Strutting Siddhu's stuff

Apparently this Osama Bin Laden is Siddhu + Photoshop. Hard to believe



Notice something funny about the girls ?

"Mirror, Mirror, On the wall,
Who is the genuine one of them all?"



And a self-portrait

Asalu needi post office kelle mohamaa ?!!!

I detest Telugu movies, I find them really brain-dead and decadent and other bad things. But a couple of movies I saw recently lead me to believe that the patient is still breathing. One is Pokiri, starring Mahesh Babu who is a really charismatic actor. The movie is quite unremarkable, but there were some decent comedy scenes. One in particular cracked me up. Mahesh Babu acts a general rowdy kind of guy, a 'pokiri'. He skips a meeting with the heroine claiming that he had some work at Kacheguda post office. Later on being found out he gets a talking-to from the heroine who didn't believe him in the first place. In that scolding is this great line: "Needi post office kelle mohamaa ?". It would sound even better with an "asalu" in the beginning, but I don't remember if that was in the movie or came out of my mind.
The literal translation of the above is "Anyway, is your face one that goes to the post-office ?"

Yesterday we saw Bommarillu. This was a nice light comedy with a genuine theme, a son struggling to find himself in th shadow of his controlling strong-personality father. Lots of good jokes and genuine creative stuff and it also had a touch of genuineness and handled some serious themes well.

We also saw 7/G Brindavan Colony recently, quite good.

Here are two Indian movie sites: Sulekha, and Idlebrain

SMS jokes

Priya's animation course classmates are a funloving bunch. They keep sending her stuff on SMS. Here are a couple of jokes:

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A scientist cannot become a President ... But Kalam did it





A poor person cannot become an engineer ... But Vishweshwaraya did it





A monkey cannot operate a mobile .....






BUT YOU DID IT



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Stand by, a Brain Refresh will happen in 10 seconds


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Error, refresh failed .... no brain found

Siddhu (my nephew) and I have interesting IM conversations. Here's one we had today. You have to have seen Lage Raho Munnabhai to understand it, though.
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siddhu7_d: hey!!
ahminotep: hi
ahminotep: how're you :-)
siddhu7_d: how are you?
siddhu7_d: me is the good!
ahminotep: Doing fine!
siddhu7_d: i've got to tell you about this movie.. lagey raho munnabhai!
siddhu7_d: seen it?
ahminotep: Yes :-)
ahminotep: What did you think about it
siddhu7_d: wait..did you get to see rang de basanti first?
ahminotep: No, I haven't seen RDB
siddhu7_d: its really good...but i dont knw whether gandhigiri works out practically...we tried doing it the whole day after we saw the movie in the mornin show!!!!
ahminotep: How did you try it ?!!!
siddhu7_d: there were people pushing in the line after the movie..we just stood aside and sent them one by one!!!!....then there was a stiff between two friends..we peaced them up!!...
ahminotep: :-)
ahminotep: Quite cool
ahminotep: We should talk about it in detail sometime
ahminotep: What do you mean you'll stood aside and sent them one by one
siddhu7_d: Yeah... exactly...i'd love to!..i was thinking the whole night after seeing the movie!!
siddhu7_d: Well...there was a heavy rush that day coz it was a sunday and guess people wanted to hurry up things or something!!!...so..instead of we people going along with the flock, we stood aside and sent them one-by-one...rather like the gate keepers in the theatre!!!!!!!
ahminotep: Why did the movie excite you so much
ahminotep: That's a very nice thing to do !
ahminotep: Reminds me of some gandhigiri I did long long ago
siddhu7_d: you did gandhigiri??
ahminotep: I was travelling in a train and the guys near me had bought some groundnut and they were shelling them and eating them
ahminotep: In 15 mins the entire floor all around the area was a disgusting mess with groundnut shells all around
ahminotep: I got so angry with them , but instead i just cleaned up the mess myself :-)
siddhu7_d: coz its a real deadly concept... i was thinking whether it would practically work out in THIS age!!!!
siddhu7_d: Awsome!!!...i expected that!
siddhu7_d: if you like munnabhai...u'll surely like RDB...and how come you haven't still seen RDB!!!!!!!!?!?!?!?
ahminotep: We should definitely talk about whether it would 'work' in this age. But the thing to think about is -- should you just do it because its the right thing to do, or should you worryabout whether it works or not . I'll leave you to ponder about that
ahminotep: We got it on video and saw some of it but it was actually quite dragging and because it didn't have subtitles, we didn't understand it properly. I've been meaing to get a DVD with subtitles and see it again
siddhu7_d: i've thought about that too...but if i really put it to work..surely i'll be the one to stand out and undoubtedly i'd be left out from the others!!!!
siddhu7_d: hey...the original dvd was out long back!
ahminotep: What's wrong with standing out and being 'left out' :-)
ahminotep: Okay, I'll get it and see it
siddhu7_d: Practically....You are in a group of people with whom you'd love to hang out and be with always... but surely none of them would never like it if you keep doing something so ruly.....
ahminotep: Well, think some more about the above statement you just made and see if there might be some errors in it or whether there are solutions
siddhu7_d: anywayz...i'll definately make an attemp to do something like that!...lets see whether it works out!
ahminotep: :-)
ahminotep: Best of luck ! Let me know how it goes
siddhu7_d: yeah...you too!



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I am somewhat patronizing with him, aren't I :-)


Here's another conversation:

http://www.geocities.com/ahminotep/Writings/generation.htm

This fellow is a creative chap with some very cool stuff he's done already. I'll upload some stuff that he's done.

Flickr badge

Flickr has this neat way of showcasing photos from Flickr on your website by this 'badge' thingie. They also let you 'tag' photos so that you can classify photos by themes. So I added a flickr badge to this site (scroll down a bit if you can't see it). The idea is to change the theme fairly frequently so there's interesting stuff showing up. Right now, I'm starting off rather tamely with 'nature', while I work on some more interesting themes

Arvind -- Classes 3 and 4

Amidst the constant change is there anything that is constant. From your infancy to now, many things have changed. The physical structure of your body, opinions, thoughts and so on. But yet we use the word "I" to indicate a constancy through all this change. Is it a meaningful word in any non trivial context. It's a pretty deep question – is there any thing constant at all in you. And this is one avenue to answering the question "who am I?"



First, here is one way of answering what is constant.



Imagine that we assemble a computer and aside from the hardware we embed it with some learning software. This learning software keeps making changes to its axioms and its view of all true and false statements. In addition this computer knows how to make hardware to modify itself. And can also replicate itself. So while the shape of this machine and its view of truth and falsity is constantly changing, is there anything that is constant. In this example yes, the learning program which is a set of clear coded instructions.



It seems to me that the parallels between life and the example above are not far off. Simple survival rules embedded within basic bio chemical building blocks have over time molded us. Our bodies and minds are simply state of the art hardware additions made to a core set of simple hard ware and an enormously powerful but simple bio chemical software that can replicate itself. By analogy we say can say what constant – the dna that carry all instructions for survival including our necessity to discern truth and falsity (is it a tiger or is it a leaf) in order to survive.



The second approach, put forth by the` class is this. Yes there is something unchanging. This is the real you. The real you can be understood by first observing yourself – for you are not anything that you observe. Peel away layers of yourself until you understand what you are. The real you is no different from the real me.



The over simplified pseudo scientific model that I put forward and the mystic model put forth by the school have one thing in common. They both reduce each of us to one thing – dna in my model and something un-nameable in the mystic model. Further the one thing is common to all of us in both models – the starting instructions in my model (our common ancestor according to Darwin) and the unnameable unity of the mystic model. However, the mystic model alludes to something more. It refers to consciousness at a very deep level and I suppose that is the synonym for the word "I". When we say "I" we probably mean what ever it is that provides "consciousness". This is not a problem reduction by any means because I cannot begin to tell you anything about consciousness. Notice again, the key statement about you are not what you observe to be applies to consciousness in the sense that the consciousness that is constant through our life time is not what we observe.





States of consciousness


Although consciousness itself is a tricky beast that we cannot easily trap and study, some things statements can be made about related properties. The class posits the following levels of consciousness. Note, these are basically measurements of something that we cannot define and the measurement is not the measured.



· Restfull sleep (or as I say post jetlag sleep)

· Dream Sleep (Sleep on other days.)

· Waking Sleep (how I or most likely you spend most of your life.)

· Fully awake (When I play tennis. Despo, heres why you need to play something. This state of existence is far better than waking sleep.)

· Higher Consciousness (Not gotten here yet.)



The idea behind the teachings of meditation and another exercize (pick any one of 5 senses and spend a minute on it) is to help revert back to fully awake and sometimes if your are really lucky move to the higher consciousness state (I am wondering if that's what LSD does for you. Spiders on LSD are known to weave better webs than without LSD. In that case screw philosophy and become a junkie!!)



The power of observation and isolation


One of the ideas that has become crystallized (I was a practicing fellow earlier but now I am so much more aware of its power) is the enormous potential of observation in problem solving. In many cases, merely dissecting the problem to its centre and observing it is the solution. I do not mean observation leads to a solution - rather I mean that observation is the solution. The problem vanishes on observation – I suppose in this context I understand the statement you are not what you observe yourself to be. For example, in my previous post I discussed how I overcame the uneasiness I had earlier felt about accusations of the course being offered by a cult.



The trick though is that it requires great honesty to be a good observer. It is a process of letting go – all my prejudices, all my vanity, all my so called achievements (Despo, since you still are hung up about achieving something, this is specially relevant), and every thing else that I cling onto. It is not hard but needs devotion. Screw determination. And especially screw discipline.

Volver

Arvind,
Volver is releasing in NY on Nov 3rd. See it, atleast for me, if you don't have the discrimination to appreciate Almodovar

Two serious websites

www.indiatogether.org
www.znet.org


India Together is a really good site with lots of stuff on all sorts of public interest matters. They cover a really wide range of things and what they say almost always makes a lot of sense. The site itself is a little hard to negotiate and a bit off-putting, but they have an excellent biweekly newsletter with the most recent article. When I read the newsletter I always find most of the articles worth reading.

Znet is a huge left-wing American site with tons of articles on everything under the sun. Lots of Chomsky.

"Sideways"

I saw this movie again recently on VCD. I had seen it earlier in the US when I visited in Dec 2004 and had a soft spot for it because of that. I liked it then as a neat 'indie' movie. Seeing it again now I'm surprised by how well-made and pitch-perfect it is. There is almost no part of the movie that doesn't work well. A small gem. You can read a little more about it at Imdb

Puzzle answers

Here are (most of) the answers to the puzzle of a few posts back:


1.) 26 = L of the A [Letters of the Alphabet]
2.) 1001 = A N [Arabian Nights]
3.) 7 = W of the W [Wonders of the World]
4.) 12 = S of the Z [Signs of the Zodiac]
5.) 54 = C in a D (with the J) [Cards in a Deck (with the Jokers)]
6.) 9 = P in the S S [Planets in the Solar System (NOT ANYMORE!!! PLUTO GOT DEMOTED)]
7.) 88 = P K [Piano Keys]
8.) 13 = S on the A F [Stripes on the American Flag]
9.) 32 = D F at which W F [Degrees Fahrenheit at which Water Freezes]
10.) 18 = H on a G C [Holes on a Golf Course]
11.) 90 = D in a R A [Degrees in a Right Angle]
12.) 200 = D for P G in M []
13.) 8 = S on a S S [Sides on a Stop Sign]
14.) 3 = B M (S H T R) [Blind Mice (See How They Run)]
15.) 4 = Q in a G [Quarts in a Gallon]
16.) 24 = H in a D [Hours in a Day]
17.) 1 = W on a U [Wheel on a Unicycle]
18.) 5 = D in a Z C [Digits in a Zip Code]
19.) 57 = H V [Heinz Varieties]
20.) 11 = P on a F T [Players on a Football Team]
21.) 1000 = W that a P is W [Ways that a ? is ?]
22.) 29 = D in F in a L Y [Days in February in a Leap Year]
23.) 64 = S on a C [Squares on a Chessboard]

Easylib.com

I mentioned this site in blogging at some point. You can call it NetFlix for books and for Bangalore. I signed up recently and its already obvious that this is a really good service for me. Briefly, you can get books delivered to your home. And for about 100 Rs a month you can read as many books as you want. I spent a lot of money (guiltily) on books so this thing is very welcome. My first borrow was "Veronika Decides to Die" and now I have "Ravan And Eddie" by Kiran Nagarkar. I have read Cuckold by Kiran Nagarkar in the past and can't recommend it strongly enough. Its probably the highlight of my reading of the past 3+ years in India. See my review here. So I'm looking forward to Ravan And Eddie, just started it.

Speed Reading and Speed Watching

Over time I have got into the state where there are several books/movies that I would like to see but don't have the patience to 'sit through' completely. Either because the book/movie is stupid/boring or parts of it cover stuff that I am not interested in,like 'fighting scenes', or because since I have read or watched so much already, the current movie or book does not feel original or fresh. Recently I read two books "The Zahir" and "Veronika Decides to Die" by Paulo Coelho, in this mode. I'm not a big fan of Paulo Coelho. It does not strike a deep chord with me.
Nevertheless, its interesting enough and there are enough rave reviews about his books that I feel like checking the books out. So I read through these books very quickly. Its quite easy to speedread these books because there's lots of stuff not directly relevant to the main plot so you can skip through all of that and still follow (of course the danger with speed reading is that you might miss the essence for going so fast).
Priya recently got from a friend, a interesting pirated DVD. It proclaimed itself as a 3-in-1 and contained Predator, Predator-2 and Mission Impossible-3 all on the same DVD. Quite a nice idea :-) and one which would give the genuine copyright owners some significant heartache. I speed watched Predator and Mission Impossible-3 with very satisfactory results.
Predator is one of those brain-dead movies whose plot can be summarized in 1 or 2 lines. This makes it very easy to speed watch as there are no subtleties to miss whatsoever. The only mildly interesting part of the movie was the way the Predator creature was 'designed' ie. stuff like semi-invisibility etc. The other thing that came to mind was how come Schwarznegger with his thick accent managed to make it big in Hollywood movies and politics. MI-3 was somewhat more interesting, but still highly speed-worthy. Not much to report there.
And last night I got Ocean's Eleven and started watching it. However due to some technical glitch that happens sometimes with VCDs on my player, the entire first disc wouldn't play. So I just watched the second half of the movie without the first half (and without speedviewing). The results again I am happy to say were excellent. I got most of the story with a few hanging threads which if anything served to improve the experience as one could chew over these after watching.

I think I'm onto something here.

Mildly amusing photo from Hyderabad. Should not need explication.

Arvind -- Class 2

Prelude

I came across a review of this course on the internet and the main accusations were that it was ( a ) some kind of cult and ( b ) it focused on eastern teaching – especially Hinduism and ( c ) there was some kind of deceit in not making it clear apriori that the emphasis is on the hindu view point. (Heres the link www.philosophers.co.uk Article "Course or Cult?")

I observed that this review was not comforting and spent time trying to figure out what exactly about it left me with an unpleasant taste. It is worth noting here, that whether or not ( a ), ( b ) and ( c ) above are true is immaterial, the issue really is why was I uncomfortable. I am not sure I fully understand why, but the following seem plausible.

A large part of my happiness comes from looking good (wealth, intellect) in the eyes of others. When my actions risk not looking good at others I feel uncomfortable.
For unexplained reasons, I feel culturally bound to Hinduism. This is an extraordinarily stupid bonding to have. I feel happy when someone says something nice about it and not so when some one attacks it. All this despite knowing very little about Hinduism.
This realization allowed me to continue with the course. The cause of the discomfort was not likely to be the course or the organization or the review for that matter. It was me.



Just a few minutes before the class, I was speaking to a lady of who is also taking this course. When I asked about her, she told me she was divorced and has no family here. There was a noticeable uncomfortable pause in the conversation and then she quickly added that "she has a boyfriend though". Looking back I think I can explain the reason for the discomfort - it can entirely be attributable to the phenomenon of looking good in others eyes. I was trying to avoid my image of this lady from not looking good in others eyes. And so was she trying to look good in my eyes after revealing something that she thought made her vulnerable. There's much to be discovered in the span of a NY minute. I suppose that's the point – there's a whole lot of shit happening and we are always pushing this crap under the carpet. I am not so much interested right now in answering if it is a good thing to push things under the carpet, but more interested in understanding what exactly am I pushing under the carpet.



Would you be Newton/Da Vinci or would you be happy?


The instructor mentioned that mentioned that both Newton and Da Vinci felt towards the end of their lives that life has completely skipped them by. ( I was reminded of Pink Floyd's Time.) The exact quote attributed towards Newton is "I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."



I don't know if the ocean was related to the discovery of empirical truth or to the realization of happiness. But lets assume, he was indeed unhappy. And lets assume the false choice is not so false and the choice is "Be like Newton or be Happy?." What would you be? I am not sure that's very easy to answer. Hundreds of suicide bombers are willing to give up current happiness for future fame. Thousands of soldiers are willing to give up lives for some kind of glory. Am I willing to give up happiness for eternal fame?. If every book in the future is going to be printed with your name on it and as the one who made a definitive contribution on the lives of future generation, am I or you willing to give up on happiness in any other form other than perhaps from the joy of professional success.



I don't really have that choice to some extent – heck I am not even half a Newton. And I cannot answer it truthfully. But right now, I am leaning towards eternal fame for a life of misery. Hot air for cool breeze? Am I exchanging a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?



May be I'll change my mind as the course progresses.



America the beautiful


I think the most endearing quality of America is that the average person is very optimistic, naïve and less cynical than elsewhere. I mean all this in highly positive way. In this course, I found most of the people to be so earnest in wanting to live this out to the best of their ability. One of the persons used the excercises of the previous lesson – meditation and "what would a wise person do?" question to help deal with the stress of the surgery of some one in her family. I felt humbled in perhaps being a laggard on this count – I am still some what distant from what this course is trying to teach. I am still waiting for stuff to happen.



This weeks class featured a zen koan. The story involves a scholar who travels to a zen master and asks the master to teach him zen. The master is about to serve tea and keeps pouring tea until the cup starts over flowing. The scholar gets agitated and observing this the zen master explains that the scholars mind is full and he needs to empty it if he is to receive anything.



The class ended with the most fundamental question. Who am I. And of course, I don't know the answer to that one.

Telemarketing

Pix: Random photo, no connection to below


Telemarketing is reaching epidemic proportions in India. Its very annoying.


ABN AMRO (bank) is one persistent one. They call me incredibly frequently trying to get me to sign up for their credit card. Their call center is in Delhi and I rarely get calls from Delhi so I know when I get a call from them. Here's how a recent call went:

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Trrring Trrring
Me (picking up the phone): Hello, is this ABN AMRO
Other side: Yes Sir
Me: If this is about a credit card, I don't want one thank you.
Other side: Okay thank you sir
Hang up

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I feel quite proud of myself :-)

Infelicities -- Kodai trip

Language nitpicks ...