High Spirits

When you start seeing three of everything, you know you've had too much. But does it always need to be this way? Cant one remain with a singular worldview yet feel like a Troika existed? This has been the great human experiment for a long time now. Do you think whenever caveman hunted a Sabretooth he would Trifork? Even if he were in an extremely delirious mood wouldn't he be worried about the Sabretooth's extended family paying him a visit? All considerations made I dont think anybody cares after the tipsing point.

Another Long Day...!!!

Back in Junior school, I remember carefully looking at my watch to check whether it was past 12 in the afternoon or not. Wishing my teachers 'Good afternoon' and not 'Good Morning' was a big deal :) :) . That's nice. so we have'good morning', 'good afternoon' and 'good night'. All very nice. But what about 'Good Evening' ?? someone seems to have left the poor fellow behind. I dont think I've ever wished anyone good evening. Can't really blame me because there's not much of an evening anyway. Up until 5:30 the sun blazes and by 6:00 night starts to fall. A 30 minute window is too less. But bewarned, the higher latitudes you climb the more 'good afternoon' vanishes from your vocab and the more 'good evening' you use. Hmmmm..... did i wish anyone good afternoon in the past month ???

Sound of Silence

Until some time back, 'the sound of silence' never really came across as anything worthwile other than the number by Simon n Garfunkel . But believe me it can be deafening....
At home and at college there is always some noise or the other. Be it cars honking, mom shouting at me, speakers blaring, dog barking,random curses in Hindi, whatever.... infinite noise. But when it all stops it can get ugly. Even the slightest rustle can seem like rocks falling. The sound of footsteps like an army marching. Every sound gets magnified a millionfold. You never knew that god had given you such a good ear. But the worst is when there is no noise at all. It starts with a small buzz in your inner ear. As you try to listen to it, it grow louder. Soon you start to get tensed and your breathing quickens. Now you hear a dull thumping noise but that's just your heart beating. At this point you can take it no more and you do whatever you can to make some noise........ but the noise is just fleeting.

Diaries of an Oenologist

“What did you do in the vacations? “This question has a habit of creeping up on me nearly twice a year. In my case it is not what I did but where that matters. The vicissitudes of fate manage to cast me (rather unceremoniously) into a sleepy Indian town called Nasik every time NITT gives me a break. This is a very average town, with a very average outlook that continually regresses to the mean. The only exception to the triteness is that it is known as the wine capital of the country. The rolling vineyards and the picturesque countryside do tend to make me a bit chatty. Hence, I will present my discourse on wine making and wine tasting for the uninitiated.

Wine is an alcoholic beverage made from fermentation of grape juice. Wine is usually made from one or more varieties of the European species, Vitis vinifera. Wines are usually named either by their grape variety or by their place of production. Generally speaking, European wines are named both after the place of production (e.g. Bordeaux, Rioja, Chianti, Cotnari) and the grapes used (e.g. Pinot, Riesling, Chardonnay, Merlot). A vintage wine is one made from grapes that were all, or primarily, grown in a single specified year, and are accordingly dated as such.

Winemaking, or vinification, is the process of wine production, from the selection of grapes to the bottling of finished wine. Wine production can be generally classified into two categories: still wine production (without carbonation) and sparkling wine production (with carbonation). The science of wine and winemaking is known as oenology. After the harvest, the grapes are crushed and allowed to ferment. Red wine is made from the must (pulp) of red or black grapes that undergo fermentation together with the grape skins, while white wine is usually made by fermenting juice pressed from white grapes. During this primary fermentation, which often takes between one and two weeks, yeast converts most of the sugars in the grape juice into ethanol (alcohol). After the primary fermentation, the liquid is transferred to vessels for the secondary fermentation. Here, the remaining sugars are slowly converted into alcohol and the wine becomes clear. Of all factors affecting the quality of a wine, the quality of the grapes more than any other factor determines the quality of the wine. Their quality is not only affected by their variety, but also by the weather during the growing season, the soil, the time of harvest, and the way they are pruned.
Wines may be classified by their primary impression on the drinker's palate. They are made up of chemical compounds which are similar or identical to those in fruits, vegetables, and spices. The sweetness of wine is determined by the amount of residual sugar in the wine after fermentation, relative to the acidity present in the wine. Specific flavors may also be sensed, due to the highly complex mix of organic molecules such as esters and terpenes that grape juice and wine can contain.
Now you are ready to visit Nasik. Bon Aperitif…!!!!

Disclaimer: I wikishagged for most of this.

Fashionable Non Sense

“Les cadavers exquis boiront le vin nouveau” – The exquisite cadavers shall drink the new wine
Pause for a moment and meditate upon the poetic beauty of this statement. Even if you are objectivity personified, it must still strike you as something out of the ordinary. This however is an example of words randomly strung together following the rudimentary rules of grammar. The point I’m trying to make is that randomly strung nonsensical words can sometimes make sense. But is the converse true? That intelligent sounding words logically strung together can sometimes turn out to be utter nonsense?

These are the words of Richard Dawkins:

“Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following:

We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.

No doubt there exist thoughts so profound that most of us will not understand the language in which they are expressed. And no doubt there is also language designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought. But how are we to tell the difference? What if it really takes an expert eye to detect whether the emperor has clothes? In particular, how shall we know whether the modish French 'philosophy', whose disciples and exponents have all but taken over large sections of American academic life, is genuinely profound or the vacuous rhetoric of mountebanks and charlatans? “

So watch out the next time you spot the CEO of a company indulging in MBA type gobbledygook such as “ We look after out customer’s interests / the road ahead / our assets are our people / our vision / strategic plan / work ethics / we will be rewarded in the long run / etc…… “ . He might just be a quack.

Finally, some food for thought for all MBA aspirants.

Disclaimer : This is almost the same article that i wrote for pragyan times

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An on-request blog... so it'll be quick, short, dirty and stinky...!!!

Our protagonist, call him Babel has a habit for translating things. He does so by eating frequencies from one language and excreting frequencies in another. Be it french, Swahili or Plutonium; babel is the man.So one day babel realised that too many people were free riding his skills. That is the day babel decided to charge for his services. And charge did he at the intergalactic rate of 1€/word translated. Babel was scared that people would cheat him so the only solution was to collect the money himself. He invented the simple system of insert here and translate. But where to insert?? The story so far has been quick and short, here is where it gets dirty and stinky.

Modern Art and me

I can never really understand what modern art is …. Try as I might, I just can’t get beyond the fact that what may be art to some; is just some random lines and splashes of colors to me. I may seem hypercritical but that’s just the way I feel. Ok, for example can you please tell me why this thing is worth being put up in a museum …..?????? Maybe I can’t reach the higher dimension of thought but still…..



Nevertheless, there do come these brief ‘Oooohhhh…..!!!’ moments, when you suddenly see the tip of the iceberg of something very deep and significant. It is precisely these moments that make you realize the importance of art and creative expressionism. I was very happy when I got the opportunity to do so this time around. This came about as a chance encounter with Gaute Lusnegard, a happy Norwegian who accompanied me around Paris one afternoon. Yes, that’s him standing in front of the giant Spider.



We headed for the ‘Pompadeau musee’ which is a famous modern art museum in Paris. The place reeked of wackiness even before we entered it. There were some pretty crazy exhibits almost all of which made absolutely no sense to me. Luckily, the museum curator was nice and had put up fundae next to each exhibit. Even then it went tangent. Knowledge of Nietzsche or Munch would certainly help but not very much. One of the images that’ll forever remain embossed in my mind is that of a wax model. I wasn’t allowed to take a picture of it, but I’ll still describe it to you in some detail.

Imagine you are in a large hall. The walls are whitewashed and the room is well lit. Kneeling down and praying while facing away from you is a little boy dressed in formal attire. Let me remind you that you this is a wax model (like in Madame Tussauds), so it is almost perfect. You can’t see his face because he is facing away from you. So as you stroll around the room to see his face, it suddenly hits you. The face is not that of a little boy but that of a vicious Hitler. As you look directly into his eyes, you can almost feel the hatred and wrath emanating from it. While we are blasé about the holocaust in India, it a very delicate issue in Europe. Gaute was quite shocked when I told him I had read the Mein Kampf. Among the other German exhibits was a clip from the silent movie of Faust, the part with the three riders.




There were a few exhibits that were fairly obvious like this one with hundreds of scared faces that depicted the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Some plain weird such as the red rhino. Some that straddled the boundaries of art and science - the ‘optimal chair’ was developed by one of the Profs at INRIA (the place where I work). Starting from a solid block of wood, the program uses a Genetic Algorithm to reach an optimal way a chair should be designed. Strange shapes result as a consequence. It is one of those rare occasions when art and science are in harmony and one can glimpse the universal connectedness of all things. Hmmm… too philosophic.




On a lighter note let me leave you with my own contribution to modern art... :) :)

Thee

Thee

I searched for thee, but I did not find thee
I found thee, but I did not recognise thee
I recognised thee, but I lost thee
I lost thee, but I love thee

I got joy with thee, but I wanted sorrow with thee
I got sorrow with thee, but I wanted pain with thee
I got pain with thee, but I wanted to hurt thee
I hurt thee, but I still love thee

I trusted thee, but I never judged thee
I judged thee, but I never doubted thee
I doubted thee, but I never blamed thee
I blamed thee, but I'll always love thee

I am far from thee, but I won't be without thee
I am without thee, but I won't miss thee
I miss thee, but I won't tell thee
I told thee, will you forgive me?

DENIED...!!!

Out on a leg, bootlegging ???
Well that was our plan for friday night. The party starts late in this part of the world. So we start out just before midnight dressed in our finest attire and armed with all the promise that we could muster. Guiding us newbies is Kamaldeep bhaiyya, the very wizened one. Nevertheless, the Bretagne weather does not give two hoots about our nightly prowling schemes. It had rained sometime back and it looks like the heavens might burst anytime. That was the first omen as to what the night had in store for us....

First Stop, Guinness bar on the Rue de Soif(Street of Thirst). A place to have a jolly drink with friends and family with lots of smiles and pleasantries going around. I settle down with a Guinness(Irish beer) and I'm all aloof, trying to look cool(which I must remind you is very difficult for Indian engineers to fake). So far so good. But then when I least expect it and least desire it, it happens. The automatic euro to rupee conversion engine starts revving in my head. Drink spoilt, mood spoilt......




Heading on, we amble through the streets of Rennes at 1 in the night and reach our next destination. Second stop, "Pym discotheque".

At the entrance, stands a bouncer whose steely looks makes no qualms about the fact that he means business. I flash my laminated International student id card(purchased from STIC travels for 250 rupees) on his face. I expect his stern demeanour to vanish at the sight of it. Not Happening. So I ask him in broken French "Gratuit pour etudiant ?" (Free for student?) and then beam at him with my biggest smile. He just continues looking through me.... and then comes the dreaded "No, €10". DENIED....!! As we walk away from disc ,dreams of great wealth and grandeur start flooding me. :( :(

Anyway, Kamaldeep suggests we try a disco that IS free for students. So that brings us to our third and last stop, Cafe Musique.

At the door stands an acolyte. A big black one. He says something in French, the gist of which means "Get Lost"--- Tonight happens to be couple entry only. We all look at each other and we know what to do. Luckily,the Bretagne region in France has a skewed sex ratio in favor of the fairer sex. So all of us suddenly transform into casanovas. Gaurav strikes first with a French Indian chick, ;) . Strangely, the acolyte has a good memory and throws us out again... DENIED...!!!!

As we dejectedly head back to the hostel, all I want to do is sleep.

QWERTY vs Francais

So, I have bravely entered the world of blogging. All hail the conquistador.. :P

In order to achieve this fair task I had to overcome many challenges. Sleep being one of the dampers. BUT none could ever come even mildly close to the .. to the... my GOD, I am petrified, mortified even stupefied to utter the Terror. So be afraid, be very afraid...!!!!! of the much feared.... "FRANCAIS KEYBOARD"...!!!!!

Huh?? what the hell is that?

Was this your reaction ?

well if it was consider yourself lucky... but dont be too sure of yourselves yet. You never know when it might unleash its deadly wrath on you.

For convenience and also so as to not inadvertantly spook you I will refer to the above mentioned trepidation as "FK" .Yes, it haunts me in my dreams as well. It comes alive with scary appendages and slime gills. I think it is better if I personify it.

I remember my first encounter with FK. She was sitting there ever so coyly, one might even say flirtatiously( she's french ), egging me on to come closer, closer, ya even closer. To touch her, to feel her, to run my fingers over her ebony skin. and then with my middle finger of my left hand at 14:00 hours GMT on 5th May 2008, I DID IT............

FK recoiled with her fangs bared...!!!

Aaaahhhhhh...!!!! What happened to A ????????? where is Q ??????? Oh my god where the hell is everything????

My world spun around me for a moment and my mind started racing. Is this a random permutation of the keys on the keyboard? if so what pseudo random number generator was used ? what are the total number of permutations that can exist? what is the probability? is it like one of CAT shock interviews with my prof watching ? Is it this... ? Is it that .... ? Vous Parles l'anglais ? NITT sux.. ? ... ? ... ? STOP STOP, I had to calm down ... !!!

many eons passed before I regained my senses.. and she was still sitting there with her sexy smile.

Here is a schematic of what exactly happened in contrast with what was supposed to happen...






and this has continued ever since..
Battles have been waged over 1234567890, @, !, % , ( ) and I can claim to have won some of them...
But I must say the war is far from over ...
My friends in their good faith have advised me to switch to QWERTY ...

But, as she sits there looking at me ever so shyly, I must say her smile does something to me.... ;)

Mon premier

So i have been contemplating writing my first blog for about 5 years now. And i have been contemplating, contemplating, still contemplating.....
I'm not too sure if you will read this because I just might not finish writing this blog.

But to the rescue is "Blogger"... Now Blogger saves your drafts automatically!

So maybe I should write something more...
maybe it would help if I were not somnolent.

Nah, bugger it.

But let me remind you, a start is a start.