Category: Random Draws

On Saturday afternoons in Berkeley, California, I would to listen to Michael Feldsman’s show What Do You Know? on KALW 91.7 which starts off with the question “What do you know?” and the audience responds “Not much! And you?”

I like that sort of stuff. Opening lines and closing lines, I mean.

For instance, on Garrison Keillor’s radio show A Prairie Home Companion , he always ends his monologue with “That’s all the news from Lake Woebegone — where the women are strong, the men are good looking and all the children are above average.”

Many years ago I used to be a big fan of Dave Allen, a British commentator on TV commentator on British TV with a show called “Dave Allen at Large.” He had a unique style. The setting was simple. He would sit on a high stool dressed in a suit. He delivered a monologue on all sorts of topics. He would smoke and drink scotch whisky during his monologue. And he would always end his show with the line, “Thank you, good night, and may your god go with you.”

Movies provide great lines as well. Sholay was a mine for great lines such as ”Tera kya hoga, kalya?”. One of my all-time favorites is from the movie The Sixth Sense where the boy confides that “I see dead people!” You have to say it in a tiny hoarse whisper. When I say it, it just cracks me up.

That’s an AP photo with the caption: Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and guests at the start of construction of the canal: “I’m more than happy.”

Since a picture speaks a thousand words, I will not have to comment. Continue reading “India’s Panama Canal”

There are places I remember all my life,
Though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain. . .

IIT Kanpur

In case you have been wondering about the break in blogging, wonder no more. I have been on the road. Last week, I was first in Mumbai and then I was in IIT Kanpur.

Visiting IIT Kanpur was a bittersweet experience. The place was at once both familiar and totally unfamiliar. The place had not changed all that much since I was a computer science student there a lifetime ago, but I had changed. What had changed was not in front of my eyes, but rather behind my eyes.

There were ghosts there as I wandered Hall V, where I lived. “Misty watercolor memories, for the way we were …”
Continue reading “Journey to Kanpur — Part 1”

Subho Nobo-borsho, as we say in Bengali, which is the greetings on the “Auspicious New Year” since today is the Bengali New Year!

New year, new resolve. What else to quote but Guru Robindranath Thakur’s (aka Robindranath Tagore) prayer from Gitanjali, a collection of song offerings:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Beautiful China

Via Myke’s Blog, these pictures of scenes from China are breathtakingly beautiful. This is a magical world that we live in.

Searching Tips

And talking about magic, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur C Clarke has famously noted. To me the technology which powers Google search is magical. Almost all of the world’s information at the tip of a few keystrokes. Again, via Myke, I came across a bunch of tips on how to search more effectively on Google.

May your searches always end serendipitously.

E. F. Schumacher: “We must do what we conceive to be the right thing and not bother our heads or burden our souls with whether we will be successful. Because if we don’t do the right thing, we will be doing the wrong thing and we will just be a part of the disease and not a part of the cure.”

Thanks, Myke, for that beautiful quote.

Pippa’s Song

The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn
Morning’s at seven
The hill-side’s dew-pearl’d
The lark’s on the wing
The snail’s on the thorn
God’s in His heaven—
All’s right with the world!

Robert Browning (1812-1889) painted that beautiful word-picture. It has the quality of a haiku–sparse and based in the here and now. What I especially like is the “zooming in” that he does. The time of the year is the best — spring. Then it is day time, and not just any time of the day but it is at 7 in the morning. And what is going on at that time? All things are in their place and the world is perfect. It recalls to mind the insight that Siddhartha (in Hermann Hesse’s novel) communicates to his friend, “The world is perfect at every moment, Govinda.”

Google Romance must be the hottest thing this April 1st. Too many people have emailed me about it. I thought it was rather lame compared to their other crackpot beta releases. (Do take their Google Romance Tour, though.) Continue reading “Google Romance”

Today I was at the bank depositing some cash when the teller discovered that one of the Rs 500 bills I gave her was fake. Visual examination did not reveal that the bill was counterfeit; only under UV light can one make out that genuine bills have a silver line which glows while the same line on a fake bill does not glow.

One of the simplest ways of undermining an economy is to introduce a huge amount of fake currency. From time to time, one hears of counterfeiting operations in Pakistan. I suppose the Pakistani terrorists operating in India get paid in fake Indian currency. What a wonderful way to kill (sic) two birds with zero stones. And I presume that some of the billions of rupees of fake currency circulating in India is brought into the country via the bus and train service between Pakistan and India.

I don’t have any proof, but my suspicion is that certain political parties in India gain from this sort of transactions.

In any event, please pass the word along that accepting Rs 500 (and perhaps Rs 1000) bank notes may be risky. If people are vigilant, the fake bills will not be able to enter the system.

The cost of living is high in India, as I mentioned the last time.

The dominant theme around where I live in Kalyani Nagar in Pune is one of massive construction. Multistoried residential buildings, shopping centers and office complexes are sprouting with astonishing rapidity. Despite the increase in the quantity supplied of floor space, the quantity demanded is growing even faster. This is evidenced by the fact that the price per square foot of built up space is growing at an astonishing 30 percent or more per year.
Continue reading “The High Cost of Living — 2”