Survival basics

The month of December is a really long month, specially because it's vacation time. For us IITians, its a 31-day vacation. And this one has been a really taxing one..to the last day. Made me think that one should have a manual on survival basics for such long stretches of holidays. Taking the cue, here is a list of few must-haves if one must survive the long and dreary days (even though its winter time)-
1)Laptop with working battery.
2)Wireless broadband (atleast at home)
3)Sweater (it's winter, what were you thinking)
4)Camera kit (winter photography is much cooler than summer photography)
5)A pair of shoes/chappals
6)Photoshop CS2+/ any Image-editing software
7)Enthusiasm
8)Social Networking presence
9)Some hill nearby
10)Mode of transport

With all the above, I started on my Activa for the 'Hanuman' tekdi (also called Law College Hill) near Fergusson College (hence, also called Fergusson College Hill). My climb initiated from BMCC college, though it was not much of a climb for a regular (4-5 times a year) Singhagad climber. Along the way I came across different flowers which i had never seen before. I wondered they were still in bloom during the winter time.

I am not much of  a florist nor knowledgeable in wild flowers, so you will have to do without an ID. But who cares? The scene was nice.

I know this one- it's called bougainvillea. You can see the BMCC ground in the background.

After lounging about at the foothills, I started on the 5 minute climb to the summit (lol, pardon my use of such jargon). The air was becoming thinner (sorry for the exaggeration) and a cool breeze had started blowing. I don't usually follow what I preach- I had forgotten to put on my sweater. So I had to complete this trek in time, before the wind really picked up. After laboring for 5 mins, I reached at the top and was greeted by this awesome view-

The trained eye can notice the silhouette of Singhagad. Why I like to climb this joke of a hill is because it gives a lot to explore at the 'top'. From the top, one can virtually see the whole of Pune from Pashan to Pimpri to Khadki, Ganeshkhind, Aundh, Koregaon park, Lohegaon, Camp, Deccan, Kothrud and other outskirts. A rough, stony, weathered path continues towards Symbiosis college and Law College road towards the west from the top. After walking a few hundred metres, one comes across a Chinese Temple-like structure which octogenarians use for their exclusive laugh clubs.

The sun was peering through the branches and structure by the time I reached there, signalling that the sunset was due. A single glance dispelled my doubts of what attracts the old population of Pune to that bare structure. With the sun saying its last good-byes, the moon suddenly struck a nice pose in the sky. Being the day before the 'Blue Moon', it looked almost full to the naked eye. I couldn't resist to take this pic while coming down.

I knew I had my fill for the day and started descending. At the foothills, I found this flower which remained true to the season

                                            

Suzuki Kizashi ("Prelude") and Bryan Adams

Darn, I love this car

Why was Bryan Adams advised parental guidance for "Ninja Assassin"?
>> It's because Bryan Adams sang "18 till I die"

a year of controversies

If this year belongs to anybody, it has to be the politicians..not just Indian, but world policitians... The 3 C's that rule India- Cricket, Cinema, Crime. The politicians are a subset of 'Crime'. Who doesn't know they don't indulge in criminal activities? But we all love them, don't we? So much that of the three headlines on the tabloid-ish TOI's web page, one is on politics, one is exclusively on crime and the other is on cinema or cricket. It's really easy to print a news paper if you stick to the above basics. Add in a bit of glamor quotient and some editorials a little bit of business world and BANG- you have your own newspaper. So here are few snippets of their 'parakrama' (believe me, its nothing short of it)-


1) Wanna a Nobel Prize? Become the next U.S President!
Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore (well he was at first awarded Presidency in one of the most controversial elections), and now Barack Obama. What left me most intrigued was that each of these awards were hotly debated. Grounds on which Obama was awarded- _____________
I was stumped and so was Obama.


2) Tiger Woods really brought up his 'X-factor' by having had as many mistresses as number of Golf majors he has won. Not to be left behind, India produced its own high level scandal, the center of which was ND Tiwari. This is what we call as beating Tiger in his backyards.


3) The number three spot goes to Mrs President- Pratibha Patil. Forgetting to salute to the Indian at a ceremonial reception for her in Mexico, having conversations with spirits of the dead,  insulting remarks on Indian culture and tradition,  and regular, expensive, state sponsored holiday trips with more than a dozen family members. At a holiday trip in the Andaman Islands more than 400 trees were chopped to make way for a helipad for the President's chopper and another 60 trees were felled as they would block the President's view of the beach. If you do not believe me, check wiki.


4)JMM chief Soren. This guy has been proven guilty in so many murders- and has escaped capital punishment by means accessible only to politicians. Now he has been sworn in as Jharkhand PM for a second term. Shows the level of Jharkhand's degradation. Makes me think Mumbai is better of w/o immigrants from those states.


5)Jai Maharashtra- Raj from MNS. 


6)CP15- Copenhagen. With the 170 odd countries not reaching any conclusion at the end of the summit (how can you expect 170 individuals to?) , it was necessary to put forward a general proposition agreeable to all so that it becomes a step forward rather than dissolving the talks for good (or bad) and taking two steps backwards. Taking the cue, our dear Obama stormed into the behind the doors meeting being held by BASIC countries- China, India, Brazil, SouthAfrica ....
"Oh, you are all here. I had some things to discuss with all of you so it’s good that you are together in the same room,” US President Barack Obama said as he strode into the room


7)Bal Thakarey on Sachin, "There was no need for him to take a cheeky single by making such remarks,By making these remarks, you have got run-out on the pitch of Marathi psyche. You were not even born when the 'Marathi Manoos' got Mumbai and 105 Marathi people sacrificed their lives to get Mumbai. He left the crease and moved to the pitch of politics by making these remarks which have hurt Marathi sentiment"


8)This one's really hilarious. I came back home from Insti (IIT-B lingo) in time for my sister's birthday. The first thing that I get to see lying on my desk is-

Website management and Fourthie Lukkha tips

Being bored of applications to Univs, I was not surprised to find all kinds of swear words going through my head (I was at home and couldn't speak them out aloud, could I?). After some surfing through my own ThinkPad's contents to find something else to do, I chanced upon my own website material and got hooked onto one of my favorite pass-times- web designing. I decided to revamp my troll, ancient website into a slick one- one fit for applying to universities. The problem however lay not in designing, but in uploading the modified pages onto a server protected by the IIT firewall.
        One way around the problem was to mail a zipped folder containing all 'to-update' contents to a friend and tell him the username and password to my account on the server where the pages are to be uploaded. It involved  putting my pleading skills to use and a lot of half-hearted effort from my friend's part. Well one cannot blame him if for this simple job he had to download and install a brand new FTP client, create my profile and upload it. It takes 5 complete minutes to do that. Being December time, one cannot expect anyone inside IIT, already consumed by home-sickness caused by extended stay thanks to December placements, to be in a mood to do any favors. So I took upon myself to infiltrate the firewall or rather what I did was circumvent it.
        Thanks to another lukkha friend- Varun's advice, I came upon an esoteric piece of knowledge. There is a way to infiltrate IIT internet. Inside IIT, two depts- CSE and EE have kept 2 of their ports (ssh and telnet) receptive just for this purpose. I cursed myself for being in ME, and started out on this new found hope. On ssh-ing into the dept server, I logged into his account and accessed my dept web server. Now I could download my own files into the local directory- Varun's account and edit them at will on the terminal. But fate had more shenanigans planned for me.
        The thing about websites is that just the written content of a page is not what one wishes to update. To improve the look of a page, one has to link images and other visually pleasing elements in the html code. So I had to find a way to upload image files from my ThinkPad to Varun's account. Everything seemed to be on song that day as I immediately found a solution. There exists a virtually unknown terminal-based mail client called 'mutt', with the exceptions of total linux geeks, that allows you to access emails like Outlook and Thunderbird but at a very economical price- it eats only 0.6Mb of the memory. Pronouncing 'mutt' the Marathi way gives it a new perspective! As luck would have it, mutt was already installed for all accounts by the generous soul of EE's system administrator. All I had to do now was to learn to configure mutt.
        They say the 'man' command is the best tutor, better than any book on a linux software. Believing in that age-old linux-adage, I typed in 'man mutt'. After scrolling down a few lines of almost gibberish, I came upon this-

I could not help but smile inwardly at first, then smile broadly and then burst out laughing.
Here is a nice tutorial on how to do it- LinuxJournal. I gave up on the idea of configuring mutt shortly afterwards as I had run out of fuel and my mom was virtually begging me to eat my dinner.
          The next day, I started exploring this much talked about page-ranking business. Google is smart because it 'ranks' higher the sites which are popular. Hence these sites show in the first few pages of google search. This ranking is based on their own unique page-ranking algorithm. This algorithm is far too complicated as the details would fit a book. So I will just bring out the important points...Every site has a page-rank associated with it. Initially all sites have rank 0. The ranking is based on how many 'back-links' are available to the site. There may be many other sites that are linked from the site under consideration, but back-links are those which link TO that site from other sites. The number of these back-links and their respective own page-ranks decide the page-rank of the page. Things can get really complicated and thus there are the 'SEO' (Search Engine Optimization) companies that provide advice on how to increase your page rank. Those who are really interested in how page-ranking works may look this up. Based on this advice, I provided the link to my website where-ever my public account was active- facebook, orkut, flickr, linked-In, Twitter...I also included the google-analytics javascript code in the source html to track my website. There are many free 'counters' available that also track down the number of hits on the website and their locations, like clustermaps. I used flagcounter along with google-analytics. The real reason behind that was it gave me in situ information on the web traffic from different geographies on my page...which looks cool. To cap off the day, I came across a joke-
Amitabh Bacchan to Shashi Kapoor: Mere paas paisa hain, bangla hain, gadi hain, naukar hain..tumhare paas kya hain, oin?
SK to AB: Mere paas Maa hain..for a while AB looks stumped, then-
Amitabh Bacchan says:Fooled you..mere pass Paa hain..ab bol.

Men are born with autofocus.

        Many of us have experienced defining moments in our lives..not unlike the stereotypical 'Aha' or the 'Eureka' moments, but not exactly the same either. These moments get etched into the memory and are the ones that we count at the end of the life- duh. Most of us are also lazy to think them over, leave alone writing them down. I am going to become one of the exceptions now precisely because I have nothing else to do.. with more time to spend than I want, I cannot be blamed for this. Story goes something like this..
        I am the simple, naive, straight, quiet, shy, enthusiastic young lad with deep interest in painting, sketching, music out of love for creativity and nothing else. You need to remember that. The iitian in me had always wanted to study those subjects from academic point of view. After 3 yrs of unconscious brainwashing, I have been instilled with these attitudes, though whether they are for the good is another matter altogether. The opportunity came knocking on the door when we were given the much valued freedom of choice (believe me, it becomes far too relevant when it comes to choosing subjects) for humanities and social sciences electives. Me and my flying friend KP aka Kalyat Panauli (come again, kaunsi panauti?) Ashwin Krishna (sigh). These South-Indian guys have fetishes for long names but this guy has an equally long life-story to go along with his name. The great Jean-Paul Sartre (may his existentialist soul rest in peace) once said, men are 'doomed' to be free. Likewise, South-Indians are doomed to have long names. But I won't digress more and will come straight to the point. We were paying one of our regular visits to one of the Professor's classes, mind you, out of no intention to learn but due to lack of anything better to do like most IITians find themselves doing early in the morning (~9:30 am).
        At this point of time, I would like to point out the reason behind my peculiar choice of words "paying a visit", the reason being that this class was like no other class. Here, one could have a breakfast at the KRESIT-canteen on the ground floor and announce the entry into the auditorium at 10:00am like nothing was wrong with it. The sun would still rise in the east and we were still the kings of our own worlds. The Professor always overlooked this, or rather chose to overlook. The topic of discussion was paintings of the Modern era as indicated by the highly polished presentation going on. Now the queer thing about that Professor was that he has the habit of making questionable/ obscene gestures with his hands which actually and fortunately go with the explaining act. While this was first noticed by KP on account of his highly receptive sensors and filters to this kind of info (come on now,  remember I am the simple, naive guy), almost every male in the class knew of the Professor's antics by the end of the class. None of the girls had a wind of it. Coming to the male to female ratio, I would say this class enjoyed a much better ratio (5:1) than most of us IITians would ever dream of, and the females of this class were also much more progressive (yay). So we guys would fight to stop the gales of laughter whenever the Professor would submerge himself into the explaining act. Men are certainly born with autofocus.
        I must make my statement before any rogue feminist out there comes and cuts my throat and shuts me up for good before I can protest on the basis of the cherished freedom of expression. Remember ever being at a bus stop crowded with men and only one woman? I know you won't remember that. You wouldn't notice the men but only the woman! That is what I mean by autofocus. We are born with it. The situation is same with every animal species. Take the example of the peacock. It has to flaunt its feathers to attract the attention of the peahen who is always the center of attention. Ah, back to THE incident, we were still clutching our stomachs in silent laughter while the Professor and the girls looked unruffled. My sympathies with the poor guy giving the presentation. The old man had stolen his show. But the best is yet to come. The presentation guy was flicking through the slides due to lack of time thanks to the Professor's overly expansive explanations. We were trying to follow the slides as much as possible and STOP spake the Professor.
Professor: Go a slide back.
Presentation guy:..
Professor: Now this is the picture of two nude women and.....