Nicotine, a rather strange strain of insomnia and a really bad psycho thriller kept me awake till two past midnight.

But that's not the point.

The point is that there are way too few psycho killers in India, and I see a whole lot of potential to make an industry out of it. Here's the plan in all its concise beauty - Abduct kids and torture them for a few years. After making sure that they'd become psychotic killers, ask them to sign an exclusive contract and release them on the world. Record their stories, write a best-seller, make a movie and become rich.

All in a life's delusion

world
Originally uploaded by Kapil Karekar.

Not long ago
I used to think that I'd like to think that I didn't like jazz
And then you happened

My Dronacharya
In tie-dyed indigo wraparound, you were
My private little phenomenon

Or so I'd love to believe
For then the delusion is complete
True though it is

Close on Goldilocks' heels

Curtsy to the Queen and her fancy cohorts
Curtsy to the arguments of design and teleology
Curtsy duly to corporates, conglomerates and their confounded rationale

Curtsy verily to family, kinship and society
Curtsy sometimes to all those things that make us unhappy
And curtsy eventually to the fell virtuous human mind.

P.S: Go figure!

You and I

We exist, you and I, as inexorable experience collectors, sometimes individually, often collectively; intertwined in our quest for experiences.

We're a rare breed, you and I, for we believe in gathering experiences sans judgements, sans pain, sans hatred. We wish to be like a sandstorm, indifferent to the dust we gather, yet growing strong with the same dust; atleast we wish to be, for sometimes, the storm falls in love with the grains, not willing to let go. We begin to love the grains, hate them, wish they'd be less abrasive, or more. The grains are what gives us strength, will and reason to sustain the storm. Without the storm, the grains needn't exist, and without the grains there'd be no storm. What matters - the grain or the storm?

We're funny, you and I, for in the course of our quest, we forget that the course is short, that the course didn't have a past before it started, and no future after where it stops abruptly. Millions and millions of paths had the million quests taken, strengthening each other, bitching, groveling, snarling, smiling, existing.

We're wise, you and I, for we realise that the course is ephemeral, and in a cosmic scale, is hobbesian.

Soon, HIV will be an assimilated parasite.

Location: A conf room
Occasion: An engineering meeting to discuss architecture for the next generation of our product.

Person 1: yada, yada, ...
Person 2: So, yada, yada ...
Person 3: Re-architecture is costly. So, when we do re-architecture, we must make sure that we don't need to do another one for at least five to ten years. Let's design our schema in such a way.

Person[4-6] nod their head vigorously in agreement. Person 2 had a hearty laugh, excused himself and walked out.

Random crib

You indhi boy, listen up. Transliteration rules aren't sacrosanct. There're no universal rules driving the shining path of transliteration. They're driven by local inculcations, and yours is as funny(and illogical) as the other one that you find funny.

After much soul-searching, I realised what made my life fall short of quintessential completeness - a farewell kiss.

It all makes sense now.

Yes, I consider Mr. and Mrs. Iyer as one of the most inanely overacted movies of the millennium. Do you have a problem?

Apocalypto reeks of racism

Opening quote: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." — W. Durant

Need I say more? The opening line stopped short of swearing by "White man's burden".

Michael Crichton has something to say on why politicised science is dangerous.

What is he advocating - Separation of the lab and the state?

Order of the day: Institutionalised spirit.

I deserve nostalgia in full measure.

Remember the nostalgia of the old - gramaphone records and stained glass, fondly clearing layers of dust from the gramaphone record, each layer of dust signifying an excess of happiness, one ember of happiness for each track; running your hand over each track igniting the memories?

Listening to Geeta Dutt singing Meri Jaan on xmms is not the nostalgia I wanted.

An obituary and another one

Two deaths in a day - one very real, of existence; eighty nine years of it, of it, eighty years of a marriage; another very real too, this one of a relationship - a year of it, but of one that feels a lot longer, one that gave me much more than I could ever give back to it.

I can only wish it all works out for the best. Thanks for everything.

Geek talk.

Two physics geeks talking in the cafeteria:

Physicist 1: Dude, did you see the interference patterns that I produced from Cherenkov radiation? T'was cool man.
Physicist 2: Whoa dude, seriously? How did you do that?
Physicist 1: Simple dude. I redirected the cherenkov radiation from the nuclear reactor, passed it through the Young's double slit experiment.
Physicist 2: Awesome dude. You rock! Now, let's listen to some daler mehndi.

A solemn plea

Sirs, madams, eunuchs, dolphins, assorted intelligent dromeosaurids and corvids out there, here's a plea; one that manifests a deep longing.

Somebody please ship me, a poor man of meagre means, a couple of XKCD t-shirts.

I was told this in jovial earnesty: 'You're not into anything. Had it not been for software, you would've been a total bum'.

I take it as a compliment.

The miracle of senility

As seen on television:

Present condition: Couple growing old.

Woman woos man: She buys an anti-aging cream, and gets her yesterday's husband back.

Man woos woman: He gets a can of low-fat oil, gives it to her and tells her to cook.

Bastard!

An appeal to women

High heels are humanity's only hope for digitigrade locomotion. Go girl,go!

Women, you gave humanity language and the boneless penis. Now, give us the new cool - digitigrade locomotion.

Wisdom

All I need is a CFG for a mail from a desperate spammer. That's next on my todo list, right between regex for English language and a push-down automata for an internal combustion engine.

Every normal painless senile death increases the possibility of you experiencing a particularly painful, young death.

State since birth: Hosting parasites.
Current state: Hosting parasites.
State after death: Hosting parasites.

Is this the point to life?

On why I love Yahoo! Answers

Move aside all other forms on entertainment; we have a new winner - "Religion" section on Yahoo! Answers.


[snip]
"Science" offers a method by which the universe, and all the beings therein, may be examined to discover the artistry in God's creation, thereby communicating it to mankind. Religion, therefore, encourages science, adopting it as a tool by which to study the subtleties of God's creation.
...
Religion not only encourages scientific study, but also permits that, supported by the truths revealed through Islam, scientific research be conclusive and expeditious.
[/snip]

And then the killer...
The reason being, that religion provides accurate and definitive answers as to how life and the universe came into being.

Priceless.

Ok, I've declared my undying love and affection. Now what?

The fossils aren't responding. Love is complicated.

Three hundred lives of wasps I've walked the earth, and now there is no time.

[snip]
Nothing to feel happy about. IMO, _bandh_ should be the last stop, to be resorted to when other forms of civil disobedience have been tried and failed.

This is what trigger-happy-_bandhs_ do ... dilute the seriousness, resort to violence to assert the seriousness and encourage people to suggest feeling happy about it.

--
Ishwar.

[/snip]

Debonairblog gets more hits than wikipedia.

New product idea - debowiki. Any interested VCs?

I graduated to a power searcher

Creation is an act of spontaneous erection

I sought
I sought
I sought
I so...

Search consultant

At Chacha, you have search experts that help you find what you otherwise can't.

Judea Pearl, in my opinion, needs a nice long Jewish bath, immersed in his own bayesian diarrhea, and thrown nose-first down the path of righteous dogmation.

This, undoubtedly is one of the most hypocrisy-ridden articles to come out of a secular media in a long long time.

Am feeling let down, like I felt when Shyamala Balaji, the very toight physics teacher from ninth standard shook her pretty little head from side to side and with a deft swoosh of her adorable hands and a salubrious blush, very guiltily dismissed me from her room when she realised I was paying her too much attention than I was supposed to.

After all the people that I chanced to come across...

After all the people that I chanced to come across, not this person; Short Messaging Service from Hutch. Life just became a self-completing haploid,

The range of possible human experiences is limitless.


I don't like this.

Adding dino description signature on thunderbird

Here's something I've wanted for a long time now, and was too lazy to write one - a script that adds random dinosaur descriptions as your signature to thunderbird mail.

Before you go on to accuse me of blasphemy for not using perl, here's the reason - I didn't want to. Why perl when you can bash :D

1. Get the list of dinosaurs from wikipedia.
bash $ wget -o /tmp/dinolist.txt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dinosaurs;

2. Strip off html tags
bash $ cat /tmp/dinolist/.txt | grep "<li> < i> < a href="%5C%22/wiki/%22" | cut -d"\"" -f 2 | cut -d"/" -f 3 | tee dinosaurlist.txt

3. Generate the signature

bash $ vim gen_signature.sh
#!/bin/bash
count=`cat dinosaurlist.txt | wc -l`
random=$RANDOM
let dinonum=$RANDOM%count
xyz=(`cat dinosaurlist.txt`)
dinoname=${xyz[$dinonum]}
echo $dinoname
lynx --dump http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/${dinoname} | egrep -A 20 "\[[0-9]*\]Binomial name" | sed 's/\[[0-9]*\]//g' > "/home/ishwar/.thunderbird/signature.txt"

text=`cat /home/ishwar/.thunderbird/signature.txt`

if [ -z "$text" ]
then
lynx --dump http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/${dinoname} | egrep -A 20 "\[[0-9]*\]Species" | sed 's/\[[0-9]*\]//g' > "/home/ishwar/.thunderbird/signature.txt"
fi


4. Change the signature once every five minutes.
bash $ cat /etc/crontab
SHELL=/bin/bash
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
MAILTO=root
HOME=/

# run-parts
*/5 * * * * ishwar /home/ishwar/.thunderbird/gen_signature.sh

Accepted, this is not the most elegant script. But it makes me happy.

Person 1: Now at last, the world will realise that India can have serial killers too, and desis will realise that serial killing is not a "western" thingie

Person 2: And you want seventeen kids to be killed to prove that?

WTF! The world needs a lesson in logic.

Currently watching Barkha Dutt wearing a sincerely pained expression, discussing the Noida serial killer. A little over-done, but it'll feed the emotions of teeming millions of beanbag-fabindia-humanists celebrating life.



Life's good.