Time pass

Note: If you dont bother abt tamil movies...ignore this blog...!!

Went to this music website musicindiaonline after a long time. Found this movie Chennai Kadhal on the top and started the playlist. (I dont do that in general. I always stick with the film songs that I have heard already). Anyways, the songs were pretty interesting...listening to some peppy songs after a long time..! Tho it reminds me of typical Vijay's film songs...like the first one of the list is very similar to this vijay's song - Ice katti Ice katti...!

Who cares, as long as it gives you a good "time pass". Any ways, now your question would be that "why the heck am I writing this in my blog?". Same reason as why you are reading my blog - JOB LESS and BORED !!

P.S. A recent article analyzed about how various hindi + english words ~ hinglish has been used liberally by various westerners. One such word is time pass.

Have a great thanksgiving break..!

(Mis)Interpretation

To be honest, I am writing this blog for the sake of filling the space. Already I am hearing some sarcastic comments like "you always do that". Now, ignoring such comments lets move further..

In recent times, many of my email text or chat text gets interpreted differently than what I intend to convey. Infact many of them have got totally misinterpreted. Usually I blame it on my language, as I have heard people around me saying that I am born to confuse. People around me say that waitresses generally have tough time taking orders from me as I tend to confuse them a lot. No one understands the simple fact that I am a stunning person and the possibility of waitress's senses getting clogged up is hence pretty high. Damn..no idea how these bachas around me are getting PhDs and masters..! And with facts said and printed..lets get back to interpretation.

A day back, one of my friend used a smiley to convey that the sentence written by him should be interpreted as a joke and not a serious one. Though the fact is that he purposefully wanted the other person to interpret it the other way before doing the necessary damage control. But my thought went around the usage of such smileys in our day today life. The possibility of misinterpreting your sentences is different according to the type of conversation you have. In ascending values, the methods can be listed as follows: direct face to face; phone; chat; email; and now scraps; In case of writing serious emails, we always tend to write things in detail to avoid any misinterpretation. In chat or scraps we tend to use smileys at different position to explain the emotive levels as well. But does it all convey exactly what we intend to say. No, not really. If looked at carefully, language as such has its own defects which can cause misinterpretation. Then again the spoken language comes along with the tone at which its spoken which is far easy to analyze when compared to written text which is devoid of any such tones. And thats where smileys play a role. But in diplomatic sense, plain text emails although can be interpreted wrongly, the effort that you have to put to do the damage control (if you intend to do some damage in the first place) is easier when compared to face to face dialogues. For example you are in your office, and your wife (I assume that the readers are male - you can call me a chauvinist) asks you in chat about the food she cooked for your lunch. Now you are in a position where you are walking a tight rope. You might not know how the food tasted, as you went out for lunch and the food either is already flushed out..or waiting for the first dog you see on the way or may be you have eaten it and you have to do some blatent lying. And above all there is this big problem in front of you .."misinterpretation". Beware you cannot put too many smileys in your chat as you might then increase the probability of she cooking the same food for the dinner. You can say "I had my lunch and I am fuuuullllllllll...No coffee today for me" instead of saying "the food is awesome...great". And now add a smiley like this :)....you are punishing urself with another course ...add a smiley like this :P...you are doomed for the rest of the week at the least...!

Guys, before reading further...I have to make a clarification. this blog is not about "how to chat with your wife" so come out of that example. Internet is going to be the future second life for mankind. Already there are websites like secondlife.com which allows you to create an entire and complete anonymous life for you. Hence looking at the broader picture with respect to communication and internet, I guess lot of research work need to be done to find intutive ways to explain your emotions via internet. Hope they make some progress pretty fast for I will be 25 in a few weeks time ":)" .

Born nameless

When first given a thought...its little bit ironical..to have a big name with more than half the number of alphabets lined up within it..and then to call myself nameless. It all started at 1:40 PM oct 29th 1981, I once asked my dad to narrate the sequence...and this is how it went..

"after more than a month of research, of course that includes some n number of consultations with the n number of grandpas and grandmas...ok ok..dont come to some wrong conclusion about my family now, the actuals do have some sis and bros whom you have to call grandma and grandpa..but my choice would be to number them...the list came down to a few names..if I remember it correctly...they didnt decide it even after I was there alive..popped out as a solid living creature in front of them. There are still few more variables that they have to take into account before deciding on "the name". Thats the date, time and the star of birth. OK now dont ask me how that works..I donno..may be I have to know it when "the time" comes...but not for now.! Finally they shortlisted 2 names..my guess is there was a small fight after this...because my dad was thinking a bit before proceeding his narration..ofcourse he wouldnt have forgotten anything..just that he hasnt learnt the subtle art of lying that easily....(man..he could have asked me..)! ...and one was decided..."

Think of the situation...the process involved 2 humans who gave birth to me..3 humans who gave birth to the former 2..Ok..wait wait...my dad wasn't cloned..its just that my grandpa got an early leave..a few sis grandmas and bro grandpas, a uncle and too many aunts, huh....it involved a dead grand grand father..(a part of his name is my name now)...and I am even ok with that..but it didnt stop there..it involved a far distant constellation of stars. And on one fine day...a month after I was born...(man..i was nameless for a month..of course all those baby visitors would have called me with those set of names which they keep seperately for a "nameless" child...juju..bujju...a few i dont want to say here...man its embarassing..if you notice it carefully...all these nameless names doesnt have any meaning...its just the way the tongue turns and the mouth shapes..when given a sound..it spells out like this. if at all I as a baby had some knowledge about this..I would have slapped those visitors left and right..I wouldnt have stopped there..in the pretext of baby innocence..i would have, attempted a toothless bite assault, a pinch and finally for sure ***ed on him/her), they had this baby naming ceremony..and after a few other rituals..they named me "Muthukkumar"..huh..it didnt stop there..it had this 2 initials..in front of it. "K.S". Why S, thats the starting letter of my father's name..why K..in simple words..my father had it in his initials. And why did he have it..its because my grand father wanted it. And why did he want it..its because..my grandfather's grandfather lived in a place ..wait a miniute..its my grandfather's grandfather's father..lived in a place called Kadavasal, a place in southern tamilnadu, India. And he wants that place attached to the name and remembered for ever. (Even though the tone of my language may be sarcastic.."which is natural"...I do know where exactly that place is and I have been there many times in my life..to visit a temple over there).

Freedom...

On a typical sunny day in the year of 1827, a guy named Charles Masson left his british regiment at Agra and travelled towards the Indus river. After many days of wandering, he stepped upon something which we all could call "ruins". Later he reported this ruins in his book "Narrative of Various Journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan and The Panjab". I am not sure whether he realized what he discovered. I am not sure whether he know that those ruins are not just 50 or 100 years old but they time back to some 5000 years. It is the place which we now call as Harrapa. This is one of the most ancient human civilization on earth. We are sure about their eating habits, a few of their rituals and also about their daily routines. But I am not sure whether they had more than one faith among their community. The general archelogical theory is that the Aryans from Central Asia invaded the Indian subcontinent and in the process may have wiped out this civilization. Clash of culture, clash of faith has been among humans since the time they started existing in groups/community. But then man kind has survived. Survived enough to device a democratic, pluralistic society where we seemingly provide everyone the freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to vote etc., but only after taking the entire freedom from us in the first place. The simple law of science is matters exist and you dont create them out of thin air. I think they same hold good for laws too. We cant provide freedom of something to some one without taking something from him in the first place. But then thats how society has been functioning atleast for the past 1000 years.

Norms or rules of a society and the people of the society are just two sides of a coin. Its the people of the society who devices the rules. But then with rules, the society governs/gives a qualitative as well as quantitative amount of freedom. Its simple one man governs another and in retrograde, he is also governed by the one who he governs. Confusing huh..? Yes! But then we are ok with it. We are OK with it to such an extent that somehow we stopped realizing this. But inadvertantly we do use this power that is vested upon us. Sometimes with in the quantitive limit set and sometimes well beyond the limit. In mathematical terms, lets assume the entire world to be a set and all its different groups to be subsets, in which we will have independant subsets, as well as interdependant ones. The only problem is the interdependant or the common ones are not just based on one single parameter. The parameters ranges from region to religion, different languages to different accents and finally from free men to slave men. In such a complex mathematical set, where every subset is chained and restricted by another thousand subset, any offset from the defined inter human societial rules will result in a chain reaction that will be adverse enough to wipe out a few subsets.

OK, now why am I taking so much pains to explain the complexity of our living world? In my opinion, many of the researchers, analysts, and all those who think some thing is wrong with one particular subset or all those who belong to one subset but trying to invoke changes in another, dont understand this simple "complexity". Many among us dont understand that its not just the building that is built using a pack of cards will crumble when you pull one card from the base, but a subset will also crumble when you pull something out of it without understanding where it stands in hierarchial deck. Infact, in case of the real world subset, dont crumble to dust, but retaliates back in the most violent way. Let us now turn our attention to the so called supporters of "Freedom" - to be specific - "freedom of speech" and the now famous Islamic cartoon controversies. Any law that pertains to the human emotions is always subjective and it does not have any specific numerical limits. And this holds good for the freedom of speech. In the name of freedom of speech, a cartoonist expressed his views publishing something which completely digresses into the most sacred belief of a faith. There were some protests, some rallies and ths issue succumbed to time. But then again in the name of freedom of speech, a few other scandinavian newspapers republished the cartoons to express support. That to me is not support for freedom of speech but to instigate something with ulterior motives.

Recently, a speaker came to my university and talked about how much west is more "civilized" when compared to the east. He gave a few examples as of how the west contributed to the east "civilizing". At first point I was hell bent on making on argument there. But then I realized its of no use. Even though he is one of the person I admire, I was sure that his knowledge about the east tends to ignorance. I am not sure whether he has heard about capitalism, imperialism, colonization, slavery, religious wars, apartheid, etc. I am not sure whether he has heard about the death of famous scientists like Galileo or Archimides or about all those secret science socities that existed among the west. Based on my knowledge about Indian and south asian history, I havent heard of any secret socities. Even though we havent had a democratic society set up till recently, members of east didnt have any problem in expressing themselves that they have to form secret societies to do so. People of east didnt go to africa, colonize them, shifted people from there for cheap labor. If that is what he calls being civilized, I hope we better not be civilized. Also, the speaker pointed out a few Islamic protest marchers carrying "death flags" to protest against the cartoons. He called them uncivilized. Living in a country which till now has not abolished capital punishment, I am not sure whether the speaker is fit enough to call these protestors uncivlilized. Yes, even the country from where I am, we havent abolished capital punishment yet. But then we dont go around the world calling these people uncivilized. Any punishment that is handed out for a particular mistake is always subjective and cannot be numerically evaluated. I am not here to justify what the protestors are doing.

We all know that, there is a growth in terrorism. A specific set of people from a specific faith, is using the faith's cause for terror. Instead of solving the problem, we are making it worse. Till recently atleast fifty percent of the members of the faith where not siding towards terrorist means. But if you are going publish such cartoons and illtreat the faith, as well as castigate them in public, then the world will loose the remaing fifty percent too. Years ago, it was just political class that patricipated in rewriting histories, but now Media has a very important role in it. They should act responsible enough. They need not solve the problem, but atleast they shouldnt flare it up.