Sudipta's Life

"90% of all quotes on the internet are made up" - Abraham Lincoln.  I cannot tell you the number of times I have had to leave that statement as a comment on Facebook. Consider this Facebook "forward", if you will:  It is attributed to Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam because it suits the narrative that my friend wants to believe in. A lot of you will probably doubt if Dr. Kalam ever said that. I suspect (actually, fervently hope) that my friend who posted this also had a flicker of doubt the source. But he went ahead and posted it anyway.  That is what scares me the most. People are willing to "forward" anything that tickles their funny bone. I have grumbled about silly email forwards before. But Facebook takes it to a whole new level. This time, you don't even need to fill out the "To:" field. You can just "share" it on your timeline and people will read it. I am surprised at the incredible gullibility of people, and sometimes just f...

To have what isn't yours: is it stealing or sheer good luck? To most people, the moral compass swings depending on the manner in which you came across the object in question. For example, if you found a hundred rupee note while you were taking your morning stroll, most people would think it is just their luck and would pick up the money. However, if you just saw that the note dropped off someone's pocket in front of you, will you still silently pocket the money or will you call the man and let him know? Like I mentioned, the "manner" of acquisition of the object matters most when deciding if it is morally self-permissible to have it. What you do with it is a completely different question: some would donate it to a beggar or charity nearby, others would just add it to their wallet. Let us not digress there for now. Guilt-free rationalization of being the beneficiary of an error is an art to be learned. Allow me to explain. Shoplifting and clerical errors are part ...

Karna from the Mahabharata is a character you keep running into from time to time. Two brilliant posts by the Jabberwocky and Mr. O-V-Shake just reminded me of my trysts with Karna, and I want to recount them here. Actually, even before I dive into Karna's character and the dramatic mix of luck, valor and cowardice in his life, let me tell you about when I first heard or read about Karna. No it wasn't a textbook (or the Mahabharat TV series). It was during one of Soumitra Chatterjee 's visits to my home town. For those of you who know him from just the movies, you definitely do not know the great elocutionist and reciter that is he. I have been fortunate enough to listen to his recitation of the " Karna Kunti Sangbad " - a great poem by Rabindranath Tagore. The poem depicts Karna's last and only honest conversation with Kunti when she begs for her other son's life.If you ever get a chance, definitely listen to it. When I came across this poetic novel...

I keep getting ideas from time to time. These little moments of inspiration usually occur out of nowhere. Sometimes, the idea that pops into the head is related to something I am working on, such as: "Oh perhaps if this screwdriver had a magnetic tip, it would be easier to use". Most of the times, though, these are just random ideas which pop up during absolutely irrelevant times. For example, when working on one software project, I am reminded of the exact configuration on some totally unrelated machine that would solve someone else's problem. The point being: they come aplenty, and they are not necessarily related to the task at hand. Now, such ideas are of two kinds. One kind are improvement ideas, or "feature enhancements" in software engineering lingo. The others are quick fixes to problems that I might have been pondering about for a while. The third set of ideas (which, although I began the paragraph with "two kinds" still makes sense), is th...

If there is one sport in my mind, where it is simple non-stop adrenaline where one has to be both tough and skillful at the same time, it is football. No, I am not talking about American football here - neither do I want to call it "soccer" as that word seems to take away the glory from the sport. I would let John Cleese clarify this detail before I speak my own mind about football itself: I do have an appeal, however, to all the modern heroes of this game: please grow some balls and become men again. See, otherwise it becomes difficult to call you a hero. The strange thing is, when a child is growing up, the act of faking an injury never comes naturally to him. However, suddenly on the day when the school is playing another, or even just Class VII section A is playing section B, people start dropping left and right, writhing in agony. Tough guys who would easily take a blow from a hammer to their shin bone without showing the slightest pain suddenly become these pan...

I know I should be seeking compensation from Mr. Ratnam, but his pseudo-protagonist and himself have become equally evil by subjecting movie-goers to a torture as long and boring as this movie. I haven't written many movie reviews in the past, but given the standards set by the movie, I doubt if I can do worse. Seriously, sire... semi-psycho and pseudo-Maoist protagonists deserve a much more ugly death and much less sympathizing on screen, let alone showing the police as a bunch of incompetent buffoons whose camps are always available for over-running by a herd of bare-bone cows on their last scamper. Lets start at the beginning. Imagine, if you will, a perfect confluence of the movie Predator and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead . Arnold Schwarzenegger was covered in mud as a natural camouflage while hiding from the super-powerful alien. Howard Roark begins the novel while standing naked on a clifftop watching the rising sun. And what does Mr. Bachchan do? He is covered in mud, ...

Slimy greasy and red-stained yellow, dripping with remains of vegetables and some chicken blood, with fingerprints dabbling in and around the knob. Thats the microwave timer knob in our apartment. We were wondering aloud the other day about why Das (my roomie) had bought this analog knob-operated microwave while the digital one might have been available for maybe ten more bucks. The place might have looked a lot cleaner then without the greasy knob if we had a digital keypad, not to speak of better control and stuff. He let out a nostalgic sigh and explained things like this: "Actually, both microwaves cost the same --- the digital and the analog one. That day I was roaming around Walmart looking for the microwave to buy when I came to this aisle lined with microwaves. The digital ones were right on top, at a visible eye level. The analog ones were down near the floor. BUT, the digital one had a plain blank cover with a picture of the microwave itself. The analog one had a photo o...

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...

I was in Class VIII then: in my hostel. One sunny afternoon in winter, our chief hostel warden and the warden summoned about 5-6 students to the dormitory roof, apparently for a little 'chat' with all of us. I was there on the list, and somehow the conversation drifted to which students were 'goody-goody' nincompoops who could only study and were otherwise butter-fingered monkeys, etc --- a pithy expression for whom in Bengali is 'Nadu Gopal' . There was some fun being thrown around: why someone does qualify and someone doesn't, who is a Nadu Gopal, and such. Suddenly, the Chief Warden asked, "So, who do you think among you here is the most suitable to be called 'Nadu-Gopal'?" There were some mealy-mouthed 'Yes', 'No'-s and then he asked me straight, "Sudipta, who do you think?". I took a look around, picked one fellow and pointed fingers at him and said, "That person: him!" Upon hearing my answer, the ge...