“The more interesting your life becomes, the less your post… and vice versa.” – Jorn Barger The first blog I came across was Kalyan’s, sometime in early 2002, and it struck me quite strange that someone could actually maintain an online journal. For the next two years, blogs appeared in and around places I inhabited, mostly computer science technical, a few on everyday happenings of people I was close to, and a few opinion journals on interesting topics. ...

In reasonably traditional/orthodox Indian marriages, the bride’s first name is also changed. The ‘also’ is to underscore the point that the last name gets changed almost always. The first name of a person, I have always believed, is very important to her. If that is indeed the case, I am surprised that some Indian women are happy/OK with this name-changing business. Its not just names we are talking about here. Indian weddings come with dowry, customs that ridicule the bride’s family, how the groom is the King during and after the wedding, and a whole lot of other male chauvinistic cultural elements. As an anecdote, during a recent wedding, a North Indian friend of mine was shocked to see the groom taking photographs of a group of the bride’s brother’s friends. He was shocked to see the men of the family taking care of cooking and serving a traditional meal at another religious occasion. I guess South India is a little more progressive/liberal regarding these gender roles than the North – but its all still pretty much the same. ...

Different priorities exist. Broadly, Maslow established them at a high level, and I try to think about them at some level of granularity that might or might not fit into his framework. Partition of India, the Holocaust, Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Corruption in the corridors of power, Organizational Behavior, Poverty, Administration, Political Science, Computer Science, Logic, Formalization, and various other aspects of my world hold me captive. These affect me deeply. But this is almost always restricted to the intellect. I get depressed or elated when I am reading about them, when I am talking about them, when I am writing about them. But rarely have these affected me from within – Deeply. ...

Following repeated recommendation, I finally watched Hazaaron Khwaishen Aisi. It is an interesting love story set against the backdrop of the Indian political unrest of the late sixties and seventies, culminating in the 1975 Emergency. A good movie, bold in its theme – which could be the eternal debate between kraanti and playing it safe in this world, or an alternate theme of the growth of the protagonist – Geeta. But first, a comment on the female lead herself – she looks gorgeous. Its been a long time since I have been so enamored by a woman on screen. I don’t know if its just her looks, or whether its her personality that captures me. But I digress. ...

Update to remove broken links. No other meaninful update. Staying in Bombay for a year now, I have seen how Shivaji, and his heroic acts, are now a part of lore, and more so, a part of their core identity – Maharashtrian Pride. After visiting Banavasi, in the Kannada heartland tucked in the Western Ghats, I remembered the historical king whose introduction to me was through the glorious movie – Mayura. I guess he, and the story of his ascent to the Kadamba throne has enough heroics and romance about them to merit some place in the Kannada identity that many in Karnataka are trying to seek. ...

This is typically how Analogies work. I want to explain some concept to someone, say A->B (A implies B). After a while, I find that the logical relationship between A and B is quite difficult to get across. I then resort to an analogy, say X->Y (X implies Y). I pick this analogy from everyday life so that the logical relationship between X and Y are evident, if not obvious. Then, with some conviction, I claim that as X->Y is so obviously true, A->B must also be true. The unsuspecting listener vaguely gets A->B, but looking at how strongly X->Y holds, she is convinced that A->B must hold as well. ...

Listening to music from Dil Se now, and thinking of the best movie album that I have heard….the most important criterion is that all songs must be good. All of them. Overall listening satisfaction must be high. As Jatin said, I should be able to play Side A and Side B of the tape without any need to forward/rewind/stop. To be fair to Indian Movie culture, the album should have at least 5 songs. ...

I haven’t been able to live up to a few of my own magnanimous gestures at times. Having given myself more credit than I deserve, I have fought hard to live up to my promises; sometimes, to others, but often, to myself. I am just one person, responsible for my own actions, and the only one to bear the consequences. Imagine Gandhi, Nehru, and others, who took a few such magnanimous decisions for 700 million Indians. Was Gandhi fair in asking the Indian Government to give Pakistan the money India technically owed them, so that they could fund their on-going proxy tribal war in Kashmir? Was he trying to be fair because India had to be fair to her neighbours? or was he exhibiting some personal gesture to himself? – that the people he leads are always fair to others. What statement was he trying to make? ...

Well, somewhat….

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is a very simple combinatorial optimization problem. Given a set of cities and distances between each pair, the problem is to find the tour of least distance that travels each city exactly once. Simple – as in simple to state. But from what I have seen this seems to be the hardest of the hard problems to solve. To give some background, there are these famous hard problems in Computer Science that do not have “efficient” solutions. Brute force solutions work very easily on them, but take an eternity to run. In spite of 40 years of extensive research by some very smart people, brute force seems to be the only solution. For example, the TSP can be solved by listing all possible tours covering the cities once, and picking the one with the least length. This takes an eternity as there are an exponential number of such tours (n!). These problems are the (in)famous NP-Hard problems. Stephen Cook at the University of Toronto proved that if one of them can be solved efficiently, all of them can be!!! A very intuitively pleasing fact. ...