Journeys

I like journeying by train. The liking is mostly due to my passion for the railways which I have nurtured since my childhood.

Among several reasons that I do not like air journeys within the country is that they are very short. Another is that the passengers are very unsocial. They tend to keep their nose high and lips pursed.

I reached Delhi by the Calcutta Rajdhani Express. Although there is always more entertainment in travelling by a sleeper class coach of a less hyped train, a Rajdhani does not always lie far behind. Take for instance the family travelling with a one and a half year old child who kept roaming the compartment on her own tugging at people's books, newspapers and laptops, all the while smiling. Then there arrived another child who always looked angry and the two children immediately took to rivalry. A lot of crying and shrieking followed of course.

Then there was a Bengali family who boarded the compartment at Dhanbad and woke up an old lady sleeping on the lower berth because she could not climb to the upper berth and immediately picked up a fight (typical of Bengalis) with the others on where to put the luggages.

But the peak of the event came at dawn. At Kanpur Junction a girl boarded the compartment and woke up the nice lady sleeping on the berth below me claiming that the berth was hers. I immediately knew where the confusion lay but chose to wait and watch. After a lot of debate and cross examination of tickets I raised my voice and asked which train did she want to board. She promptly and confidently replied, "Sealdah Rajdhani". I smugly replied that this was the Calcutta Rajdhani. The Sealdah Rajdhani would follow in 10 minutes. She hysterically cried, "O shit! o shit". But, shit or not, the train had started moving. It was left to the merciful Deputy Train Superintendent to find her an empty berth and let her travel 'ticket-less' for the rest of the journey to New Delhi.

I am home...

Ah! Finally I find time for another post. I have been back in Howrah a week after what I must describe as the toughest 4 months of my life. 4 months during which my routine was ...sleep-eat-class-assignments-eat-assignments-eat-assignments-sleep... And what would I not give for a peaceful night of sleep then. I had nightmares all night of I not finishing an assignment, of an instructor failing me, and then there would be a segmentation fault and I would wake up with a jerk.

I have been making up and sleeping a lot this last week. But work has already piled up and I must go back to it soon.

Until next time, good bye.

Obamaniac

The CWG scams disappeared from the front pages of the newspapers, so did the Adarsh scam. Why? Because Barrack Obama had come to India. The minutest details of his daily activities had to be featured in the front page of every newspaper... and there can be only one front page for a newspaper (if you do not consider the latest gimmick of selling out the front page for full page ads). God!!!

Even the death of Sidhdhartha Shankar Ray could only find the bottom most column of the Kolkata edition of The Times of India.

Kudos to The Indian Express

I have been skeptical about the materials that appear in the print and visual media since long. Regular followers of yours sincerely will have noticed that. The point that I always tried to drill home is the media criticises all, but who criticises the media? Well, the unfortunate answer is that the general Indian public is so overwhelmed with the gimmicks that the media come up with that they will believe anything presented to them, and there is none to find faults with them. Taking advantage of this, the media now manufacture breaking news to increase their TRP.

I was very happy that The Indian Express reported on the drama being manufactured by news channels on the Delhi Floods. Please read it, it's kind of hilarious.

Udaan

They were running a free show of Udaan at the Dogra Hall yesterday. I took it as a welcome break from the strangling schedule here.

The theme was very contemporary: boy wants to do something while the father wants him to do something else. Add to it that the father is a psycho who keeps beating his children and marrying every time his wife dies.

The director does an excellent work mostly, except at the end. The ending could be better. If the solution is to run away from home, he could have done it a lot earlier: why wait so long?

The music was good and the background songs were well placed. The acting skills of all the actors deserve special mention.

It was a good experience which refreshed my mind.

P ≠ NP

While we carry on with our daily chores, one of the biggest breakthroughs in the realm of theoretical computer science may have just been made.

Vinay Deolalikar of HP Research Labs, Palo Alto has just released a paper to his fellow researchers claiming to have proved that P ≠ NP. This was something that has been baffling the greatest computer scientists of the day. Everyone sort of knew that the result was this, but, somehow, the proof had been eluding them. Such was the craze that there's a $1M prize money for the proof. Now the paper will be scanned from jacket to jacket under the eyes of uber-math geeks. (To get the feel of the uber-math geek thing, see this.) And if the approach turns out to be genuine, quite a few text books will have to be written.

The most important thing is that the gentleman at the centre of all this is an Indian.

If I have been away from my blog for a little over two weeks it's because I have not had much time to think beyond eating, sleeping and solving assignments, the last forming a major part of the daily chores.

The professors keep setting assignments and we are expected to find time to do them. And, mind you, they are not routine assignments: each one of them is enough to fry your circuitry for good. Lectures are neither long nor too many. But self-study and assignments form a major part of the goings-on. And as a result we spend most of the day in the lab: be it weekday or weekend, night or day.

However, you keep liking the things because the environment keeps you going. You always want to utilise the resources being provided to you to the fullest. And that is why there is no reason to complain.

Until next when I find time, have a good time.