A girl in love...

If a man opens the car door for his wife, either the car is new or the wife is. If a woman laughs at a man’s joke, either she likes the joke or …

It’s almost always a pleasure to look at girls but observing a girl in love is something different. She will adore the object of her affections, overlook all the injustice he does to her, forgives almost all the mistakes except for looking at other girls and simply loves him. A man loves sometimes from his eyes, sometimes from his organ but a woman loves from her heart. I remember reading somewhere, why don’t men look into the eyes when they talk with a woman? Because breasts don’t have eyes! I don’t know what the girls have to gaze at except for the beer bellies or the facial stubble some specimens of the male species maintain. She will look into your eyes and peep in your heart. Agreed, girls are low on testosterone but when a girl loves a man, she goes beyond the surface and loves the entire package!

She will talk your head off and will tell you about all the little things that happened to her. She will be a loyal supporter and her whole life will revolve around her man. All she asks for is you love her forever. 

She wants him to touch her once he has touched her heart, she wants him to cuddle her, to embrace her. Though she will die of embarrassment before saying so in as many words.

A woman just has to look cute to please a man but a man has to be and do a lot of things to please a woman. However, once she is smitten by the love bug, she lives in a dream world of her own. She will keep looking at him lovingly when he is with her and will keep dreaming about her man when he’s not with her.

Sometimes I wonder how it would be being a girl but being a man and to experience the affection of a woman is not bad either!

Isn't it stupid???

I have always hated wearing shoes when not needed. I like to take them off the first chance I get if I am forced to wear shoes. Granted there's no option while playing football or going on a trek but why in the office???? Fortunately, both the companies I worked for preferred to look at the quality of my work rather than the type of my footwear.

When I was transferred to Delhi though, my new boss grilled me about the sandals I was wearing at the IGI airport at 12' O clock in the night! I had to run out to the market and buy a new pair of shoes before attending office the next day.

Wonder what would happen if I attend a job interview in sandals. Does a company reject an otherwise good candidate just because he is not wearing shoes?

Here is someone who shares the sentiment and puts it in a much more colorful way than I have...

http://superblog.crazyengineers.com/2011/07/27/why-do-indians-wear-shoes-isnt-it-stupid/

We should be ashamed of ourselves...

We should be ashamed of ourselves for the pathetic condition we have forced our country in. Brave soldiers sacrifice themselves for the motherland and the spineless politicians continue to insult them!

Here is another example of how the world looks at the India map and how we like it to look. An example of how the sites display differing maps in different countries.

Just take a look at the map on the page:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-friends-dont-let-friends-use-internet-explorer-6/8851?tag=content;siu-container. The writer has shown an image from another site. So, this is how the Indian map looks like outside.

Here is how the map looks like when the actual site is opened in India. Notice any difference in the border of J&K, which we proudly like to claim as an integral part of India?!

Feels like the Sarangi has gone silent... RIP Ustadji

RIP Steve

Uncommon common sense!

Theirs' was a class of intelligent, selected boys. The school's admission tests ensured so. The school has a reputation built partly on that.

The Sanskrit teacher, in one of the weekly unit tests, asked them to translate an unknown Sanskrit verse into Hindi. It was a verse describing the great country of India. One of the guys, who never studied for exams, was in problem. Sanskrit wasn't one of his favorite subjects then. He couldn't get the meaning just by reading the words.

For those who know a bit of Sanskrit, a part of the verse said, 'हिमालयस्य दक्षिणतः'  Our poor hero was trumped by the Sanskrit text, couldn't make out the meaning but used his common sense and translated it as he thought appropriate.

The D-day came. The teacher distributed the answer sheets. this poor guy was trying to see where he had scored a few marks and lost many. Suddenly someone who liked to pick on him snatched his paper and pushed him towards the teacher. Saying that now it was his turn to get his marks reduced. This guy was terrified. His score wasn't much to write home about in the first place. A further reduction would be disastrous. He had no option though. The teacher got his paper and read the translation he had written. A miracle happened. 'He's got it right!', she exclaimed and sent him back to his place.

She then asked our poor hero to read out his answer to the entire class and everybody was asked to take it down. To his utter surprise, everybody else, including the Sanskrit scholars in the class had written statements to the effect that the 'Himalayas are to the south of India.'

It's better to be dumb...

It's better to be dumb and fortunate,

rather than being intelligent and unfortunate

I had resisted writing these lines for quite some time now. A few recent events brought it out again.

One sees people around oneself who are incompetent, unwilling or simply a pain in the a** and still getting away with it all. 

There is no more cruel a joke than someone being granted smarts enough to think and all that he\she gets to think about is why do I think so much and why don’t the others think a bit.

One who knows, one who can think has to do good. Who else would?

Guess one has to go through life and face whatever it has to offer. It’s not a bollywood pot-boiler where the good guy gets the girl and the bad guys get thrashed.

I remember attending a Marathi drama ‘Yada Kadachit’. It can be called as a spoof on the Mahabharata. In the last scene, someone, probably Krishna says that ‘finally’ the truth prevails. Duryodhana, one of the villains Indians love to hate, has a ready backlash, why finally?

Again guess it’s not the end till the good guys win!

A Sanskrit verse goes like this:

It's better not translated and felt in the original but still.. 

Take me from the untruth to the truth, take me from the dark to the light, take me from the death to immortality (or in a more heartfelt way, take me from this fragile, cruel and what-not world to the eternal feeling of blissfulness.)

I sometimes use these lines to joke around. I like to say that these lead me to three girls, 'Satya', 'Jyoti' and 'Amruta' (Agree that ‘Satya’ doesn’t exactly sound like a girl’s name, especially after the movie of the same name)

However, I sometimes think about these lines as I did while writing this. There is a more profound meaning somewhere there.


PS: Blogspot didn't save my original version. Possibly has a problem with the image pasted. This is what I could recollect after pouring my heart out the first time. Hope I could do it justice the second time around.

Patterns and habits and results

If you keep on doing the things that you always did, you will keep on getting the results you always did.

If you fall down a hole, stop digging!

Two statements to always keep in mind. Two statements I have experienced to be true. Two statements that tell me what was, what could have been,. what is and what could be.

I am not giving out actual examples from my life but have seen these work both ways. Always be alert about what your habits are getting you into, what kind of pattern you are following with yourself and those around you.

A right pattern, a right habit will serve you well while a wrong one may get you all messed up.

Being proactive is one of the most important habits you can inculcate. Steven Covey rates it as the first and the most important of the seven habits of highly effective people.

The use or not of this one habit can make a lot of difference in your world. It sure did in mine!

Your habits serve you well. Make sure that you keep on picking up the right ones and weeding out the wrong ones. 

My affair with....... R

My introduction to the R software was as an under graduate student of statistics. One of the teachers was very enthusiastic about it. However, at least initially, I did not share his enthusiasm for R. We were still learning the very basics of statistics and as a consequence, used R for pretty basic computations and graphs. That failed to sustain my attention.

However, things changed when I started exploring R on my own, especially in the university when I was enrolled in a post graduate course in statistics. As my knowledge and understanding of statistics increased and improved, my admiration for R followed quickly. I was taken in by the amazing data acrobatics offered, the latest theories incorporated, the open community model and last but not the least, the zero license fees!

The affair continued in my second job which is at a CRO. Though SAS is the software of choice for statistical analysis in the Pharma industry, R can work well as a validating program. I started using R to validate SAS outputs and found it very reliable and flexible. It used to take us almost a two page SAS code to compute pseudo SD, but with R, I could do that (and more!) in about five lines of code. I also developed a macro (or a set of functions to be more precise with R) which automates a regular task of validating routine SAS outputs for safety memos. Currently, as a part of the QA team, I am using R to create validators for the innovative software products developed in the company. R is not only a good choice but also the only choice when it comes to validating first to market products.

I can go on and on with R. It was R 1.4.1 when we first met, now its 2.13.0. I have seven versions of R installed on my machine at work. I wish all the best to the R team and say a heartfelt thank you. Looking forward to learning more of R and more of statistics.

You don't know

You don't know what you had
   unless you lose it

You don't know what you missed

   unless you get it