On Christmas day morning I was out driving around 6:30AM to pick my MIL from E-City. I turned on the radio and heard the usual lot of film music doing the rounds on the air waves. As I reached 91.9 MHz, I heard a bhajan. Now this was a 24 hour strictly English/western-only songs channel. Was there some mistake ? I tuned to a different channel and came back. No change - same bhajan on Lord Hanuman !
On Christmas day, I was expecting 'Jingle Bells' or some christmas carols and not bhajans on this channel. For the past 2 weeks they had been playing Christmas songs but on Christmas day they were playing devotional music of a different kind.
To explain this as the effect of Modi's victory in Gujarat would be too far fetched. So what else could be the reason for this strange color of music ?
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Of mains and crosses
Bangalore is city of mains and crosses - at least the older parts of the city are. I remember reading a similar description about Malleswaram in one of the hand-outs that my fac-ad gave me during our first meeting. The mains and crosses are perpendicular to each other and their intersections are called 'circles' (local slang for the intersection junction) . I was always perplxed at seeing some of the mains being smaller roads than the crosses !
Today morning I was reminded of this puzzle that is Bangalore. I had to attend a function at 8:30pm in Rajaji Nagar. I was given a postal address - complete with a door no., block, main and cross numbers. One would have thought this would be sufficient information to locate the place. Having spent twelve years in Bangalore now, I should have known better.
I was driving around, in vain , through various narrow lanes marked with yellow stone boards having the main numbers. As the numbers increased, I thought I was in the right direction and then suddenly the numbers seemed to be reset to 1 !
Asking for directions at a couple of places resulted in nebulous responses - you know should-be -somewhere-there kind of general hand-waving.
I got a straight-in-the-face response at the third place I asked.It was a STD booth and the owner had just then opened the shop. He replied in a mix of fluent Kannada and English that just asking for a main and a cross is no good here. We have been living here for the past 40-50 years and still we don't know all the mains and crosses. It is best to have an associated landmark and ask for directions. The owner looked too young too have stayed 40-50 years anywere let alone Rajaji Nagar - I guess the we included the old man, probably his father, sitting in his shop.
But as I drove on I realized that this was a fundamental truth of this city. My lesson for the day - right there. I had a landmark alright, but it was very close to being absolutely useless.
A Ganapath temple. It was as bad as looking for a Manjunath in Bangalore (or Attilla in Budapest :-) - every street had a Ganesha temple.
I felt like the leader of the forty theives in the Ali Baaba tale - hoping to find a house with a cross mark on the door and on reaching the town, finding out that every house had the same mark !
Luckily I had a phone number which was thankfully answered and I got some directions over phone. I was even more lucky to actually make it to the place. As you may have guessed I did'nt exactly follow the directions as given to me - I had got them a little wrong. But alls well that ends well.
I was pleasantly surprised to hear couple of other guests describe their 'we-were-lost' stories - especially to know that they were 'lost' in spite of having spent 30+ years in the city !
That was when the 'landmark' truth finally dawned on me.
Today morning I was reminded of this puzzle that is Bangalore. I had to attend a function at 8:30pm in Rajaji Nagar. I was given a postal address - complete with a door no., block, main and cross numbers. One would have thought this would be sufficient information to locate the place. Having spent twelve years in Bangalore now, I should have known better.
I was driving around, in vain , through various narrow lanes marked with yellow stone boards having the main numbers. As the numbers increased, I thought I was in the right direction and then suddenly the numbers seemed to be reset to 1 !
Asking for directions at a couple of places resulted in nebulous responses - you know should-be -somewhere-there kind of general hand-waving.
I got a straight-in-the-face response at the third place I asked.It was a STD booth and the owner had just then opened the shop. He replied in a mix of fluent Kannada and English that just asking for a main and a cross is no good here. We have been living here for the past 40-50 years and still we don't know all the mains and crosses. It is best to have an associated landmark and ask for directions. The owner looked too young too have stayed 40-50 years anywere let alone Rajaji Nagar - I guess the we included the old man, probably his father, sitting in his shop.
But as I drove on I realized that this was a fundamental truth of this city. My lesson for the day - right there. I had a landmark alright, but it was very close to being absolutely useless.
A Ganapath temple. It was as bad as looking for a Manjunath in Bangalore (or Attilla in Budapest :-) - every street had a Ganesha temple.
I felt like the leader of the forty theives in the Ali Baaba tale - hoping to find a house with a cross mark on the door and on reaching the town, finding out that every house had the same mark !
Luckily I had a phone number which was thankfully answered and I got some directions over phone. I was even more lucky to actually make it to the place. As you may have guessed I did'nt exactly follow the directions as given to me - I had got them a little wrong. But alls well that ends well.
I was pleasantly surprised to hear couple of other guests describe their 'we-were-lost' stories - especially to know that they were 'lost' in spite of having spent 30+ years in the city !
That was when the 'landmark' truth finally dawned on me.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
94 Down - Angry with everybody (for e.g.) for a puzzle ? (9)
Crossword. Yes that was the answer to the clue (created by yours truly :) in title of the post. December 21st was the 94th anniversary of the crossword puzzle. To quote Wikipedia -
I had been seeing crossword puzzles from the time I had been reading newspapers. But mostly ignoring them as some black and white squares with cryptic clues that only English pundits would have any chance of filling up.
My interest in them was kindled in the third year at IISc - our combinatorics course professor, cevm, was infatuated with them. He gave us a crossword at the end of the course whose puzzles were combinatorial problems and solutions were numbers ! We could solve them but right answers did not contribute to the final grade. I had bought the first of 'Art of Computer Programming' books few months back and was pleasantly surprised to find a problem in the book that required generating a crossword puzzle given a description of the grids. The program had to be written in MIX - I wrote one in Perl that generated a Postscript file instead of just a matrix of 0's and 1's. I even sent the program to Knuth's email id - I was so thrilled at having solved at least 1 problem from the great book. I was even more thrilled to get a response back !! It was not from the Don himself but one of his students who replied saying that the next edition of the book would have the problem modified requiring postscript output. That was something.
I still did not get to solving crosswords. It was only a couple of years later when I got a job and was living couple of friends that I got my first taste of actually solving these puzzles. Sonal was my crossword guru - he taught me some of the hidden pointers in the clues that helped get to the right word. We worked on the crosswords from The Hindu. Many a 'aha' moments were experienced while wasting hours bent over the folded newspaper with blunt pencils. The crossword bug had bitten me and I am affected till date.
I have never been able to completely solved a newspaper crossword yet. I did manage to win a prize for completing a crossword puzzle at workplace - I had to use the Internet to solve some of the clues.
I also try to exercise 'my little gray cells' on the Sunday crossword - they are much more cryptic but cracking even one of the clues feels great.
Amateur cruciverbalist - I can gladly call myself that.
On December 21, 1913, Arthur Wynne, a Liverpool journalist, published a "word-cross" puzzle in the New York World that embodied most of the features of the genre as we know it. This puzzle is frequently cited as the first crossword puzzle, and Wynne as the inventor.
I had been seeing crossword puzzles from the time I had been reading newspapers. But mostly ignoring them as some black and white squares with cryptic clues that only English pundits would have any chance of filling up.
My interest in them was kindled in the third year at IISc - our combinatorics course professor, cevm, was infatuated with them. He gave us a crossword at the end of the course whose puzzles were combinatorial problems and solutions were numbers ! We could solve them but right answers did not contribute to the final grade. I had bought the first of 'Art of Computer Programming' books few months back and was pleasantly surprised to find a problem in the book that required generating a crossword puzzle given a description of the grids. The program had to be written in MIX - I wrote one in Perl that generated a Postscript file instead of just a matrix of 0's and 1's. I even sent the program to Knuth's email id - I was so thrilled at having solved at least 1 problem from the great book. I was even more thrilled to get a response back !! It was not from the Don himself but one of his students who replied saying that the next edition of the book would have the problem modified requiring postscript output. That was something.
I still did not get to solving crosswords. It was only a couple of years later when I got a job and was living couple of friends that I got my first taste of actually solving these puzzles. Sonal was my crossword guru - he taught me some of the hidden pointers in the clues that helped get to the right word. We worked on the crosswords from The Hindu. Many a 'aha' moments were experienced while wasting hours bent over the folded newspaper with blunt pencils. The crossword bug had bitten me and I am affected till date.
I have never been able to completely solved a newspaper crossword yet. I did manage to win a prize for completing a crossword puzzle at workplace - I had to use the Internet to solve some of the clues.
I also try to exercise 'my little gray cells' on the Sunday crossword - they are much more cryptic but cracking even one of the clues feels great.
Amateur cruciverbalist - I can gladly call myself that.
Saturday, December 8, 2007
1 in 15333 - The lightning talk I did not deliver
On December 7, I had my first taste of Lightning talks at foss.in. They are a wonderful thing. Unfortunately I did not sign up. Unfortunate because I did not decide to sign up when opportunity knocked and was repenting for not having done so all the way back to my home that evening. I could not make it today - there was another round of lightning talks. The now legendary Danese Cooper was facilitating these talks. She was actually noting down the inital list of speakers from the white board before the event when I went to take a closer look. She even asked me if I was planning to do one. I said I was not sure but would surely attend the session - after grabbing a cup of coffee.
Anyways here is the talk I would have delivered had I signed up that day.
This November about one hundred thousand people signed up for a race. 15,333 people emerged as winners at the end. I was one of them. I was a winner ! I did not know how many people actually won when I finished the race. I came to know about the 15,333 number only a couple of days back. So what kind of race was this, you may be wondering ? It was a writing race. A race against time. A race where one had to write 50,000 words in the 30 days of November. If you do the math, it works out to 1667 words per day. The race was called NaNoWriMo - the National Novel Writing Month.
1667 words per day - that's easy, some of you would say. That's what I also thought initially -
not just from the daily word count perspective but overall I thought I could spit out 50,000 words. No sweat.
I actually signed up a day late, November 2nd, after reading an internal blog where I first came across NaNoWriMo. I did not write anything that day. And on November 3rd I wrote 452 words. I was'nt make much progress as you can make out. By 10th I had serious thoughts of throwing in the towel. But thanks to a combination of pep talks from the NaNoWriMo community, constant encouragement from my buddy and dogged determination on my part in refusing to quit this crazy race, I kept chugging along. A weekend of absolutely no writing was followed by a 5K words Monday and by the 25th I was close to 35K. There was no looking back after that. I finally completed 50K at around 2:00pm on November 30th - ten hours before the deadline ! And probably I was the only one who used vi on Win XP to write the novel !
As I look back it was as I had lived my whole life in that one month. A six month old son at home, Diwali, Barcamp and quality audit at the work place nothwithstanding I actually completed my novel ! Noone has read the novel. Even I have'nt read it. But it does'nt matter.
I encourage all of you to participate in NaNoWriMo 2008 - at least those of you who are 'One Day Novelists', who want to write a novel one day. NaNoWrimo would mark the end of the 'One Day Novelist'.
I may not have spoken exactly these words and managed to complete my talk in the alloted 3 minutes. Nonetheless this is how the talk would have sounded like.
Anyways here is the talk I would have delivered had I signed up that day.
This November about one hundred thousand people signed up for a race. 15,333 people emerged as winners at the end. I was one of them. I was a winner ! I did not know how many people actually won when I finished the race. I came to know about the 15,333 number only a couple of days back. So what kind of race was this, you may be wondering ? It was a writing race. A race against time. A race where one had to write 50,000 words in the 30 days of November. If you do the math, it works out to 1667 words per day. The race was called NaNoWriMo - the National Novel Writing Month.
1667 words per day - that's easy, some of you would say. That's what I also thought initially -
not just from the daily word count perspective but overall I thought I could spit out 50,000 words. No sweat.
I actually signed up a day late, November 2nd, after reading an internal blog where I first came across NaNoWriMo. I did not write anything that day. And on November 3rd I wrote 452 words. I was'nt make much progress as you can make out. By 10th I had serious thoughts of throwing in the towel. But thanks to a combination of pep talks from the NaNoWriMo community, constant encouragement from my buddy and dogged determination on my part in refusing to quit this crazy race, I kept chugging along. A weekend of absolutely no writing was followed by a 5K words Monday and by the 25th I was close to 35K. There was no looking back after that. I finally completed 50K at around 2:00pm on November 30th - ten hours before the deadline ! And probably I was the only one who used vi on Win XP to write the novel !
As I look back it was as I had lived my whole life in that one month. A six month old son at home, Diwali, Barcamp and quality audit at the work place nothwithstanding I actually completed my novel ! Noone has read the novel. Even I have'nt read it. But it does'nt matter.
I encourage all of you to participate in NaNoWriMo 2008 - at least those of you who are 'One Day Novelists', who want to write a novel one day. NaNoWrimo would mark the end of the 'One Day Novelist'.
I may not have spoken exactly these words and managed to complete my talk in the alloted 3 minutes. Nonetheless this is how the talk would have sounded like.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
A matter of life and death
As you can make out from the nanowrimo badge in the frame, I managed to complete 50K words and was declared a winner ! Yohoo !
I did it with about ten hours to spare - churned out the last four thousand words in about two and half hours. When I started off I was worried about reaching 50K and hence sent my MC on a long tour aroundIndia. Finally when I hit 50K I was no where near completing the story ! So right now the novel is incomplete - hoping I can spend some time over the December 'break' and clean (and complete) the novel. The whole experience was amazing. During the first couple of weeks there were these two voices inside of me - one telling me that all this was a complete waste of time and just stop it. The other voice kept egging me on - now that you have signed up you better complete it. Somewhere after I crossed 25K these voices kind of merged and I could hear - you should have stopped much earlier; now that you have reached this far better give your best shot and go all the way !
There was a point when I thought I would cry when I was done - one of those tiring days I guess. I thought two consecutive 3K word days were awesome and then I did an exhilirating 5K word day - on a working day ! That was it - I had to complete this thing I started.
And I did it ! Yohoo !!
Anyways, on Friday I wanted to have a small TGIO celebration at home. Raghu's first wedding anniversary also coincided on the same day. So on the way back from work to home, I dropped in at a Nilgiris store. There is a new chain of stores around the city - got to know that the management has changed and they are driving the expansion.
The black forest looked inviting - there were only three of them which I picked up immediately. As I looked around the display window, I came across a card stating "Life By Choclate". My mind immediately made a connection to "Death By Choclate" - a richly sweet cake with couple of scoops ice cream that is available at Corner House. Was this choice of name deliberately aimed the Corner House offering ?
Some people live by choclate and some are willing to die for it.
Being a more positive name, I picked one of the LBC's and one double choclate moouse. I strongly recommend the double choclate moouse - do try it out. I really liked it
I did it with about ten hours to spare - churned out the last four thousand words in about two and half hours. When I started off I was worried about reaching 50K and hence sent my MC on a long tour aroundIndia. Finally when I hit 50K I was no where near completing the story ! So right now the novel is incomplete - hoping I can spend some time over the December 'break' and clean (and complete) the novel. The whole experience was amazing. During the first couple of weeks there were these two voices inside of me - one telling me that all this was a complete waste of time and just stop it. The other voice kept egging me on - now that you have signed up you better complete it. Somewhere after I crossed 25K these voices kind of merged and I could hear - you should have stopped much earlier; now that you have reached this far better give your best shot and go all the way !
There was a point when I thought I would cry when I was done - one of those tiring days I guess. I thought two consecutive 3K word days were awesome and then I did an exhilirating 5K word day - on a working day ! That was it - I had to complete this thing I started.
And I did it ! Yohoo !!
Anyways, on Friday I wanted to have a small TGIO celebration at home. Raghu's first wedding anniversary also coincided on the same day. So on the way back from work to home, I dropped in at a Nilgiris store. There is a new chain of stores around the city - got to know that the management has changed and they are driving the expansion.
The black forest looked inviting - there were only three of them which I picked up immediately. As I looked around the display window, I came across a card stating "Life By Choclate". My mind immediately made a connection to "Death By Choclate" - a richly sweet cake with couple of scoops ice cream that is available at Corner House. Was this choice of name deliberately aimed the Corner House offering ?
Some people live by choclate and some are willing to die for it.
Being a more positive name, I picked one of the LBC's and one double choclate moouse. I strongly recommend the double choclate moouse - do try it out. I really liked it
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