“A Zugzwang!” – exclaimed Grandpa. “So it seems” mused the other old man. He laid his over-sized black-framed glasses down on the floor and turned to me with a grandfatherly smile. “Your Grandpa will be stuck for a while.” He turned towards the old chess board again and gazed at it for a while before smiling back at me. “Do you know what a Zugzwang is?” I nodded my ignorance. His grin became wider, and those stained yellow teeth, by themselves, were grinning at me now. ...

1 – Suprabhata Coffee Kendra: This won’t get figured in any top-list (other than mine, of course). They serve the best coffee in town, and probably the best sambhar as well. It’s one of those pre-darshini-age standing hotels, and is very popular among our auto rickshaw drivers. It’s on the diagonal road connecting Sajjan Rao Circle and Minerva Circle; just before the second hand two wheeler market starts. The good thing about this place is – you get coffee in the afternoons. ...

Finding counter examples to conjectures can be notoriously hard (pun? I think not). This is an area of creativity that mostly goes unappreciated. Here’s a personal anecdote: my father once came up with an algorithm to solve a hugely constrained version of the traveling salesman problem. The greedy proof was slightly hand-wavy, and I felt it would be an easier thing to find a counter example where his algorithm wouldn’t find the optimal tour. Of course, I was just trying to tell him that he couldn’t have solved TSP (or even approximated it). I learnt two lessons that day. ...

Or is it just a dark room? The Nandigram SEZ was supposed to be developed by Indonesia’s Salim Group. Preliminary web searching indicates that Salim group has very close ties with Dow Chemical. And of course, Dow Chemical owns Union Carbide. It’s up to investigative journalism to figure out the extent to which Salim and Dow are bedfellows; what I find most surprising is that this has not found mention in any major column/article or news coverage of any other form anywhere. I read about it in an Arundati Roy interview in Telelka, and after some serious digging on the web, the best I could come up with was that Dow Chemical was actually invited to bid for the Nandigram SEZ. The collective enormity of these two ironies evokes a very deep and profound rage. ...

Pre-Script: No spoilers ahead. In Christopher Nolan’s brilliant period sci-fi drama* The Prestige, an old Chinese magician lives his act. It means the following: He understands that his flagship magic trick, to look surreally magical, needs a heavy personality quirk. To ensure that he can pull this quirk on stage, he lives with that quirk off-stage. Every day, through his life, he ‘lives’ his act. It’s quite a small scene, and almost irrelevant to the movie; but for some reason, it hit me that there is this guy who is willing to live an act, consciously, forever. I will not get into acts that we live unconsciously, or sporadically, or with temporal profit in mind for some limited time. This is an act that a person lives – forever. Method Living? Perhaps. ...

No significant update. Just removing dead links. -Aside- Ages ago, the Intellectual Whores website (now a 404) had given me some solace; but not much hope though. The masterfully written Ladder Theory explains why things are so screwed up; but, yeah, but, so we (whores?) don’t lose hope, there are the ever so entertaining whore avoidance tips. Now, after all these years, I finally manage to read Woody Allen’s short story, The Whore of Mensa. -End of Aside- ...

Jatin forced a comment which is worth expanding a little more. Ever since I found that the PageRank vector of the web-graph is the dominant eigenvector of its matrix representation, I have been meaning to get to the bottom of this eigenvector-eigenvalue concept. I am still snorkeling; long time to scuba dive. Most of us studied concepts like simultaneous equations in our high school algebra classes, but never really wondered about them deeply, or even more so, felt that they were difficult. Problems like – 3 oranges and 4 apples cost 17 rupees; 2 oranges and 3 apples cost 12 rupees; how much does each apple cost? – never seemed that difficult. We knew that the equations that represented these statements were ‘fluid,’ and need not apply to just these statements, and an overall tool was being mastered. ...

It’s somewhat sad that the Autobiography of Malcolm X is also meant to be a specific political and social message, as well as serve as a brilliant account of the life of a thoughtful and brave leader. X thought he would be dead by the time the book came out, and was also probably a little concerned about what he wanted his reluctant critics to think about him: so that they would take his message seriously. So, instead of celebrating change for change’s sake, X decided to underplay it, to an extent that if don’t watch out for it, the book will seem more like a testament to the angst and the rage of the African American in mid-nineteenth century. It is that, I don’t deny it; but it’s also an account of a man’s life – a life of change: change in reverence of concepts, in thoughts, in mind-sets, in lifestyle, and more so, a change in life itself. ...

From Tic-Tac-Terror (by a Franklin W. Dixon) to Lolita (Nabokov), I’ve collected more books than I have read. But I have read some. It started off with Hardy Boys; and I remember Fenton Hardy’s case always being connected in some way to the Boys’ case. So, during each book, I used to watch out for clues that would link the boys’ case with anything that their father was doing at that time (mostly in some other part of the country; just to add to the grandeur of the plot). At one point somewhere during 6th or 7th standard, just to ensure that I could prove to a few friends in school what I had read, I started maintaining a list which had the name of the book, plot, and ‘gangleader’ written in neat columnar format. A sample line would be like this: ...

I have seen a few many times over; I have seen a few once; and have missed far too many of them. But with so much more to go, it makes me happy that I still have all the does-idealism-pay-off? thoughts from Satyakam due; can ponder about what triangles he explored in Jurmana and Bemisal; and maybe there is another heart wrenching moral dilemma in some other film that I don’t even know about. ...