"Trisha illana Divya"

In case you are not Tamil or are Tamil and do not recognise the title (in which case you are around three-fourths of a sore loser) - there's more to this than just the title.


If there should exist a statement, short as you would please, embodying in itself the very spirit of sportsmanship, posing as the epitome of perseverance, delivering in full, yet in all subtlety, as true as the truest of words, yet not losing, in its quest to educate, its sharp sense of humour, its message of hope and consolation to the failed, defeated and downtrodden of this sad and dreary globe, then there can not, for all that I know, be a more suited example of one such than this particular timeless piece of mirth delivered by perhaps one of the most famous and renowned, not to mention comic, philosopher in the history of Tamil: "Trisha illana Divya".

Trisha illana Divya: (Tamil); "If not Trisha, then Divya."

In the realistic manner of Epictetus, the speaker instructs us to not fret too long about what is out of hand and what goals have failed to be achieved, but to move on to other aspirations, perhaps humbler and less glamorous, and to nonetheless lay on its pursuit the very same passion and dedication that arose in one in toiling towards the former. All this in three words delivered in the same breath as many other lines that have today become wayward remarks of lore (atleast my lore), a notable couple of which are a number of his renditions of a particular classic by Gene Kelly from one of his critically acclaimed hollywood musicals and his remarkable portrayal of a village don here, containing the much appreciated Tamil version of Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Hasta la vista, baby" from Terminator 2: Judgement Day.


Sadly, though not a bit unexpectedly, there do not appear to be too many who appreciate the depth of philosophical clarity displayed in this and various other seemingly offhand remarks encountered in various circumstances, often as their delivery and the situation in which they appear seem to exclude the possibility of them having any serious knowledge to get across. But of course, this particular case is perhaps but an exhibition on my part of those skills possessed by seemingly few other than your English teacher which allow one to accredit to the long-gone poet's simple piece of poetry interpretations and hidden nuances that he himself never in his wildest dreams meant for it to possess.


Notwithstanding, it seems to be true that most issues in many of our lives are a result, direct or indirect, of either some form of miscommunication or dissonance. Either we read too much into a statement, or too less, both of which are as disastrous as the other given the opportunity.


Getting back to the old not-so-serious-and-philosophical spirit, as the knight in shining armour of the laughter-ridden and the saving grace of the dreadfully bored would advise you to, the next time you come to face a "vada poche" situation, feel like moaning out "avana nee", or end up in the gutter muttering "ammae ammae", pick yourselves up with all your might, and, feet firmly planted on the ground, eyes looking up to the heavens above, remind yourself that hope is eternal, and tell yourself with all the confidence you find yourself capable of mustering, "Trisha illana Divya".


And just move on.

To sir, with love..

Perhaps the most effective utilisation of time spent in a CS110 class in all history gave rise to the following:

Of all the cows in barley farms,
Of all the rum and beer,
Of all the bees that fly in swarms,
Of wombats far and near,

Of Chesire cats and Jerry mice,
Of dogs and big bad wolves,
Of superheroes bad and nice,
Of giants, dwarves and elves,

Of wild streams that flow smooth and swift,
Of towering redwood trees,
Of leaves that in the west wind drift,
Of mountains, raging seas,

Of the pits of doom, of the hounds of hell,
Of the darkest desires of men,
Of treachery, arson, vile despots,
Of neverending tales of woe,
Of demons that roam the lands of nether,
Of evil dragon lords,

Of all the 'of's from my pen,
Of Deans, all honourable men,
Why, oh why, I ask again,
Why CS110?!
(to be read "CS one-ten" for sake of rhyme and meter, speaking of which, if they seem to be absent at a few spots, thats due to lack of sufficient consciousness.)
     
               -by the ubiquitous roommate and myself, bored to the deepest chasms of the wettest oceans.

And if my topics seem too repetitive, trust me, its only because frequency in this case happens to be a linear indicator of severity.

To cut a long one short..

    I like long sentences.

    To be more precise, I like sentences which, unlike those that you find yourself uttering all your life in most acoustic forms of communication, are generously worded, as lavishly punctuated as can be, precariously worked upon (can be compromised with skill) and polished to verbal perfection, posed to leave the casual reader lost for an interpretation, offering to him their true arguments and implications only upon atleast a second reading, holding him back and drawing his attention as less complicated wayward statements of thought seldom can, stimulating those mental faculties that, in a sizable portion of the populace, lay dormant until presented with a stimulus that to them seems vivid enough to be worthy of their consideration, the parsing of which calls for marked patience and a realisation of the oft ignored importance of every single comma and colon, and which, while not all the time resorting to pentasyllabic words or far-fetched metaphors, manage to leave the casual reader stumped for a few seconds by the sheer complexity in their structure and formulation, and at the same time are not vague rantings of an incongruous mind, but at the end of all the effort, convey to the patient (or skilled, perhaps) interpreter the precise ideas and bits of information that the writer meant them to.

    So yes, I like long sentences.

    From what I've heard, the supposedly phenomenal Ulysses, by James Joyce, has, in its last chapter, a sentence consisting of over 12,000 words. (I've heard lots about that book. Should read someday.) In contrast, my personal best happens to be a page long on a scribbling pad on the futilities of the Indian educational system (an all-time favourite topic; definitely a post on that soon).

Now, I have two theories as to why I like using long sentences:

1)  I try to cover up my inadequacies in writing in terms of lack of involving content and inability to present in a humourous or forceful manner my thoughts.

2)  The "intellectual stimulation" they provide appeals to my rarely exercised . 

   It is not for me to comment on the first point, but as for the second, I always preferred House M.D. to sitcoms, and Memento or The Usual Suspects to American Pie. Humour, of course, is a different aspect and commands importance on its own merits.

    The brain, I have often heard, is much like any other muscle in the body- it can be exercised to further its potential greatly, but the exercise is not to cease if one wishes to keep one's bean toned and up for action. Disuse begets slackening. In accord, it is essential to occasionally engage in activities that strain one's mental capabilities, reasoning, lingual or otherwise, and which are at the same time fun. Framing or even parsing "long sentences" (see definition above), for example, is one such activity. (Avoidance of anything related to the study of Chemistry is a significant other)

     These and a couple of other as wondrous and perhaps as individualistic activities such as my harmonica and some sociology fill up whatever free time I get. Trust me, its fun to be busy. :)

The Adventures of Random Walker, Episode 1: Of Individuality and Insomnia, Futility and Fumigation.

(Statutory Warning: Serious stuff coming up in a couple of lines. If found funny, pathetic reader is welcome to the club.)

Stuff happens.

The world's a big place. You meet a hundred people a day. 

You go to the market. You meet a hundred people. 

You go to the theater. You meet a hundred people.

You go to Chemistry class. You meet thirty six people. Fifty four signatures in the attendance register. 

Stuff happens.

A hundred people, a hundred minds. A hundred minds, a billion thoughts. 

None the same as the other, none much different from the rest. 

All of the very same objects, yet each as unique as can be.

All of a hundred people, all of a hundred noses.

A hundred right legs, a hundred spleens.

All the same, yet each distinct. 

All of the same, yet each truly individual.

Each to his petty obsessions, each to his pretty goals.

Each to his own corny jokes, each to his fantasies.

Each to his own Chemistry prof.; no wait, you aren't generally awake long enough to know who that is.

Each to his own Easter Bunny, each to his own Santa Claus.

Each by his own principles and morals, each by his own rules and laws.

Each with his own strengths and standings, each with his own wrongs and flaws.

Each to his own, each to his best, does anything else rhyme with "laws"?

A hundred ants scramble all around, three hundred untiring pairs of legs, scramble all around, gathering every morsel they reach, dragging every single bit back to the hill, the hill where a thousand more ants exist, all gathering, all scrambling and all surviving, only to feed their queen and perhaps feed themselves.

A hundred dogs roam the streets, barking here and barking there; barking at the post-box, at the ringing bell, barking at what you never can tell; they roam the streets, eating what they get, minding their business, and those of others. What do they do in life, where are they needed? Married men have a wife, and their word is seldom heeded.

A hundred men roam the world, and hundred thousands more. A hundred read comic books, a hundred Calvin and Hobbes. Hundreds walk the very same Earth, hundreds toil all their life. Hundreds go sleepless, hundreds love; hundreds dream dreams and thirty six literally so. Hundreds strive to be better, strive to learn more, strive to get better, strive to be fine. Hundreds work hard, hundreds work in vain, hundreds die, and thousands are born again. Hundreds learn lessons only to forget them, hundreds are sent to computer labs- these hundreds curse that unholy sem.

Hundreds live long, hundreds die hard. Hundreds exist, and I wonder why.

Told you it would be serious.

No, dear Watson, Cadbury's Dairy Milk is just not a good enough reason for the existence of humanity.

Justification for 'Fumigation' being in the title: Mosquitoes have finally discovered my room. The public health guys gas them away with this addictive-smelling white kind of gas that gases mosquitoes away.

This is NOT a sitcom. If it was, it would've been called "The Adventures of Random Walker, SEASON 1, Episode 1: Of Individuality and Insomnia, Futility and Fumigation."

Life on a Tuesday Evening

The run-o'-the-mill teenager residing in the austere premises of the forest that calls itself the Indian Institute of Technology Madras finds himself, even on the very best of Tuesday evenings, thoroughly defeated in his strongest and most sincere attempts to maintain a state of wakefulness in spite of the ongoing discussion on the fundamental principles of organometallic chemistry. Mustering all the will power bestowed upon him in blood and soul by his illustrious ancestry and peerage, your humble narrator, scarred and wounded, valiantly stages a counter-offensive against the indomitable forces of chemistry and boredom, which are no less fixated upon their motives to undermine his consciousness. War cries fill the fateful classroom, blades clash, shields are shattered, lances make pincushions of helmets, walls shudder with the voice of the esteemed professor, instilling slumber in the hearts of the forces of light, formations are broken, battalions uprooted and platoons devastated, elbows limp, vision hazes, fingers lose their grip on writing equipment (if any), eyelids droop, the head drops, and before you know it, the battle is over, and darkness prevails yet again.


But of course, ladies and gentlemen, everyone wakes up at the end of the class (with a tolerance of 3 minutes), unless you're the prof, in which sad case you're committed to stay awake the whole while. The next two dozen minutes are largely un-Tuesday-ish, involving an appreciable amount of activity dedicated to homing in on your friendly neighbourhood bicycle, followed by the tour-de-IITM, cumulating in the regular two puffs, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of  milk (neither shaken, nor stirred).

Not yet, ladies and gentlemen, have you been educated as to what essentially defines a Tuesday evening for your humble narrator. All of us, some day or the other, are bound by fate, the Geneva convention and the red herring prospectus to end up in a C-programming class. But only the unfortunate few way down in the gutters of fortune face the dread of a lab session and a chemistry class in the same evening. So there, ladies and gentlemen, was your humble narrator munching off in all glee and glory at the pathetic excuse for lemon rice that is regularly passed off on myself and my comrades in the infamous mess, when the bloke on the other side of the table (BOTOSOTT in short) makes a point.

BOTOSOTT: (candidly) Its 7:30. Methinks thou art perchance a tad delayed for thy laboratory session. (in a bit plainer English, come to think of it)
ME: (even more candidly) Yes, I am.

So off I went, off on my bike, no time to offer a lift or a hike, riding high, riding low, sometimes fast and often quite slow. Pomes apart, your humble narrator lands safe and in one piece in front of the Building Sciences Block, which happens to house the scenic computing facilities of the department of Computer Science and Engineering, which, sadly, is where the ominous TAs (Torture Administrators, for all I care) of the comp sci lab hold court.  Talk about a good room filled with computers ruined.

You'll know you're not way too high on the virtue of punctuality when you realise that nowadays your watch faces from you the query of, "By how many minutes am I late?" more often than ,"Am I late?". This revelation, ladies and gentlemen, struck your dear friend and humble narrator in the face like a crusted apple pie on the face of a feline fiend, hurled by a hunted rodent on an animated show usually seen succeeding the roar of one of the lineage of the royal family of the forest.

Minutes from the hall-of-an-eighty-machines-running-linux:

Prof: (without smile) You're late by 7 minutes. Why?
Me: (sullenly) No excuse, sir.
Mind voice: (confusedly) Hmm.. the watch informed me it was more like 10 minutes.

Prof: (with smile) You were late last week too. Any problems?
Me: (sullenly) No, sir. No problems.
Mind voice: (smirkingly) Gibbering goose-buns. If going late to class meant problems, I'd have been Bane's roomie in Arkham by now. But yes, the prof seems like a nice guy.

TA: (initially) Have you written down the programs for the assignment that you are supposed to code today?
Me: (nonchalantly) No ma'm.
Mind voice: (surprisedly) Of all the turquoise unicorns that ever roamed the plains of Andalusia!

TA: (non-understandingly) You didn't write last week either. Why is this so?
Me: (unabashedly) But ma'm, let me show you, I know how to do it. Thats why I thought there was no point in writing it down.
Mind voice: (amusedly) I'm perfectly sure I know how to input the radius of a circle and, after running a recursive algorithm with an exponential amortized complexity on the input float value, print its area.

TA: (irritatedly) No no. Rules are rules. Even if you perfectly well know how to do this, (in tone of "even if you are the President of India" ), I can't give you any sort of exception. You have to write down in your notebook a C program that takes the radius of a circle as input and outputs its radius. (note: nothing about the recursive algorithm)
Me: (protestingly) But ma'm, I've been learning C for 2 years. I assure you I can do this fine enough.
Mind voice: (even-more-amusedly) Circle? Circular queue, anyone?

TA: (even-more-irritatedly) NO. You write or I won't grade your assignment.
Me: (Resignedly) Oh, all right. I'll write.
Mind voice: (what-the-hellishly) Of all the sea cucumbers in the Baltic Sea! Just don't complain if you don't understand my handwriting.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how your dear friend and humble narrator ended up being pushed to commit the unforgivable cardinal sin of writing a piece of code on a notebook with proper syntax., as he figured that the TA (look for expansion a few paragraphs above) was but doing her job, and troubling people is actually not that nice a thing to do. After a few more such misadventures in the hall-of-an-eighty-machines-running-linux,

TA: (finally) NO. Even if you finish your programs in 15 minutes, you're not allowed to leave the lab until 9:30. And no, you're not allowed to do anything either. Just sit there and do positively nothing for the next one-and-a-half hours.
Me: (blankly) Oh...
Mind voice: (@%*$^-ly) &%*^#$@%&  &*^%*$*&% !!!


And that, ladies and gentlemen, is, for your dear friend and humble narrator, an average Tuesday evening - one unlike any other evening of any other day, one that demands extreme valour in the face of battle, one that serves you rice-mixed-with-baking-soda with a trace quantity of citrus flavouring to it, one that calls for superhuman hamstrings, one that introduces to you profs from Earth and TA's from Kerala, and beyond all, one that offers you experiences you can snigger about on the less happening Wednesday evenings.

Life, as they say, is a jumbo-sized blob of fun. Most of the time.

Thoughts from the toothbrush

For some strange reason, I don't feel like writing right up until that moment when I enter the auspices of the bathroom some time after midnight, intending to undertake the rather mundane act of brushing my teeth before hitting the sack after another tiresome day. And sadly, as Murphy would have it, on most of these occasions I'm already swaggering and dreary-eyed, loathing even the activity involved in rolling out my (rather thin) mattress, let alone sit up for another hour recording my thoughts on the vistas of life. But today being Valentine's Day and all that, I decided it was nothing less than my duty to pour out my views, etc. when I am in the mood to.

During today's instance of the perennial 'act' described above, I found floating in my mind thoughts so compelling that despite the fact that I need to be up quite early tomorrow (don't ask why), I'm still awake and keen on writing them down. But alas, by the time I found the bathroom door closing behind me and started wiping my feet dry, I found that these very thoughts had somehow fled my mind, as often occurs, leaving me desperately groping for some tiny detail of what they were about, in a disposition not too different from that in which you find yourself upon awakening from a particularly pleasant dream and finding that you can't, for all the blue barnacles in Arabia, remember any fact of whatsoever significance about the dream other than that it was particularly pleasant.

No big deal though- considering the fact that they made me quite happy, I believe those thoughts would have been mostly along the lines of what I have been talking to myself about frequently over the past few days. (Oh, and mind you, talking to yourself is by no means a definite indication of possessing a bee in your bonnet). The subject concerned in these monologues with myself happens to be the general goodness of the world around. I have noticed that these past few days, perhaps weeks, have been perhaps on the average the most pleasant ever for me.

I'm not able to put my finger on why this is so, but more often these days than ever before, I feel like going around with a smile, beaming at people I meet, generally feeling swell about stuff, and existence itself seems a tad more cheerful and fun than ever before. I don't know whether everyone goes through such a phase as they grow up, but these days I dread the very thought of wasting time, and my very definition of what passes as 'time well spent' has come to be refined by some kind of gradual paradigm shift over the past couple of months. Academics no longer occupy the top spot among my priorities, in fact I sometimes feel quite sorry that they once did. Active pursuit of what I find fun and interesting, be it the harmonica, artificial intelligence, or the continual efforts to understand the wirings of homo sapiens, seems quite more important than the grades some professor decides to assign me based on my knowledge of the synthesis and applications of arachnoboranes.

Of course, I am by no means implying that I don't care about grades or anything- when it comes to that, I want as much as any other ambitious chap in IIT Madras who has a life does, and perhaps a bit more :). Just that they are not all that important, and what I actually learn and do over here, most often outside of a classroom, is going to take me much farther than being a 10-pointer or anything ever could. (mind you, I am by no means implying that your humble narrator is, by any means, a 10-pointer)

I've been finding a lot of new interests lately, ranging from machine learning to sociology, and inexplicably, the very existence of so many interests along with the fact that I am actually working on all of them somewhat actively provides me a certain degree of what is best described as 'smugness'. And of course, I frequently find that I just don't have enough time to do all that I want to do. I'm trying to cut out as much wastage of time as I can, but when it comes to mid-sems and workshop homework (@#@$#$@!!@!@#!!!), not much seems to be in my hands. And I'm not doing too bad when you come to think of it- its been like a month since I played a computer game for any considerable amount of time, and I don't have a girlfriend to waste time on either. (lovebirds perched on park benches and coffee shops out there, spare my insolence).

Coming to Physics, I'm greatly looking forward to the NIUS programme this summer. I long for some active work in the king of the sciences, and am even currently working on a project "for fun", as my prof likes to call it, with a couple of friends.

Then there's also this wonderful feeling of constantly evolving ('growing up' would have been an understatement). Every once in a while I look back and find that I have changed so much from what I was even like two months ago, and for the most part, I find it to be for the better. Perhaps everyone finds themselves in situations like this once in a while, and everyone evolves, I don't know. I can tell you its an immensely gratifying feeling to acknowledge that you have actually done a few things right and have stood to learn from your past experiences, both pleasant and disastrous.

Finally, I'd like to mention what I believe to be the spark that ignited this spell of feel-goodness, that tipping point where bottled up emotions and treasured memories burst the banks of deprival, flooding the bleak landscape of the mind with the lukewarm waters of the wonderful sense of belonging and the essence of everlasting friendships. Oh, I could just go on and on about the joy of meeting old friends after such a long time- that one day with the alumni meeting at P.S. followed by what I will consider for many years to come as one of the  greatest evenings I have ever had, meeting so may of my friends at Vivekananda Vidyalaya, many of them after one whole year. And would you believe, the way we met again, you could never have guessed that some of us hadn't been in contact for a whole year, it was all as though we had just said goodbye the day before- such is the familiarity which I find with my friends from over there.

And yes, that evening just reinforced the strange reflection I had after a similar occasion an year ago- its worth losing touch with your friends for some time just to experience the immense pleasure obtained in getting back together.

P.S.: I've just picked up a copy of 'The Catcher in the Rye' by J.D.Salinger. After reading all those articles following his demise, I look forward to a wonderful time with the book.

The science of consideration

The bible of online information, the mecca of the seeker of knowledge, the knight in shining armour of the helpless student with an assignment due tomorrow and with no idea what its topic is about, the encyclopedia built on wikis , holds the following opinion:

Science (from the Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge") is, in its broadest sense, any systematic knowledge-base or prescriptive practice that is capable of resulting in a prediction or predictable type of outcome.

As the article goes on to mention, science, under a stricter definition, is any systematic study carried out by "the scientific method". The scientific method, as I remember reading a long time ago, refers to the process of observation and  acquisition of data, formulation of a hypothesis to explain the observations, and subsequent testing of the hypothesis by further experimentation. In simpler terms, you look at stuff and try to explain it off.


So, what "stuff" do you look at as subjects of study in the course of your mundane existence on this forlorn planet? In school, its balls and slinky toys. In college, perhaps diffraction gratings, colorimeters, or the rare specimen of the fairer gender (though with considerably less success as compared to the other topics). But what about the much more common elements, like say, the fullstop and the comma, or the throes of passion and the pleasure in humour? These are generally topics left for linguists, cognitive psychologists and other such specialists.


So, I figured, why not, with the playful curiosity of a young adolescent kid uncorrupted by 'education', explore these less frequented domains of study? Of course, these searches for the truth in each case can only be shallow, for I am neither a specialist in any of these fields, nor am I in possession of an intellect broad and magnificent enough to have an insight of any significance in anything whatsoever. Such an exercise, I believe, shall not only help understand a whole load of stuff better, but shall also serve to develop skills of reasoning and deduction, which can only be honed by constant practice


Hence, in that spirit, I propose to "publish" over here the results of a few of my exploits. (well, I need to maintain a record somewhere, right?).


As with all sciences, we start with an axiom- something that cannot be proved or derived from anything more fundamental. Following my fancy of fancy names, I call it "The Axiom of Consideration" :

Anything can be considered scientifically.

 What that implies is that one can take the scientific method, and apply it to any subject of one's choice, be it grammar, baldness or wheat fields, and actually hope to obtain some sort of an insight into either how the subject works, or how it behaves to a particular set of stimuli, or something similar to what physicists look for in particles and chemists in test tubes.


Now, it is not without some reflection that I decided to take this up as an axiom. For a lot of us would prefer that certain emotionally significant topics like friendship or love would rather be left as they are, unfathomable and mystical. I felt this myself, and I would like to mention here that rationality is quite different from insensitivity. Knowing how something works doesn't take the fun out of it, just as the knowledge that all emotions are nothing more than a few thousand electrical signals in the brain doesn't stop you from being happy or sad. (unless you happen to be a stage magician, where you're broke if you broadcast how your tricks work). So, I figured, the axiom is actually a swell idea to begin with.


I'm working on questions right now, and though not much progress has been made, I can now decorate my language with a brand new set of vivid constructs. Like, for example:

Random bloke: May I ask, when will your blog next be updated?

 Me: (with straight face) I do not know, but the answerablitily of that particular question happens to possess a non-trivial degree of temporal dependance.

Random bloke: Vada pochae...

So long then, either until I'm done on questions or until I find something interesting to write about.