psychedelic ..

..and then there was a pause .. u choke at the utter impotence of ideas or the lack of it ... n u still gotta write. about 'something' - that never happened - random thoughts - random strokes as u keep penning down a chain of thought - ideas. or the lack of it.

something tells me i should write about avik tossing the cigarette butt off as he pensively gazed out at the incessant rain through the window pane. reluctantly enough, he sipped through the coffee mug in silence, and stared at
himself on the ripples he made on the surface of the coffee. have you read 'identity' ? by kundera ? did you really notice how he kept writing the same chapter - well the same sequence of events seen from two different observer's perspectives ? well if you've read it you know exactly what i feel like NOT writing about. not. at all. why write then ? is it because someone told me u lose shine when u dont write ? well no. i never shone anyways. then why write ? is it because you want someone to hear you. i couldnt care less. you write. cause u gotta write. so. here's to whoever said that the show MUST go on :D - well worth a hearty laughter - to you the oldest haggard of all - 'the' toast.

a sadness grips you .. u realize u r inching back to a non-generative degenerate mode - back from the wilderness - the tamed YOU. there's a struggle. u ask why suddenly ? within yourself. u know not. u suddenly feel like tuning on to the sadness and isolation - 'tristan und isolde' ? wagner ? u feel like picking 'desolation angels'up and try read into the meaning of life or the lack of it. u want to take a closer view of the void. aah quantum dot. heisenberg. uncertainty principle. no. seriously. i gotta recollect it clearly enough. wait a sec. what was it then ? light is not just wave - it could also be considered as particles. and now when you hit subatomic particles with light in order to 'observe' it - what u c is not quite what u want to c. c ? it's perturbed already - it's on a collision course with what we know as light. 'light'. 'light'ness of being. brings you back to kundera. life. they say do come full circle.

a close brush with aila

near itc sonar bangla



towards chingrighaTa



onward strokes ..



near nicco park



sector V

I have been tagged by Chaos to write on all that I had wished to become as I grew up. Here's
to you Chaos - the saga that still
continues.....


In our early childhood days they used to show this star trek in
Doordarshan and I guess that together with glorification of
Rakesh Sharma day and night on television would tell you why
exactly I wanted to be an astronaut. I guess that's about time
when I used to look up at night sky and think I will be there
some day.

On my fifth birthday my father brought me a globe. I was
visibly disappointed as I of course had a mercedes in mind :).
He was a geologist always away to various parts of the country
off to his field work. My earliest recollection of my father
being home is large charts and maps spread around the entire
floor and dad marking something here and there. I guess that's
time when I thought it would not really be that bad an idea
to climb down the stars off to the ground level.

I was seven when I could boast of my first camera [it was a
hotshot mini] - time when I reached to conclusion that of
course I had to be a photographer - a globe trotter and a
photographer. I would not be ashamed to admit that I still
cherish a not-so-hidden ambition of becoming one so to speak
- even when am 30 :)

While all this was happening at homefront - an uncle of mine
was infusing love for numbers through telling me stories about
tower of Brahma and various such puzzles of sorts - it was too
early for me to realize one could also be a mathematician but
it was time when I started befriending numbers and was playing
around with them forming combinations, finding patterns out of
them. I knew vaguely that I will be doing something with them,
but I knew not what :)

Of course, cricket had to be in one's blood, born an Indian.
Sunil Gavaskar was the national hero then. I remember spending
hours practising with a hidden agenda that Rohan [Gavaskar's
son] and I anyways will have to open for India 15 years down
the line. Thankfully better senses prevailed soon enough and I
aborted this idea.


Maa [mom] again was all about music - she tried to get me into
Tabla when I was five that I fled in a matter of 5 months.
Dont know where from I had formed the idea that chasing music
is kinda girlish. I guess my dad being very non-musical had
driven me to that conclusion. Maa came back to try again
when I was around 11 to chase me to a violin which I turned
down with something like 'maa well it's too late for me to
change focus now - you better try with my sister'. I am still
reminded of this incident and I must admit that around my 20
I did regret not becoming a musician - a violinist to be
specific. I dabbled around with many an instrument then on
only not much to audience's 'listening pleasure' am afraid :-).


Having 'not' done so many things I off late have started
seeing in Sidhu-jyatha [Sidhu uncle], a perennial talented-but
-lazy bengali character straight off Satyajit Ray's books,
my alter ego, whose famous quote went like this

'Aami onek kichhu korle onekeri poshaar thakto na - taii aami
kichhu i korini ;)'

['True, I could excel in many a thing that would have seen
many out of business - reason enough for me not doing anything
at all :)']


So long.

a short story of three parallel lines

there were three parallel lines - yes, three were they with two
nincompoops tidly and wiki standing hand in hand gazing blankly at
them. they thought 'chalo lets go skiing' you take the rightmost two
and i take the leftmost two - well that makes us share one ! is that
fine ? they nodded at each other.

they also chose to name the lines family, us and career to avoid
confusion. and off they went skiing around happy with the sail.

family though thought career was too arrogant and started whistling
merrily, bending outwardly to the river - career was silent. he didn't
like his stolid stand being misunderstood but he kept firm on the
ground. this got tidly confused - she was going off wiki ! pheww ..
and it was all happening rather fast - she asked wiki to join hands -
wiki too impressed with the firm stability of the career asked tidly
to let go off the whimsical family instead. 'Why dont you let family
go talk to the river instead ? they chose to do that ? they started
the break in the ice ? come on now and the storm is coming up we gotta
rush ?' - Right then the offended family bended slightly more to the
river. Us ruptured into two halves. And off shot tidly-wiki skiing
happily alone ever after.

to their journey called life ahead ...

amen.

GDP - ok - what next ?

A rising frown on fuelling commodity price, an interesting 'penguin pocket series' read on the way to kgp and a fired up discussion with colleagues over yesterday's luncheon did make feel the need for fill this space up.

hmm - rising price - natural economic cycle that is - election year - the stage is all set - and we never get to miss a cameo when the stage is on fire :) - but but but - the worst hit takes a blow and a bow. are they happy ? apparently not.


John Kenneth Galbraith one of the finer economists of his time brings our attention to a very interesting observation [in 'innocence of fraud'] - here he talks of the several socio economic stands that outlined several eras across different landscapes and how it found a safe cocoon inside capitalism and how gdp emerged victorious as the yardstick of progress/well-being/health of a society - he argues this yardstick to be grossly flawed and never even a near-true reflection of a society. think. He makes two points for this motion

1] gdp a measure of produce and services of industry houses do NOT reflect PEOPLE. *hmm*

2] 500 years down the lane we remember golden eras as the ones that left substantial impact in their academic/civic/artistic excellence ! [so very true] and he sites examples as Newton, Shakespeare, Venice, Art of Florence, all of which seems to share a time and era when the respective civilizations were suffering from patches of low gdp

This read and a recollection of the first time I read of Bhutan being the happiest nation as per UN happiness index [this stats was true in 2004 and I might be slightly dated here] seem so strongly in tune ?!

Flashback - eighties - early nineties - tough time for our dad's gen [home loans thn stood at 15-17% as against 13.75 today under inflation <- no kiddin'] - bt still thr was happiness aplenty in the air - Galbraith - UN - observation - all coming back in harmony - life was a lot less complex [read: demand driven]

Happiness ? Seems to be further from fuel price now - somewhere where people bike along the empty streets and make merry !

disclaimer: Some may think am shunning chasing wealth all the same here - a big NO ! but resigning yourself completely to a blind demand driven chase ? This to me and to above seemed slightly flawed. Means over ends and not ends over means would probably get there - some day.

Signing off,
JCL.

Starting up ? Anyone ?

I found this one from www.startupcomics.com. To be frank I was looking for a more appropriate dilbert to go with this specific write-up, a few minutes of googling up led me to this one and i said ya wht the heck ! am in a hurry and this serves me well anyways. why dilbert.

c the point ? whtever google leads me to first thing, clinches the deal. In this fast paced world anything close will do, if waiting for the best takes forever.

When Knuth wrote his entire third volume of TAOCP, a big fat scary and beautiful book on sorting and searching, seldom did he think tht search is going to such a big apple-pie for everyone. I myself headed straight for a remote school in 'somewhere in Alaska' based on an observation that Anurag Dod [guruji.com] and Robin Li [baidu.com] has managed to work wonders in search domain in India and China after their training from this school - and i was not disappointed. First week into it, i knew the backbone of google story which at that point gave me an instant kick. That and a few stints here and there with some great startups from India [lookup Minekey and the supersmart team] made me realize yes it probably is time.

It seems that everyone today aided with excellent opensource from Apache, is after their own startup [i myself been considering one for sometime now] - but wait, let's see what some of the recent successful ventures been upto by taking four aspects into account. Here is the countdown.

[4] user interface: some guys work wonders in capturing user into their look n feel [look at beta.searchme.com ; apple is an excellent example again; google the cleanest of them all, null [i am taking the authors license to define this null later]]

3] content: whats beneath the surface is the real thing my dear Watson, in case u were ever wondering. While a clumsy ui can repell users like a skunk, only polish and no value, does the same [i reduce the set now to apple, google, null] - c ? searchme is gone. But am sure they will pass the beta and bring home the real horse. It was for the same reason [speed, accuracy tradeoff] I shifted to kayak.com from expedia, that I shifted from altavista to google.

[2] value: this been the most disturbing aspect of the recent startups I see in India. To me it looks a valid question to ask from a customer's viewpoint ['is X.com a part of my life that I cannot do without ?'] before I design this X.com from the owner's viewpoint. What I see in many a startup is what i would say the mall-effect. A new one comes up with better look n feel, users dump the older one and hops on to the next. This very model and our jumpy attittude makes business models transient.

[google adds value and i cannot do without it once i have used it, i probably can do without my macbook [like right now am on my dell] but that too is a close one in convincing me of its merit]

[1] cover: Kleinrock back in late 1960's sitting in a remote lab was frantically trying to make two computers talk to each other. Think of it again. Those machines of size of a room, with no i/p device even, where u fed ur pgm via a punchcard n used to chk on the o/p a few days later. Thr ! those times. He was trying to make two of 'em talk to each other. And well he did manage to achieve his goal.

Today 40 years down the line, when am writing this specific blog on 'internet' it's because of him. Let's wait for yet another null then that brings home something of this magnitude.

Am planning more of a technical saga on 'em - will start a new blog up on it ;) soon. Stay tuned !

JCL.

Reality check ...

My short and sweet tenure at Kharagpur after almost two years of UK and another two in US has been that of an eye-opener - coming down to ground reality - for those [including myself] who had always thought ankle-deep waterlogged city is next to God's curse, come see entire south bengal today - submerged beneath what is still not declared a 'flood' :)

My journey today started at 7.30 from Kolkata and soon after we left Santragachhi it was all the same story till Kgp. What bothered me more is people seemed acquainted with living on the edge and have taken it for granted. They know that each monsoon is probably going to bring home a tide, and they will flow with it. They probably even don't know that there is a 'flood' in someone's dictionary. In their own way I saw many of them netting fish that came home with this tide. With this positive attittude [probably stemmed from a mix of ignorance and helplessness] and a smiling face they kept on fishing for years. And would probably dwell another century in their silence.