Zaroorat hai, zaroorat hai

Yaay... the #%&!$ project deadline is finally over! All pending comments have been answered, and I plan to visit all your blogs soon. Anyway, I was looking through some blogs of people I know in person and noticed that I had been tagged over a year back by my sister. Well, it is never too late to take up the tags, and this one pleases me no end.

I need to describe eight different qualities I would like to see in my would be life-partner (who, wherever she is, already has my sympathies :D ). And then I need to pass the tag onto 4 others. As I see it, there are two ways of answering the tag. One is to be honest with myself and write the truth here: in sincere detail. But that, I suspect, will start giving my mom and a lot of other people a lot of ideas, besides putting me through some traumatic (blogging) experiences. Therefore, in the interest of public mental health, I wouldn't do that. Instead, the alternate way of describing the potential unlucky lady would be as follows:

1. Should be less than or equal to 70 kilos in weight: I can lift that much with one hand. The other arm should always be free ;)
2. Should be perfectly hare-brained... a see-through tunnel between the ears is the hallmark of the ideal candidate.
3. Must have a firm and unshakeable belief that I am the best thing to have happened to this earth since God Himself!
4. Must rate me as 100% sexy, 100% cool and 100% trustworthy on Orkut... never mind what the real life details are. Must also become a fan upon very first acquaintance!
   
5. Must remind me time and again that I look and smell my best when I don't bathe/shave for a week or two. In fact, should compete with me at times to see who can stay without bathing for how long.
6. Should nominate this blog for the Nobel prize in Literature every year: in fact she should also file a PIL in some Indian court suing the Nobel committee if they don't award it to me every year. Did I mention the IndiBloggies, too?
7. Should constantly worry that she is getting thin and should need daily reminders from me that no, she is actually getting fat and she needn't gorge on all the delicacies I cook from time to time.
8. Must, must, absolutely must always believe that she is the only specimen of her kind!

Bolo, hai koi nazar / aaine mein? :D

Updates from troubled times

Yes, I'm short of time. So I haven't also been able to reply to the comments on the two posts below... but sure as hell am following the discussions :)

Anyway, this is just the last update to this post, as promised. The point being, "Mukhpora kothakar" translates roughly into 'the one with the burnt face', essentially meaning a not-so-handsome monkey. :) So, if you have not actually said the same to some Bengali guy/gal --- you were just saved from a lot of embarrassment. Therefore, I am sure everyone like Pallavi, Sky, Manasi, etc who expressed anguish over me apparently classifying only Bong girls as hot: now you know the reason. And dear Bong girls reading the post, none of you are burnt-face monkeys. Imagine the fun of a guy coming up to you and saying that in all innocence, though: so that you can take pity on him and his well-intentioned attempts at Bengali. Wouldn't you pity him and find him cute? Wouldn't he be scoring a few brownie points? See --- I'm so good. Thats why I posted this! :D

Original post:

P.S. - There is a little update below!!

A couple of interesting things:

• It turned out that the last guest post was also at the end of a year, much like the last one that was published at the end of the year 2006. This guest post was the last post published on this blog in the Bengali year 1413. We follow the Surya Siddhanta, which in itself is derived from the Saka calendar and we have stepped into the year 1414.
• By the way, now might be a good time to greet all the hot Bong girls you knew with a very cute Bengali new year greeting. You go up and say, "Mukh-poda kothakar", and you might optionally add a "Shubho Nabobarsho!". Think of all those you never dared speak to at Orkut, those you always shied away from in your college --- now is the chance!! :)

I am swamped with projects and assignments and so there will be very little updates until May here. Also, I doubt if you will be able to get the pronunciation right. So, remember that you can also write "Mukhpora" instead of "Mukhpoda". Remember --- "Mukh-pora kothakar" and an optional, "Shubho Nabobarsho"!

Fellow Bengalis, please don't attack me in the comments section for giving away this little snippet --- my warmest new year greetings to you all. I may be a little late from the start of the month/year, but still better late than never. After all, I am just spreading a little happiness and joy! :)

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Update: okay, the same phrase can convey cuteness and such qualities to hot and handsome Bengali guys as well. So, ladies, in case you have your eyes on some hunk of a Bengali dude then now is the time: go for it and wish him proper!

A gift for the lady

Buying a gift for a guy is so easy: you just need to find something useful. It can be a home repair toolkit, it can be a good camera, or even a set of the latest action flick DVDs. Bringing a birthday gift was never any easier. The same, unfortunately, doesn't hold true for the ladies.

Once in a rare while, it so happens that a sudden object catches my fancy when I am not actually looking for a gift. At these moments, I just know that it will be the perfect gift to give to the lady in question. The price of the object doesn't matter then: it can be the cheapest thing around but it is always the gift. But I am rarely so lucky.

The 'useful-gift' syndrome keeps rearing its ugly head and lands me in the most embarrassing situations. Sample this: in Scotland, I was in a superstore looking around for cosmetics to give to my sisters. I entered the section, where two other girls are going through the aisles and comparing notes, and I stood there flabbergasted. I mean, lip gloss, lip polish, lip stick, and some other lip -Xs of a thousand shades and colours made up just one rack. And a million mirrors with posters of a thousand models that made you feel as if you were inside a rainbow! Right then, I could literally feel my ears going red as I was sure that the two girls were watching me with some obvious amusement due to my confounded look. Aarghh... I couldn't take it any longer --- I imagined my sisters wearing some of the shades of lip stick and nail polish which I saw there, and decided to pick them and ran out of the section as fast as I could go. Whew! I just felt like I was surreptitiously stealing something that day in those aisles. Thank God my sisters actually liked the things I brought! :)

Initially, I used to get these 'useful' things home for my sisters as their gifts. However, the mutual gifts between them almost always consisted of soft toys, 'cute' and 'cho chweet' trinklets and such stuff, which basically set me mad, because I never understood the phenomenon. Inevitably, all the girls I knew right from my college, when hunting for a gift to give to another girl, would come up with something like that. I pondered and pondered, looked through a thousand gifts a lot of girls had given each other, or the gifts the so-called cute guys/ boyfriends gave to their girlfriends, and finally discovered the secret!! And bless your stars, because you shall be privy to the same today...

The idea is very simple: go and look for the most useless thing you can find, but make sure that it looks good. It can be a teddy bear, it can be a long chain of crystal hangings, it can be a little fluffy bird that chirps "You're cute!" whenever you press its sides... and voila, you have the perfect gift!! Somehow the gift expresses thoughtfulness, an everlasting quality, and undying love for the reciever in question. And boy, did that work!! My sisters suddenly discovered that my annual or biannual trips back home did not bring back just assorted pen sets or multi-coloured highlighters; now they began getting Scottish scout caps or baby Hamish-es. The more stupid the gift/animal looks, the more cooing noises you get to hear when you give them away. Hah --- I finally know how to please the ladies!! ;)

From Panna Dhai's son

The theme of the post is from a Hindi poem a friend of mine discussed with me in my undergraduate college. I don't remember the poem or its author, and would be grateful if any of you can actually send me a link to them. For those of you who do not know the story, let me play Aesop for a while. Panna Dhai was the nurse of Udai Singh, lawful heir to the throne of the royal Mewar dynasty in Rajasthan. She had practically played mother of the baby, breast-feeding him from birth and taking care of him along with her own son (Chandan) who was almost of the same age.

The political scenario of the Mewar throne, however, was very uncertain at this time. A distant cousin of the ruling dynasty, Banbir, was the operational regent for the throne and had the teenage crown prince Vikramaditya under house arrest because of his juvenile ways while at the seat of power. Banbir thought that he could usurp the throne amidst all this turmoil and therefore, one night murdered Vikramaditya, the 14-year-old prince and thundered onwards towards the Bundi palace to remove the last barrier, Udai Singh. The news of his approach reached Panna Dhai earlier, and in a moment of supreme courage and patriotism, she swapped the two babies in the royal cradle and the ordinary one where her own son, Chandan, lay fast asleep. The accounts vary here, but in the poem, Banbir storms in within a few minutes, and doesn't really need to be told which is the royal progeny. Panna Dhai had stood there in horror as her own 10-month old son was butchered in front of her own eyes while she clutched on to the real Udai Singh as her son. Many years later, when Udai Singh grew up, the news of the nursemaid's courage and his survival spread. The young prince came back and claimed his right to the throne, after defeating Banbir in a battle who was never spotted again. Panna Dhai quietly went back into the oblivion of history.

Yes, what she had done was a display of extreme will and strength of mind. But, for a moment, step back and look at it from the eyes of her son. What had he done to deserve such an end to his life? Why did he have to be woken from his 10-month-old's innocent sleep and have his heart pierced by a sword? In the poem, he asks, "What was my fault, O Mother, that you put me through this?". Stop all bullshit about patriotism and duty: step into the heart of a 10-month old child sleeping peacefully, feeling safe in its mother's presence, and then answer that question. Do you have an answer?

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Well, in case you didn't notice, there is an update to the post below, mentioning that the charm works for Bengali guys as well. I am dying to update that post --- someone please try it out and let me know!!

A life hacker's handbook

Everybody, this is a guest post by my room-mate, Arunabh Das. Please feel free to comment, etc. (err... if you actually manage to beat Agent Smith, that is)

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A Life-Hacker's Handbook (LHH) - Or how to program the matrix - (10 commandments)
I do not claim that all of the ideas here are completely original. But they are ideas I believe in, nonetheless. Let's dive right in -

#1 - You better believe it - There is a state of nirvana. There is such a thing as a state of nirvana. Not counting the ozone layer depleting, the polar ice caps melting and meteors crashing into us from outer space, i really honestly believe that it is possible to find a set of rules that you can live by, which you can apply to your life globally so as to optimize your ergenomic configuration, maximize your opportunity and enrich your existence. I guess the Chinese call it Feng Shui. I call it my Karmic Configuration. This guide is an attempt to outline those rules.

#2 - Explore Everything - It has taken me this long to come to the conclusions that I am describing in this guide and the process of exploration has been long, painful and involved. And yes. I have had to explore various possibilities in order to reach the conclusions that I describe here. They say that life is in the journey, not in the destination. But I feel like destinations can be reached, epiphanies can be experienced and conclusions can be formed...conclusions which can withstand the test of time. Realizations which will not be challenged, even though the assumptions behind some of those epiphanies may be ephemeral, fleeting and transitory.

#3 - It is necessary to make assumptions - Why is it important to make assumptions. There are many reasons but the most important reason to make assumptions about things is as follows. In order for us to make "choices", we have to make the assumption that there is a physical reality. That there are people around that may be governed by "physical laws" but they are not governed by the same rules that we are governed by. We exist because we are able to question our existence and hence we must be the observer. However, our reality is the reality that we create around us. Our reality is simply the processed output of some filtered inputs that our brains have chosen to process. So, if reality is simply the product of some synapses that have been firing in the neurons of the observer, then we must be the subject of our observations - "the observed". So, now we have the assumption about the existence of a physical reality. And we have a counter-point that the only physical reality that there is, is the physical reality that the observer of the "so-called physical reality" has engendered. These two notions seem contradictory so we shall have to reject one of them. If we were to reject the notion that our brains do not create reality, that would be the same as questioning our existence. If our brains stopped processing information, then we would not question our existence and we will, by the definition of existence, have ceased to exist? Right? So,the first notion must be the one that is true. So let's then go with the assumption that there is a physical reality. That's our assumption number #3 for this guide.

#4 - The first step....mmm...fourth step is to admit that you can manipulate reality. So the physical reality around us seems to be a world beyond our control. Why does it seem like it is beyond our control? Because there seem to be other entities that our brain has manifested that seem to have powers that we don't have. Now think outside your own brain. This brain thing wants the rest of us to think that we do not have control over the nature and behavior of "reality". And that is the reality that our brain has fed us. So we must now investigate the reason our brain would do that to us. We must for the purpose of investigating our brain's motives make an assumption again. The assumption we need to make is that our brain is trying to exist. That it doesn't want to die. And that everything it does is focused towards perpetuating its existence for as long as possible. If the brain were to make us reach the conclusion that we have total control over reality, then the brain would probably have conquered all the problems left to conquer and there would not be any problems left to solve, no riddles left to unravel, and no challenges left to face. So, creating a universe of infinite possibilities, confusing choices and paradoxical dichotomies must be the brain's survival mechanism. What then would we have to do to preserve that logic in the brain and yet, simplify our existence to the point where we feel in control. Perhaps this could be done as follows. We program our brain to do the following things. First, we program it to reject the notion that it needs to manifest a chaotic world as a mechanism to perpetuate itself. However, it may at that point self-destruct. So, before it registers that segment of code in its CPU, we buffer the following data and inject it into the CPU before the fact of inserting the first segment of code. The buffered segment being the instruction that the brain should manifest other entities which are in need of data relating to the programming of the matrix. Since the second instruction will execute after this instruction, the brain will still have a purpose and will not self-destruct.

#5 - You have now transformed yourself into a spiritual guru / avatar - Since you have tricked your brain into existing, but with fewer instructions to execute, what you have now done is become a spiritual guru...rishi...swami...whatever you want to call it. It's not the highest plane of existence but it is almost there. The only realm your brain needs to conquer now is the transcendental realm, that is the cron-job of manifesting entities around it that do not know how to program the matrix and the second cron-job of transmitting that data to those entities.

#6 - Use your powers responsibly - Since you are now a global spiritual guru, you need to use your powers responsibly. You can manifest any number of entities and transmit all the information in this lifehacker handbook to them, but if you find that you are getting some form of gratification from it, that would cause your brain to self-destruct also. The reason is that the only way to attain the highest plane of spiritual existence is to have no need for any sort of gratification and so we need to find a system to eliminate gratifying effects caused by the process of manifesting entities and transmitting the lifehacker's handbook to them. Which brings us to point #7.

#7 - Program your brain to only manifest entities that seek and try to find gratification from using the lifehacker's handbook. This would be an additional segment of code in instruction #1. In essence, the lifehacker's handbook would have to be injected into the manifest sequence so that the manifesting daemon would manifest entities that had an awareness about the LHH. Since the manifested entities now have access to Rule #7 and they are programmed to perpetuate the brain, they would automatically manifest as entities which did not follow the rule about not finding gratification from applying Rule #6...if there was to be a manifested entity / agent that did not follow Rule #7, then the daemon that spawns those processed would have to be terminated.

#8 - When attaching the LHH to the code which manifests the target entities, it may be necessary to attach it to their non-primary memory a.k.a. subconscious. If you were to attach it to their primary, then they would already have an awareness about LHH and your brain would not have any purpose left.

#9 - In essence, the only thing left to do is trigger a sequence of code which releases the LHH from the entity's secondary memory to their primary. In doing so, the entity will become aware of the LHH. Being able to process the LHH will cause it to have powers comparable to your powers and may. If it has powers comparable to you, it may either mutate by the process of code-morphing and ignore rule #7 and become an avatar itself (which is probably what your brain was hoping for) or it may just remain an entity which needs a constant refresh of the rules of the LHH so as to create enough work for your brain (which is also fine as far as your brain goes)


#10 - So the only other instruction left to include in the manifestation of entities is the code-morphing code wherein every entity manifested will over time ignore rule #7 and cease to get gratification from manifesting sub-entities and become super-entities like yourself and at that point it would not self-destruct but spawn sub-entities for the purpose of it's survival.

When enough entities with the right instructions are manifested and spawned, your brain would probably not have any purpose left and self-destruct. Mine hasn't self-destruct, cause my brain is still trying to figure out how I need to deal with this fatal flaw/ glitch in system.

Leaps of faith

The best ideas come to me at the worst of times. What else can explain me sitting down to write this blog post at 3:00 a.m.? Actually, blog post ideas take some time to coagulate in the head. The seed, or the little irritation is planted by some event or some random memory. And then it sits there for days, sometimes weeks, gathering layers upon layers of ideas and coherence in the warmth of the oyster shell. And then, one moment of inspiration and a cup of warm coffee later, they tumble out, sparkling as ever to form the beads on this necklace.

Even as I write, I have at least 4 unpublished drafts sitting in the list of posts, waiting for me to find words to express them with. And then there are some more ideas that are just churning in my head --- some deliciously sarcastic, some chuckling-ly funny and some others that talk of serious topics. But these aren't all that keep my head occupied all the time. There are thoughts about assignments and presentations which are due in a couple of weeks, there are musings about what life might be at a new place in a couple of months from now, and there are fleeting memories of what life was only a year back. And the thoughts that lie most dormant in the far recesses of the mind are those about research projects, class assignment problems and ideas about future dimensions in problems that I want to explore: they never seem to consciously bothering me so much.

Every now and then, however, these last set of ideas jump up and shout in the brain. I may be writing a blog post, may be solving a statistical equation, or even might be brushing my teeth --- and all of a sudden this brilliant idea just clicks into place! Suddenly things begin to make so much sense; suddenly there appears a dimension to a problem which I never though existed! And it is so tempting to just open the thing right then and there and to start working on it... whatever else I may be doing then seems unimportant. Often, these ideas provide keys that unlock a whole chamber of treasures, and exploring them, tweaking features, understanding their operations, etc. are just so much fun! It is like suddenly spotting a gold nugget beside a river while you are there collecting little pebbles --- you want to throw everything away and run and just get it, all else be damned!

Most of the time, these jumps pay off pretty well; and I tend to get a lot of knotty problems solved when these flashes of brilliance come along. But not always: sometimes I end up delaying homeworks just because I was busy last night reading through some journal paper that was interesting :( However, these little leaps of faith are rather addictive. The thrills lie in being in the highly productive mode every now and then, and do outweigh the little time I spend mourning over split milk. You will know what I am talking about only if you have suddenly sat up at 4:00 in the morning some day and looked afresh at a problem. Whether you are able to solve it or not then doesn't matter so much --- all that matters is the fun of looking at the problem differently! At the end of the day, I am in grad school to enjoy myself --- I don't really care too much what the grades have to say. :)

What your blog tells about you

One of the attractions of studying in a big university is that you get seminars and talks from people all around the world, from all sorts of interesting disciplines like psychology, linguistics, astronomy, etc. About a couple of weeks back, we had a very interesting talk by Dr. Scott Nowson from the Centre for Lanugage Technologies at Macquaire University in Australia. The topic of the talk was, "The Secret Language of Blogs: It's not WHAT you did, it's HOW you blogged it". Among other things, his research focuses on "linguistic analysis to explore personality and gender difference in the language of weblogs" [quoted from his homepage]. Needless to say, I didn't need a second invitation to go for the talk!

The results and the conclusions he presented were based on the analysis of 71 blogs, recorded over a single month. All of them had answered and passed around some meme which was a 41 point psychology questionnaire to determine the profiles of the people participating. So be careful about the next set of tags you answer: you might be taking a quick psycho test in disguise ;) Also, I must add here that he had gathered the consent of all the participants before their personal information was used for building the statistical models.

So lets talk about the gender biases found: the women wrote 6800 words in 30 posts in a month as opposed to 3700 words in 19 posts by the men [ha-ha! I always knew that!! :D] Also, it seems that the blog is more a personal diary for women than men, although both sexes write equally --- the males seem to concentrate more on current affairs and such topics. Women are more immediate and are significantly more contextual in their writing, they use more pronouns, verbs and social and emotional words; articles are really less used by them. It was observed that men on the other hand use more articles, make judgements, talk of money with quantity and functional phrases and also swear more :)

But the more interesting facts that came to light were related to the personality stamps that stood out from the blog posts. Neurotics seemed to express more anxiety on their blogs, describing physical states, their jobs/work etc. They talked less of other humans, and more about themselves (using phrases like 'if I', 'I have to', etc.). Extraversion on the other hand was found to be more closely associated with high references to other people and low references to self. The extroverts use social words like 'cool', and less often talk about their achievements and occupation. Openness stood out in personalities through the use of long and frequent words, and the more open a person is, it was found that he/she would express more positive feelings and communicate better through the blog. Closely related to this personality trait is agreeable-ness, and again long words and articles really stood out in the writings of people who scored high on this count. Agreeable people also tend to use less contractions like "I'm, haven't", etc. and use the full forms to write out "I am" or "is not", etc. Finally, conscientiousness --- the high scorers meticulously end their posts with punctuation, where as the low scorers fiddle about from topic to topic using words like 'anyway', 'actually', etc. Interestingly, these people also talk less about their personal friends, etc. For the uninitiated, the five factors above are a standard way of mapping personalities.

Before you start jumping back to read your own blog to see what category you fit into, take a look at the good news here as well:Bloggers seem to score really high on the extraversion and openness scales in general. So if you are a blogger, the chances are that you are an open and agreeably extravert person! :)[both images from the slides of his talk]
And the fun part of this research (which aligns well with my own research interests) is that future natural language processing programs will probably be able to tie together multiple blogs and online personalities by the same person, perhaps even generate a blog post that looks sufficiently like your own! And of course there might be programs that chart out your personality profile from the blog, even recommend potential people whose blogs/personalities you might like, taking social networks and online dating to the next level. So the question you gotta ask yourself now is, "What category do I belong to?". Tell me, blogger, do you feel lucky? :D