A wake up call ...

My friend pinged me to give a shocking news yesterday - 'Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto assassinated'. 'What?' was my reply in complete disbelief. But as I read through the link on Rediff.com, my disbelief turned into a truth.

What a pity... A lady who just survived a deadly blast killing hundreds of innocent people, is murdered in a similar fashion. Some of the reporters say that there has been 4/5 attempted assassinations since this October. There was a baby suicide bomber, a 15 years old boy loaded with explosions was trying to kill her. In spite of such dreadful incidents, the Pakistani government failed to protect their one of the most influential political icons. What could be the implications? In an utter anarchy, a big shot political leader like Benazir is shot dead, where the hell an ordinary Pakistani will look for safety? The problem and solution might be found in the Pakistani Mentality.

Pakistan is always been notoriously known for its political turmoils and lack of respect towards the democracy. There has been a bunch of Generals, ISI honchos, Mullas - Maulawis who molded the principles as per their way just to fill up their own bags. And unfortunately, the Pakistani Aawam failed to recognize their hidden motives. To exacerbate things, there has been international pressure and interference in Pakistan's politics. This assassination is not the end, it's the beginning of realization which should force Pakistan for an introspection. If we look at past 50 years from Pakistan's birth, we will hardly find any strategic decision made to speed up the growth of economy, to provide basic needs of an individuals. Compare it with India's maturity as the World's Biggest Democracy, you will see a country willing to accept changes and the other one which is sticked to useless fatwas. We hear the news of hatred between the Shiyas and Sunnis, a violence on the borders of Baluchistan, a continuous struggle between people from rich Sindh area and other undeveloped areas for political supremacy, a militant, a self-consecrated leader who dreams of Islam Reign in Pakistan sits in a Masjid and challenges the Pakistan's very own constituency. What can one infer from this? Pakistanis are not learning from their mistakes. They are falling to the same delusion of 'Raat Ka Khana Delhi Me Khayenge...' slogan, which once visualized as a symbol of Pakistan's greed and so-called-pride, now leading towards their self destruction. I don't know the meaning of Jihad, but let it be whatever, you can't kill the people in the names of Allah....

The Islamic groups, Inter Services Intelligence, once built keeping in mind the interests of politicians were the icons of strength ( at least that's what they pretended to be). Now they are nothing but the boomerang of threats which has gone very much powerful in recent years. They are not only disastrous for Pakistan but equally dangerous to India's 'Sarwabhaumatva'. In India, the ISI has already gone far deep, and if it is not rooted up now, one day, we will also have to face some such blows or maybe catastrophes. Benazir Bhutto's assassination is a wake up call for all those who are promoting terrorism / fanaticism under the guise of false patriotism.

It's Modi Again ...

It wasn't a shocking result, in fact very much anticipated by political pundits. But some of them did claim that this year will be much more tougher for Modi than his first term. The poles have proved it wrong and BJP is elected with huge leads over Congress. I am not a follower of BJP or Congress but somehow elections create a kind of interest for me, except election there is nothing in politics that I appreciate much.

Many newspapers claim that Congress's lack of ideas / focus on the local issues is one of the reasons of their defeat. On the other side, Modi's firebrand image, outspoken personality and 'straight from the heart' speeches are rewarded with a clear-cut lead over the opposition. Some of the speakers of opposition also lament saying that its a win of devil over god or bad over good. No doubt a bit of communal touch is given to this election, you can refer to Modi's statement about Soharabuddin's encounter and Sonia Gandhi's much criticized remark of 'Maut Ke Saudagar'. But somehow I believe that BJP did not win on the basis of these usual 'election mantras'. Modi has proved to be a good chief minister having nice portfolio of development, especially his prudent decision after Gujarat Earth quake and even after Godhra . Also his various 'vikas yojana's' over Gujarat are primarily focused during the election campaigns , a stand for which Congress has no answers. Modi's elections campaigns were more inclined towards promising a new, developed Gujarat while Congress was much into riots issues. Naturally, a positive attitude won over the negative one. Sonia Gandhi worked really hard with countless rallies but her 'Des ki Bahu' image did not create magic in a common Gujarati's business oriented mind. Congress did touch upon the sensitive and emotional points like Mahatma Gandhi and his connection with Gujarat, but again , failed to attract voters on their side. I personally feel that political parties in India should not use any of India's heroes in their election campaigns , it's because these great souls did not have any political motives behind their deeds. Let me clear one thing, the list of Great Souls does not include Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru !!!

People might come up with different conclusions after this result and may even predict that Modi will be next Advani, or The Saffron Brigade will get a rejuvenation after this win, or there will be more communal riots in India or anything... But I think, Gujarat election has put forth an example that the democracy is changing now. Gone are those days when people vote you just because you belong to some so called elite family, or a powerhouse of India. Now, the shrewd 'Aam Janata' find her leader with much precaution and after deep analysis, of course there are places in India where someone votes for you just for the sake of Rs. 100/- and a 'Desi Santra' , but we can look at it as a beginning . I suppose the voters should take decisions on the basis of the 'work done' and not on the basis of anything else. Gujarat gave Modi another chance and now its Modi's time to keep his words.

My tryst with GRE extra score reporting

I was reporting my GRE score to ETS tonight. When you appear for GRE, ETS ( the institution that conducts GRE and other tests) allows you to send scores to 4 university without charging a single dollar. But as I am applying to more than four, I called up ETS to report extra scores. I actually planned to do this before 4/5 days, but as usual my laziness stopped me from doing it. Now that I am on the verge of missing a deadline, today was the D- day for me. Generally ETS takes 5 working days to report your scores to the respective universities and that means from 20th Oct it will take around 31st Dec. to reach my scores at the concerned universities. It's because, they have a holiday on X-mas (23rd and 24th Dec) and I suppose they don't work on SAT-SUN. So, if I would not have called today, there would have been fair chances of missing the deadlines of 2 universities, one of which is 'safe' for me. FYI, safe in GRE aspirants world means some university from where you are cocksure to get an admit.

But it was not the end of the story. When you call ETS, it allows you to send your scores to 8 universities in one call. Again, I made a blunder there. At the time of taking my test, in free score reporting, instead of applying to University of Texas at Dallas, I applied to University of Dallas. And to my utmost insanity, I did not notice this while calling. When I hanged off the phone, and cross checked the code with that of Kedar's, I came to know about the stupidity. Now, I could have called ETS again to report the score to UTD, but thought I will send it by fax. Anyways, UTD's deadline is not yet close.

After this incident, I came to one conclusion. Whenever there is an critical moment to act comes, I make a mistake. That has became a characteristic of my personality now. I thank myself for at least knowing my mistake (some time later though). If I would not have understood the silliness, I might not have sent the GRE score to UTD, and will be happily waiting for a reply from their side.

One more bitter lesson from life !!!

Think, I need to keep the "thing over my shoulders" very cool, otherwise one day it will sink me down .... :-(

Fantastic Link

Today Mohsin sent me a link The Programmer's Dress Code . One of the most hilarious and informative things I have ever read. The author of this post has got a great collection of some of the legends in the computers. Out of those, I liked Jaron Lanier's photo and especially the witty punchline 'No Woman, No Cry'. Must be showing the realities behind the virtual world. ;-)
Others are also quite good. Look at the smile on Dorothy Denning's face. How pretty and original , those spects are just the reflection of fashions at their times.

Anyways, thanks Mohsin for a nice link. I have forwarded it to all of my colleagues and they are really appreciating it.

Latest Obsession : Algorithms

These days I am reading 'Introduction to Algorithms' by Thomas Cormen. I wanted to take DAA ( Design and Analysis of Algorithms) as my final year elective but my project partners forced me to take AI ( Artificial Intelligence), so that our group can remain in the same class. In fact there was no logical reason behind leaving DAA and taking AI, but that time I didn't give it a thought. And as far as getting good marks are concerned, I am a total waste in AI as well as in DAA. As per the new syllabus , University of Pune has made DAA a compulsory subject and I believe that's a good decision .

Now that I am reading the book, I am finding a different chord of interest there. I have just read Insertion Sort and loved it. The language looks okay except few 'bouncers', but that's accepted. When someone does a deep research in a profound field like Algorithms, the 'tangents' are bound to be there. Similar things happen when I read Kerninghan and Ritchie ( fondly called as K & R), so it was not new to me. After reading so many engineering books, you get kind of expert in digesting things even if you are not able to grasp it properly ;-). But Algorithms are not that easy, unless you are damn clear with what you MEAN by something, the corridors of uncertainty can trap you anytime.

The real fun comes when I start writing code, that's the thing I love the most. Backspace is the key which I use most of the times and sometimes I get so bored looking at code,wondering what have been written, I wipe out everything and start from all over again. I am looking forward to take a course in Algorithms during my MS, with a hope that this latest obsession will turn into a life long passion.

Wish me best of my luck for completing the book and implementing the assignments with some intense coding sessions.

Bug?

I am having a lots of problems while adding a friend in my 'Blogger Friends' list. Posts on forums showing howto's of manipulating the template were of no use. As well as the official help from Blogger.com is not worth. The problem was, when I tried adding a friend in a list, it could not add him. I initially thought that there is a limit of 10 friends but it wasn't true. We can add as many people in the list. After Mohsin's suggestion, I even upgraded the template to see if something useful comes up or not. But again, the effort was futile.

When I clicked on Page Element tab, I could see a nice layout of everything but after clicking on edit button of Blogger Friend's tab, I could not really edit the things. "Add Link" tab could not do what it is supposed to do. Also I could not delete few links on my blog. It was so irritating that I eventually tried removing the complete page element. But that also did not work. ;-)

My other friends did not have similar problem with their blogs layout. Frustrated, I went to try out my luck on Internet Explorer and to my surprise, it worked. I could easily manage the things from IE but had hell lots of problems in doing the same on Firefox.

Probably it is a time to add a entry in blogger's bug database. They should have a consistent behavior irrespective of the browser that I use.

Hollywood vs Indian Film Industry

I wanted to write about this topic way before this post but somehow it didn't happen. Now since I am much into movies, the thought popped up again.

I am not a specialist or something but being a person who likes to watch good movies, I wish to compare Indian Film Industry with Hollywood. Now, someone might say that its totally a waste of time as the situation in US and in India is too different and one can not compare them. But I am in total disagreement of this point. We must admit that our film industry is often ridiculed by the name 'Bollywood' a similar connotation to that of Hollywood. And it is because of a major number of 'INSPIRED FROM XXXXX' movies from Hollywood. Our movie makers get furious when they are called as Bollywood's director than a Dream Merchant of Hollywood. But believe me, there is a bitter truth behind this word 'Bollywood'.

How often do we see a beautiful script equally presented by a connoisseur eye of a director? As far as the ones that I watched, I could separate out a very few. To name them, from oldies, it could be Sholay , Anand, Deewar , Bawarchi, and almost all movies of Hrishida . And about the latest ones, well, we know them very well. I might have missed upon few, but at this moment I don't remember all of them. Except these movies, all we see is an attempt to make a movie. I haven't made any movie yet but have read a lot about what it really takes to make a movie. All I want to say that if you are anyways doing it, why don't you do it with all your hearts and heads? What is the point in making a straightway copy of a Hollywood flick? Don't we have great authors and latest technologies? Don't we have enough money ?

The real problem is the lack of a good script and real actors... Actor here means , someone who gives his 100% in acting, who might not have inherited "so called" traits from godfather actors / actresses or in some cases both, who might not have dude / cool/ hunk / macho looks, who hadn't ever taken part in or won a beauty pageant, instead who has an extremely clear voice and pronunciations, who HAS a knowledge of what is called as acting. How many of these actors / actresses do we have in our industry today? I bet, we could not cross a figure of even 20. All we see here is a bunch of useless people who have got money and know nothing about acting. There are few exceptions though, I am not at all leaving them. On the contrary, in Hollywood, we see different shades of life in their movies. Be it romantic, action, Sci-Fi film or be it a drama full of emotions or a real life story inspired from a lovely novel. I am not saying that there are no flops and BS movies there, but what I see is at least they dare to show something different, something original ( which is very rare in 'Bollywood' of course with few notable exceptions).

50+ years of experience is much more to be a versatile film industry. I am not only blaming the film makers for this situation. We, the people are equally contributing towards this nonsense. We could not differentiate between the real gem and some haphazard sequences of ostentatious display. Otherwise, all those crap beauty contestants and miss / mister universe / world / galaxy/ milky ways / comets / or whatever hadn't been established here as a actor / actresses.

Show some maturity and originality man, and then hope for the prestigious Oscar. It's not a boys game out there. And if we really want to see that our movies getting a world wide recognition as a fantastic movie, we should better stop our current stupidity and seriously think of doing something really original.