Of late, my movie intake has gone done quite low along with the food. The latter I was sick of and the former, I am yet to find a reason other than telling that I am trying pretty hard to get myself to work (failing miserably though!). So, it might seem that I am passing my time in compelling myself to get to work, well, I am doing rather useful work like doing assignments and sitting up 24 hours for a Numerical methods exam and the latest being giving an exam in Solid State Physics exam for 6 hours with a lunch break in between. Trust me, to do all this you need to build a lot of patience, and that’s what the rest of time I am meditating upon. This I do by sitting and staring at the same page of the book for 2 hours, inclusive of a coffee break.

And because of all the afore mentioned causes, my hard drive has quite a few movies left unwatched which include Umberto D, The Spy who came in from the Cold, Zulu, Point Blank, etc. and quite a few books too. Actually, all the books that I bought this semester are pending which would amount to nearly 7, considering my estimates are decent.

With all this hectic schedule and more unofficially official work, I am looking forward to the next weekend when I will be free for the next two months from my long-continuing struggle with course work.

There was at least one good news for this semester and that is I will finally be shifting from Wadala … no more travelling everyday …

It feels like ten years since i have joined here. And ten years is a long time. Indeed, i feel i am finally getting into the groove of sending things into the log books quite effectively which are looked into when the moment arrives(usually a few hours before any submission). And above all this, i have reached my all-time high when it comes to the concept of exams … i am giving up even before starting

i guess i will effectively be institutionalized soon. i can feel that it has begun as i have stopped caring about the capitalization(?) of  ”i”.

But, what I effectively need is food for my body .. lacking chocolate, lacking decent cheese, and above  all lacking home-food for over 5 months. Here, we are over-fed with food for the soul(mind?), that it  gets quite repugnant after a while … well, they do expect us to finish nearly 8-9 books in 4 months, and guess what’s my count ! ?… (i managed more than one at least )

Apart from this … i seriuosly don’t get the point of Nvidia Tesla .. i think i would prefer to buy GTX 280M or ATi Hd4870 and use CUDA or ATi Stream i guess to get nearly same performance … of if people fund me, we can even get Xeon of Opteron …. but forget about clusters … i haven’t yet lost my interest in acquring a Phenom II X4 …

I guess i don’t have time for anything mentioned above though. Now, have to go back to my relentless effort in trying to study for my solid state physics exam(this is a minimum of one book, if you don’t want to study the suggested bookso n special topics .. other wise 2.5 ) …

Wish me luck for my next two weeks

Been quite sometime since I wrote a post. Well, though that this would at least ease my frustration of the work that’s not working.

Last Saturday I went to Nakhind to trek for the second time after I joined here. This time it was more unconventional, rather thrilling and of course a highly required physical activity that I required.

The unconventional elements are completely attributed to Amaresh and company. The paramount issues that occured due to the inconsequential choice of a near-random path with the only goal seemingly being the peak had it’s thrills and perils.

Even after all this I did not manage to reach the peak (I guess I was abt 20 mts away from the peak ). Hopefully, at least i will achieve this peak when I go there the next time(if ever there is going to be one).

http://picasaweb.google.com/ravitej7/NakhindTrek170109?authkey=ByxzGMiSOdU&feat=directlink
(sorry, for not editing the uploads. there are too many self-shots which i guess i should remove.)

Vista seems to enjoy gobbling up space it is currently using up around 25GB of my C: which is almost nothing but the OS ..! I think it is not meant for lower mortals like me to understand why I require a whole cache of all dll’s and all the junk even if they are outdated. The winsxs(Windows Side by Side) folder is currently occupying 8GB.

I think windows should stop helping people about how to manage space. It’s not that I am running out of space, but it’s just the realization that I am running an OS that uses 1GB RAM to run, 20GB of hard disk space for installting itself. Comparing this to my Arch, RAM usage (usual) about 185MB other than the NVIDIA and 3.7GB(mainly because of emacs and openoffice … other wise it was about 2.9GB) of current installed size.

I am again in a quandary as to whether i should remove vista from my laptop or not !

I finally shifted my OS after my 2 month old thought that I should change. I dumped ubuntu and gentoo and moved to this, the “Arch Linux”. Well, the installtion was a bit long as I forgot the specification of my wireless card and few other stuff. I was lucky to have SLAX on my pendrive to fix them up. After what I thought I finally got the OS running, in the aim to delete a folder that I made unnecessarily in /etc/; I did $rm -rf /etc/ .And, yeah I had to redo the whole thing again… thoug this time, I finished it all in few hours.

That’s for my installation. Now, coming to why I finalised on Arch were the number of good reviews of a 32-bit OS that I found about Arch on forums. I discarded my idea of 64-bit after a shot usage of hardy. Everything was fine, except that the memory usage and temperatures at which it runs is high. It’s not that I had a problem with memory, I am well-off with it. But, it just that I did not feel any improvement in performence.

Arch performs very well and is not bloated. It’s not bloated because it installs only the base. Over that, I found a considerable performance improvement from my hardy32-bit. I still don’t know how this happens. Well, bottomline is that I am not going to change from it for at least two years, I guess.

www.cmi.ac.in/~ravitej/hardinfo_report.html … this has few benchmarks done by the “hardinfo”, at the end of the page.

Be it as it may, my life seems to be getting from boring to uninteresting. Life at CMI, was actually something I liked, it’s mostly a compact and a closed community. Mind you I am not emotional as I write this post. It’s just that I am tired and uninterested in writing about anything else.

Life here, seems to made of classes, travel, assignements and exams. (:P) .. I agree that this not something that’s really that different in any student’s life. But, what if profs even after finding that you day is just 6 hours long(excluding few hours of sleep , travel, classes, etc.) and keep piling assignments. Be they as may be, I still don’t get the point why I have to sit for three hours and give an exam, I feel I am less of a reseach student than what  felt before. It seems life follows a sinusoidal path and seems to have rational winding numbers and most of the times non-orientable too (:P).

I feel I am revisiting my life during my 11th and 12th when I was enrolled for an IIT entrance. Well, this might actually be worse.

For long I was planning to write blog and it chanced upon that my other blog got reports from my great classmate, Mr. Anirbit Mukherjee. Well yeah, may be it’s not nice on my part to have published about a personal chat between two persons. It’s just that I got excited because the topic of this chat was the same as the one on which I had short heated arguments with Mr. Mukherjee; short because, though people might not believe, i am a bit short tempered.

Well, this is not about the aforementioned blog or the chat. I’m not going to do that mistake again. This will follow a pattern that the article that is going to be commented upon had used. This is a set of comments on the article of comments; though I’m not that adept or mature enough to comment on articles of those people who I feel think they are writing an editorial on how things can go completely wrong with no chance of reprisal.

Well, if comments about personal conversations cannot go public, then personal ideas about public issues should be managed more diplomatically. But, my complaint about this article is neither about the writing style of this article nor am I judging or critically analyzing. It’s just that if a person gets to know the author at a more personal scale, you get to determine his/her beliefs and actions. There is truly never a limit to a person being a hypocrite. If any person who knows a little about the subject that is being talked about you can see these contradictory paragraphs appearing. There is a time when Mr. Mukherjee seems to see elementary facts to be too elementary and at times, slightly higher level realizations to be rather high.

And now coming to the point about Expectations. Expectations are common as a person. But, expectations do not alone form the basis for life and interests. I do agree that it’s mars the mind at least for a short span of time, when expectations are not reached and I definitely agree that there are things in life, in which a person should not by any chance compromise. But, at times, even such situations do arise, due to their non-zero probability, and adaptation in such a situation is must.I completely agree with the author in few of the issues raised in the article. But, it seems that the author’s pedagogy is totally pessimistic and does not have a well defined set of principles by which he measures and concocts subjects. My view of the article is that though the article issued a disclaimer in the prologue, it lacks complete sense as the issues raised were public. And giving a personalized opinion as to how the things are to be run, such that the author can live “happily ever after”, seems to me a coup d’etat on the part of the author.

Again a personal opinion, but this time it’s mine, is that, rather than a single person setting  up the rules and creating the same problem as the existing one; a change has to be made where one gets to choose after a certain point of time  the path that he wants to take. There is a negative side to this too. There can exist cases where instead of taking a path, one takes up various paths, so that the end is reached without any substantial increase in level by taking up random elements, here and there. Well, this might be solved, if an interaction process between us and the teachers be made such that one gets to decide on a particular path. If one is unable to decide on any, then he is to take a path set up by the teachers.

That’s all I have to say.

P.S. : Everything above is written in a very general fashion without pointing at anything specific or trying to point at the situation that has made me write this.

P.S : But, there  is one point that I wanted to be specific about. It’s regarding the admission into DTP, TIFR. As i might have mentioned before, that author seems to lack complete knowledge regarding the interests of his peers. It’s not that they were not taken into DTP, it’s just that no one else’s topic of interest was offered in DTP. And, for the sake of illumination, everyone got into the department of their first preference.

As the morning washed the remnants of a long night, beckoning the bloom and caressing the withered, I slid out of what has been the most restless of my nights; dotted flamboyantly with the sardonic and soporific images of the insignificant impromptu.  Well, that should do for the usual cliched description and boring imagery. But, does brevity span the abnormal? I guess not. It’s never too late to realize this. As the train of disconnected but meaningful thoughts flowed through the leftovers of last night,streaming a headache. A remnant, a hangover, the effect.

Situation may seem abnormal, but the cause needn’t be. And the cause being normal does not reflect upon the abnormality of the effect. Well, to stick to this philosophy I shall give the mundane cause behind this incongruous effect.

As usual, a delightfully late entry into the crowded cake shop marked my unobserved entrance. Found out that the special was the tempting mixture of black forest dipped in orange nectar and topped with orange. A tangy temptation. After managing to squeeze two out of the counter, I came and sat at the already occupied table. No response; even this is usual. Was I ever punctual? As Rembrandt put it {\emph Sincerity is the eventual deception of all great men}. Well, I never understood this.

As an author, everyone faces difficulties in voicing their opinions. Some are cordoned by self restrictions, some by personal affairs and the others by society. I thought I have been always free of these. But now, mine seem to be of the second type. I can write fluently and do not care about what the society thinks. But, it seems you have to be bound lest your pen runs free. Sincere apologies to all the red pens that strike through the life, for this comment; you are just being dumb like the donkeys that were tied to grind-stones with their eyes covered, who think that they have travelled miles. The other day I published my third of the anthologies. Maybe it got personal. Well, it is impossible as an author not to give out something personal some time or the other with or without realizing. I realized the adverse effects of this only now. A core collapse, distant and cold looks. I sandpapered my throat with the tangerine sands, considering an elopement from the clutches of everything; to a place of serenity, sanity and solitariety.

That’s what had happened. After that everything was a blur; a storm of emotions crashing upon a damp cliff. The precipice below which lays the society. A salinated tangy flavor broke through the softer parts of the hard set stone. And fissure upon fissure formed in the stone by the violence of love. And then I thanked the one. Crumbled.

“Farewell.”  That was the word that I fumbled as I made an exit. Coincidence? The word that changed my life. The reply that answered itself. I woke up to live the life this has presented me with. It will never be the same again. I will go to the shop again to have the day’s special.

A cold, bleak morning. A door opened. Neuvo sol. Eustache walked out leaving a trail of sleep behind him. Normandy! flowers. Bleaker. And a contemptuous voice says, “Life goes on”, another flower falls asleep imbibing the sweet sleep of Eustache, the ingratiatory welcome of Monsieur Kart(MKart).

“Long live,Caeser.” Poor Eustache, attained a higher level of awakening with this untimely road show of the dramatists as MKart vaporised into them. Realisation always comes late. Well, maybe it’s better to have a slower realization of things. That’s what Eustache always believed in and followed. He never cared to understand anything unless rudely smacked right in the face. Surely, It did dawn upon him now, in the form of an archway leading to a vestibule on the other side of the street which was strewn with yellow daffodils and blue daisies. Probably, some leftovers of devil’s work.

Arch did seem familiar. As he entered, he heard someone cackling against the slow drip-dripping. It seems to be a day of realizations. As realization buried him in it’s wings, his shook under it’s warmth and felt himself aged with no thoughts except the horror. Yes sir, this is the place where he worked. Where he did his rather rudimentary and incomprehensive job. You might guess this from Eustache’s description of the place as a dinghy, dark, asylum for localising highly mutinous kids,a palatial mansion! Talking about the kids, those morose, wily, blood-thirsty, inquisitive and above all stupid blighters who used their brains only in unsuccessful attempts to eradicate Eustache, thier tutor.

So much for the stupid detail of the stupid kids. “Clip, Clop, Clip, Clop, Clang”. Not only a day of realizations but a day of adrenaline too. Kids are devils, they have managed to set an armour on a horse after him. Well, what do you expect to do in such situation? Flee, he did, the athlete propelled by the adrenaline and a reason that he is trying to find a reason to live. Alleys passed, and it grew dark. Is it a solar eclipse? Well, I don’t expect to use my time up in examining whether it is or not. But, he is Eustache, the inquisitive teacher. Another realization, phew! A whole army against him. Seems that kids have reached a peak, coming in full force as the Dark Lord Sauron against the Eldar. Eustache drew himself up in the open space, just to feel more miserable about the vastness.

Exhaustion. Tired legs and body trying in vain to replenish the used up adrenaline.He stopped. The cackling, a hollow and sonorous one drew closer. He reached out his hand to finish it off for once. Cold, hard and stinging surface met his hand, a tumbler? The impetus to end turned into a corrugative bang on the head. All fell silent. He basked in jubiliation in the emptyness as it got filled with more and more familiar faces who came to inquire and congratulate him. The drawing room, another trap? The sinuous evil cackle closed upon him yet again …………

I hate the bloody alarm clock with snooze instead of shut-off switch.

Well, maybe you can call this a review… but it is just another of my reflections and thoughts. Narayan’s style of writing has always fascinated me, the words “lucid style” put forth by many authors for the works of Narayan, never made much sense to me. You call the style that presents the deepest of the meanings in subtlest of the ways “lucid”. Well, I do agree that the flow of the writing is fluid and the theme naive. But, only once you start looking into it do you find the connections woven throughout the book subtly, deftly and in fact really smooth.

My latest of Narayan’s work is the aforementioned title. It was truly brilliant though it cannot replace “The Guide” from the top of the list. The setting was the same (Malgudi), people similar and the protagonist leading a common middle-class life. But, the whole profile of the story reflected upon the aspect of the human character of greed, beliefs, relations, money and faith.

This can be suggested as a must read if you want a “lucid” imagery of Narayan’s Philosophies in Life, his observations on the wants and lifestyle of an average Indian family at the time of writing.