Sudipta's Life

Yaay... the #%&!$ project deadline is finally over! All pending comments have been answered, and I plan to visit all your blogs soon. Anyway, I was looking through some blogs of people I know in person and noticed that I had been tagged over a year back by my sister. Well, it is never too late to take up the tags, and this one pleases me no end. I need to describe eight different qualities I would like to see in my would be life-partner (who, wherever she is, already has my sympathies :D ). And then I need to pass the tag onto 4 others. As I see it, there are two ways of answering the tag. One is to be honest with myself and write the truth here: in sincere detail. But that, I suspect, will start giving my mom and a lot of other people a lot of ideas, besides putting me through some traumatic (blogging) experiences. Therefore, in the interest of public mental health, I wouldn't do that. Instead, the alternate way of describing the potential unlucky lady would be as follows: Sh

Yes, I'm short of time. So I haven't also been able to reply to the comments on the two posts below... but sure as hell am following the discussions :) Anyway, this is just the last update to this post, as promised. The point being, " Mukhpora kothakar " translates roughly into 'the one with the burnt face', essentially meaning a not-so-handsome monkey. :) So, if you have not actually said the same to some Bengali guy/gal --- you were just saved from a lot of embarrassment. Therefore, I am sure everyone like Pallavi, Sky, Manasi, etc who expressed anguish over me apparently classifying only Bong girls as hot: now you know the reason. And dear Bong girls reading the post, none of you are burnt-face monkeys. Imagine the fun of a guy coming up to you and saying that in all innocence, though: so that you can take pity on him and his well-intentioned attempts at Bengali. Wouldn't you pity him and find him cute? Wouldn't he be scoring a few brownie points? S

Buying a gift for a guy is so easy: you just need to find something useful. It can be a home repair toolkit, it can be a good camera, or even a set of the latest action flick DVDs. Bringing a birthday gift was never any easier. The same, unfortunately, doesn't hold true for the ladies. Once in a rare while, it so happens that a sudden object catches my fancy when I am not actually looking for a gift. At these moments, I just know that it will be the perfect gift to give to the lady in question. The price of the object doesn't matter then: it can be the cheapest thing around but it is always the gift. But I am rarely so lucky. The 'useful-gift' syndrome keeps rearing its ugly head and lands me in the most embarrassing situations. Sample this: in Scotland, I was in a superstore looking around for cosmetics to give to my sisters. I entered the section, where two other girls are going through the aisles and comparing notes, and I stood there flabbergasted. I mean, lip glos

The theme of the post is from a Hindi poem a friend of mine discussed with me in my undergraduate college. I don't remember the poem or its author, and would be grateful if any of you can actually send me a link to them. For those of you who do not know the story, let me play Aesop for a while. Panna Dhai was the nurse of Udai Singh, lawful heir to the throne of the royal Mewar dynasty in Rajasthan. She had practically played mother of the baby, breast-feeding him from birth and taking care of him along with her own son (Chandan) who was almost of the same age. The political scenario of the Mewar throne, however, was very uncertain at this time. A distant cousin of the ruling dynasty, Banbir, was the operational regent for the throne and had the teenage crown prince Vikramaditya under house arrest because of his juvenile ways while at the seat of power. Banbir thought that he could usurp the throne amidst all this turmoil and therefore, one night murdered Vikramaditya, the 14-year-

Everybody, this is a guest post by my room-mate, Arunabh Das. Please feel free to comment, etc. (err... if you actually manage to beat Agent Smith, that is) ---------- A Life-Hacker's Handbook (LHH) - Or how to program the matrix - (10 commandments) I do not claim that all of the ideas here are completely original. But they are ideas I believe in, nonetheless. Let's dive right in - #1 - You better believe it - There is a state of nirvana. There is such a thing as a state of nirvana. Not counting the ozone layer depleting, the polar ice caps melting and meteors crashing into us from outer space, i really honestly believe that it is possible to find a set of rules that you can live by, which you can apply to your life globally so as to optimize your ergenomic configuration, maximize your opportunity and enrich your existence. I guess the Chinese call it Feng Shui. I call it my Karmic Configuration. This guide is an attempt to outline those rules.

The best ideas come to me at the worst of times. What else can explain me sitting down to write this blog post at 3:00 a.m.? Actually, blog post ideas take some time to coagulate in the head. The seed, or the little irritation is planted by some event or some random memory. And then it sits there for days, sometimes weeks, gathering layers upon layers of ideas and coherence in the warmth of the oyster shell. And then, one moment of inspiration and a cup of warm coffee later, they tumble out, sparkling as ever to form the beads on this necklace. Even as I write, I have at least 4 unpublished drafts sitting in the list of posts, waiting for me to find words to express them with. And then there are some more ideas that are just churning in my head --- some deliciously sarcastic, some chuckling-ly funny and some others that talk of serious topics. But these aren't all that keep my head occupied all the time. There are thoughts about assignments and presentations which are due in a coup

One of the attractions of studying in a big university is that you get seminars and talks from people all around the world, from all sorts of interesting disciplines like psychology, linguistics, astronomy, etc. About a couple of weeks back, we had a very interesting talk by Dr. Scott Nowson from the Centre for Lanugage Technologies at Macquaire University in Australia. The topic of the talk was, "The Secret Language of Blogs: It's not WHAT you did, it's HOW you blogged it". Among other things, his research focuses on "linguistic analysis to explore personality and gender difference in the language of weblogs" [quoted from his homepage]. Needless to say, I didn't need a second invitation to go for the talk! The results and the conclusions he presented were based on the analysis of 71 blogs, recorded over a single month. All of them had answered and passed around some meme which was a 41 point psychology questionnaire to determine the profiles of the peo