Sudipta's Life

So I picked up the task of blogging for 30 days straight . As you might know, I have tried to follow the letter of the law: I have posted some regular write-ups during the course of this time. I have put in some placefillers as videos, and even put in some "nothing" posts just to make a post for the day. I have also slipped in my schedule during the end of this stretch - even back-dated posts and videos were not posted. Overall: blogged 24 times out of the scheduled 30. 11 of these 24 posts were placefillers, and 13 were regular posts. I do plan on adding 6 other videos or songs on to the list to make up for the lost days. What good has come of this, you may ask. Well, if nothing else - it has broken off my writers block! I think that was the real intent of this exercise: to get you started on whatever you wish to be doing. And this worked for me! Similar to the Star Trek commander training exercise where the purpose of the test is not to be able to defeat the system but t...

So some people  have been telling me, that posting just a song or a TED video is not fair. That does not constitute a "regular" post, you say. Well, it _IS_ a real post, if I say so. And that is because, I say so - I am the blogger who posted those! This post, also, technically is not a regular post. Although I'd say it is. See, the purpose of this 30-day blogging marathon is to get out of the writer's block. I think I am out of it. But this constant pressure to write something everyday isn't fair. You have a life, so do I. And writing so much isn't possible. But the important thing is that I am still posting stuff. The post that I am writing now could have been a final summary post, you know, at the end of 30 days. But screw that! I have just realized that holding on to an idea, a post, or just a thought in the head that wants to be expressed isn't good. In fact, the pursuit of a "spectacular" post can lead to the death of the post itself. ...

In less than 6 minutes, you shall be entertained and informed about the dangers of blogging as well as of, well,  being a guy:

Reference: Confessions of an all-nighter Yes - I am posting this at 9:30 am. Yes - I am happy and elated. No - the achievement is different this time: haven't written down 1000 lines of code Yes - it was productive work, and I have learned to use a new software which will be useful for me for a long time to come. No - nobody clapped for me at 7:30 am this time either! :( Yes - this post (like the last one) is technically a cop-out: not those ponder - laugh - hate - ponder ones I usually post. Yes - I still want to continue my quest to report success to myself. And yes, many many more posts are coming.

There have been many-a-post sitting idle in my drafts. The urge to write something and get it out of my system has been plaguing me for a while. This particular video from TED actually inspired me to try and write at least a post a day for the next 30 days. Do watch the video and take up your own pledge. And wish me luck!

Some things worry me. Actually, not me but others who read this blog. You see, anything I write here does not necessarily correspond to something happening in my own life. I know that the disclaimer posted on the blog is thick and it covers a lot of ground. The post right after the disclaimer triggered so many chain reactions from a lot of people I know. So I have decided to explain things in a way that would probably make things easier to understand. And of course the last crash course post made some of you happy, others happier... so I need to tell you how I feel so euphoric. As an author of any story, one tries to get under the skin of the character. You will realize this if you try writing something yourself. So for example if I write about Anu the six-year-old, I try to think like her. Or sometimes when I see myself being torn between duty and emotion, I can identify with Arjuna . In some cases, lets say I'm experiencing a particular feeling. And then if I am reminded of s...

Hi Barkha,  As an ex-fan of yours, I have some things (in a rather long post) to tell you. I need to tell you things as a friend, and also as a blogger. Unfortunately, within this last group you've suddenly made a lot of, shall we say, "extremely unfriendly people". You thought you were setting an example by stamping out irresponsible statements by individuals. Instead, you now discover that you've thrown a stone into a hornet's nest.  First, let me tell you that I do not think you wanted to jeopardise the lives of anybody: be it the hostages in the Mumbai hotel or our jawans fighting at Kargil. Nobody, not one citizen of India would "want" to do this. Any such accusation is stupid. The fact that this happened (or at least so we believe) at Mumbai is a different matter. It is a matter of cut-throat competition among different TV channels, and being there at the site of live action and not broadcasting the stuff is simply not "practical". We...

I am a leaf. I am a thought, a story. I am a plot which formed in the author's mind some time ago. That day, the sun had risen after a long time from the misty night. The cold dampness of the evening before was gone. Yes, some days of yore were sunny. The author had written posts which everyone applauded, leaves had sprung forth to spread the green, and the tree had basked in the sunlight. But then the evening came. Unfinished thoughts, vague echoes in dark alleys echoed through the woods and the tree was engulfed in a dense fog. It was the night. That morning, the tree just knew that the sun was rising. The first rays of the sun hit the bud where I was to be born. The mist cleared, and the horizon was suddenly showing itself. A thousand new ideas across a sparkling skyline shone bright, as if in the delight my me being born. A drop of the fresh dew formed in heaven and dropped on the branch. I, the story, was born. I have growed since then. A random sentence here, a little incid...

It is a kingly jest when kings hold out their palms to beg. However, when you weild as much influence as a king, and yet steal from the common man, you are nothing more than a petty thief. More so when you claim to report the unbiased truth, but don't have a conscience of your own. Yes, I'm talking of unacknowledged filching of images and text from bloggers by the mainstream print media in India. It is funny, really... how these newspapers get away with it. Look at the recent example from Shrinidhi 's blog: they just posted it there with no acknowledgement of the source. From a respectable newspaper, you'd expect permission to copy, and some negotiation for monetary compensation. Unfortunately, the Slimes of India believes that they at a higher state of spiritual enlightenment than any respectable newspaper, and hence " Raam naam japna paraya maal apna ". After all, the advaita philosophy preaches the Oneness of all creation, and hence the Theives of India do...

Bloggers, wake up! For long the mainstream media has been plagiarising pictures from our blogs for long. And they seem to get away with it with impunity. Because they don't respond to emails. They don't publish letters sent to the editor about their reporters lifting images with impunity. How can they -- these losers can't stand up to own their mistakes; they don't have the balls to do that. Yes I said it, they lack the balls. They copy images, text, opinions, and they aren't man enough to acknowledge the source: let alone ask for permission or compensate monetarily. Twilight Fairy , Archana , Bobinson have pointed it out before. And now, Shrinidhi finds one of his pics on the Times of India. The question is, how do we fight it? And the answer is right here: we have our own blogs. Remember, united we stand and divided we fall. So on October 2nd, let us all post something about this plagiarism. It should only be fitting that we all stand together and lodge our prot...

Okay, so you've been on the blogging track for quite a while. You began by looking at a few blogs with high readership (at least going by the comment count). Then you thought... what the eff, I can definitely do better! So you began by publishing a blog of your own. Some of your friends were forced to read the first few posts, but then nobody really cared if your cat had cereals or fish bones for dinner last night. Which, admit it, was all you could think about after a month. After some time, even tempting emails such as "Hey dude I just moved my blog from blogspot to wordpress, take a look!" didn't seem to work. And the fact that everybody knew the one digg on that post of yours was your own doesn't really help matters. So worry not -- here are the top 10 surefire ways of increasing blog traffic (or at least these are guaranteed to spike your traffic for a day): 10. Pataofy blog aggregators You see, we are all human. So find the blog aggregator websites like blog...

When I had published this list of bizarre search engine queries , I thought they were the weirdest ones you can come up with and land on my blog. But, as always, life never fails to disappoint. Ladies and gentlemen, presenting, another set of queries that led to this blog, grouped together for common answers: Interracial fantasy stories; Desi fantasy ladki; Life porno ee: First of all, an ROTFL... okay now let me catch my breath. For the love of all blogdom, what exactly did you expect to find here? Inter-racial fantasy stories? My dear dude/dudette, all those hot blonde chicks you see in the movies don't even give a second glance here towards me, let alone the fact that they are surrounded by tons of Salman Khan replicas. So 'inter-racial' fantasy stories will remain just that --- fantasy! And if you were searching for desi ladki fantasies, you might find yourself suddenly a deeper shade of beet red than those actual beet ads if you happened to know anyone else's fant...

By far, the most common keywords that redirect people to this blog relate to GRE and/or GATE, MTech admissions. Which is a good thing, since they find useful things here (hopefully). Also, the second most prolific keywords that lead here are my name. Yes, every time you search for that and come here, I know about you --- it is not exactly such covert sneaking up here, you know! But, amusingly enough, some people land here looking for 'special' things, we shall say, and I intend to answer your queries here as best as I can. Unfortunately, the stock of weird keyword searches is not as long as the ones here or here , so you will get specialized attention. 1. Bengali smell armpit --- Now, why on earth you were looking for the exact smell of Bengali armpits, I'm not sure. Maybe you need some lactatives or purgatives, maybe your mornings are not as 'yellow' as you would want them to be. Or maybe you're frustrated enough with the sample smell of armpits from all over...

We all know about the writer's block. When the blogger doesn't want to write, when there may be ideas in the head but the body is just too lazy to type. When there are demands on time, place or net usage and you simply cannot get yourself to sit down and write a coherent blog post. Yeah, it happens to all of us. However, there is another one --- the commenter's block. When you read a post but don't post a comment. Yes, all ye lurking readers... I am talking about you. But, believe me: I completely understand. There is this block --- the commenters' block which is very difficult to overcome. You read a post, maybe enjoy it and then also perhaps it provokes thoughts. You might also want to go into the comments section and see what others added to the discussion there. But going out to type one yourself is a problem. There is this awkward fear, the nagging doubt that your comment may be judged, even met with disapproval. Also, then the fact that you've read the pos...

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...

One of my friends, who regularly reads this blog, told me recently that the quality of writing has gone down in the last 2-3 posts. Even though the last post had found mention on Desipundit, I thought she was right. On hindsight, I think the last post was mentioned partly because it talked about love and relationships, finding the perfect woman/man etc. But she was right: the post on free pizza and drinks was a sort of forced humour: something that could have been written more hilariously or perhaps with a dash of sarcasm. The next post on the human billboards was well, sort of ok. But I'd rate it to be a 3/5, but not a 4/5 or a 5/5 because umm... something was missing. As I ponder over the phenomenon, I think this applies to a lot of things, not just writing blogs. When I used to go to debates or elocution contests when I was absolutely convinced of what I was going to say or speak, I used to come out with flying colours. When I wrote essays, or even answers in the language exams...

It seems like a fairytale. And the worst part is, I cannot fully feel that it is over now. Yes, the AGRE is over and well, it went better than I expected it to be. It feels nice to be back. And the best part is that I have two things to tell you: one a bit of my gyaan and the other is well, just somthing which you might like. I have been pondering over something while I was not blogging, and that is, what is it exactly which I miss. To see as a pure machine, I can see that I saved myself some very important time, and also some keystrokes. But I am human, and so I am prepared to spend much time and energy on keystrokes just to blog... because at the end of the day it is my diary. When I ponder over things, I sometimes come to conclusions. And I want to record these thoughts here... you just never know when you think of what. Also, as Abhinav puts it here , you cannot make the baby pee just by asking it to. It just happens, and I am told that when a baby wants to pee, you better let it d...

Issues, assumptions, and show-stoppers... if you are a manager in some software organisation, they set your heart aflutter. If you are a software engineer, you keep smiling secretly because you can relax till that all-important-entity called the 'client' comes in and resolves them. And if you are blogger, well, you just plain get sad, because you have to put blogging 'on hold' :( Yes, you got it right, I am going to stop blogging. Why? Because I don't have time. I have to apply to the best possible places, I need to finish my SoP and my Recos, and need to finish a lot of other associated things in the application. If you have gone through this process, you'll know. And the icing on the cake is the AGRE or the Computer Science Subject GRE that I need to take to prove my mettle once again. Oh, I am already getting the creeps because I don't even know the entire syllabus now. To clear it well, I need to study. To study, I need to shut off distractions, and to d...

Huff... puff... and a thousand other such exclamations later, I am back. Before I launch into a detailed narrative of what I have been doing this long, let me give you all the good news: I scored 1500 on the GRE (and the test is out of 1600, for the uninitiated). That was last weekend on Friday. Today, as I type, I am supposed to go for my GRE, but the Marwah house where the test centre is in Mumbai seems to be drowned, and so it has been rescheduled for 20th August. Till then, therefore, I am here. Ah, folks, let me just thank all of you here for all your good wishes. Everybody who visited, said I'll fare well, wished the best of luck to me... thank you!! I cannot tell you well how I have controlled myself, have been swearing at self-imposed chains and fetters, and how I have squeezed myself into this recluse. I missed all of you, your tales, your messages, your comments, your chains of discussions. This has been a trying time for me... not visiting the favourite haunts, not com...