I would have taken great offence if I had been informed, when I was in school, that the history I was being taught then was sugar-coated to the extent of killing a diabetic patient. While skipping irrelevant details is acceptable and, in certain cases, required, altering history to the point of causing delusion is both disgusting and shameful.

As an example, we all know the tragedy of Jalianwala Bagh by heart, and have grown up to hate Dyer. However, most high-school history books will leave out the details of the Siege Of Cawnpore and more importantly, the heinous Bibighar Massacre. Few high-school history books mention that the street in Amritsar where Indians were supposed to crawl on their bellies was the same one where some Indians had, earlier, beaten an European lady to death after pulling her off her cycle. And she was not the only European beaten to death. What Dyer did was immoral, cowardly and wrong – Churchill would try his level best to ensure that Dyer was punished some time later. However, he was born and raised in India and had seen the mutiny of 1857; it is not very difficult to understand why he assumed the Indian mob which had already killed a few Europeans would soon exponentiate to another mass-murder of his own countrymen.

No one talks about Gandhi’s racist views in South Africa. No one talks about how Gandhi never wanted to erase the race line, but simply wanted “British Indians” to be moved its other side – the side with the educated English as opposed to the one with the “native blacks”. No one talks about how, in South Africa, Satyagraha failed, movement after movement. Indian biographers, it seems, have a habit of omitting things that shed a dark light on our beloved Bapu. What they don’t understand is that these real details only make the father of our nation easier to follow, they only help us appreciate how everything is not black and white and teach us that no mistake is incorrigible.

Perhaps this is why we’re so backward. Perhaps this is why India fails to make progress. We are a blind, deluded, superstitious lot who fail to see what is apparent and believe only what is convenient. Maybe this will change someday, a day I will hopefully live to see.

I’ve always found internet slang irritating. I don’t see how dropping vowels from words and punctuating incorrectly is “cool” – it seems to indicate the lack of a proper primary education than anything else.

Some basic abbreviations are understandable on IRC and general chat. Using it on emails and even Facebook, however, is inexcusable. You shaved off 1.33 seconds at the expense of sounding brain-damaged. Yay!

The weirdest thing about internet slang is that it is not always about saving time, some people will spell my as mah; they add an extra letter to make sure they spell incorrectly. If there is a way to be more wannabe, I don’t know what it is.

You may dismiss this as a passing fad, but I think the roots lie deeper. A person sloppy on the keyboard is more likely to be sloppy in other spheres of his or her life as well. I judge people by the way they type – you should too.

Why do we see what we see? It is clear that what we perceive is not the truth – the world is certainly not contained in three dimensions and the book you think is there is not really there. Our perception and our intuition is oriented in a certain way, diverging from the truth. We cannot, for instance, intuitively grasp the slowing down of time when moving very fast (though we can do the math) like we can judge the width of a box or how far we can jump.

I think this has to do the way we evolved. Our ancestors were not required to do complex mathematics in their head in order to survive – understanding the wave nature of particles was obviously not as important as figuring the path to the nearest stream. We evolved the way we needed to evolve. Our perception and our intuition evolved in a way so we could make more practical sense of the universe. We evolved to understand classical mechanics, because that was what nature decreed.

Perhaps, someday, when we take up space travel seriously (though I’m not sure if that day would come, and our race won’t perish long before) we’ll need to evolve such counter-intuitive intuitions to continue to survive. All of us would be Einsteins then, and we’ll find the curvature of space-time as natural as a ball bouncing off a wall.

I’ve heard far too many people blame bad luck for everything that went wrong. While the world around us does have a certain inherent randomness, most people take it too far. Getting wet en-route to an interview is bad luck. So is getting robbed in a bank. Perpetual bad (or good) luck, however, is a mathematical impossibility.

A major mishap is generally the combination of multiple factors and it is unlikely that luck screwed you in all of them. On a similar vein, concluding that a person is lucky because he or she is successful is just as unfair as it is incorrect. No, Tom was not lucky that he got the promotion, he got it because he worked harder and (possibly) is more competent.

Instead of reciting “Shit! Bad Luck” when something goes wrong, it is better to spend that time figuring what went wrong (and, also, why). Accepting one’s incompetence (as opposed to hiding it) is the first step towards self improvement.

My fictitious readers must have surely noticed that I have, recently, with a fresh passion and renewed vigour, re-started blogging. I don’t mean this to be a haphazard demonstration of my fickle persona, but a general trend, my action plan to keep up the tempo being the following:

• I shall keep technical posts to a minimum

  Since it is very unlikely that I shall stumble upon a new command line option to aptitude that the world does not know about or prove P=NP in my leisure time, it is better I contain my technical and academic incompetence within myself. I do plan to indulge occasionally though, perhaps when high I’m on Caffeine.

• I shall keep my posts short and sweet

  No point in saying in two words what can be said in one. Saves my time as well as the (as yet fictitious) readers’.

• I shall blog impulsively

  For a while I was under the impression that stewing my posts in my head before actually posting them was a good idea. It seems, however, that the cook inside my head does not have a good sense of taste and often overcooks. On every occasion I’ve spent more than a certain amount of time on a single post, I have ended up not posting it. These days, I’ve learned to (partially) remedy this by blogging impulsively and rapidly, which is what I plan to continue doing.

To me, blogging is like writing letters to myself. It sometimes is the best way to distill your thoughts and refine your intellect. There is also a slight possibility of it helping you get laid.

One of the recent books I read is ‘The Selfish Gene’ by Richard Dawkins. It has changed the way I think and, in some cases, the way I act.

I don’t intend to provide a review here, especially because Richard Dawkins does such a good job of not digressing, making it virtually impossible condense his ideas further. While I will suggest you go ahead and read his book yourself, a word of caution for the intelligent seems necessary.

It is not difficult to understand the ideas Dawkins has expressed in his book, both due to the lack of boring technical details and his brilliant writing style. However, it does take a minimum amount of intelligence to comprehend their impact. In his book Dawkins attacks our fundamental philosophical question – ‘Why are we here? What is our purpose?’. The answer, as Dawkins proceeds to prove with rigour, seems to be far more meaningless and cynical than most of use would like it to be. In a stroke of brilliance and a flash of genius, Dawkins reduces all our glory, all our achievements and all our pride to the survival struggle of molecules we cannot even see.

Of course, he never says so directly. In fact, he almost goes out of his way to show that it is the other way around – that the feeble acts of altruism our race sometimes attempts to partake implies that there still is hope.

In a way, the idea is like global warming – while everyone knows what it is only a handful realize its true nature, how it will ultimately ensure our grandchildren die a slow painful death. Not many people are intelligent enough to be able to conclude how meaningless our existence is. Those select few better have the emotional strength to absorb the shock of the same.

For the past few week, I’ve been learning LISP on weekends, this being a part of my new ‘Two programming languages a year’ resolution (I plan to learn Haskell later this year and FORTH and Clojure next year). While I was mostly inspired by Paul Graham (if you don’t know who he is, you should probably jump off a roof), I also wanted to have a look at what has kept LISP alive for sixty years. I was not disappointed.

The coolest thing about LISP is the way you express your program as a tree. While it initially feels a little counter-intuitive, this counter-intuition is the same one one feels when switching to Linux from Windows – “Where is my C:\ drive? Where is my start menu?”. As you write more code, it becomes difficult not not to think this way.

While most people will disagree with the statement above and talk about how the macro system is really the coolest feature of LISP, I think S-expressions naturally lead to the defmacro construct. Such a construct will not have been possible in languages like C and Java, simply because the programmer does not have any access to the underlying representation.

Currently I’m following this fantastic book called ‘Practical Common LISP’ and working on a Limp / SBCL stack. Once I’m done with ‘Practical Common LISP’ I’ll move on to ‘On LISP’ by Paul Graham.

There are two things that make me puke: bad whiskey and people who pretend to care.

I recently bought an iPod Classic, the 160 GiB edition. I could have used that money, the money which I used to buy something completely non-essential, to fund the education for an underprivileged kid for a year. I could have used it to save the lives of a hundred toddlers in Sudan who are now, as I write, starving to death. I could’ve used the money to transform the life of kid who was born blind. However, I did not; because I do not care.

People spend too much of their time talking and too less of their time doing. The worst part about this is that it allows some sort of partial self-gratification, leading to even more talking and even less doing. “I talked about how I sympathize, and hence I must’ve helped”, may not the be the immediate conscious thought (at least not for non-politicians), but does seem to the more basic sub-conscious one.

If you can sip coffee in Barista knowing that, as you do so, an eight year old boys begs at a traffic signal and a thirteen year old girl enters prostitution, you cannot possibly care.

We are born selfish, evolution ensures that (I will not delve into further details, please refer to the excellent book “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins). Selfishness is a fundamental aspect of our psyche, of all our thoughts, of all our actions which shape the world around us – true altruism does not (or, rather, cannot) exist. It is okay not to care – our genes will not let us, eventually. What is not okay is to pretend that you do, because that makes me puke.

Some time back I decided to take out time to read things beyond technical manuals and ‘Hacker News’. While I started out with rather light material like ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ (Khaled Hosseini), ‘The Selfish Gene’ (Richard Dawkins) and ‘The Guide’ (R. K. Laxman) I’ve recently decided switch to some heavier material, both because I believe they will help me improve my mental tenacity and would also ultimately sharpen my intellect.

Keeping to that viewpoint, I took to reading ‘The Odyssey’ (Homer) and, that done, moved on to ‘Ulysses’ (James Joyce), which I’ve just started. I also plan to read ‘The Iliad’ (Homer) soon enough. I’ve ordered a bunch of books from FlipKart, using the money I received from GSoC:

1. “Gandhi And Churchill: The Rivalry That Destroyed An Empire And Forged Our Age” (Arthur Herman)
2. “The Blind Watchmaker” (Richard Dawkins)
3. “Homer” (Richard Rutherford)
4. “The New Life Of Dante Alighieri” (Dante Alighieri)
5. “The Education Of Henry Adams” (Henry Adams)
6. “Sigmund Freud” (Richard Wollheim)
7. “The Picture Of Dorian Gray And Other Writings” (Oscar Wilde)
8. “Economics (A New Introduction)” (Hugh Stretton)
9. “Mein Kampf” (Adolf Hitler)

These, along with “Ulysses” should keep me occupied for some time. :)

I’ve been watching a few movies over this summer, and have noticed that good movies fall into one of the two categories – the ones which make you think and the ones which entertain you.

There are plenty of great movies which entertain you – ‘The Godfather’ (both I and II) and ‘The Dark Knight’ come to mind. Only few movies, however, set you thinking. Such movies also tend to be more difficult to discover since they generally are not ‘blockbusters’.

Here is a list of movies which set me thinking, in no particular order.

Ladri Di Biciclette – A beautiful Italian movie from the 1940s, straight from the neorealist movement.

Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain – Recent French movie. Won an oscar.

Before Sunset – Two actors. No props. No plot. See ‘Before Sunrise’ first.

Pulp Fiction – Kick-ass non-linear storytelling. Love how the beginning and the ending of the movie really fits-in somewhere in the middle of the normal chronological ordering of the plot.

American Beauty – Little can be said of a movie which has five ‘official’ interpretations. Incredible cinematography.

Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi – Undiscovered masterpiece. Nothing more, nothing less.

Casablanca – Old Black/White movie. Half the hackneyed shit you see in Hollywood / Bollywood these days is lifted off this movie.