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 […]
O Discipline, Where Art Thou?
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 […]
Let’s Get Into Character
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 […]
Of Quests and Barriers
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 […]
Quantum Brain?!?!
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 […]
Heuristics vs. Provability
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 […]
Lolita Haze
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 […]
Salaam Bombay! (1988)
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 […]
Adaptation
Epiphany:(1) : usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something(2) : an intuitive grasp of reality through something (as an event) usually simple and striking(3) : an illuminating discovery(4) : a revealing scene or moment In the self referential film – Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman (of whom, I don’t think so […]
Get Shorty
Ramanand passed me the 55-word-limit-short-story baton and here is an attempt: —begin—Am a ten pointer. Doesn’t mean that it’s been easy. My neighbors (let’s call them ‘R’ and ‘P’ for now), cheap scorers, but so popular still; seen everywhere, unlike me (sigh). Me, gotta wait for you to complete me. Ah, there you are! come […]