T Rajendar (TR)'s movie Veerasamy

Awesome fun! the best part is that TR actually thinks he's funny...wow...Thanks to the tamil cultural association, a bunch of us got to watch this movie...his dialogues are world famous, and his general great humor is evident throughout the movie...though no one had a clue what was the story....some weird stuff about his daughter running away with his sworn enemy's son, whereas our hero , TR , is himself in love with his servant-maid... Lots of corpulant dancing, weird brylcreem-ed hair-don'ts and allround fun...a must watch for every tamilian out there!

My all time favorite!

Enable download plugins in your browser, and reload this page, in case you have'nt already. You should see a song playing on top of this page.

Also, if interested, look this up :
Uyirin Uyire Live Mix

Its a score remix.

Cheers, and enjoy the rest of spring.

Reservation in India : The real source of brain-drain

For those not in the know, the recent announcements from the Ministry of
HRD,India have re-instated the provisions of the Mandal Commission
recommendations of 1980 of reserving 27% of all seats in institutes of
higher education being centrally funded for OBC's. In effect, this
alongwith the quota already administered for SC's and ST's ricochets
the quota to a staggering 49.5 %

This act will come into being in institutions such as Delhi
University, IIT's, IIM's and other prominent institutes on which India
prides itself. To create reservations for 49.% of the total seats
completely undermines every notion of the so called "equality" it
seeks to bring about.


Wikipedia tells me the following:

Reservation is a phenomenon unique to India and is different from affirmative action which is practiced in many other countries. The main difference between the two is that in affirmative action the amount of concessions to be made in order to increase representation in an underrepresented group is at the discretion of individual organizations, whereas the reservation system in India is based on statutory quota that must be met.

Affirmative action, by the way, is followed in the USA, particularly for Black and Hispanic minorities. In India, on the other hand, the whole system is lop-sided against the 'un-reserved' people...

Woefully, reservation was introduced to counter generations of partiality and prejudice adjudged to be due to the caste-system being in vogue, and, instead persecutes people of the un-reserved classes, which still account for 30-50% of the masses.

Under this pathetic system, the 'general quota' positions, are filled according to merit, and the people of the 'reserved classes' under those allocations, do not account towards the reserved vacancies.


Following is a view from an middle-class student from a high school in Chennai:

The concept of reservations in India has not worked for 50 years, and this guideline too is a more populist measure aimed at the "aam aadmi's" vote, while cutting away from the real reasons that foster an ever increasing urban-rural divide. Instead of focusing on increased infrastructure creation, strengthening the rural school systems and quality of education, creating trained manpower, cutting corruption and so on, the administration has instead played the reservation card yet again, screwing a sizeable section of the population.

Nice to see school kids knowing and acknowledging such things.


I, for one, felt an instant sense of alienation, due to extenuating differences in how my classmates and I, whom I had grown up with, were segregated, and differentially 'admitted' into institutions, based on accommodation into respective quotas (In case you are wondering, I fell into the general quota sometime back, which was filled up first, and hence, the consequent cribbing ;-) ).

I felt, personally, that there was no role, that I should play, to accede to this system further, and decided, that further education was only possible at a place there was no such prejudice on where you were born into. Sure, I could afford traveling abroad to study, and sure, my parent's were'nt the poorest of the poor, but it shames me to see, other very smart people, being left in the dirt, simply because, they were'nt of the right class. One of my cousins, for example, cleared well over 99 percentile on both engineering and medical entrance exams after high school, and still could not get into the top three medical colleges in the state, simply because he was'nt of the right birth.


Super-smart, ( or super-rich) people do not feel this pinch, among the un-reserved classes, but the poor, and insufficiently educated lot, are certainly decimated by the system. People like me, who could afford to get out of the system, do so... And considering the opportunities vis-a-vis money and potential elsewhere, why is it then at all surprising, that there is so much brain drain?

Something must be done to rectify the situation, before the politicians in India accuse the smart people of bailing out.

India V Bangladesh, WC '07

India won!! Not!

For the first time in history, I feel like giving up on cricket...Losing, is all too common for India, but losing to B'desh, and that too in such a wimpy fashion, deserves a blog entry, nay, a whack-in-the-butt...The high and mighty attitude Team India carries is all too evident...They lost to Zimbabwe similarly in the 1999 World Cup, sealing their fate then ( though Zim were a better team then, and that result had a probability of say 20% ).

There seems to be a deep-rooted mentality amongst general cricket-watchers and cricketers alike to over-rate or under-rate India, based on current performance...Think of it this way, of the 30-odd matches India played against B'desh, India never lost...Probability finally caught up with it...lol.

Totally unremarkable spring break

Hi,

After much deliberation, me and a bunch of friends decided to go someplace. Well, in our rather extreme stupor, we decided to head to Dallas. Almost immediately, thanks mainly to Google, we discovered that there was practically nothing to see for a tourist at Dallas. But considering group politics and our total lethargy in planning anything else we settled for Dallas.

An early morning ( at about 1PM ) trip to Enterprise gave us a car, and the trip there was rather easy. We stayed at the DaysInn Plano, and went the next day to the Dallas Arboretum. That gave us a rather neat view of Dallas downtown, with its picturesque highrises and so on. Nothing out of the ordinary, except for seeing about a million flowers, all of whose genetic classification I have forgotten by now.

A rather uneventful trip to the Natural Science Exhibits ensued at Fairpark. Saw some really weird dead bodies enbalmed, preserved, and internal organs dyed and displayed in totally unorthodox positions. The term 'rigor mortis' kept popping into my head, as for some reason, the relative positions of the different 'specimens' was rather strange. We also saw a bunch of other things there, but nothing remarkable. Apparently one can donate one's body to this rather irreverant exhibition, though I have no clue why anyone would do that.

Sure, there were a number of other things to do, but we decided not to do them, for inexplicable reasons. Our drive back was far more eventful and lively, thanks to the torrential rainfall that accompanied us all the way from Waco(enroute) to Austin.

J.S. - B.E.; M.A.;

Yes...Its official.

" Jayesh Seshadri, of the University of Texas at Austin, shall end up with a M.A., courtesy his professional adventurism in attempting the impossible... trying to get a thesis done as part of his Master's. "

( And yes, its spelt Master's and not Masters you dope... And don't hate me for my punctilliousness :-))

Its remarkable that from a Bachelor of Engineering, in an Engineering school, I end up getting an (aaargh!) Arts degree from the College of Natural Sciences.

Personally I have nothing against the Natural Sciences bit, but getting an Arts degree, as Patton put it, is simply, a bridge too far.

My friends ( the 'Scientists' amongst us ) jokingly allude to the ludicrity with which it shall be viewed in my (possible, probably improbable) marriage invitations ( another bridge; perhaps too far! ).


p.s. No offence - I have nothing against Art-'ists' , but just my upbringing in a developing world, where traditionally the lowest ten percent end up going to schools of arts puts me in a weird mood... I understand completely that this could be read as bigotry, prejudice, etc...But I shall whole heartedly disclaim any version of this attributed to me in the future...I'll just claim this is a consequence of a MySpace attack ;-)

A Nomad's life

Aargh....damn these pesky bedbugs....Unfortunately, I have recently found out that bedbugs can exist without there being any beds too...On the stubborn refusal of my roommate to throw away his bed-linen, we have ended up with a rather sticky problem...I am unable to stay home past 10p.m. thanks to these nocturnal pests squiggling around to suck my blood...my roommate, however sees nothing wrong in "giving" away some of his blood...

As a consequence, I have been restricted to a nomad's life...roaming from location to location in seek of shelter. Lucky am I, to have some friends....

Pencil chewers, Duos, Trios and Austin Entities in action :-p

Just thought I would show off my collections of roommates/best friends/couples etc I captured slyly over the past 5 months of action in Austin....Vetti is me, I know ;-)

>> Kaarthic(MK) in action......Tasting pencil,of course...accompanying him is Suresh Talore...another rather famous Avalonite (Avaloner? Avalonian?)...






<< Image 2...The deadly trio of MK, Anand (Madurai Veeran), and Arvind (Chella) ...Anand is upto his usual histrionics, roaring around, making noise ;-)..He has a strange fascination for velakennai, btw ( future brides beware :-))



>> Image 3: Sarath and Arun....This comedy pair was also part of the refugee camp at Avalon 211 around end of May 2006...these two switch between brief fights and gelling together on road trips. Currently roommates-at-large somewhere at the Raleigh...




<< Image4... Krishnan and Tinny(Amit)...were the guys I used to go to Intern with...
They are quite a fun duo...
Tinny, like any hard-working IT specialist, loves to sleep when given the chance(Image 5 )....>>>





>>Sumeet and Keerti,(Image 6) are on the other hand, made for each other, though are quite non-gay...Sumeet loves to cook and also to raid filled refrigerators(see Image 7 below) and Keerti loves to contemplate the meaning of life, when he finds time away from jogging around or doing compilers assignment... I should'nt crib about them too much they have put up with a lot of my antics of late :-)















>>(Images 8 and 9) Any blog entry on Austin entities would be incomplete without our dude Srivatsan, the oft misunderstood, misquoted, but much loved stud of Austin. Herein, I present two rather contrasting sides of Srivatsan...the pic on right shows him reading his gospel (Sundaraghandam) and on the left, he's deep-frying some good old fashioned ground-nuts... Being his roommate has been quite a roller-coaster ride.

Where's the party tonight?

My recent 'break a leg' incident left me literally identifying myself with the 'differentially enabled', and yearning for days to rush by so that I could walk normally again!



Look for the long compression-stalkings on the guy on the left...Sumeet Rao cannot contain his laughter for some reason... Btw, this was at Chinmayi's Bday party the other night. Keerti, has a rather funny take on this photo...

Tanha Dil, Tanha Safar...

The more I listen to this sing, the more I see the correlation with my present rather masochistic life...Tanha Dil, Tanha Safar indeed...

For those ignorant few: This was a song brought into this world by Shaan, in his album Tanha Dil...(2000). Awesome, if I do say so myself! Thanks Keerti L (brought into this world, a few years earlier, in 1982) for reminding me of it!


Some lines, for those who can appreciate good lyrics ;-) :

Aankhon mein sapne liye
Ghar se hum chal to diye
Jaane yeh raahein ab le jaayengi kahan
Mitti ki khushboo aaye
Palkon pe aansu laaye
Palkon pe reh jaayega yaadon ke jahan
Manzil nayi hai anjaana hai kaarvaan
Chalna akele hai yahan
Tanha dil, tanha safar
Dhoonde tujhe phir kyoon nazar
Tanha dil....

Dilkash nazaarein dekhe
Jhilmil sitaarein dekhe
Aankhon mein phir bhi tera chehra hai jawaan
Kitni barsaatein aayi, kitni saugaatein laayi
Kaanon mein phir bhi goonje teri hi sada
Maane kiye the apna hoga aashiyaan
Vaadon ka jaane hoga kya
Tanha dil, tanha safar
Dhoonde tujhe phir kyoon nazar


Cheers...Happy Diwali everyone!

(btw -- This is Keerti L's real identity..Not quite Jason Bourne, eh;-))

In Suspended Animation

I have been inundating myself in tonnes of anime, over the past month or so...Four serieses and almost 200 episodes down the lane, I find the thirst unquenched...a subtle knock inside my brain tells me that I am reneging on the vow to self that I shall dither from spending all my time watching pointless, meaningless, purposeless, listless, endless waste of time, via Manga-turned animation series, a la Japanese anime; english subtitled, but nevertheless far more interesting than tame american cartoons [ 'cartoons' here are meant purely in a derogatory fashion! ].

Perhaps all this TWT can be attributed to the heights of boredom that one tends to fall into when interning...Excellent bandwidth and YouTube are primary reasons for the fall of anime-addicted men!!

[LP] Linkin Park

I have been listening to nu metal and rap for quite a while now, and thought the least I could do for LP ( other than buy their CDs of course ;-)) is to put this link up ( and increase their Google PageRank™ by a notch!!

Check out "In the End" by Linkin Park launched in 2001 under their 6x Platinum release: Hybrid Theory...

This was followed promptly by Meteora and Reanimation Remix, going over 8x Platinum (over 8 million copies sold!!) with songs like Pts.of.Athrty, Numb and Somewhere I Belong...bringing Linkin Park to #1 on the Billboard US charts in 2001,2002,and 2003. They also sneaked in multiple Grammy Awards for Numb and Numb/Encore with Jay-Z in 2004 and 2005.

The band was touring most of 2004 and 2005, peforming internationally, and most importantly in Texas [ see Linkin Park-Live in Texas!! ]

I have quite an antiquated Singingfool link for some of my favorite songs. The official website has most of the record videos and audio streams at high bit rates. I can't compete with Wikipedia on info on Linkin Park, so go there if you wanna know more!

In the End, is however, their highest grossing single ever, and continues to be played on nu metal/rap radios across the US...
Listen to the music on Amazon.com

Interning to glory!

Aloha!

Being an intern at National Instruments is certainly quite a lot different from what I imagined it would be.... I have pretty much a free hand in deciding the course of my project, and I am being challenged to the limits of (my very limited) knowledge and programming skills...Scarcely would I have imagined that I would have so little to do with electronics at NI....

That said and done, internships are supposed to be fun, and I end up having so much time on hand at the end of the day and on weekends, that I find myself questioning myself as to why I have this much time on hand....Scarcely over the past 5 years have I felt so little weight on the top of my mind, ( could be because my brain has gone to the dogs...but who knows...)...Its actually fun to be in an internship which limits you -- quite strictly- to 40 hours per week, and gives you plenty of relaxation time...

I now know why people who work find it so difficult to come back to academia or to study in specific....its simply awesome to be feel so liberated, and voluntarily going back to the shackles of student, let alone the poverty-stricken graduate student, life is going to be soooo difficult!
This duality, of being an corporate employee and a grad student has its perks though...I get to watch all the FIFA World Cup matches in the relative comfort of my Grad Lounge, as opposed to being forced to run to the nearest pub/bar, as my work colleagues have to do.. (You guessed right...My department's loaded...)

I can't wait for next summer! Who knows where I will be then!!

Dreams for an Insomniac

I watched Macross Zero over the last week , an animation continuation of the popular Japanese Anime mega series Macross ...Watching anime was once a favorite past time. I was hooked onto Robotech in the late nineties...

All the stars seem to be looking down upon me , and having a nice big hearty laugh, with a snicker, they seem to chorus "Loser,loser..."....It is perhaps apt. I am so not in control of anything....Like a troupe of vultures scavenging, perhaps....Maybe those stars are just me seeing stars!! I am sick and tired of not doing anything useful...Maybe it all boils down to the moral paucity one feels in driving oneself to suicidal mania...Or it could be just the caffeine talking...Sleep comes unnaturally, at unghastly hours, these days... Maybe it is all divine direction...Reminds me of the dialogue from Rang de Basanti about youth and usefulness...

The mere thought of the stigma of failure, and the gathering of heavy clouds right over one's head seems all too familiar...especially in context to what comes to mind of Wordsworth and his little gloomy interlude, when he wrote zero works of literature in nearly a year....Being driven into subsuming madness, and amidst repeated defeats at the hands of fate, one does get dark ideas....Amidst extreme self-inflicted pain, and coffee-induced multiple day insomnia...I finally dream of dreaming...Yes...

I can now see why people have breaking points...The mere fact that I am typing this load of BS when I have tonnes of work over the next week, shows the pathetic state of affairs...

It is often difficult to hide happiness, and far easier to hide sorrow, a wise man once said ( Vishwasms , remarkably , concurs ), but for someone who's almost never happy in any situation ( the kind Redford talked about in The Color of Money), my attempts to be cheerful have often lead to drastic drops into spouts of sadness, nay , depression (denial?Me? Naah). Hyprocracy? Never...

Ah well, self analysis will get you no-where...or is it now-here? Space-time curves and figments of warped time-space in singularity, with the altogther wrap of being solo ( prnounced 'so low', maybe 'hollow' as the Phillipine island of the same spelling goes in pronounciation ). Twenty Two was a far cry.... Able was I. Vous cherchez, mais vous ne trouvez pas que vous cherchez......Lost ctrl :-(


Jay

p.s. Coz my keyboard's broken ;-)

Twenty-two

Twenty-two is where life begins and days turn sprite...
Every dawn, noon or dusk blooms with her sight.
Twenty-two....All's spite...
To glimpse her afar makes us take flight.
Catch 22? Uncaught...Mostly right...
A year too young for her? What?? That can't be right!


Aiming to meet her, don't have to cuss.
Missing to meet her,is to literally miss the bus...
...and class,
Oh! Dont be so non-plussed!

Route Twenty-two...Chicon...Exposition Loop...Ne cruzes delante ou detras de la autobus..."

p.s. This blogger is twenty-one, in age.

The Karma of Chaos

Wondering about what I will be doing a year or so from now, post-graduation, I feel an intense apathy ( oxymoron ? Lemme know ) towards the weird meandering path my life's heading for...I have, in fact little clue what I shall be doing in 24 hours, let alone after a year in this cold, desolate place ( This is Texas, mind you.)

Chaos & anarchy ruleth me mind...

The Ides of March have passed...

Amidst much disappointed over missing some paper deadlines [ and realizing, to much ado, that there exists great fall before potential pride ], a much more humble, now-perenially [ oxymoron, I know! ] unshaven me has crossed into the path of happiness...Bliss so sweet, that one can feel such intense pleasure only after....

Playing QUAKE III!!

Well I know that Q4 is right around the corner ( or has it been released already ?? Lack of DIGIT magazine access here ensures that I remain ignorant of such tumultous happenings...)



For the uninitiated, Quake and its sequels [ and several other popular First Person Shooter(FPS) genre games ] are a creation of id software, a powerhouse in gaming technology and game engine development... A brief look at their shows how immaculate their 3D rendering technology is/has been; brought to the forefront with Q3 Arena ( which even spawned multiple game shows on several TV channels including noW!).
Tons of clans have spawned up over the years, and the initiation needs are quite different for each clan.

AdDiCtEd, am I.

Spring breaks....

Wow....Was'nt that some match?? Absolute beaut with over 850 runs being scored in it....Amidst rumours of it being fixed, I was stunned by Gibbs' innings in particular....175 (111)!! My gang and I are presently caught up in running reruns of downloaded highlights of the match, amidst periodic reruns of old and new movies alike...Thanks to the 300 GB harddrive one of my friends bought sometime back....UTDCHUB rulz, eh!

I now yearn to drive here, after watching a few friends drive over from A&M....Seems easy enough to use the IDP for renting a car...Ah well...wish I had more time and patience to devote to further that idea...

Amidst hectic research going on, I am trying to catch up on my coursework, and thats proving to be a forgettable pain...Well less said the better!

Spring is officially here....Remarkable that in America, people celebrate it by basically 'chilling out'....getting a week off right in the middle of an hectic long semester ( or quarter, depending on where you are ;-)).

Most SB's apparently look like this....( I flicked this from a SB Album in Webshots)

Well mine involved only one location :-(()....

Reason has dawned on me that perhaps the best way to have fun is to jump into work with happiness...Do whatever you have to with a grin on your face, and things seem easier to take in stride...So many aspirations...So many challenges...Its sometimes difficult to focus on whats important...A reality check, if you like to call it, is in order...

I am happy that the internship processes are finally over....and I have time to devote to more critical things in life ( TV, Movies, Table Tennis, Racquetball :-))
Btw, I smacked a certain Raghavan in the face while playing racquetball, giving him a 'grunge' look in the process...He has been reported to be going around claiming he had got it in a fight....Be enlightened, if you have been speaking to him! The truth beckons thee....

Call it a premonition if you like, but some portion of my brain says that something negative is gonna happen soon.....

Call me a pessimist, but that's me!

Btw, I am now also the webmaster for The 2nd International Conference for Wireless Internet (WICON 2006)....Let me know what you think...The site's still in its infancy though...

Later, dudes...

Of Coffee Drips, Late Nights, Research Papers, and Testicular Fortitude

Aloha,

PhD Comics is so the gospel....especially when it comes to grad school...Coffee drips do keepeth one awake! If you have'nt read it by now, I suggest you start reading 'em or drowning yourself!

And why I am resorting to masochistic self-deparavation of sleep? To 'put' a paper , thats why....Readers from the glorious heydays of SVCE would remember the ease with which paper were 'put', His Vettiness' help notwithstanding! I am realizing how much painstaking work goes behind writing a real paper for starts, one in which, the topic is not arbitrarily picked, and actually makes sense...

I even had to scribble on the whiteboard-common to get the facts straight! Thats so unlike me...I hate writing things down...

Amidst desires of AOE-ing away the weekend, most of the weekend flew past me with polka-dotted dreams of racquet sports disrupting consummate illusions of happiness.When that bubble had burst, I managed to learn one more of life's polymorphic forms:

Life's a constraint satisfaction problem!!

{grin: I could just imagine Viswas MS' happiness on reading this ;-))

How I wish that I had not whiled away my weekend, enforcing the constraints of project due-dates and assignment submissions and my research(gasp!) work, one could say, I am very well caught betwixt and between! An old friend, Sai Siddharth (a.k.a. Diamond Babu, as his illustrious PS Senior classmates call him), dropped by Austin, and lo and behold - the weekend hath passeth! { forgive my poor lizzy English...I shall better imitate Chaucer, perhaps at a later moment... }.

Learning of a new savvy way of torturing the donuts out of the typical male from "Madurai Veeran" Anand (CEO of Lungspace, Mindspace ) , I pondered the consequence of implementing the same on a few choice people(read: roommates)...

Btw, I hope to have my trusted Compaq laptop with me in a couple of days...Blogging would be so much more convenient and colorful with that, I guess...

I shall not further stretch the constraints. Escaaaape.


--

The Return to a Semblance of Normality

Ahh...I feel at the top of the world!!

My sleep cycle has returned to normalcy, and I once again get up at 7am....I hope gone are the days of late night sessions involving pointless movie watching and chatting away....For some reason, I feel revived, 'le joi de vie' seems to have returned, quite inexplicably!

Amidst a dozen or so phone interviews with Apple, I had gone last week to a 'Smartphone Feedback Session', where I had to make arbitrary comments about the look and feel of Nokia's latest Symbian OS development tools...God knows why I am so lucky...I got a cool $50 and pizza lunch for basically nothing! I plan to go again today, and revel in expensive things in the weekend ( like perhaps a trip to one of the Indian Restaurants ?)

We had a large gathering Monday at the peaks of ACES ( 6th floor, where I have my cubicle ;-))...Jean-Philippe Martin ( a fellow graduate student at UT) terms it "Easy Mondays", but rather it was a rather tough experience for me...'C'est un tradition' as he would perhaps like to quip; It involves letting one dude from the 50-student strong Laboratory for Advanced Systems Research (LASR) to talk about his favorite topic (which typically is his work, a la research). I felt like a dumb moron at the meet, being the junior-most grad student of the bunch, and perhaps well-intimidated...Well I guess most of you know that feel!

The past week also saw perhaps what one could best term as unrestrained indulgence....A few of my drinking buddies ( I dont generally drink) got together, and we had quite a blast! We ended up watching 'Captain' Vijaykanth's revolutionary movies, and cracking inane jokes at each other...After a couple of hours of general dancing around, the girl who lived downstairs finally could not take it any more...She came up to my buddy's place, and gave us a good ol'-fashioned 'Intro', followed by a 'Whippin' ( as the natives here call it!)

To quote her exactly, " Hi , My name's ---------, I really love your music, and I really like parties. I have been to several parties on Saturday nights, but you know, the pictures are falling of their hooks in my house...So if you guys dont mind, can you like please stop the stomping around...Thanks."

To which the drunkard (MK) who opened the door said, 'Do you want to join us?'....
(junta feel: 'Ah well, at least she was good-looking!' ). I guess we better look for a new location for our (pseudo)drunken revelry....

I have a new fascination, with a song titled 'Aadat- the remix'...(its available on Megablast.us)...Can't get it out of my head, for some reason...

I guess the best that has happened to me since I have been here has been a Co-op/Intern interview call from Cisco...Finally I hope to get a networking internship!! I am crossing my fingers and praying that it works out...And I have to pay income tax soon! Wow, the knowledge of that made me feel like a grown-up....Guess can't stop old-age from catching up! I hope I can sneak under the tax radar, and actually get it all refunded...there is supposed to be an Indo-US tax treaty, whereing I am(i.e. all Indians working in the US) allowed a significantly higher standard deduction than other foreign nationals...I wish actually ever understand legal documents...Can't make head or tail of these things.

And apparently, Mardi Gras is next week, too...With New Orleans basically deserted, I guess maybe we'll be seeing some fun downtown...

Btw, I also heard of this awesome orkut-girl-hunting community called 'Tamil Helmets'..Check it out if you got an account and the time!

Till next time, astalavista!