What makes somebody GREAT...

Recently I came across ans article where the author was discussing what makes a person Great. He was of the opinion that if the person can perform his duties and tasks with 'dignity' appropriate to the task. What do you think about it?

REMAINS OF THE DAY

It has been long time since I wrote last. A lot has transpired in between. I have started office ( still can't believe). There have been moments in between, like first salary, first relationship, first break-up...actually when I look back there have been lot of firsts. But nothing stands out in my memory. I don't think its memory loss or rather loss of significant memories. But lately I have been pondering on lot of things and started spending more time with books. May be because deep down I feel lonely and feel at least books won't betray me or perhaps its longing for a relationship.
During my this study phase I came across this book "remains of the day" by ishiguro. Well I noticed this book at a fair, and to be frank with you, did not think I will end-up buying it. Primarily because it was Booker Prize winner and thought it will go over my head. But on the contrary I found it really interesting and more importantly could understand what author is trying to convey.
This book is my first of ishiguro novels. I must say he has written and conveyed some beautiful concepts about life in a very simple and tangible way. The story is about an english butler who serves at a very distinguished house-hold. His previous master, to whom he served most of his life, has passed away and has been taken over by some american business-man. He has gone out for 2 weeks and recommends to Mr. Steven( the butler) to take a motoring trip and see the beautiful english country-side.
During this trip he between beautiful places, he has time to introspect and think over the past moments and decisions he has taken. During this time he relives his past memories. Why he behaved in a particular way, why he chose the way he did. What would have been different otherwise and sort of things.
He tells about his previous master, his greatness and how people mis-understood him towards the end. But he remained loyal and did his duty to the best of his ability. He tries to justify and convince the reader about his situation and in that way how he has served humanity. There is a very engaging discussion about what makes a butler a 'great' butler, for that matter what makes a person a great person. Then towards the end sitting on a bench a short discussion makes him realize, that he should stop looking back and try to live in the present.
The novel is written in a very simple but elegant language with beautiful flow of ideas. It almost looks like the beautiful concepts are somewhere hidden in those natural beauties and you have to go there and spend some time with them and yourself to uncover the truth for you.

when few stood against the many......

It started off as any regular hostel day. Got up late and had no idea of what to do next. Had no idea whether the classes were there or not, and even if they were there had no inclination to go. We had decided long back and did our homework about the release of the movie 300. We were planning to go on the first day of the release. But i had no idea that it will be first day first show. I had my breakfast and was about to start with newspaper, when my friend came knocking on the door about seeing it first day first show. I had never tried it before, and considering the promos and trailers it was worth going for it. We stay near a town which u cant place on a map. The theater is some 17 kms away from here and its an adventurous half an hour ride in bus. The whole bus thing is a complete different story altogether , lets not mix up but i will tell you this the way drivers drive the bus here is quite an experience its something like that old road fighter game we used to play on video games. Anyway we reached early and bought the tickets for others , we killed rest of our time by hunting for babes. Trust me seeing our college females for one week is reason enough to go out for green ( its not even greener ) pastures.
Before i start with the movie let me tell you this. We all have gone through movies which are overhyped-underperformed phenomenon. We were scared that this will also fall into the same category because the music , trailers and promos were so good that it raised our bar of expectations. But this movie was amongst the very rare group which out performs your expectations. It was simply superb !!!!!!!!.
Well lets first get over the basic stuff. Its based on the frank miller's graphic novel ( read it its good well sin-city is better). Its directed by Zack Snyder ( who also directed sin city). Its based on the Battle of Thermopylae ( not sure of the spelling) where huge Persian army led by Xerxes attacked Greeks to take up his father Darius age old conquest. History has it that, this was the biggest fleet ever floated across the ocean, they say the numbers were up to million or something. Unfortunately for them they had to begin their conquest by facing Spartans. Now we all have heard about the bravery stories of Spartans on the field. Their code of Strength and Honor , their commitment towards war, their superior strategies and brilliant fighting skills. They are known never to retreat or surrender. Death on the battle field is the greatest glory any Spartan can have and this movie is all about it. Well i wont go into the details but will say, this movie certainly has raised the bar of expectations from a movie. So decide for yourself.

Impression of IMPRESSION on me ......

If we just sit and analyze our single day's actions , you will be surprised to know that we spend an awfully more amount of time impressing others than we should. This random thought just occurred to me when i was sitting idly and watching others so engrossed in their activities that i thought i am the only inconsequential entity in the whole world. But if you carefully take each and every situation of your life , most of the time we are trying to oblige somebody or the other and the worst part is it makes you feel good. I am not saying that this is something wrong, but the problem is in the process we forget our true identity , what we are and what we want. You know this life looks like a rat-race where we are already programmed to do things . going to school-college-then job -marriage- etc etc etc ...you know how it is...... Its really important to stop once in a while and ask the question that is this what i wanted or rather is this the guy or girl i want to see when i look in the mirror....Actually it sounds pretty lame, heard and said many times but if u start implementing in your life, you will definitely notice difference in you and your outlook towards life. Thats why i believe you should spend more time in doing what you want than spending time on what others want from you....

Hostel Life is a must..........

Its magical. I think everybody should once go through the Hostel setup in their respective lives once otherwise you have missed the true essence of life. I cant believe there are people leading their life without the flavor of Hostel Fun in it. Its like ice-cream without chocolate, entertainment without movies, Bollywood without Amitabh Bachchan , Hollywood without Al Pacino, Indian cricket without Sachin tendulkar and many different parallels can be drawn.
It makes a completely different person out of you. You get to know so many people with different backgrounds, habits and idiosyncrasies. There is lots to learn from your college life which can only be felt and experienced , its difficult to put them down in words.

why people need to blog......

The degrees of separation of the people in this world is decreasing at much faster rate then it was anticipated whereas the degrees of freedom are increasing at much faster rate. Since Frigyes Karinthy has put forward this small world phenomenon , the social fabric of our society can be seen in a complete different light. He started with 6 degrees of separation and now due to internet- orkut and blogging , they say it has reduced to 2 degrees of separation ( for those who do not know degrees of separation is the minimum no . of acquaintances by which you can connect any person on this planet to any other person....quite amazing isn't it ) .We all know its shrinking and one of the most constructive outcomes has been blogging.
Blogging started of as an online personal diary, where people went online and started writing about there strange daily happenings and related stuff. But now it has evolved and matured into a form where people can use it as a bank of personal experiences of different people with different things. Like the other day i was looking for some new laptops which have come out in market and i found it a very convenient and varied source to form an opinion ( there is a very famous blog for tech stuff called Engadget ). The other obvious advantages are that u get to know more people, know different things and all but most importantly:

Philosophically speaking blog is a reflection of your character . The way you perceive things, how u take things , how you react to them, how they affect you and many related things. You form an opinion about some event or some product considering your past experience and history with it. But forming this opinion and taking decision is a very important thing, because that is life. Our life is result of decisions we have taken till now. So writing blogs is a very good exercise, it helps you to look at things in a different way.
One very big advantage of blogging is that you start understanding yourself better. Writing about anything may it be your trip to some hill station, your hang out with friends, personal experiences...it requires introspection. You have to think deeper have your thoughts in proper coherent order and then you put it down on a blog. To some people it comes naturally but i find it quite an exercise and something i should do regularly.
I am very lazy about writing things because of the above mentioned reason but because of my cousin sister's (Suchita i owe this to you) enthusiasm to read the blog i am writing this. I therefore dedicate this blog to her.

The Legal Blackhole.....

these are some of the pictures of the Guantanamo Bay prison pics...
















































well the first thing which comes to my mind whenever i hear or read about Guantanamo bay(GB) is Jack Nicholson in the movie A Few Good Men. This movie is about that naval base where Jack is a very senior officer and gets trapped in the legal battle with Tom Cruise over torture and subsequently death of one officer J.F.C William S. Santiago ( gosh i still remember the name, i am good or what ) . Code red as they call it was pretty routine torture thing in which he dies. They have shown how inhuman procedures they still use on their officers who go out of their line to get them back there. I cant imagine what they will be using on the prisoners there. It represents the height of double standards shown by US officials. Firstly, they go about preaching the world about the democratic setup and their benefits and all. You will always notice them first pulling the legal bullshit in everything which goes around the world where they have no business putting their nose in between. On the other side, in GB they detain people without any trials. Its such a foolish thing they have it going their, that they r not even aware of the legal status of the whole prison thing, it doesnt come in the purview of US laws, people are not tried there. The Executive branch of the U.S. government has classified the detainees in Camp X-Ray as "enemy combatants" rather than prisoners of war. They are themselves not sure of what they are doing with them.

Amnesty International has to say about them:
"Guantánamo has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the notion that people can be detained without any recourse to the law. If Guantánamo evokes images of Soviet repression, "ghost detainees" – or the incommunicado detention of unregistered detainees - bring back the practice of "disappearances" so popular with Latin American dictators in the past. According to U.S. official sources there could be over 100 ghost detainees held by the U.S."

there is one story about the detainee which is really famous:

Former Guantánamo detainee Murat Kurnaz , released after five years of captivity. Murat Kurnaz was a Turkish citizen and resident of Germany. Kurnaz claims that he went to Pakistan as part of a peaceful Muslim aid group where he was captured by local people and sold to US military for $3,000. While in Guantanamo Bay, he says, he was subject to various sorts of mistreatment and torture.

Murat Kurnaz's statements are:

Shock rooms: "(In Guantanamo) I was subjected to severe torture. For three months, I stayed in these cold-hot shock rooms. When you go into the room they pump very hot air inside. After that, they pump extremely cold air. It is a horrifying kind of torture. There were various sorts of torture methods including electrical shocks, drowning in water tanks, depriving of food and water, chaining and hanging to the ceiling."

"I witnessed people dying": "They brought a tub full of water. They dipped our heads and held them in water. There I witnessed many people die. They stripped us of our clothes, chaining and hanging us to the wall. I was kept hung to the wall for 4-5 days. Then doctor used to come and check if we could stand more or not. We were not given any food for 20 days. They only gave us one piece of toast, one carrot or one apple per day."

"Psychological Torture": "When none of these torture methods worked, they applied psychological torture. They threw the Quran to the floor and kicked it around, throwing it in the toilet. They were playing Adhan along with other music and dancing to it. They made religious insults. Once I could not feel my feet or hands due to the cold. Then I felt a gun barrel at my head. The soldier was yelling at me saying that he was going to kill me. I started laughing. All other detainees started laughing, too. Because I felt that I was already dead. If they killed me, they would be doing me a favor.

"Sign this document": "One day, they brought this document to me and told me to sign it. For example, there were sentences saying that I would guarantee that I would not get involved in terrorist activities. I told them I never did anything like that anyway, and I would not sign it. I was told that I would not be able to get out of there if I did not sign it. Then they packed my bags and sent me back to Germany."

"All Guantanamo camp footage is fake": "After I was released I saw a lot of photos and video footage of Guantanamo detainment camp. Those are all fake and full of lies. Americans were selecting 2-3 detainees for the footage. They were giving mattresses, blankets, prayer beads and skullcaps to these detainees and were recording these videos. The documentary The Road To Guantanamo is a good work. But it is only telling 20 percent of what happened there. It is hard to show everything that happened over the years in one movie".

Anyway i feel at this stage, when we have made such progress having such camps shows a very primitive side of us. I am not a human-right activist, actually i hate them more then this thing ( its a different story altogether, they are those bloody money suckers who get paid for doing nautanki ). But there is a place where we should draw a line. Using such cruel measures is really shameful. That too its US government who farts the most about human-rights protection. The world should use this as their diplomatic exploit against US and they should start thinking about shutting this BLACK HOLE down.

loved only numbers..... Paul Erdos (1913-1996)

He will be famous or rather infamous ( who got screwed in the paper by that question ) by the people who gave CAT ( a fucked up paper to some how test your management skills ..i never got the connection ) this year ( 2006). There was one question regarding Erdos numbers ( yeah i am talking about the same guy ) in DI section ( if u dont know what it means dont bother). Anyway he is considered the second most prolific mathematician only after the great Euler. I can bet not many people would have heard of him but he is something you should know about, maybe we can draw some inspiration from him to change our lives ( i doubt it though).

Paul Erdos was a Hungarian born mathematician famous for his brilliantly elegant proofs of seemingly unsolvable mathematical problems, especially in the area of numbers theory.
He founded the field of discrete mathematics, the foundation of computer science.

So thoroughly did Erdos devote himself to mathematics that he never married, acquired no property beyond a change of clothes ("Property is a nuisance."), and he refused to stay tied down to a job because it would limit his ability to focus on mathematical problems and to collaborate with distant colleagues. Instead he traveled from one place to another, living out of a half-empty suitcase, staying with fellow mathematicians and sharing ideas from one place to the next. Whatever money he acquired was soon given away, sometimes to charities but often as prizes to those who solved the difficult mathematical problems he set them.

After his siblings died before his birth at the ages of 3 and 5, he was the only child of Anna and Lajos Erdos. His parents were both Jewish mathematicians, from a vibrant intellectual community. He could add at age 3 and at age 4 he could calculate for friends of the family how many seconds they had lived. Erdos showed early promise as a prodigy, and soon became regarded as a mathematical genius by his peers.

Though kind hearted, warm, and likeable Erdos was known for his lack of social graces, the by-product of an unusually sheltered childhood. He was extremely coddled by his mother who had to raise him on her own for several years while his father (captured by the invading Russian army in WWI), was imprisoned in Siberia. It is said Erdos had never tied his own shoelaces until age 14 nor buttered his own bread until he was 21 years old. More significantly, he had been kept home from school (which his mother thought crawling with diseases) all through childhood and early adolescence. Well you dont have to be inspired with this.

As his colleague said, "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems", and Erdos drank copious quantities. He also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month. Erdos won the bet, but complained that mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." The bet won, he promptly resumed his amphetamine habit.

He had his own idiosyncratic vocabulary: he spoke of "The Book," an imaginary book in which God had written down the best and most elegant proofs for mathematical theorems."You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book." He himself doubted the existence of God, whom he called the "Supreme Fascist".

Other idiosyncratic elements of Erdos' vocabulary include:
children were referred to as "epsilons"
women were "bosses"
men were "slaves"
people who stopped doing math had "died"
people who died had "left"
alcoholic drinks were "poison"
music was "noise"
to give a mathematical lecture was "to preach."

He died "in action" of a heart attack. a book entitled "Proofs From The Book" has been published, intended as a collection of the most beautiful mathematical proofs in the spirit of Erdos.

What is your Erdos Number ? :

Because of his prolific output, friends created the Erdos number as a humorous tribute;
Erdos alone was assigned the Erdos number of 0 (for being himself),
while his immediate collaborators could claim an Erdos number of 1,
their collaborators have Erdos number at most 2, and so on.

Erdos numbers have also been humorously assigned to an infant, a horse and several actors.


Well this was pretty long but he deserved this. I have taken much of it from wiki, I admit but its worth reading it. Thanks for the patience and you werent then its your problem i guess.....

mathematicians.....

There is something about maths which is so pure, beautiful and subtle that i cannot explain. It doesnt mean that i am good at maths or something but this is something which fascinates me a lot. Simple logic , equations and representations which can solve most complex problems in the most elegant way is basically the beauty of maths. You know solving a good mathematical problem or puzzle in some elegant way is the second most pleasurable thing i think ( no points for guessing the first most pleasurable thing). I have always admired mathematicians and the mathematical world they live in. Most of them are eccentric or psychotic in their own ways. Here in my blog i will post some really interesting trivia about my favorite mathematicians. We hear a lot about famous physicist, biologists and chemists etc etc et c. But that is not enough, mathematicians play some really important role in our daily lifes, and being ignorant about them is like a crime or something. I mean they have done so much important work that even to comprehend that requires some skill. I dont know why and how they are left out so much on their important contributions but through this blog i will make a feeble attempt to put forward what ever i can so that people ( if you r sulking already buzz off) will appreciate it better. Dont worry i wont bore you with their mathematical achievements , as i am not competent enough to do justice with it. But definitely whenever i post at the bottom i will write some anecdotes about them or something. I will try to organize some material on the ones which are not so famous but deserve that glory and in the process will learn a lot. I hope you will appreciate this effort and will visit me again. Your comments will be most valuable as there will be a lot of ground to cover.

the pledge...the turn....the prestige...

I was surprised with the movie when i was through with it. It touched or rather discovered a complete different emotion in me . It became one of my favorites despite being in the different league of movies i watch. Its a christopher nolan movie so i had to see it. He has that uncanny ability to direct movies blending the characters with amazing screenplay and brilliant script. His previous movies like following and memento having non-linear story-telling sequence. Insomnia and batman begins have brilliant script and screen play with superb cast.
The Prestige is based on christopher priest novel with the same name. Its about two magicians who are obsessed with stealing each others secrets and how eventually christian bale with his superior tricks fools hugh jackman ultimately costing his life. the movie has one part which i specifically like in which christian bale talks about importance of secrets to magician. Scarlett johanssonn looks really cute in the movie after she has reduced much weight from lost in translation. This movie is about obsession, deceit and of course magic. Its really brilliant with the right cast in it.

chupke chupke (old).....hrishikesh mukherjee

Awesome. There are few movies in indian cinema which have such a wonderful combination of humor, family values, romance and of-course hindi as a language. I have seen this movie more than 30 times and i am never tired of watching it again. It has that subtle connection to our indian psyche using humor and romance as the key elements that i am amazed every time i watch it. Hrishikesh Mukherjee is a magician of movies. He uses simple incidents and regular tit-bits in everyone's daily life to generate such a beautiful mosaic of humor and romance that no body else i know of has done it. Be it golmaal , chupke-chupke and other social problems related movies, he uses simple characters and strong music aptly placed in the movie situations with beautiful lyrics to make the fabric of the movie. Its simply perfect. Besides the cast just goes with the plot so well that u cant imagine how it would have been without them or somebody else playing the part. He is my favorite director and a brilliant man to be. The simple plots contain deeper meaning, but are generally straightforward in form, theme and treatment. He directed around 50 films most of which were valued because of their middle-of-the-road accessibility, heart-warming irony and literary sensibilities.
The situation is based around a plot to fool sulekha's ( sharmila tagore) genius jijaji (om prakash) as she kept on praising him in front of her husband ( dharmendra) professor in botany. The plot is so simple but so well executed that i feeel refreshed every time i watch it.
Its a classic and i think every indian should be proud of such movies as part of our otherwise egregious hindi cinema (bollywood).