Link of the Day !

May be you know about it by now, but I recently discovered an extremely innovative comic strip called xcfd, and found it super funny. It makes jokes about mathematics, programming, and space/time, and of course human species - both flavors. I particularly find this strip very optimistic.

Link of the Day !

Such posts are rare (link via). Sincere expressions like "I like to keep them [your photos] with me as symbols of beauty" are even rarer. The exceeding beauty of this love letter makes us wonder, is it real !

Read this other exceptional post by him, where father gets seduced by him and "offers" his daughter to him, and in between he throws his most-modern ideas on Feminism.

Manchi Pani Chesaav, Raju gaaro !

Simpli-fly !

I had a privilege to board an Air Deccan flight after a gap of 2.5 year. It has changed a lot. The air plane has got bigger and things like that. This time it started only 30 minutes late, practically on time and all the passengers looked happy and rushed to the plane to catch hold of their seats in the free seating arrangement, which near matched the rail-coach frenzy. The flight from Hyderabad to Ahmedabad ascended the air taking a mini India with it.

My interaction with co-passengers started in the boarding pass line itself where people with the printouts are shouting at Air Deccan staff for no apparent reason, its one of the ways to fight the heat outside and forget family tensions. Some young guys even chatted with the young girl at the Air Deccan counter, inquired about her working conditions and asked her to take a better job and gave some tips too. It was like flirting but not as effective. She smiled and smiled like a true girl. As usual, middle aged men cribbed how precious their time is and they have connecting flights, and older persons talked about how flights used to on time at their times and the whole bit about privatization, other have nothing to talk about so they talked about hot weather and how this time is even worse than last year and AC sales have gone up, they discussed more such unimportant things. The young ones were crying as usual. Its a good omen for flights because children sleep after a good cry. Some mother even slapped their children to make them sleep later but such practice are rapidly going extinct with the advent of over-protective super-moms.

The person behind me in the line was happy to the core, especially when he saw my print out and saw I bought the ticket for 2K+, he showed me his, it was a Rs 500 ticket. He was as happy as a lottery winner. Later I realized that he booked the ticket early this year and he is not alone but has a whole marriage party with him. It seemed that they fixed the marriage date depending on the tickets availability. Truly Indian. But the real fun was still to come. As our flight moved above clouds and people loosened their seat belts, party time began.

Flamboyant gujjus were every where. All relations and all friends. Pure delight and full fun. I was literally shocked when I saw three girls moving all over the plane with handycam photographing each passenger and even clouds outside, I even thought of taking out my SLR and flaunt, such was the passion on plane. The good smell of eatables and sound of munching was everywhere. Since Air Deccan doesn't offer anything except the good flying experience, so they have come loaded with all sorts of namkeens and beverages. They sang and if space were sufficient, no one in the world would have stopped them from dancing. Only kids danced in the narrow pathways. I was pleasantly surprised how the whole plane was hijacked with love and affection, song and dance.

Next was thing that my friend told me long time back and I never believed it. Where there are gujjus, there is antakshari. The whole aircraft was soon divided into two groups and antakshari started. As a customary for warm up, they did the 'Maine Pyar Kiya' version in chorus first. Its a satisfying experience to hear songs from the long forgotten films like 'Police Mujrim' and 'Dulha Dulhan', also they sang some of favorites. When it was announced that we are moving through the turbulent weather, they sang situational songs. The guy who is going to marry, was on the plane, his name was Mayur and girl's name was Mansi because they were replacing the original names in the songs with Mansi and Mayur. It bought back the memories of buses with stickers 'Mayur weds Mansi' or 'Mansi weds Mayur', from bus to airplane, 'Baaraat' is the same fun. They sounded like professional, singing full songs with dialogues in between (do you remember the dialogues from 'Ijazzat', they did, all of them). Air hostess were mesmerized and didn't even attempt to interrupt. They just stood near the toilets and heard the concert. Hope Bharjatiyas would have seen their impact on society and probably conceived a film on marriage in air, near god and heaven and then we can get such out-of-world experience more often, films mirroring life and vice versa.

With all this going on, I tried to read Kafka to keep the air-plane on balance (or balance on air-plane). I usually carry Kafka on flights, to fight the fear but this time there was no need of Kafka. The guy next to me didn't like the songs nor the Kafka. He cribbed and tried to sleep. Later he even asked the flight attendant that where can he fill the feedback form. God knows what he will complain - ban the families on board. As for me, I really loved the experience. These one hour and forty minutes were the best one can do to fight the altitude nausea and the relative disorders, its a therapy like a Bollywood movie.

A Childhood Tale

I read a story when I was kid, and I think everybody had because even if it is not read, it just get passed onto generations like the evolutionary gene, you learn so many thing like that, which are not said or explained, they are just put in air. The story was about a young, (of course beautiful) princess, who, for some strange reason had forgotten to laugh or she is just suffering from some teenage syndrome, that Freud can explain in details, given the relevant data and a scope of extrapolation. The important point is that it is not good for a princess to be sad, because she is princess and its its bad to have a sad face. For all of us, face is nothing without a smile and you can't potentially smile with heads or legs, though some poets have tried to attribute smile to eyes with partial success, but for most of the time and for all practical purposes, it is attributed to lips and some area around it. So the little princess was not using her lips for what they are made for, and it is really pissing off the onlookers, they want to see her happy, desperately.

The princess too sensed it but was not responding because this is what you do, when you are a princess, try to be indifferent, and if you fail, just show that you are. So with the king presiding, all of the friends and officials (who are by default friends) gathered, to picture this you can imagine it as a corporate meeting with well defined but never explicitly exposed hierarchical relationships and people discussing a trivial matter with unwarranted importance. When I was a kid I imagined it as a big courtroom with silver chandeliers and all of the friends in their royal robes looking really royal and also worried whether the meeting will come up any good solution and also wondered what would it be. The kids who read the pictorial version of this story were refused of that imagination but those kids, now young professionals working here or there, will rightly argue that even my imagination would have come from some other pictorial book, but I will say, I was free to choose.

But now, with all the commonly and worldly wisdom that I have gained, I picture it less dramatically and also don't worry whether or not the solution will solve the problem but I now have a fear what the solution will be, will they assign the task to a over-ambitious Mantri who will catch someone and probably assign him the task to make princess smile in 5 days, or if he is benevolent, one week or so and that will make both, the life of that man and the princess miserable, and probably by the end of it man will also forget how to smile, although that will give him relevant and worldly experience which he can use in his other professional pursuits and if he is of any artistic type mortal, he may even write poems about the pain of smile, at least he has suffered it. All in all a classic lose-lose situation will emerge and probably in the end princess will smile with sick desperation and the Mantri will get promoted to a slightly higher level and friends will definitely be happy about the princess newly-found smile.

In the childhood story, they came up with a very elegant solution, which I now consider really sensible on the part of the creator of the story, they actually announced in the whole kingdom that who-so-ever will make the princess laugh will get half of the kingdom ( the king really loves his daughter because money counts) and will marry the daughter (now the we can doubt king's intentions). The last part of the solution has greater benefits and repercussions, for the romantic kind of readers, it may be said that the one, who can make the princess laugh will always keep her happy forever, for the more enterprising readers, it looks like the king had a clue that clowns can never be good administrators and he can get his half-kingdom back easily, for the feminists activists, if we remove the chance of a girl marrying a girl then this competition will turn out to be guys-only and it also points to an arguable fact that girls can not make you laugh, which might be right, but I am unable to comment because of lack of any solid experience but I still think they are sort of funny, for the more fatherly readers, it removes one from the tension of marrying their daughter, the sooner the better, the tension should go. Anyway, the solution is elegant at least in one way, its based on free-will, no one is forced except for their hunger for money or their libido, which to a certain extent sounds fine, at least in a childhood tale.

Also from the perspective of a storyteller and entertainer, its a dream come true, you have a entire kingdom of strange characters to choose from and made them do hilarious stuff, which might not make the princess happy but can make the readers laugh. When I read that during my early years, I really found the same pleasure that the kids (also grown ups who are into kid stuff) of this generation find in their potters and harries. So now in the kingdom, full fanfare was going on. People who wanted to showcase their talents came from all the parts, even though they knew that it is quite a high dream to make a princess happy but they can go and see the extravaganza and be part of it and probably be happy for themselves. While all this reality show went on, suitors came with huge smile and confidence and left with sullen faces.

After few days of this effort to challenge the sadness of princess, this sadness spread all over the kingdom. During childhood I wondered why a princess was sad, of course she is a princess and everybody want to be so, then I thought it to be a story trick, I thought that in real life princess can not be sad but if the princess in the story is not happy, how the story will progress. Now I think how can a sad princess ( for that matter any person) be made happy by people jumping in front of her and saying 'Be happy', for what I can imagine it would make her irritated and she will try to cover that irritation with a plain face and since a plain face doesn't have any smile, she will again be considered sad. Now readers can wonder why she didn't fake a laugh just to get rid of the buggers but you should understand that there is a thing called ego and we should respect our ego, otherwise who we are, at least a princess should maintain some decent levels of ego.

Now that the fun fare has ended and people have started thinking that they are done enough for the sad girl and they have other works too, and life is not making everybody happy and couple of more convincing things like that, they stopped caring. Once in a while princess girl friends will make sad faces to pretend to be a princess and a word flew that princesses are usually sad. By this time princess is also getting bored by her sad face and the lack of attention, and she got into some serious thinking to get her smile back.

Now as any serious story reader and any famous story teller know, there is no story without a happy ending and all the authors and readers don't love Kafka that much. So here it goes, at the same time when our would-be happy princess decided to get her smile back and decided to brush her teeth properly before she do it, almost at the same time a clownesque young boy thought he should also try his luck and put a late entry into the reality show. These type of chances are rampant in our daily lives, but we accuse the poor story tellers for fabricating them. How many of you have met a pretty girl on flight? all...see... As they say it is important to be at the right time at the right place with the right person or may be vice versa. So at the sunrise, after brushing her teeth properly, she came to balcony to see the sunrise and wow, here she sees a man in a clown dress jumping like pig, not with the faintest thought that the upcoming smile will cost her a life long porky feeling, she stretched her facial muscles and a just-average smile came up, which made the guy jump more vigorously, and to make the coincidence sure and proper, a gardener saw all this which he proudly termed as, 'Love at first sight', and the news of princess laughing and getting married to a clown spread, to borrow an overused expression, like a jungle fire.

A smile costed her a fortune. Although with hardcore royal grooming, the pig with turn to a virile stallion but even then. As a child my heart throbbed in the final sequence, and to picture the pearly smile of princess was very satisfying. Now I think why this fairy tale is told to kids, I seriously think it may harm the innocence of young girls and they can even get struck by sadness, which, as I said earlier, Freud only can explain. Like this the story ends, on a seemingly happy note, but I think we should ask the princess first, on an average a princess do get a smart guy with blue eyes or may be pink horse in the end, sometime even animals turn to handsome and rich princes but even though our princess was the princess of the fairy tale she got just a smiling moment and that too resulted in serious after effects but as always let us assume for now that she lived happily ever after.

I'm such a loser

I started with some affection for self-help because this shit is so easy to fall for. But now I abhor it in totality simply because it is disgusting.

One recent incident bought so many things to forefront. Some of my office colleagues were listening to an audio in full volume by one of the most irritating self-help gurus His-Highness-do-things-my-way-Shiv-guruji-Khera. When I heard it, I rushed to the accident place for rescue and told that its all stupidity. They are all so involved in the shit that they took my running for my want to listen to that crap.

They started it from beginning. God proclaimed things which the non-god should be doing. Non-God are losers by default, not that I mind being a loser but how is guruji so sure of that. And above all God had recipes for all the worldly problem faced by the non-gods. My colleague argued whats wrong if we follow the guruji's experimented formula, gain from it and be a Winner. The so-called experimented recipes include things like 'Do it anyway' as if its as exciting and inviting as ridiculing Shiv Khera. Now the world seemed to be divided in two sections Winners and losers. Winners are those who follow guruji and 'do it anyway' and Losers are those who think and 'do it their way'. I felt, I'm such a loser.

One of the many quotable quotes from Guruji's speech. "Losers don't want to get up in the morning and they don't, Winners also don't want to get up in the morning, but they do it ANYWAY".

Amusement in crap

We adapt with our surroundings and if our surroundings are crap we adjust to that crap, knowingly or otherwise. One of the easiest way to adjust with crap is to take amusement in crap.

Take for an example how the sensible lot used to crib when they first heard or saw remixes, now some of them find amusement in them. From 'amusement' here, I mean a pleasure/excitement which is not generated out of love or respect or curiosity but by sheer disrespect. The pleasure thus gained is of high order and quality.

One more example which comes to my mind is watching the serial 'Alif Laila'. This is one of the crappest serial ever made, even the producer/director knew that its crap.But it provided quality entertainment mainly because it was not meant to laugh on. During Doordarshan days, this type of crap was difficult to find only because the airing time was small. Today there is no dearth to it...

Being part of one of the most uneventful professions, I am always on a look to find amusement in the crap around me. I can recall taking amusement in group mails, management crap and design documents to name a few. There are some instances where this crap and the amusement, relieved me from work stress.

To take amusement in crap helps reducing in the cribbing attitude towards that crap. I donot know if it is Ok not to crib, but I prefer amusement to cribbing. Some ppl can argue that taking amusement from it like patronizing crap or taking it easy. They have a point here but I have noticed over time that crap is not worth taking seriously and it generates more crap in return.

There is a sort of sadistic pleasure and also require some critical amount of self-esteem to indulge in this pleasure. Morally, it may not be considered the right thing to do, but again who is here to define our moral standards. Show the morality bibles to those who make crappy movies, serials and self-help.

The art of Procrastination

Believe it or not, Procrastination is an art. Although being a very fast learner, I took relatively lesser time to master it, you may take some time...:))
Previously I used to worry about things to be done, I still worry about them... also I used to feel guilty about the things that I have not done, the guilt is still there... let me make this clear that this art is not going to help on those fronts...A master of procrastination will not care about worry and guilt, he will simply procrastinate to care about them, till they die their natural death...
Let us take a simple example to explain it. 3 guys working on a project in final semester. Guy A at his room, starts off my making his mind to work. But before starting he wants to relax(he is knowing that it will go for long, its already 10:30 pm) with his favorite music( to listen) and favorite magazine(to see). In this relaxing mode Guy B entered the room with urgency to work on the project, seeing Guy A in a relaxing mode, first he vent off his anger on him by giving the bad shape of the project work... Now the atmosphere is tense and they are both hungry (its 11:15 at night, they need to go and fetch something before the shops closes)... they both start off to eat something and discuss their project over tea as they both have a big idea of what needs to be done, make very stringent dead lines and make promises in mind to deliver... its 12:30 now and the third Guy (Guy C) is still not there. They both start to discuss why they have taken such a stupid guy with them, who has no sense of himself, doesn't work and never motivates... good and coherent discussion goes on... now its 1:15 at night and they both make their mind to start the work seriously... Guy C enters the room, and shows his dissatisfaction over life in general. and all three discuss this common topic about life.. its now 2:30 am, time for Guy A to sleep and since they need to work together its all deferred till tomorrow.
There are some of the finer points to the story. first is procrastination comes by induction. And ppl in group try to procrastinate more easily and coherently. secondly, there is an inherent urge to procrastinate and fortunately ( or unfortunately), as you start to learn this art there is an initial thrust and as you progress things become easier and easier (some of us will not even figure out the process which made us the master in this area) and thirdly the worry and guilt part are becoming lesser and lesser with time ( i.e. till the third guy arrives and because there is always a tomorrow)...
Now a question for those all who read this, Who of the three Guys is the best procrastinator ( please give your reasons to it and you can make reasonable assumptions)...