The prison system

"At thirteen, Bobby was nabbed while robbing a Jordan Marsh department store. The remainder of his childhood was spent mostly in the state reform school. That was where he learned how to fight, how to hot-wire a car with a piece of foil, how to pick locks, and how to make a zip gun using a snapped-off automobile radio antenna, which, in those days, was just thick enough to barrel a .22-calibre bullet. Released upon turning eighteen, Dellelo returned to stealing."
[Source: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande]

See anything wrong in the above paragraph? Anything illogical that shouldn't be happening?
A criminal, spending time in government custody, isn't having anything close to a change of heart and a betterment of life; instead, he's learns more about crime, and returns as a worse criminal.
This is a real life story. It isn't an isolated event either. There have been many such reports of such happenings in daily newspapers and magazines. And, if you think about it, putting in many criminals of varying "expertise" in the same place is logically going to lead to this outcome only - the criminals are going to make friends and learn some new tricks. So, in effect, prisons are training centres for criminals, a place to meet different varieties of their own people and learn from them. Is this what we want our tax money to be spent on? Is this the way to curtail crime and make a better society? I definitely don't think so.

We've come up with so many advances in various fields, but in this one field, we're pretty much imitating what people did thousands of years ago. Well, except for adding new ways of torturing war criminals. Not much constructive experiments, not much innovative ideas. Our "prison reformation" ideas are limited to one or two prisons, one or two people like Kiran Bedi. If those reforms were so good as to deserve Asia's Nobel prize, why aren't they being implemented more widely?

I believe that the general apathy towards this area is because people think "prison reform" only means a better life for the criminals. And obviously, they couldn't care less about criminals when they've got their own problems. But that's completely missing the point: we need prison reforms not for the criminals' sake (at least not only for that), but for building a better society for ourself. When we have prisons where the criminals have an opportunity to better their lives, ways to learn and improve themselves, we'll have a better society, one with less criminals. It would mean the difference between a one-time hunger thief becoming a lifelong burglar, and becoming a doctor or an entrepreneur; it might mean the difference between losing your life savings to him, and having your kid's life saved by him.

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Endhiran - my review

If you know me, you'd know that I'm not the movie-reviewing type usually, but I felt Endhiran deserves one, not only because it's a sci-fi movie, but it's a good sci-fi movie.

(Warning: Here be spoilers!)

I (as is becoming usual) missed the first ten or so minutes of the movie, entering only when Vasee asks Chitti to drive the car and others back off from the journey. Rajini has a very good scientific nerd look as Vasee, suppressing his action movie image and appearing as the intellectual he should be. Chitti, while managing to look truly handsome, did not impress me at first. "Ok, he's the usual robot that does some things awesomely and some things stupidly".

However, the scenes where Chitti takes care of neighbourhood noises brought me back into the movie. He explains why he's able to operate the stereo (it's infra-red) and then does it without directly fighting the enemy guys off  (which would have made this a clichéd action movie scene). Same with the "Chellaattha" loudspeaker guys - he does not pick a fight with them, instead using his electromagnet and disarming them. It turns out to be an amusing comedy (especially with the ladies starting to pray to him as Kaali and then standing confused as he drops the weapons).

The thing that impressed me about the movie was the absence of any glaringly-obvious and embarrassing pseudo-science that's present even in a lot of Hollywood science movies. No superman style flying for long distances, no reading-your-mind-because-I'm-an-awesome-robot stuff.
Ok, the mosquito scene was somewhat stupid. Even if it's the future and we've figured out how to make machines talk to mosquitoes, it doesn't explain the mosquito talking back to Ash. But leaving the scientific viewpoint, it was a well constructed scene, except that they ruined it by making it too long. This is a theme that repeats throughout the movie - almost every single scene in the movie stretches longer than necessary, testing our patience.

Rajini's acting deserves a special mention. The robot and the human are always distinguishable, from their tone, body language and expressions. In the scene where Chitti rescues a bathing girl and is chided by Vasee, his confused response "But she's alive!" reminded me very strongly of Sonny's "But I have to inject the nanites!" in I Robot.

The movie also seemed to contain a lot of references to sci-fi or the-average-Indian-movie. The mosquito scene reminded me of the butterfly scene in Ejamaan where Rajini fetches a butterfly for Meena after jumping through fields and gutter. The scene where Chitti's eye gets damaged and he replaces it with a red colored one feels to be a homage to the Terminator where Arnold Schwarzenegger does the same. The scene where Chitti takes Ash to his magnificent place guarded by other Chitti's is mildly amusing in that it's the usual "villain kidnaps heroine and takes her to his awesome palace guarded by thugs" in average Indian movies, except the villain and thugs this time are robots.

The robots taking formations into spheres and snakes, while obviously done for the "Wow!" effect, also makes sense in context, and each formation is done for a reason which makes it completely excusable.

What's inexcusable is the all-too-frequent and not-so-pleasant songs. They're made tolerable only by the beautiful visuals and the direction in the songs too. Shankar is awesome in this film's songs, Rahman is not. The re-recording is also too noisy and too obvious, the kind I would have expected from a newbie music director - not Rahman. The "thamizh semmozhi" song and the songs in this film make us wonder if Rahman is no longer concentrating much in the Thamizh side after the Oscar. Hmmm.

On the whole, it's a movie that I left feeling clean and refreshed, happy that the arguably first sci-fi movie in thamizh turned out to be a good sci-fi. To be honest, as a movie by itself, it's not great. It's a somewhat confused mess of a sci-fi movie and a family-sentiment-masala-thamizh-movie. But the sci-fi part taken alone is very well done. Kudos to Shankar for that.

Verdict: It's a film worth watching once in the theatre, and storing on the hard drive for years. If you're a sci-fi fan, don't expect an I Robot or a Terminator, expect an average hollywood movie and you might be pleasantly surprised.

A few random things

Blogger has introduced a better preview option. Cool. If nothing else, it at least shows Google is still polishing Blogger and has not abandoned it.

I learnt that German is quite a beautiful language, at least in its pronunciations, while hearing to Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality in audiobook format. Names like Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstal have a beautiful ring to them that I'd heard so far only in French. The book itself is wonderful too, written for a layman interested in the history of the development of quantum physics. We can feel how the physicists themselves were bewildered by the bizarreness of it all, and only reluctantly accepted the theory. I'm now a little more than halfway through the book, where Heisenberg and Schrödinger have just given out their two formulations of quantum mechanics.
As a side note, it's interesting to note that Pauli shared my nocturnal habits, while Dirac too studied electrical sciences due to the urging of his father while his calling lay elsewhere.

Duck Duck Go is proving to be a great search engine to set as the default, with most other searches I need available at a bang's distance. The "bang" is simply the exclamation mark, which within this search engine can take you to most of the common lands on the internet. Search Wikipedia with !wiki, Amazon with !amazon, Wolfram Alpha with !alpha, torrents with !torrent, or resort to trusty old Google with a !g added to the query. In my experience, it's the best search engine when it comes to broad searches on a topic such as "rottweiler" or "diablo 2". There are about 25% of my searches that DDG does not understand and gives nonsense results, and I add "!g" to the query to go to Google's results instead; recently, this has been only needed for filtering out old results with Google's "Past year" tool. For the remaining 75% however, DDG is leaps ahead of Google.

Talking of Diablo 2, I hated that game. As a result of trying it, I've found that:
A. I probably hate the "hack and slash" genre itself, and games should involve some thought and strategy for me to like them
B. For me to enjoy a game, it should be either 2D like most flash games or The Battle for Wesnoth, or very realistic 3D like Batman: Arkham Asylum or Assassin's Creed II. The latter two are the most immersive and enjoyable games I've ever played.
Also, factor A seems to be more important than factor B, since Dead Rising too has a realistic 3D, but has failed to impress me at all so far.
I completed Batman a few weeks ago and am now into Assassin's Creed. It's difficult to describe progress in this completely non-linear game, but so far I've unvealed "Il Duomo's Secret" and "Torre Grossa's Secret", and have killed 4 of the major enemies (including at least 2 of de Pazzi family).

I felt compelled to write this post after more than a week of complete lack of communication with anyone I knew, friends or relatives. More and more, I'm coming back to my old ways of hating cell phones and electronic media of communication, and much prefer personal conversations. I keep thinking of visiting my friends at Marathahalli more often, but my laziness and nocturnal habits make that a difficult task.

I said "lack of communication with anyone I knew" because I've been communicating with random strangers at Omegle a lot. Amidst the various  "asl?" (asking for age, sex and location, mostly as a prelude to a cybering episode), or "Jesus can save you" stuff, there are a lot of interesting people there with profound ideas.
I chatted with an agnostic guy from the US who knew a surprising amount about Hinduism and Buddhism, and I had the opportunity to clear some things up and show that Hindu Vedanta philosophy was at least an internally consistent and beautiful theory, if not a true explanation of the universe. We agreed that while religion itself was unnecessary and often harmful, the practices discovered by Hindu and Buddhist monks were very helpful to cleanse and improve the mind, and should be adopted purely for their utilitarian value.
I talked with a Chinese woman who found India's arranged marriage system strange, felt all Indian guys she had met were wonderful gentlemen, and recommended two chinese movies to me (one was called "Aftershock" in English, the other translated to "Hawthorn"; I've not been able to find subtitled versions of either).
I also talked with a European guy (was it Sweden? or Switzerland? I forget.) who shared a lot of my interests, was living my dream life with having studied psychology as his major and now going on to neuro-psychology in higher studies. He was also exactly my age and shared my interest in books too. Unfortunately the conversation got disconnected due to a server error and I never got his contact details.
I'm learning a lot through these conversations and they're expanding the limits of my morals, thoughts, knowledge and imagination.

Thank you Tim Berners-Lee, for this wonderful thing called the Internet.

Forgiveness and me

I never learnt to forgive people. This is perhaps my greatest weakness. There are very very few things that bother me or make me angry, but once it has happened, there are very very very few things that can make me forget it and forgive those who did it.

This has cost me dearly in relationships, has murdered what were otherwise good friendships, but I have no idea what to do.

Because, I never learnt to forgive people.

Rule yourself

Anywhere you look around on the Internet, you see people having arguments, people trying to convince each other of their own viewpoints. There is the thought that if your opinion isn't the majority opinion, at least within circles you consider important, your opinion becomes invalid. So, people try hard, with logic, profanity and every weapon possible, to win these arguments.

On the other hand, a lot of these arguments can be stopped if the real experts stepped in, whatever the field of conflict is. So, why don't they do it? Some time back, I read an article on some controversial topic, and thought, "That is very good reasoning, but he hasn't presented it in a convincing way at all. Why has he missed this wonderful opportunity? Sad, perhaps he doesn't have the skills to do so."

Today, while reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", a thought sprang up: Why should he try to convince others of any viewpoint of others at all? May be he put it out just as a mental vent, to share his views with those who care. He doesn't need to persuade anybody, and whether or not they see the logic in it is their own problem, their own choice and wish.

In general, why should anyone care what anyone else thinks at all? After all, our life is our own to live, and we can adhere to our viewpoints and act according to them all we want. What base does this desire have, this desire to 'convert' the whole world into our point of view? It's pointless, meaningless, energy-sapping, idiotic endeavour. Most people who are really good at what they do, avoid this kind of argument. That is both partly the cause and partly the effect of them being an expert. They are intelligent enough to see that it's unnecessary, and hence they spend their time better, honing their skills and building their mental energy reserve.

So, I believe that all that time we spend arguing could better be spent in introspection, clarifying our own beliefs and reasoning to ourselves. This will give us a lot of confidence in our beliefs, after which we see more and more that the arguments are pointless - because, either the opponent really has a good point in which case it's time to re-evaluate your point of view, or the opponent refuses to think logically, in which case it's stupid to argue with him/her. There's the other case where your priorities are different, and hence different things are important to you both, in which case too an argument serves no purpose.

So, kindly let me suggest that it's better to seek to rule yourself, instead of trying to rule others' minds. There's a lot of 'you' to rule anyway, you're huge internally.

Thank you.

PS: This isn't an attempt to convince you of anything either. It's just a mental outpour. That's it. I'm not a hypocrite. Really. :)

Virtual suicide attempts and success

In the middle of the night, out of thin air, popped the desire to play Contra. For those who don't remember or know, Contra is an awesome game that was created for the consoles - for the common people, that means TV video games and such. I was going to play this in my laptop using the NES simulator I had gotten long back from Venki.

However, the simulator was not where I thought it would be, and even after a lot of search it didn't reveal itself (in the process, I realised Google Desktop search was good for nothing, and uninstalled it - it doesn't even have Advanced Search!). I gave up and started browsing. After some time, purely by chance, I came upon the folder that contained the games. Some wise guy rightly said "Stop seeking, and you will find", though he was probably talking about God, not Contra.

Anyway, as Providence would have it, by the time I found this folder, I had lost the interest in playing Contra, and instead wanted to play some Flash game. "Bow Man" caught my eye, and I started it up (here's an online version, but don't you run away from my blog or I'll find you and make you read it; and that won't be a pleasant experience). After a few games, it got quite repetitive - I had learnt to adjust the angle and force by reading the numbers, and was winning too easily.

It was then that I decided to play around with the settings to make things harder. Thee settings window had:

• Something called "show index", which probably referred to the angle and force being displayed near the player when we shoot an arrow (this is a bow-and-arrow shooting game by the way, in case you hadn't guessed). I turned this off to make the game a little difficult.
• An "add wall" option, which I enabled to make the game a little more difficult.
• An "add wind" option, which too I enabled, since "the game was too easy, right?"
• A "vitality" option, which I guess to be the number of arrows needed to kill someone. I increased this from 2 to 4. Don't ask me why.

And with these settings began the longest match I had ever played. Without the angle and force numbers to guide me, I was left to best-effort guesses, which led to arrows that kept landing either too near or too far. The presence of a wall that blocked more than 3/4ths of the screen vertically wasn't helping either. I mean, really? When I chose "add wall", I was expecting a wall that's maybe double the height of the men, or even half the screen. But this was too much!

And the hilarious part was how the opponent Computer player played. At first, he kept shooting as if the wall didn't exist, resulting in all his arrows getting stuck on the wall. Then, he realized the wall's presence, but still didn't realize that there was a wind, resulting in arrows landing far beyond me. After this, he kept alternating between these, resulting in an accumulation of arrows on the wall (I was actually hoping the wall would fall down from the weight of his arrows!) and in the space behind me. As for my part, I managed to create a minor injury on his leg, and that was it. None of his arrows even touched me.

Finally, I decided to take matters into hand and end the game. One obvious way is to close the window, but that is for sissies. Real men never quit a duel just like that. It's victory or valiant death. And so it was decided: I shall kill myself. But I immediately realized this wasn't such an easy job either, because of the presence of the wind. Without the wind, I could have shot straight up, and 4 such shots would probably have killed me. But with a wind blowing, I had to aim perfectly at an angle slightly less than (or more than, depending on the direction of the wind) 90 degrees. After many attempts, I managed to do this too. Here's part of the screenshot of the dead me, along with the arrows of my failed attempts at suicide:

Notice that one of the 'failed' arrows is behind me, which is because the wind suddenly started flowing from left to right before my final arrow. So, I had to shoot to my left for the arrow to reach me, and got it right only in the second attempt.

Also notice the small green leaves on the ground. They indicate the direction of the wind, by flying in that direction. The game designer could simply have used an indicator arrow or something to point to the direction of the wind, but chose to do it in this realistic manner, which impressed me.

Ok, that's all folks, you can now go play Bow Man yourself. Enjoy!

PS: A friend of mine recently wrote a post for the first birthday of her blog, which made me look back into my first post. And whoa, this blog too has had its first birthday come and go (it was on April 17th). Hey blog, I'm sorry for forgetting your birthday, here's a cake for you:

Happy now? Now don't eat all of it yourself, give some to these sweet guests.
And sweet guests, I have provided you the great opportunity to read these wonderful posts, without expecting anything in return. However, I know that many of you are itching to pay me back, so: I accept payments through cash, internet transfer, Mafia Wars reward points, and many other things. However, people sending in bounced cheques are advised to renew their life insurance policies immediately. Thank you.

That's all, this time for real,
Sundar

Welcome To The Internet

 I see you're new here. Look around. Get comfortable. It's a big place, but most of it is friendly. Actually, most of it is trying to sell you something, but much of the rest of it is friendly.

I've been assigned to fill you in on some of our literary conventions. You didn't think you could just spell words accurately and use correct grammar did you? Oh no, we have a different way of doing things here. We call it: illitracy. It's all the rage with the cool kids.

The first thing you should know is that if two words sound the same, they are interchangeable. No need to fret over homonyms around here, no sir! Feel free to mix words like “there” and “they're” and “their” randomly and inconsistently—none of us can tell them apart anyway. Such freedom, huh? I knew you'd like that. Soon you'll be checking out whether reports to see what you should where.

It gets better. The words don't even have to be true homonyms as long as they sound vaguely similar. To those of us who have embraced Internet illitracy, there is no difference between “then” and “than,” or between “accept” and “except.” If you can except that, than you'll do fine hear.

Pretty good so far, rite? Well their's more, and it's all about ease of use. Your convenience is paramount. For instance, throw out your capital letters because you won't need them any more. we're all about lowercase in these parts. the first letter of a sentence? lowercase. proper nouns? lowercase. see how easy it is?

However, don't go thinking you can do away with your shift key. It's important to type characters that require the shift key, like exclamation points (can't have enough of those!!!). That way your reader will know that you could capitalize letters, you're just choosing not to because you want to express your individual and unique style! And like everybody else, your individual and unique style is that of an asshat!!!

Speaking of exclamation points, that brings us to punctuation. The general rule for punctuation is an easy one: don't. That's right you can just leave it out altogether!!! Life is so good hear on the Internet. Remember the goal when you write on the Internet isn't to communicate it's to express. No need to fret over interpretation or specificity. Just embrace what is easiest for you. I'll tell you what: just b as lazy as possible and you'll fit in fine.

If you really must punctuate there are three things you can do to fit in. The first is to end your sentences with either two periods or at least four of them. Never use just one period, and never three.. Your individual and unique style calls for two periods at the end of a sentence.... Or four periods.. Or perhaps sixteen!!! My personal rule of thumb is to depress the period key and keep it held down whenever I pause while writing..........

The second of your individual and unique punctuation choices is to remember that on the Internet an apostrophe is used four too things only: first, the word “it's” should contain an apostrophe in all instances except when substituting for “it is”; second, an apostrophe indicates that a noun is plural. Thus: “the jogger's ran buy the car's while listening to there MP3's.” Their is a simple elegance to Internet punctuation.

Your third individual and unique punctuation choice concerns the comma. Oh how we love the comma. What's fun about the comma, is that it can be used anywhere. It is a meaningless mark and, that is the key, to its joy. Personally I like to finish, writing first, then go back to sprinkle fistfuls of commas liberally, and randomly about. I'm the Johnny Appleseed of punctuation.

On the other hand, what you must take care not to overuse—in fact, not to use at all—is the return key. Paragraphs are unwelcome on the Internet. Remember that the goal of your writing is expression without communication. Nothing forwards that goal so much as serving up your text in a giant homogeneous mass like something from a literary spittoon. If at first you still struggle with the urge to use paragraphing, you can always simply substitute a particularly long series of periods....................................................
Finally, a brief word about spelling. Remember the ease with which we delt with homonyms? Thats nothing when compared to the simplicity of Internet spelling!! First, you can just make up your own words. If it is even remotely possible to pronounce any given string of meaningless characters the weigh you intend, then thats good enuf. You can type “b” instead of “be.” U can type “do u c?” insted of “do you see?” U can type “i ownz j00! i am a haxx0r!” instead of “I live in my parents' basement and have never kissed a girl.”

If you do not know, how to spell a word, jus toss out a guess with as many letters doubled as possible, and then tack “(sp?)” after it. Embrace de delicious irony of riting sumthin on a computer attached to the world's largest system of information access and still not bein bothered to spel correctly!!! The purity of the scorn u can show for ur reader in such a simple action brings a tear to mye eye. I luv this place....

As always, the rule is that you matter but ur reader does not. Do not waste your own time whenever u can more conveniently leave the work 2 ur reader. You matter! You have things to do and places to go!!! Let the peons untangle your txt n puzzle over it's interpretation. Let their eyes squint and their brows arch. Their efforts r inconsequential. Meaning is meaningless. You have better things to do then 2 make urself clear.

Befuddle your reader, misleed your reader but, above all disdain, your reader. wellcome to the Internets!! pull up a keybored and jus start 2 bang away on it.
With ur face!!!!

[Originally by some genius on the Internet, with some editing by Sundar here :) ]

Why is spoken Tamil so different from written Tamil?

Why is spoken Tamil so different from written Tamil?
ரோட்டில் நடந்து கொண்டிருந்த சிறுவன் திடீரென நின்றான்.
ரோட்டுல நடந்துக்கிட்ருந்த பையன் திடீர்னு நின்னான்.

Take a look at http://ta.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%AE%AE%E0%AF%81%E0%AE%A4%E0%AE%B1%E0%AF%8D_%E0%AE%AA%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%E0%AE%AE%E0%AF%8D : "விக்சனரிக்கு வருக! இது சொற்களின் பொருள், மூலம், பலுக்கல் அடங்கிய, கட்டற்ற பன்மொழி அகரமுதலியொன்றை உருவாக்கும் கூட்டு முயற்சி." What?
If someone spoke to you like that in real life, what would your reaction be?

Why do you think this difference exists so much in Tamil? English doesn't seem to have this much difference. If you know any other Indian language, does it have this difference too?

Being intelligent can be dangerous

Whenever I complained about the college 'system' and things, I knew deep in my heart that there must be something wrong in me too that makes it a problem - "it takes two hands for a clap" they say.

Today, I came across this page: Your high IQ will kill your startup
It explains at least part of (what was) my issue.

People who are born intelligent start off life with everything easy for them. They don't have to work hard to get good grades, they never really have to do much to get ahead. The major challenge of early life is school - and school is designed for average people. So intelligent people just breeze through.

But there is a point where every intelligent person faces something that requires more than intelligence. It requires hard work, it requires the ability to fail, it requires being able to do tough tasks, boring tasks. For the first time in their life, in spite of their intelligence, these intelligent people are challenged, and they start failing. Like when they first attempt to create a startup.

And that's where most of them retreat. They focus on things they can't fail on, and ignore the other important things. They start to blame other things (like the school system). They procrastinate. They refuse to face new problems because they know they will not be able to handle them, and this does not fit into their worldview that they are invincible.

Thankfully, the "things they can't fail on" I chose in college were things like programming competitions and 'robot' making experiments, which turned out to be a not-too-shabby choice. Still, it's good to be honest to ourselves and realize where we screwed up. I hope I've learnt to digest and climb over failures these days, or at least am learning to do that.

I also found a similar link meant as a letter to Linus as he was exhibiting the above syndrome: Curse of the Gifted. Try to generalize the things there while reading, instead of reading in Linux's context itself. I especially liked this part:

"there will come a time when your raw talent is not
enough.  What happens then will depend on how much discipline [...] you
developed *before* you needed it, back when your talent was sufficient
to let you get away without."

It would seem I did not develop much of that discipline, but I'm trying to make up now. It's never too late in life to do the Right Thing.

The world's worst browsing center

"Endhaa? Browsing centre o?", he asked.
"Haan... Internet centre", I replied, exhausted from the heat of the Kerala Sun and the tar roads.
"Endhaa?" he asked again.
By then, I had struggled enough with this gentleman to move away mumbling a 'Thank you'. Thank you for nothing, I should perhaps have said.

I was on the roads of Trivandrum, having arrived there for a family function. I needed to take a print out of my return ticket for that night, and needed a browsing center for that. By then, I had strayed a good kilometer from the hotel I was staying at. Still, no browsing center was in sight. All I saw were some ancient buildings and some foreigners, and of course lots of Keralites.

After walking some more distance, I chanced upon a hotel on my side. There was a waiter in sight, and I was bored walking sans a destination. So I approached him, and asked in my broken malayalam, "Chaettaa... Ivvada computer center evvada undu?". He eyed me strangely, and said "Angae counter la kaelunga sir, avaruku therinjurukum". Turns out it was a branch of Coimbatore's famous Annapoorna, and the employees there were mostly Tamil people. I learnt from them that there was a browsing center just opposite to the hotel, that I had somehow missed to see (I wish I had missed it forever, but that's another story... well, actually, that's the story that follows).

I entered the "browsing center", and it reminded me of the 'Infotech' xerox and printout center near my college, being crowded with machines and people simultaneously. I told them I needed to do 'browsing', and a guy who was probably 19 years old directed me to a set of cabins. The cabins looked a little like the ones in Sify iWay, and I was somewhat impressed. Little did I know what was about to come.

I sat down in front of the computer, which had a tiny monitor (do they make monitors less than 14 inches? This much be one of them), and a keyboard that was on an immovable platform raised to an awkward height. Well ok, I thought, this is an average Indian browsing center, don't keep your expectations too high. Thinking thusly, I looked at the desktop which was filled with various icons of different programs and files. People put all sorts of files carelessly on public computers' desktops - there was the entire passport application document of a guy on this one's desktop. I could probably have disabled his mobile number using this information, and perhaps could even have gained access to his bank account using some 'Forgot password' option!

Neglecting such allures, I opened the Start menu to open the browser. No sight of Mozilla Firefox, but I was glad to see a Google Chrome icon. Just then, I also happened to see a sign on the wall that said 'To open G-mail, use Google Chrome'. These people seem pretty knowledgeable, I thought. Eagerly, I opened Chrome, and typed gmail <Ctrl-Enter>, which Chrome dutifully converted to www.gmail.com. The mouse pointer got a hour-glass attached to it for a moment, and then... nothing! The page remained blank as it was, and there was no sign of progress.

Umm... Okay. Maybe the Chrome has its network settings wrong or something. Let me try the good old Internet Explorer. Well, old it was - the IE version there was 6.0; the version well known for its horrible security issues, and well known for its inability to handle any decent amount of Ajax that runs many popular websites. Ok, whatever works, let me try to open Google here. Uh oh... "The page cannot be displayed" declared IE (Ah, nostalgia! It feels like years since I last saw that message). Ok, Commander, we have a problem at hand. At the same time, the person in the cabin near mine called the browsing center person, and said something that I understood to mean the "Internet connection is gone". The center guy shot a questioning look at me. Lacking the Malayalam vocabulary needed to explain the situation, I replied "The page cannot be displayed"! He made a poor attempt at hiding his smile, and ventured onto his computer, which I took to be a sign he was trying to repair things. After a few minutes, he called out "Network connectivity repaired". I refreshed the IE screen, and voila! There it was, the revered Google home page.

Immediately, I switched to the Chrome screen, and requested it to try and refresh the page. And then I saw... nothing again! The page remained blank as ever, perhaps reminding me of the virtues of a clean mind. But right then, I needed my ticket more than any advice, so I turned to IE itself. I felt unclean as I opened Gmail using IE6, knowing I might be adding credibility to someone's claim that "Google shouldn't drop support for IE6, there is still a significant percentage of users using it". Coding to work around the various flaws and security bugs in IE6 is a nightmare, and the developer in me cringed at the thought that I might be extending this nightmare to some other developers at Google. But alas, I was only a victim of circumstances, trapped there with nothing but this vicious tool called IE6.

Gmail opened fairly quickly and worked quite okayish even in this browser of the ancients; Kudos the tireless efforts of Googlers. The scroll on the screen was much less than ideal - most of the time I did not know where a scroll of the mouse's wheel was going to take me. Fortunately, I had enabled keyboard shortcuts on Gmail, which made things much more tolerable. I opened the email containing my ticket details, copied the mail and pasted it in Word. A mess of incomprehensible junk got pasted into the document. Phew. I was tired of fighting against fate by this time. Oh Lord, show me some mercy, deliver me a better browser. I made the same request to the 19-year old guy at the center, telling him "Chrome work cheyya laedhu". I know, I know, that's not Malayalam, that's Telugu (hopefully). By this time, I didn't care what language I was talking in, or what he thought of me. I wanted my damn printout.

He caught hold of the mouse (not in Sabari's sense, thankfully), and refreshed the page in Chrome a few times. Giving up on that effort, he started looking for Mozilla Firefox in the Start menu. Finding nothing there, he looked at the desktop, probably hoping against hopes to find it there. Of course, it wasn't there too, so he finally declared that there was a problem with Chrome, and Firefox wasn't available. Well, thank you for the flash news, you prophet! I asked him "Any other systems have Firefox?". He looked at me, and managed to communicate through his glare: "Won't you give up on this already? I have real work to do!". With that, he made some pretenses of looking for Firefox in a few other systems, and left the room in some time, to return only at the climax (I'll cut him some slack though, he was the 'hero' who saved my day finally).

I was now stuck alone with this monster called IE6, and had to grab my dear ticket in its full beauty from this monster's clutch. After some more (failed) attempts at copying and pasting, I admitted defeat. I was never gonna get the mail in a beautiful document, let me at least try to print this mail as it is. The problem was, a friend had booked the ticket for me, and I didn't want her name glaring at the top of the page. I thought, let me forward this mail to myself removing the headers and changing the subject. Then, Gmail will treat it as a separate mail, and only my name would be at the top of the page, which is fine. As I clicked Forward, Gmail put the text of the mail in the 'Compose' text field, which gave me an idea. As a final try, I copied the mail content from this area, and pasted to Word. And... it worked! Hurray! Yay!

Ok, you'd think this would be the end of my sad story. Unfortunately not. But I would spare you the gory details (I'm tired too, to be honest). In summary, the old man who was the 'head' of the browsing center didn't know damn about his own center's printers, and kept giving wrong settings. Every time, we'd walk back and forth between the system and the printer, and every time he would declare "Printout vandhittillaa". Finally, he called for the 19-year old hero, who set things up properly, giving me my beloved ticket - Mario had finally caught hold of his princess.

And that, my friends, is the story of my encounter with the world's worst browsing center!

After all this suffering, I was ready to forgive the sinners and walk out peacefully. But when the old man entered the time I browsed as "40 minutes", I could not contain myself. "Endhaa chaettaa 40 minutes? Half the time net connection work cheydhittillaa, half the time printer work cheydhittillaa! 15 minutes ae nyaan browse cheydhu!!" I exclaimed (now, those who know Malayalam, stop laughing. Now! ). He looked up, gave me a silent glare, and continued writing something. I knew any more resistance was futile, especially given my poor vocabulary, so I thought of a way to communicate my anger in a different way. I needed to sign out of my Gmail account, and went back to the computer. Once I was there, I knew what I had to do. I thought of a trick using PrintScreen, but even that simple key did not work on this system. Not a guy to be discouraged, I first hid all the icons on the Desktop. I then opened the 'Magnifier' application, and dragged it to occupy half of the screen. Now part of the lower half of the screen was shown magnified in the upper half of the screen. But I also wanted to expose the sad plight of Chrome on that system, so I opened it in the lower half of the screen. This would be enough to confuse any averagely-computer-literate guy, I thought.

There were a couple more tricks I could have pulled off, like deleting the IE icons from the start menu and stuff, but I was not sufficiently motivated, and am not sufficiently evil, to do those. This was enough to convey my frustration, to perhaps make them think something is wrong with the center, to perhaps encourage them to make things better. I know, probably building castles in the air, but a man can only hope and dream.

Finally, I walked off carrying my bag, smiling with the satisfaction that I had done my share of Good for the day.

Good deeds

A lot of good deeds go undone every day because someone is shy, uncertain or hidden in a crowd. The best thing you can do with your life is not to help others (though that's great) but to step forward to help in the first place. It's the hardest part - after that, helping becomes easy.

 - from this wonderful thread on Reddit. Highly recommended read, will enliven your hope on humanity!

I'm taking baby steps now, but I too need to step forward soon. Time's flying by, and I'm realizing that if it's not now, it's probably never - I don't want to be just another lump of meat that does things only to feed itself, and I'll probably become that if I don't start living the life I want NOW!

Edit: Just read the other comments in that awesome post. Very highly recommended read, will probably change your life and mind a little for the better.

The script of death

There was a sad post in Reddit today about a guy who had killed himself. The guy was (apparently) a programmer, and so left a really geeky suicide note. And it is perhaps worrisome that as soon as I read that, what came to my mind was "Awesome guy, this is the way to perform suicide".
The guy had been preparing for it for weeks, mainly by writing a script. Yes, a script for suicide. What the script did was, once he was dead, alert the people who know him via Blogger, Twitter, Gmail and also a website he built for himself. The script also wiped his Gmail account clean (presumably because he thought someone might guess the password and read his mails after his death). Here is the script of death. It takes a single (optional) command line argument. If there is no argument, the script runs in testing mode, where it doesn't do the real updating or deleting stuff - it just prints out what it will do when run in 'real' mode. If there is an argument, and the argument is 'NO', it runs in the 'real' mode, where it informs every one that the person has committed suicide. It feels very very sad to write that line - it is a strange mix of the usual program manual and an announcement of a person's plan to kill himself.
Here are the original post and the reddit comments on it.
In my own moments of despair, when I considered suicide a viable option, I've thought of writing an encrypted suicide note or a suicide note on Blogger that is scheduled to be posted some hours after the 'event'. This guy went a step ahead and automated the process of notifying via so many venues. That is simultaneously very cool and very sad.
This has given me an idea though. If I ever consider suicide, my note will probably be an treasure hunt involving challenges in programming and encryption (like, for eg., http://www.pythonchallenge.com/). That would fit perfectly as the last thing I want to do on earth, the last thing I want to be remembered for.
But then, that might be too much work, and I might want to just get rid of the world. In which case, it might be a single message in the Drafts folder of my cell phone.
It is perhaps telling that I've thought through this in so much detail. I've not been feeling like working from the moment I read that post. I've been trying to get into the mindset of the person who did this, to think through the thought processes he had. It affects me so much because I could very easily have been that guy, and can understand how one can calmly write a script for weeks while planning for a suicide. I'm happy that I'm (hopefully) out of that state.
I like to believe that I went through that stage only so that I could understand such people who go through the same stage, and be able to help them.
If this post seems a confused mess, it's because right now my mind is, too.
May his soul rest in peace, may his next life (if there is one) be much more peaceful and bliss-filled.