Festember Fever

With NITT's cultural festival three days away, Festember, as we proudly call it seems to be the word in everyone's lips. The very first poster that I saw for this year's cultural extravaganza impressed me a lot. It just looks like yesterday when i packed my bag and left on a ten-day break away from college for the first festember, and here i'm shedding some light on the last festember that i will be witnessing ( as a student ). This year's events promise to be a visual treat and a telling farewell for me.

Day 0 sets off with Tarangini, the light music event -- the silence before the storm. Lot of workshops have been made available this time and we have achieved never-seen-before registrations for all the workshops, with the 'Salsa' workshop leading the seven-bullet list. Please visit www.festember.org to get more concrete information about the events and the registrations.
Next, the best of the bag.. Pronite with singer Karthik and popular drums player Sivamani are ready to set the stage on fire. We had kay kay last time, doing the proceedings which tended to shift awkwardly for his selections were mostly in Hindi. I hope these two will strike the balance this time.
With lots of surprises awaiting us, lets make it enjoyable and memorable! Be there..

Superfluous Accolades..

When I grab the newspaper everyday, I feel a very strong urge to skip to the sports column directly. It happens every single time. How much ever i try not to do, i can't help it but to get to the penultimate page every time. And every single day, I'm finding some news or other about Abhinav Bindra, the guy who made us proud by clinching Independent India's first ever gold medal. Its a great achievement, agreed. Its a never-seen-before feat, agreed. He has been diligent and has earned the medal, agreed. He is a treasure for the country, agreed. But why is everyone so keen in getting him cash awards everyday? He has been earning in crores and lakhs. It seems like this is going to be his only Olympic game and as if he is going to retire immediately. If not so, people are making it look so. Some amount of appreciation is absolutely essential to cheer up and encourage the sportsman. But if people are going to keep showering accolades on him, he is eventually going to get smug and not have the urge to work harder and try to sustain the success. This happens in every single sport. If there is a talent, in the pretext of encouraging him, the government is actually making the sportsman feel complacent. I have no idea when this is going to stop. I'm afraid this is going to be his one and only gold medal...

Chaos Theory

After a revolutionary tamil movie that hit the screen 100 days back, this theory shouldn't look alien to anyone. I'm also among that group of people who went crazy on watching it, came back home and googled about the theory to know more. As a general rule, it is always the practical knowledge that enables us to understand the implications of any subject. More than reading from any book or watching some movie, the concepts become more inveterate if we can relate it to a real-life example, some day to day activity that perfectly follows the tenets established by the concept. Suppose we pick up today's newspaper and read that the stock market indices plummeted to a never-seen-before threshold, it doesn't tag along with it any impact. But if the same had happened with you buying lots of shares on the previous day, you better buy lot of water cans at home to cope with the stress. Therefore, if something has an impact in our life, that is when we understand the real significance and implications of its source or cause.
Chaos theory essentially deals with a past-present-future relationship. It characterizes the behaviour of certain systems, mainly dynamic ones. The very existence of this theory is characterized by disorder. An important postulate of this theory is the Butterfly Effect. Butterfly effect refers to the behaviour of dynamic systems that are sensitive to their initial conditions. The effect refers to the idea that a butterfly's wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado or delay, accelerate or even prevent the occurrence of a tornado in a certain location. The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale alterations of events. In simple terms, something that may seem very insignificant now might have a huge impact later.
I got my passport issued in the year 1998 in Nairobi, Kenya. It was valid for ten years from then. The stipulated expiry date was 6.9.2008. I never even thought of how 2008 would be like then, but now it happened to be the year in which i'm going to take all the graduate examinations that demand for the passport. And I never bothered to think about it a little before. So i had planned to give my exam in September. But because of this passport renewal crap, I was forced to give my exam before 6th. And because of this, I had to give TOEFL on 24th of August itself, breaking the cliche surrounding the order in which the exams are generally taken. I booked for TOEFL just a week before 24th. The centers in Trichy and Chennai where full already. So i was forced to book my exam in Coimbatore. A five hour bus journey from Trichy to Coimbatore that began with an accident during the onward journey ended with the return journey that left me drenched in rain, feeling the cold while breathing. All this had to happen one day before the first set of cycle tests. I reached college at one in the night, extremely exhausted after the boring 4 hour exam and the equally boring five hour journey. With the first exam of the semester twelve hours away, i cudnt do anything but to snore away. The outcome? Messed up marks.
All this grueling predicaments because of that date that is printed in my passport! The date that had no significance initially proved vital in deciding everything this semester. If only there was some leeway, so much of turmoil would have been avoided. I'm feeling the chaos already!

Partial Courtesy: Wikipedia

A first look at Google Chrome

Lets all sit and wait until we have Google Underwears available in the market!
Google seems to be taking the lead in everything. Everything that i put up in this post is just my view and opinions may differ. So fights and arguments are not entertained.

With its plunge into browser world, Google comes out with Chrome, its Web-based browser. If you can sit on a rocking chair and think about the design of the browser, there are two words that strike you immediately - Light and Smooth. Chrome, just 7mb away from the Google Web page is extremely light and has a sleek and simple interface, very apt for browsing. On first use, you realise that tabs open faster than IE7 and the transition is extremely smooth.
The "Homepage" cliche has been revamped with a "Most Visited Pages" concept that pulls your eye towards it immediately. A very useful feature and presented in a very neat way!
The next thing I realized is the font. It has an awesome font that enriches even a mediocre-looking page. The outline of the browser has a light blue tinge that is soothing to the eye. The address bar displays variegated info with the main address alone shown in black and and the other, often irrelevant details looking pale. People get disparate notions about the browser but i term it as 'eclectic'. It has features taken from disparate sources which blend gingerly onto one neat package.
The next and one of the most interesting features for youngsters ( ;) ) is the incognito window. Websites that you view in this window are not stored in the browsing history, no cookies are stored, but the files downloaded are retained. No traces of it are left and hence leads to 'clean' browsing. ( Sounds ironical doesnt it?? ) Very Useful for you-know-what!!!!!!
Some people keep telling me that firefox is still better than chrome and chrome seems to crash often. Hitherto, I have not come across such a situation, so if i come across i may agree with you.
In sum, an awesome release from Google, worthy of trying and getting used to it, if not getting addicted to it!

The ironical magazine

I consider Eight thirty on a Sunday morning to be the best and preferred time to donate my hair to the hair dresser's dustbin. I have no clue why but that is when i generally visit a saloon. It had been very long since i had had a haircut for i wanted to grow my hair long. After much cerebration as to retain it or not( read "Since long hair sucked on me" ), i decided to cut it shorter and portray the nalla payyan look i had adorned all these years. So i went to the saloon and found four people waiting before me. You never have the feeling of going to a saloon if you don't find a queue there. The mathematical concept of queueing theory gained recognition because of saloons only, for it follows the mathematical model perfectly. You can never find a saloon when you are the first person to shave it off. This is precisely why saloon's garner a lot of newspapers and magazines so that people don't feel bored waiting on chairs. So i found a comfortable seat and starting searching the pile of papers and magazines and finally settled down with a Tamil magazine that had a very attractive cover design. It had a peculiar pattern that had six moon-shaped tusks arranged radially, all pointing towards a map of India which was delineated at the center. The Indian map had a lot of interesting pictures, and the whole pattern was sailing on a boat whose mast portrayed the word Vetri (Victory). I'm quite sure everyone will be tempted to open it and read it. So with all the eagerness i opened the magazine. The front page had a message from the editor. Just like anyone else, I flipped to the next page ( Messages from Editors are the most ignored pages in a magazine. May be we should ask them to save some printer ink ).
The next page had a story written by some incognito writer. The article had a diagram on top. The diagram had a man and a woman sitting on chairs. The men was decently dressed. The women seemed to wear some dress which her parents bought her when she was ten. ( or may be twelve.. cant really say ) In sum, her dress was revealing! OK... Just a picture, I thought. So i started reading further. The article was about some water problem in some remote location in Tamil Nadu. I kept reading it hoping to find some connection between the article and the picture. ( OK.. Let your brain not reminisce about Dasavatharam now, just like how everybody struggled to find some relation between the first 20 minutes of the movie and the rest of it ). The article went long. As far as my brain could venture, i couldn't find a relation between a women with low-cut blouse and paucity of water. If anyone who gets to read this post has the analytical brain to reason out such a relation, please enlighten me by leaving a comment. Good Start ain't it?!
Totally pissed off with the very first article i started flipping pages. Every page had some picture or the other which had women in revealing clothes ( read "visible curves and cleavages" ). I have no idea when they are planning to stop this. ( Yes, i'm a very nalla payyan and No, i'm not interested in your response to this if you already know me ). Fine chuck the diagrams. I opened the middle page. It had a huge picture of Shriya, the female who acted with Rajni in Shivaji. Oh no!! I'm not describing her raiment this time, I'm bored of it and you can guess it! The sides had thumbnails of all the heros in Tamil Cinema. So this page had tidbits about cinema. The first piece of news read
"Thee Peyar nadigaikkum number peyar nadigaikum ulla modhal erikkonde pogiradhu. ippozhudhu adhu ucha kathathirku pogi vittadhu endrum sollalaam. Number Peyar Nadigaikku adhuthu adhuthu irandu padangal vandha vegathileye thiraiyai vittu veli eriyadhu. Adhanal number nadigai romba upset. idharkaaga, hyderabadil irukkum thee nadigai thanadhu thirai nambargalai kupittu oru migaperiya party koduthu irukkiyar. idhu therindha number nadigai innum upset." (If anyone wants a translation please leave a comment).
The next piece of news read
"Rajni, Kamalukku piragu ulagengum adhiga pugazh petra padam kanthasamy than. Idhanaal shriya saran migavum urchagam therivithu irukkirar. Inimel ella herokallum ennudan nadikka thudippargal endru avar kuri irukkirar." ( Translation rules apply ) --- Even though the article din't have anything important, one thing had to be appreciated. The news and the pictures on the page had some relation.. YAAY!
Perversion reached its limits on one of the pages. It had women posing topless. ( No, I'm not a pervert and Yes, the pictures were censored i.e. the vulnerable spots were blackened out with rectangles ). The picture had a long article which i planned to avoid reading and proceeded. As usual every page had some sort of vulgarity. Finally i reached the last page of the magazine. But that is not the end of the Story. The last cover page had actor Srikanth posing with Navya Nair for their latest flick. The news is that some movie of their's ( that will release and be out of theatres within a week ) had its name changed. Phew..Alright thats the end of it, i thought.
I flipped through the back cover page and flipped it to see the cover design again. The magazine's title read Kudumba Malar ( Family Magazine ). ENNA KODUMA SARAVANAN IDHU!