Decoding Names

There seems to be a great joy in decoding something.Almost an exclusive feeling of being privy to something the coder intended upon. If you are like me given a city/county name you would take it at face value.So while I was driving around the San Francisco are I saw a lot of counties starting with "San ...." . I knew "Los Angeles" meant City of Angels and hence a nearby town called "Los Altos" meant the City of Heights (made up.yet to confirm).

Now, San Mateo is the county where I work in and a colleague was trying to correct my pronunciation when it struck me that San Mateo is spanish for St. Matthew. Voila! Immediately the bricks fell in place.Everything around here is curiously named "Mission ..Blvd..St...Ct....."The Spanish Catholics were on a mission to proseletyze the heathen folk around here and named the cities/counties around here after the canonized fellas. So, it immediately dawned upon me that San Fransisco is named after St.Francis of Assisi. San Carlos is St.Charles, San Lorenzo for St.Laurent , San Andreas for St. Andrew, San Leandro for St.Leander.The mother of all San Jose was a tough one to crack till the oyster gave it up as St.Joseph. Of course the county I live in is called "Santa Clara" which should probably be St. Claire but I cannot understand the difference between "San" and "Santa". Of course there is more fun in decoding these rather than getting a compiled list like last time.

Techie at an Airport writing this Poem

Baby Eyes

I did not see you standing there
still and quiet as a bronze soldier
beneath the folding of the papers
and the mumbled chorus of strangers

The cuffs of long pants whispering by
Leather and silicon in every hand
Worry, the only mask worn here
Where only faces of time are seen

Silence grabs me like gravity
As if you have dug a well of still
In this land of the moving lifeless
Where nervous men wait for wings

You are so out of place, little girl,
I remember thinking as I looked down
to see you staring up at me
with eyes that asked no questions

I resumed my reading, or my talking,
or whatever it is that wingless men do
when they are in between here and there,
not knowing that your stare was for me

But there you stayed, still as a stone
with eyes as soft as children's hands.
Startled, I looked around for your parents
For children should not be left alone.

No one came to claim you,
No one even seemed worried,
And least of all you,
little girl with soft eyes ..

Soft eyes as deep as depthless chasms,
wide as the breadth of grand canyons
and trusting as playful puppies,
eyes that bring me back ..

I know these eyes! Whose eyes are these?
I have seen you before
In someone else's eyes,
At someone else's time

Where is she, your mother?
Is she here? She must be,
for you are surely she
and your eyes cannot deny it.

Your gaze never travels, never moves.
Why do you stare at me?
What is it about me,
that you have never seen before?

.. never seen before ..

And then I know
Why I have never seen you before -
My breath is gone
And I do not know if you are real

It hits with the weight of the universe
of a billion suns created from nothing,
the weight of words that spun the worlds from dust,
the weight of losing one's own child

Slow realization creeps over me
that I will never see you again -
This my only chance to see
Those beautiful eyes, those beautiful eyes.
- Cameron Purdy
___________________________

For those in the know, Cameron Purdy has a decent technical reputation among the server side engineers. I thought that was very well written from a guy who thinks about cache coherence on middleware systems.

The Elysian Fields

Homage to the city founded by the french, conquered by the spanish, sold to the Americans and populated by the Africans. I didnt realise this would be this worse.

Mr. Tumulesh Solanky, wherever you are, I pray you and your dear ones are safe. I practically dont recall anyone else that would be near and dear to me in the city of New Orleans.

Ohh! Those Deceptive Elysian Fields...

Plato On Love

Over the weekend, my friend Parvez has given me a treat by recommending me to the work of Plato which has a particularly non-platonic exposition on the matter of "Love". The work is titled Phaedrus and is a free form conversation between the fabulist Phaedrus and the greek philosopher Socrates. To gain a flavor of the work, consider the following statement on the definition of love by Socrates before he goes on to express anything related to it :

"Every one sees that love is a desire, and we know also that non-lovers desire the beautiful and good. Now in what way is the lover to be distinguished from the non-lover? Let us note that in every one of us there are two guiding and ruling principles which lead us whither they will; one is the natural desire of pleasure, the other is an acquired opinion which aspires after the best; and these two are sometimes in harmony and then again at war, and sometimes the one, sometimes the other conquers. When opinion by the help of reason leads us to the best, the conquering principle is called temperance; but when desire, which is devoid of reason, rules in us and drags us to pleasure, that power of misrule is called excess. Now excess has many names, and many members, and many forms, and any of these forms when very marked gives a name, neither honourable nor creditable, to the bearer of the name. The desire of eating, for example, which gets the better of the higher reason and the other desires, is called gluttony, and he who is possessed by it is called a glutton-I the tyrannical desire of drink, which inclines the possessor of the desire to drink, has a name which is only too obvious, and there can be as little doubt by what name any other appetite of the same family would be called;-it will be the name of that which happens to be eluminant. And now I think that you will perceive the drift of my discourse; but as every spoken word is in a manner plainer than the unspoken, I had better say further that the irrational desire which overcomes the tendency of opinion towards right, and is led away to the enjoyment of beauty, and especially of personal beauty, by the desires which are her own kindred-that supreme desire, I say, which by leading conquers and by the force of passion is reinforced, from this very force, receiving a name, is called love."

Of course he later even concedes that certain forms are madness are a heavenly blessing and it is better to be in that state than make sense. If this whets your appetite, please consider reading the full text.

This definitely requires 2 dictionaries and a bottle of scotch :)

Admiration of Joyce

Came across this today written by Borges in his admiration towards James Joyce

What does my lost generation matter
That lovely mirror
If it was justified by your books
I am the others. I am all those
That your obstinate rigor rescues
I am those you do not know and those you save

Curiously enough,. Umberto Eco remarks that whats common to both these authors is the fact that the universal culture is their playing field(for their salvation or damnation).

Bharat GanaRajya

Thats what the text beneath the Sarnath emblem on my passport says. (literally means Union of India). Its one of those days where I peruse each of the pages in it.That reminds me to renew it as it expires this October.Being removed by a couple of oceans from your homeland can do wonders.

I called up my pop to greet him greetings and I gather he wasnt so happy to be a recepient of my I-Day wishes. In fact he seemed to be disillusioned.He quoted an incident where a local MLA was ambushed by so called Maosits in that area and asked me how what the heck do my wishes mean?

Our family history is a nightmare that I have woken up from but I guess it still stuck to him. My grandpa was a Pearl trader headquartered at 7 Thambuchettiar St, Chennapatnam(Chennai).Then the clarion call for Independence struggle was given by whoever that resonated something in him. He left his primary occupation and took to the road.(Of course the fact that he studies "tarka-sastra" for quite a while in Benares doesnt seem to help here)Now there was no Companies Act in those days that limited your liability in case of liquidation and this fella had to forefit everything he acquired. Local contacts or head honchos had to pull strings to yank him out of the occasional jail.Promptly he came back to the Coromandel Coast and settled down as a clerk at a temple writing satirical plays and a 3-volume magnum opus on The History of Kalinga ( Modern day Orissa where my granny is from).A few heirlooms that were passed on to my childhoos were a mahagony bed and a mirror made in belgium.(my dad used it as an aid for shaving, I guess). So that was in short how the stakes were played out w.r.t to my family. Yeah! The Nation gained independence but the net worth of a fella like my grandpa went to zero. I am glad he did what he did. Its kind of liberating to know that there are some folks out there who follow Mark Twain's sayin "Always Do Right! This will gratify some and astonish the rest". I guess I am among the astonished.

That being said I am glad that things look bright atleast from my perspective. I see a progressive evolution in the country's attitude and I am not half bit as disillusioned as my pater-familias would. I am sure it could always be asked as "Kahan Hain Kahan Hain Mohafiz Khudi ke, Jinhe Naaz hain Hind par woh kaha hain.." and my answer would be that they are there where we left them and they are there where we look for them.

ps: BTW I am truly shameless to come back after calling it quits. Its something like you can take x out of y but you cant take out y out of x where x=me and y=blogging.

pps: I guess this also underscores how far I have travelled from my last year. I love August.

Over and Out

Its been a heck of ride but I guess I am running out of steam. As some of my readers might have observed the quality of my posts has been exponentially dropping close to zero. Its a nice point of inflexion to hang up my boots before I start hitting the negative values.( I have just confirmed this for a fact with an objective third party observer).I started out with a Fugue but I guess I ended with a Toccata with a bit of Allegro thrown in occasionally.

Adios!

Accounting

You dont need to take a Management Accounting class to understand the terms "Profit Center" and "Cost Center". Your organization could be broken down into business units that either are revenue generators or revenue sinks. For example Sales is always a profit center since they solely focus on their quotas to generate revenue ( as a side effect commisions) whereas HR is always a cost center because they dont generate any revebue but cost the organization some revenue to do whatever it is that they do.(While it is interesting to compare the mentalities of people working in either center, I shall refrain from that digression - for example cost center folks are usually content, laid back , easy going versus hectic, hungry, aggressive profit folks)

In a recent internal company meeting one of the directors nailed me as a "non revenue generator",( that translates into not being one of his folks, who are consultants billed at an hourly rate). I was doing Sales Consulting in my previous life and I do understand the luxuries of being one of them. At the end of the day given the pressure to meet targets, some things would be sacrificed. While this sacrifice is Okay to some and are very happy as to what comes with that territory, I couldnt actually come to terms to a job partially done. Something essential to the work-well-done-feeling is taken away, thanks to the negotiations on the deal.Sorry. I cannot be one of them and Hence my move to this new job where I could do what I want to, to my heart's concern.I have become an accidental engineer because I could not become a scientist or a mathematician :(

Half a dozen retorts came to mind but I resisted ( My favorite one was that we are a profit center with a profit target of zero and we are consistent with that.Beat That!). Luckily to my rescue one of his own team called him their "pimp" (there's a certain element of truth to that :) and we'll lay matters to rest here.

Thinking about this on my way back, I could picture my economics instructor at high school explaining me an isomorphic (read: similar) concept of certain profit and cost curves and their intersection. This was in those days when whiteboards and sketches werent common and good old chalk piece with a blackboard was the standard display medium in schools. While the economics teacher rambled on, I could see the chalk particles from the writing slowly come off.
Have you ever seen that the fall of chalk particles observes a certain parabolic trajectory? ( Incidentally she was talking about the breakeven point of some sort). The particles at the vertex of the parabola take the most air-time. Similarly there seems to be some other "____ center" which could be defined as neither profit nor cost but nevertheless gives us the best of both worlds. Till I figure out that part, I'll have to carry this cross.

Bliss

is to do nothing
on a sunday afternoon

watching clouds move
leaves waving
paper flapping

a plane glides through
a fig incense burning
my favorite song playing

book open and unread


-Anonymous

Kalakshepa a.k.a Timepass

Hurrah! Long Weekend is here.After days of chasing bugs, playing heck of a lot more sports than I am used to and constantly being occupied by something or the other, I finally find some time for myself. Feels like paradise.Sleeping at 4:00 am in the morn, waking up and walking to starbucks followed by a "tiffin" (as desis are wont to call it) and having a dip in the pool just makes the cut.

Now I am suddenly at a loss to do something.Nature abhors a vaccum,right? But then wait, rushing myself to do something is only gonna take away the flavor of a vacation.Having offloaded something like 300 odd Hindi MP3s to the Pod, my mind wanders at a time when none of the things I am used to in this world were around (like pools, chaat bandis, iPod, etc).Wonder what people used to do..Lets see what my mind seems to dig on that score

(a) Recitation of Stories, Some peccadilloes of certain gods followed by some eccentric sages cursing the crap out these immortal gods and their opponents trying to get the throne,etc

(b) Some Music possibly with some earthy tones.

(b) Lectures on Metaphysics , pondering over philosophical questions and solving them by adding a layer of metaphysics to justify them and playin with some imaginary structures

(c) Possible some time studying the cattle and other miscellaneous domestic animals or in the course of domesticating some other wild animals

(d) Alchemy : Assuming some metalheads were present in the ancient society, somebody trying to convert somebody's gold to dust.(Later it was supposedly reverse)

(e) Finally among other unimaginable pleasures probably there's a place for a hearty roll-in-the hay sex.

Anyways there's one particular form of entertainment that struck my fancy in my childhood. That being called "HariKatha". In this particular medium you need to write your own narrative based on some popular story, have some music, make people laugh, make sure the lyrics carry with the music, etc to completely engage the audience with the performers' own creativity.Ok.Here I go to get my Violin to do something like that..Till then you folks have a wonderful and a fun-tastic weekend.