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.

This is something I realized tonight – I’m not a geek.

I love code, not computers.

Geeks package software for GNU/Linux distributions. Geeks have all the possible command-line arguments to du on their finger-tips. Geeks can upload all the files currently open by the process hogging up all your RAM to an FTP server in one line of bash.

Geeks love computers. I don’t.

Till a few hours ago I was under the impression that the world was divided into three kinds of people. The first kind consisted of dumb people who could sit through anything on television. The second kind consisted of slightly less dumb people who liked F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and not Seinfeld. The third consisted of the kind who knew what sort of rubbish F.R.I.E.N.D.S. was (that does not imply they hated it though …) and loved Seinfeld. The verifiable evidence I had for this hypothesis was the fact that I was yet to meet someone intelligent who had watched Seinfeld and did not love it. This was, however, applicable till only a few hours ago. One of the few genuine people I know, Ramkumar (http://artagnon.com), announced that he’s seen a few episodes and that he liked none.

The reason why people like F.R.I.E.N.D.S. is the fact the everyone finds a little bit of themselves in the cast. Everyone in the audience is a linear combination of all the characters on the show and every character on the show is a linear combination of everyone watching it (of course one follows from the other). The happy are the ones who’ve realized this subconsciously. But once you start thinking on these lines with conscious effort, the show falls apart and becomes a soap opera with better lines and a huge budget. Another reason might be the fact that the plot is determined a group of writers. The individuality is lost.

The only reason that can explain someone with any brains not liking Seinfeld (other than the possibility that they’re deluded about the size of their brains) is the fact that they were expecting something else. Face it – no matter how aged, scotch is never sweet. Seinfeld parodies life and to understand Seinfeld, one must understand life. You are not supposed to identify yourself with the characters, you are not supposed to place yourself at their level. Seinfeld revolves around Nihilism – no episode of Seinfeld makes a pointsimply because nothing does. You are supposed to look at the show from the perspective of a person who looks at the world as a zoo (which it really is) and human beings as little more than meaningless self-sustaining chemical reactions (which we really are).

Here is a small extract from one of the Seinfeld episodes (courtesy http://seinfeldscripts.com).

(Newman, with the woman he wished for, are riding in his car. He stops at a stop light - right next to Kramer)

NEWMAN: (To his new girlfriend) You see, my dear, all certified mail is registered, but registered mail is not necessarily certified.

WOMAN; I could listed to you talk about mail all day.

NEWMAN: Anything you wish.. I'll tell you a little secret about zip codes: They're meaningless! (Laughs evilly, driving away)

Compare this to all the conversations you’ve had with your better half. How are they fundamentally different?

I have, after considerable thought, discovered that you can always whip up three reasons for whatever proposition you wish to prove or support. There are three (surprise) reasons why I think so:

1. Three is not too big Three reasons is a small enough number of reasons to come up with on the spot.
2. Three is not too small In general, providing three reasons for a proposition is the minimum amount of work you need to do to convince or brainwash the other party in context.
3. You (generally) need to make only one fake reason You will notice that, generally speaking, you will have to make only one fake or made up reason (like this one) to complete your set of three reasons. Easy enough to get away with.

This post is admittedly a little (okay, a lot) late but I had to put it up nevertheless. This December three of my friends, Pratyush (Pondy, PP), Ashutosh and Anurag (Annu, Juice) went to Goa for about seven days.  Anurag had a neat Club Mahindra thing so we got free 5 star accommodation. One always learns from experience and so for people who plan to go to Goa in the near future, here are a list of pointers.

1. If you have a girlfriend, try to get her to come. No kidding, there are plenty of things for couples to do in Goa (other than the obvious) and you are sure to have a good time.
2. Rent bikes on the first day. There are people in Goa who will rent you bikes (geared or non-geared vehicles at your choice) at affordable rates. We rented two Honda Dios from a guy named Steve for 300 INR a day. Don’t  underestimate the kind of fun you will have just riding around drunk on empty roads, especially if you are an all guys group (like us).
3. Ethanol. Booze is cheap in Goa but make sure you don’t end up drinking Kingfisher all day – try native stuff as much as you can. Almost every beach in Goa has a bar and there is really nothing like having a Goan sunset sitting on a beach in Goa during sunset. Here are two specific places you might want to check out.
   1. Tito’s – Due to certain circumstances we could not check this one out but everyone we know who’ve been to Goa swear by Tito’s. You might want to pay them a visit
   2. Micky’s – One of the smaller places where you can kick back and enjoy. These guys have wonderful live music and an awesome crowd. While I found the waiters a bit too busy, you’ll, in general, be enjoying yourself too much to notice.
4. Residence. We spent our first night in an awesome place called the Varca Beach Resort. Though we did not shell out a penny, rates generally range about 35k INR a night at around the time we stayed there. Needless to say the place was amazing, with swimming pools all over and a proper spa + gym. For the other six days we were put up in the Jasmine resort, which, too was great. I found it slightly dull but I guess I was spoilt by Varca.
5. Buying Stuff. Shopping may be a concern if you have your better half with you, which was not the case with us. I did, however, drop down to Newtons and pick up a bottle of El Charrow Tequila, a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label, a can of Twinings coffee and a bag of Nilgiri Tea. As mentioned, booze is cheap in Goa and one must make the most of it.
6. Water Sports Frankly, this was a little disappointing; not as exciting as one would imagine.

I know that this is nothing new, but I too have begun tweeting from the shell. I use a bash script which POSTs the required data to the Twitter servers. It also uses ispell to run a quick spell-check before POSTing. See the code here.

After hours of reviewing and proofreading here is the first usable version of my CV. I know it is not perfect. It never will be. And I’ll probably change it.

For quite some time I have been working on a simulator which we (me with the other awesome folks from http://robotix.in) would use to evaluate the submissions for our XAnts problem statement. I initially implemented the entire thing in pure Java (I know … What was I thinking?) but in the past few days have re-implemented a lot of it in C. The code I’ve written so far is up on github on my fresh new account.

A lot of my coding style has been influenced by what I have seen of the Linux kernel. The project is currently in its infancy and has absolutely no documentation (yet). I intend to release the first few versions that solely run on *NIX and will slowly port the entire thing to Windows as well. That should only involve re-writing some socket code.