tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-284304502024-03-08T01:03:34.481+05:30Billions of Blue Blistering BarnaclesUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger76125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-7314061492120514592017-05-11T01:01:00.001+05:302017-05-12T10:22:14.683+05:30Musings on Baahubali 2<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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These are some thing that popped into my head as I was watching the movie and cracked me up.<br />
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Technically there are no spoilers and so I am not going to give you a spoiler alert. You can just make up a movie in your head with what you knew about Baahubali 1 and if you had world class graphics, your version of Baahubali 2 will be very close to the actual version. No, I will not be “revealing” why Katappa killed Baahubali if that is what you are worried about.<br />
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1) Most of the movie was about What Would Amerendra Baahubali Do? Use levers and slings (gears and pulleys too, but mostly levers and slings). Tells me that guy must have played a lot of angry birds. Sheryl Sandberg <i>was</i> right then - one <i>should</i> marry the nerds. Rippling muscles are preferable but optional.<br />
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2) Strong women characters? Yes, a step forward and everything (as Baradwaj Rangan remarked in a review, in most other masala movies, the only thing the hero teaches the woman is a lesson and not archery). But eventually, women, even wise and able ones like Sivagami, could be manipulated so easily, no?<br />
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3) Sivagami with all her glowering eyes could pull off Padayappa - 2 ( a Neelambari spin-off)<br />
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4) I was expecting Baahubali to discover granite after he is banished and is working with the masses as I silently sang Vetri Kodi Kattu in my head. Instead, he ends up doing only the Padayappa Panchayat scenes.<br />
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5) All the UFC level bashing in the last forty minutes with all kind of heavy-duty iron implements made up for all the super-hero movies that I have watched only on the trailers. Baahubali becomes Thor, Hulk, Flash, Captain America all at once.<br />
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6) Every action scene with Baahubali Sr and Jr. that involved sliding with knees, bashing the ground with knees or falling on knees from a great height was a physically painful to watch for a person recovering from knee surgery. Kids, don’t try these stunts at home.<br />
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7) Coronation scene was so much like Inauguration day. Insecure king, the person who lost the throne gracefully conceding, the colorful people who were not wearing pantsuits, but were very pantsuit nationesque in their protest. Kattappa was Comey and was all “Oh Lordy, what have I done”.<br />
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8) When Nasser (sorry, don’t remember his name in the movie) and Sivagami talk about potential anarchy in the kingdom, and when Sivagami says “Don’t worry, I have a plan”, I half expected it to be electoral college.<br />
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9) The most unbelievable thing in the Baahubali franchise is Tamannaah's role as an archer. A size-zero, mostly anorexic physique will work for her next cutie-pie movie, but come on, a warrior, with those spindly arms? Especially, with a title like Baahubali, one would have expected some weight training.<br />
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Here is a crazy thought. This movie would have been as big a blockbuster regardless of how it ended. Instead of being so predictable, why could they have not killed both the hero and his nemesis? Why couldn’t Devasena rule the kingdom? Somehow all the female leads that the director wanted us to believe as strong capable women, were only so good to glower and hatch plans, until the boys start bashing each other, with and without the armor. Yeah, yeah, it is a masala movie, but people would have bought this alternate ending and Devasana potentially would have Made Magizhmathi Great Again. Even Tamannaah. But no, the hero will prevail. Only Indian Oscar nominations kill off the hero.<br />
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Reminds me to watch Wonder Woman. Claire Underwood (okay, Robin Wright) in an Amazonian suit might just cleanse me off all the testosterone.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-30571918021295544942016-12-06T09:06:00.001+05:302016-12-06T10:51:28.960+05:30Broken - Part 1<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I wrote this article a while ago and forgot to post it.<br />
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This saga began on a Friday. It had been a fruitful day for my research. I had had an optimistic meeting with my advisors and a great lunch with colleagues. I went back home in the evening mightily satisfied with my life. After taking a nap and browsing through thirty restaurant pages on Github, I told myself that I had to kickstart my productivity by taking a walk to this really nice place that sells homemade ice-creams. </div>
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Halfway through the walk, I thought to myself that my biggest fault seemed to be the fact that I keep squandering my potential by giving into impulses. After all, I had spent all summer intensely working out. I was swimming more than a 1000 yards every other day and weight training on other days. Late night ice creams did not fit into the plan, for you see, I had a plan.<br />
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Instead, I decided to walk towards the gym. It was about 9:00 PM and I thought I could take the late night shuttle back home that would drop me at my doorstep. With new pink shoes, new pink shirt and teal shorts, I felt empowered. I was walking towards the university and I told myself that how my life worked itself out and how nice it was to be where I was. I told myself that I should never drive myself crazy and think about how happy I felt at that moment on what was a beautiful Friday night in Pittsburgh. I am not making this up to build this into a story. I was truly happy and in a weird way, what happened after this makes me worried about feeling happy about anything, ever again. I am forever going to be haunted about how I jinxed myself.</div>
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Ten minutes later, at the gym, I had 10 pounds in each hand and was doing lunges. After three lunges, a voice popped in my head and told me that I ought to be doing reverse lunges because the forward ones were too easy. I happily stuck my leg back and as I bent my knee, I realized I was losing balance for my other leg was tripping over what was a free weight on the floor. I had just broken what I now know as the golden rule for lunges - never stick your leg in an unknown direction assuming that no one would leave a free weight lying around. Along with these rules, I had also broken a whole bunch of things in my knee.<br />
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Since my knee was in a bent position, when I lost balance and fell down, my knee cap (patella) was slingshot out of its groove as the ligament that holds it in place tore. My patella also managed to tear a piece of cartilage and break a chunk of bone on its path of destruction. For more details and an animated explanation see <a href="https://youtu.be/TVTmz0zAsqA?t=40">here</a>. </div>
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It took a couple of days to understand that this was more serious than it initially appeared to be. It was a week before I saw an orthopedic doctor, two more days to get an MRI and get a diagnosis.<br />
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Two weeks later, the surgeon patiently explained my options to me - I had to get the torn cartilage re-attached to the bone and get my medial patellofemoral ligament reconstructed. I could also get the torn cartilage taken out and get my knee closed up without doing anything about reattaching it. He told me that this would leave my bone unprotected and I would almost certainly get arthritis in ten years and strongly discouraged this. He told me that I was going to get a surgery one way or another.<br />
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In short, I was in for a long ordeal. Sometimes it is so difficult to acknowledge accidents. I had a carefully prepared plan for what was going to be crucial two months and all my plans smoldered when I was gasping on the gym floor holding my knee. I keep trying to understand what made me change my mind from getting that ice-cream - I could have been safe. Why did I have to go to gym on a Friday night when the rest of the world was taking a break. And even if I did go to the gym, wasn't it a good thing? Wasn't I honoring my body with my commitment? </div>
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When I come to the "Why me" question I keep remembering this quote that was once a tie-breaker question in a quiz that I lost. Arthur Ashe contracted HIV due to infected blood that he received during a heart surgery in the early 80s. Apparently, he received tons of letters from his plans asking "Why you". Arthur Ashe was supposed to have said "<i>The world over-- 50,000,000 children start playing tennis, 5, 000, 000 learn to play tennis, 500, 000 learn professional tennis, 50,000 come to the circuit, 5000 reach the grand slam, 50 reach the Wimbledon, 4 to semi-finals, 2 to finals. When I was the one holding the cup, I never asked God "Why me?". And today in pain I should not be asking God ‘Why me?’</i> "</div>
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Of course, I haven't achieved anything close to what Arthur Ashe did and it would be extremely presumptuous of me to overstate my sense of purpose, but it feels like a great way to think about adversity. I have always been that person for whom statistically improbable things happen - I get business class upgrades, I win raffles, my name comes up in a random draw, I get picked up for TV game shows and win them. I have accepted all this unquestioningly and the only way to accept this suffering is to do the same. Not that I have a choice. </div>
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The other day, I mused glumly to a friend that if I had been a horse or a dog, I would have been put down at this point. He pointed to me that I was neither a horse nor a dog and that for a person who tries to build counterfactuals for a living, I was terrible at coming up with a positive one. Accordingly, I have told myself that if I had gone to eat ice-cream something worse would have happened anyway and I should be very glad for the kind of friends who help me keep my sanity.</div>
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What happened after this is best left to another post.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-71214468156816919722015-12-19T09:24:00.001+05:302015-12-28T07:55:46.067+05:30Gospel of Wealth and such<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17.5636px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.5636px;">One of the things I love about this country is its amazing network of public libraries. I went from 0 books in 2014 to about 21 in 2015 without spending a single cent. All thanks to the magnificent Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh (CLP) and its tie-up with Amazon to e-borrow books and to deliver it straight to my Kindle, for free. Even the $40 audio books can be borrowed through Amazon, for free, if you have a public library card.</span><br />
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17.5636px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The really nice thing about using a library is that sometimes one needs to wait until the book becomes available. Waiting actually makes you want to read a book, because in a sense you have "worked" towards it by not giving into instant gratification. CLP and Amazon seamless work together, put me on auto-hold, so that when the book becomes available it is auto-delivered to my Kindle and 21 days later it is auto-checked out. No more late fees to the library or walking/sliding through icy sidewalks just to pick up a book or worse to return an unread book.</span><br />
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17.5636px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Since Amazon owns Goodreads, I get all my recommendations through Goodreads where I follow people who seem to like the books I do but are more regular and avid readers. So what is in there for Amazon to facilitate such a fantastic process?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17.5636px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Since Amazon knows at what time I start a book and what time I take to read a book, it can model my purchase behavior. Thus, in a Machine Learning induced sales frenzy, Amazon follows me around the Internet desperately trying to sell me the third part of a thriller series that it knows I generally finish in a day. Amazon also knows that the third part is on hold, I am fifth in the queue and I am the kind of a customer who quivers tremulously when presented with a deal. Amazon is very likely to have figured that I have self-control of a two year old and it would just be a statistical anomaly if I don't buy the third part when I am targeted the right way.</span><br />
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17.5636px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">It is a win-win here. Not only are people more likely to use the library, they are more likely to enjoy the material, search for good books and might even buy the ones that they like. Something that Amazon tried with Kindle Unlimited - but why would you use Kindle Unlimited when you have the mighty American libraries at your disposal?</span><br />
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17.5636px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Getting the books delivered to my sturdy refurbished Kindle (surpassed in robustness only by Nokia 1100) is fantastic. I remember my childhood in Madurai, hanging around in private libraries for hours, so that my parents don’t have to pay the 15% borrowing charge on books that will last for less than a day. I recall waiting agonizing months for the latest Harry Potter to make it to the library because it was so expensive that it was too much to ask for. To me, a free, well-stocked public library in itself is a thing of wonder and a one that just makes reading so much more convenient that it weans me off 30 Rock re-runs on Netflix, is truly awesome.</span><br />
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17.5636px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Interestingly, so many of Andrew Carnegie’s legacies are powered by cutting-edge technology and this has truly changed the way people benefit from his great altruism.</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.clpgh.org/exhibit/images/gif/ac1.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="http://www.clpgh.org/exhibit/images/gif/ac1.gif" height="320" width="256" /></span></a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-64507559083949255592015-10-02T01:06:00.001+05:302015-10-05T10:25:22.283+05:30Dear self, X years ago ...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
I came across this wonderful video today where a bunch of
folks talk to their slightly younger friends about things that that they wish
they had known just a year ago. So the 20 year old says “Dear 18 year old, do
not put on so much make-up” while the 28 year old goes “Dear 26 year old, back
up your hard-drive now.” I was so thrilled by this video and I thought I could
do my own version of this. Since it is very hard to empathize with a 10-year
old self as an 11-year old self when I am 26, I am fixing my view-point in my
current timeline, so that the story does not have annoying jump cuts.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Dear 10-year old –
your handwriting does not matter at all. Stop moping that your favorite gel
pens were taken off production.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
“Dear 11-year old – do not attend any Tamil weddings even if
you are tempted by the live Dosa counters and the limitless possibilities that
the buffet line has to offer. The PTSD is not worth it.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Dear 12-year old – You can never be tall enough. One day
you are going to understand how painful it is to dabble in 4-inch high heels and
if some moronic relative cackles with a funny, funny joke about how they have
to rebuild their ceilings when you visit them, don’t stand just there and fume
in adolescent anger. Try breaking their TV before you leave. 'Tis not vandalism if it is for a good cause.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Dear 13-year old. Quizzing is fun but it is not as big as
you think it is”<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Dear 14-year old, it is okay if you cannot do two digit
multiplications in your head. The rest of your family might not know it, but
there are things called calculators and doing Math really fast in head will
become as obsolete as having a good handwriting. Actually, scratch this.
Instead, avoid all contact with extended family. When they quiz you in Math in social gatherings,
tell them to go to hell and add some gory details if possible. You have a
morbid imagination. Use it.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Dear 15-year old, memories of reading Harry Potter will
remain extremely salient all through adult life. Cherish it.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Dear 16-year old, no amount of practice tests is going to
prevent you from misreading the question in the final board exam. It is three
rolls of two dice and not two rolls of three dice. It might bump you down by
500 in the rankings for getting into a good school, but you will do okay with
what you get.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Dear 17-year old, pay attention in the calculus class. Despite
what your seniors say, understanding how to get a Thevenin’s equivalent right
is never going to help in life.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Dear 18-year old, this year you will have Electrical
Engineering laboratory. You would think that all that character building should mean something, but it never will. You will survive even
if they kick you out of the lab multiple times. Blown fuses are not your fault. Well, though we both know the truth deep down. If only you had not distracted ...”<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Dear 19-year old, eat all idli from all the restaurants
that the splendid city of Coimbatore has to offer. Someday, you will be
mortified to unfreeze idlis and dip them in what passes as coconut chutney. You
will long for the beet-root chutney at RHR Idli Kadai.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
“Dear 20-year old, IBM is not going to give a free bag that
says “I am the chosen one” during recruitment like they did the year before.
Stop basing important decisions in your life on free stuff you get at job
fairs.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
“Dear 21-year old. Hot chocolate does not mean melted chocolate. It is just a fancy way of saying Bournvita. That does not justify drinking a whole bottle of Hershey's syrup to deal with the disappointment.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Dear 22-year old, this is the first year in life you will begin to know that you cannot always make things happen by working really hard. Actually, this will be the worst and the best time of your life. Remember every day." <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Dear 23-year old, stuff yourself with Google food. You will
only have the memory of such indulgence to carry you through grad school when
you are deciding between going hungry and the saddest salad you have ever
seen.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Dear 24-year old, five cups of coffee is not good for
health and not doing dishes for a month is such a terrible idea.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Dear 25-year old, do not binge watch Netflix, on your
laptop, lying on bed. Your eyes can get remarkably screwed in a very short
period of time. Gilmore girls is not even riveting story-telling. Also, do not
panic. God works in mysterious ways.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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Check out the video I was watching <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sycgL3Qg_Ak">here</a> .<o:p></o:p></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-26686254338183601392015-05-02T11:57:00.002+05:302015-05-02T23:17:07.852+05:30Gather around kids ...(for a note on storytelling)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Words used in the right context make all the difference between good writing and great writing. All those Wodehousian summers have made me particularly sensitive to clever turns of phrases in good writing. I grew up reading about Lord Emsworth pottering around the Blandings Castle while the hedonistic pig, Empress of Blandings, chomped on her potatoes. Wodehouse could have used "ate" her potatoes but somehow the rather onomatopoeic chomp makes you understand the vigor with which the Empress of Blandings tackled tubers.<br />
<br />
<i>A thwack from a cat's tail, the trill notes of a girl's voice, clomping down a passage with uncomfortable heels</i> -really helps you feel what the faceless characters do, with a distinctive sound. Most of the writers I enjoyed reading were the ones who paid attention to describing things really well. For example, Enid Blyton’s scones were not just scones, they were hot, buttery and smelled heavenly of all good unknown things from an English pantry and of a potential adventure that was just around the corner.<br />
<br />
The challenge I see in good writing is the imagery. I have always wondered how people see what they read inside their head. In mine, the characters are always charcoal silhouettes with mild, very blurry faces that alter depending on circumstances. For example, I would <i>feel</i> how Dumbledore would look like and not exactly see his face. It is a mixture of certain defining features that you associate with the character - a long flowing white beard, a robe and let us say, a certain ebullience that Dumbledore brings to the table. Is my Harry same as yours? How can I approximate even a silhouette version of a Geisha in Japan while reading the Memoirs of Geisha when I have no idea how the Geishas look like? Heidi from the Swiss Alps looked nothing like the cartoon that later came on TV. Particularly difficult ones were the fairy tales from the kindergarten - how did Cinderella look like? I did not have a Disney Princess to compare it with and in my head Cinderella was like the doll I had, blonde and blue-eyed. All the princesses looked the same way. Now they are replaced by the “Frozen” version and that makes me sad.<br />
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Cars, to me, are particularly disturbing. I am seeing all those cars I knew as a child being so different to how they appeared in my head. Nancy Drew had a Mustang. Particularly fishy guys would lurk in a Toyota Camry to stalk an innocent victim before proceeding to do something that involved grisly details. Chet Morton in Hardy Boys had a “jalopy”. Some cars were convertibles while other were coupes. In my head, everything was one single car. When a character went into a car, it took the shape of an Indian car I was used to, which at that point was an ambassador. And if it was a fancy car, it was a nameless sedan, and beyond that the cars took a cartoonish block car style. Remember this was an age before Internet, before you had the luxury to “Ok Google, what is a jalopy?”.<br />
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This is probably why you should "Never judge a book by its movie". Movies almost always disappoint fans because of "my Hermoine is not yours" problem. Imagine a million fans and a million different versions of Harry Potter and then you get a movie that defines the vague silhouettes with real flesh and blood, which is perhaps an average of all these versions. JK Rowling might have chosen Daniel Radcliffe, but that is how her version of Harry looked like. Dumbledore looked more intimidating and showy in the movie. In the books, when I read about Dumbledore being angry, he goes away from my baseline of a happy bumble bee, the blur becomes more pronounced and all I can feel is that Dumbledore is angry with no figure to support it. In the movies, Hermoine was way too pretty from my baseline and her hair never grew “<i>more and more bushier as she bent over a cauldron in the potions class</i>” like it did in the books. The movies miss the tiny details -<i> "they heard a noise like a plunger being withdrawn from a blocked sink" </i>which refers to how Ron stopped kissing Lavender. You can show the kiss on screen, but cannot reproduce the plunger analogy. Nor can you take away anything that Wodehouse says, not because it is funny, but because it paints a much elaborate picture of what is happening and gives the blurs just enough focus, if you pay attention -<i>"She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips that season", "He walked as if on air, and the whole soul had obviously expanded, like a bath sponge placed in water"</i><br />
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That is the beauty of writing fiction. I found the distinct difference after letting a year pass without reading a single book and then one day, I sat at a cafe and started reading Bill Bryson. Out of nowhere the grey blurs start forming. I am inside the frame, feeling the protagonists walking through forests and I get sucked into this timeless void of storytelling. That is good storytelling because you don't get tired. That's when I realize how much I missed this experience and how I have been let Netflix easily define my picture of a womanizing Madison Street executive instead of working my way through an introduction to get a picture in my head.<br />
<br />
There is some research to back up how important the story and the imagery is. This was a work done at Carnegie Mellon in the Machine Learning department. Based on the regions of the brain that lighted up, they could identify with 74% accuracy the paragraph that the subjects were reading in Harry Potter. "The test subjects read Chapter 9 of Sorcerer's Stone, which is about Harry's first flying lesson. It turns out that movement of the characters — such as when they are flying their brooms — is associated with activation in the same brain region that we use to perceive other people's motion. Similarly, the characters in the story are associated with activation in the same brain region we use to process other people's intentions."<br />
<br />
If you can make someone feel the rather unnatural act of flying on a broom, it is a job really well done. So well done, that you can <i>force</i> Amazon to sell your books only through Pottermore on Amazon. Take this from Gabriel García Márquez<br />
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<i>"A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread."</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
No wonder it is called magical realism.<br />
<br />
What makes me sad is what passes for best sellers these days. It is not that I am put off by the vampires or women waiting to be swept by Mr. Grey. I was pretty okay with the whole Mr. Darcy’s "In vain have I struggled. It will not do". What puts me off is not even making an attempt to use the right words because sexy, dominating male persona and vapid women are enough.<br />
<br />
English is a beautiful language. You have words that swirl in your mouth waiting for the right context and there is nothing like a word well placed that makes you smile fondly. You can even reflect on inane things like Ice-Breaking like Ogden Nash did and come up with clever, clever one-liners like <i>'Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker'.</i> I think the trick is to disassociate GRE flashcards and pretentiousness from words and look at them on how they well they let you express what you want to say.<br />
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[I started writing this, because I thought it was particularly clever of an author to note how in books "girls giggle", but "boys always chuckle" and how a character laughed was closest to what can be described as a “guffaw”. Oh, what good times.]<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-54957262059038834372015-04-15T09:50:00.003+05:302015-04-15T10:04:25.538+05:3033.33%<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
There are certain times I know that people around me define my happiness. Today is one such day. I defended my first research paper today. This contributes to 1/3rd of my PhD requirements. Instead of qualifiers, we are required to have done 144 units of PhD level coursework with one research paper at the end of the second year. I am done with coursework and the first defense. Therefore 33.33% of my PhD is done. There is a second paper due the same date next year and yes, yes, I am getting to it in just about five minutes.<br />
<br />
I cannot have more supporting advisors. For the entire week they have been trying to work on my paranoia, constantly telling me that I was going to do great. It was so nice to stand in this crowded room (with a heater than just wouldn't switch off), knowing I could turn to the familiar smiling faces for support if things went horribly wrong or if I ventured into la-la land, which I have the propensity to do, when things become uncomfortable.<br />
<br />
My quorum consisted of the best people in their fields, extraordinary Statisticians and Economists who took time off their schedule to stop by my talk and I think that is really nice of them. It is not everyday one gets to listen to all these people telling me that I had done good work.<br />
<br />
I was pacing the corridors all day yesterday for no reason until a professor took pity on my fragile nerves and offered to listen to my talk. She took about forty minutes off her schedule and gave me such good advice on the really small but really important details on how to talk. She arrived to my talk and I could see her beaming as I spoke. She then told me that she was incredibly proud of me. Doesn't happen everyday.<br />
<br />
The other PhD students took turn to listen to me ranting, sacrificed their weekends sitting with me so that I obsessively time and re-time the talk. They were people who told me that they were going to nod sitting in the front row so that I get to be reassured during the talk in case I need reassurance. People cannot get better.<br />
<br />
All my friends showed up stood for good forty five minutes at the back of the hall because it was full though they knew what exactly I was going to talk about. My best friend spent just about four days helping me to script the talk so that I knew what exactly I had to say.<br />
<br />
<br />
It is not everyday that someone gets to defend a paper while both the advisors taking pictures of me talking just so I can mail them to my mother or they can congratulate me on Facebook. Seriously, I don't know how many PhD students can say this, my advisors are the coolest. Refer to Figure 1 below. You have to click on the picture to see the whole picture.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmprSuThrVEbgbJBHKJlOStSXlUUgEo-CqH1Iz3Wa6dt8dD8ewQT-8sOdU1oOANOr-qTFRQl8uLCADVlg0LyWJJViJFWDa5AZL-bRrP7tPlbEWRn1vbR8bzzykhmkpqOgLl6wnFA/s1600/tw_photo.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmprSuThrVEbgbJBHKJlOStSXlUUgEo-CqH1Iz3Wa6dt8dD8ewQT-8sOdU1oOANOr-qTFRQl8uLCADVlg0LyWJJViJFWDa5AZL-bRrP7tPlbEWRn1vbR8bzzykhmkpqOgLl6wnFA/s1600/tw_photo.png" height="205" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fig 1: One of my advisors posts a photo on Facebook</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
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What strikes me is that there are so many many people invested in my success here more than at any point in my life which is just wonderful. I was a kid brought up on a staple diet of acerbic taunts which left me so cynical about goodness in people. As someone who does Bayesian work, this might be the time when I should acknowledge that my data overwhelms my prior about humanity. There are so many nice people who genuinely want me to do well and it is a pity that I spent about twenty years obsessing about how people were fundamentally jerks, using a limited and a very biased sample.<br />
<br />
Speaking of family, my mom's voice always radiates happiness whenever I do something good that involves a lot of public speaking. Believe me that this a woman who is very hard to impress and the voice very rarely radiates that much approval. She spent a considerable portion of her life writing fiery speeches in Tamil for me. I remember all the evenings sitting on the terrace working painfully on the small finer details for hours. This was for competitions that happened in some corner of a dusty school hall which no one on the earth would care about as much as my mom did. I was high on her approval meter today and she told me that all her time was not wasted after all.<br />
<br />
I never really wanted to write this post because I didn't want this to be jinxed, but I did, because this is one day I want to remember in the future when I start whining about how difficult doing a PhD is<br />
<br />
<br />
So, what was my paper on?<br />
<br />
This is what my professor asked me to say when I asked him how to succinctly summarize my research in ten seconds.<br />
<br />
<br />
My research sits at the interface between two fields: Combining Social Science techniques to understand the drivers of fraud and consumer responses to fraud, with Computer Science and Machine Learning techniques to develop managerially relevant responses to review fraud.<br />
<br />
It is called A Tangled Web from ...<br />
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<span style="font-family: CMR10;">“Oh what a tangled web we weave,</span></div>
<span style="font-family: CMR10;"><div style="text-align: center;">
When first we practice to deceive”</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
</span><span style="font-family: CMTI10; font-style: italic;"><div style="text-align: center;">
Sir Walter Scott<span style="font-family: CMR10;">, 1808, Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field </span></div>
</span><br />
</div>
</div>
</div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
I think this is the 10% of doing a PhD that everyone says makes up for the 90% of work.<br />
<br />
<div>
Alright. That's all the happiness a grad student is allowed to have every year. Now, to sleep and wake up to a morrow filled with programming a 29 page Hidden Markov Latent Drichlet Allocation model from scratch.</div>
<br />
<br />
Fun times, indeed.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-91155315423830970612015-01-31T22:45:00.000+05:302015-02-01T03:27:20.019+05:30Reflections on Yoga in America<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My first introduction to Yoga was in America
when I was visiting Mountain View in 2011. Before my initiation, my idea of Yoga was a bunch of freestyle arm
twirling that my mother did at home and insisted that it worked miracles on her
carpal tunnel syndrome. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My mother was diagnosed with carpal tunnel
syndrome when I was in 9th grade. She was terrified that she
was going to be at the mercy of doctors, whom she hated with such vehemence and
thus resorted to do Yoga. A year later, the recurrences decreased and she
became a Yoga evangelist and preached the miracles to everyone who would listen
to her. She did Yoga everyday at home. However, the original poses that were
taught to her disappeared and she swung her arms and legs in a weird PT teacher
way. It was a mixture of aerobics, kick-boxing and Bhagyaraj dance moves. She
demonstrated this to anyone who visited my house with such passion and claimed
that this was the way to a life full of happiness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The other kind of Yoga I knew was about sitting
in a quiet room and being calm. None of the words in the previous sentence
resonates with my persona. I was not new to meditation. I had been forced to
meditate before my Math tests all through my life to somehow empower me with
the elusive gift of concentration and it never worked. People gave up and
decided I was not going to be an IITian after all which was the whole point of
doing Math anyway.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, when I first visited a Yoga class in
America, I saw a bunch of very fit people doing incredible things. Three
minutes into the class, I was yelping with the imminent fear of some body part
breaking. However, my arms and legs ached for the next two days, so much so
that a year later, I was doing Yoga on a daily basis at the office back in
India. My mother was overjoyed that I was finally listening to her.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;">I had two Yoga teachers in India. The first one
was a traditional Yoga guy who was pretty old school. His idea was Yoga was sun
salutations and doing breathing exercises through the throat. He focused on lifestyle
changes. For example, he asked me to fast and consume only liquids once every
week. He didn't quite expect the amount of different liquids I can scour around
in the </span>cornucopia<span style="color: black;"> that my office was. I
brightly went to him on the eve of my first fast and recited my meals for the
day - 3 milk shakes, 3 juices, 1 coconut water, a bunch of coffees and masala
chai. He was gaping at me and I hadn't even included the pani puri that I had
eaten, which counted as liquid food in my head.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My second Yoga teacher was fantastic. She was
quite young and came from one of those new age yoga places. This is the kind
that is taught under different brand names in America. It was strenuous and a
lot of people believed that it was power Yoga when it was not. It just felt like
power yoga because anything feels like power yoga for people like me. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As a kid, I had been rejected for the role of a
snake in the "snake dance" owing to my lack of grace and also because
I couldn't really bend in any direction without yelling in pain. My mother
insisted because "snake-dance" was all the rage. The post-traumatic
stress of trying to be a snake led to my assuming the male roles in dances. One
such example is "Singa" that just required nodding and tapping my
feet occasionally to give the illusion of dancing . Singa was a roadside gypsy
who had a wife Singi and they went around preaching the morals of a good life
not unlike my mother talking about Yoga. You see how the nodding plays into
this? Given this background in flexibility, I performed a perfect Chakrasana
before the amazed audience that my family was after a year of Yoga. My mother
quickly took credit that it had been my years of training in Bharatanatyam that
was finally helping me with my flexibility. To the true spirit of a trained
Singa, I nodded my head.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then, I came to the US for doing a PhD, which is
when all of my fitness initiatives went to hell. I decide to take charge every
now and then and attempt to do Yoga in this country, which leads to these
reflections.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1) I have never known these many kinds of Yoga
in India. Really, hot Yoga in Madurai will be something akin to setting the
place in flames and doing a snake dance in it. There is a whole breed of
hot Yoga centres here in Pittsburgh. I heard they crank up the heat and it
helps in stretching the muscles. By that logic everyone in India should be
really flexible. I should have been a killer snake girl, for it was never less
than 100 degree F in Madurai. Maybe the American muscles react differently to
change in temperature. There is Hatha, Vinayasa, Iyengar, Bikram and Anusara.
Honestly, the only school of Yoga I knew all my life was Yoga Meenakshi school
of Yoga whose notable alumnus was my very own arm-twirling mother. Jillian
Michaels Power Yoga is one of my favorites. She yells at you from the video
"that booty isn't going to burn on its own" as I pant and wheeze. I
call it the booty-burning school of Yoga. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2) The fitness regimens I have seen while
growing up was just seeing my parents taking walks or my mother doing her
calisthenics. After I started working there were always a bunch of middle-aged
men and women walking around my apartment's jogging track for I was never a
part of the hip group that went to gyms. So all the people I have seen
exercising were really the people who needed the exercise and amidst them, I
looked positively aglow with good health and youth. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However, in America, whenever I walk into a Yoga
class, ridiculously sculpted model like people surround me. One of the things I
hear about this Hot Yoga places expounded in the paragraph above, is that women
wear only tank-tops and shorts while men just wear shorts. I am wondering if
this will cause a self-selection issue. So fat people who don't want to strip
to the bare basics wouldn't really turn up to such classes and therefore
everyone who does Yoga might seem healthier? Maybe the famous obese demographic
of America, which I am yet to encounter, is staying indoors and doing all the
booty burning at home.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">3) Yoga is perhaps the most commercialized Indian
thing in America, with Naan finishing second. Anything that comes with the Yoga
prefix is almost always much more expensive than its non-Yogic counterpart. For
example, I saw this ordinary jute bag at Target that costs $30 because it was a
"Yoga bag". I am doubtful if that price is justified even if the bag
does Yoga. This is not even the type that holds Yoga mats, which is rented
out in Yoga classes if you don’t bring them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You have Yoga towels. Do they wick Yogic
sweat? Or maybe they are heavy duty if one does hot Yoga. Then there are the
Yoga pants, which for the uninitiated are loose fitting pants. You may
wonder, like I did, about the non-Yoga pants, for all the pants I have owned
all my life can be classified as Yoga pants by this definition. These athletic
pants turned out to be viselike spandex shorts that chic women in gyms wear
with matching headbands and sweat bands.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> To enter into an American gym dressed like
I do is to completely internalize the dork-pride and be happy at the silver lining
that I was at least more likely to eat my food with lesser guilt than the rest of
the people there. Americans dress very appropriately for each sport, so much so
that there are separate sections, specialty shops and the corresponding luxury
version. Tell this to the neighborhood uncle in Madurai who strides
nonchalantly around race course with his belly bouncing and attired in those
stylish Lungis. The gleaming white Nike shoes that he wears is the only
anachronism to the 1975 setting that Madurai is stuck at. Exhibit 2 is my own mother who walks 7 KMs a day
wearing Rs.50 Liberty slippers glowing in the fluorescent yellow salwar and a
deeply mismatched bright orange bottoms which she claims antagonizes the canine
population on the roads. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then there are Yoga accessories. There are
blocks, yoga straps, and “toeless" Yoga socks - some of these terms that I
cannot recognize despite being an Indian. The next stage in this game would be
for fancy people in India is to introduce this stuff in the Yoga classes
because the Americans use them and legitimize these Yoga modifications as a
truly Indian practice. It is a vicious cycle, I tell you. There are also these
luxury yoga items - lululemon thingamies. When I filter by lowest price on
their website I get $48 which paints the picture. There are different Yoga wear
for different types of Yoga. I wonder what it is for the booty-burning kind.
The other accessories are incredibly expensive. For example, this <a href="http://shop.lululemon.com/products/clothes-accessories/women-yoga-mats-and-props/Mala-Beads-Patience?cc=10167&skuId=3602581&catId=women-yoga-mats-and-props">"compassion"</a> beads cost just $98
while the <a href="http://shop.lululemon.com/products/clothes-accessories/women-yoga-mats-and-props/Mala-Beads-Strength?cc=3969&skuId=3602585&catId=women-yoga-mats-and-props">strength</a> one costs only $108. One would
think that it might be cheaper to be actually compassionate, but what do I
know. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">4) Yoga teachers are always in terrific shape
and radiate mysticism. In my head, I always hear sitar music when I talk to
them. They chant out the instructions - cow pose, dog pose, cat pose, camel,
dolphin, pigeon and cobra. But they always, you can notice it next time, if you
haven't already, say "Chatturangaasana" correctly. I wonder why
Chaturangasana retains its Sanskrit roots more than any other pose.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">5) One pose that Americans always struggle with
so much is the deep squat. Even the strongest and the fittest tremble with
strain that makes the instructor cry out "don't bite your lips". The
Indians plop down with ease and look around wondering at their sudden finesse
in performing Yoga. If you don't know what I am talking about you should
see <a href="http://img2.timeinc.net/health/images/healthy-living/natural-living/yogic-squat-150.jpg">this</a> pose and you can immediately
understand why Indians rock this pose like a boss. Muscle memory, my friends,
is an extraordinary thing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In all, Yoga in this country is almost nothing
like Yoga back at home. I don't even think Indians like Yoga that much because,
you know, it is not American. But it is refreshing to see that Americans are
not disappointing my mother's vision of an optimized life. It makes me think
that doing Yoga in America is like wearing a suit in India. It is foreign, everyone does it,
it is expensive, stylish, has a Facebookable value to it and you feel very hot. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-22146802545112775872015-01-22T23:48:00.000+05:302015-01-22T23:48:01.208+05:30Resolution Resolution<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I have decided to write more regularly. I don't intend to write huge posts but focus on just writing more.<br />
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I don't like reading instructions. Most of the time, I foolishly waste an hour trying to randomly fit things into slots and then begrudgingly admit my lack of expertise before resorting to the manual.<br />
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We as a family also think that we are immune to things that affect other people. My mother, for example, believes all the diseases can be cured by not being a sissy. I once sprained my ankle and yowled about it at home. Since I used to be the kind of kid who self-diagnosed a lot of diseases, my mother told me that I can cure the sprain by not being lazy and asked me to climb the stairs a dozen times. After three weeks of limping we finally qualified this as an injury worthy enough of a medical professional's help.<br />
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Anyway, when people tell us not to do things, we assume it doesn't apply to us. So when I read about caffeine keeping people awake, I always assumed otherwise for I trusted in my super powers.<br />
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When I came to America, I had atleast five cups of coffee a day. This combined with eating the first meal of the day at about 3 PM caused my stomach to whine like a petulant dog an effect that I observed only in America. In a place with hungry grad students, I have heard many a growl especially in the morning classes. I suspect that this is because the buildings here are very quiet with no fans and magnifies even small sounds - like the incessant clicking of ball-point pens in classes which drives me nuts.<br />
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I then realized that I had to get off coffee and started doing two cups a day which is my way of saying that I had "gotten-off" coffee. I have started noticing that having coffee after 11 PM pushes me off the Eastern Time work schedule and I start my days at times that would be considered late by the Pacific Time.<br />
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The other way work too. I can list out the things I have done on mornings I have not had coffee:<br />
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1) I have tried to walk through glass doors in the Dubai Airport. They felt really clean against my nose when I crashed into them.<br />
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2) I have fit myself with another person in a one person revolving door causing much anxiety to the person who was crammed with me in the door.<br />
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3) I have hunted for my glasses for a good ten minutes before comprehending that they were perched on my nose<br />
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So when I hear the sound of my coffee maker's whirr, I feel a Pavlovian response to become jittery.<br />
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Now I know that coffee has an effect and it is not really a myth by my family standards.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-64275205602992416112015-01-22T06:25:00.002+05:302015-01-22T10:57:34.270+05:30This is ...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
This is going to have a lot of memes.<br />
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Whenever I think of Pandas, I picture myself gearing up for the eventual adrenaline rush. Working with data can be a pleasant, fantastic, immersive experience- but it is not for the feeble hearted.<br />
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I cannot tell the days I have squealed with absolute delight to find a pattern that might be useful in my research. This is almost always followed by a victory jig.<br />
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There are days when I get so pleased with myself on figuring out a nuance that would have gone unnoticed if it hadn't been for my clever and careful inspection, only to discover (mostly when I am treating myself with an ice cream) that I had done something horribly wrong. <br />
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And then, there are the days I have crashed and burned because my computer had just placidly displayed a p-value of 0.98, thus invalidating months of work. I might not be the first one to say this, but I suppose when Fisher first popularized p-values, he would have never thought about how intricately his p-values are going to be tied with a grad student's self-worth.<br />
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In my head, the whole idea with data is a scavenger hunt. You have millions of corners where exciting things may or may not hide. This kind of digging appeals to the crazy deal seeker in me and I tell myself that this is why I love this gig. But there are times of almost cruel disappointments - for example, you would expect something fun to lie beneath 1 TB of data, which is always not the case. You just keep ploughing through hoping for your "high fiving a million angels moment". The uncertainty is a rush, but once you see the ugly side, you always know that things can go terribly wrong.<br />
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So when I think of Pandas I always steel myself for disappointments. It always feels like I am walking into a battlefield, like this.<br />
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But then I came across this video today and this is the first time I think of Pandas without getting riled up.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0K-jjS00Y7_XdVWEk8KSjJqlPA1XE1YbDUtYA1S5-9tdClllm3yNUoy9gqgT8WHonOAjtlHsqrNf8joeE65dVJg4TMjbAF7nVH-8xquKsIZdeprzIJzCg3cS3BQk6ydCoBDRDpg/s1600/pandas.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0K-jjS00Y7_XdVWEk8KSjJqlPA1XE1YbDUtYA1S5-9tdClllm3yNUoy9gqgT8WHonOAjtlHsqrNf8joeE65dVJg4TMjbAF7nVH-8xquKsIZdeprzIJzCg3cS3BQk6ydCoBDRDpg/s1600/pandas.png" height="272" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWryl6RZ7Bw" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWryl6RZ7Bw</a></div>
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This is also Pandas - Just the cute and the cuddly kind!<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-33181472463497309802014-12-31T12:34:00.002+05:302014-12-31T13:58:20.696+05:30End of year post<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
For a long time now, I have been writing a post about the year that went by. It has become a New Year tradition to take a deep breath, squint and try to recollect the hazy details of yet another year.<br />
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The only detail I remember about January is how terrifying and pleasurable it was to ski down the bunny hill at Seven Springs. Sitting in one of those ski lifts (after I progressed to the "green"), I was getting awestruck at the wide expanse of snow beneath me and when a friend of mine yelled "Get ready now and .... jump". Two minutes later, I was jolted out of the lift, while a kid of about five years, gracefully slid off the ski lift behind me while amusedly looking at the tangled mess of arms and legs that I was.<br />
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This year, I happened to walk along Castro Street in Mountain View after two years. Castro Street is truly close to my heart in lots of ways. I have spent many evenings in the yester years, glumly walking the lengths of this bustling street thinking about the colossal problem of finding a purpose to make a statement out of, mainly to convince an admission committee to get me into grad school. Walking along in Castro Street somehow helped me think about what choices mean in the long run.<br />
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This was a year of clambering through brutal coursework. I took 10-701 - Introduction to Machine Learning. When I came to CMU, my friend chucked delightfully just thinking about me going through 10-701. Between Econometrics II and 10-701, I lived and died on a bleeding edge and was almost always exhausted. I remember waking up everyday after five hours of sleep with scorching eyes and feeling monumentally disgruntled with the universe. I shuffled between research, coursework, mid-terms, more coursework and grading strategy papers while looking wistfully at my bed for a day I can sink into to the sheets with nothing but a free day ahead. The day never really came in 2014.<br />
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One of the best things that happened this year was learning Pandas. I started analyzing data with the humble pivot tables in Excel a few years before. Somehow, I never felt the need to get beyond what I now call, the "click and drag" life. Though I dabbled in R and Python, I never really thought of either as a strong data analysis tool that will help me do wicked things to my data that seemed only possible in Excel. This year I figured out how deluded I had been and how much time I could have saved if I had just learned Pandas earlier.<br />
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The nice thing about Pandas is that it is extremely addictive - almost like binge watching House of Card. I would start doing something at 10:00 PM and realize by 11:00 that there should be a better way to do it. By 1:00 AM I would realize that there should be an even better way to do it and all I had to do was to frame my wishlist in a way that it can be Googled. For example, I cannot really search for "Hey, I need 1s in column A which should contain the max value corresponding to the index but it should not include anything that satisfies these conditions". Most of the learning came in figuring out what to search for. By 2:00 AM, I would find user1457 in stackoverflow who had the exact issue as I did. I would get tickled beyond words to find a single line command in Pandas fulfilling all my needs that I could blearily think of at 3 AM, on a school night. I would then painstakingly write a script and send it to a friend for review.<br />
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This friend, while explaining the nuances of things I had missed out, would reflexively add spaces before and after the "=" as he talked, would convert my thirty lines of code filled with ifs and loops to a pithy little piece. He also always shuddered convulsively at the way I named the variables . I shrugged this off as a piece of programming snobbery. I later learned, in a rather hard way, that naming variables like "junk_i", "junk_i_value" ,"test_k", or a plain "a" because I felt too tired to think of a name, leads to undoing days of work. It is astonishing how even a week can completely obliterate the memory of even having written some code let alone ponder the mystery of the recurring test_k which seemed to single-handedly reflect various thought processes that went in my head at various stages in the code.<br />
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As a reformed character, I now name my variables true to the spirit of someone with a 28 character name - I kid you not, it goes like "data_positive_features_negative_adjusted_values_below_threshold_train", so as to make code "read like a story". My friend still scowls at an extra line that I could have done without but I leave that for next year's character building.<br />
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Thus this year, I shuffled between Python, R, Matlab and Stata for the different courses, swearing every time I added brackets to a for loop in Python. In 2013, I wouldn't have imagined a scenario that required me to swear about adding brackets in Python. I count this as an improvement to life.<br />
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I made new friends, studied with a group for the first time in my life, drank gallons of tea and became a Pennsylvania licensed driver. This is how a day generally looked.<br />
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Life has never been tougher and my writing has never been this squigglier. I also read <a href="http://qr.ae/zmaiI" target="_blank">this</a> in Quora on what happens in a learning process. I can approximately mark my location on the graph. There are going to be tougher years.<br />
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But knowing that it is all upward slope after the tough bit takes my mind off the fathomless pit which is all the things that I don't know. What I do know is how the inflection point in the picture feels like - I glimpsed it briefly during my tryst with Pandas.<br />
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In retrospect, I am okay with the Miltonian notion of bearing the mild yoke to serve him the best.<br />
I am going to like this gig as long there are moments like holding a paper written in LaTex that feels exactly like how I always thought good work should feel like - sturdy, warm off the printer and thanks to how Information Systems papers are written, very thick.<br />
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Here is to 2014 - a tizzy trip with insanity that helped me understand how a banana feels like inside a blender. <br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-50427429966542387012014-11-18T19:13:00.000+05:302014-11-18T23:30:52.862+05:30Second first snow in Pittsburgh<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I remember in being Microeconomics class last time when it was snowing and remember getting an email that made me grin so much that the person sitting next to me thought I was crazy. I also remember running outside barefoot and making a ball out of the first snow.<br />
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I will commemorate this year's first snow by cramming for my Machine Learning midterm. If at all I do end up using a lot of ML in my life, it would be nice to think about ML in the context of first snow. It is also to do with the fact that I am going repress the impending traumatic memories of the midterm tomorrow that I'd rather remember ML by the beautiful snow outside!<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Outside</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Inside</td></tr>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-91463543410936096262014-10-29T10:27:00.000+05:302014-10-29T10:57:09.538+05:30Expected value<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I wanted to write this post partly because I haven't written in a long long time which is bad for health and partly because I've been thinking quite a lot about the state of my well being in the past few tumultuous months.<br />
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This summer was my introduction to a world of pain and despair, namely doing Bayesian Models. In the past, I've often congratulated myself on not having chosen fields of study that required patience, grit and the ability to keep growing cultures day after day, waiting for a better tomorrow. The readers of this blog are probably familiar with my views on instant gratification. However, in the realm of Rev.Thomas Bayes, there isn't such a thing as gratification, let alone instant. This is the first time in my life I have run code over 32 core processors with 1 TB RAM only to find that Bayesian models take just about 7 days to tell me that I am absolutely wrong. The next seven days would go into figuring out a subsection of the problem which would then cause something else to break in the next seven days. Basically after three months, I had nothing to show except the fact that I had crashed the CMU server a few times (which felt oddly satisfying) and that I had written code like I have never done before.</div>
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In my undergrad, when people talked about memory efficient programming, I've often wondered why on earth would anyone need to do that considering all that memory in the computers. During this summer, the happiest days were when I managed to reduce the time for one iteration by three seconds. This is 3x80000 seconds that we are talking about - a time that would otherwise be spent with nerve wracking anticipation and bags of candy consumption. Heck, forget the processors, this is the kind of waiting that my genes are not programmed to handle. </div>
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Basically, my respect for people who do Bayesian Statistics as their main area of research just soared up. The amount of Math and programming these guys did, in what seems to be the days of yore (which is essentially pre-Google), just makes me gape in awe and wonder. These people would probably click their tongues at me and shake their heads collectively on how spoiled kids these days are with their fancy Stackoverflow and parallel processing. </div>
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Anyway, after this three months of masochism, I went back to school as a changed woman. Between homework and midterms, I moped so much that there was a sufficient cloud of gloom wherever I went. When the situation calls for my special brand of relentless narcissistic pessimism, I always step up and gleefully spread the depression all around, even in a place filled with despondent grad students. My adviser, however, cheerily reassured me that this existential crisis was nothing but expected out of a newly minted second year PhD student.</div>
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This brings me to the next phase. Yesterday, I was sitting in a seminar and when I took a quick look at the room from my vantage point, it suddenly dawned on me that I was sitting in a seminar at Carnegie Mellon listening to a professor talking about a complex Econometrics model. The room was filled with so many accomplished Statisticians, Economists, Criminologists and Mathematicians. It suddenly hit me that this is the bunch of people who trusted me enough to let me in and give me an opportunity to do things that I would have otherwise never ever done in my life - not even in my wildest dreams. Here I am, sitting in the same room with them and hey, some of the stuff on the slides even looked familiar that I didn't have to pretend like I understood!</div>
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This gave me a chance to think about just how far I along I have come in life and how I never really acknowledge that. As a screwed up kid, whenever I thought about future, life beyond a decent engineering college always tapered off into uncertainty. It struck me that given the kind of circumstances I grew up in and given the kind of background I am from, I really have exceeded every expectation I had for myself. Everything beyond this point is just a bonus in so many aspects. </div>
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It is actually tremendously liberating to think about my PhD this way and it helps me calm down to focus on the nitty gritty of research that I usually wave my hand about. All I need to do now is cut myself a lot of slack, dig into the tubs of ice cream and then get back to doing the next assignment.<br />
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Each day at grad school brings on a new set of challenges and in this pleasant randomness lies my hope, which in turn, springs the eternal. After all, man never is, but always to be blessed.</div>
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<i>P.S: I owe the pun in the title to the three hours of Advance Econometrics problem sets, but felt appropriate to the context.</i></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-37546441349957431802014-08-05T08:23:00.000+05:302014-08-05T21:09:01.825+05:30Should I give up on Math? A Quora question<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I read this question in Quora.<br />
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<a action_mousedown="QuestionLinkClickthrough" class="question_link" href="http://www.quora.com/Should-I-give-up-on-math" id="__w2_wQb0Vui_link" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #155fad; font-size: 24px; letter-spacing: -1px; line-height: 1.25; text-decoration: none;" target="_self"><i>Should I give up on math?</i></a></div>
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<span class="inline_editor_value"><i>My family and my teachers keep discouraging me. They say I have no math talent, I just get good grades because I work hard, I should focus on humanities instead of math, I'm forcing it too much, etc. My teachers want me to study philology and my aunt told me that math is my ultimate weakness.<br style="line-height: 1.4;" />But I love math. It's the thing I love the most, I'm fascinated by it's abstraction and beauty. I can understand new concepts quickly, school problems are easy to me (I'm an 8th grader) I'm just struggling with harder problems. Sometimes I think for days about a problem.<br style="line-height: 1.4;" />People around me keep saying I should understand that math is not for me. Should I give up on it?</i></span></div>
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<span class="inline_editor_value">I couldn't stop myself from writing an answer to this.</span></div>
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<span class="inline_editor_value"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">It is like reading the story of my life. You should read this and take heart.</span><br style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;" /><br style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;" /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">Let me start from the beginning. In India, doing Math is about doing calculations fast. For example, a guy in my family knew multiplication tables till 19x19. This amazing power earned him the much sought after title of being the smarte</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">st kid in the family. When people around him told him he was "great" at Math, he became super confident about his prowess and went on to become a success in his life. Conversely, my mother was always told that she sucked at Math which made her firmly believe that she was dumb and meant to do lesser things which in her definition, is everything else that is not Math. </span><br style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;" /><br style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;" /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">That's the story of how my life became a living hell when I was little . My mother became paranoid that I would inherit her "dumb Math genes" and made sure I knew multiplication (till 20x20, of course) before I went into first grade. Every time I visited a relative's house, I would be asked to solve Math problems until I got something wrong. It was a pity because I secretly liked Math and thought it was neat, but it felt unnatural to like something that everyone told me I was bad at. I vehemently hated being judged based on some arbitrary time limit within which I "had" to solve a problem. </span><br style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;" /><br style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;" /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">When given a problem I would immediately jump to figure out which is the fastest way of solving it, realize that I was losing time, become distinctly aware that there were at least four people looking at me with smug grins, then panic that I hadn't figured out the shortest way yet and panic more. By then, everything would go down the crapper and I would have been pronounced dumb. My mother would glare/yell at me while some woman in the crowd used to think it was appropriate to say "Oh, don't worry. We will get you married to a guy who is good at Math/is from IIT". It set off a lifelong aversion of my family, family gatherings and as a bonus, panic attacks well into my college years.</span><br style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;" /><br style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;" /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">Everybody in my family, in literally every family gathering, told me I sucked at Math and that I got good grades just because I worked hard. In Engineering, I was trying to prepare for "CAT" which is an exam that people in India take to get into prestigious B-schools. A lot about that exam prep reminded me of the oh-so-horrible mental Math tricks that I had to learn growing up and which I hated with every fibre in my body. I would not even look at the "data interpretation" section and proceed to the verbal section, because for about 18 years people had told me that I was great at "humanities stuff" and not Math. </span><br style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;" /><br style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;" /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">Then, I started working at this really great place. At my work, I ended up doing a lot of data analysis in a real world context. Moreover, there was no time limit, no competition and nothing that made me think that the world would end if I didn't solve a problem under a minute. This was the first time I figured out how much I loved data and how elegant it was. It made me realize that all the aspects of Math that had been beaten into my head as important things were so arbitrary and unnecessary. It was liberating just to use Excel for the dreaded and revered 19x19 and still be excited about the bigger picture that I got to solve. It was fun and a matter of honor just to be in a zone where I could operate with so much comfort.</span><br style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;" /><br style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;" /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">Two years into doing this kind of data analysis, I decided that I should do a PhD in using data to solve real world problems. My field of study is at the cusp of Marketing, Applied Economics, a lot of Econometrics/Statistics and some Machine Learning thrown in for fun.</span><br style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;" /><br style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;" /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">Every time I write up a white board full of equations, I step back and feel good to see how far I have come along, from my relatives' gloomy predictions. I wish that I can go back in time and tell this to the 8th grader who cried </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">herself to sleep because some moron in her family told her she can't do Math. As a famous T-shirt caption says, great things begin at the end of the comfort zone. It is all about exploring the bleeding edge in your own time or with someone who will not judge you for it being beyond your comfort zone.</span><br style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;" /><br style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;" /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">Also, you should read this: A mathematician's lament-</span><span class="qlink_container" style="font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;"><a class="external_link" href="https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf" rel="nofollow" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: url(data:image/gif; background-origin: initial; background-position: 100% 5px; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: initial; color: #155fad; padding-right: 12px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">https://www.maa.org/exter<wbr></wbr>nal_arc...</a></span></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-45335555093641423322014-07-18T20:35:00.001+05:302014-07-18T21:15:00.016+05:30Why it was a mistake to write on Quora ...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I loved Quora. It felt very liberating to write answers for questions in the small chunks of free time during school hours . Writing helps me think better and when I am angry, it helps me figure out who I am angry at and if I am being reasonable.<br />
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Quora had enough audience to stoke my ego. Enough people who didn't quite know me all that well. It was perfect, considering it was a way to give back the Quora community and all that.<br />
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This went for a bit, until this really long day when I was thinking about Google food in a bout of nostalgia. I had just come back from home to a fridge filled with soggy rotten vegetables and gooey stuff that I hadn't bothered to clear out in a long time. It is then I answered a question, in elaborate detail, on what it feels like to work at Google on Quora, focussing only on the food. The answer became super popular.<br />
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I should have been really pleased about it. However, I knew that it wasn't really for the quality of the answer that people liked the post. It was about the tales from the magic world of amazing food that kind of triggered this reaction.<br />
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Then came the stalking. Suddenly, my Linkedin profile had a thousand views a day. People started deluging me with messages in Quora on how to get into Google. Some of the memorable and amusing messages asked me questions like "You are from ECE, how do you know to code" and the assorted variations of how Indians generally view the differences between the branches of engineering.<br />
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This was followed by the hundred friend requests on Facebook. I was starting to feel a little creeped out because I didn't quite understand how people would like to connect with a stranger on Facebook just because they liked the said person's answer in Quora.<br />
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I was waiting for the wave to die down when I discovered this "other" inbox on Facebook. Apparently, all the messages from people who I have never interacted with gets filed under "other". I discovered about 300 messages from random frandship messages to earnest questions, all about getting into Google. At least, FB did a pretty good job of hiding this from my view up until a few days before.<br />
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This is when I realized that I had inadvertently hawked a dimension of Google's awesomeness on the Quora trade floor.<br />
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All of this was easy to ignore, until today when I discovered a question under my undergrad alumni page where some anonymous answer seeker had felt compelled to ask "How did Uttara get a job in Google after CIT".<br />
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I found this disrespectful on so many many grounds. There is really no need for my job skills to be a topic of conversation. More than that, I knew I wasn't really the model of what people expected out of a mere girl at CIT. I've bruised a lot of macho egos and all these blokes were collectively pissed at me in various points in their time at CIT. I am very well aware how the forum could be used to spew their pent up hatred.<br />
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The other reason why I found this insulting was that the person asked this question anonymously. There were so many ways that they could have approached me if they thought I could help, but no - etiquette has never been a part of the stringent moral code that my undergrad institution tried to impart on people. I have known people who had no qualms about copying my Statement of Purpose word for word and sending it out to universities and somehow thought it was okay. Somehow all these things are okay. What is a day in life of a Tamilnadu Engineering student without Plagiarism, right? One can win thousands of money in the ridiculous paper presentation contests by ripping off every word from a famous paper in their field. It is disgusting that all this is deemed completely acceptable.<br />
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Funnily enough, what is not acceptable at all, is girls wearing sleeveless tops or guys wearing jeans. I once was asked to write by hand, a request for permitting some students to go off for a competition, because the same letter, when printed instead of being handwritten, was disrespectful<br />
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I am sick of this. I am sick of how the likes of my undergrad institution trains people to think what is okay and what is not. <br />
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And Oh, I decided to pull off my Google answer. There is really no reason for people not to be happy with whatever they are happy doing, without thinking about all the great food they are missing out on. In retrospect, it was rather childish of me to have written the damn thing in the first place. I should drool at the pictures of the mango festival in the privacy of my apartment if I become hungry.<br />
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I have often wondered about the abuse operations in Quora and how they manage to scale it having worked in G+ abuse myself. Let me see if they do pull down the question I requested to be pulled out.<br />
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So, Congratulations Anonymous poster! -you have successfully managed to anger me after years of not letting social media get to me. I thought my experience with the Internet denizens should have taught me better.<br />
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P.S: I really don't have time to do the mandatory grammatical error check. All errors are to be attributed to the extreme ire I writing this post in.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-253904658519878082014-06-04T22:14:00.001+05:302014-06-04T22:18:42.342+05:30Telling a tale or two or a thousand<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I have always been a veritable source of stories. People often amaze at my ability to talk continuously for hours whipping up stories after stories. I switch track from one story to another while bleary eyed first timers, who are too polite to interrupt, watch with wonder as I trace my way back to the main story just about three hours later after the first story. People who know me are the people who dread the timeless void of my story barrel and firmly put their foot down while I dolefully let go of a fantastic anecdote.<br />
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Until I was about five years old, no one would understand what I talked. I spoke at the speed of a rambling express train. People knew I was definitely on to a great story as I would animatedly gesticulate, my eyes wide with expression. It would be like watching a movie at 4x speed. They took me to a doctor who said I tried to cram in a lifetime of stories, which was about five years then, in the two minutes people allotted for listening to five year olds. I had an anxiety even when I was that small, that my stories would go unheard. Then, I slowed down to my current speed as people were forced to listen to at least five minutes, out of politeness. Even now, I catch people with their eyes glazed partly in incomprehension and partly in horror.<br />
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I also aspired to become a psychiatrist at some point in life. My father pointed out that my story telling ability would hinder my listening ability which is what psychiatrists generally get paid for.<br />
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I tell a lot of stories because I pretty much have an almost photographic memory of incidents. For example, I can perfectly recall the day in first grade, when Manopriya was given the "Class Leader" badge and how, in a gross abuse of power, she jumped up from desk to desk wielding the wooden scale on the terrorized villagers.<br />
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This is how it would start and I would talk about Manopriya's family and her Malayalam roots and how she would pray in the Race Course Mariyamman temple to get cent percent in first grade Math.<br />
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See what I did there?<br />
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Anyway, I read the following in Heavy Weather (Of the Blandings Castle series) by P.G.Wodehouse and I couldn't help smiling.<br />
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<i>The Hon. Galahad had brightened. Like all confirmed raconteurs, he took on new life when the anecdotes started to come.</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>...................................................................................................................................................</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Once more the Hon.Galahad smote the green cloth. ' You'll smash that table,' said Ronnie.</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>There flashed into the Hon. Galahad's mind the story of how old Beefy Muspratt, with some</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>assistance, actually had smashed a billiard-table in the year ninety-eight; and such is the urge to the</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>raconteur's ruling passion that he almost stopped to tell it. Then he recovered himself.</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>...................................................................................................................................................</i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i></div>
<div>
Sometimes it is difficult to let go. In the recent days, I have mastered the art of summarizing the anecdote and somehow fitting it in the conversation under the ruse of letting it go. Again, I read this and just burst out laughing.</div>
<div>
<i><br /></i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i></div>
<i> 'Well, I'm dashed! Hurts like sin, that sort of thing. I haven't heard of anybody having a girl's name</i><br />
<div class="p1">
<i>tattooed on him since the year ninety-nine, when Jack Bellamy-Johnstone ...'</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Ronnie held up a restraining hand.</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>'Not now, uncle, if you don't mind.' </i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>' Most amusing story,' said the Hon. Galahad, wistfully.</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>'Later on, what?' </i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>'Well, yes, perhaps you're right,' admitted the Hon.Galahad. 'I suppose you're</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>not in the mood for stories. It was simply that poor old Jack fell in love with a girl named Esmeralda</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Parkinson-Willoughby and had the whole thing tattooed on his wishbone, and the wounds had scarcely healed when they quarrelled and he got engaged to another girl called May Todd. So if he had only waited ...</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p1">
I am what they call a "raconteur". In the grand scheme of everything else that I could be, I guess it isn't all that bad.</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
All I can say is that I have a best-seller in my hands.</div>
<br />
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-29090677534521091112014-03-29T22:51:00.003+05:302014-03-29T22:54:04.819+05:30Think Different<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I just read about this teenager who figured out a simple and an ingenious idea to save a lot of money for the Federal government. Read about it <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/27/living/student-money-saving-typeface-garamond-schools/index.html?fb_action_ids=10152333084794776&fb_action_types=og.recommends" target="_blank">here</a>. Isn't this beautiful? We would have never thought about a typeface making a lot of difference and apparently it does, which is not entirely an inconceivable notion.<br />
<br />
I keep reading about these kids doing big things in high school. They develop complicated biomedical instruments, power saving contraptions and so on which always makes me think that their parents would have helped them with it (though I might be completely wrong, in which case it is remarkable). I suppose I am deeply suspicious of kids doing mind-blowingly awesome things in high school, by themselves, having been witness to many, many Tiger Moms. That is still not that big a deal in the bigger spectrum of things, but I know how it is for reporters to blow things out of proportion, call the kid the next Steve Jobs only to put inordinate pressure on the kid to perform later in life. I remember something similar happened with an Indian kid a few months before where he created a new operating system of sorts that made the Indian media go bonkers. There was this huge thread in Reddit where they myth busted the awesomeness of this operating system.<br />
<br />
<br />
When I was in high school, one of the Tamil Magazines opened up an application to come up with the next big public policy idea to revolutionize India. The prize was a Compaq PC which was incredibly hot at that time. I remember spending days holed up with my mother trying to brainstorm and come up with the greatest idea ever. We never did. My mother was prone to sending out essay, stories and jokes to Tamil magazines in my name. Thankfully, most of them did not get published. Some of them did, but they were mostly restricted to the realm of kitchen tips in women's magazines. At one point I had middle aged women spotting me out in weddings and telling me how good my idea for scrubbing kitchen counters with pumice stone was, which is when I put my foot down on the state of affairs. My mother sullenly took up my grandmother's name for her future publishing endeavors. Now you can understand my natural skepticism for the limitless projected potential of high school students. When I was in eighth grade, this shady article appeared in a shadier magazine that was literally titled " Flower Bouquet " on how I plan to become an IAS officer. The readership of Flower Bouquet magazine was probably a sum total of fifty people which includes the publisher, the parents of the kids who write in the magazine and the relatives who get forced by these parents to read the "featured" articles. Despite the small damage the limited viewership can wreak on kids, I think it a very presumptuous thing for parents ghost for their children and then make the child take credit. Somehow it feels that they are setting dangerous precedent about taking credit for someone else's work without a twinge of remorse.<br />
<br />
However, what makes me happy about this typeface idea is that it is so simple and fantastic without the usual frills of transistors or gene modification or cancer curing drug. It is definitely something that a high school student could have conceived and executed by himself without parental help, which to even to me, feels very convincing and weirdly, reassuring.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-37325750115420983152014-03-18T06:54:00.001+05:302014-03-18T10:37:49.307+05:30What if I am tricked?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<br />
One of my friends posted <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOA">this video</a> up on Facebook. It is about Assistant Professor Chao-Lin Kuo surprising Professor Andrei Linde at Stanford with evidence that supports cosmic inflation theory. <br />
<br />
<div>
Now, I don't know anything about cosmic inflation theory. But this video made me smile so much at the professor's look of disbelief and wonder when his colleague says at the door "five sigma, as clear as a day, with a R of 0.2". <br />
<br />
After a rather crappy day of trying to break the will of this obdurate block of data, I was deep down in the dumps. Seriously, there is nothing that sucks the morale out of someone like staring at Excel all day long without food.<br />
<br />
This video added a little more perspective to why I signed up for this deal.<br />
<br />
The professor goes on to say (after looking at the results, of course) "What if I am tricked", then looking lost, probably in the poignancy of the moment, slowly and deliberately adds "What if I want to believe in this just because it is beautiful?"<br />
<br />
I guess being with people like this who "want" to believe in things just because the said things are beautiful, is what makes my own little world filled with vindictive and egregiously large p values, worth it - however academically unacceptable they may be.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-90340731081122683342014-03-05T09:12:00.001+05:302014-03-05T09:44:26.220+05:30Going forward<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
I really have to get going and hence will keep it short. Today also marks the first year of getting my admit in CMU. That is sort of all the birthday gifts (wrapped in one brief email) that I could have hoped for as a kid. It is a fitting tribute to this occasion that I have a test tomorrow and I ended up studying.<br />
<br />
In the immortal words of Ron Swanson, birthdays were invented by Hallmark to sell cards. I concur. For most people, birthday is a time to stop, introspect and make an assessment. For someone who wanders about introspecting all the time and procrastinating everything worth assessing, birthday is one more day I expect the world to go out of its way and pamper me. Up until now, it has happened only once.<br />
<br />
<br />
Yes, my days are along the lines of looking under rocks in the creek. And of course, I am happy doing that.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhydwa1V-OHWq-vcNv37hrmJrPG4iyMtN5kGF_ixLmE71ajEW8YPd8ZhPF5EqjaCZB5m27YJKNdECAs48oblZoKvV33VZvQy_9rgEQW3PDYMZ8qTyYw7aQ6M2_ctPp0TojTlM0Wdg/s1600/cal.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhydwa1V-OHWq-vcNv37hrmJrPG4iyMtN5kGF_ixLmE71ajEW8YPd8ZhPF5EqjaCZB5m27YJKNdECAs48oblZoKvV33VZvQy_9rgEQW3PDYMZ8qTyYw7aQ6M2_ctPp0TojTlM0Wdg/s1600/cal.png" height="200" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
The title is a bad pun on my birthday - March Fourth. It sounds like an order - March forth. Right Ho!<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-75600815614603882852014-02-24T00:03:00.003+05:302014-02-24T00:25:05.273+05:30On getting a job.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I suddenly remembered the "placement season" at my undergrad for no reason. To the uninitiated, the placement season in Southern Indian engineering colleges are when software companies recruit engineering students en masse. This generally happens just before the start of the final year of engineering. This is the coming-of-age ritual that every engineering student undergoes.<br />
<br />
After a nasty childish spat with a neighboring college (which I am sure readers of this blog will remember) I received more than one ugly note saying that how I would be dealt with during the pooled placement season that happens on their campus. I bring this up because, it is funny to think that they wanted to punish me with a job that I would miss out on for my (admittedly) bad behavior. One could sell anything to anyone if they attach a "placement" tag to it. Oh so much for campus placements, the petty issues, the mad race and the hacks. I am surprised that they don't sell powdered dragon claws as a performance boosters (or do they?) during the season. I remember ludicrous stories of how "cotton salwars" were the only accepted dress code and how guys would get rejected if the interviewers sniff out the fact that they had used a particularly misogynistic brand of deodorant. There were special classes to crack these mock tests for which people paid good deal of money.<br />
<br />
In this fiasco, the placement coordinators (PCs) are the ones who truly deserve a lot of credit. The amount of bullshit they take during placement season, for the greater good of their peers (who are not particularly nice to them) is mind boggling. They have the nerve wrecking job of having to deal with some of the most narcissistic and egregious blokes who saunter into campus in the guise of interviewers and dangle placements, money and hope over these poor PCs. The PCs with their limitless patience are completely answerable to their peers and to their professors and are often the casualties of nasty college politics and get majorly footballed around during the season. The PCs would wait on the interviewers hand and foot and treat them like royalty. I remember hearing horror stories how some of these interviewers would send the PCs off at midnight on a mission to procure a particular brand of chicken or liquor and how the PCs would wordlessly comply.<br />
<br />
I understand that people spend a lot of money on engineering colleges (excluding the state schools, of course) just because they can get a job. But the whole deal becomes futile if the sole focus is on getting a job than becoming employable which are two different things altogether. One cannot simply become good at something by dreaming about tantalizing notion of landing a lucrative job or by cheap hacks or doing things just to have a good resume. It shows up as glaring inadequacies in the first ten minutes of of an interview.<br />
<br />
I recently overheard a CMU undergrad giving his phone interview to some company as I was lounging in the sunny corridors of Gates building. As he talked on, I was starting to feel awestruck at the things this guy knew. I was beginning to feel bad about the futility of my undergrad when this guy mentioned that he was in his first year (looks like he was pitching for an internship) and my jaw dropped. In my first year, I had given up on Electronics as a chosen career path after my first bungled tryst with Norton's and Thevenin's theorm and was moping around about how I had made a big, irreversible mistake. In contrast, here was a first year student who had built things that were clearly beyond my comprehension and apparently he had been building such things since eighth grade. Seriously, if we dream of competing in a global arena and think beyond the standard software placements, cramming up Agarwal's Quantitative aptitude or buttressing our engineering ability by reading "selections" of frequently asked questions, is NOT going to help. The "Group Discussion" rounds are such a farce. It makes me smile just think about how people believed that they can become proficient in topics worth having a group discussion about, by reading the newspaper for two days before the dreaded GD. Also, how on earth a person's analytical ability or his propensity to communicate and work in a team can come out in such a carefully constructed tableau?<br />
<br />
I don't know if the status quo will change. I hope it does.<br />
<br />
On a side note, in retrospect, it amuses me that I somehow always managed to wangle my way out of doing things that I didn't want to do - like never having to cram up the nuances of C such as linked lists & pointers or even think about attending pooled placements for dream companies (that I was cutely threatened with). My parents just let me take twenty days off and be at home during the placement season because I couldn't stand being on the campus what with the peer pressure driving me insane. Not everyone gets to watch reruns of House MD while grappling with an identity crisis, oblivious to the world outside. Somehow, my parents were more confident about my employability than I was and were just waiting around for me to sort out my issues (which anyway took me the next four years).<br />
<br />
Despite my incessant bitching about life, I think I should really be thankful for these small pleasures.<br />
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-62533810363026337162014-02-17T07:28:00.000+05:302014-02-17T07:41:15.720+05:30Out of chaos, comes order (and also a perfect cup of tea)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(This might be a repeated theme in this blog, but somehow I feel
that today's deeds hit the high levels in the craziness meter)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It is not everyday I wholeheartedly set out to study. Today was
the day to atone for watching an entire season of House of Cards in a record
thirteen hours. As I watched House of Cards with my jaws slackened and devoid
of any animation, I was already making elaborate plans on how to finish half
semester worth of Math in eight hours of undivided attention. I was even
prepared to use the art of meditation that people tried to force me into before
my 12th board exams to zoom through two hundred pages of disquieting Matrix
algebra. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If nothing, I am all about super-human goal setting. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Just ten pages through my book, I decided that I should be washing
the dishes. As I was doing the dishes, I realized there were so many in the
sink because I did not have space anywhere else in the kitchen and had been
dumping things into the sink; and into the fridge. (It reminds me of this
answer I read in Quora for the greatest software misuses on how people use
recycle bin to store files) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Suddenly the prospect of cleaning the fridge became quite
appealing given the task I was currently up to, was rather slimy. I didn't
quite calculate the odds of the next task being equally, if not more slimy.
Whistling a merry tune, I abandoned the dishes and set off to clean the fridge,
which is where I discovered the stuff I had been looking for months. I found empty
plastic containers, which to my surprise were stacked neatly in the corner of
the third row. I also found an entire loaf of bread in the vegetable tray. This
was the elusive loaf that I had been looking for, every morning, in desperate
need for breakfast, before scrambling to school in hunger. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I kept a stiff upper lip and decided that I needed an organization
strategy to deal with the situation. And so, I decided to clear out the pantry
to make space for the things that had absolutely no need to be refrigerated but somehow had found their way into the fridge - like the empty glasses, the bag of potatoes, salt shaker and a couple of
kitchen knifes stuck to apples in a rather threatening way. The fridge, meanwhile,
lost all hope and went back to its melancholic whirring.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">While cleaning the stuff off the pantry (or a "larder"
like how Enid Blyton would call it), I disinterred a bag of cardamom and cloves
that I had gotten from home. I was sniffing the bags for a good couple of
minutes, taking in the heady aroma of these spices. This must have tripped some internal circuit in the old noodle as I
suddenly started having an intense craving for a cup of Masala Chai. Now, there
is this quaint little shop called "Arasan Sweets" in Madurai. Up
until now, I have never had a cup of Masala chai that tasted better than the
one they serve at Arasan Sweets. I have made it a point to visit Arasan Sweets
every time I go back home and slurp the tea standing amidst the gang of Indian
government bureaucrats who haunt this place for their notoriously long
pre-lunch, post breakfast tea break. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This gave me a new mission. I went online and fifteen odd clicks
and ten websites later, I had a general idea of how go about making the Masala
Chai. A dash of cloves and cardamom, a sprinkle of cinnamon, a smack of ginger
and a generous dab of attention deficiency turned out to be the secret ingredients
required to make the best cuppa Masala Chai. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I hope to iterate through this crazy loop over and over until my
homework, dishwashing, clearing-out-the fridge, cleaning the pantry, drinking
more tea and incoherent-post-tea-rhapsodizing - all get done.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What is life without some optimized parallel processing, eh?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-58927562689784406852014-02-05T09:26:00.002+05:302014-02-05T09:28:05.924+05:30One more quora question<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="http://www.quora.com/How-do-people-feel-when-their-names-are-mispronounced">How do people feel when their names are mispronounced?</a><br /><br />Ok, we from Tamil Nadu don't really have a surname. We just take our father's first names as surnames because the western world demands one. So, the first name is pretty important and I think my parents spent a whole lot of time in coming up with mine . It is quite unique even today and the only advantage is that I get the choicest of email ids. However, coming up with this name was a bad strategy in so many ways.<br /><br />I don't know why, "Uttara" just freaks the heck out of Tamils. They simply can't handle the two ts. They say ta, instead of tha and perhaps while reeling from the initial shock, add a couple of 'a's for good measure and approximate it to nothing like how it is supposed to sound.<br /><br />Somehow, everyone outside Tamil Nadu pronounces it perfectly. It is just my kith and kin who stumble so much and have mangled it beyond recognition that I don't care anymore. Pretty much everyone, whom I used to correct in my younger days, which was pretty much everyone, stuck to the unthreatening version with their comforting "h" in the sight i.e, Uthra. I swear I have a certificate that says "Avtara" (from A.Uttara). I remember one of my teachers in middle school scrunching up her face in effort and say "Udderaa". <br /><br />Nowadays, I am happy if I hear a "ta" & a "ra". Even a ballpark estimate would do. But definitely not "Andhera". <br /><br />By the way, my "surname" that is not, is "Madurai Ananthakrishnan". Your turn, western world.<div class="form_row" style="background-color: white; clear: both; color: #333333; float: left; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.666666984558105px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 5px; width: 485px;">
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-35522687913636509492014-01-27T08:38:00.001+05:302014-01-27T10:40:11.805+05:30This is the story of Snownibal<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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My exposure to the western world began with Enid Blyton novels. Every Enid
Blyton novel set in the winter, had children building snowmen. Sometimes these
snowmen even had clues to solving mysteries involving stolen goods and
fireworks meant for Guy Fawkes Day. When the children in these novels were not
eating scones or stealing pies from the larders for their secret adventures, they
were accessorizing the snowmen that they built with hats and scarfs. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Despite vanquishing
the bunny hill at a ski resort, this winter, my tryst with snow didn't feel complete without building a snowman. There was a gaping void in the list
of activities I had meant to do the moment I set foot in this country. Making a
snowman was that gaping void, for the lack of willing accomplices.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This Saturday, just when I was about to sit down
with my Econometrics book, one of my friends suggested that we should build a
snowman given the polar vortex seemed to be doing its second round and all that
snow was going waste. So intrepid we were, that we trudged through -13 degree
celsius to campus just because the snow would be much more pristine on the
campus. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Our initial plan was to make this ginormous
snowman that would be visible from the entrance of the campus. We hadn’t quite
contemplated on prior research before embarking on this endeavor. After all, it
was a dumb snowman, and we were two doctoral students with one being a real
life brain scientist. Ten minutes in the snow, our flawed
methodology and the years of growing up six degrees above the equator started showing up. Our hands were too frozen to consult YouTube from our
phones. After multiple strategy sessions and scuttling back into the safety of
indoors every 20 minutes, we figured that we could approximate a snowman out of
this the huge mound of snow that we had created. Our art started looking
more and more like a three layered frosted cake. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After we made the final spherical mass that was the head, we
decided he looked snowmanly enough. But the deed wasn’t quite done. The stump
of carrot that I had so carefully carried had turned soggy. Our amateur effort in
giving the snowman his well deserved nose job, which was along the lines of
poking a series of holes wherever possible, caused his face face to
disintegrate as if he had been a victim of an acid attack (Life is all about violent imagery, isn't it?) . But a snowman isn't a snowman without the carrot. We finally managed to cement the darned carrot in ( we called it "fixing the deviated septum") and substituted some twigs
for eyes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The fun part about any project is the naming
stage. In fact, I believe that the only good part about having pets or even
kids is that one gets to name them. I should say that I am terrific with names.
I once thought of a series of names for twins that a colleague at work had,
that started with Ping and Pong to downright arcane characters from Greek & Indian mythology. After a while, he started taking a different route every time he saw me
as I was spewing out names at a rate higher than he could take in, without
visibly grimacing. My stuffed elephant is called Ashwathama after his
elephantine counterpart in Mahabharata and my pink flamingo, with her frilly
wispy skirt, is called "Azhagiya Laila" after the legendary Marilyn
Monroesque scene that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBAJrvKMLYQ" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Ramba pulled off in Ullathai Allitha</span></a>. My bike in India was called
Karuthamma (Black beauty?). My friend calls her stuffed lion, "Singaram,
the lion" and therefore a team like ours had a self-inflicted responsibility to
come up with a name befitting our art-work.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We came up with three. The snowman was called
Santhanagopalan. He also goes by Sheshadri. Since Santhanagopalan implies that
he will be spelling his name forever at Starbucks, we decided to call him
Snownibal as a salute to the sleepless nights of reading Hannibal Lecter books,
though the logical abbreviation would have been Santa. Snownibal was also chosen for Hannibal because of the whole Crossing of the Alps bit and we were sure there must have been lot of snow while doing so. </span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Santhanagopalan Andrew
Carnegie Sundaram Iyengar (as a hat-tip to all the schools we both attended/attend) would
have been perfect but it was too cold to goof around more. In retrospect, it actually abbreviates to SACSI- Sexy indeed, the effect that we were going for.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I can now proudly say that I finally built a
snowman. He is quirky and wears his hat at a jaunty angle.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8VjGeI7oAXX0yV8oFAqLrkCGKtoe3xEDaeiJvfpvH4j1KiA-EvwWuU0ZGX3Vsrb4qewsCfcxXC3ORW6rncye5gPv0IaEF71zJWTwvJkm-BvPsIaOMEZCR2qw2GZIkio1M5Bv3EA/s1600/snownibal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8VjGeI7oAXX0yV8oFAqLrkCGKtoe3xEDaeiJvfpvH4j1KiA-EvwWuU0ZGX3Vsrb4qewsCfcxXC3ORW6rncye5gPv0IaEF71zJWTwvJkm-BvPsIaOMEZCR2qw2GZIkio1M5Bv3EA/s1600/snownibal.jpg" height="320" width="239" /></span></a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-84579920513679338312014-01-21T08:24:00.001+05:302014-01-21T08:24:26.456+05:30One of those days (aka Dear Diary post)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Today was one of those days when everything went according to the plan. It is amazing how rarely these days occur. I went to a lecture three minutes ahead of time; hit the gym; did not binge eat; did the dishes down to the last spoon; walked into the frozen yogurt shop and then walked right outside without buying anything; drank only two cups of coffee - boy, I am so proud of myself.<br />
<br />
I am so proud that I wanted to make a note about this once in a blue moon day. The problem with self-control is that, by default, mine is on a road to perdition. I calculate the probability of my going above and beyond to stick to a routine and then give up just by the thought.<br />
<br />
Like everything that is not good for a person, doing things impromptu, feels good. Historically it has worked well too. I get so much work done when I capitalize on my prime productivity zones that probably occurs once a week at inconvenient, god-forsaken times, and then go about the rest of the week, in what Calvin would call, a complete forfeiture of experience. The problem with this approach to life is that it is extremely difficult to induce these happy zones, on demand, especially when there is homework to be done and reports to write.<br />
<br />
Digressions apart, today was perfect- except the time I tried to study and fell asleep for a rather embarrassingly long period of time. Oh, so much for perfection.<br />
<br />
I am just going to try holding on to this meek attempt to live a normal life and see how it goes.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-51942754834594486052014-01-06T00:30:00.003+05:302014-01-06T08:20:02.863+05:30They said I would hate winter<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="text-align: left;">
Summer is for outdoorsmen- The people who play cricket when it is 45 deg C outside; The ones who talk about Madurai weather with such fondness in their eyes while their shirts get soaked in sweat minutes after they come out of the air-conditioning that they have to scurry back in for their fourth shower of the day.</div>
<br />
Back at home, the summers were typically 45 deg Celsius (110-115 deg F). We didn't have air conditioning until after I was in college. Not that it made any difference because we always had (and still have) six hours of power cuts everyday during summers. I remember lying hours together on the floor with my face pressed to the cool marble floor of my home and settling for buckets of lemonade or buttermilk instead of Rasna as it was "unhealthy". Arun ice-cream had a monopoly in Tamil Nadu and the sticks of orange or grape icies were rare treats. In the evenings, my parents and I would splash a lot of water on the clay floored terrace and sit down on "easy chairs" to read, while the gnarled teak leaves fell down and the coconut tree's leaves swayed very gently. By 8 or 9 PM after it turned unbearably humid and hot, I would go down, shower for what would be the third time that day and swathe myself in layers of Nycil (and Dermicool later on). I always prayed that the power shouldn't go off at 4 AM so that I won't wake up in a pool of sweat. Cotton, thin, soft, non-scratchy clothes were the order of the day. My parents and I would shudder at anyone who wore a full sleeve. I remember my mother writing a rather scathing letter to my principal saying how stupid it was to make us wear shoes and socks in Madurai's horrendous climate which was one of her few actually valid reasons to write a scathing letter to the principal.<br />
<br />
A room without a fan was a nightmare and my undergrad classrooms didn't have fans while we all fanned ourselves with the thinnest of our engineering books. Imagine being in labs poring over faulty circuit-boards with the hair sticking to the back of your neck for three hours and coming back to the hostel to find that there is no water or power. My roommate and I would hang up towels soaked in water over the windows so that it would cool the room. The laptops would get so hot on the bed that I had to work from a desk. The horror.<br />
<br />
God, I hate heat with a vehemence that comes from the twenty three summers of longing for a cooler tomorrow.<br />
<br />
Thank goodness for the snow and this list.<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>The crunchy nice new snow every morning</li>
<li>Wading through the new snow just because it is so powdery and soft</li>
<li>Making the first footprints on fresh snow</li>
<li>Short days warm bed, just being at home</li>
<li>My hands getting cold as I type</li>
<li>Going around my house reciting <span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia;">Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening with no one to stop me or roll their eyes at me</span></li>
<li>Struggling to say "Wet cappuccino" at the coffee shop with the frozen lips and tongue and getting "Venti cappuccino" instead</li>
</ul>
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<span class="author" style="background-color: white; color: #4d493f; display: inline-block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0.05em; text-transform: uppercase;"></span><br />
Ha, and they told me I would hate winter.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28430450.post-66519879332386249632014-01-01T02:30:00.002+05:302014-01-01T02:37:02.452+05:30Year end post<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I don't really remember too much of 2013 as it whooshed past by. While 2012 was all
about indulgence, 2013 was all about backbreaking work. I realized this as
I was scrubbing out six months of cooking from my stovetop. The first five
months were all about my letting the goblins in my head take over and crank up
the crazy just a wee bit more to wreak havoc. But I have talked more than enough to anyone who
would listen (or really, be in the same room as I am) about this, and so I am
going to selectively remember the few good stuff. My official admit came on my 24th birthday.
My shoes and coats came to Pittsburgh three days after my admit and then I
managed to bring 4x23 KGs of luggage here. I am taking a moment to savor the
shopping that happened between March and July. Really, that's all the good
stuff in the first part of the year.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "inherit","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">2013 was the year I
realized how hard it is to fend for one self. I have never realized how
terrible and how hard it is to keep up a house. All along, I have waltzed past
the concept of living alone armed with maids at my beck and call, who cleaned
my house, did my laundry, folded my clothes and took care of me for a paltry
salary equal to ten days worth of coffee at Starbucks. I fondly remember the
days I used to groan just at the thought of getting up from my bed and letting
the maids in to my apartment. </span><span style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "inherit","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">My background in
housekeeping is almost non-existent. In twenty-four years, I have never once
taken out the trash. It was something grown ups did and when I had to, it felt
so repugnant. At the first attempt, I held on to one corner of the trash bag
testily, squealed all the way to the trash room and back. This was just the tip
of the household iceberg.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "inherit","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dishes piled themselves in
the sink. I painfully realized that things turn greener and gruesome after a few
days of lingering around in moisture and goo. Then came the mystery of missing
spoons. I had gotten about three dozen on my first gleeful trip to Walmart and
somehow there was never one around when I most needed a spoon. I didn't know
that spoons have the propensity to wiggle their way into the bottom of the
sink, and create a pyramid of quivering dishes resting on a base made of
spoons. Of course, I never make it to the bottom whenever I valiantly set out
to do the dishes. The worst moment of this year was the first time I did
reach to the bottom of the pile and realized the ghastliness that my First In
Last Out approach was. Decay, squalor and all things slimy and shady
characterized my first attempt at truly living alone in 2013.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "inherit","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">My peerless house keeping
skills resulted in a neatly traced out path from the door to my bed. I have
been called as a threat to myself as if it is news, after people almost broke
their necks stumbling on innocuous heaps of clothes, which camouflaged deadly
heels. I tell them that they just need practice. I bought a sofa as a treat for
doing great in an exam. When I wanted to flaunt the wonder that my sofa is to a
friend, he looked blankly at the general direction I was waving at. It took him
a whole minute to comprehend the presence of a sofa from under the pile of
clothes. Personalized robots that can fold clothes and organize boots cannot
get here sooner. </span><span style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "inherit","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">2013 was a year of feeling
erudite befitting my latest stint in the academia. Sometimes, I step back from
the whiteboards filled with squiggly integrals feeling quite proud of myself. I
am exceeding my own expectations just by nudging myself out of my comfort
zones. For once, R seems to be easier to handle than Excel, which indicates
great personal improvement and less blaspheming (years may pass but spinning
beach ball of death in Mac's Excel will never cease).</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "inherit","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This year, I have learned
the importance of being earnest and of sanity, a pat on the back, a kind word,
a genuine grin, a good night's sleep and oh-so-lovely work. I don't think I get
to complain about anything. After all, <span style="background: white;">who
best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. If by mild yoke, a roof
caving in, so be it. I shall take the hazing and the assorted cosmic character
building endeavors like the manned up, Zen Guru that I am.</span></span><span style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: inherit, serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Last but
not the least, <span style="color: blue;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBDF04fQKtQ">this</a> </span>bit about "a little help from my friends". What would you do if I sing out of tune,
would you stand up and walk out on me? Apparently, yes.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "inherit","serif"; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Here is to 2014 and as
Calvin says, the world owes me happiness, fulfillment and success. I am just
here to cash in.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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