Rest at the time of Work ?

So Representative ;-)

UPDATE: I haven't been able to blog much for the past few days. Life's been just a little too hectic. With loads of assignment submissions, class tests, viva-voce, internship applications, I just wonder when will I ever to live like Garfield.

Moreover, Illumination is coming. This is an annual contest we have at IIT KGP on Diwali Night, wherein you have to tie diyas on huge chatayis help up by bamboos. The diyas try to give shape to a picture, usually of mythological context. On Diwali night, all the electricity from all hostels is cut off, and the only visible things are these diyas. Trust me, it looks majestic. After all, a month of back-breaking, night-lamp lighting work goes in for that. And when the diyas burn, people tend to become delirious with ecstacy.

For more information on Illumination at IITKGP, you can visit Apro's blog. Apro is the General Secretary Social and Cultural here and is responsible for the contest.

Pictures of Illumination
These pics were two years back when our hall won it. Last year, it rained on Illumination night, and all our work was wasted. Pray that it doesn't rain this 12th

























Will put up some Rangoli Pics Soon...

Navaratri

Thoughts on last night:

Nabami Rajani tumi jeyo naa,
Tumi gele Uma jaabe,
Amar ashrudhar sharibe naa.

(Nabami evening please do not go, for the Goddess will go with you. I will not be able to restrain my tears.)

My grandfather had taught this to me when I was very young. It is a poem by Tagore.

Will write about my experiences during the pujas sometime later.

And yes, Happy Dussera and Shubho Bijoya to everybody

UPDATE: A more detailed post with puja experiences will follow as soon as I get time.

TGOST and AF and TDVC

Just finished Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. The book is old but had I read it earlier, I would not have been able to appreciate it.

It is the poignant story of two twins Rahel and Estha, who are separated by fate but linked in their destiny. And not in the Kumbh Mela. Their mother is the divorced wife of a man whom she had married against her family's wishes. Soon after their marriage, he shows his true colours. His concern for his family can possibly be compared to Uncle Sam's concern for Nepal. Soon after the birth of the twins, he is threatened by his employer who offers to let him keep his job in return of his wife. Ammu, as the children call her, leaves soon after to arrive in her parent's house where her past continues to haunt her. Through envy, through jealosy, through ill-will, through the Marxism, and through the clash of religions. It rears its head once again when the daughter of the children's uncle arrives from Britain, and somehow manages to die. In the meantime, the divorced mother of two somehow manages to find love in the arms of a Paravan, who works in their house as a carpenter. I will not give any more of the story away, but what follows changes the life of all concerned. Forever.

What I really liked about the story is the language and Roy's almost lyrical manner of writing. I haven't seen better use of alliteration [As tho' I have seen lots of it]. She has her own way of describing imagery, which use very simple words and similies to describe very complex images and human emotions. The words come back to haunt you as you read the book. She keeps jumping from the past to the future to the present and back. Although you tend to smell the plot right through the book, it unravels completely only in the last chapter. I have also heard that the book has autobiographical overtones, but do not exactly about that. You can find more about Roy and the book here and here.

ehT doG fO llamS sgnihT is surely Worth a read if you haven't read it and worth a re-read if you've already read it.

I also read George Orwell's Animal Farm sometime back. I really loved the way Orwell makes use of substitution and allegory to tell a very pertinent and politically motivated tale. His analysis of human psychology is truly mind-boggling. Greed is not just presented as an emotion, it is a reality throughout the book. The way the pigs make use of the other animals to live a regal life themselves can find many a equivalents in the real world. And the way the laws are bent and broken is so real that you almost find yourself finding instances in newspapers when you read them next time. The message tends to live beyond the last page: "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others".

A very thin book which should be on the read-list of every person.

UPDATE: Just finished Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. I read it in under 30 hours which included, among other things, a 7 hour sleep, my daily ablutions, a visit to the temple [a rarity] and pandal hopping in Calcutta's ugly traffic. That clearly goes to prove that even at 490 pages, it is a very quick read. In fact, once started I just could not control myself. I even took it with me when I went pandal-hopping just so that I could finish it during the traffic jams.

The story is probably well known now. Robert Langdon is a Harvard symbologist, who in a trip to Paris is accused of the muder of the curator of the Louvre, the famous Museam. A cryptologist, Sophie, helps him escape, but they find themselves going deeper and deeper into a maze which contains the greatest secret hidden by mankind, the greatest con act ever. After reading a good part of the book, I had been suspecting a prime character as being the villain, but I was proved completely wrong. Brown is a master of suspense, and what I really liked was the way he made up an imaginative story while giving such substansive and believable evidence about it, and the way he weaves history into his own plot. You really tend to believe it by the end.

A compulsive page turner. UnPutDownAble.

Visit DanBrown.com, and DaVinciCode.com. Also visit Lisa Shea's site for a criticism of Da Vinci Code.

Electronic Media, culture and the Youth

Today we had the Inter Hall Debate. I had prepared for the selections but did not get selected finally. However, our team won the gold and that is what matters the most. Anyway, for the record [both mine and for others' benefit], I am giving the speech I had prepared for myself. The topic was "The House Believes that the Electronic Media is promoting the Commercialization of Indian Culture among the Youth." I was FOR the motion.

Current Mood: Elated
Current Music: Again on the thin client in my lab :-(

--------------------

After the recent despicable act of Zee news in airing its reality show ‘Gudiya Kiski’, Rajdeep Sardesai justified the story saying it was an act of great human interest, and remarked, "In fact, no one really has any business being overly self-righteous since all of us itch to redraw the ... journalistic ethics to suit our interests." Good evening, everybody, I, KPOWERINFINITY, firmly believe that the media has long forsaken all of its ethics and can always be seen grossly promoting the commercialization of Indian Culture, acutely affecting the Indian youth.

Since, the debate has already progressed to a great extent [I would have been the 10th speaker], I will skip the usual definitions, and directly come to my thrust areas. The first is FESTIVALS. The traditional Indian festivals, which once were a time when the extended family met and shared its sorrows and their joys, have been obscured to little more than times for shopping sprees and bonanza discounts. The respect to elders and love to peers, today, is no more than an Archie’s card or even a Yahoo e-greeting. Exasperated by the rallying campaigns by the media during Diwali a reader remarked in India Today, that the media, “reduces the festival and its significance to consumerist terms. We need to de-mystify and de-mythologize festivals in contemporary times, but reducing it to just a wish list may not truly represent the psyche of millions of Indians who celebrate it with a noble significance and a nobler wish list.” Pray, the media has even exalted the quintessence of Indian marriage to a Page 3 party. Being the cynosure of the media’s prying eyes, is the favourite pastime of the Indian youth today, thanks to the very visible electronic-media.

Then again, coming to the ARTS. Indian Music, both the Classical genre as well as the Old Hindi film music. In the Remix culture popular songs of the bygone era, are converted to a raunchy semblance of the same, with the scantily clad women and the titillating gestures et al. After listening to Vinay Sapru and Radhika Rao’s take on his melodious Kaanta Laga, Naushad Ali, one of the greatest exponents of Hindi Film music, and the original creator, rued, “It was such a melodious song, they’ve completely ruined it... They’ve spoilt the true meaning.” He even offered not to partake the royalty money only if his music was not treated with such disrespect. The electronic media, however, lead by MTV and Channel [V] dedicated umpteen hours of video footage to the hot-selling video. In fact, the award for the “Best Remix Video” in the MTV Immies went to Kaanta Laga.

Let us come to a very recent addition to our culture: CRICKET. From wearing Cigarette brands on sleeves, to noodle straps during the matches, Cricket is one area where everybody takes cognizance of the rampant commercialization aided and abetted by the Electronic Media. A world where Fair and Lovely is the title sponsor of an India-Australia series, and every once in a while a glamorous and sensuously clad lady purrs about the cuteness of the players does not find many takers among the cognoscenti. Add to that the cat-fights for the coverage of the sport, and the brouhaha surrounding the selection of the Chief Mentor, and you get the idea that the media turns wherever it sees the money. Coverage of other sports, including the national game, Hockey, is at best, pathetic.

The electronic-media has not even pardoned the basis of Indian culture: RELIGION. From long-distance salvation to television satsangs and electronic nirvana in virtual temples, the electronic media will not leave any stone unturned in its quest for TRPs, even if it may be disparaging the power of the Almighty above. Art of living has been blown out of proportions by the Indian electronic media, replacing the erstwhile coverage given to Yoga, Vipassana, and Pranayama, and all because the Sultans of Indian Business visit Sri Sri Ravi Shankar for his blessings.

At the end, I can only say that media continues to pollute Indian traditional culture -- its festivals, its family system, its attires, its rituals, its beliefs, its religion, its sport, its fervor and its basic fabric. It is high time, we ensure that proper checks are put on the media, because the way it is using culture to feather its own nest, given a chance, the media will make sure that we have none of it left.

----------------------------
Readers' opinions solicited.

Long time no C

There are various ways to look at the title of this post. It can be interpreted as my not having posted anything for the past few days. Or, I could mean my not meeting somebody for a long time. Or it could even imply that I have been doing too much coding of late, and the result is that my brain has now stopped "interpreting" instructions, and is now looking for some where else to apply its programming prowess.

Anyways, the fact is that the last few days were too bad. I had a programming assignment to submit in which I was supposed to verify a C-program. [Non-geeks may skip this!]. Actually I had to implement a syntax checker for a compiler, and that believe me can be a tough nut to crack esp. if you are not using any compiler generation tools.

So, as I was saying, last few days were spent mostly in the lab. It is usually the case with me, because I am never able to study in my room. When the deadline approaches, or when the exams come knocking, I usually have to take shelter either in my A.C. lab or the A.C. library [both of which I don't mind ;-)].

Read quite a few insightful blogs on philosophy of life, which got me thinking. First came Anu's post where she quoted Erma Brombeck [have never heard of her] how she would spend her life after she discovered Cancer. Also read Bibin's post also on philosophy. I do agree with you people. Most people never give a thought to how they are living. They carry on an aimless existence, always looking for promotions, ways of making more money, more cars, more bikes, more of everything. Another thing I hate is the "good boy" or "good girl" attitude people have. Trying to be perfect in whatever you do, trying to get marks because all good boys get them, trying to keep your room clean just because 'Cleanliness is Godliness', trying to read only "good" books, well-acclaimed movies [in fact, once I saw a movie by most prolific actor of India, Mithun da, it was hilarious (tho' it was supposed to be serious), n I loved it ;-)]. However, I do feel that most of the time we get so much carried away in all this that we are unable to appreciate the simple pleasures of life. We actually live life like a bot. We also got to realize that many a times we get more of life not by "more" but by "less". By having less worries, by being less regular to class, by doing less work and more play, by keeping your room less clean, by sometimes unleashing the devil within you, and really have a blast!

Sadly for me, I have too more deadlines to meet in the next week, and I can't afford to be all that bad right now :-(

Current Mood: Relaxed
Current Music: Tata Young in Dhoom

Vindication, at last...

Well, I did fret a lot in my last post; thank you guys for bearing with me.

At IIT Kgp, we have two kinds of events in the Social n Cultural Calendar: Open IIT and Inter Halls. Open IITs are the ones which are open to every hall, but since they do not contribute to the General Championship, there is not much competition there. The Inter Halls is where the real action is. For days before the event, halls start preparing for the events, practising again and again, honing their skills, editing their speeches one more time, getting just the right intonation on that word, another chapter of the quiz book, and so on it goes.

Now, the event I had written about earlier was Open IIT English Elocution, in which I recited a piece from the Lord of the Rings; more specifically the part in the Return of the King when Smeagol does that marvelous monologue where he makes an insidious plan to lead Frodo and Sam to the lair of Shelob, the ancient poisonous spider. The piece obviously was a difficult one; and other than a few problems with the mike initially I did it pretty well. And that is why I did not expect to be placed even in the top 15, and what happened after that can be very easily guessed from my last post.

After that, last Saturday we had the Inter Halls. We have a guy in our hall who is absolutely awesome in elocution, but somehow he could not go for the event. After a lot of practicing and selection which went on for almost 3 hours, no less, I was selected to be one of the two to represent the hall.

The only problem was that I was fearing my throat would not hold, because in that piece I had to generate a sum total of 5 distinct voices. Somehow, everything went well; I went on stage and although I was nervous as hell [my legs were shaking while speaking], I could give a decent performance.

...
...
...

AND WE WON THE GOLD!!!

Current Mood: Elated!
Current Music: I am sitting on an IBM thin client, which sadly has no speakers :-(