Zephyr and the intruder

He liked to stay in his room, where always he felt under control, his feudal kingdom. He felt under control because the elements of the room were under his own supervision. Zephyr could decide on who comes in, including sunlight, how should he react or even ponder whether the other presence deserved a reaction or not. But once Zephyr stepped outside the threshold of the door his control was gone. He was under pressure to respond to the sudden intrusion of external elements. Forced to react to the new sounds, new people, old people and even the Sun's play on him. Sometimes he chose not to and be like a transparent layer between what was on his right and what was on left. He could choose not to but damn those people who knew him well.

"Don't pretend to read", Zikka laughed derisively in a mocking tone. Zephyr knew he was caught while retreating to his shell. He immediately put on that "I am sorry" expression on his face with a fake smile that Zikka could immediately penetrate. Zikka smiled back, conscious of the fact that she had sensed that moment of vulnerability in Zephyr, caught spliced between reaching out and shrinking back. People like Zikka made it a point to blot Zephyr's social journeys, and these were the people who forced him to learn what he called the art. His art was exclusive and its only practitioners were the secret service agents. The art of being inconspicuous, the art of being fluid like a person minus his physical presence. Only because of his art he learnt to be cut off and be sane. Sometime he wondered why people are so fake with a wedge forcefully inserted between their external and internal appearances.

His life went on like this and one fine day came the intruder.

Zephyr had stayed all his life in hostels and knew an empty room without its occupants is a prized possession. Fortunately or not his roommate decided to go for a yatra to attend a marriage. That too for a week. There was he, lying alone in his room wondering what he could do. "Don't be naughty, Zep", someone hollered from the outside. Zep smiled and thought field nights for a week. So he set about decorating the night with a bushel of his favourite cigarette, a comfortable quart of "saste main masti - old monk" and settled comfortably in his universe ready to vanish. Once the rituals were done Zep set on to do his favourite activity of the day - which was to read a book with a glass of the monk and a cool breeze cutting across his thighs. For a bried period he was lost in this reverie and was close to becoming something which was not his character. He for once became a wall completely divorced from his room.

As the time passed by the bushel became a couple, page 6 became page 69, and the quart was reduced to an ounce, the apothecary's ounce. But he was sure saw a silhouette with tail that swished by and he was confused what to attribute it to. "Definitely not the monk" his innards whispered confidently. He chose to ignore it, the voice and the tail. When the quart was done, his day was done, or so he thought. As he retired into the bed and reached for the lights he saw the tail, escape the dustbin lid and not the dark room as he had imagined the room would be. At 4 A.M. end of the day shouldn't have been so bad, Zep thought. He could still see the tail sliding along the lower skirting of the wall into a corner along with 2 pairs of legs. The lights were still on and he tried to desperately search every corner, thanking himself that the room did not have many things on the floor to plunder. Of course the tail eluded him suddenly appearing and disappearing like magic act. Finally at 5 A.M. tired with the search, Zep chose to sleep and chose to forget that the tail could climb up the legs of his bed and put on a late night taandav on him.

The next morning was very happy for Zep thinking that the tail would be gone, but this elation lasted only for 30 seconds, for now in broad light he could confirm it was a rat. Sadly he surmised that from now on his control area, his terra firma, would have to be shared between him and the rat. Atleast the rat couldn't be Zikka, thanked Zephyr and went about doing his job - hiding from any external intrusions and calculating the area the rat would need in his room. He was firm and decided that the rat could not be allowed to prance in his whole territory till his roommate returned. Then it would not be his headache alone anymore.

Forget the quartiles !!

Don't target the 1st quartiles or the second or hell even the third. As per Pareto, and the tribes, its the quintiles that matter.

Can't think of a title

"
There was a young man who said: Run!
The end of the world has begun!
The one I fear most
Is that damn' Holy Ghost,
I can handle the Father and Son.
"
(Unknown limerist, early 21st Century) - From William Poundstone's Prisoner's dilemma

Meanwhile the fires must linger (from a friend)

MBA Hazard

On two different levels, I think there is a problem with this statement -
A good piece of statistics or a good piece of fiction, which is tougher to create?
I think, after undergoing the tortures of regression, clustering, multivariate analysis, the former is not a cakewalk.
However, the years of endless reading also says, the latter ain't that easy either. I think lets leave it to the Poissons, flauberts to decide.

Linguistic overtures - reloaded

Presenting the linguistic overtures, the longitudinal collections. At the behest of a cynic, here it goes, the time warped collection of tilted view of words.

Collection 1 - "Around the world"

Saluting the spirit of obsession - "Lust is contained fully in being a slut"

And they say the problem with the devil was that - "Even after reading it backwards it lived"

Devil and lived

Infact it goes a little inside as well, evil when prodded backwards is live

It's very puzzling to see two words describing the same action, having different connotations but the same letters just rearranged. I need not explain, but see the difference between -

Veto and Vote

Two difficult words with the same letters but very different consequences for our world, today. How a flip can make something so dangerous?

S AC RED
S CA RED

Collection 2 - "Mathematics on english - English language quirks, mathematically speaking."

A matter of taste : State - Taste = '\0' (Null character) which means for me (stating without having a sense of taste is meaningless). I am just curious or plain "wanton"

Matter - Meter = Eat

Touch taken to hurting proportions loses a "t" and becomes ouch.

Intim"id"ate - Intimate = " ID ", coincidence or Freud coined these words.

Propitiously "women ...... men" and the question to you is what fills that dots (a mathematical symbol). The answer is ">" because men on both side cancel out. Now this has some deep insights.

Collection 3 - "Quirky, related? Yes the words in English"

Gateway = Getaway (flipped the three letters in between, and backwards)

Incidentally if you have not wondered ever "Bedroom" has an interesting jumbled up word which is "Boredom".

Two unseemingly related words which are again jumbles of each other -

"Teacher" and "Cheater"

"Fresh from the rakes inside - doom is also after all a mood"

Disclaimer - Some of the listed contents above are plain rants or even beyond redemption. I know or sometimes I donot know. I have just documented as they occurred in that moment. Let me know which are "Meh"!!
PS - Meh is the latest addition to the English dictionary.

Random Quotes

A small session of random quote making progressed in the ideation area of my brain. So here is a couple of rant / quotes / whatchamacallit -

"Photography is just an eye between an intrepid at one end and the world at the other end."
"Death is also like photography but intrusive. The act catches a snapshot of life but in the process ends it. "

Linguistic Overtures

Saluting the spirit of obsession -
"Lust is contained fully in being a slut"

And they say the problem with the devil was that -
"Even after reading it backwards it lived"

Juste comme ce la

The journey of internet - from period to dot.

Linguistic overture

Two difficult words with the same letters but very different consequences for our world, today. How a flip can make something so dangerous?

S AC RED
S CA RED

Twitter curious

Apparently when someone tweeted a gmail address, I checked out whether GMAIL is on twitter.
Lo and behold - YES!
Where on twitter - Here
Soon I visited the profile only to see this and twitter offered me "actions" to block "gmail".

Well, the gaffes of technology ...

Linguistic overture - 7

State - Taste = '\0' (Null character) which means for me (stating without having a sense of taste is meaningless)
I am just curious or plain "wanton"

The Hindu's Literary review is a treasure trove to discover your likes and dislikes for a host of books. Some of them in today's issue -

"I have long subscribed to the idea that one of the novel’s primary tasks is to produce a map of the contemporary. By one definition, then, the province of the novel is what you read in your newspaper each morning or watch on your television at night. The novelist’s task is to explore how the news enters people’s lives and indeed becomes a part of daily life." - Amitava Kumar in his piece on Aravind Adiga's 'The White Tiger' (This is great)

"These are women who live a humdrum existence, mainly jobless, surrounded by children, a world so common that I sometimes think it does not deserve to be written about." - Rumina Sethi in her book review "In the country of deceit" (Now this sounds really apathetic, isn't great literature about what is everyday and common, like the above quote. I felt offended.)

"

A falling petal

Strikes one floating on a pond,

And they both sink.

" - quoted by Ravi Vyas in his article on classics revisited (This is spellbinding. Poetry is a real dense form of communication and often very tough for me to even get near to it, forget comprehension. But this enthralling, WOW)

So for me THLR is a treasure trove. For many who really do like it, here are date wise listed archives

A sign of things to come

" but we really don't care about OS's the way we used to. I switch back and forth between my Vista and OSX boxes with ease. Why? Because everything I do now is in the cloud so all I need is a Web browser. Hint: starting a web browser up on both OS's isn't that much different between the two. After getting my browser started I really don't care about the cool desktop search or the improved wifi features (at least not that much). It's not like the early 1980s where there was deep pain in using these systems and each update brought a TON of new stuff.."

This is from Robert Scoble. Although I am not that well informed/aware of the cloud computing business and all, but pretty much of my activities today are centered around my browser. So more power to such things.
What I do understand is -

1. The OS will become a "low involvement purchase".
2. Browser will be the cynosure of activities.
3. Apps will become indifferent to the underlying OS.
   

An issue with design

We are being exposed to a lots of good looking and useful applications these days. Top of my list that have really broadened what I know today are - Friendfeed and Twitter. But the problem still remains, the disconnect between semantics and application design. Sample this -

A business veteran of 30 years of experience has been wiped out. But the feature of "liking" an article says below that "someone liked this". I know that the person who liked it was referring to the article. But for god's sake someone has been wiped out, and the application says - "someone liked it".
As I see it there is a disconnect between the application side (the content) and the human side (emotion). This is pretty much disconcerting for me at least. Semantics is therefore about two things - the application, the human.

PS - The person who found this article "intriguing" is a great guy.

Grammar 101.2

Today I was looking for books to populate my new bookshelf after shifting to a new home. I found it really curious and oddly intriguing. In terms of the job, it is a sheer pleasure (remember I am not saying SHEAR, imagine the consequence otherwise). In my own queer way I was searching for books are reflect something about me, something about my journey through these books. However, given that I have about 100 odd books, which pretty much seems like a tyro's library, I gave up pretty soon.

What did I do? Revel in my own collection wondering "aah - I do have this book, oh - I have this book as well, now I don't have to buy it again". So I had the likes of Francis Fukuyama, "A Portrait of the Artist as a young man", "Vedic religion", Primo Levi, Andre Gide, "Tin Drum", "Remains of the Day".
Out of the dark comes this book by Lynne Truss titled "Eats, Shoots and Leaves!". What is it about? Well, for those who are familiar with the term "grammar nazi", it is about punctuation. So I am back to my own favourite topic - finding gaffes in english usage around me. Perfectly captured here by the author -

"If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of pulse ...."
"... it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement."

It is always such fun to read about "mis-punctuation". Sample this (A panda comes to a hotel, eats a sandwich, fires two gunshots in the air, and leaves. When asked by the waiter, as to why, it says, refer the wildlife manual which mentions- )
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves"
Understand? Coming to the title, presenting today's gaffe over the web -

PS - What the two words really mean?

Fore·ward

The van; the front. [Obs.]

Fore·word

A preface or an introductory note, as for a book, especially by a person other than the author.

Well, what can I say am I a grammar nazi? Well, yes. Maybe, no. Ohh! All of this later!!

Grammar 101

Okay I cannot claim to be a "know-it-all" as far as grammar is concerned. But given minimal awareness I may not make such mistakes. This is live from a B-School (event frenzy in B-Schools going on these days)

"---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Events Coordinator <events@%$$%%.org>

Date: Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 3:15 AM
Subject: $%$%$ presents Paragana 2008 :Launch of Chrysalis and Engrave ,Business Plan Competitions
To: events@%$$%%.org

Hi All,
due to a server error the attachments could be delivered.
Kindly RESEND this mail to all your college students.
Apologize for any inconvenience caused.
"
Okay so due to a server error normally the attachments cannot be sent, but curiously it was sent in this case. D'accord
But it get curious-er (pardon me), they want the receipient college to apologize for the server error. LOL, LMAO, ROFLOL and suchlike.

(so much for event organization pressure)

A complaint

I just have one complaint against the "book" - It does not capture the transformation of its own author as a character without, while doing the same within. Or perhaps this could be an idea that could be explored in the same book.

Linguistic overture

It's very puzzling, for me atleast, to see two words describing the same action, having different connotations but the same letters just rearranged.
I need not explain, but see the difference between - Veto and Vote

Linguistic overture

Touch taken to hurting proportions loses a "t" and become ouch.

Technology as an enabler - chuck that

This happened to me just now -

So when I am commenting on an article I am reading on LiveMint, which had some problems in linking. Apparently the third page of the article has been wrongly linked to another article by Vir Sanghvi on Rolling Stones while I was reading an article on data mining. I try to point out that, and I get this error (INVALID written next to my first name).

So today's discovery- I have an invalid first name. Thank you Amma, Appa for giving me an invalid name. Ayyo!!!