Idle Talk

Got a bunch of great snaps of kerala from a website. A weekend cable blackout meant I had enough time on my hands to whip up some new designs to go with them. Nothing complex. Just some photos and colors to go with them.

Sreekanth has been sending horror stories via email about life at IIMA. Put together a bunch of smart people and you are bound to get a challenging competitive environment. But I didn't expect it to be this extreme :)

Bought a bunch of ghazals from landmark a week back. The Jagjit Singh ( live in singapore ) CD is heavenly. One of the good things about buying a live recording is the variations the singers bring in while rendering their hit songs live. Hariharan & Jagjit Singh are two singers especially adept at this.

If you are feeling really bored today, follow this link.

To end with, lines from a song I am currently listening to,

tum itanaa jo muskuraa rahe ho
kyaa Gam hai jisako chhupaa rahe ho
aa.Nkho.n me.n namii ha.Nsii labo.n par
kyaa haal hai kyaa dikhaa rahe ho.

Give Hawk-Eye a chance

“Hawk-Eye does not try to predict the path of the ball after the bounce. Instead, the Hawk-Eye cameras track the ball both before and after the bounce, so the correct trajectory of the ball leaving the wicket is determined. Hawk-Eye simply observes and then calculates the actual trajectory of the ball. Whether the cause of this trajectory was due to atmospheric conditions, the wicket, or the ball hitting the seam is irrelevant from a Hawk-Eye perspective. Hawk-Eye just tracks what happened - it does not try to predict nor to answer why it happened."

So, if the ball rears up unexpectedly after hitting the seam or a crack on the pitch, Hawk-Eye will track the trajectory off the pitch to predict the future course of the ball. Similarly, the tracking system will come into play if the balls shoots along the ground after hitting a dry spot on the pitch. In fact, Hawk-Eye has shown that balls pitched on roughly the same area on the wicket have passed the stumps at widely varying heights. And in tests conducted, thousands of deliveries were bowled from a bowling machine and filmed by Hawk-Eye. The camera feeds were cut about two metres from the stumps, approximately the point where the batsman would normally intercept the ball. When the ball hit the wicket, Hawk-Eye was able to determine, to within about 5 mm, the point of impact.”

Read more.

I am not going to say that a few umpiring decisions decided the series.

It is though a shame that technology, when it is readily available, is not being used. Maybe the 300+ scores in ODIs and 500+ scores in tests will come down drastically. But it will also seperate the men ( dravid ) from the kids ( afridi ) :)

Cricket will be the winner.

Happy Birthday

It was the october of 2001.

Our client, a small internet based startup, had already been hit hard by the late 20th century collective madness , the dot com boom ( and the subsequent bust ). 911 proved to be the killer blow for our project and we parted ways saying solemn good byes. Faced with nothing to do, our situation was something like that of soldier pulled out of a gruesome war and put in a budhist monastery. We just couldnt take the silence and lack of work.

After days of tea time terrorism discussions and idea generation sessions, we invented creative methods to spend time like network roadrash races and chatting.

Now ever since Internet was introduced in the late 90's by VSNL, I have been online. Those days, you had to fill a form, send to VSNL chennai office and then wait for a good amount of time before VSNL send you back the connection details. Over the last so many years I have done most of which can be done on the net except for one thing : Chatting.

Why ?

Right from my childhood days, I have been this shy silent guy whom you will more often find in a corner reading a book than in the centre of a crowd talking. This has changed considerably over the years but still in many ways I remain such a person.

So chatting was not something that came to me easily. But when it came to text chatting on a computer, I had a small advantage. It is my belief that I am a better writer than a talker. So armed with a keyboard I was a wee bit more confident than I would be otherwise. Using a combination of instant poetry and fancy icons, I managed to build huge friend list in my messenger within a short time.

It was during this period that I met the person for whom this post is being written. The first thing that stuck me is the unabashed joy of living seen in the person.

I need to digress again and detail a personal quirk. By the by, a complete listing of my personal quirks might take more space than my host provides :) Anyway this one details my friends. A long time back when I was an antisocial nerd ( I still am in a small way ), I had oh so serious friends, People who find it easier to quote Nietzsche than wear a smile on their face. Luckily this guy stepped in and more or less changed the way I used to go about life. Ever since, I have been fascinated by people who are genuinely happy. Pretty soon, my craze for chatting died a natural death but my friendship with my new friend endured.

Thus in the strangest of circumstances started this special friendship. Now I have a couple of friends who could perhaps one day start a new cult among them with the title, “The Joy of Living” :-)

Today is my little friend's birthday and so here comes the wish for which the whole post was written.

Happy birthday, my dear friend.

Who am i ?

“Who are you ?”, You ask me.

Not used to answering such blunt questions which probe the reason for my very existence, I try to pretend that I never heard that question. In an attempt to divert your attention, I point to the poster of the upcoming Rajni movie,Baba and start off on what was supposed to be a long monologue on the star and how he might represent a new hope for a state tortured, indeed mutilated, by politicians taking advantage of the gullibe, simple and loving folk. Something in my actions, ( the fear of the question or the ignorance of the answer showing itself ? ) makes you repeat the question.

I realise with a sinking feeling that today, I will not get away unless I answer that question. I ponder the various approaches to take. Should i do a straightforward name address occupation recital ? Something in your manner shows me that you are not interested in such a superficial understanding of who i am. You show with your questioning glance that today what you are interested in is knowing who i really am.

I turn away lest my face betrays my true emotions. I lock my eyes on the horizon which inevitably leads to looking inside.

“Who i really am ?”. Now that is a question which has teased me all my life. Every now and then, I get glimpses of the answer. But then Time has always stepped in to prove that what i thought was an answer, was an illusion. Illusions that my mind makes up in attempt to pacify my heart. Deception of the heart by the mind to justify a mundane existence in a mediocre world which has seen only a few flashes of brilliance. I check myself before i go into a loop. I inadverdently go into an infinite loop of self loathing when that question comes up. My mind not able to control itself goes off on a tangent.

There are dreams waiting inside my mind. They have only seen the dark of the night when i let them loose inside in my mind. They complain of being afraid of the dark and want to come out with me in the day to see the world they have heard so much about. I lock them behind doors lest the world sees and laughs at them. I carry on with my ordinary life doing not what i want to do but doing what the world asks me to do. Doing not what gives me hapiness but doing what gives me money.

Money steals away from you what you could have been and in return decides who you are and what you would become. The purpose, the motive of life has become to earn money and more money. Money is happy only when it sees more and more of itself and in turn makes its owner feel the same.

When a few sheets of paper decide who you are, that is when you want to run away from life.

All these thoughts flash past my mind as i struggle for my answer. In a sudden moment of inspiration, i hit upon a way to answer your question. I take out a few scenes of your life and scratch away the superficial motives with which your mind was deceiving you.I show them to you and return the question, “Maybe, you could tell me who you really are ?”.

You realise that some questions do not have answers. Maybe, The answer to this one will be a consolation prize God gives you when you die. Or maybe, He himself is searching for a reason for his existence beyond that of a support system for a man too weak to live life on his own.