Grooving at work

Listening to music while working (or being at work) is a tricky thing. The music should be just so, interesting enough, that you want to listen to it, but not too interesting, that you get sucked into it. One of the rules of thumb, for this, is to go with songs in languages you don't understand. In my case, there are a lot of languages to choose from :) So here is a sample. A song in Japanese, one in Turkish and one in French.

日本語 :
clap your hands everybody

(you will need realplayer)

A cut from the compliation called Reach Series #1. Various progressive Japanese rock groups perform their version of children's songs in this album.

التركيه (صفه) ترك:

Mustafa Sandal, a turkish singer. Songs similar to some of our own Bollywood music. Some interesting videos. There are about 6-7 songs that are streamed from his homepage.

français :

Lounge music by Rouge Rouge. Cannot find their music online. But listen to it from a wonderful eclectic collection at Putumayo

Oct 31, 1984.

That is my earliest political memory. A sad fact, that it is a political assassination, which remains etched in my memory to this day.

"Sikhs everywhere were outraged at the perceived desecration of their holiest shrine: on October 31, 1984, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards, Beant Singh and Satwant Singh. She was cremated on 3 November, near Raj Ghat and the place was called Shakti Sthal. After her death, anti-Sikh riots engulfed New Delhi and spread across the country, killing more than 1,000 and leaving tens of thousands homeless." - wiki

"No school today! Indira Gandhi is dead.(why is she dead?) Her own bodyguard killed her. (Is that bad?!) What on earth is playing on the television? (Some boring guy playing the shennai. Now another playing the sitar.... State mourning... great! Can I have some cartoons back?... Well, at least, they don't have cricket on!)" - my first thoughts.

Slowly, reality kicks in.

Our neighbor, X Singh uncle, who hosted the most wonderful satsangs at his place, every week (I was sure, everyone thought it was wonderful, mostly because of the amazing pooris they made.) It was at his home, that I ate my first roti-sized pooris, fried for everyone who attended the satsang. Made by anyone, willing to help make them.

And now, his son, Y bhaiya, who started college a couple of months back, is in danger. His parents and everyone around, suggest that he go and register himself at the nearest police station. Maybe he should spend the night there. Jails are the safest place for a Sikh to be, you know - they say. Maybe he should be clean-shaven. Maybe he should... (Why should Y bhaiya go to jail? What has he done? What harm have the colourful turbans on his head caused - to anyone? No one answers.)

Honestly, how does killing people, solve the world's problems? (Thanks falstaff! - for the c&h story)

Reading Veena's first, brought back these memories.

Greed is Good?!

48(!!) CPUs on your server machine, with 128GB RAM. Fabric7 announced its products today. One of them is 8 way - 16 core Opteron based server. It makes my head spin. What can I say the CPU still rules. Now go figure how many engineers it would take to make the machine use its full capacity and actually do something useful (I mean don't keep choking it with benchmark test... its not a toy you know)...

Mythology can be fun. Finally!

Finally. A good reason to break silence :)

Found these two awesome animation films on the web today.

One on Sita. Presenting Sitayana, by the very talented Nina Paley.



Check out the animation here. This is really hilarious. Sita and Rama are this hot couple, singing and dancing around trees (Yes, I know. It totally reminds me of a million other Bollywood movies:) ). This should help you get over the scars Ramanand Sagar's Ramayan left on all of us, a whole generation of Indians.

And another, on Hanuman. A full motion picture, by Sahara One. Details here. A review from Rediff.

Ignorance is not bliss

What you don't know can hurt you, only you won't know it.
- bumper sticker

Corridors, Acquaintances and Turning Invisible

Its 5pm and I need my sugar fix. A dark chocolate cookie with chocolate chips, from the cafe. I can imagine the soft chocolate chips melt in my mouth, as I chew on the cookie. mmmph. Life - can wait. So can work, unanswered emails, and the rest.

I quietly make my way to the cafe. Passing through the long corridor. The long corridor that seperates me from my cookie. These long, lonely corridors. Cubicles to right of them, cubicles to the left of them and lets not forget, cubicles to the front of them!

And I see this acquaintance, making his way through the same path. Only he starts at the other end. He sees me and I see him. But, we both know, it will take 10 seconds for us to pass each other. Those critical 10 seconds, where you cannot look at each other, or heaven forbid, smile at each other. Sadly we have nothing else to look at or cannot even look busy. Its 5pm on a friday evening, we both know, the only starting point and destination is the cafe or your cube. Not a meeting room, not the lab, ok, may be, the printer...

We walk on, with a brave face (no smile, no eye contact). For 10 whole seconds, we are both invisible. We walk on, aware and conscious of the other person. But never once acknowledge the other's presence. Then, we are about 5 feet away. He smiles and says, "Hi!" and I smile back. And we have crossed each others path one more time. And boom! like magic, we are visible again. And, we walk on.

Why should just looking at someone - for 10 seconds, be so uncomfortable? What makes us look away? What do we fear? That one of us, might learn some deep dark secret about the other, by just looking at each other?

what poetry? - II

Bumper Sticker Poetry!

Google poetry reminded me of this Israel hip hop group - Hadag Nahash. Who gained popularity with their - Sticker Song.

(please note, they were touring last year, in the US of A, so this poster has last year's dates.)

"The group's name literally means "Snakefish" (dag=fish, nachash=snake), but it is also a Hebrew pun. In Israel, people who have only recently gotten their driver's licences place a tag on their back window with the words "Nahag Chadash" ("new driver"). The name "HaDag Nahash" therefore indicates the group's ambitions, as a voice for the youth in Israel."

"One of their most famous hits is "Shirat Hasticker" (known as "The Sticker Song" in English), written by Israeli novelist David Grossman. The lines in the song are all direct quotes or plays on slogans that actually appeared at some time on bumper stickers in Israel, but the unique collage of opposing political slogans juxtaposed against apolotical slogans, parodies and so forth creates an angry irony." (Wikipedia, of course!)

From their (translated) lyrics:

"Wipe Out, Kill, Deport, Exile,
Exterminate, Extradite, Death Penalty NO FEAR!
Destroy, Eradicate, Overthrow, Mop Up
Everything for You, Friend!"

what poetry? - I

Google Poetry!

Found interesting 'poetry' last night, while listening to Salman Rushdie talk about his new book.

Ladies and Gentlemen, introducing - Google Poetry. (note: you will need real player to hear this. Will post the transcript, when it becomes available. Anyway, its always nice hearing good Danish accented English). The poet, Pejk Malinovsk, reads his creations in the audio clip.

How does Pejk create this poetry? He types in a set of words in google and creates his poem from the search results he gets. For instance, I looked for "I wish I could" and here is my poem.

I wish I could

I wish I could
have been there,
I wish I could
but I can't.

I wish I could
shimmy (like my sister Kate),
I wish I could
fly (like Superman).

I wish I could
read for the 1st time all over again,
I wish I could
do more ...

I wish I could
go back home,
I wish I could
remember you.

What is yours?

Rebels in Waiting

A whole generation of us, rebels, waiting for a cause. Biding our time on this planet, for something, to kick us into action. Opposing what we find. So, when a worthy cause comes along, we will be prepared ... :)


Opposition


In my youth
I was opposed to school.
And now, again,
Im opposed to work.

Above all it is health
And righteousness that I hate the most.
Theres nothing so cruel to man
As health and honesty.

Of course Im opposed to the Japanese spirit
And duty and human feeling make me vomit.
Im against any government anywhere
And show my bum to authors and artists circles.

When Im asked for what I was born,
Without scruple, Ill reply, To oppose.
When Im in the east
I want to go to the west.

I fasten my coat at the left, my shoes right and left.
My hakama I wear back to front and I ride a horse facing its buttocks.
What everyone else hates I like
And my greatest hate of all is people feeling the same.

This I believe: to oppose
Is the only fine thing in life.
To oppose is to live.
To oppose is to get a grip on the very self.


Kaneko Mitsuharu
1895-1975

(Tr. by Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite)

Its a ... its a .. its a $100 laptop

A laptop for under $100, well atleast in the works at MIT. An interesting feature is a power crank, which would be very useful in place with undependable power supply. Here is article. And here is more information on this project.

Apparently, up to 15 million of these test systems will be distrbuted among children in Brazil, China, Thailand, Egypt and South Africa.

'He said a goal of the project is to make the low-cost PC idea a grassroots movement that will spread in popularity, like the Linux operating system or the Wikipedia free online encyclopedia. "This is open-source education. It's a big issue."'

The Dance Within

"Is not most talking
A crazed defence of a crumbling fort? "

A poet on my blog, after a long time. Have been meaning to write about Hafiz and his poetry.But never found the words. Hence the silence.

I have laughed out loud reading some of his poetry in quiet bookstores and fought back a tear or two in the library reading others. What can I say. Just grab a book of his poems, sit back, relax and let the pleasure begin. :)

Silence

A day of Silence
Can be a pilgrimage in itself.

A day of Silence
Can help you listen
To the Soul play
Its marvellous lute and drum.

Is not most talking
A crazed defence of a crumbling fort?

I thought we came here
To surrender in Silence,

To yield to Light and Happiness,

To Dance within
In celebration of Love’s Victory!

From: “I Heard God Laughing: Renderings of Hafiz: by Daniel Ladinsky.

My first Hafiz poem, you ask? After a long, interesting (and needless to say, absolutely pointless) discussion with a friend. I start questioning the usefulness/uselessness of time spent chatting. My friend smiles, but says nothing. Later that day, I find this in my inbox. Most wonderful!

What Should We Do About That Moon?

A wine bottle fell from a wagon
And broke open in a field.
That night hundred beetles and all their cousins
Gathered
And did some serious binge drinking.
They even found some seed husks nearby
And began to play them like drums and whirl.
This made God very happy.
Then the 'night candle' rose into the sky
And one drunk creature, laying down his instrument
Said to his friend - for no apparent
Reason,
"What should we do about that moon?"
Seems to Hafiz
Most everyone has laid aside the music
Tackling such profoundly useless
Questions.

- Hafiz


(image from http://www.sharadhaksar.com)

I was instantly fascinated. Why worry about the why, when you are having such a good time?

Reminds me of Madhushala by Harivansh Rai Bachchan. Bachchan is another poet who can make you, care and yet not care, so easily, that it can hurt.

Let me not forget, the reason (a post by Falstaff), I was reminded of Hafiz today.

Can I have the Time please?

Cell phones, computers, coffeemakers, cars (or may be even my niece's fancy new pencil box)... and pretty much everything under the sun, seem to have a clock embedded in them.

Still, there are times, I would really love, to be able to sneak a sly glance at my (nonexistent) wristwatch.

When someone really nice (or important) is boring me (to death). Opening my handbag and scrambling for my cellphone, to check the time, just doesn't do the trick.

A friend is late for dinner and I decide to sneak in a trip to a wonderful used bookstore. There I find Buddha (!!), right in the middle of all the Astroboys, in the manga comic section (which needless to say, is in the basement-with-no-wall-clocks. Isn't that the exact place where bookstore owners would want weird comic readers shoved away, while the important looking readers come by, looking for latin/greek classics...?) Just as I am done scanning through the first few volumes, I realize, I have no idea how long I have been in that basement. Of course, my cell phone switched off (I am a civilized person in a bookstore, remember?).

I am on a trail. Many a times, I am drawn to go on, longer than I had intended to. Either by the wonderful little wild flowers or the humming birds. Suddenly, I realize, I have to walk back 6 miles. 6 long miles to civilization (and my car). There is no way of finding out what the time is. How long before the sun will set? Will I be all alone in the wilderness, in the dark.

I am chatting with someone, sipping some awesome hot chocolate, while taking (what was supposed to be) a short 15-minute break. Just about the time, when we have start discussing Gael Garcia Bernal, and both of us have no clue how we got there (considering, the conversation started with Sourav Ganguly and the state of indian cricket). Then, I wish I could check the time.

"To wear a quality watch and feel its weight; to know it is carved out of blocks of steel, not squeezed out of plastic, is deeply reassuring." - Sunday Independent

And I know, I am not alone.

The Clown

Reading Shalimar the Clown.

Parts of it are classic rushdie,
Some parts are just pompous and fluffy...

Reading the different sections, here was my reaction -

Hated it, loved it, hated it, loved it...

Then, sadly, today, had to return the book, as it was 'On Hold'.

An affair left incomplete...

Useful reviews can be found here

hmm!!

200,000 books! A dollar or less!

Friends of the San Francisco Public Library's 41st Annual Big Book Sale!

Only Three Who Have Real Meaning

Like Murakami? Check out his short story in this week's New Yorker.

The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day

Murakami is the kind of author I like to read when I feel the need to stop and reflect on my own life and the strange things that happen in it. His stories manage to help me to pause my wandering mind and make me reflect. There are times when life seems busy and I don't want to stop and reflect. I cannot read him then. But now seems like a time when I need a Murakami fix.

His stories seem to have a lot more going on inside the heads of the protagonists than in the outside world. They always seem to be about a guy and the women are only there as catalysts, that cause changes in the guy's inside world.

This story starts with an interesting pronouncement by Junpei(the protagonist)'s father -

"Among the women a man meets in his life, there are only three who have real meaning for him. No more, no less," his father said—or, rather, declared. He spoke coolly but with utter certainty, as he might have in noting that the earth takes a year to revolve around the sun. Junpei listened in silence, partly because his father’s speech was so unexpected; he could think of nothing to say on the spur of the moment.

"You will probably become involved with many women in the future," his father continued, "but you will be wasting your time if a woman is the wrong one for you. I want you to remember that."

I find it interesting that someone would say such a thing to a sixteen year old. But what is even more interesting is, how it affects the choices he makes in his life.

I wonder if there were things people told me when I was sixteen, that are still affecting my life?! If I need a - Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day, in my life too.

Of Culture, And Polluting It

Israeli couple gets fined for kissing after getting married in a temple in India. Each had to pay up 500 Indian rupees (about 11 USD) for the pollution they were causing.

I only wish, that people who dump toxins into rivers and air also get fined similarly.

"The Asian Age said priests at Pushkar's Brahma temple were so incensed when the couple smooched as hymns were still being chanted that they filed a police complaint."

Here is the article.

Network of Dreams

An AI experiment on the web - GNOD. Kinda like a friend, who might introduce you to a new Author, Band or Movie.

Would you like gnod's suggestions? Check it out...

music : U2

books: Rushdie

movies: The Bridge on the River Kwai

Dutch Treat?!

"The Dutch government will begin tracking every citizen from cradle to grave in a single database, opening a personal electronic dossier for every child at birth with health and family data, and eventually adding school and police records."

The article on Wired does say this will help raise a "red flag" to alert authorities when a child is in trouble etc. But really is this a good thing?

Would they also provide a record clearing option for the powerful? Will there be an equivalent of the memory erasure in the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (Don't you see a market for a record erasure service?)

Sign of the Times

Graduation Speech

Is this a whole genre of inspirational writing (speaking?).

For a long time my favourite one used to be Hindsight - Guy Kawasaki's speech at Palo Alto High School in 1995.

Then there were others. Steve Jobs' at stanford this summer - Stay hungry, Stay foolish. Which was kind of interesting. He talks about, how college is useless (I can only imagine the faces of all those parents, who had paid tens of thousands and were sitting in the hot sun, listening to this.)

One of the more shocking ones - Muhammad Ali's speech at MIT.

"Me, We"

2 words. period.

Here is another one I came across last week. The Johns Hopkins University commencement this summer. The talk by the President William R. Brody. If you haven't heard/read this one and like commencement speeches. ;) Here is the complete text.

And, here is small snippet for the lazy people! ;)

"I'd like to close with one last story that I think you will especially understand, because today you are receiving a degree from what you know firsthand is a very competitive school. All of you, I am sure, have along the way felt pressure from your peers and perhaps from your parents to get good grades and become accomplished, so you can go on to even greater achievements later in life.

Today, I want to turn those expectations on their heads. Today, I want to encourage you to do well by doing good. The trick is not to fall into the trap of thinking that the way you do well is to do so at the expense of others. It's not a zero-sum game. And I'd just like to relate this story to make my point.

There is another trustee of Johns Hopkins who I'd like to tell you about. His name is Sandy Greenberg. In his youth, Sandy was a very good student, but he came from a poor family. And so he went to Columbia University on a scholarship, and there he met his roommate, who also was receiving financial aid.

Now while he was a sophomore at Columbia University, he contracted an eye disease that eventually proved to be glaucoma. But the trouble was, it wasn't detected early enough, and as a result he became legally blind, while still a student at Columbia. I ask you all to imagine for a moment having been sighted all your life, and then all of a sudden being faced, in a very competitive school, with losing so much sight you could no longer read. This is what happened to our trustee, Sandy Greenberg.

But something else happened to Sandy that may surprise you. Sandy said that when he lost his sight, his roommate began to read his textbooks to him, every night.

So I'm going to put you in that position, in a competitive school like Columbia, or Johns Hopkins. If your roommate had a serious disability, would you take the time to read textbooks to him every night, knowing the more you spend time reading textbooks to your roommate, perhaps the less well you might do with your other activities? That's not as easy a question as it first appears.

But luckily for Sandy, our trustee, his roommate did. And as a result, Sandy went on to graduate with honors. He got a Fulbright Scholarship, and he went off to study at Oxford. He was still quite poor, but he said he had managed to save about five hundred dollars as he went along.

His roommate, meanwhile, also went on to graduate school. One day, Sandy got a call from him at Oxford. And his former roommate said, "Sandy I'm really unhappy. I really don't like being in graduate school, and I don't want to do this."

So Sandy asked, "Well what do you want to do?"

And his roommate told him, "Sandy, I really love to sing. I have a high school friend who plays the guitar. And we would really like to try our hand in the music business. But we need to make a promo record, and in order to do that I need $500."

So Sandy Greenberg told me he took all his life savings and sent it to his roommate. He told me, "You know, what else could I do? He made my life; I needed to help make his life." So, I hope you'll remember the power of doing well by doing good. Each of you, in your own lives, will be faced with challenges, with roadblocks, with problems that you didn't anticipate or expect. How you are able to deal with adversity will be influenced, to no small extent, by how you deal with others along the way. What you get will depend a lot on what you give. And that's the end of the story of doing well, by doing good.

Ah! I almost forgot. You probably are wanting to know who Sandy's roommate was. I think you've heard of him. Sandy's roommate was a fellow by the name of Art Garfunkel, and he teamed up with another musician by the name of Paul Simon. That $500 helped them cut a record that eventually became "The Sounds of Silence." Recently, we had the pleasure of going to Sandy's daughter's wedding, and it was Art Garfunkel who sang as Sandy walked his daughter down the aisle."

- President William S. Brody, Johns Hopkins University, Commencement 2005.