conversations and experiences.

...a lesson will be repeated again, till you’ve learnt it well enough.

...the only thing worse than a nightmare...is to wake up and realize that real life is even worse.

...you can have hundreds of friends on orkut and yahoo...and still feel unloved and unappreciated.
and that feeling goes away even if u talk to a friend for a min on the phone...or as in my case get a voicemail(thanks Gmail).

...one 'trivial' mistake can scar you for life.it cud be the difference between realizing your dreams and struggling all your life to do so. it cud be the difference between reaching Atlantis and having to remind yourself that another world,your Atlantis, exists.

...the only thing worse than failure is succeeding and not being able to share it with those to whom it would have meant so much.

...giving treats to friends and taking treats from them are gr8...but the best treats are the ones you give yourself.

...NIIT is wrong: Life begins at an IIT.
(NIIT says "Life begins at NIIT")

... Life's a chemical reaction...you break old bonds and form new ones for better stability...but it invariably adds to the confusion in the Universe.

The last and the best one:
"THERE IS NO SPOON"

HOW LOGICAL ARE YOU?

Took this test on blogthings.com. Darn easy ...but still HAD TO SHOW OFF!!

You Are Incredibly Logical

Move over Spock - you're the new master of logic You think rationally, clearly, and quickly. A seasoned problem solver, your mind is like a computer!

How Logical Are You?

Schumi...thanks for the memories

A week ago it was Andre Agassi that bid the sports world a tearful goodbye. Today it is Michael Schumacher.Another one that makes me go into a chest thumping fist pumping frenzy.
With Schumi's imminent retirement...I have 2 less guys to root for desparately.
From Agassi I learnt that the craft was often more important than winning...Schumi thinks differently I guess. No one can put in efficient lap after efficient lap on the limit quite like him.
It is almost a privilege to see him racing...without him F1 is poorer. The initial wins at benetton in 94=95 followed by 4 frustrating second place finishes from 96-99.
Nobody really remembers those I think. i think he got injured in the 99 season but came back to try and help Eddie Irvine win over Hakkinen. It was damn close...and u cannot say schumi did not try. 90 Gp wins (and I hope he makes it a nice round 93)...an infinite number of records. What I remember is thinking that this man does not need a Ferrari to win...put him in a McLaren or any other car that does not cost him 2 seconds a lap and he will. The unbelievable will to win is what I will remember him for.
I don't really think it is necessary to be a very gracious loser...if u lost by all means BE SORE. It showed in Steffi...and it showed in Michael. Maybe it is a German trait.
Schumi's replacement at Ferrari Kimi (rhymes huh) is my second favourite driver right now...and come next F1 season he shall rule the roost.
All in all...
SCHUMI ...THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES!