I really enjoyed reading this issue for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I don’t follow Indian politics very actively and I’ve never really had a good grasp of how the Indian political scenario evolved in the post-independence era. This issue had a three year concise summary for each year — the highs, the lows, the oomphs, the oops — covering everything from sports to politics. So after this whirlwhind tour of the last 30 years, I atleast had some vaguely consistent picture of what has been going on in the country. For one thing, it made me feel much less guilty for not having a strong opinion (in favor) of any of the politic parties in India.

The second reason why this issue struck a chord with me was that it was a glimpse into the past. A sort of looking glass. So much has happened that we soon forget. And while its not good to live in the past, its not good to forget it altogether either. Reading the issue brought back floods of memories of things I had heard but not understood, seen but not felt. And though none of these events personally affected me, I still somehow felt connected — be it the bhopal gas tragedy, or the Godhra massacre, or the tsunami or the earthquake(s), the demolition of the Babri masjid, the emergency and so on. I just felt that I understood a little more, absorbed a little more of India.

Of course then there was the ego boosting factor: its always good to look at your achievements over 30 years if you pile them up all together. I was inspired by what India had achieved in cinema, in economic terms, in sports, in fashion, in literature etc. The issue had sections on “Living Legends” and “Turning 30″ (some newsmakes who were born in 1975) which made for a very good read — and there were plenty of names in there that I had never even heard before.

Last, but the funniest, was this sarcastic “Whammy Awards” section done by Dilib Bobb that was just hilarious. Here’s a teaser: Manmohan Singh won the “Best Supporting Actor” award, Lalu won the “Milk the Cow” award and Jaya Lalitha won the “Amma Dekh” award. A must read.

But I always get a feeling that in such high power battles, the “real” truth doesn’t really matter. I mean look at Clinton, despite all the astounding evidence against him in the Lewinksky case, he came out unscathed. Do I know the truth? No. I do have a strong feeling that its not all that meets the eye.

The truth is out there somewhere. Lets hope our legal systems are robust enough to let the light shine through.

>In controversial research reported all over the place, Richard Lynn, the emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University claims that, on average, men are more intelligent than women. Let battle commence! As the research is not yet published there’s nothing more to go on than the press reports. The co-author of the study, Dr Irwing, a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University, is apologetic about the findings. In the BBC News report he states that the paper will go on to argue that despite their disadvantage in IQ, there is evidence that women utilise their (lesser!) talents better than men. This simply begs the question of what use IQ tests are if they don’t predict anything in the real world.

Here are some of the links:

* [[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4183166.stm|BBC]]
* [[http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1749346,00.html|Times Online]]
* [[http://education.independent.co.uk/news/article307985.ece|The Independent]]

Ladies, let the wars begin.

A couple of days back, Nakul raised the issue again in [[http://nakulmandan.blogspot.com/2005/08/motherland.html|this post]]. The quote mentioned there-in is very well written indeed (that [[http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20050811&fname=monbiot&sid=1&pn=1|outlook article]] raises some very good points, and presents them succinctly). It might all boil down to just a difference in perspective, but let me still try to further elaborate on my point of view. I’ll give you three different ways of looking at it.

**Why you //must// have some feelings for your motherland**

Nakul (and that article) say that they are not ashamed of their nationality, but why should they feel any different for it than for any other country. They say how does it matter where you’ve been born and brought up.

I’ll give a simple analogy (its an exaggeration, of course, but you should see the similarity). How do you feel towards your parents? Looking at it objectively, they invested some resources in you to raise you (just like your motherland); you’ve lived with them and inherited much from them in terms of culture, beliefs, values (just like your motherland); and you _do_ feel differently towards them than say towards other parents, don’t you? Then
why do you treat your country any differntly?

I would love to live in a society where there are no geo-political barriers, where we are all citizens of the world. However, the reality is that that day is no where close. For an innumerable number of reasons (some good, some bad) the world we live in continues to be divided. And its going to stay that way for a while.

**Why you //should// have some feelings for your motherland**

The fact remains that who who are and where you were born and how you were raised, //do// make an impact on your life, whether you want it or not. Throughout history, groups of people have been in clashes, inevitably.
Perhaps its just human nature. Whatever be the case, even today, we see nations in conflicts, there are still the opressed and the oppressors. If you were born in a country that was being invaded, just //randomly//, would it
help that none of the people of that country felt no feeling of nationalism?

What if no other country comes to help?

We live and breathe in a free world today, and we should be thankful for that. But not less than hundred years ago, things were very different. This independence didn’t come for free, it came at a cost. Sure, had you been born elsewhere, who knows how things might have turned out. But you were born //here//, and the life you led would have been *so* much different had you not enjoyed this freedom. Don’t you owe anything to the people who fought for this country and built it?

**Why you //could// have some feelings for your motherland**

Feeling pride for your country doesn’t mean you look down on others. I don’t
know how Mr. Manbiot concludes that a patriot British will choose a program
that lets 101 non-britishers die other a program that lets 100 britishers die.
Since when did patriotism imply non humanitarism?

Infact, I have often found that appreciating how my “motherland” has evolved
over the years has //increased// my appreciation of the struggles and the
triumphs and the tribulations of countries and cultures struggling elsewhere
(both in time and space).

Let me rewind a little bit. Let me ask you some questions: we always hear
about efforts to preserve and promote handicraft, aboriginal art, rare
forms of pottery or porcelain or even cheese making — what do you think
of these efforts? Why do we care about these things? What are “these
things”?

I’m guessing your answer would be something similar to “they are a part of
history, a part of the cultural heritage of some people and so it is
important that they be preserved”. When I was in middle school, I used to
hate history — it was so boring, so drab. But over the years I’ve come to
realize how interesting and fascinating history really is. And not just
for the factual content, but also for insights into the evolution of
civilizations.

Why is culture important? Why should we care what culture people had
before us? I’m not going to answer those questions. But I believe if you
sit down and think about it, you will come up with //some// reasonable
arguments. But how does all this relate to nationalism?

//If// I was living in the aforementioned utopian world, the notions of
nationalism that we are discussing here would simply not make sense.
Then we would all be part of the same culture, the same civilization,
share the same heritage and so on. However, that is not the case. The
fact remains that (and this is as true for individuals as it is for
countries) if we don’t assert our individuality, we start to lose our
identity.

True, if you moved around a lot, you might feel more a part of the “global”
citizenry than others, and you might not feel strongly about any one
particular country. And I think thats //perfectly fine//. Eventually
(hopefully) as boundaries dissolve, we will all merge in the global culture.
But its not happening yet.

I don’t know from where Mr. Manbiot got the notion that patriotism can be
interpreted as a kind of racism, and could encourage wars. While there are
certainly extremes in each ideology, I think “taking pride in my culture” and
“looking down upon other cultures” are two entirely different things. I
respect and admire other cultures as well (modulo the fact I don’t know most
of them as well as I do mine).

Finally, I’m not in favor of blind or false pride. That kind of disillusion
is never useful. No one is perfect. Be critical of your motherland, just like
you are of your parents. But if you find something that you believe in, that
you admire, that you care about, then be proud of it. Why not?

I have often wondered, what makes a great school great? How is it, that over and again, we see that certain places manage to inspire and produce generations of outstanding thinkers and artists and scientists.
The Stanfords, the Berkeleys, the MITs, and of course, the IITs.

Abhaga astutely observes that experiences such as living in a hostel don’t make a place unique. Irrespective of where you live, 4 years of hostel live will definitely teach you a lot about people, the world around you, the realities and the brutalities, the goodness and the selfishness. You will grow as a person, understand your responsibilities, learn to make your own decisions, make mistakes, learn from them (or not). Hostel life prepares you for the real world.

But these places have something more. They teach you to dream. Rather, they teach you to //learn to dream//. I’m neither as emotional or articulate as Abhaga was when writing his post, so this probably doesn’t sound that eloquent :-) But the point I’m trying to make is, the actual education is not in the text books and the assignments. Somewhere in those hall ways and libraries and great halls and quads, we get inspired, and learn to live and pursue our dreams.

I think the inspiration factor is key here. Inspiration can come from many places. Roaming in the lawns at Stanford, among those old-architecture buildings, I could easily imagine how people could get inspired simply by their surroundings. The rolling hills, the lush green grass, the tower and the status. Or if you are sitting around with your friends around a fountain in the cobbled courtyards of Princeton. Atleast to me, it seems sometimes just the //natural beauty// is enough to inspire.

Then of course there’s the rich history factor.

Another important thing IMHO is //tradition// — be it the hall 2 vs. hall 3 rivalry of IITK (which sadly, is not anymore… or is it?) or the MIT hacks — traditions both grand and silly, serve to bind the whole place by an invisible threads. Even if you meet a 10 years senior from IITK or a 10 years junior whom you’ve never met — you can always talk about the buildings and the mess and the faculty and the freshers and the ragging. Traditions make you feel that you //belong//.

Sometimes I feel we are in a constant battle to defeat our past, to live up to the expectations of these institutions that we so proudly associate with.

Of course, all of these places were not always great — I mean they all had a beginning right? But they all built a //critical mass// of good students and faculty, that gave them the foundation, on which they built upon and spawned forth. And its not that all the places are consistently great. Everyone has their lean period. But the sheer momentum of the past sometimes burgeones us into the future.

Ah, those days.

>>//How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective history and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world’s population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone’s 10-year plan.//

If you do the math, that amounts to about **150 million** pages of //new// contrent //**every single day**//. Even if we were to take 20% of that as a conservative estimate, thats still more than 30 million pages. Now //that// is truly staggering.

>> //What a shock, then, to witness the near-instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new one appearing every two seconds.//

A new blog **every 2 seconds**. Beat that!

But a little too far fetched at some points (IMHO):

>> //In 10 years, the system will contain hundreds of millions of miles of fiber-optic neurons linking the billions of ant-smart chips embedded into manufactured products, buried in environmental sensors, staring out from satellite cameras, guiding cars, and saturating our world with enough complexity to begin to learn. We will live inside this thing.//

>>//Today the nascent Machine routes packets around disturbances in its lines; by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks the moment they are launched, and dissuading malefactors from injuring it again. The patterns of the Machine’s internal workings will be so complex they won’t be repeatable; you won’t always get the same answer to a given question. It will take intuition to maximize what the global network has to offer. The most obvious development birthed by this platform will be the absorption of routine. The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine.//

An interesting read, none the less. And finally, the omnious sounding conclusion:

>> //Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.//

Right before [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/2005/07/26/the-half-blood-prince/ | Harry Potter]], I finished reading [[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0452286514/amzna9-1-20/ref=nosim/002-7210026-9576015?dev-t=D26XECQVNV6NDQ%26camp=2025%26link_code=xm2 | Transmission]], a book by Hari Kunzru.

Its just an //average// book. Quite melodramatic, but low on technical details. Makes writing computer viruses sound like some obscure Japanese art which has a lot of “feeling” in it. I’m not saying there isn’t, for I haven’t written a virus myself, but probably because I’m from a CS background, the book didn’t appear convincing to me.

The plot is mildly interesting. No fascinating twists and turns, no deeper inklings, very simple and straighforward. I did feel that some of the characters and some of the events in the story held little or no meaning. The author tried to create an open ending of sorts, but I think most readers will end up with similar guesses.

So bottomline, it was a passable read.

I will comment on the original article that was behind the post later; I first want to comment on some of the things Nakul said in his post.

**Idol Worship**

I will concede that each society has its own notion of a //God//. But labelling all such notions as //idol worship// is shortsighted. It might be the case in India (though I don’t think even that holds true). Further, all notions of God are not about //personification// (against, most are, but not all). And finally, simply because //YOU// have not felt or seem //him// doesn’t mean others have (just to be clear, **I haven’t**). To me, the definition of God is a very personal concept, and tied close together with your values, beliefs and faith.

Something that might be seeing and believeing for me, might just be stupidity for you. I don’t believe human society is at a stage where one can give an unambiguous quantifiable litmus test for God. That would be the end of philosophy. Anyways, coming to the point — I don’t think its all bullshit. I sincerely believe that some people do believe and have felt what they think God might be. And I say good for them!

**Motherland**

You were not //just born// here — you were born and //brought up// here. Now **that** is something you can’t just ignore. You probably don’t realize it now, but I’m sure as hell you will when you go to London in a few days. I agree that people make too much of a big deal about brain drain. And I also agree that with each passing day we are becoming part of a larger society. All that is fine and I have nothing against going outside India looking for a better life (I think it just comes back to India in better ways if that happens).

All I’m saying is that there are many things that are part of you, your core values and beliefs that are in part simply because you spent a substantial portion of your life in a specific geogrphical portion of the earth. And that you don’t necessarily //owe// anything to that land or its people, but just spend some time thinking about things like how life would have been had you been born 50 years before Independence, or how things would have been had you been born in Africa or Europe or America or Spain for that matter.

There are fanatics and extremists everywhere. But feeling passionate about one’s country is neither irrational nor hypocritic. Its something to be proud of.

** Hypocrisy **

I wouldn’t go so far as saying that its a //human// trait. But its definitely a //societal// trait. For that matter, I find glaring examples of hypocrisy here in the United States every day. Women here got voting rights only in 1920 I think. And in the 300 years of US Congress, there have been only [[http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/history/h_multi_sections_and_teasers/Photo_Exhibit_African_American_Senators.htm | five African-American senators]]. Compare that to the vivid (though chaotic) representation in Indian politics. Despite all the talks of liberty and equality, your color is still something you can’t forget. I could go on an on.

But I think in the original article the writer was a bit too biased (or exaggerating to bring out the point). What I worry more about is that over the last 2 years (and going on) there’s an increasing dichotomy of societies in India. Microcosms of societies have formed in and around the metros (Pune, Bangalore included) while the majority of rural India gets left behind. What they do see however, is cable TV, internet and bollywood. The combined forces of these three media can be devastating, without appropriate education and exposure.

People mingle together, flock together. Groups are formed, loyalties are found. There’s gossip, there’s politics. Small little things that get said here and there turn up a few days later as major public announcements. You have to take care of what you say to whom, and always keep your eyes and ears open.

I don’t know what the numbers are, but it seems to me that a lot of the big stuff in a company—be it products or ideas or new recruits or other decisions—are made over innocuous lunches.

No, this post is not about ending that war, or even trying to. This is just a response to my amazement at how deep rooted this war continues to be in our community.

So this wednesday as I was waiting in the hallway to meet with Amin, I heard him say something about Vi and Emacs to one of his students and how none of these editors even close in terms of productivity when compared to the mature IDEs (such as Visual Studio or Eclipse) for serious programming. I used to be a devout Emacs user for a long time (around 4 years) before I moved to Vim, and I’ve never been happier.

Naturally when I went in, I asked him about his take on Vi vs. Emacs. Turns out that Amin is a devout Emacs user, right from his undergrad days. Apparently in his time Vim was not popular, and Vi does kind of suck in a way compared to Vim. Being the good Vim lover that I am, I engaged him with all the neat things that my Vim setup could do, and he was genuinely surprised, and happily, interested too! So its quite likely that I might have to give him a demo of what Vim can do these days very soon :)

Here are some nice reads:

* [[http://thomer.com/vi/vi.html|Vi lovers page]]
* [[http://www.io.com/~dierdorf/emacsvi.html|Emacs and Vi]] (note the and, instead of the usual vs)
* [[http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/12/04/0326236|Newsforge article on the holy geek war]]
* [[http://www.tarunz.org/~vassilii/srom/|Suck-o-meter]]