absurd

When thousands lost their lives on Sunday, there were a few znanis ( goons ) who were attributing the natures wrath to Sri Sankaracharya's captivity. WELL WELL WELL :DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD.

Numerous relief funds have been raised by the government. I do have a complaint about US ( Indians ). It probably took 3-4 hours for the tusnami to hit India. Couldnt we sense its arrival. Couldnt we caution . Are our disaster predicting systems so pathetic. Even the airbase at Andaman and Nicobar Islands dint have a clue till it struck them. If we really lack the infrastructure, then in my opinion we should spend a part of the Releif fund in building better alerting systems.


okies ... namma contribution nenuskondre .. innu bejaar aagotte .. so let me not highlite it..

Mood

The usual. Its been this "usual" mood for a few years now. What happened to other moods, I wonder. Looks like its time for the next level of introspection, coupled with some retrospection.

Today for the first time, I got bored at a Bookshop (Landmark). I went around a mall (Forum) and the boredom got worse. McDonald's was crowded like crazy, and so were other places, with a urbane, boisterous, "family" crowd and all were going through the motions of shopping, eating, drinking, hoping, loafing, and whatever else people do in malls. While writing this, I am now thinking about what I was doing there...will that be the last time I go to malls? I don't think so. I am changing; and I don't like this change.

Mourning for all those who took the brunt of nature on sunday. And sighing at the thought of all those who are talking about how Tamil Nadu is now paying the price for its mistreatment of the Shankaracharya

happy bday richie ..

looks like u had a great bday party ..
cooooooooooooolllllllllll

I will be back in Jan last week ..
meet you guys soon ..

my body is hurting due to skiing ..:((((((((

RSS

I mean, RSS - Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, not RSS - RDF Site Summary (feed). On my way back from Soraba, I met a very interesting relative of mine who works full-time with RSS and has the somewhat lengthy title of "Akila Bharata Saha Boudhika Pramukh", which translates to "Head: RSS Think-Tank". As we had a couple of hours to kill on the bus till we reached Shimoga, it was talk-time for the idealogically confused Tejaswi Nadahalli and the passionate RSS leader/idealogue Dattatreya HosabaLe. We covered some organizational behavior, leadership, Indic-culture, (Neo-)Colonialism, India, Indian-ness, Nehru, Partition, and a whole load of other similar topics. For the very first time in my life, I met a true leader of people; someone who knows the complications of implementing policies, logistics, people, Indian History, is very well read, ideologically driven, unmarried, devoted, and a lot more. Very impressive person, eye-opening conversation....I even checked out http://www.rss.org and a few columns there. Vitriolic as usual, and also extreme in places; but still, after pondering for a while, I am not sure I am as liberal as I think I am.

I will end this with a few quotes that he used, that I still remember.

"If you are below 25 and not a communist, you dont have a heart; If you are over 35 and still a communist, you dont have a brain"

"Gandhi chose the wrong man; and so did God" - (think Nehru and Patel)

the uncles are here

Christmas eve 2004, is something I will recollect fondly :). My sister(Aditi) and brother-in-law(Kartheek) who had come down on holiday to blore, threw a surprise birthday party. It was fun, with my cousins too joining in. Leftovers of chocolate truffle still available at my place, so people can drop in at any time ( other than Kumar, since he was there for the party anyway :D).

happy birthday richie_jag!

have a nice day today!

~Sudeep

AGRE score out

Got a measly 78 percentile :( ... chitranna. I would have been comfortable reporting a score of 80-85 to universities, but now am unsure. It is required for institutions like Rutgers.. hmm.. My pennstate app has been sent anyways; ucsb & ohio by this weekend.
review got over last week. ver 4 of self needs to be released pronto is the verdict :)

the weekday brouhaha

wtf?

w=wednesday
t=thursday
f=friday

after wtf,...we are having holidays!
we are having a VACATION for one week.

i have no plans abt celebrating the janam-din of christ or new year.
i dont think i will have any.

after all i am not the "partying types"

hahaha....i love the phrase after all i am not the "partying types"

Party means something to every human being.
Based on the intrepretation of the word "Party" we have four (right now i can think of 4)
categories of people :-

1) Partying animals(PAs)
Yay! to party....Yay! to bacardi.

2) "Not the partying types."
They have GENUINIEly been in category #1 for sometime and they are out of it.

3)Idiots who CLAIM that they have been in category#1 and later who switched to category#2.
Nobody has a clue what they were upto.

4) (My favorite) People who confuse party for Congress Party and Janata Party.

ANyway i will tell you what class i belong to later....
:-)

Bangalore #3

I am off to my village for 3 days starting tomorrow. Some people to catch up with, a wedding to attend, and a few more sleepless nights are in the pipeline...

Visited IISc today to catch up with both the Dattas, and two others, one from TW, and one from Yahoo!, things are going good at IISc...Christos Papadimitriou is in Bangalore these days at HIPC2004 I heard...thats academics for now....

Will get back to you folks after 3 days......till then, adios.....

After 1 helluva of a

roller coaster debugging session , i figured out that nothing is drastically wrong with my piece of code.Ofcourse there will be some bugs here and there....

Not that my piece of code is a masterpiece.But still it is a good relief.
It is a niraparaadhi.

Whew!

Anyway, weekend just swooshed because of Kummi's parents shaanti and other important things.
Tej is here and manja (the texas-tech manja) is in town.

Okay nothing much to say........
:-)

Shanthi #2

it was a strange feeling watching my mom and dad getting married..
it felt kinda good..some moments to be treasured...also i noticed something..
i felt that they were looking pretty (yes pretty!!) when they were sitting on the 'hase manne' (the wooden plank
on which ppl sit while getting married)..was it because of their costume..with garland and all that..or was it cos
of the whole setting..or was it just my eyes playing tricks..or as one of my aunts suggested..was it cos of the 'hase manne'
itself..(to put it in her own words 'hase male kuthre hage kaLe barathe nodu')..donno..

will send the photos once they are developed..
blore boys..any plans of going out this weekend??janapadha loka anybody???

sops and e-sops....

gimme a place to stand and a rod , i will be able to turn the world....

wah wah!
words of gold, i say....

i dunno which scholar said this....I think it's a greek scholar....
Aristotle ? PythaGoras ? Euclid ?
But he was a shrewd guy.
Why ?
Because nobody could give him a place or a rod.

If the greek scholar lived today and he would write a
writing a SOP to some university if he told those words
what would the chancellor say to him ?

:-)

The inner purpose of a SOP is to make a claim.
But it's good.

Because, i feel ONLY if you make claims you can go into the achievement mode....
because you become responsible for the words u've spoken.....
and you have lit the fire on your own behind.

so i will claim.....
give me some place ....

no i will claim something afterwards...
my filesystem is bombing....

shanthi...

beta chands...ee sunday namma appandhu shanthi idhe..
in ashrya party hall...this place is near ganesh mandhir in thyagarajanagar.. thavalru sakutumbha parivara sametharagi bandhu vadhu vara rige shubha korabekendhu thammali vinanthi..
teju, nenage phone maduve..

sop

i think I need to borrow samba's SOP ..hehe ..
just kidding ..
seriously, it is a painful job to colour your thoughts, when you are not sure of what you want to be ....
well finally(looks like ) samba has got his colors right , or atelease he managed to replicate a 'da vinci'

its high time I go to my PM and get my return dates confrimed .. I mean something concrete like Jan 29th or Jan 22nd ..

Papanna dont shift to rajarajeshwari nagar ..
magane hoskere halli is awesome .. You are just adding more miles to your long and tiring journey to SASKEN .. reconsider.......

blore would be borring without tejaswi ..and richie and kummi who are in line too ..
arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...

Statements of Purpose

I have read many SOPs, esp during the days when I was applying to those PhD programmes in the US, and rarely have I seen anything like Samba's SOP. Mail him and ask for your own copy to read a pretty well done SOP with the right amount of calculated arrogance, cheeky humor, judicious amount of self confidence, and of course, a great flow of thought. I liked his SOP. After working for a year after writing my first SOP, and after going back to academia, my ideas have kinda changed and now, I find that I dont like my old SOP at all. WhoTF cares about SOPs now eh? lets get to more interesting stuff.

I have postponed my Bombay journey to the afternoon of 3rd Jan 2005. I will be taking a Jet Airways flight out of Bangalore at 1400 hrs, landing in Bombay at around 1530 hrs. Three cheers for my first flight.

Kumara? when is the Tyagarajanagar Oota?

Just like cola wars, we have the

Toilet wars

Today,

I have come on a scooty to the office...
even though it was very noisy,it is better than grave-like silence.
But driving thru the Bommanhalli Service Road is really risky.
But it was a nice change.

Guys at Bangalore ,
Anyone game for a saturday/sunday meet somewhere ?

Janapada Loka ? Utsav ??

touch anything

on my body, and it pains.
I had too much josh over the weekend . First we played volleyball then tennis and yday ended up with trying iceskating . Dont go for iceskating. Its precarious.
ammaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...

My buttocks curse me like hell

I had a pretty mournful morning , my neighbour woke me up. at 5 in the morning . Her roomie had gulped over 15 tylanols ( pain killers.. and for us pain providers :P) , over some stupid conversation with her husband ..

we had to rush her to the hospital, and we were pretty lucky , that she had vomitted and the concentration wasnt that higher .

Full actions,morning morning .

No josh to work ...as usual ..
But I am doing good today ..

The weather is bad in Australia ..
My neck painsssssssssssss..

GD

Bangalore #2

Am already into my second week right now. And the first week has been hectic, very hectic. Am done with most of my to-do stuff. Minor Major, Vidyarthi, BCB; have paid first visits to most friends; am having filter coffee everyday; having mosranna and other normal food at home; catching up with relatives and cousins.....and other usual after 6 months kinda stuff. Nothing out of ordinary.

Now that I am back for a week, things seem normal; people are the same, Sudeep still gives disclaimers, Sumanth hasn't lost his staccato accent, Kumar looks the same, Sainath is as geeky as ever, More of my software engineer friends have bought digital cameras, adding to the YASETP count of Bangalore (Yet Another Software Engineer Turned Photographer). Saw power cuts, corporation dog-squads, cable TV failures, traffic jams, roadside masale puri, churmuri, auto rickshaws, radio city 91FM, Gandhi Bazaar tarkari market and all the usual stuff that makes regular life here. It was great fun back then, it still is. Love this place.

Will be visiting Yahoo! and ThoughtWorks this week. Am gonna be at Dhimant's play this weekend. And a host of relatives to visit. Will be out of town next week for a wedding, and the last week in Bangalore - will be on call.

And check this out; I am spending my new years eve at Dharmavaram Junction in Andra Padesh, thats right, my ticket to Bombay is at 1800 Hrs, Dec 31st. Thats crazy, but true. Hope to find someone on the train to party into the morning that night :D

Good morning angels !

(from all of those forgetable movie charlie's angels).

Weekend ended.YIPPIE ! It's monday!!!Yes! Yes!! Yes!!!

Okay the fun part is over...Let's mourn.

Caught up with jag and teju in that order.Jag is into probability theory and all that jazz.

Teju and I had been to the one and only Vidyarthi Bhavan and had some deadly masala dosas.I had not been to VB for 6 or 7 months.Wow that small hotel never lets u down!

Akshai has started a blog and this is the blog.
Hope we will find some good pjs there.

Bye...i am pretty "busy" now...
hahaha

yesterday...

Life was such an easy game to play
Now i need a place to hide away
Oh i believe....
In yesterday!

Suddenly....
I'm not the man i used to be.....
There's a shadow hangin' o'er me...
Oh i believe....
In yesterday!


The beatles.Gr3at song.

Yesterday....
Great rotis at Ghar Ka Khaana
Great coffee at Riu's Lounge.

Bangalore

me is back home, and it looks a trifle different; mostly due to changed interiors at home, different bed, new tables, cupboards, sheets etc.; but maybe some changed perspective as well, from my side; dont know for sure. hmmmm. cant pinpoint the exact feeling and thought, but just not feeling the same: thats the abstract part of the whole come-back-home experience.

bikes good; so, cruising all over the place. Su Depp is doing fantastic, all exciting about nothing and everything at the same time. Me has a mild bout of fever, so, not really venturing out beyond HosakereHalli on one end and Nagendra Block on the other. Will get out into the thick of things starting this weekend.

My professor has given me some work to finish by this week; so, maybe the next couple of days will be on that. Its been a while since I studied at home, maybe time to call Kumar home and start on with some serious study (tea, Britannia milk bikies etc), can get some quality kathe also; what say Richie Rich? UGH, I have become insanely nerdy; sucks!!

Need to get well quick, cuz lotsa people to visit on the other side of town; Yahoo!, TW, Samba, Dhimant, and quite a few others; people keep telling me that Bangalore traffic has worsened, need to check that side of the story too. And of course, gotta visit Vidyarthi, Brahmin's, UD, dont know if I can make it Janapadaloka, but lets see, gotta whole month to plan.

looks like

the lady lucks smiling on kummi ..
and a bit on me too .. but no tangible outcomes on my side ...

me restarted gymming again .. ( nth time reboot ) ..
swalpa kammi adrenu super aagi kanotte .

teju , beware , blore would add more pounds
One reason why I fear comng to BLore .. :p
irli dove yella beda eegaa ..

ivattu tumba bega bande office ge and am feeling all sleepy.. :DDDDDDDDDDDDD

life without a comp @ office

is pretty good...i dont spend time surfing the web after/before/during working hours..
only prob is with checking official mails..
actually i screwed up my sys when trying to install fedora with a corrupt cd..it damaged the hard disk..
although i managed to install Suse 9.1 on the damaged hard disk..the installation was not proper with qt3 missing..
which means text only mode ..finally i gave up today and asked the sys admin's help..and belive it or not he promised me
a new high end m/c with 1 gb ram and 80gb hard disk :)..and he didnt even crib abt me spoiling the sys :)

amale nenne papu manele dhadiya sikidha..my observation: he has taken good care of his tummy...
other than that he hasnt changed a bit..hehehe
we were there for an hour or so..so detail agi kathe hodedhila..looking fwd to this weekend..

Randon plans #1

I plan to move out of PHX in Jan, aptly put to arrive in India in Jan.
Spend a few weeks in HYD and get back to BLORE asap. HYD is mandatory.
I need to start searching for other jobs while in HYD, so that my company
understands how serious I am about BLORE.

I want to utilise all my leaves .. around 25 .. :-), write GMAT during this time.

Anything else ?? lots need to be achieved on the personal front .
Have to visit SFO . I will not able to catch raghu, harsha, amit etc in Newyork .
They have planned to go on Weekdays :( :( :(

I am looking forward for a good appraisal . A bad one will really motivate to change my orgranisation.

What else , I need to know complex systems in the application world . the SAP world is beckoning.

Random Thoughts #2

from my side.

I want to change a few of my traits.
I want to change that thought too.
I hate recursion.
I am beginning to suspect that there is a big gap between what I want, and what I am willing to do to get there;
I am an unclean fellow, my lab-desk is the messiest in the entire IIT; with zillions of papers, a water jug, couple of bags, three to four used handkerchiefs, a fully chewed/bitten tshirt (that can never be worn again), a ton of books, 40-50 one/two rupee coints stewn around, handiplast covers, tablet covers, medicine covers, unopened bank statements, a pair of shoes, chits, an uncountable number of computer cords, used teabags in a plastic cover, and so on......
I am making a few serious mistakes in life.
Its been a long time since I introspected about some of my core theories.
I have lost the craving for good food.
I seem to subsist in vacuum.
Very few things seem to interest me these days.
Very few things seem to move me these days.
My telephone manners have improved.
My general reading has taken a big beating.
I haven't held a TV remote control in 5 months.
I wonder where I will be this time 2 years from now.
The cynic in me is getting a very big share of my actions.
Life is still beautiful, interesting and fun....

I had been to a cousin's place yesterday, in up-market Bandra, and met my cousin's daughter who is in seventh standard. She studies in the best school, carries a 6610, knows more about Yahoo! messenger than I do. With all this and more, she came out of her room, wished me a very good evening and vanished. After a lot of talk with my cousin regarding how young students in up-market Bombay are getting into smoking, drinking, drugs, casual sex (I have also seen the DPS RK-puram video, and was almost disgusted by it), peer-pressure among early teens, and I ended up feeling like I was talking to some American suburbian mom. Bombay is so damn polarized, the cultures are so different from slums to plush apartments, that it is taken to both extremes. Anyways, I went to check the girl's room and found some very interesting books like Richard Feynman's essays, unabridged versions of some classics, and so forth.......and also a few Mills & Boons (Kummi, ask Richie what these are), and so, to make it a good day for our friendship, and to also encourage her to read the kinda books I read, I presented her a good book that I had purchased earlier that day (for myself, called The Brief History of Everything - Bill Bryson)........ the girl lives in a world thats somewhat different from ours........and very different from her mom's.......

life.

Random Thoughts

Random Thought #1
---------------------
Mummyyyyy :-)

I had been to a gruhapravesha and I am back at my seat where I feel
excessively comfortable.

I think I saw half a dozen not exactly new moms from the US of A
They were putting their kids all of them <= 5years in spotlight.

Asking them to sing nursery rhymes.
Asking them to dance.
Why?

Just remembered Roger Waters.

HEY TEACHERS! LEAVE THE KIDS ALONE

And the kids just wanted to be alone.

Random Thought #2
---------------------
Death.

I was thinking about a woman who had made an analysis on death.
Her name is Kubler-Ross or something.
According to her a person dying goes through five phases :-

The five stages go in progression :-
1)denial
2)anger
3)bargaining
4)depression
and
5)acceptance.

Well, I feel these stages go in progression not for death alone
but for something which we can never achieve too, no matter how hard we try.

see ya guys...
Tezz 'twas gr8 talking to U

Google ain't cool everywhere.....

All these days, I was under the impression that Google was THE place to work in, they were doing the coolest stuff around, coming up with geeky ads in Bangalore newspapers etc etc. And so when I heard that there was a talk by Krishna Bharat at the CSI2004 conference today, I registered myself and went for the talk....... In a packed audience of 250.....after the (quite heavy) talk, there were two questions from the audience, and guess who it was; yep, yours truly; thats about it; no other questions; nothing.....as one of my "miss"es would've said in middle school - pin-drop silence.

This was mid-afternoon. Later today, from 1900-2200, there was a Google openhouse, where they were supposed to talk about their Bangalore R&D centre, their work culture, research problems, get to know us better etc; guess how many turned up. I was there, there were 2 fresh-teachers from Punjab University. There were more waiters and maitre'Ds than technical people there. I was bowled. Ain't Google cool? Aren't people interested in knowing what they are looking for?

Couple of thoughts come to mind. The conference was CSI2004 - a historically old-school society; where they highlight topics like "use of technologry to serve rural India better", and other systems areas like DB and OS. Maybe the audience were those types. An interesting observation (confirming this) was that in the morning session on Middleware Technolgies (most of which I attended), there was NOISE, it was chaotic, with tons of questions; the presenter was screwed by a very interested and keen audience.

Does this mean the Indian software companies are still only services driven? excited by J2EE etc.? I mean, it was a proper conference in a 5 star hotel, all the works, not some IT-fair-glitz thing. The delegates here represent a good sample of folks who actually make up our industry and academia. Further, I asked Google how their hiring was going on, and they replied that it was quite frustrating that most Bangalore software people do not know what computer science means and are out applying in droves.

Anyways, I had a few things to talk about with them, but no freebies :((((.....good food, pastres, fruit punch, and back to the campus......

My first time out to Bombay-West......and "MG's", "Brigades", and "Kormangas" of Bangalore are no match for the kinda .........er......... pretty young things I saw on a DVG-road like street in Bandra. Dileep Kumar, Sunil Dutt, Shahrukh Khan, Priety Zinta, Rajesh Khanna, Rishi Kapoor, Aamir Khan...saw all their homes. Remembered the nostalgic days of VLSI2001 (you with me till here GD? :)))) )........