This is why I do not advertise my identity openly (not that you have to be Sherlock to figure it out).  My readers are invite only, or unknown strangers.

I suspect this is why I relate to 750words.com. Should the fear of judgement win over the possibility of something written resonating with your friends, loved ones and complete strangers? Every writer must decide for himself.

His entries were written in old style cursive script complete with blotches from the blue fountain pen. I knew he could write well, but what I did not suspect was how different his writing was from his speech. In his diary, I found the intelligent, thoughtful and vulnerable man I had heard about. Someone who was deeply hurt, wary of love and always out of place. I never knew he was so lonely, that the desert had left him so hollow. I never knew how much it hurt him when my mother wouldn’t return his affection. I never knew he considered his family more of a liability than anything else.

Needless to say, I was upset. I always thought I meant a lot to him. That I was special to him in the way he was special to me.

My mother always used to say that I was the only reason why she did not simply leave.

After going through my father’s diary, I found out that it was that way for my father  as well.

Knowing that you are the sole reason for two people who hate each other to tolerate each for the rest of their lives is both moving and sad.

I’m glad that he kept a diary.

I did not gel well among them. I was ambitious and incredibly passionate about computers. I already knew the contents of my curriculum years in advance. I had written complete programs (products from Anisoft is what I called them), played with most programming languages and was proficient in developing for and using both Linux and Windows. But I was not good at other subjects; my mind was tuned to work well only when it comes to computers. I reached out for like-minded souls on campus and was fortunate enough to find one who remains a best friend.

To make the best of my time, I read a lot of books at night. I slept during the day, often in the classroom. Teachers often woke me and asked questions related to what they were discussing. I would answer correctly, ignore their chagrin and keep my head down.

The books I read were recommended by Amazon or books that were deemed the best at explaining the topic. Not what the University prescribed or pertaining to the topic the University chose to include in the curriculum. I believe this was crucial in shaping me for what I am today.

There is a world of difference between a good book and a bad book. Take Hennessy and Patterson’s Computer Architecture. The writing is clear and there are so many case studies and actual history that makes the book come alive. The difference that I can see is in the passion. A book that explains something for the sake of explaining or to help you pass an exam can only do so much. It cannot give you context, it cannot free your mind into exploring new directions which no book can teach. A book should illuminate, convey about the process of understanding as well as the actual topic.

Some of my favorites are The Art of Computer Programming, Petzold’s Programming Windows, Tanenbaum’s Computer Networks and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. This post will not be complete without mentioning Paul Graham’s essays which have always inspired me.

The Indian education system needs inspiring teachers who actually want to teach and are passionate about the subject. Not people who have retired  and passing time or worse, people who had to become a teacher as a last resort. Maybe this has changed, maybe I was stuck in the wrong college. But what worries me are the hordes of programmers passing out of such colleges every year.

The depth in Snow Crash’s plot is incredible: Sumerian language is the firmware programming language for the BIOS of the brain. This makes the brain susceptible to linguistic viruses. To make the brain immune to such viruses, Enki (a God in Sumerian mythology) creates a counter-virus that makes humanity speak in different languages. Linguistic viruses make a come-back in a form that only affects computer programmers. The internet has evolved into the metaverse, a 3D extension of the internet, that is prevalent and popular.

While the above paragraph looks a bit complicated and geeky, the way the book presents the plot and moves forward is excellent. There is lots of action revolving around bikes, internet and sword fights.

An excellent review of Snow Crash is available at Russ Allbery’s website.

I heard the Glee version of this song the first time. Glee is so bollywood like.

The new Mortal Kombat inherits what was best in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and brings that forward with HD graphics and high quality animation. The multiplayer options are amazing and extends the life of the game since no in-game AI can match what another real person can come up with.

I couldn’t get the multiplayer option to work with BSNL, it kept on complaining that the “The connection between the Ethernet cable and router have been disconnected”. I switched to Airtel, configured my ADSL modem to set the WiFi router in a DMZ (google for router DMZ) and made sure UPnP was enabled on the WiFi router. After that, it just worked. The same setup did not somehow work in the case of BSNL (maybe a problem with their supplied router than anything else). In all fairness, the error message should have been more descriptive.

As my wife pointed out, I have a bias for movies or stories where the underdog rises up to win. But here, it is more about the journey rather than the end. Beautiful, vivid imagery depicting life in China takes me back to the old days of Malayalam movies.

Let me explain. There is a quality that old Malayalam movies have: showing mundane, normal scenes from the real world and yet conveying a compelling story via the medium of cinema.

Jaden Smith is really why this movie works. Highly recommended – do watch it.

Once we slept our hangover off, we walked across Figueroa street and I looked at the pavement to see if there was any hint of gold. To tell you the truth, it did sparkle a bit. Tall buildings loomed in all directions and a variety of beautiful cars dotted the roads. A homeless man tipped his hat and addressed us, “India, y’all from India? Can you spare a dollar?” We walked faster, the homelessness making us a bit nostalgic about where we came from.

The next day, we checked out Universal Studios and walked a bit in Hollywood highland. Both were amazing experiences. Oh, but we had an awkward moment in the Metro bus: a young girl, probably seventeen, asked one of us if we had cocaine.  Once we impressed upon her that we were lacking in such possessions, she hysterically asked us again and rose unsteadily from her seat. Her eyes seemed glazed and wary. She got off the bus while the LED monitor was glowing “Hollywood/Western” as if that explained everything.

Tuesday was the big day. I had my demonstration in the evening at Nokia Theatre, L.A Live. Each presenter has only five minutes and the crowd is critical. These demos are considered to be the showcase of the on-going innovation in the company.

My heart was pounding as the guy in front of me stepped on to the stage. I peeked out from backstage to see 4000+ people intently focused on him and his computer screen projected on a huge display. Butterflies were in my stomach and I quickly ran over what could go wrong. That was bad because it seemed like everything could.

My name was announced and as I stepped on to the stage, my worries melted away. I felt calm. I introduced myself and started. After my first bit, I got a lot of applause and cheers. Ditto for the second act. I felt like I was on fire, that I could do anything.

And then it went wrong.

I waited for the application to launch. It seemed to be taking too long. I heard someone shout from the audience, “You have a compilation error!” accompanied by laughter.

I did the only thing I could think of then. I pressed Control + Z, the Undo shortcut. Thankfully, it worked and the application launched correctly. The auditorium boomed with applause and cheers.

It was like they wanted me to succeed. That they were rooting for me to win the minute it went wrong. And that collective optimism exerted its own gravity over the demo. I guess that this optimism is very American.

Outside the auditorium, several developers shook my hands; the others shouted, “Good going!” as they walked past. Later that night, the guy in front of me in the buffet queue moved aside, shook my hands and said that I should go ahead. People pointed when I walked by. I went from being non-existent to slightly famous. Not famous in the grand scheme of things, but on that night, I felt like I was a rock star.

That is a night I shall never forget.

I bought a Karizma ZMR and now understand a bit of what this is about. A slight flick of the wrist and in about four seconds, the wind is screaming at you and the speedometer reads out 60+. My first reaction was surprise. In an instant I was transported back to my early teens, back to the first time I rode a motorcycle. The sheer exhilaration and thrill of moving with so much momentum. You’re alone in the world, there’s the blue sky above and sweet cool wind blowing across; everything else is either a blur or an obstacle.

When you’re riding a bicycle, you imagine that the motorcycle will be so much faster. And when you actually ride the motorcycle for the first time, you savor the deliciousness of its speed. When you move away from the 100cc bikes that are common in India to something more faster, there’s a similar transition. A savage, masculine pleasure in leaving others behind, visualizing paths around obstacles in advance that in the heat of the moment is your own private strategy against being constantly crowded and jostled.

My new bike has reminded me of something else that I had lost in my teens; a sense of appreciation for doing a manual and simple chore – like washing the bike. The bike is heavy and powerful, but I suspect this has nothing to do with its role in pulling me out of  the world behind the digital screen that I had immersed myself so heavily into.

It has remote key-less button start – like Street Hawk! :) (For the bike enthusiasts, this was an accessory)

With this, I bid goodnight to you, fellow wanderer. Drive Safe and please, I beg of you, tell your friends to honk only if they feel constipated.

While on the platform, look left towards the city and you see an orange sky. To the right, a crisp dark blue sky twinkling with stars. Usually, the cold wind shakes the trees lining the second platform. There are no boards indicating the positions of coaches; no announcement when the train is near. A lady in a blue saree rings a circular metal ring. Many passengers huddle around her and ask where their coach would stop. You have three minutes to board the train.

Coming back from the city’s traffic to this place is startling. The first thing you notice is Silence. The kind where you can hear a leaf rustling. Arrival shatters this barrier – to the point where your heart pounds as the train slows down to a halt.

My two-year old son loves going to this station and often, so do I.

Situated by the road to the old airport, Megabowl had been a fun place to be. Bowling is a very social sport, where new friends are easily made.

We drove over to Leela Galleria hoping that Amoeba sports bar there would still exist. And yes, it was there and I’m surprised at how little crowd there was, compared to other Amoeba joints in Bangalore.

Like dreams and beasts, the computer stands on the margins. It is a mind that is not yet a mind. It is inanimate, yet interactive. It does not think, yet neither is it external to thought. It is an object, ultimately a mechanism, but it behaves, interacts and seems in a certain sense to know.

I came across this is in a gloomy Guardian article. And it got stuck in my head.

They have compiled a book: Confessions on Life, Death and God. There is also this beautiful video they shot to promote the book.

Published in 1996, this book sold a lot of copies and has 7791 readers in librarything.com. One of the things that struck me most about the book is its logical structure – on the basis of characters, very much like the television series “Lost.” The story is told in third person, focusing on a character at a time. And there are good characters – characters which leave a taste of their personality with you. My favorite – Tyrion Lannister, a misshapen, short son of a powerful Lord. He is nicknamed the Imp and gets away with sarcasm due to his short strature. People mock him, he mocks himself while taking snide jabs at everyone else.

An interesting thing about the origin of the book (from Wikipedia):

Martin worked mainly in Hollywood, principally as a writer or producer on The New Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast. After Beauty and the Beast ended in 1989 Martin returned to writing prose and started work on a science fiction novel called Avalon. In 1991, whilst struggling with this story, Martin conceived of a scene where several youngsters find a dead direwolf with a stag’s antler in its throat. The direwolf has several pups, which are taken by the youngsters to raise as their own. Martin’s imagination was fired by this idea and he developed it into an epic fantasy story, which he envisaged as a trilogy consisting of the books A Game of Thrones, A Dance with Dragons and The Winds of Winter.

The transition from a scene about a dead direwolf to an 800 page novel is stunning.

Martin holds no punches in his book. You won’t find any romance in the book. Instead, you have frank, old-fashioned sexuality, incest, rape, etc.  In fact, bastards play a crucial role in the book.

The plot is gripping, you do want to know what is going to happen next to the character when a chapter finishes. I’ve already started on the second book in the series, let us see how that goes.

Dear Internet, I have known you from your early days. From the short hiss and screech of the dial-up modem to the silent, blinks of the blazing fast DSL modem, I have traversed far across your lands. I’ve dialed into Bulletin Board Systems and seen dark, blinking and ugly RIP graphics that are like today’s animated GIFs, only more irritating because it uses text. I have seen your dark and bright sides, with the brightness far outshining the darkness these days, which considering the fact that my one-year old son is growing up, is a good thing.

You have taught me a lot; there is no doubt about that. I taught myself things that no lower middle-class child sitting in a small town in Kerala could have known of at the time. With frequent power cuts, noisy telephone lines and a 133 MHz computer, I set out to learn and understand how these fascinating gatekeepers of knowledge work.

I heard from a stranger in an IRC chat room that you could make the computers do what you want by speaking to them in their language. The limits were only your own intelligence and the hardware. As a child, this was magical to me. I taught myself C programming early on, content that I had a knack for it. Soon, I could tell the machine to draw fires, rains, and stick-figures on its screen. I could play games with it, teaching it rules that it didn’t know. I could instruct it to communicate with other computers and exchange words. The language was precise, logical and easy to pick up. It made you think in boxed ways that separated you from the world into another one where only your rules exist. The only thing that prevented you from making the ultimate program were your own limitations of remembering what you were writing and how it connected to what you wrote before.

I thought of life, and how it could all be this complex program that someone had written. Some people had power to manipulate programs in a big way and write more programs while some could only participate and do what they were meant to do.

Those days were some of the best days in my life. I beamed with the secret of the machine inside me, and decided that I would be a programmer (the next Bill Gates, no less) and change the world with what I know about the language of the machine.

Now, as I watch the Internet transform and connect all these people together, I continue to wonder, how much of my childhood dream is still driving me and how much of the possibilities I imagined in my childhood I can still recall.

P.S: The above post is what happens when my wife works on a Saturday leaving me alone with access to WordPress.

For example, take a look at this excerpt from “Zen in the Art of Writing” by Ray Bradbury:

I began to make lists of titles, to put down long lines of nouns. These lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull.

The lists ran something like this: THE LAKE. THE NIGHT. THE CRICKETS. THE RAVINE. THE ATTIC…. THE CROWD. THE NIGHT TRAIN. THE FOG HORN. THE SCYTHE. THE CARNIVAL. THE CAROUSEL. THE DWARF….

I was beginning to see a pattern in the list, in these words that I had simply flung forth on paper, trusting my subconscious to give bread, as it were, to the birds.

And this excerpt from William Bayard Hale’s “The Story of a Style”:

The task of speech is to predicate, not paint…. Adjectives qualify, describe, limit…. They are popular, because easy; they eke out effortless poverty of idea. The man who has something to tell has little need, little time, for them; he snaps out his tale in words of action. The thought that pants for deliverance bursts out in verbs…. The artist in language suspects an approaching adjective as he would suspect a possible rogue at the door.

The first thing an outsider (which many Bangalore residents are) notices is that vehicles stop as a last resort. They try to keep moving regardless of someone crossing the road or another vehicle taking a U-turn. The persistent and rather annoying honking is as much a part of driving in Bangalore as the swarm of numerous two-wheelers that remind me of flies, flitting in and out between vehicles cruising at 60 kilometers per hour, blissfully ignoring the fact that a small mistake by anyone could be fatal.

I remember reading this in a book (most probably a Terry Pratchett one):

“The average I.Q of traffic is the I.Q of the least intelligent person on the road divided by the total number of vehicles.”

Regardless of the statement above, I consider the average I.Q of traffic in Bangalore to be rather high, and no, this has nothing to do with software engineers, but more to do with the sheer variations of stupidity that all drivers in Bangalore are exposed to regularly:

If a two-wheeler makes too much noise, keep going straight. You will soon notice a rush of wind roar by, making impossible turns like the Batpod in “The Dark Knight”. And amazingly, this roaring bike does not smash any side mirrors unlike the Batpod. An important point to note is that the driver of such a bike usually wears sunglasses when it is cloudy and has bits of hair gel streaking behind him like a comet’s tail.

If an expensive car honks continuously and you hear the engine being revved repeatedly, make way. That is the sound of a person unwilling to accept that he is not driving the Harry Potter bus, which can collapse and expand depending upon the space available.

If an auto rickshaw is headed diagonally onto your path, slow down and let it drift sideways. The diagonally challenged tend not to look at the rear view mirror and assume that they can stop anything coming towards them like Neo coaxing bullets to a halt.

To sum up, avoid the Batpod, Harry Potter Bus (The Knight Bus) and the Diagonal Auto Rickshaw.

These are only a sample of the actual complex rules that numerous Bangaloreans subconsciously follow in order to stay alive. How can a mob that computes so much at the same time be anything but intelligent?

I have had my share of close shaves on Bangalore’s roads. There I was, happily driving a Hero Honda Passion Plus at seventy kilometers per hour, occasionally gawking at the large advertisements on the side of the infamous outer ring road around nine o’clock.

Suddenly, I heard a noise and my bike lost balance, the back tyre skidding sideways because of my panic brake dance. I tried to tame the beast and eventually succeeded. The mirror on the left had bent and I looked ahead and saw an Activa slowing down. I caught up with the scooter and gave it’s driver the choicest of abuses. My heart racing, I accelerated away from him and tried to calm myself down.

I noticed that the Activa was catching up with me, and I remembered the stories of road rage I had heard of. Of violence and death and uncontrollable rage. I looked sideways into the eyes of the man and he said the last thing I expected to hear at sixty kilometer an hour: “Sorry”.

Biking in the rain is an unforgettable experience. The joy of water splashing all over you whenever a car passes by, of the back tyre skidding at the least pressure on the brake pedal, etc. is inexplicable. Once, I had my helmet visor up while the rain was pouring down heavily. I sang a Malayalam song loudly in order to drown out the pounding my eyes were being forced to submit to.  I crossed St. John’s junction and a guy on a Pulsar rode in parallel along with me. I was more than surprised to hear him also sing that same Malayalam song along with me, laughing while the rain raged on, two wet but happy malayalees, chugging along Sarjapura road.

There is an excerpt from the book available for your immediate reading pleasure.

Here’s a sample:

… Adriana, whose husband is dying after having his face smashed in with an axe while working as a security guard, asks why John could not have been a “facilitator” for her and her children, instead of a self-conscious Byron-Christ wannabe; instead of leaving her to cope with an alien bureaucracy alone:

“Sometimes, you know, I would be trudging the streets of that ugly, windy city from one government office to another and I would hear this little cry come from my throat, yi-yi-yi, so soft that no one around me could hear. I was in distress. I was like an animal calling out in distress.”

It would be a cold reader who would falter here and ask who Adriana really is in Coetzee’s post-modernist house of doubles: is she a real person? Is she made up? This is one of the moments in Coetzee’s work where something stirs; where an expression succeeds which very rarely appears in English-language literature, and tends to sound off-key when it does – an expression of love which is not love for a person, but a tenderness, an empathy, with the very idea of life itself. How brave any creature is, just to live.

The article also talks about Coetzee’s interest in the concept of the doubles:

When Coetzee was awarded his Nobel prize in 2003, instead of making a speech, he read out a short story, a strange, allusive tale called “He and His Man”, ostensibly about Robinson Crusoe and Daniel Defoe, but really about doubles, about a character and his creator, a recluse and his busy, worldly reflection; how they were close, yet could never meet. The Nobel performance itself was a sort of doubling. “Here you see JM Coetzee, the silver-haired old fellow who joins you for dinner,” it seemed to say. “Yet that isn’t the Coetzee you are giving a prize to; you are giving a prize to Coetzee the writer, who perforce cannot be here. I shall read you some of his work.”

Here is the full article at the Guardian website.

And this saddens me. Effortlessly being able to translate thought into code is something I’m proud to be capable of. If  only, it would work for English. That thought got me excited for a bit. What if I was willing to re-learn English, as a programming language?

I can hear the pointlessness of it all from the keyboard’s tones. English – with a strict, well defined syntax, keywords and control structures? Ha.

I haven’t given up yet. I’m going through the “New York Public Library Writer’s Guide to Style and Usage” and am actually enjoying the commentary. Maybe I should take the easy route and read a traditional “quick guide to correct grammar” book and be done with it. Then, I remember my engineering days. The easy books would let you beat the exam; but the harder ones do something far more profound. They leave a bit of themselves in you, arming you with knowledge and more importantly, experiences that the author went through. So, I’m sticking with my bulky guide to style and usage, thank you.

Let us see how far it goes.

P.S: This only applies to writing; I’m super fast and don’t have any problems when it comes to reading English.

P.P.S: Okay, this idea was discussed as long ago as 1966.