Questions, Questions, Questions !#!@#!@#!@$

Every damn thing around me seems to make me want to ask a question! The first thing is my frustration with Google. I am now in India spending the winter vacation with my folks. Everytime I type google.com in my browser it automatically geo-locates my ip packets and redirects me rather forcefully to google India. Now, google India doesn't have the interface to search youtube videos!! Son of a Rasthack, fasthack, kasthack, spitipfitigitydoan! >:| Now, I'm on a quest to find out more about IP geo-location and am going to attempt to overcome it. Found this neat 22 page (D-Yikes!) paper,

http://cs.smu.ca/~jamuir/papers/TR-06-05.pdf

The second question that just came across is rather bold and controversial. I was watching this show on Discovery Channel where they show a band of men from Ice-age traveling across the Arctic region from Europe. They see the "northern lights" phenomenon in the winter sky and one lady in the pack asks the leader, "where do those lights come from?". The man replies that those are lights from "spirit-land" and the woman goes "Oooh!". Now, we all know these days that the northern lights are just charged particles from the Sun hitting the earth's upper atmospheric molecules. Coming to think about this more closely (I do have PLENTY of time here to kill at my family home :P), what men dismiss as God or Ghost are those that they don't understand that well. It's a simple explanation of things that borders on irrationality that most of us, even the ones who've waltzed with the principles of science, would accept it. Closer inspection into these "forbidden" sacred or scared realities of life leads us to understand what they really are and lifts the veil of mysticism surrounding them. My question from a completely neutral perspective is that, could we possibly explain scientifically everything that ever happened, happens and will happen in the lifetime of the universe? The answer IMO is a resounding "yes" but it might take infinite time to find out. In short, we may never know :)

A peck on the cheek?

I just happened to watch the movie "A peck on the cheek" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0312859/) more popularly known in tamil, the language in which it is shot, as "Kannathil Muthamittal". I never had the drive to watch a heavy movie on a sunday evening after a long work week that still ceases to end. But boy am I glad I watched this one. The movie is all about how humanity and relationships suffer during times of war. The ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka is just one instance of what Palestine, Chechenya, Zaire and many more regions go through every single day. The director through the character Harold Wickramasinghe, played by Prakash Raj, sums up the whole issue in these lines:

"With guerrilla warfare, nobody wins, nobody loses; it just keeps carrying on until there is nothing left to fight for."

Powerful lines! Awesome performance and great package overall. The first thought that came into my mind is why did this movie not create any ripple? I was in Chennai, India (the heart of tamil film industry) when this released and it was hardly spoken about in the media as a film as such. I did see some articles that primarily focussed on the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka but nothing close to what this movie truly deserves. Part of the reason lies in the fact that the people of the sub-continent are constantly fed on a diet of glam, sham and skin centered movies that a movie like this one would be received as pure heresy. And if you read one of the reviews written by a gentleman by the name Rob Chester, you'll understand why this movie never got nominated for an oscar.

It's the age old divide between the hindi speaking part of India and the rest. This movie won the national award for "The best regional movie"! "Bullocks", I say. A good movie transcends all barriers of language and ethnicity and movie connoisseurs who look beyond what generally meets the eye will vouch for it. I am not trying to be a purist but all it takes is just some common sense - the cure of all. How do you like it when our Bollywood movies get nominated for "The best foreign language film"? Haven't you ever had a discussion with your friend as to why our celluloid sizzlers are never considered on par with the english movies made all over the world? Look no further "bhai" the answer lies right where we come from. How we dismiss non-hindi movies as "regional", Hollywood dismisses non-english movies as "foreign". Oh yeah, the next thought that comes to your mind that tries to defend our stance, "Oh even hollywood does it. We can't be quoted as doing anything wrong in branding non-hindi movies as regional." This is exactly why India was invaded over and over again by savages and money mongers! We never seem to have grown our tails off of our butts in trying to ape people like our primate ancestors. And FYI the movie that went in for oscar that year from India was "Devdas" [slaps head in utter disbelief!] . Devdas is a good entertainer but not even a zillion miles close to an oscar performance. The rest of the world thinks that Bollywood is all about colors, cheesy item numbers, cheap skin, over-the-roof dialogues etc. and we perfectly feed them more and more of it with our oscar nominations. If something sells we make more and more of it and stuff it in through people's noses until they puke out through their, ahem, mouth. This post ain't an angry rant but a call for some "common sense". I write what I like and believe in. There will be no lies here. I am always ready for a verbal joust without any prejudices.

Bless this food

Almost every culture in the world has a way of saying grace before a meal. It is a way of thanking the people and mother earth for providing us with food that sustains life. Agriculture and animal husbandry owe their origins to the first men that ever walked on the face of the earth. Over the many thousands of years we humans have perfected the art of producing food. But as with everything in the past century there is a disturbing trend of commercialization and mass production overtaking conventional wisdom handed down through countless generations. Just to get you started, here are a couple of very informative videos that basically tell you how your grain, vegetables and meat reach your plate.

Your Food - Part 1

Your Food - Part 2

There is no denial that "Money is the root of all evil". In a quest for generating more profits, the multi-million dollar corporations that control the world's most developed nation a.k.a the United States of America (this is worth a whole new blog entry all of its own) mess with some of nature's basic elements. And we as consumers, in an effort to save on a few bucks involuntarily support these organizations by patronizing. This is a problem that hits every one of us each day - You cannot remain indifferent. Hopefully the very few who stumble upon this blog that I seldom publicize would make the right choices.

Mom! Look, that's "Flying Spaghetti Monster" that I've made

Minutes after getting back home from a grocery shopping spree, I settled down into cooking dinner. All through the evening, I narrated stories of spaghetti grandeur to my room-mate who is ,well a little too "Indianized" to be precise with his taste buds. After hypnotizing him for the better part of an hour, we finally decided to cook spaghetti tonight. Now, just hang on and read ahead to find out how I made a "Flying Spaghetti Monster" out of this whole situation!

It all started right with the boiling of spaghetti. I forgot to add salt and a little oil (to prevent the strands from sticking to one another) while boiling spaghetti. Well, that ain't criminal; so, I said to myself, "go on champ! you've got it covered!". Then came the turn of onion to add a little tear or two to the process. I found a half-cut onion in the freezer (yup! one of my illustrious roomies had the resourcefulness to carefully place a cut onion in the freezer to preserve it for all eternity lest a nuclear war between America and Swaziland breaks out all of a sudden!! Good Jesus, what do we do without a half-cut frozen onion?? He probably thought he could become the sole savior of all humanity!). Now, I don't claim to be anywhere close to a gourmet cook but I should have had the common sense of a bullock to infer that frozen onion would taste crappy if microwaved , to say the least. But, my stupidity got the best of me. I microwaved it and it came out all drenched and soggy like a mass of marshy earth found at tropical swamps. I followed that up with a clever little sleight of cookery, namely cooking the marshy mass in cheese! The stench that reeked is stuff that horror stories are made of and not to mention that the mass still remained uncooked. Then, I added a little too much of tomato puree to the mixture along with some mushrooms and italian herb mix. The whole thing took a tangy turn for the worst. On top of that I added some milk and sugar (well, I had some kulfi (traditional Indian ice cream) just before making this... So, it's influence kind of rubbed off ;). Finally, voila, you've got the world-famous "Flying Spaghetti Monster!". Tastes like sh**, stinks like the back of donkey, looks like squished pumpkin lying on the road, what more do you want!

In case you are wondering what a REAL "Flying Spaghetti Monster" is, it is a holy deity of the pastafarians (pasta + rastafarian). Pastafarianism is a religion started by a frustrated grad student from Oregon State University to protest against the state's scrapping of the biological evolution from the school curriculum. This religion is complete with its own gospel and FSM branded t-shirts! Anyways, so much for de-Indianizing my roomies' taste buds. I was lucky not to get smacked on the face by my own "Flying Spaghetti Monster"! Peace!

The end of a never-ending beginning

I decided to call this post "The end of a never-ending beginning". I've officially "started blogging" so many times before with multiple blogs, account-names, promises and crappy content. Half of those blogs are lost in the expanse of the intricate world wide web. This time I am not going to make any promises as I've done with my past "first entries". I know I suck at this but hey, I am a firm believer of "blog like there's nobody reading it" principle (which as a matter of fact is a perfectly plausible proposition to begin with in my case :P)!

I've got a really hectic month in march coming up with lots of concrete goals and deliverables at sight. I've kind of chalked out a half-cooked plan to get thro' this phase without much self-destruction. Part of that raw plan is to cut down on my Internet activity; orkut, emails, browsing for cheap deals, music and the general timepass stuff. But I hope to continue blogging. Most of it is going to be a glimpse into my life as it screws me hard; so caveat lector, there's going to be plENty of whining and moaning around :P. Well, looking at it from a broader perspective, you do get a fair idea of how students in the US are doing. So, the next time you ask, "hey dude! wazzup?? US and all huh, big guy, big money, cool life!.. ", be my guest fellas, be my guest; you're welcome to walk in my shoes :)