My usual gang here at IIT, we hang out at Nishant’s room (H5, #76), be it after dinner, after lunch, just bored, just about anytime. And occasionally, we end up having disagreements. And today was one such. It was the usual Capitalism vs. Socialism debate that’s been haunting me for a while now. And this time, I tried playing the devil’s advocate and tried defending Capitalism; tried everything I had in my arsenal: globalization, trickle-down effect, jungle-culture, primal-instinct, and myriad other theories. When Amit was here a few weeks back, we had had the same argument through his entire stay in Bombay, and I tried to remember what he had used then, and tried in vain to use it now. But after an hour of heated discussions, I realized that it is incredibly hard to defend something you truly don’t believe in.
I salute this aspect of defence lawyers, esp. the ones who know whether their clients are guilty. I wonder how many of them go through conscience turmoils when their professional ethics force them to defend a guilty client and their personal morals abhor the same client.
Speaking of dilemmas, I watched and loved Swades. As Upperstall put it, its one of the few good big movies which has some social message. I will watch it again in a theatre.
Speaking of academics, I am working on the open source search engine, Nutch these days. I don’t know whether it will result in any solid contribution to the community, but I do hope that I get the required grades :)). Will get back to that now…..