one more year

One more year of mediocre existence achieved!

One of the scary things about birthdays is that it reminds of the previous occasions and also painfully forces me to remember every stupid thing I did in the interim - worse are the memories of things that I wanted to do but was too lazy to even think about it.

This date also forces me to think about the end, reminding me that I will have only a finite amount of these days. Its not a fear of the unavoidable death that troubles me, but a sense of lethargic acceptance of the death with an implicit denial of the meaning of the time between now and the eventuality.

Lastly, the thing I dislike the most is the ordinary nature of the special day. Irrespective of what fun activities we do, what extra fun we get out of this day - the day itself is spectacularly ordinary; like every other day. This fact in itself has been troubling me as long ago as I remember birthdays.

Anyways, all these are disclaimers for why I might have sounded grumpy or reserved today. Happy birthday to me! Thanks for the wishes.

Critical analysis of Endhiran(ROBOT)

Endhiran (Robot) is a tamizh movie staring Rajinikanth and Aishwarya Rai. This is a high budget commercial sci-fi movie and it wins hands down on all three counts.

I am most excited about the sci-fi component in this movie. I wish the inevitable success of this movie to proliferate the genre in tamizh industry. List of sci-fi questions raised and (atleast partially) addressed by this movie

Can a robot

1) be called alive?

2) be part of our society without emotions?

3) understand/feel complex emotions like love?

4) understand moral rules?

5) replicate?

6) form collective intelligence?

7) break paradoxes?

8) do self evaluation?

9) take over the world?!

Even though I liked the amazing visuals and LOVE rajini's evil villan laughter in the second half, the innocent pj-cracking emotion-free robot version 1 is the best part of the movie DOT

self-less-ness and the true athiest

The Agnostic Manifesto

selflessness is a lack of concern of oneself in comparison to others. This is a rare and interesting quality in itself but I am interested in sort of a "variant" of it.

I am trying to imagine a true atheist - a person who shall believe in nothing unless there is a proof or enough evidence pointing to that belief. Such a person will reject gods and UFOs in seconds (rightfully so). But does it stop there? What about the sense of self itself? Its obvious (at least to me) that one cannot prove the existence of ones own self any better than prove the existence of ones own god.

Does the presence of consciousness prove the presence of self? Yes! Is our contradiction resolved? No, because neither self nor consciousness can be proved to an external entity and our true atheist is not allowed to have "gut feelings" which cannot be objectively validated. Alas - the root cause of this problem is that some trivial facts in first person cannot be promoted to third person.

So how can one be a non-hypocritical true atheist? Can a person reject the notion of self and lead a truly selfless "life"? No - I don't see life, as we know it, exist in true selflessness.

Our true atheist has to settle for retaining the "unprovable" notion of self even after successfully defeating every other superstition. Although this is as good as any human could do, our self proclaimed true atheist has almost arbitrarily chosen few unprovable personal beliefs over the other.

Lets consider a true god believer who has forgone his personal identity in pursuit of his visionary god (imagine a lonely saint in a forest trying very hard to commune with god with no care about his primitive impulses .. yeah - u get the picture!). At first glance, our true believer is a lot dumber than our true atheist for he is basing all his life on an unverified theory. Even at second glance, our true believer stays dumb since he probably leads a suboptimal life from the materialistic view of the world. Should we stop at that view? Take the true athiest, remove the sense of self, and replace it with a grander illusion of god, you get the true believer. Our two fictional characters can (and will) argue forever, faithfully but fruitlessly, about which is the right assumption "I" or "GOD".

Both the true believer and the true atheist are having "fun" (yet another subjective entity) based on their own choice of superstitions and they are incomparable.

57-el-PJoker

This is my new phone number (google voice number). 57-The-Poor-Joker is the expansion for the non spanish folks.

If you guys are looking for creative ways to publish/communicate your phone numbers, I recommend this site.

As I have decided without any doubt that there cannot be an absolute purpose/meaning to my life, I am preparing myself to solely commit to a series of sweet lies, faked shared preferences, strong group affiliations and occasional get-tog-ethers. In short, stay in touch. (If you dont know me and you are reading this.. Assert(0))

PS1:remove/delete all my previous numbers so that you do not get "who is this?" replies

PS2:I got a Samsung Captivate!!

Faces

A cube has 6 faces- how much does a human have?

I really do not know the answer to the question.. I consider human character to be a continuum of things.. it is the most analog thing out there in the world.In other words, there are no discrete quantum leaps in the scale of greatness of a person. In simpler words, all is grey when u start measuring it!

All my life I have assumed that having a single face is the solution to all problems - absolute transparency and universal objective accountability. But now I can assert based on first person experience that absolute transparency is impossible and hypocrisy MUST be the way of life for any civilized person. There cannot be a single face for all of us - the dichotomy gives rise to personality and character.

In short, if your whole life can be explained based on simple reason - that means u have not been living it. Be a hypocrite or be a stereotype - there is no middle ground!

The power of science and mankind

"The world is beautiful, but has a disease called man." Friedrich Nietzsche

We are a disease capable of exponential growth; tolerating, circumventing and eliminating many problems; creating, distributing and managing lots of resources. But where does our power come from ? I am tempted to say "Science". Our mind with its scientific inquiry can unfold mysteries and make this world a better place.

"Simplicity ,when taken to the extreme, becomes elegance"

What happens if we are really really good at science? In the short term, the answer is obvious, more problems solved, increased human life time, more fun time. What if we find everything there is to find? I am afraid that will be a very bad world to live in.. Anyone who cant do physical labor has to become an artist, and I have to go home!

Thanks to Gödel's incompleteness theorems and other crazy quantum physics theories, we can be sure that science will be arround for a long long time. The real power of our species is not in the large amount of complicated things we have managed to decipher but in the never ending quest to increase our understanding.

Critical Analysis of "Angadi Theru" (Market street)

Breathe eat sleep bathe laugh cry earn save can be done with reasonable tolerance by the protagonists in angadi theru; hope safety comfort progress freedom and prosperity cannot be achieved to any degree of satisfaction; love?

Instead of figuratively touching upon subjects like "love is more important than money" using punch dialog like in most ordinary movies , this movie tackles the above question in a tutorial-by-example fashion. Though we can theorize to some degree that material things are NOT important for love (and in turn happiness), to see the theory exemplified in a real brutal world through live characters in realistic scenarios is an amazing experience.

Despite of having a story about people with bleak future, this movie has a positive note all along, sandwiched between scene after scene of brutal, but realistic abuse. The climax of the movie, though at first glance seems like a movie sequence set in a tone of "final destination" (yet another accident? Really?!!), is a quick summary of the entire plot (in my opinion) : "love + hope > dire circumstances"

Critical Analysis of Ayirathil oruvan(one in a thousand) - Tamizh movie

Ayriathil oruvan is a tamizh movie by selvaragavan, staring karthik, parthibhan, rema sen and andrea.

If you have seen previous selvaragavan films, you could guess that, this would be another "Chery" boy meets city girl, falls in love, kind of story. Throughout the first half, the familiar selvaragavan scenes are retained with a good blend of humor and reasonably strong story telling. You get to see mass killings, gory deaths following some mystery trail - keeps you awake.

The second half calls for more criticism. Selva changes the genre of the movie from adventure,comedy to mystery,gore in the interval gap. Though all else has changed, sex still takes predominant role in plot development. Seduction, gore, magic, gladiator-sequence, more gore and a 300-climax fight followed by rapes and soldiers dying with the king. The second half of the movie is so intense and some visuals so stunning that I could still recollect them as if it were a ghost movie. The pure tamizh delivery combined with costumes were a definite plus to the movie.

There were a lot of pitfalls in the movie, like lack of graphics budget, our ancient kings de-glorified to barbarians. In spite of all that, to everyone's surprise, there was a story in a commercial movie! How often does that happen?

Critical Analysis of Vettaikaran(hunter) - Tamil movie

Vettaikaran is an amazing tamil movie staring Vijay and Anushka. It successfully beats even the lowest expectation possible. I am not concerned about the actual lack of any story (what did you expect from Vijay?), page long punch dialogue without any punch or the twisted physics employed in stunt sequences. I was prepared for it and can sit through that crap. I am trying to decipher the chronology of events to really understand was there ever a screen play written.

I want to decipher the creators intent to see if there was any thought process in the entire story line. If you are worried about SPOILERS, there is none. In fact, I cannot think of any SPOILER to write - there is no piece of information given before hand will make the movie any better/worse to watch.

1) Ravi (Vijay) is studying 12th standard (for the fourth time) and wants to become a super cop called "Dhevanath". Following the supercop's footsteps, He drives an auto to pay a tuition fees and lives in a hostel actively , flirting with Suseela (Anushka). Occasionally, he does a remotely "benevolent" act, like opening up windows in class rooms, clearing traffic, but does not let you give credit for him by backing the act with a lengthy dialogue. The whole pattern was vaguely familiar from "Sorry Shaktiman".

2) There are a whole bunch of villains, who do bad things. Ravi starts a fight with the villains mainly to rescue his class mate. The "vettai" (hunt) starts at that time and becomes a full fledge war.

3) The war is much like a turn-by-turn game but without any strategy. Both teams are not capable of looking beyond the next step. It is very similar to chess, because nobody can kill Vijay(I was secretly hoping someone will). Some random villan will be hit/killed by Vijay's plan. Everything else is pretty much uninteresting pawn cancellations. To

make it more boring, there are new villans who are also killed/threatened.

4) Ravi hits Chella. Chella calls the cop (Kattabomman) to arrest Ravi and take him for Encounter under the name of a different popular bomb villan. The good-guy-"pretending"-tobe-bad-guy-due-to-no-[eyes-or-family] Dhevanath sends people to rescue Ravi from encouter by making him do an apocalypto jump. Ravi steals Kattabomman's gun and does the real encounter instead of the fake one there by making the police immune to his presence for the rest of the movie.

5) Kattabomman(the bad cop) losing his second wife Janu for the hairy guy decides not to be a villan and helps Vijay proceed with his next grand strategy, which is drive an auto straight to the villans place (If its that easy why didnt he do it before? oops - sorry its a climax fight.). Due to Kattabomman's insult, the villan decides to enter politics and so Ravi and his friends hate him even more.

6) No one exactly happens in the climax gun shot moment can never be truly understood because its basically few people dancing with guns and aruvas; the villan dies at the end, killed by the blind supercop with voice directions from Ravi.

I had a few laughs at step 1 but was waiting for it be done with when the vettai started. If you watch random youtube videos, with same actors in it you can probably make similar causal analysis and derive your own story which is more solid than this one.

If you are heavily drunk or if you are less than 6 years old, you will probably find this movie very good.

Vettaikaran = "Disgrace to humanity"

What does not change?

The monitor you are looking at probably refreshes more than the rate your eyes can recognize just to give you the constancy feeling of the text that is being displayed. Of course, I am assuming you are not printing this stuff out (a very safe assumption).

For a simple interface like a web-browser displaying junk of text, we need a lot of things unchanging - giving the constancy feeling which is very essential for us to "do" anything. How much does the universe have to "do" to give us the constancy feeling that we so much enjoy. "The only thing that does not change is change itself" - is a well known observation by some random old dude many centuries ago, though the constancy feeling that does enable us to observe and appreciate the change is equally (if not more) important. So what does the universe maintain constant for us to enjoy life? Which cardinal constraints should all physical and chemical reactions follow?

1) Energy: Energy is not lost or gained but remains constant in any reaction. Though, if you very small particles (quantum stuff), energy and mass are constant (because Einstein says energy and mass are interchangable).

2) Momentum and Angular momentum: Take a particles mass multiply it by its velocity (or angular velocity) and you get the momentum. Do anything (walk, jump, cry or die), you should conserve momentum as badly as you should conserve energy. It so happens, even the small stuff inside the atom needs to conserve momentum and angular momentum.

3) Charge: Charge is a property shared by all particles. +ve, -ve or neutral. Once a particle has a charge, it cannot magically loose it. In any type of reaction, if a charge comes in, one of the outputs should take the charge out. So the overall charge is same.

4) TCP: time reversal, charge conjugation and mirror reversal. This conservation happens only in quantum stuff. Take any quantum reaction,

a) take the outputs of the reaction and run the reaction backwards (time reversal)

b) Conjugate the charges (electron to positron etc..).

c) Run the reaction in mirror image. Every particle spins clockwise or anticlockwise, just swap them.

If you do all these, you should get the original inputs back! - theoretically of course.

These are the only things that are always there and give us the continuity feeling that we are so used to. So wat? Nothing, just typing junk as usual. Go ahead and do some real work instead of wasting time on pointless stuff on the net.

Hollywood Hollywood

I always thought road trips are those kind of things which everyone pretends to be excited about because it sounds cool. To my surprise my first driving road trip proved to be awesome fun and profoundly entertaining.

I am trying to break the pieces of the road trip into its constiuent parts - but as you all know the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts.. So here all the list of fun things I did last saturday in no particualar order

Aug-15-2009 7:15 am : Pretending to not hear my friend's wake up call to start the road trip.

Aug-15-2009 8:15 am : Continuing previous step with great resolve.

Aug-15-2009 9:10 am : Woke up and asked the simple question "Are we really going?"

Aug-15-2009 9:20 am: Driving my nissan maxima out of my house.

Aug-15-2009 1:00 pm: I travelled at 100 miles/hour for the first time in my car.

Aug-15-2009 3:35 pm: Ate "Soy chicken" in vegan world restaurant.

Aug-15-2009 6:00 pm: Figuring out how to go to Hollywood sign.

Aug-15-2009 7:00 pm: Illegally Hiking toward the hollywood sign.

Aug-15-2009 7:30 pm: Shot a "deeply philosophical" short film (run time 27 secs)

Aug-15-2009 9:00 pm: Sitting in Electirc Karma restaurant waiting for the "sambhar soup" which didnt come with the "Thali" that I ordered.

Aug-15-2009 10:30 pm: Walking in some kind of crazy hi-fi street where things are supposed to be fashionable (meaning expensive).

Aug-15-2009 11:45 pm: Took a picture of my patient friend near Staples building.

Aug-16-2009 12:16 am: Made a wierd left lane change in a curve making the trip adventerous.

Aug-16-2009 1:10 am: Driving back towards L.A to refuel the car.

Aug-16-2009 4:30 am: Found highway driving really boring because there is nothing happening.

Aug-16-2009 5:15 am: Me and my friend had no more topics to discuss and began to start repeating words, phrases, jokes, debates and arguments.

Aug-16-2009 6:25 am: I closed my eyes in sleep while travelling in 101.

Aug-16-2009 6:26 am: Woke up again still in 101 - still travelling in the right direction.

Aug-16-2009 7:15 am: Came home and slept till 3 pm.

Sweet lie or Hard truth?

We are confronted with the choice time and again in a civilized environment. There are always things that we do not want talk about. Lets say a very boring relative calls me up - I have to ask him how he is doing though I have no interest in his wellbeing and I have to laugh for his "jokes".

That part is simple because it is just a temporary mask - or is it? Where does the mask end and "the real you" begins. The way I see it, its much like onions, we have different masks for different people and most probably there is nothing inside.

Assuming that everything discussed so far is reasonably accurate, the next obvious question is what is there in the inner most level of the onion? Cant it be the real you? My best bet is the inner most layer in the onion is just a set of believes held so close to you that you cannot live without them. It just represents one of the stereotypical images at the heart.

In a nutshell, we are all stereotypes of one type or the other and we lie to ourselves about it by forming more and more layers around the fundamental.

Motivation

I woke up at 5:30 PM today evening after sleeping at 4 AM in the morning - a good 13.5 hrs sleep. I woke up twice in between at 10:33 AM and 12:15 PM and chose to go back to sleep because ... ?

The reason I went back to sleep is that I knew that there is no one out there that will know and feel my absence - in other words - anything that I would have done would have been so inconsequential that I figured out that they are worthless in mid-sleep. In essence I have been jobless for yet another day.

What happened to the fire inside me - assuming there is one still left? Have I been fueling it well enough? Have I given it a reason to glow? Or have I let the system-of-things-I-don't-particularly-like and the inertia-of-inaction give in to my fundamental spirit?

Its true that given a deadline I would not have been this lethargic - but shouldn't all motivation be self-motivation? Shouldn't I command myself instead of subjecting myself to a system which commands me to work? Do I have to loose free-will and subject myself to the system-of-things and run inside the system to ensure that I don't choose inaction out of lack of self-motivation?

Ok - Enough work done - I am getting back to sleep :)

Hello Stranger!

If you are extremely calculative and overly analytical and if you start to guess (and assume) the exact reasons why your friends are actually friends with you, you would realize that most of them have ulterior motives to maintain your friendship. Or, if you have some good friends, you may realize that those people are not friends with you for any particular reason(s). There is a strange sense of satisfaction that is derived from the fact that reasons for those friendships cannot be trivially articulated. This of course is a mere difficulty in expression probably due to lack of development of enough words for all possible emotions in literature and cannot be attributed to the "quality" of the friendship. But it can be safely argued that best friends usually belong to this inexplicable category.

We have a vague notion of differentiating friends from best friends using the limits of language and expression abilities. But this theory, even assuming is 100% true is not worth a penny. There is one more simple succinct theory on friendship (rather acquaintanceship) based on communication that will be worth a life times learning - which most people already know, but face great difficulty implementing. "If you need friends, you need to listen!" Seems trivial and easy but its not (at least to me).

Today I had to make a simple conversation asking for a small (probably useless) gift for a friend from a stranger. I was bold enough to initiate the conversation ( I am very happy about it!) but was so embarrassed in the middle of the conversation that I didn't actually realize the fact that the female said something synonymous to "yes- u can have it". In essence , I asked for something from a stranger for which she said yes (in spite of my record poor communication skills) and I didn't register that yes (probably assuming pessimistically a NO!) and walked away like(?) a total fool.

Irksome

Guess what! I found my super power.

I can irritate anyone in this world without even knowing what I am doing. I am kind of happy about this super power but for the simple fact that I cannot control my powers.. the same problem that many heroes have in the not-so-stupid serial "heroes".

I wish I am totally senseless so that I don't care about the damage that I create, thereby there will be nothing to live with or think about. If thats not possible, I wish I am totally sensible never doing the irksome things that I do. But if the later happens, I will have to be dumb for the most part of my life! I talk so much that sooner or later I will have to offend someone. I have been talking talking for so long that I really do not know what will become of my if I don't talk.

In conclusion, be warned about my super power!

hi 08

Lets welcome another set of 365 days of existence. Before I can realize 2 of them are already gone. I don't remember doing anything other than eating and sleeping in the first 2 days of this year. Its tempting to wish to spend my entire life with this level of laziness.

What do I expect from this new year? I want to surprised and excited about something this year.this shouldn't be just another year that I will forget.this should be a terrifying and fun experience.

Now that the requirement is clear what are the things that I am going to do to make sure that this year catches me of balance and keeps me interested in this game of life? I have no answers for that question. I am inherently so lazy and uninteresting that I am getting bored of myself.. I am becoming too predicable.. How to make myself more interesting?

Some one said "It takes 100 years for a person to be bored of himself".. why is this estimate wrong?

1 sem in Retrospect

Most of the things a human does are just imitation of things that are happening around him/her. One of the most important subconscious factors for me traveling from Ambattur to America, was that 50% of my friends back home did that.

But the more important reason is to explore the horizons of my knowledge.. it is not just tat.. for some stupid reason I believe myself to be capable of expanding the horizon of mankind's knowledge about stuff.. Though the very thought of doing something that great is too cool.. am i really up for it?

I have decent grades, a job , an assistantship and a bunch of good friends. What more can I ask for? I want to study the subject for its own sake and not for the sake of grades.. which I do not do.. I want to do "something great" with life.. just dono wat!!

And there is this eternal loneliness that I am destined to feel within myself till death comes and frees me.

Love: The apprisal

Love is a an interesting thing...

it wouldn't be an overstatement to call it the most interesting and exciting thing in life..

Everything about love is pure and gr8 - just like being repeatedly described and exaggerated in the movies.

There is one downside of it - THE STARTING PROBLEM. Love like parental love, or brotherly love is generally always there (at least in my case :) ). Since the family love is always there - it is not that exciting and it does not have the starting problem! But the love in the context of lovers has this starting problem.

Its the ultimate appraisal.

I hate appraisals coz it has to judge at least one of the team mates as a loser, which can end up subjective to a great degree.

To prepare to tell a love is much like preparing for the ultimate Appraisal - The most common complaint about appraisal is "IT IS TOO SUBJECTIVE" - But in the case of decision about a lover, the subjective nature is inherent and cannot be complained about!

This problem is engulfed in a web of so many other issues like ego,fear that it doesn't surface that easily.

But without all theses problems the process of love will be so mechanical that it will not be exciting.. In other words, only when u r ready to risk it all - can u reach the fruit of being Happily ever after .. or ?

Absence

The non-existence of an entity.

I am concerned abt the transformation of existence to non-existence. This transformation is dealt with by loss, death.

One strange type of absence - denial is haunting me. u look at something and can clearly see that it is present- but still deny its existence - this is denial. Many practice denial in many forms.. some deny the existence of hatred in glorifying humanity.. some deny the existence of ambiguities in glorifying religion..

but can i deny the existence of a person (or the most important person!) in my life and carry on my life??

Obviously I CAN, as long as i am busy enough so that i don think abt my life!

The simpler way to answer the question is that there is no one important enough in my life to be the most important person. Writing the above statement gives me a (false?) sense of comfort and power.

The denial is denied by me writing this abstract.

Am i alive?

I am trying hard to figure out the answer to the above question. Defining the state of being alive as the ability to act at my will, i will have to face the fact that I am not alive anymore. You can predict my exact state of mind, sitting/lying position, amount of food waiting for digestion in my tummy etc..etc.. to an amazingly accurate level of precision given my assignment and exam schedules.

But still all your predictions about what I did last Saturday are bound to go wrong. There was too much work on a Saturday evening and all my room mates were immersed in their laptop monitors when a GR8 news spread. There was free food somewhere in college. This is too good a news coz no1 was interested in cooking and no1 ( at least) me was interested to stay in the gloomy room.

We started off to hunt down the spot and where we ended up was a dance floor like the ones they show in those movies! There was snacks instead of meals which diminished our hopes of getting our tummies filled. After entering a dance floor for the first time, and having never danced before, I was standing there in a corner trying to figure out what to do next.

After 5 minutes, nothing changed, the music was foreign to me - so was the entire place. After 15 minutes, I started to shake my body in seemingly haphazard fashion which provoked quite a few comments from my friends - negative ones of course :). I closed my eyes and let the music sink into my body. My thought process was so simple and so lucid. I danced for my own fun without even considering how i look to an external entity. Considering the fact that the room was dark and no1 is there really looking for me or assessing how well I am dancing - it was totally up to me!

The music consumed me - though I never even moved my hands or legs in any way closely resembling any acceptable definition of dance- but i danced !! I danced for so long that the night seemed endless and still I haven't learned a new step or found a new friend .. I was just lost in the beats.. I tried to imitate a lot of steps in vain.. but overall it was more fun than I was hoping for!

Take aways : 1)Never miss an opportunity to dance!
2)Do something crazy! Or else how will u know that you are "Alive"??