Spring in the Air - 2

I had celebrated the arrival of spring with some pictures last year too also. The difference is that this time the camera is my own!

I am preparing to go to Germany for a month and one of the first things I did was to buy a camera! A Sony Cyber-shot DSC W210. I am yet to get used to it - having done all my earlier photography with a Canon T70. Here are some of the first results. Hopefully, more will follow before I leave, in about a week and of better quality than these.

Rain trees with new leaves. N R Colony, Near Nettakallappa Circle

Yellow flowers in bloom. Botanically oriented may please supply the name of the tree. These are to be seen on the from National College to Gayana Samaja.

Spring in the Air

Don't say "Why should I?" like in the joke by George Mikes famous for his impossibly hilarious books such as "How to be an Alien" and "How to be decadent"!

This picture is to celebrate the arrival of Vasanta - Spring - in Bangalore.

This tree in full bloom, is jut around the corner from my home.

Anti-Superstition

At last there is one advertisement to cheer about.

The ICICI Prudential advertisement makes some remark about the futility of adding letters to your name. Kkaran, in this case.

After Jayalalithaa and Yeddiyoorappa successes, perhaps this madness had gained in strength!

So, this advertisement is a welcome change.

Gandhi and Madonna

I am sure that the title is catchy enough. But there is a reason for this title, other than an effort to make it catchy. At least, I did not put Madonna before Gandhi!

The Saturday issue of Deccan Herald carried two small news items. I had missed them and Jayanth Laxman, a friend who could always be relied on to bring such things to my notice, did bring them to my attention.

One said that a nude photograph of Madonna fetched some 37,500 dollars in an auction.

Right below this piece of information was the report that Gandhi's memorablia - sandals, watch, glasses, etc. will be auctioned soon and is expected to fetch 20,000 to 30,000 dollars.

No comments.

The Land of Kamasutra!

I should perhaps write this in my Blog Peripatetica as it concerns an incident from my not so frequent travels. But the context is here and now.

In front of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris I came across the most unusual description of India.

There used to be a perfumes seller in front of the famed cathedral. He had a donkey kart filled with all kinds of perfumes. This ‘caricature’ of a Frenchman spoke several languages, flirted with all his women customers blatantly but charmingly. I watched his performance for a while and when my turn came (yes there is a queue in front of so humble a shop) I told him what i wanted. As he was preparing my order, he asked me, with a twinkle in his eyes: “Where are you from, Sir?”

“India”, I said.

He stopped his preparations and raised his hands in the air and looked heavenwards with reverence on his face, “Aaaah! The land of the Kamasutra!”. If he had mathematical bent, he would have said, “Aaaah! The land of zero!”, perhaps. Since he was an admirer of the ‘gentler’ sex, as evident by his flirting, it had to be Kamasutra, I guess.

If this happened today, what would he say? I wonder.

“Oh no, the land of the Kamasutra that does not tolerate public kissing?”

"Oh no, the land of Kamasutra that does not like Valentine’s day?"

No, I will not provide a link to that one. Why publicise something that craves just that?

I do not like Valentine’s day, which is just a commerce driven event that destroys the environment – with all the cards that are exchanged. The suspicion is that this is a non-event made big by the greeting card industry – as is often claimed.

But ban it? Threaten the couples with dire consequences – like marriage for instance!!!!?

Amreekandesi took objections to calling the happenings in Mangalore Talibanisation. I wonder if he will change his opinion, after this. Taliban imposed strict “Islamic behaviour” before it could get that kind of power. Men should have beards, women should be in Purdah, etc., and punished the offenders brutally. That was the first step.

A character in James Michener’s “Caravans”, set in Afghanistan, says something like, “Don’t give power to the mullahs. It will ruin the country.” It really does not matter if it is a Mullah or a priest in any other garb, power mixed with religion is ruinous.

I hope that we, as a nation, are better or luckier.

Women Are from Venus . . .

Australian Open mixed doubles final. Great day for Sania Mirza. She has won her first grand slam title. Great day for ‘Hesh Mahesh Bhupati. This is his nth (n>10) grand slam title.

Prize distribution ceremony. The cup is given away and collected gleefully. The check is given away and collected gleefully.

Then the Australian special comes in. Two Teddy bears are offered and Sania’s hands are full – the large trophy. ‘Hesh collects it for her graciously and hugs one and dunks the other FACE DOWN (or bottom up) in the trophy Sania is holding. Sania says something sharply to ‘Hesh. He looks sheepish (or did I imagine that?) and adjusts the Teddy so that it faces the waiting cameras.

. . . . Men Are from Mars

Music or Noise?

Indian classical musicians make all kinds of interesting gestures with their hands when they perform. Each musician has his or her own characteristic gesture, as distinctive as their voices or singing style.

But, all of them seem to share one gesture. Let me try to describe it in words. Left hand pointing to or touching the microphone and the right hand moving jerkily upwards, with the palm facing up. This gesture is performed invariably with the musician's face turned towards the person manning the amplification system. Even the accompanists are no exception to this. They repeatedly interrupt their playing and make this gesture.

The result of this is: EAR SPLITTING MUSIC . I stopped myself from saying noise. At that volume it is very hard to make out the difference.

You might say that I am being overly critical. But I am sure there are many who agree with me. When will our musicians see light? Not that there are none. Sri T N Krishnan for one, pushes the mic away, as soon as he settles down. So does Dr. N Rajam. Runs in the family, perhaps.

Recently, I heard Smt. Veena Sahasrabuddhe's concert. A rare early morning concert so that morning ragas could be presented. She sang Nat Bhairav and Bilaskhani Todi. Very good renderings. But the mic was so close to her mouth and the volume so high that we could hear sounds that should not be heard.

A week before that, I heard an all-night concert in which the same phenomenon was to be seen. I mean heard. There too Dr. N Rajam's concert was the sweetest (Darbari Kanhara. It was excellent.) as the sound level was on a human scale.

Musicians seem to have forgotten that they are practitioners of a fine art!

Are the musicians and organisers listening to this plea? Or should I turn the VOLUME WAY UP?

Has Darwin Failed? II

Quite accidentally I came across the English version of Ist Darwin gescheitert? on Spiegel Online!

Here it is.

Now, I plan to compare this with my own translation and see how I have done. The first paragraph was very encouraging.

Prof Aprameya - A Tribute

I heard that Professor Aprameya of NIE, Mysore, passed away on 5 January, 2009.

He was a legend. I had heard of him even before I started studying in NIE.

The sheer influence of his personality was such that while other teachers struggled to establish some kind of authority over the students, Prof. Aprameya, well, just had it.

Since I was a student of electronics engineering, under normal circumstances, I would not have had the good fortune of being taught by him. But, thanks to an unusual set of circumstances, I did attend one of his classes. We had a greenhorn teacher who enraged us by his behaviour. When he came in to our next class, a roof high tower made out of stools used in the drawing classes confronted him. He promptly made a hasty about turn and went to the staff room and complained to Prof. Aprameya. He came into the class and in a very casual manner, without even looking at the offending tower, asked us to bring it down. It was, pronto. We thought he would chastise us. He gave affectionate advice instead. He told us how we should treat the new teacher like a friend and get along happily. He cited how "Prasanna" (The inimitable E A S Prasanna, who was an alumnus of NIE) played cricket, enjoyed college life and went on to achieve great fame, etc.

He took the day's class himself and taught us some engineering drawing. The way he could draw lines on the black board was unbelievable. The drawings came to life.

It is difficult to write about such a man as he. In lieu of it here is what the others have said about him. Sri Bapu Satyanarayana, one of the writers to be found in this site, kindly sent me the link, so that I could add it here.

Has Darwin Failed?

This year is a year for a double celebration - in science.

• 150 years since Charles Darwin published his "The Origin of Species"

• 400 years since Galileo turned his telescope towards the skies and changed man's concept of the world and himself.

Both brought man down from the pedestal he had placed himself on. There are debates about who did more in that direction. Galileo showed that we are not the centre of the Universe and Darwin showed that god did not create man after his own image.

In honour of these two events, there are many interesting articles in the press. I came across one of them and decided to translate it for myself. I did and here it is for your reading pleasure - hopefully.

The Original German Article from Spiegel Online: Ist Darwin Gescheitert?

My liberal translation of it: Has Darwin Failed?

Zamana Badal Gaya

This has been bothering me a long time.

Indra Nooyi is awarded the Padma Bhushan. Pullella Gopichand, the Padmashri.

Wondering what the connection is?

Nooyi is the CEO of a company that is actively contributing to the ticking time bomb of diabetes in India. The products of her company symbolises imprudent consumption. It uses water that is scarce and converts into a drink that has no benefits, except to the people who make it and sell it.

Pullela Gopichand, a fine human being and a great achiever, refused to endorse some Cola, perhaps even Pepsi. The offer must have been lucrative and hard to resist, to anyone, except Pullela.

Our omniscient government deems it fit to honour her and not him.

This has been boiling inside me from the day Nooyi's award was announced. The anger or frustration was so much that I did not blog it. Today the nudge from a friend finally made me write this. Thanks friend!

Pragmatism

I was reminded of
Cromwell's admonition
To his troops,
"Put your trust in god,
But, keep the powder dry",
When I saw
The three spikes
Of a lightning arrestor
Atop the tall tower
Of a house worship

Mera Bharat Mahan

I was watching some “nature” channel on TV and the programme was on snakes, cobras in particular. It took us to various lands and showed us the different species of cobras in those lands.

The location shifted and there were huge boulders and the presenter was walking on them towards a snake. I could see that there were inscriptions on the rock. No, not the type that would interest an epigraphist. More recent graffiti and quite large. I tried to read what was written and at the back of my mind derived some satisfaction that it was not only in our country that people leave their (ugly) mark on otherwise beautiful rocks.

My satisfaction was short lived.

That new country turned out to be, you guessed it, India.

Dedication

I am living in the present house for more than a year. I had not seen the design of the gate of my next door neighbour at all. Rather, I had not observed it at all.

Here is the picture of that gate.

“What is special?”, you might say. Look closely. What does the white line represent? If you have had any brush with statistics, you will recognise it as the Normal Distribution curve or in the more general parlance the Bell Curve.

The owner’s profession? An expert on Statistical Quality Control. This is the gate of the house of (now late) Mr. Srinivasan. He had a Master's degree in Statistics. He once told me that he had trained some top people in the company I worked for – for nearly 20 years – Kirloskar Electric. When I left that company, I was the head of Quality Assurance for one of its units, Unit IV, Mysore, hence my interest in Statistics.

When I told Mr. Srinivasan about myself, he presented me some books written by him, one of them on Quality Control. You could take a look at his book here: Managing Quality: Concepts and Tasks By N S Sreenivasan, V Narayana. After retirement, he wrote some more books - on self development and he gave me copies of those too. One of them is "vyaktitva sudhaaraNe" published by saahitya sindhu prakashana.

Alas, he is no more.

Happy New Year

I had taken a hiatus to study for an examination. Now I am back but, without even attending the examination. For various reasons, I decided not to take the examination at all this time. Now I am back with blogging, among other things.

Now I have to prepare for the exams again, either during March/April 2009 or November/December 2009. Inshallah!

Many of my friends will ask me where that last word came from. (This is almost like the time when E M S Namboodiripad said “God only knows” in the Kerala assembly. Some people took him to task. How could he say that, after calling himself an atheist? EMS replied, “When I say god only knows, I mean no one knows”.) It is only an expression of uncertainty and nothing more. As someone said, "It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future" – variously attributed to Churchill and Mark Twain among others.

Let me end with some forwarded e-mail humour.

God had enough and decided to end the world. He decided to announce this to the world through some really powerful people. He chose George W Bush, Hu Jintao and Bill Gates and told them. They in turn told the others.

Bush: I have good news and bad. Good news is that there is a God, as I always said. The bad news is that he is going to end the world.

Hu: I have bad news and worse. We were wrong. There is a God and he is going to end the world.

Gates: I have good news and better news. Good news is that there is a God. But then, we don’t have to release updates of Windows Vista.

Taking a Peep . . .

In my last post, I had said that I had to appear for an examination, had to study for it and hence I was taking a 'sabbatical' from my blog.

The examination was supposed to be in November and it was never even announced. Enquiries with the authorities did not help much, as recently as last Monday.

I decided to take a break and do things that I had either not done or reduced to a minimum. Blog - none. Crosswords and Su Doku - minimum, etc.

Just now, I decided to write a post. So much, that I would have loved to write about, has happened. Obama wins. Anand retains his title. A hundred other interesting things worth writing about. It was hard not to.

Just before, starting my post, took a peek at the website and lo and behold! The examination has been announced! 29 Dec. 2008.

So, here I go again, back into the shell. See you in the new year!

Dasvidania, said Brinda and Amities, said Zbigniew, in their comments to my last post. Let me add "Do widzenia". Back to the drawing board, I mean, study table . .

Auf Wiedersehen

It sounds surprising to me that my last post is dated September 24.That was inspired by the fact that I came across the name of 'Getafix' in the Bangla version of Aserix - Etashetamix. It means a-mixture-of-this-and-that. I was fired and wrote down the names of many of the other characters for the Kannada version - if and when. But that was really not a post by my reckoning.

The post before that was from September 15. That was just a comment on a report. By that standard, I could make another post today. The Pope and The Archbishop of Canterbury find it fit to say good things about Karl Marx! The days of miracles (or of absurdities) are not over after all.

So, why have I not written any more posts?

Let me go off at a tangent. (For the unmathematically inclined, or mathematically uninclined: tangent is not a well tanned man!)

One day, I looked into Blogger.com to see if there is any blogger who shared my profession - at that time entered as Patent Searcher. None. I tried synonyms (a common trick in the patent searcher's bag of tricks) - IP analyst, novelty searcher, patent information specialist. None. Apparently there are very few (none, infact) fellow professional who are inclined to writing blogs. After all, an overwhelmingly large part of our workday is spent in reading and reading and writing seem to be two ends of a spectrum. Please do not ask me, "A spectrum of what?"

Now, at the age of 53, (Thank you, thank you, Today IS my birthday) I am preparing to pursue a new profession. Instead of reading patent lieterature, I am going to write them. I mean 'draft' them and prosecute them. (Apparently, my company thinks that one can indeed teach a new trick to an old dog)

The actual shift takes place on Jan 1, 2009. (My dear mother's birthday incidentally)

Now, it is not as simple as it sounds. I have to pass an examination, to be able to pursue my new profession, sooner or later, preferably sooner. That means I have to study. I have to study in a manner I am not used to. Remember text, and lots of it, verbatim. Do I hear groans?

So what does all this mean? I will not write blog posts for quite some time. I take a holiday. A busman's holiday, is the idiom I guess.

So, off I go, to my study table, to return later, after I have taken the next major step towards my assignment. Hopefully, with the good news that I have passed the exam.

Well I have my work cut out for a couple of years - study/learn patent drafting, under a mentor. I do hope that somewhere along the line, I come back to start writing again "for pleasure". I hope (am sure) I will have pleasure writing professionally too. No one has ever said "professional is professional and pleasure is pleasure, and never the twain shall meet"

So, until then, Bye, auf Widersehen, hasta mañana, varre, barteeni, accha, ami aaschi . . . .

Who on earth?

Can you identify them?

aascharyix OR aascharyasoochix
maastix OR maastikallix
mudkix OR mudiyix
gayix
kunnix OR naayix
mailigix OR koLkix
chaalix OR gaalimaadix
jaalienjaayix
aayurvedix OR vaidix
mukhyaamshix
tondrix
nidrix

These are now subject to copyright!

Darwin

The news that the Anglican church has apologised to Charles Darwin fascinated me.

Somehow, the image of the Church saying, "Sorry Charlie, old fruit!", a la Bertie Wooster passed in front of my mind's eye!

I am doubly honoured!

Some days ago, my friend, fellow blogger, friendly critic (of my posts) and post-publication-spellchecker and grammar-questioner Starry Eyed Shruti gave me this award. I am thrilled.

However, her bestowing the honour coincided with a slump in my blogging. I do hope that that slump is in the quantity and not the quality of my posts. I hasten to add that I am not claiming that my posts are of great/excellent/irreproachable quality. All I am saying is that it has not slumped from whatever quality I normally try to achieve.

The slump was such that I did not even properly acknowledge the award and "brag" about it in a post. So here I am. Thanks Shruti, I am honoured.

This morning I was told that I have been given this award, again! This time by Shruthi.

Are you wondering what this is all about? Look at the spelling. The second one has an 'h' extra. Now, how is that I described Shruti so variously and not Shruthi? Well, Shruthi is my niece, friend, cheerleader and guide, coach, teacher, problem-solver for my blogging.

Thanks again!

Now, how can I sign off without taking a dig at someone or the other? So here goes.

When I describe these two I was uncomfortable that I sounded like many public speakers who introduce someone on the stage with such superlatives that the subject of the praise could start wondering if someone else is being described by mistake. I am sure that Shruti and Shruthi (No reference to Thomson and Thomson intended) will surely recognise themselves without any problems.

Finally, the earlier recipients have all passed on the awards to others. My blog reading is limited. So, I do not pass it on to others. If I had received this award from someone else, I would have (without second thoughts and without a second's thought) given it to these two!

*** Links to the blogs of Shruti and Shruthi are in the list of links below my picture, at the beginning of my blog.