Interpreting a dream…

Last few days.. so I went to library today, but on a purpose : for this book ‘Interpretation of Dreams’.. by Freud. The dream I had yesterday morning left me wondering what on earth it meant. Trust me.. its been long since I ceased to be a regular AOC player but here I was :

.. a desert like terrain and I was with two horses and a camel… damn thirsty. Suddenly there is sound of gun powder and I along with  the camel fell to the ground. Two elegantly dressed Jannisaries pointing their barrels emerged out of nowhere.. I was sweating like hell [perhaps the fan was off.. :p]. I was on my knees pleading them to spare my life. To my surprise, both spoke english [with the middle east accent] … ‘Mongol!!’ said one… apparently the other one disagreed. After long examination they seemed to have figured out that I am from the less dangerous territory.

Then with some respect they asked me what I did.. to the best of my knowledge [in the dream] I was a perfume merchant from Cochin lost here, a shipwreck. so I told them. After a swift ride on the fastest of their camels I was presented to a dark, imposing personality.. who looked like a cross between Sultan Saladin and Solomon. I was scared like hell in the beginning but my fear soon turned in to respect and his suspicion soon turned in to kindness. He instructed his men to give me what I needed.

After my needs were attended the imposing figure sat in front me to speak.. ‘So you are the scribe from Asia?’. I was dumbfound.. what scribe? I am a poor perfume merchant from the far east.. I pleaded. Then he remembered that he never introduced himself.

‘I am the ruler of Ottoman Turkish empire. It is foretold that we would have a great naval victory against the Austrian empire and the arrival of an arrival of an Asian scribe is a good omen. So the quest for Ottoman domination of Europe begins with you stepping on our land’.. Hmm gotcha!! I thought… So I am meant to be treated with respect.

I was on one hand very happy but this man’s presence was quite intimidating.. so I thought I could break the ice by speaking something.. but speak of Turks.. Gunpowder, Kamal ata Turk and his diplomatic and mathematical skills, weightlifter Suleymanoglu are the only things that come to my mind. I randomly spoke of their civlization, their use of Gun powder. [I couldnt exactly recollect the exact details.. but some parts were real awsome.. ].

‘Oriental people have rare wisdom’ he said.. ‘and yet we feared the Huns and Mongols for their savageness.. even their warfare is driven by that wisdom.. I presume’. Then he glorified the Ottoman empire for a while explaining how their obsession with technological advancement led them to use gunpowder so effectively, the trade relations. We walked along the roads of a magnificient port city and reached a mighty castle [much like the heavy one we see in AOC]. I asked him [with he greatest respect] where he was taking me..

then he dropped the real bombshell : ‘You will accompany us to the Austrian shore.. the prophecy also tells us that the Asian scribe shall stand as a testimony to the rise of the Ottoman empire to its zenith. Make yourself comfortable on the ships.. we have a long ride and a big battle ahead’.. [One part of the mind is screaming.. what crap? those ships will take forever to reach Austria.. leave alone beating whole Europe. God knows when you will go home .. the saner part is still screaming .. wtf? as if this is all true.. just enjoy the movie-like show!!].

However the saner part of it had no direct control on the movie character.. So I turned around and started running.. and sound of gun powder behind me ‘thud.. thud!!’.. my mind screamed ‘turn back you fool!! and have an eye on the direction of the shot.. at least you can hope to escape’. So I turned.. I mean I actually turned in my bed and landed on the floor of my room, unhurt but feeling weird…. a nice movie like dream vanished. I checked the time 5.00 a.m. I dozed off again.. regretting the loss of a nice dream

I went to Visesh in the morning saying ‘Why didnt ya wake me up in the morning’… ‘What? I was banging of door of #368 like hell at 5.00 in the morning’.. he said. Then it became clear to me… then gunshots on the turkish shore!!.. ‘thud.. thud!!’.. poor kid in #368… my room no is #375.. and our dear Pelu got it wrong!!

more books, G-Office, and a screwed-up OTI

So sreejith thinks I am gone from IIIT [~\cite{comment-on-last-post}].. nay.. not yet. I still have some scores to settle [and many programs to write and debug ]. So after that book I really went after other books around my desk and desktop.. i) Love Story by Eric Segal.. 46 pages of pure bliss, awesome. ii) Then Andy Grove’s mgmt. classic ‘Only the paranoid survive’. iii) then the subversion [svn] manual… I swear no manual for any project on tigris.org had been so good. iv) ‘Fountainhead’.. only halfway through, but it already started sorta rebellion in my brain. Never imagined a female philosopher could be so influential, Is this gonna change me forever!!. Nay, nay.. right now I would prefer to be Keating than Roark.. coz I need to graduate .

Then… every tech. news feed creates a big fuss about Google’s office suite etc. etc… big deal.. huh!!. Same old hype story. Check these : zoho , zimbra . Zoho’s case is more agonizing.. its too cool to be ignored or die in the shadows like this. But then as the comments here suggest its all about muscle.. Now what!! M$ is already in to this business. May be Y! will join by buying one zoho or similar thing. Only thing that interests me is that now G has really pinched M$ by stepping on to an almost exclusive territory.. now the battle is really on. But a serious doubt that I have is : where does this web office thing stand in comparison to the desktop thing?. I have been using writely etc. but still feel like sending ‘.doc’s or latex generated pdfs when it really matters [yeah!! agreed zoho is cool.. but replacing good old pdf and latex presentations.. NO!!].. and of course the privacy thing is always there… is this the case with me alone? or may be I am chained by the convention and my latex-addiction or may be I am too dumb to make smart use of this web thing. Anyway’s as one of the bloggers said ‘Irrespective of who wins this new race, if the cost of creating office documents goes down the consumer is the winner.. [or may be M$ is the loser.. ]‘

…and cricket after soooo long after Hairy stuff !! and that too an OTI I thought.. I was excited when I started for the dear OBH [am I getting nostalgic a bit too early?]. The newly bought TV in the TV-room was an additional attraction. This was first OTI I ever watched and I was expecting airy shots, a six an over, lotta free hits and what not.. but what a dissappointment!! The brits sucked big time with the bat. Singles, strike rotation, defense and the only six of the innings is in the last over.. wtf?.. this is OTI for God’s sake!! [or wait, are OTIs in general like this? ]. At least Afridi provided some entertainment [one of the few occasions when I thanked the pakistani cricket team.].. otherwise I would have been writing about my precious 3 hours and what all miracles I would have pulled off in blast billiards if I were not watching that stuff.

Book : The Devil and Miss Prym

Author : Paulo Coelho.

.. Vardhman got it issued but I was the first to finish it (as always and this time in just under 4.5 hrs. from I started reading it.. yeah yeah 201 pages in 4.5hrs.. I know I am terribly slow). I didnt read Paulo’s better known The Alchemist. But the current book in itself is enough to convince one that he is a master writer. Beautiful dramatisation of the struggle that goes on within every soul.. between good and evil.: A rich ex-arms trader [stranger] comes to a small celtic village [Viscos, supposed to paradise wit everybody virtuous and all but on the brink of being wiped out from the map], there he uses a young woman[Chantal Prym] as a mediator to propose a deal to the village [that is equivalent of temptation by the Devil] : he would gift the village a treasure [that would ensure all its inhabitants a happy life for generations] in exchange for a murder in the village. Would the villagers accept it? If so who is the victim? who would be ready to be a martyr for the village? who should bear the guilt? .. what happens later is an enlightening depiction of the nature of Good and Evil [which is what the rich man wants to know as he himself feels punished unjustly in life : he loses his family to terrorists for doing what is right].. The ending is a bit shaky.. but overall, its amazing… finally letting us know how one can conquer the fear that avoids him/her from the true living.. in the end the relevance of it to our daily struggles is what impressed me. The metaphors, the story telling is just too good and all of this in 201 pages flat!!. One review of Alchemist said ‘Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever, this is one such book‘. Then, I ignored it as extravaganza. Now, I know that it couldnt have been exaggeration. At the end I know this : there is good and evil in every soul.. so everybody feels the sameway I feel when I see a buxom girl strolling on campus roads or when I get an opportunity to copy the 10%-of-course assignment.. so we are all same.. what separates us, then, is what we choose to do… this freedom of choice is a strength that we have and for that mankind is blessed!!. and to know of a writer who could tell this so magnificiently to us… I am blessed!!

LOTD : Sorry too busy to browse nething these days!!

Netvibes rocks…

I was fascinated by Google’s personalized homepage stuff for a while.. but only until I saw netvibes. Now I can access my mail(gmail, yahoo, and all POP mails), chat via meebo, read all the tech news, maintain calendars, have tabs all on a webpage.. this ‘desktop on web’ thing really rocks. I got rid of all my korganizer, kmail, knotes stuff and put it all on web. And after seeing netvibes my belief that  Google is nothing great and all hype is getting more and more strong. The latest acquistion of Neven-Vision says it very clear : we cant do it, so buy off someone who is capable of that. I saw this happening so many times.. and the talk of innovation?.. gimme a break.. whats new about gmail( no giving more space aint innovation), gtalk(skype was already there, hype made it a hit), blogger(its acquired), homepage(see netvibes), calender (kiko was there much earlier), reader (aggregators is no new concept).. To me, hype seems to be at the core everything gets so much just bcoz its from Google.. and of late the business strategies start resembling those of M$’s. These days my opinion about Google swings between extremes.. I look at design documents of GoogleFS and think here is a company which revolutionised search… and then look at other things, see how lacklustre products become hits because its from Google while many superior ones (from lesser known startups) remain in shadows and feel like shouting ‘Its not FAIR’.. and then enlightenment!! damn it.. who am I kidding. Nothing in this world is really fair.. including the definition of fairness.

The pencil story

.. these days I get so lazy that I copy stuff from other blogs… . Normally at the end of it I feel ashamed and refrain from posting but this one is (from here) impressive enough to deserve mirroring  (Dont curse me for formatting errors and all.. ):

The Pencil Maker took the pencil aside, just before putting him into the box.

“There are 5 things you need to know,” he told the pencil, “Before I send
you out into the world. Always remember them and never forget, and you
will become the best pencil you can be.”

“One: You will be able to do many great things, but only if you allow
yourself to be held in Someone’s hand.”

“Two: You will experience a painful sharpening from time to time, but
you’ll need it to become a better pencil.”

“Three: You will be able to correct any mistakes you might make.”

“Four: The most important part of you will always be what’s inside.”

“And Five: On every surface you are used on, you must leave your mark. No
matter what the condition, you must continue to write.”

The pencil understood and promised to remember, and went into the box with
purpose in its heart.

Now replacing the place of the pencil with you.  Always remember them and
never forget, and you will become the best person you can be.

One: You will be able to do many great things, but only if you allow
yourself to be held in God’s hand. And allow other human beings to access
you for the many gifts you possess.

Two: You will experience a painful sharpening from time to time, by going
through various problems in life, but you’ll need it to become a stronger
person.

Three: You will be able to correct any mistakes you might make.

Four: The most important part of you will always be what’s on the inside.

And Five: On every surface you walk through, you must leave your mark. No
matter what the situation, you must continue to do your duties.

Allow this parable on the pencil to encourage you to know that you are a
special person and only you can fulfill the purpose to which you were born
to accomplish.

Never allow yourself to get discouraged and think that your life is
insignificant and cannot make a change.

All Links!! No Stuff :(

I will post the LOTD so that the impact of my last post even better.. soon after that match there was  indeed hope for SL :  Water flows to Sri Lanka farmers . And thanx to my buddies who appreciated that.

The upcoming seminar thing I talked about happened on 9th. The famous prof. did concur with me.. but I didnt except he would challenge the existing defintion of PR and the the current computational model itself!!. But if I start talking of it, it would fill a book. So no comments!!

A good reason to watch cricket..

.. for long I had been trying to search for a good reason for my extra interest in cricket [well all my frenz know how many hours I screw up reading columns on cricinfo., looking at profiles ].. Now here is damn good reason why one should : Cricinfo reports, after tense test between SL and SA [I must admit SL did a great job in pulling that off]:

A few minutes after firecrackers went off in celebration of the host’s victory, a real blast rocked a southern suburb of Colombo. The car bomb killed at least one and maimed others, quickly putting the cricket, just a game, into sharp perspective. During difficult times this Sri Lankan cricket team has provided much joy for a nation that badly needs good news. Their cricket, especially their resilience, has been a revelation and it was no surprise that Ruphavahini, the national broadcaster, replayed the match highlights in the aftermath of the bomb, a soothing balm in a depressing time.
and for those who know the intensity of the ethnic clash in SL, an emotional Kumar Sangakkara, another great player himself, writes sometime back about the genius Muralitharan [needless to say, Murali belongs to the minority ethnic group]:

For Murali, caste, class, ethnicity or faith is irrelevant – we are all equals. His life – the exploits on the field, his resilience in the face of intense provocation, his natural kindness and generosity, his remarkable charity work with The Foundation of Goodness – evokes a powerful spirit of reconciliation for a polarised nation. He has taken much from the game of cricket, but he has given back so much to our society. More than any other public figure in Sri Lanka, he stands apart, a source of joy on the cricket field, an example to us all and an answer to the ethnic conundrum we face in Sri Lanka.

I dont know how seriously our cricketers take their job.. but to me this is amazing… one top performer can have such an impact. Inspiring not just commom men but men of his stature too.. I remember my childhood when I used to run to the ‘udipi hotel’ every morning [on my way to school] and searching tea-soaked ‘eenadu‘ daily, desperately looking for something inspiring : a news on rupee-value [I didnt understand inflation then ], an interesting innovation.. such things were rare and the inspiration usually was on the sports page, from the ocassional cricket/hockey victory, from certain Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar or Dhanaraj Pillai.. at least somewhere, we are a force in this world and there are heroes in this land… and thats a beacon of hope [to quote Sangakkara].. perhaps things arent as dark as I perceive them to be. And that used to move me..the paper screamed.. ‘run to school and read, kid! someday you could be like them, someday you might see your photograph like that.’. Well, I did run everytime I saw such a thing.. and I am sure there are hundreds of youngsters who draw inspiration like this.. and for me to this day it continues. I know it sounds stupid to let a goddamn game to affect my perception of progress, resilience so much, but then that is what happens everywhere. Perhaps thats why till I entered IIIT-H [which brought kinda enlightenment] I used to follow the production stats of mika, rice, the aqua-industry everywhere things were bright for us.. and for us there are more conundrums than SL has.

To end this thing: while going through the mails on alumni group I noted a point wothy mentioning [I would have done better to post the content of the mail.. but for obvious reasons I didnt]. One of the seniors was mentioning why the first two batches left a remarkable impression in whatever they did. As I understand it, since there was no IIIT-brand sorta thing then, they were all building it and there was freedom which made them feel responsible.. and they pulled off some great things!!.. in the process they added value to themselves and almost all of them tasted great individual success. Its a testimony to what a few self-starting, motivated individuals can do. These days, the way freshmen speak to [very rarely , courtesy the healthy interaction fiasco] makes me worried ['Sir, the placements are so good, I heard', 'Sir, where are you placed?', 'Sir, what is in demand?'[sic] ].. Of course, I cant talk to them the way I blog but I wish I could tell them these things in a way they understand better.

LOTD : After Zune now its sony’s turn with Mylo [Wi-Fi based and it comes with Skype, Y! and GTalk.. where is this competition heading? ]. And here is something else : Read-Ink [more about this in the next post ]

The real ‘Indian Stanford’

I wont talk about the ‘virtual’/'unreal’ one here [since that might land me in trouble] but this time the ‘Indian Stanford’ thing sure seems to be happening : metal tycoon Anil Agarwal is investing a billion dollars to set up a unversity that bears the name of his firm ‘Vedanta University‘. Wait a sec, before closing the tab thinking that this another of my exaggerations read this. This is great to see.. and its not aimed at another IIT kinda stuff : there’s gonna be law, theatre.. everything. [well the 2k1ites reading this might remember an old mail which talked of a timber merhcant who went on to build universities... see, all my ideas are being stolen]

LOTD : Code4Bill , Coke Fiasco [Wonder what's the Govt. doing ... by the way Coke is the worlds top brand of 2006 according to this . I dont know what to say ]

Another social networking site(.. and this time its M$’s Livespaces)

I am finding more and more of the soical networking sites with umpteen number of features.. blog, photos. Well many vanished as fast as they came up but this time its something special.. M$ is trying its hand at this.. calling it ’space’. I got one here. The features are somewhat interesting although not technically amazing stuff. But the ‘updated spaces’ thing is really cool. I dont know if its real time but I know its at least partly aligned with reality : I watched it for half-an-hour and nothing blinked from the north-eastern past of African continent while North America was blinking all the while

LOTD : How To Lie (I wish it were the other lie)