Chess strategy insists that you develop your pieces, and make them take control of the four central squares of the board – either by occupying them, or by exerting control over them. This has to be done quickly, and with least loss of time/tempo. The question is why? Why should you develop pieces without there being any necessity for them? There is no real check-mating strategy in mind, there is no threat from the other side, there is really no objective. I don’t know what’s my goal, my purpose, my real goal. Why develop pieces when you don’t need them? Why get a masters degree? Why not just move the knight back and forth waiting for the opponent to start his attack? Why not just keep a good job, and do a back and forth from home square to office square? Why open up lines to develop more pieces, even rooks, and not be satisfied with developing just the queen? Why not just make money, and assume that the rest will follow? Why is it considered bad strategy to start a queen-attack in the beginning? Why does investing in money now sound so wrong to me? ...

Someone with whom I share an exclusive relationship decides to make it semi-exclusive. This hurts. Sometimes fleeting, sometimes deep. But is this hurt due to the shift of allegiance/love/companionship/friendship(?) causing a void in our lives? or is it due to the shift making a statement about our worth? I have always claimed that having a richer life leads to lesser jealousy. This seems intuitively appealing to me, and further, if I ponder about it in the light of the above questions, it rings true as well. A richer life leads to voids being filled up again, quickly. A richer life gives us a good measure of self-worth that is hard to dent by one person. But is it this simple always? Can we define ‘richer’ lives for ourselves easily enough? ...

As I walk up the dark cinema hall aisle, the screen light falls on people sitting. I don’t notice whatever I don’t notice; but I do notice some hands holding each other, heads resting on shoulders, arms entwined, shoulders touching, and before I realize it, I am looking for my seat. As I move on with life in such small steps, it hits me that I miss being in love. I don’t miss any specific detail. I just miss the feeling. That’s just it. ...

I read Lapierre and Collins’s “Freedom at Midnight” and am incredibly moved, even sobbing many times during the book, and make a promise to myself that I’ll learn more about India, and esp. the Partition. So, I pick up Sucheta Mahajan’s “India and Partition: the Erosion of Colonial Power in India,” and start it with great enthusiasm. At around the 20th page, when going forward with any reasonably degree of continuity requires looking up citations, making notes, and higher levels of concentration, I switch to some pulp fiction. ...

Think about a paedophile’s daily diary: yellow stained pages (or stained yellow pages, if you must), scrawny handwritten accounts of disgusting pleasure, half-baked buns of fantasy smeared with rotten butter, and similar. It will invoke revulsion, loathing, and maybe even sympathy towards such madness. But, would such a diary invoke literary mirth and intellectual satisfaction in the reader? Probably not. Think about the paedophile’s victim: a pretty 13 year old. Innocent to the point of being naive; at least in most matters. Dainty, reciting poems from memory, sobbing, throwing pebbles at the caged dog, slightly sadistic – as only children can be, charming in spite of muddy toes, and sprinkled with other Nobokovian adjectives. Think of the child’s Dear Diary: pages stained with salty drops of tears, fantasies of sand castles, running in parks, convoluted stories with toy characters (no adult toys featured in the Dear Diary; those are reserved for real life), candy cravings, a lot of loved loving and a lot of hated loving, and similar. Such a Dear Diary would invoke grief, pathos, hatred, helplessness, love, bitterness, and maybe even murderous rage. But, would it make you chuckle at its wit or marvel at its genius or exasperate you with its self referential cleverness or make you wish that there was an annotated version somewhere? Probably not. ...

Just watched Anupama yet again, and am feeling a mix of satisfaction, goose bumps, tears, and optimism; but most of all, I am left wondering at how some failed relationships [in this case, the doomed father-daughter one] can never be overcome. One cannot really move on. One can move on in life, but that particular relationship slot [for the lack of a better phrase] will always be a void. On the other hand, these relationships are mostly not affected by long-distance, attention-deficit, character flaws, and other parameters that can affect (say) a romantic relationship heavily. Is this because of our long standing childhood relationships with parents that are mostly exclusive? Is this because of the birth-happens-only-once factor? or something more sublime? ...

Given a problem, we can: Give efficient methods to find exact solutions. When this is possible, all’s well. But alas, this is not possible all the time. Give inefficient methods to find exact solutions (brute force), and bemoan that P != NP (mostly). Propose intuitively appealing heuristics that are quick, and give “mostly good” results in practice, and hope that the malicious worst case input which can tear the heuristic apart never comes about. Prove theoretical approximation guarantees about these heuristics so that even in the worst case, the heuristic won’t go bad beyond some known bound. Personally, I am fascinated by #4. Most current large scale problems rely on #3, which hopefully will get elevated to #4 in a few years time, and theoreticians will tell the practitioners – “Yeah, your heuristic will never give a solution that if off the optimal by 200%.” As a budding researcher, is it better to build simulations, concrete systems, models, etc., and show empirically that certain heuristics work most of the time? Or is it better to take some small heuristic and prove without doubt its effectiveness under all circumstances? ...

In my last post on heuristics and approximation, I asked the question – Given realistic scale and scope, how does the human brain solve such problems (like question-answering)? Does the brain map everything to combinatorial optimization? Can its modus operandi be applied to automated systems so that they solve our problems…. – which leads to further interesting exercises in intellectual masturbation. Combinational Optimization is about finding the optimal (best/worst) candidate (based on certain acceptable parameters) among all possible options. A large category of problems can be mapped to combinatorial optimization, and most of these are NP-hard. This means that most of them do not have efficient solutions. ...

Feel my heart, reader, feel it, its throbbing and beating, beating me to death. The death of normalcy, simplicity, and all that my earlier normal and simple writing stood for – or shall I say banality? The tip of the tongue takes a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth – Lo – Lee – Ta. I am in love. In love with Lolita, her simple attire (she looks black and white, but now, she is hardly that, is she?), her appeal’s complexity, my inability, or if you generously will, my incapacity to understand her completely, and most of all, that dolorous fact that she will never be mine, fully…..Lolita, you adorn my shelf and my heart. Worn out, you shall be, no doubt, some day; I will buy a new copy then, whatever your price might be. Did I tell you I loved your dog-eared cutie-two-shoes look? Oh, I might not have, due to my adolescent, almost juvenile principal principle that I will shun vulnerability. ...

IMDb says that Shafiq Syed is repairing auto rickshaws in Bangalore these days. Almost every garage I have seen has either a chotu, or a kuLLa (Kannada word for a short boy). Syed must have been one of them, or probably he owns a garage himself. I have no idea. In the Salaam Bombay! inspired MTV-India’s chaiwala filler, the chaipu pulls off a cute jig to a great Kishore Kumar number. I had vaguely heard that the movie was about one such chaipu (chai serving boy), and his (mis)adventures in the dark underbelly that-is/of Bombay. ...