Morning Walk!

The idea for writing this new blog sprung from my wish to share my morning endeavors. Recently I decided to walk every morning to my Institute. The walk takes around half an hour and I reach all sweaty. Initially I thought my being sweaty will completely demotivate me from working and the whole purpose of walking would go to waste. But no! I am very fresh and all up for working after a brunch that I have in the institute. I have it at 8:30 am and yup I still call it a brunch as I skip lunch after that :)

Today morning walk was slightly more painful and thought provoking than other days. I took my laptop to the Institute and that made my bag heavy. Here I was walking and thinking about how to save my career and life, when I saw this cute labrador barking!!! It was marking it territory of course but that still brought a smile to my face. That got me thinking as to what the dog would actually see. Communication gap of course. And that lead me to this scene that I recently saw in the movie Taalash. There was this clip in which a murder scene was being investigated and some of the witnesses reported that Lila somehow knew that some thing was wrong. That Lila happened to be the name of a DOG! Hilarious scene.

There were so many things that I was thinking about which sort of if not discussed immediately goes down the whole day and by the evening when I sit to blog about it nothing comes to mind and I am left wordless! Ah that is an unfortunate end to my tale, but hopefully I can blog something more interesting than a dog barking tomorrow!

ANGER!!!

I have had a few incidences in the recent past related to the title of this post and that got me into putting my thoughts to pen though I am still wondering if one should really change the phrase "putting my thoughts to pen" to something that is more let us say modern agey.

Anyways coming back to the title of the topic. My reminiscing started when the other day I went to a Baskin Robins place to get some ice-cream. out of the blue I was reminded of an incident. A few months back my friend had taken ill and had to be admitted to Malar hospital. I used to keep my friend company during the day and some other friends used to cover the night shift. One day I got really angry at my friend because my friend had had ice-cream from Baskin-Robins the previous night inspite of being sick. I scolded my friend and was rude and that sort of created a wall between us that I probably would ever be able to break. The problem with my being angry is that I might tend to make stinging remarks like a scorpion which I later regret having made.

My later visit to the Baskin-Robins made me ask the question: Why was I really angry at my friend? I realized the answer to my question. Because my friend had had ice-cream without me. It was as simple as that. I was purely being childish.

This realization got me thinking about all the times I have been angry in my life and realized that most of the times I have been angry for stupid reasons which could have been sorted out without much ado. For example the ice-cream episode could have been sorted out if I had just left my friend got some ice-cream from Baskin-Robins and had it together. Period.

The story doesnt end there. I have had a weird kind of experience with my being angry as well. Recently we have some new computers in our office and the keyboards are not very good. In the sense that one makes a lot of noise while typing. This one day I wanted to take a bit of a nap in the office when my officemate was busy working. I got a serious headache from my officemate typing on the keyboard (it seemed like a rattlesnake had entered the office) and I really got pissed off and angry. So I got up from my resting position with a rage that would burn the whole of matscience as Kannagi burned the whole of madurai. I also started typing hard on my keyboard with full music on (of course i didnt want to hear the drumming). This was supposed to be my revenge. Surprising enough I managed to complete a section of my work which had been pending for I dont know may be ages. I was surprised at my capabilities actually. Thankfully this officemate of mine knew me a bit more didnt judge me and we are friends still! These types of incidences have happened to me before. In the sense due to anger on someone I was able to shut that portion of my life completely and shift focus fully to a new thing at which I have excelled.

But now I am totally confused. On one side i have my anger ruining my relationships and on the other I have anger trying to help me to work better.  What I take back from this reminiscing is that if I do get angry then instead of shouting and being rude, if I could just channelize my anger to something else then I might actually do something good.

Outraged!!

What in the worlds hell is happening in our country? I seriously want to know.

I open Facebook and I see a post from my friend about an article publish in Times of India that says that people are looking for Brahmin sperms. How crazy is that? I mean don't you people know that the childs mind develops depending on the situation and the circumstances that it is in. So if you carefully nurish the child he will grow to be a wonderful person. Isnt that what they want? Or do they want to completely strip the kid of its creativity. I am stunned at this behaviour and want to know why you want a kid in the first place.

I go down below to see another post from another friend about the recent program that has been started by Amir Khan called Satyemave Jayate. He has posted a blog in which the guy had alternate view about the program. Firstly what does the program do? The program is an Indian analog of the Opera Winfrey show.  Two episodes of the show have been telecasted as of today and the topic that were discussed were female foeticide and child abuse. Social causes that the government is doing nothing about. The program creates an awareness among the people. I didnt know for example that the percentage of female foeticide in the urban areas is more than that in the rural areas. I was under the impression that education make people broad minded and I see that a person who is a doctor whom we go to to save our lives is killing his own seed. Another misunderstanding got cleared today when I came to know that among children boys face a larger share of abuse. I am sure a lot of people would have been under this fog.

 Coming back to the program, I do agree that it gets a bit emotional and may be the issues could have been handled better. But the ulterior motive of the program is good and I guess that doesnt get into the minds of the people. Returning to this blog from which I took a small detour, that had an alternative view about the program. Not three episodes of the program has been telecasted and this guy talks about doing just things that Amir has asked not to do. What is the mind set of this guy and people who support him.

It is not just this program but most programs in india are treated emotionally because believe it or not indians are emotional. So if thats the way to attract the public to social issues then so be it. Even a program like Roadies which mostly used to be about bikes and difficult tasks to perform has now stooped down to the level of talking about peoples personal lives. Its possible that they are doing this for their TRP but knowing that there are people in the world who have faced similar problems and have come out of it colourfully gives hope to survive. Hope to fight and that is the what is needed.

The message that I would like to put forth is that think about what you are doing before doing it. 

How important is a title?

A new day begins with a new post!! The day usually begins in the same usual manner: I get up, brush take bath and head to the office where a number (usually greater than 45) articles are waiting for me to go through in Google reader. Looking at the number of articles to read puts me in a bad mood but as i start reading the titles of the articles and see that of the junk of articles one or two are relevant to my field and then i am happy as i have few articles to read. It also boosts my moral as it shows that the field is not that popular that zillions of papers are published in a day and I can still survive in this field :).


One thing I realized from reading these articles: the title of the article is the most important thing. If the title is not catchy or doesn't contain some keywords I don't even bother to read the abstract of the article. A very sad incident related to this happened to a friend of mine recently. My friend et al strived really hard in writing a paper and sent it to PRL for reviewing and publishing. A day after they sent the paper, my friend got a mail from the PRL editor saying that the title of the paper has been changed! He was feeling as though "neeche se zameen phisal gayi ho".. the after effects of the shock was seen even after two days of this event. The changed title was the worst ever possible. It seemed like the editor felt that the work done by these people was crap! My friend et al went through the rules and regulations of PRL submission to check if this sort of thing could be possible and revolted against the editor. Well the fight is still in progress and hopefully it will be a win for the right!


Recently we had applied to a contest conducted by NVIDIA. There was a one hour long discussion as to what could be a suitable title for the proposal sent by us. We didnt want to make the title too technical so that the common masses wouldnt understand and at the same time we didnt want to be too non technical such that it would sound cheesy to the tecno guys. But alls well that ends well and we came up with a very nice title the details of which I shall post after getting to know the results of the contest. Well we hope to win or atleast come in the top three. With that hope I end my post. ADIOS! 

KK the singer

I have not thought of a topic to write on but decided to go with the flow of my mind....
So what would i like to say today i think.....
Of the top of my head, I have been working a lot on group theory lately but lets not discuss that....
hmmmmm ......
Lets talk about the singer KK....
Oh for this i can go on and on but I shall try to stop somewhere ;)

He is a versatile singer .......
He sings in various languages .....
There is a spell cast on you when u hear him sing.
One is completely mesmerized by how he can pitch his voice really really high...
It seems like he really feels the lyrics when he sings the songs.
And also somehow he choose the songs with the correct rhythm that just fits with his voice.
I have been his fan from a very very long time and i simply adore him even now...
And his voice suits most of the actors that he has sung for. So the whole package seems a good deal.
There are some songs which were neither solo nor a duet but a group song like "Hum dono jaisa" from the movie "Mere yaar ki shaadi hai" and even there the group just piece up together ... Is it because of his good relations with the other singers or because of very good sound mixing i dont know but what matters is that I love his songs even though he has not been appreciated by the indian film board. And I dont think he minds either as I have not seen him cursing them for not giving him credit. This is a quality that very few people (definitely not me) have.
A few songs of kk like "I am very sorry", "Maine dil se kaha" are on my playlist and I shall spend the rest of the day working with this background

A Penny for a thought

It has been quite some time since my last blog and that definitely is not a good feeling. When I was in Pune i used to have long walks in the fields of trans (not transalor ;) ). After coming to Chennai and off late I feel that I have stopped taking these walks and hence stopped writing blogs too not that i used to frequently write blogs in Pune as such but atleast there used to be something worth thinking about and I really treasure these walks. Recently my mind seems clogged by stuff and there is no room for a peaceful idea. With lot of determination and some plumbing there is a start for the flow of words.

 Today was a special day in many ways ... Got up really early in the morning .. actually forgot how 6 'o' clock looks like  :) and experienced an amazing weather ... there was cool breeze giving a sensation of rain... wow simply amazing!! This sort of inspired me to write. And then that got me wondering inspiration seems an important motivation for writing. Most generally a sad moment in life triggers a thought process that makes one think about what lead to the sad moment. So are sad incidences the only seeds for inspiration or can happy ones also blossom into something as beautiful as a string of sensible and rhythmic words? When one is happy, one is enjoying the moment so much that one just doesn't think about putting their thoughts to pen. Another inspiration for writing seems to be solitude. Would you call this a happy or a sad moment or is it just a moment away from the mundane day to day routine? I have no answers for these questions right now but whatever may be the reason, i am happy that all is not lost and somethings can be revived ;)