moonlight

time flies, it really does… and in a week and two days i have to board that inevitable flight back to college… these hols were simply the best and i really really don’t want them to end… i wish all life were hols

for the record, this was officially the best summer ever… may was one hell of a roller coaster ride and i loved all the twists, turns and loops ( the past 11 days ) june was a week in awesome andamans, a week in sultry yet oh-so-homely calcutta… and after cal, it was two glorious weeks at home… july, well, i’m still at home and rest latter half will, alas, be at insti…

what i did at home : read and read - digital fortress, deception point - both by dan brown, the devil and miss prym - paulo coelho, the cracking codebook - simon singh and halfway through ‘the adventures of feluda’ - satyajit ray…

dan brown,well, here’s the gist of the four books : one world disasterous situation… a maiden and her faithful scientist… one high class dude who wants to save the maiden because of senti reasons… and lethal killing troupe who are ruthless and have no idea who their employer is

paulo coelho is what ma calls too intellectual… you need to see as he ’sees’… his writings are vague yet i find them enjoyable… kind brings in a deeper aspect to your soul if you want to understand his writing, that is…

the cracking codebook - the history of cryptology, the evolution of ‘unbreakable’ ciphers… lost fame and recognition and wit at its very best… a MUST read for anyone who enjoyed dan brown and also others, even otherwise

feluda - a bengali detective, class apart - satyajit ray’s works of art come to life through his words ( though i’m reading the version translated to english cuz i ain’t that fluent in bangla )

and… i met up with a lot of friends with whom i didn’t think i’d ever meet up… painted bathroom tiles and kitchen tiles ceramic painting - the latest obsession for me

and ofcourse, conversations at 6pm

sums up the summer of 2008 was simply awesome

lines from ‘better days’ by the goo goo dolls… i can’t help but listen to this song over and over again thesedays…

it was the 7th of jan, ‘08 - 12 45am… i had just played a horrible joke on him… and he didn’t realise it… i acted hurt and he sympathised with me… and when i did tell him it was all a joke, he shut me off completely… he behaved so so erratically that i couldn’t believe that i had awaken the worst in him… i couldn’t forgive myself for what i had done… he blocked me from chat, switched off his cell… to leave me in desperation - a pillow soaked with tears and muffled screams of guilt… i kept trying his phone every 15 mins… i finally got through at 2 am…

both of us had cried like anything… and he told me to listen to ‘better days’… i did… and as silent tears rolled down my cheeks and whimpers from him were all i could hear, i knew that things were going to ok… i promised him that i’d never do anything like that again - ever…

gave my lappie for a battery change - it was discharging real fast - like in 15 mins when its supposed to last for 12 times that amount… the servicers formatted my lappie and as a result all my data is lost - acads, music and pics… all of them

going home tomorrow… its been a wonderful two and a half weeks… today is our last day together… i don’t know what to think… whether to be happy that we made such beautiful memories… or to be sad that our time together, for now, is coming to an end…

the project i’d stayed back to work on is anything but tending to completion… coding is such a thing that you cannot anticipate where a ’segmentation fault’ will creep up and turn your night’s sleep into a jumble of contemplations of loops and assignment statements… to add insult to injury, the department computer room - medusa - is being used as the venue for the mtech interviews… so we can work from only 1pm today… i wonder if we’ll be able to get the program running by 5pm…

all the seniors say that if you stay back for a project, more often than not, you’ll give up and go home… and when your prof doesn’t care a damn about whether you’re working or not, you really feel no incentive to put up a fight… i mean, if he doesn’t ask you by himself how the work is going or whether you’ll be able to complete it before the deadline, and the only interaction you have with him is when you go and ask him your doubts and even then he doesn’t have some concrete solutions - its frustrating… sure i’m enjoying what i’m doing, but it would be so much better if sir cared i was doing something…

stations, local trains, sweat, smiles, clasped hands to avoid getting lost in unruly crowds, auto rides, chicken in all form - chicken noodles, chicken croissants, chicken pizza, chilly chicken, chicken kababs ; playing hide and seek with the watchman, omlettes and buttered toast breakfasts; footer field, world war II conversations, sunshine, moonlight, stars, aeroplanes, eyes burning from sleep deprivation, walks in the sultry weather under the moonlight, sleeping off from 7am to 2pm, the seaside, junk, coke, bisleri, blue and red vaala lays, making recordings, lakeside sunsets, gg roof sunrises, footer field star counts, cloud shape contemplations, cricket fielding positions’ lesson with chocolate sauce leftover from the sizzling brownie ; bohemian rhapsody, killer queen, american pie, she will be loved, groovy kind of love, paint my love ; ‘gublu-gublu-gublu-gublu’, ‘cool-cool’, lower-lip-stuck-out-pouts ; kfc, ccd, saffron and spice, kareem’s, mocha’s, natural’s, domino’s, subway, pop tate’s, sheesha’s, baghdadis, monginis, road-side-juice stalls, haji ali juice centre, railway station food stalls, staff c, gullu, maddu mess; sedimentary and igneous seasides; cloud sunsets, sea sunsets; titanic, notting hill ; stories about snakes, childhood, incidences ; google earth, firefox, media player, winamp, vlc, mplayer, fifa08, minesweeper; laughter, friendly punches, tears, pouts, walks, cross-road runs, jokes, pjs and djs ; and krishno chura petals… I)

after more than a year, the day is finally here

PS i don’t think i’ll be blogging much these next few days… then again, maybe i will…

ok… arbit theory time :

consider an average iitian who develops a ‘liking’ to this girl… we call this degree of liking as ‘love concentration’ which is a function of time. now, his grades start getting affected adversely because he can’t think of much else but this girl. and the more the ‘concentration of love’, the more his grades get affected.

so, we formulate this equation:

- d(grades)/dt = k[love(t)]

here, k is a constant depending upon the person in question and [love(t)] is ‘love concentration as a function of time’.

now, the [love(t)] can be assumed to be of the form : N( 1 - exp(-λt))
where N and λ are known constants and time is in months.

so, we integrate this equation ( from t=0 to t and find that grades as a function of time is :
grades(t) = grades(initial) + kN/λ - kN(t + exp(-λt)/λ)

now i can’t actually draw the graph here right now, but it turns out that the grades initially decrease, reach a minima and then go up again

to be honest, this is what i expected… because when i fell in love, it was whirlwind of emotions of sorts and then gradually, we became each other’s strengths… and its imperative that we support each other now…

update : courtesy my friend kalyani’s comment below, the struck out part is incorrect… hoping someone can suggest me a love(t) function which proves the struck out part…

here’s a scrap convo we had on orkut (it was the night before an exam for me)

me: feelin’ happy and sleepy and tense and nervous and nonchalant and stupid and crazy and silly and weird and huggable and kissable and maed!
justify all the emotions by giving the reasons for feeling them
best of luck!

(all of the following constitute his reply )
oh my god
hey, you haven’t given the word limit
anyway, here we go then…

HAPPY because you’ve just had a brainwash from an expert anasuya-brainwasher which has, well, ‘washed away’ the negativity. the inertia thus imparted to the brain ensured that it went into happy mode. hence proved, your brain functions like a pendulum. only it sometimes get stuck at the extreme positions. the main objective of the anasuya-brainwasher is thus to keep you stuck at the extreme position corresponding to the happy state. it is such a refined art, universities could soon be handing out degrees for specialization in anasuya-brainwashing. unfortunately though, only one person will be eligible to apply.

SLEEPY because your body is smarter than you are. you think you can trick it into believing it’s getting adequate sleep. sorry babe, your body ain’t that dumb. by integrating the intensity of sleep over a time-period spanning a whole day, your body is able to accurately calculate how much sleep you’ve been giving it. and in case you’re trying to be too smart, the body has a control center to retaliate against such injustice. the guys up there inject extra melatonin and dopamine into your bloodstream, and voila, you’re, er, dope!

TENSE because that is the default feeling every brain in this world generates before a big day. every brain which is not on depressants, that is. infact you need to go see a psycho (-logist) if you’re not tense.

time for a [:*]

NERVOUS is a synonym for tense. bad question. and for this i shall demand compensation. no details need be given here.

NONCHALANT is diametrically opposite of tense. this happens because of the law of conservation of energy. since one part of your brain is full of negative energy, the brain has two ways of conserving the law. one, it can develop positive feelings thereafter, or it can induce them there and then. do note that the brain does this purely out of respect for theoretical sciences and empirical laws.

feeling STUPID is a sign of humility. nobody ever wants to admit that they’re stupid. they always pass the buck to the others. no, we’re smart. others are stupid. these are the words of the haughty. so you’re humble, and for this you get a [:*].
however, feeling stupid is also a paradox, as it takes brains to ascertain you’re stupid, and if you can do that it means you’re not stupid.

and do i need to even begin justifying why you feel CRAZY? coz baby, that’s what you are. it’s a, umm… er… manufacturing defe…. feature, rather. a custom-made crazy babe… slurrp! so that’s you’re instinct, and hence justified. indeed it is why i find you so delicious, and for being crazy you get another [:*].

SILLY? awww… cute little kiddie babies are silly, and since you’re a cute little kiddie baby, you’re feeling silly. so there.
interesting fact about the word, though:
Silly has undergone one of the most astonishing semantic about-faces in the history of the English lexicon. In a thousand years it has gone from “blessed, happy” to “foolish.” The transformation began with “blessed” becoming “pious.” This led on via “innocent, harmless,” “pitiable,” and “feeble” to “feeble in mind, foolish.” The related German selig retains its original meaning “happy, blessed.”
Encarta ® World English Dictionary © & (P) 1998-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

WEIRD because the happy-tense-nonchalant mix is an eclectic one. your brain, being equivalent to a little baby’s brain as far as feelings are concerned (i don’t mean the magnitude here, just the distribution), is incapable of handling these three per se, so it generates the weird feeling to shroud the unrest. thus your brain is duping you. and you can’t even think about it because it is your brain you use to think after all. you think what your brain wants you to think. think about it.

so now we move on to the two more sensitive topics. but before that a [:*].

HUGGABLE. my my! now that’s exciting!
okay, back to professionalism. you’re feeling huggable because of the puppy fat all around your anatomy which make you absolutely huggable. plus, you’re feeling cuddly because of the nature of the situation which makes you wish to be hugged. you haven’t specified with respect to whom you’re huggable, but i think i know it, so *hugs*.

KISSABLE. i think this needs a bit of a detour from professionalism.
anybody with luscious lips like you have, what with all their pulpiness and softness (my goodness, are they delicious), should ideally feel kissable all the time. use a bit of lip balm and keep them moisturized, coz someone would like to kiss them pretty soon.

MAED. now there are only two people (because of the copyright on the term) in the world who can feel this way: you and i. given the mix of emotions above, you don’t even need to tell me you’re feeling maed. and in fact, after writing all this, i think i’m even more maed than you are.

please note that this was not a free service. payment will be charged in kind, in a format which shall be disclosed to you over a telephonic conversation.

>> this is what we call complete arbit-giri

my math prof - gks, is one of the most engaging teachers i’ve ever come across… despite our lectures being in LT (lecture theater) which is air conditioned, cushioned seats and dimmed light, which induce sleep in ‘acchon se acche’ ( ‘cuz even our insti diro (director) slept off in the first row during a cultural ‘gandhi jayanti’ function for a good half hour), gks can manage to keep people successfully awake throughout a period of one hour… it is quite an achievement, let me tell you that… especially when the math is the first lecture on two days - at 8:30 am… and you can’t expect junta who sleep at 4 am to even bother about the first lecture ( apart from the die hard maggus )… even then, there is quite a turn out by 9 am…

anyway, coming back to the title of this post, our current course is about differential equations and we have just started laplace transforms… we were learning about the laplace transforms of sinωt, cosωt and i was astonished when he pointed out that though the sine and cos function vanish as different function as s tends to infinity… it was really weird - we always treat sine and cosine as just graphs shifted by π/2 and even then, their laplace transforms decay differently…

and then we started talking about the smoothness of functions at zero and the way their laplace transforms decay… only, there was a very feeble relationship between that… a naive assumption that says if a function is twice differentiable, it will decay as s^-3 can never ever be made…

he went further and said that these were deep problems in wave propagation… and hence, the gamma function was introduced to make fractional order differentiation valid… he said that fractional order differentiation is not introduced into math just like that… infact, we are compelled to introduce it to deal with the wave propagation problems… come to think of it, i’d never wondered that there could be even fractional order differentiation when i learnt to differentiate in 11th… and for the first time in a few weeks, i was marveling at the applications of math…

i was seriously staring open mouthed and wide eyed at him…

the Chemical Engineering Association - ChEA… there was a call for ideas for the department t shirt… and i sent in my ambigram… and it got accepted!