That sense of Awkwardness

Awkward : socially uncomfortable; unsure and constrained in manner; "awkward and reserved at parties"; "ill at ease among eddies of people he didn't know"; "was always uneasy with strangers"

Have you ever been in an awkward social situation? How do you react to that? Do you get carried away by the moment? Do you really reflect on it? Do you later on try to view the situations with your inner eye? How much of what people say do you really care about? What do you do in the following situations:

The Sudden meet: So you have great friends. As friends you hang out together, you make plans for weekends, you make fun of each other and all the normal things that friends do. There cometh a time when the friends move on especially when they find potential life partners. Their lives become different then. The luncheons become progressively lesser, meets rarely do happen. The times become hectic. Suddenly out of a blue you meet each other. Both of you have nothing to say. What happens next? Awkwardness

The Repartee : So you for a long time bear the brunt of teasing in your group. One fine day you just happen to joke on one of the others. The person receiving it takes it so badly that sometimes the accusation of negativity drops on you. What do you do to reply? Every other day the person would have been taking their liberties on you, making fun of you with all and sundry. All this takes a negative turn when you give the joke back to them. The next moment all you feel is plain Awkwardness.

The Worker : You bug your best friend to do a lot of work for you. He might be better than you at certain computing tasks. You get all your work done from him. You have the audacity to disturb him and go to the extent of even getting upset since he does not finish your tasks. After everything gets over, suddenly you vanish. You become more important. You have everything now. The next time when he calls you, you ask your office colleague to pick the phone for you. How would your friend react next? Awkward

The Accusation : So you have your certain set of interests. You have your ambitions. You love doing certain things. What happens when somebody says that you do the very things to satisfy somebody else or to be approved by a group. The next moment your whole life flashes behind you. You look at yourself moving through time and then take a moment to get back. Another gem of an Awkward moment.

Life is a roller coaster ride of little moments. One cannot be his best at every given point in time. One aspires to be. Sometimes, the best of them would lose track in the constant barrage of negative cannons thrown at them. Obviously one has to take it. Because only in falling can we rise up again

PS : I really don't know what to write on a rainy day. These were just reflections of a mind which is tired.

The varied streams of reasoning

A daily quiz question mail-list sent a question with three pictures, asking us to give a connect between the three. I found that the first two pictures just gave away the connect. The first was a picture of Stephen King, second was a picture of Rita Hayworth. To anybody who has watched The Shawshank redemption, this would be a piece of cake. I guessed the third picture to be Frank Darabont, which was probably inferred from the fact, that I know Stephen King and Rita Hayworth connect only for this movie and the other closest connect I can find is Frank Darabont. It turned out to be right when I verified my thoughts.

What exactly triggered my brain to give the answer as Frank Darabont. At a mathematical level I'd say that the intersection of {King,Hayworth,The Shawshank Redemption} can lead me to certain connects like {Morgan Freeman,Bob Gunton, Frank Darabont,...}. Now I know that the third picture is not Bob Gunton or Morgan Freeman because I know how they look like. So the only possible connect here was Darabont. While we can mathematically eliminate a set of choices, the visual recognition also plays a huge part in the final elimination here. Yesterday's question was similar. I had to look at an epitaph of a young poet to figure out whom the epitaph belonged to. The young poets I knew, who died early in life were {Keats,Wilfred Owen,...}. I decided to look at the date of his death. Now that leads me to only Victorian Era poets. Here the only Victorian Era poet who died and closely resembled the epitaph was Keats. That turned out to be the answer. What amazes me is the fact that so much stimuli are hit upon when our brain is asked to process or deduce an answer. The cognitive processes that follow deal with visual recognition, context understanding, elimination of other choices.

These are minimal observations from somebody who also is a budding practitioner of Artificial Intelligence, but the questions these observations throw are mind boggling. How do I for example build a simple reasoning engine which can also accumulate knowledge. From the previous examples the accumulating knowledge part was how Frank Darabont and Keats get added to the brain. Now they are stored permanently in my brain and probably would serve for future knowledge gathering.

As Steven Pinker put it, The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted – recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question – in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived.... As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come

The analogy of a Human Brain

No great content ahead folks. So I just did a Brain.rand(MyBrain) to come up with something.What turned out were highly unusual. I thought my brain was just another empty shell but it's seemingly decent storage capacity did return a myriad of content. So here goes a few random thoughts.

I was leafing through A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle where for the first time he introduces Dr.John.H Watson and Sherlock Holmes, the greatest fictional detective ever. Watson is piqued at the fact that Holmes knows nothing about the earth or the sun or even anything about Poetry and Carlyle. Did a google for the exact text and I got it...

"His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth"


This really set me on the contemplative mood. How can Sherlock Holmes to whom knowledge and perfection is of paramount importance can not be aware of this basic fact? Why was he not too keen to update his knowledge?So many questions just raced through my mind with each one trying to win the race. The next few paragraphs cleared my questions. Surprisingly enough they made me look at learning in a different perspective. Just read the following extracts from the novel and you'll get a wind of it.

Sherlock Holmes : "You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."

Watson: "To forget it!"

Sherlock Holmes : "You see," he explained, I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

Watson : "But the Solar System!" I protested.

Sherlock Holmes : "What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently: "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."

Looking back, is Sherlock Holmes not right? Should we also limit ourselves to what is useful for our line of work? Or the skeptic in you says the brain has every right to store any kind of information. I reflect on the above paragraph and feel Mr.Holmes was probably right. What do you think?

The travails of being a Programmer

Wrote this in my company internal blog sometime back. Had nothing to post and just thought that I could post it here.

The last traces of a human company in my floor just vanished now. I just stood up to see that I was the sole occupant of an entire floor. Studying for certifications can be a boring task. Especially if you have a running nose the entire day. I still don't know why I should be studying something called ITIL, when there is a pressing need for me to learn Computational Linguistics. But what I have here is an incident that happened to me yesterday. I'd really like to share it with you folks. The great Larry Wall once wrote about the three qualities of a programmer. So why do I bring this up now?

Yesterday, I had to meet my Big Boss to clarify certain things. Well it was something entirely personal and nothing to do with the official work. He was immersed in his work and asked me to wait for a while. I Hung around** for a while. My eyes scanned the space emptied by the occupant there and so I had to trouble the the other team mates. This is the place where I realized, how important those prophetic words of Mr.Larry Wall were. One of the senior folks was actually working with a XML file. The XML file was generated with some blank spaces between tags. Her task was to remove these blank spaces and generate a clean XML. To illustrate the problem, her XML tags looked like StartTag(loads of blanks)some_string EndTag . Now all she had to do was to remove the loads of blanks. To folks well versed in notepad++ and TextEdit, this would have seemed trivial. A simple find and replace would have worked. TextEdit for some weird reason was not working. I looked at her and asked if she would consider writing a program to do it. She was not interested as ..it would take more time to write a program. So she was manually removing the spaces. I said I'll write a java program.(These days I am familiarizing myself with Cygwin and so I thought I'd as well try the powerful tools in the Unix shell). She was very apprehensive and inspite of her sweet denial I could figure out that she was really not so interested in the task.Well it would have required only two lines in java. Assuming there were only blanks or spaces. All she had to do was this :

String a = //The string from the XML file
String b = a.replaceAll("StartTag\\s+", "StartTag");

Probably that's not the best way to do it either. There might even exist a simpler way. Thankfully today I realize that there might be some traces of the laziness that Larry Wall spoke of. Oh! Btw you should have also thought about the immutability of Java strings if you viewed the above two lines of code.

This might be just me. Some folks would still love doing the manual way. I have no qualms about that. But, I wonder if the creative spark in me would die a slow death. Will I start imitating my seniors and shed the remnants of any creativity that I have? I get reminded of the movie Idiocracy where the protagonist lands in a future where the humans have become totally dependent on machines and cannot think for themselves. Hmm.. I really don't have an answer to the question now.

I just remembered a beautiful poem by P.B.Shelly called Ozymandias. It talks about the crumbling of mighty empires and the ultimate destruction of any civilization, however great it might be. Here is the poem:
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said:
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert.
Near them, on the sand, Half sunk,a shattered visage lies,
whose frown And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away

Yeah! I just hope the creative thinker in me doesn't have the fate that Shelley has put forth in fine verse. I hope that he lives on for at least 20 years from now.

(**Pardon me,I think the purists would not agree to such a usage. I'd rather use it for the descriptive purposes :D**)

**Goes back to listening songs from the evergreen movie Abhimaan and decides to call it a day**

For whom Time stands still

Time! on whose arbitrary wing
The varying hours must flag or fly,
Whose tardy winter, fleeting spring,
But drag or drive us on to die

-Lord Byron

This weekend, as is the case with any other weekend, I was cooling my heels at home. Words can be misleading for Chennai is essentially a hot cauldron for the first few months of the year. It would be rather apt to say “I was burning my heels at home”. Unmindful of the sweltering heat, I chose to sit down and from the heap of books strewn across, picked one and was immersed in it. My reverie was rather abruptly broken by a familiar voice in the streets. Why would I not recognize it? After all it’s been the same distinct loud voice, which I have heard for ages and which mouths the same two lines over and over again.

Paper, Old paper...

Unmindful of my observations, my mother called out to the owner of the voice. She asked him to come over. This was my cue. Over the years I have dedicated myself to making sure that my mother is not made to work hard for every little thing in house. This makes her feel happy and most of the times it is her smile and her silent acknowledgment that matters. I ran over to the other room and immediately began stacking the old pile of newspapers in a jute bag. The door bell rung and I was ready. The man looked at me. The glint in his eyes suggested a trace of faint recognition. A small smile ensued then in his lips. I acknowledged it and we both were into the act of shifting papers in his weighing machine. Just when a little stack remained, he looked at me, and asked me, “Son, what do you do now?”. In a low tone I told him I work. Me naming the company, which most of the educated urban lower, middle and upper class would instantly recognize would not bring the same sense of recognition in his mind. I spared him the name and tried to keep the conversation going on. I asked him how things are going on for him. He looked at me and said, “Son, it’s all the same, I do the same old work, collect papers and try to eke out a living. That has been my life for almost 20 years now”. My heart went out to him. I could not reply back. The words might have stung me. Here I was in my home making rapid strides in my life moving step by step to a place of higher recognition, whereas there was a fellow human being, who in all fairness has struggled more than me but life never has changed for him.

He gave me two soiled fifty rupee notes for the newspapers. I gave back one fifty rupees to him saying he could use it to buy something cool and drink. I guess he was overwhelmed with surprise for there were tears in his eyes. He thanked me profusely, blessed me and carried on with his work. I sat down again with my books. My mom, used to my ways asked me to keep the fifty rupee note. She was apparently happy for the house looked cleaner without the strewn newspapers around. My mind was rather engrossed in the inequalities of our lives. How many times in our lives would we hear elders asking us to work hard, for the fruits of hard work are sweet. Wasn’t that man doing the same thing? Every day he had to shout till his voice grew hoarse. The fury of the Sun will not stop him from venturing out for the pangs of his hunger are a much bigger driving force in his life. Time is a deceptive illusion I realized. For me it was the measuring factor of my achievements and age, whereas for him it was all about counting yet another grey hair while his life always remained the same. I suddenly realized I was sweating and switched on the fan. A cool wave of air spread through the room giving me temporary relief from the Sun’s fury. The voice outside became fainter. I realized he would soon move on to the next street. I wondered if I would see him ten years from now, would he still be the same. I wished he would go to places. I wished somebody would give him Redemption for the hard work he has done all these years. But these I realized were Utopian thoughts of a mind which has some solitude and loneliness. For that man though “Time will always stand still”.

In that journey called life... with those people who are Friends...

The best kind of friend is the one you could sit on a porch swing with, never saying a word, and walk away feeling like that was the best conversation you've ever had.

If there is one word that can summarize my existence on earth then that would be colourful. I tend to view it as an unfinished painting and I think of myself as the expert artist. The artist starts off as a dabbler, blissfully unaware of his skills and as time progresses his strokes get bolder,the melange of colors that he creates acquires another dimension. He realizes that in his hand is the fostered child of silence and slow time. A slice of life that, perhaps would serve as a window to his world in the ages to come. When the strokes of the artist's brush come out of a clarity of thought he is well on course to create his masterpiece.

The bolder strokes in my life would be some of the hardest decisions that I have taken. Yes not all creative ideas are successes and the same reflects in life. We realize that Experience means failing the test first and then learning the lesson. Trust me, nothing can be harder than that. I often hear the adage greatness lies not in falling, but in rising everytime we fall. Many a time getting up requires that extra effort which can only be provided by another set of hands. The set of hands that pull you out. In the artist's world, probably the vivid hues that bring life to his masterpiece.

What is a masterpiece without colors? The vivid hues add another dimension to a piece of canvas. A dimension that perhaps the solid canvas would not have offered had it stayed white. If ever my life is hailed as a masterpiece, then probably it would be because of those beings, whose unwavering support and immense belief served as an elixir to my unquenchable thirst. In times of low self belief it is their belief that holds me through. Words may seem redundant to the supporting shoulders that they offer.
Every other day when the entire world seems against you and starts doubting you. When you yourself cannot decide if what you do is correct, it is then that their belief carries you through.

Not only to those folks who provide support in terms of spite, but also those folks who stay on with you every day, listening to your irate ramblings, to your quixotic ideas and to your promises that would stay on unfulfilled. I see them everywhere. My life would not have been colourful without you folks. The masterpiece is not yet complete. Yeah it's not yet reached crossed even Quarter of what it has to be. But the vivid hues inked have surely been etched for ages :-).

*Phew atlast finished it..was contemplating for too long I guess*

PS : A thank you to Prazy, Harsha, HRH Anu(I'd be killed for this), Deepti, Shanky, Mayuraa , Sanz and of course a late thank you to Gody, Avi and Janani :D. Many a time I just felt energized after just speaking to you folks. Of course my heart is beating funeral marches to the grave but thanks to you folks I still think there is space in this world for my footprints to be etched :-).

Indian 'Hypocrite' Media

So a few days ago in Tirunelveli,Tamil Nadu, a police officer lay battling for life after being hacked by certain bad elements of the society. It was played out on all Indian Media channels and most of you would have come across it. To sum it up. Vetrivel the police officer was knifed,bombed and hacked by certain unlawful elements and he was lying down in a pool of his own blood. The dear Dravidian Party ministers and their cahoots arrived at the spot just in time. The dear ministers were just plain afraid to even get out because there was a bomb threat? (What a joke!!). Ok the others like the secretary were also afraid. The cop begs for water, pleads for help. Not even one single person is ready to take the dying man and give him treatment. Instead the ministers call the Ambulance and by the time the ambulance arrives, the hero has bled to death. Now the questions raised by the media were very accurate. Let me put it up for you :

1)Could the ministers allow such a thing to happen? If the situation was reversed wouldn't the cop be helping the ministers out without any fear to his own life?

2) When somebody begs for water what would you do? In particular if the person in need of the elixir is actually dying. The disgusting scene of the secretary pouring the water on Vetrivel's head was shown. How untouchable is that man? Aren't the elected members from the same Dravidian party movement that years ago fought for eradication of that evil?.

Ok now for the pertinent point. The entire thing was captured on Television!! So what was the media doing? Can't the politician ask back? If the politician could not help the person, why not the Media in particular the cameraman, instead of filming the event go and help the dying person? Where were the morals of the great Indian Media? They were happy to point fingers on the politicians, whereas they weren't ready to clean their own mess. Ohh all the news channels played it again and again. Disgusting to say the least. In all a life was lost. That life would be insignificant in the World's Grand scheme of things, but would remain a lamp that just faded away instead of lighting up the house it was required to. I for one hate the so called Indian Media Boom.

(500) Days of Summer - A movie review

This is a story of boy meets girl. But you should know up front, this is not a love story


What would you do if you were in a failed romance? Are you searching for something that would get you out of the unpleasant past? Then you must surely talk to Scott Neustadter, co-writer of this brilliant movie. The story is based on his true experiences with a girl in the London School of Economics. Ok now back to the review.

When was the last time that a romantic-comedy-drama movie really fleshed out characters as if they were just you and me. The so called romance movies usually have a story line, where a desperate or a loser kind of guy falls in love with an absolute beauty or probably where a guy is ditched by somebody and he meets this warm person and grows on eventually to love her. Add a bit of comedy and variations and you get a love story. My problem with these movies is that, though they are enjoyable, don't connect to the audience. The audience are not fools. We know the things portrayed on screen cannot happen.

(Before the breakup)
Tom:[Montage of Summer] I love her smile. I love her hair. I love her knees. I love how she licks her lips before she talks. I love her heart-shaped birthmark on her neck. I love it when she sleeps.

So where was I? Yeah now Tom played by Joseph Gordon Levitt falls for a girl Summer played by Zooey Deschanel. The story is presented in a non linear fashion for us. The narrator every now and then pops up with annotations. The movie starts reverse from the 500th day. The beginning of each day is highlighted in the movie. So Tom works in a greeting card company and Summer is the new assistant to his boss. During a party, his drunk friend blurts out to Summer that Tom has fallen for her. From the word go she makes it clear that she is not looking for a boy friend but she is ready to have all other things that comes with love :D(Seems hard to believe eh?). Tom obviously being a guy falls madly in love with her. The two date, go around as a couple, shout in parks, frolic around in each others houses. Tom and Summer really seem such a cute couple together. In spite of the different perspectives in which each of them views the relationship, Tom thinks she is the girl of his dreams and Summer believing that there's no such thing as true love, they carry on. We get to know that Tom is actually a talented architect who probably landed up in the wrong job. They have a breakup after watching the great Dustin Hoffman movie "The Graduate". Tom is unable to cope up with this and life goes on in a downward spiral. Summer drops in and out of his life and the scene they have towards the end of the movie is perhaps the defining moment. Tom has quit his job and he goes pursuing his dream. The last scene is perhaps the most memorable for me :-). He meets this really hot girl and when he later asks her name, she replies Hi, My name is Autumn and so the story continues.

I hope I haven't given too much of details into the movie's plot. Probably not the best reviewer in town. You definitely should watch this movie. I would rate it as high as The Graduate,Annie Hall, Serendipity, As good as it gets. The characters are so adorable in spite of their obvious flaws. It's been nominated for all major awards this year. Both the actors are amazing. Zooey Deschanel is just so natural. What do I say about Joseph Gordon Levitt. He's surely one the best actors I have seen in a long time. He just gets into the part with ease. So I'll end it now. Go watch the movie folks. You won't be disappointed.

(After the breakup)
Tom::[Montage of Summer] I hate her crooked teeth. I hate the way she smacks her lips. I hate her knooby knees. I hate that cockroach shape splotch on her neck.

PS: Special Thanks to my friend Silky ;-) who made me watch this movie and to Karadi who gave me his copy :-).