Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Rehan and Mayanti
These were the people who made my Sunday.
1. Rehan Butt must get my salute/salaam/sashtanga namaskaram of the day for THAT beauty of a pass he made to Sandeep Michael which culminated in the winning goal for the Bangalore Lions against the Chandigarh Dynamos. He made a magnificient run from the half line, dodged three defenders and made that rasping pass to Sandeep from the edge of the D.... All this in spite of running a high temperature.
3. The beauteous and knowledgeable Mayanti of Zee Sports kept me rooted to my chair from
19:30 to 22:30. It also helped matters that Theo Walcott opened the scoring for Arsenal in
the Carling Cup final. Nevermind the fact that Drogba scored 2 to screw Arsenal, but dear
Mayanti, you have made my evening and possibly the whole week ahead!! You have rekindled my interest in Indian football too!!!
Who is Mayanti you ask?? O, ignorant one, here The Goddess appears before you:
Saturday, February 24, 2007
An evening to remember
The evening of 24th February 2007 saw new additions to my favourite singers' list. The occassion was the Carnatic Classical Festival called Indradhanush Mahotsav 2007 organised by the Fine Arts Society, Chembur.
The artists in question were the sisters Ranjani and Gayatri. Brilliant, melodious, uplifting are some of the words that I can come up with to describe the music of these ladies. The alapanas, the gamakas, the choice of songs and ragas were just right.
I simply loved the last bit, a Marathi abhang composed by Sant Tukaram which in the words of Gayatri is, "..a ninda-stuti..." (prayer by way of criticism). Somehow managed to locate the lyrics for this song from here:
Roughly it translates as: (courtesy Gayatri...)
"There is a demon in Pandharpur; Those who go there never return; Please don't go there... Tukaram went to Pandarpur, And never came back to this earthly life"
Before the last line was quoted, I was under the impression that she was referring to a ghost being tamed by Tukaram; but turns out that Lord Vitthal himself is being referred to as a ghost to suit the style of poetry...
There was also some Tamil poetry and a Purandhara Dasa 'rachane' (composition) in addition to the Carnatic numbers.
Some other facts also presented themselves before me:
1. The true meaning of the music 'Rasika' hit me only today when a majority of the huge audience followed the lyrics in addition to the tune and were able to appreciate the finer nuances of the song, while I was left just appreciating the tune.
2. Listening to Gayatri sing and speak has led me to this generalisation, "Any female who sings should be the emcee of any function." Her voice was kinda magical. Sweet, rich and commanding attention at the same time.
All said and done, this evening should motivate me to get back to my violin!!! Lotsa catching up to do.
The artists in question were the sisters Ranjani and Gayatri. Brilliant, melodious, uplifting are some of the words that I can come up with to describe the music of these ladies. The alapanas, the gamakas, the choice of songs and ragas were just right.
I simply loved the last bit, a Marathi abhang composed by Sant Tukaram which in the words of Gayatri is, "..a ninda-stuti..." (prayer by way of criticism). Somehow managed to locate the lyrics for this song from here:
Pandhari Che Booth Mote
Aalya Gailya Zhadapi Vaatay
Bahu Ghethalicha Raana
Bagha hey Veeday hoya Mana
Thethay Jaavu nakaa konnee
Gailay Nahi aalay Parathoni
Tuka Pandhari see gailaa
Punha Janma Nahi Aalaa
Roughly it translates as: (courtesy Gayatri...)
"There is a demon in Pandharpur; Those who go there never return; Please don't go there... Tukaram went to Pandarpur, And never came back to this earthly life"
Before the last line was quoted, I was under the impression that she was referring to a ghost being tamed by Tukaram; but turns out that Lord Vitthal himself is being referred to as a ghost to suit the style of poetry...
There was also some Tamil poetry and a Purandhara Dasa 'rachane' (composition) in addition to the Carnatic numbers.
Some other facts also presented themselves before me:
1. The true meaning of the music 'Rasika' hit me only today when a majority of the huge audience followed the lyrics in addition to the tune and were able to appreciate the finer nuances of the song, while I was left just appreciating the tune.
2. Listening to Gayatri sing and speak has led me to this generalisation, "Any female who sings should be the emcee of any function." Her voice was kinda magical. Sweet, rich and commanding attention at the same time.
All said and done, this evening should motivate me to get back to my violin!!! Lotsa catching up to do.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
The Defensive Enigma
Its been a perennial wonder as to why Indian teams lose matches when they are supposed to just play normal cricket without being too flamboyant or too defensive. An example of flamboyance would be the 3rd test against England in Bombay, the 2nd test against SA in Durban etc. Examples of defensive play would be the 3rd test against Pakistan in Bangalore, the 3rd test in the recently concluded series against South Africa etc.
Atleast to illustrate a side losing due to a defensive approach, India need to look no beond than the 1998-1999 Ranji season where Karnataka punished Madhya Pradesh for being too defensive in the Ranji final. MP chose to win the Ranji trophy by virtue of its first innings lead by batting out the last day. Instead they lost due to the web they wove for themselves.
Maybe Dravid needs to talk to people like Sujith Somasunder, Chandrakant Pandit, the lost wonder Vijay Bharadwaj, Sunil Joshi and the run machine J Arunkumar. The wisdom that he gains from this talk could be passed on to the Indian team; rather drilled into them that there is something known as a middle path between flamboyance and going into one's shell.
I am not able to recollect any examples for flamboyance, but one thing I can tell India is, you are your own teachers, so learn from your experiences.
Atleast to illustrate a side losing due to a defensive approach, India need to look no beond than the 1998-1999 Ranji season where Karnataka punished Madhya Pradesh for being too defensive in the Ranji final. MP chose to win the Ranji trophy by virtue of its first innings lead by batting out the last day. Instead they lost due to the web they wove for themselves.
Maybe Dravid needs to talk to people like Sujith Somasunder, Chandrakant Pandit, the lost wonder Vijay Bharadwaj, Sunil Joshi and the run machine J Arunkumar. The wisdom that he gains from this talk could be passed on to the Indian team; rather drilled into them that there is something known as a middle path between flamboyance and going into one's shell.
I am not able to recollect any examples for flamboyance, but one thing I can tell India is, you are your own teachers, so learn from your experiences.
Plagiarism by the Times of India
There are limits to copying. Or should I say, there are methods of copying. One is where you copy the meaning, the message whatever but not the words verbatim due to which no one's aware of the act of copying since they are unable to trace the source.
The least that could have been done was to acknowledge Cricinfo!!!
The other which is the more foolish of the methods of copying, is what the Times of India adopts i.e. reproducing articles verbatim. Today's i.e 23rd Feb,2007 main paper, sports section carried an article on Heartbreaking Moments in the cricket world cup. There was a section on the 1992 England-South Africa farcial semi-final where SA were left to score 22 runs of 1 ball due to some dubious calculation.
TOI wrongly assumed that none of its readers follow Cricinfo. The same article appeared in Cricinfo early this week. Read this article by Andrew Miller first.
Now check out this image from the e-paper version of TOI. Since I was unable to obtain a permanent link, I took the image of the offending article and underlined lines which were copied from Cricinfo. Turns out, it was the whole article!! Shame on you Solomon S Kumar.
The least that could have been done was to acknowledge Cricinfo!!!
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Replying to SriVishnu
Srivishnu Mohan, my junior from NITK asked me here as to why Arjuna is a hyper-polygamist. Well, the polgamy part is self explanatory. As far as I remember, Draupadi, Subhadra, Uloopi and Chitrangada were Arjuna's wives.
The hyper part is just for added effect !!!
The hyper part is just for added effect !!!
Monday, February 19, 2007
Interpretations of Autism
The IEEE Spectrum edition of October 2006 has an excellent article on autism, new viewpoints regarding autism and different classifications of autism. What drew me to this article was the magazine contents using the heading relating engineers and autism. And this is what I saw at the beginning of the article:
Among the children of engineers, autism and related conditions are found twice as often as in the general population, according to British studies, and are unusually common even in the grandchildren of engineers. Anecdotally, hot spots of autism have been reported in major centers of engineering, including Silicon Valley; Austin, Texas; and Boston’s Route 128 technology ring.
The article goes on to describe a new theory on autism which tries to explain autism as something not resulting from only external causes, but as merely the extreme of a continuum on which all of us reside. To quote the authors, In this view, autism is a difference not in kind of thinking, but in degree.
The psychologist behind this theory, Simon Baron-Cohen, from the University of Cambridge starts off with firstly classifying two poles of thought: the systematiser and the empathiser. The systematiser looks for recurrig patterns or attempts to classify everything under some pattern or the other, but the empathiser understands occurrences as a result of action of agents, i.e. minds like our own. He takes the example of an unkempt but designer tie and the article then delivers the statement which should put engineers on guard,
And, if Baron-Cohen is right, today’s male engineer is more likely to leave the house wearing a stained tie than his professional forebears, simply because he is more likely to be married to a woman who is herself of the systemizing persuasion. In Baron-Cohen’s interpretation, the flow of women into the universities has sorted them, as it long has sorted men, according to inborn mental proclivities—greatly increasing the chances that two systemizers will meet and marry. Such “assortative mating,” as he calls it, would have served to concentrate the critical genes, increasing the chance that such a couple will give birth to the most extreme systemizers of all: those with autism.
Well, the theory is interesting, but I have to take it with a pinch of salt!!!
My only point of argument against such experiments and classifications is that the control period is too long to arrive at any definitive conclusions. If I may be allowed to place an estimate, the control period for such experiments cannot be less than 3 years; and in 3 years lifestyles can undergo a sea change. Case in point?? Check out the way Bangaloreans lived in 1999 compared to the early 2000s. Hell, consider 2002 or 2003!!!
This is not to criticise the scientists, for whom I have utmost respect, but in an already paranoid world, unless you have an understanding population, such articles can set off ripples. Thank God, this article is in Spectrum and not in Times of India!!!
And Spectrum being Spectrum, provides gems like these:
So intently do those with autism focus on the trees that they often cannot see the forest. “What happens if you have such an extreme systemizing style that you study a rotating wheel close to your eye, looking at the tiny details, not playing with it as a typical child does,” says Baron-Cohen. “Your systemizing is so extreme that you learn everything there is to know of that wheel, but a psychologist giving you a test would find a learning disability.
Going by the above, Arjuna should have been an autist (remember the famous "parrot on the branch: take your best shot" test conducted by Dronacharya for the Kauravas and Pandavas, which, only Arjuna managed to pass out of the 106 present in total (including Drona's son Ashwatthama). Luckily Drona was not like the psychologist described in the previous paragraph, because if he had looked at Arjuna's concentration as autism, mythology would have lost its best archer and hyper-polygamist.
The next paragraph should be an eye-opener for the ignorant many in Indian society who tend to classify autists as people with inferior intelligence. Nothing could be further from the truth!
With high-functioning autistic people—those who tend to fall into categories six and seven—a slightly weaker systemizing tendency allows them to tolerate irregularity enough to cope with the world. They can master self-contained bodies of knowledge, such as calendar calculation, or the ability to name the day of the week on which a date centuries into the past or future falls. This trick is commonly found in savants, such as the character played by Dustin Hoffman in the movie Rain Man.
All said an done, the article is good, and the research, like all other research is aimed at the betterment of mankind. And in a sense of deja-vu for me, the article ends by saying:
Perhaps we must accept certain psychological extremes as inevitable side effects of essentially beneficial genes. “If we were to get rid of the autism genetics, we’d have no science,” Grandin says. “We’d have a lot of talented people but nobody who could make things.” And maybe this publication wouldn’t have many readers
Among the children of engineers, autism and related conditions are found twice as often as in the general population, according to British studies, and are unusually common even in the grandchildren of engineers. Anecdotally, hot spots of autism have been reported in major centers of engineering, including Silicon Valley; Austin, Texas; and Boston’s Route 128 technology ring.
The article goes on to describe a new theory on autism which tries to explain autism as something not resulting from only external causes, but as merely the extreme of a continuum on which all of us reside. To quote the authors, In this view, autism is a difference not in kind of thinking, but in degree.
The psychologist behind this theory, Simon Baron-Cohen, from the University of Cambridge starts off with firstly classifying two poles of thought: the systematiser and the empathiser. The systematiser looks for recurrig patterns or attempts to classify everything under some pattern or the other, but the empathiser understands occurrences as a result of action of agents, i.e. minds like our own. He takes the example of an unkempt but designer tie and the article then delivers the statement which should put engineers on guard,
And, if Baron-Cohen is right, today’s male engineer is more likely to leave the house wearing a stained tie than his professional forebears, simply because he is more likely to be married to a woman who is herself of the systemizing persuasion. In Baron-Cohen’s interpretation, the flow of women into the universities has sorted them, as it long has sorted men, according to inborn mental proclivities—greatly increasing the chances that two systemizers will meet and marry. Such “assortative mating,” as he calls it, would have served to concentrate the critical genes, increasing the chance that such a couple will give birth to the most extreme systemizers of all: those with autism.
Well, the theory is interesting, but I have to take it with a pinch of salt!!!
My only point of argument against such experiments and classifications is that the control period is too long to arrive at any definitive conclusions. If I may be allowed to place an estimate, the control period for such experiments cannot be less than 3 years; and in 3 years lifestyles can undergo a sea change. Case in point?? Check out the way Bangaloreans lived in 1999 compared to the early 2000s. Hell, consider 2002 or 2003!!!
This is not to criticise the scientists, for whom I have utmost respect, but in an already paranoid world, unless you have an understanding population, such articles can set off ripples. Thank God, this article is in Spectrum and not in Times of India!!!
And Spectrum being Spectrum, provides gems like these:
So intently do those with autism focus on the trees that they often cannot see the forest. “What happens if you have such an extreme systemizing style that you study a rotating wheel close to your eye, looking at the tiny details, not playing with it as a typical child does,” says Baron-Cohen. “Your systemizing is so extreme that you learn everything there is to know of that wheel, but a psychologist giving you a test would find a learning disability.
Going by the above, Arjuna should have been an autist (remember the famous "parrot on the branch: take your best shot" test conducted by Dronacharya for the Kauravas and Pandavas, which, only Arjuna managed to pass out of the 106 present in total (including Drona's son Ashwatthama). Luckily Drona was not like the psychologist described in the previous paragraph, because if he had looked at Arjuna's concentration as autism, mythology would have lost its best archer and hyper-polygamist.
The next paragraph should be an eye-opener for the ignorant many in Indian society who tend to classify autists as people with inferior intelligence. Nothing could be further from the truth!
With high-functioning autistic people—those who tend to fall into categories six and seven—a slightly weaker systemizing tendency allows them to tolerate irregularity enough to cope with the world. They can master self-contained bodies of knowledge, such as calendar calculation, or the ability to name the day of the week on which a date centuries into the past or future falls. This trick is commonly found in savants, such as the character played by Dustin Hoffman in the movie Rain Man.
All said an done, the article is good, and the research, like all other research is aimed at the betterment of mankind. And in a sense of deja-vu for me, the article ends by saying:
Perhaps we must accept certain psychological extremes as inevitable side effects of essentially beneficial genes. “If we were to get rid of the autism genetics, we’d have no science,” Grandin says. “We’d have a lot of talented people but nobody who could make things.” And maybe this publication wouldn’t have many readers
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