Similarly,

The route began at Penn station, navigating between the crazy cabs on Manhattan roads  and tourists in Central Park all the way to the upper west side beyond Columbia to the George Washington Bridge. Crossing the bridge, we moved on to the 9w, which my friend proclaims “the mecca of bikers” for another 1hr of ride in the greens. I enjoyed the onward journey but my mountain bike was not greatly suited for such long drives and had to beg my friend  to turn back. On the way back, we took the Hudson river parkway – a beautiful joggers/bikers track along the river all the way upto 51st street. Since it was already past 7:30pm, I decided to pack my dinner – a burrito at Chipotle, making the whole physical exertion “energy neutral” – I ate what I burned

My biking has a funny history of its own.  From the school days when I have torn scores of school pants every time I fell from the bike to hauling friends at college campus, riding the bike had its own charm. Everybody would have had their own stories on how they learnt to balance on a bike (hopefully when they were kids), how they were jealous to see a second grade kid effortlessly “monkey pedaling” an adult’s bike to the day they had to wait at the local puncture shop to see the mechanic trying to find the leak in a murky bowl of water. You might have grown up,but there remains the lingering  urge to sneak on to it before the kid next door sees you. When I told my parents that I bought a bike, they giggled away saying I was acting childish. I remember this particular conversation that my friend had with his dad when he got his bike.

To save us all from this frequent ridicule, somebody thought of patronizing  Lance Armstrong and made cycling a fitness regime. Today, I can see tons of bikers in tight outfits cruising on their cannondales weighing probably a kg. I wouldn’t  call myself a  fitness freak or a biking maniac, but just a biking enthusiast. My bike is over 4 months old,  I have refilled air in my tires just once and used it frequently to dry my wet towel. To make amends, I embark on such rides which allows me to explore the city as well. Wearing those mentally retarded helmets, a pair of gloves, carrying the bike up the LIRR stairs and watching passengers look at you with a sense of awe- has its own share of silly pleasure.

Did anything interesting happen after I posted my last entry (that was 298 days back)? Hmm..Let me think..7 train failed miserably twice, I got to visit India twice, fell sick twice and till now it had snowed twice in NYC.  Ya, also one of my RECT (or now NITT)  seniors is coming up with his book soon (best wishes sidin!).

Snow is light but as days pass, it could freeze and become the evil ice. You could see the municipal snow removers removing the snow from the street and dumping to the side walks while residents, shovel it back on the road. After this relentless war, people continue to walk over the snow and do what it hardly deserves. Make it super dirty and as the days pass by the city wears a shitty look with piles of brown snow or ice.

So what must an ideal snow remover do? Remove snow before it becomes ice. Heat based melting could be energy intensive (and not green), how about some sound based devices. High frequency waves, breaking ice blocks and melting them. But you don’t want broken car windows as the municipal ice exterminator moves through the streets. And yes, the snow needs to be picked like garbage and not left to rot. So how do you transport it or coming back to the previous point, melt it and allow it to drain through the city storm water drains as it happens during rains.Or with all the mobile devices emitting tonnes of cancerous radio signals, how about we all “tweet” the snow to its death?

So what brought about this change? One of the reasons is of late, I have been reading some really interesting blogs of other fellow bloggers.

After every fifteen minutes of brain draining work at office (oxymoron?) which includes checking internal mails on outlook, latest news, I tend to read few blog entries here and there. Some of them are darn hilarious, while other denigrating. But after reading each one of them, I have the strong urge to blog. With all hoopla, I hop back home only to doze off watching vadivelu and vivek comedy.

These urges keep coming every now and then and are directly proportional to how less you are busy at work or at home. A boring day always motivates me to write blogs. But the content gets churned over days only to find its vent on that D-Day when you try fishing out the username and password of your blog on wordpress. I don’t believe that blog is like a personal diary, I am sure nobody would make notes on their hawala transactions on blogger or wordpress. Probably if that was the case, we could have caught a bunch of criminals by now.

Osama bin laden’s blog on Sept 10, 2001

“Today I enjoyed watching my child bulldozing two lego towers with his toy airplane.. You get some cool ideas watching these kids these days.don’t you!” and you know what happened on Sept 11, 2001

Telgi’s Blog (kingpin of stamp paper scam in India) early 2002

“Damn these court vendors..I bought a new pen and that oollu ka patta didn’t give me a blank stamp paper to see if that pen writes. This is shear discrimination….I will print my own, make paper rockets and launch them on his face”

Swami Premananda’s Blog early 2001

“My disciples managed to recruit one more female staff today….uuhh..haaa. ammm…I can’t wait…mangalam ..mangalam!”

Life of police and CBI would have been lot easier then and all that they have to do is recruit some laggards who manage to read all blogs on the world and leave a post on each one of them.

But the most compelling reason is internet connectivity. Back at my undergrad, we had to wait hours to get access for internet access when somebody was tunneling to download porn at college internet “room” and get charged, to unlimited browsing in L&T (we could install yahoo messenger but they banned it the day after i left ), but again limited internet access at Delphi, 20X5 ( 4 hours internet ban at hostels), 24 X2 (full access during weekends) at IITM and now between my latest company and home I manage almost 24X7 internet connectivity again. Also, other major factors include “are you employed if so how long”, “age”, “do you have a girl friend or are you married” etc.

Immediately I pulled up an excel sheet to do some major curve fitting equations that I struggled to learn during my engineering and MBA days to conjure an equation to determine the propensity to blog which I would call the “blogurge factor”. 1 indicates a perennial blogger while 0 indicates destined to hell blogophobic

Blogurge factor (“BF”) = function(internet access (IA), how long are you employed(E), length of engagement (with your girlfriend or married life) (LEN), Age (A))

where IA could take values between 0-1 (0 – no internet, 1 – you have broadband at home)

E should be in years (0 if you are a student)

LEN in months (0 if you are not married or not in a relationship) and AGE in years.

BF = α₁IA + α₂E + α₃LEN -₄AGE + error

Where

α_{1 =} 0.4567

α_{2 =} 0.075

α_{3 =} 0.0009

α_{4 =} 0.013

(Note that Length of engagement is in months because people get bored soon and feel spending time on a blog is lot more interesting than talking with the opposite sex and this factor is more prominent than length of employment in years)

So in case of PBWNOGF (Poor-Bachelors-With-NO-Girl Friends) like me, where IA = 1, E = 0.8 yrs, LEN = 0; AGE = 26 would give a BF = 0.5037 which takes me past 0.5 mark, but for a poor chap with exactly same parameters like mine except that he is going with his GF for past 8 months, the factor falls to 0.3957

(Disclaimer: People who are hell bent on proving the above equation wrong, mind you I will tweak the error value to get the BF that I want)

All said and done, suddenly blog has caught the attention of so many people that, it has become one of the most important element of eating up bandwidth and storage space..who cares! infact we bloggers are indirectly pushing the Moore’s law and other infinite laws on storage/bandwidth/computing power. For some, it brings the writer in them (many times an illusion for the blogger and not the reader) or the comedian or the revolutionary or for some the power of “anniyan/Aparchitudu/Aparchit”..the anonymous with power to slander/comment/pour out emotions.

So whats your BF ?

(PS: I have excluded corporate, tech, PR, media, Mktg blogs for the analysis. Its all about personal blogs — Note added to evade some serious scrutiny on the equation by geeks )

Some of the best episodes include Imagination Land and Warcraft. The former, actually talks on how much that the 9/11 attacks have evaded the American psyche by featuring a terrorist attack on imagination. With public imagination running wildly, the CIA has no other option but to nuke the imagination. A hilarious episode with a strong message. The Warcraft episode talks about the growing craze for video games particularly among kids, who become couch potatoes playing games non-stop and becoming violent as they start emulating the characters and the wonder world.

The show, without any kind of inhibition pulls down all famous characters in the world may it be Bush, Al Gore, Hilary, Britney Spears etc. But what impresses me, the American Freedom of speech. Its absolute here and I guess this series can’t be screened anywhere but the US because the producers would need to spend most of their time appearing for defamation cases or receive constant death threats. I can understand freedom of expressing ones views, but abusing and using foul language..hmm..that needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. But at the end of the day, things turn out to be funny yet naughty.

I am always awed by the blatant contradictions in this country (read as USA). Probably the most immigration friendly country with freedom of expression held so high, but becomes really intolerant with the middle east and is so stereotypical that blames Indian and China responsible for growing food and energy price raises as Bush recently claimed” India’s increasingly prosperous middle class was helping to raise the cost of food“. A country that doesn’t stop its costly stockpiling of crude oil at current $126 a barrel price, that doesn’t exploit more than 5% of its oil resources, whose wall street biggies are kept afloat by sovereign funds from the middle east (if i may use Islam money), whose weak dollar is also responsible for the current price hikes (commodity is proving to be a better hedge against depreciating dollar) and lately doesn’t like growth stories in any other part of the world loves talking of world peace and order.

As in economics, the best thing a government can do, is to not to interfere but allow market forces to take control, similarly on the political scale, lots of issues would be better managed if they are not interfered with. Recently if I may quote the ministry of external affairs statement on US’s advice to India during Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visit to India “Both nations are perfectly capable of managing all aspects of their relationship….It is important that the genius of each nation living in a particular region is respected and allowed to flower to meet the expectations of enriching relations with neighbors“. Funny yet strong right!!

In spite of lingering commotions all over the world, people at large want to lead a peaceful and fulfilling life. So, I guess the possibility of future world war is pretty minimal as mutual dependance for resources would keep bargaining power distributed widely thereby reducing the emergence of power centers.

My piece of advice to this country’s political administration – “Concentrate on technology growth, financial management , keep raising the bars on standard of living, knowledge and continue embracing meritocracy. Stop this rhetoric and believe me, people would respect this nation a lot better – You would then be the real super power!“

Do you guys watch cartoons?

Starting on 21st evening by Jet blue on a 6.5hrs flight to San Jose, CF was eventless except for some 45min delay at JFK. I was told by my friends that domestic flight experience in US is something not worth mentioning, they felt that all of them were a bunch of Deccan Airways. But Jet blue was awesome, it had all features of an international flight, with individual movie screens and decent leg space. Very efficient I must say and they boasted on their in door catering menu – ” assorted chips, biscuits, nuts all for free….”.. I was joking with my friends that my company provides a much more bigger variety for free.

My friends were out there at the airport to pick me up and we all headed for a quick rest as we had action planned for the next 2 days. Early morning we headed to Disney Land, LA. A very long 6 hrs ride and I felt sad for my friend who was the only one who knew how to drive in that group. We gave moral support by not dozing off The route was just scenic, with lot of vineyards (California is supposedly famous for wine tasting events) and grew hotter when we hit LA. We made it to Disney Land at around 1:30pm. Now at the ticket counter, we were bit confused whether to go to the usual Disney Land or the California Adventures theme park. For the uninitiated, California Adventures has all that an amusement park needs to have for teens and adults like roller coaster and other mad rides. Disney Land park is more of a fantasy land and I am sure it would be hit among kids.

Making into California Adventures, me and friend made some quick strategy on what all rides we need to cover which obviously would be the ones with long queues and that provided the most of adrenalin rush. Disney has Fast Pass system, where in like our tirupathi system they tell us when you actually you need to come for your chance so that you can meantime spend your time on other attractions. But the catch is, you can’t get another Fast Pass if your previous fast pass has not been used for its ride. So invariably you will be in some queue or other or force yourself to mediocre rides. So the big thrills you should’nt miss include

a) Maliboomer: A full pressed spring which throws you up the sky when it recoils

b) California Screamin’ : An awesome roller coaster which will literally throw your guts out

c) Hollywood tower of horror: A 13 floor free fall in a lift ( the dramatics is awesome here)

d) Grizzly River Run : A cool rafting

e) Mulholland Madness: Will get you prepared for the roller coaster

In the night, Disney has a wonderful parade which dazzles in light and music. Tired and hungry we hit back to our hotel for a good sleep. Next morning we made a late start to Universal studios, some 40 miles drive from Disney.

Coming to Universal studios, one of the hollywoods’ biggest production house (and competitors to Disney..they keep saying that), is an attraction in itself. They take you on a studio tour which gives a glimpse of the making of special effects of explosion, back drafts, locales (they have recreated almost everything out there). The conductor was sweet, chirpy, funny chap who kept us in splits through out the ride. Universal has also its own theme attractions, but the difference, its linked to a movie like the jurassic park, mummy etc. The mummy roller coaster ride (all in dark) was a hit not because of the speed, but the way they take you deep in a cave and literally bring you back with the same speed like a full rewind. This is added with a feeling of those blood sucking bugs literally moving all around you. Awesome!!!. Next we headed to Terminator 3-D show another impressive show of technology and special effects and finally the Shrek 4D show, where the theater seats rock to the gallop, rough roads and donkey’s pranks.

After taking enough pictures (as a proof!!!) we head back home for another damn long drive back to Fremont and it was 1am when we hit our beds.

During the weekdays, I kept myself busy by visiting my relatives in Sunnyvale, Campbell and Milipitas. The scenic beauty of green fields, mountains didnt tire me out. Actually we made a partial trek of Mission Peak. After seeing all those big apartments, rush back at NYC, the 2 storied buildings, green yards, lakes was a blessing change. The life style was very much laid back and people were just enjoying life. Cool!

During the week I got a chance to go around the Pal Alto, Silicon valley, places around Standford and finally got to step into Google. Google looks like a big college campus, people eating, chatting and doing work at their own pace/style. I did get a chance to taste our usual Indian cuisine at infinite number of extremely affordable Indian restaurants serving really tasty food and my uncle who made some really exotic Italian Dinner. Loved it and good to see so many men have got a liking to cooking. My aunt was surprised herself and I explained her that one thing in the so called “women’s territory” (no more I think) that impresses men is cooking. Men perceive cooking more of a science, chemistry, mixing portions in different ratios and be intrigued by the different aroma and taste. Another thing that impresses them is geometry and cutting of vegetables using appropriate knives ( I love really nice and sharp ones) gives another satisfaction of symmetry.

Meanwhile I embarked on a missionary zeal to spread the ubiquitous rasam recipe but with a different flavor (sans dhal yet soupy). Click here to get it.

And finally on saturday, my friends took me to San Francisco to see the golden bridge. The structure is similar to Brooklyn bridge in NYC (Hanging bridge I meant), but what makes it really attractive is , it connects two mountains with sea in between. Further it bit more higher and the whole view is just awesome. I got a view of downtown San Francisco, but NYC downtown just beats it way down. I can’t just keep praising California always right

Then we headed to the Oakland international airport to catch my return flight to NYC. After performing the usual temple ritual (removing your shoes for security check) I boarded my flight back home. This time the journey was just 4.5hrs because of tail winds and I was back home at 6:30am thanks to MTA and Airtrain. Quickly took bath, had a good lunch and crashed to charge up for work the next day.

Getting back to work the next day was difficult, but the company helped me to get back to senses with loads of work . Looking back the trip would always be etched on my mind for a long time. Whats the reason…the place ofcourse..but more than that..its the people. If you have good friends, even Alaska would be interesting. Luckily I had some awesome friends (Venu, Saravana, Sreeja and Family) and relatives who took all the pains to make this trip of mine a big hit!

So where are you guys heading for long weekend??

Disney Parade

I wrote this piece for my hostel magazine at IIT, Madras.

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Sleep is something that probably every student loves and I am no stranger to that. While there is so much of research on “why do we sleep?” I am more interested on “why the heck do we keep awake?” We sleep for just a third of the day (that gets heavily compromised in our hostel life), but who decides on us sleeping for that small portion of time? The same people, who admire the blissful sleep of babies (mind you, they sleep for more than 18hours a day), keep constantly nagging at us to get up from the bed and stay awake throughout a class.

I get really annoyed when people just don’t understand the “great feeling” that one experiences when one dozes of to a deep slumber, particularly the professors who expect us to listen to theoretical gibberish at 1300hrs when oxygen struggles to reach the upper hemisphere (read as brain) like one of those rickety buses that puffs and huffs to climb a slope. There are other kinds of professors, who openly acknowledge this fact and make it a point to keep us awake, that mere resistance puts more people to sleep. While others, sadistically wake up a poor soul and ask him to solve a complex equation, when probably he was imagining himself enjoying a chat with his lady love over an empty cup of Nescafe at the Sharavathi (for the uninitiated, the girls’ hostel of IITM).

Understanding that I am in control of my destiny (at least as for as sleep is concerned), I always have that strong urge to take naps when ever I find a break between class hours. But Murphy’s Law pounces to action and I get entangled with some obligation or another reducing my precious sleep time to a minuscule. Yet, I religiously set my alarm for those nanoseconds to satisfy my deprived soul. Again in the morning, the “its-going-to-ring-soon” syndrome catches upon us as we wait for that dreadful alarm to invade into our state of “nirvana”.

My sleep patterns are kind of strange. I can’t sleep when lights are on, and my friends constantly irritate me by switching on the light in the middle of night. I just don’t understand how my rod cells are so sensitive that I feel somebody has lit torchlight inside my eyes. Also, I take more than an hour to fall asleep and the waking up process is equally long. Any disturbance to this ritual badly offsets my night’s sleep and I am forced to wake up with blood shot eyes and walk up to the class like a zombie. I am always jealous of those people who have concentrated sleeps, who are unaware of anything happening around them, and those who can manage quick naps and stay fresh…Lucky people, surely they must have done some good deed in their previous life.

More from the philosophical angle, I always contemplate on how the world would have been if we had to sleep 18 hours a day and remain awake for just 6 hours. Then the world would not be as its today, full of uncertainties and destruction, but rather a serene and better place to sleep. Those long periods of wakefulness are probably the reasons for the today’s sad state of affairs. Probably meditation is just another form of sleep and as the WordWeb defines sleep as also a euphemism for death, a state when the unconsciousness meets the consciousness of that Almighty, is what we are probably all eventually longing for.

I guess all of us would be constantly bombarded with words..” US market recession”, “NASDAQ/NYSE fall”, “weak dollars”, “subprime”, “FED rates” etc. etc.

Recently I came across  an article about applying psychoanalysis of stock markets to predict the overall investor mood/trend and predict the next market movement. “Neuroinvestors” as they say, are trained to diagnose phobias, compulsions and hope to find financial irrationality — the article says. It has been generalized that the majority of the investors follow the “herd” behavior and rationality is dumped for “instincts” – which is counterproductive to making money.

The “Prospect Theory” from Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman is supposed to be one of the ground breaking work in this direction.  The researchers found that people when offered a choice formulated in one way might display risk-aversion but when offered essentially the same choice formulated in a different way might display risk-seekingbehavior. Simplest example being, given a choice to chose between 1000$ sure loss to 50% chance of losing all or none of 2500$, people invariably chose the later even though the mathematical expectation $1250 > $1000. Similarly given a choice of making 1000$ or 50% probability of making $2500, people again chose $1000 even though 1000$ < 1250$.  Thus people tend to use irrational standards for evaluating uncertainty which are no way closer to the actual mathematical probability.

A Texan researcher by name, Peterson, who holds a degree in electrical engg. from Univ. of Texas, went to a medical school to develop qualitative and emotional models to predict market moves. He is planning to launch his hedge fund by name “MarketPsy Capital” and plans to exploit his newly developed software to detect human idiosyncrasies.

The logic is simple though, the software scans through millions of on-line stock material, news, blogs, investor opinions to gauge investor expectations. Words like “risky” are weighted against historical swings in the market and then used  to predict reversals. Under simulated studies, the researcher was able to make returns over 34% over S&P much greater than the 15% the average returns for a given period…all by simply by reversing bets, opposite to the market direction and cashing in when the market reverses. Cool!. His fund is currently strongly funded and he is yet to put his model to test on actual market/money. With hard results, he expects to pull in more investors.

The next logical question that the article raises, if the model succeeds and psychoanalysis of stock markets takes a strong footing, will it become increasingly difficult to make profit as “herd” behavior would continue to fall.  But as always is the case, man finds increasingly stranger ways to act irrationally.

So how do you invest?

I have this habit of trying to reason out certain weird things that happen around me. I have observed that people do spit on the roads here in NYC too and those who do are generally Asians and Hispanic. Asians here I mean Chinese, Indians, south-east Asians. I would ignore Japanese because I feel they are supposed to boast of great hygiene and cleanliness.

Its obvious that people lack civic sense when they spit on the roads, but instead of taking the usual track, I thought why do these people have the urge to spit at the first place. The reasons could be

a) Based on what we eat

Back home, we are known to eat betel leaf and nut. People try to spit out the remaining cud after extracting the juice out of it. Its like a chewing gum without its sweet taste and you better spit it out.

I am not sure of other nationalities but probably they too might have certain stuff in their food that might force them to spit them out.

b) Oral hygiene

Another reason for spitting would be improper oral hygiene. If you don’t brush your teeth properly, the accumulated saliva in our mouth would leave a strange nasty sensation which might force us to spit it out. I suspect this to be the most important cause for the Asians to spit. Eating constantly lots of baked/boiled meat but with improper oral hygiene forces them to spit relentlessly.

c) They have caught common cold

The notorious common cold generally leads to collection of flum in throat. You have this constant sensation to spit it out and sometimes you swallow it too (yuck!). My family doctor used to say, control the cold before it propagates downwards towards your throat and lung as in future it might lead to lung infections. Tropical climate and pollution probably makes us more susceptible to common cold and thus, the urge to spit (on the roads).

Summary: Eat sensibly, Brush regularly and Protect yourself constantly

Track 2

People generally hate Dhanush, but strangely I started liking him after watching Thiruvilayadal Arambam and Pollathavan. He is ideally suited for total “galeej” roles, the local “pettai” slang and a person of no class. Particularly in Pollathavan, I got to hear the “authentic” chennai slangs and surprised to know people knowingly or unknowingly use 3-4 languages. Words like “dauwlat” from Hindi/Urdu, “wrong..public..damage…” from English commonly figure in their speech. Truly cosmopolitan . In the climax scene, dhanush looks like brucelee in his bare body. Funny but you will have some good time pass.

Track 3

The “Nala” in me has been quite active. After my successful attempt at coconut burfi, I managed to make two more mouthwatering dishes: Masala vadai and Dhal Payasam. Luckily both of them turned pretty good and were greatly appreciated (referee: my tongue palate and stomach )

Recipe for Masala vadai

Take 1 cup of chana dhal, 1 cup of thoor dhal and handful of raw rice and soak them for 2 hours. Grind them coarsely with red chillies, coriander and curry leaves, asfoteda, salt, clove and cardamom. Generally urad dhal is also added but I used a bit of gram flour to act as the binding agent. To the paste add finely chopped onion. Make lime sized balls of the paste and flatten them on a greased sheet and deep fry them. Serve hot with tomato sauce or chutney.

Recipe for Dhal payasam

This is one of the traditional payasams made in south Indian and offered to the God. Its made of channa dhal, jaggery and milk. First cook a cup of channa dhal with a cup of milk in a pressure cooker till it becomes just soft. Meanwhile in a pan, dissolve jaggery and make a thick syrup. Add milk and once the mixture starts thickening add the milk cooked dhal. Add 2-3 tablespoons of grated coconut. Allow the mixture to boil on medium flame for 10-15 min till the dhal gets cooked completely. Garnish with cashews and raisins roasted in ghee.

Burp!!! I overate.