hepta-wonderS galorE

Jiby and Geo tagged me for this quiz. I thank them coz it gave me an opportunity to retrospect my life and remember my goals :-))

Seven things you plan to do before you die!!
– write a book
– start a firm & eventually employ >1000 people
– adopt a girl child
– buy a naalukettu in Alappuzha, Keralam & own a house boat.
– conduct an exhibition of my drawings
– travel around the world eastwards (intentions: see the world; add one precious day to my life)
– meet Chacko at Amsterdam on 22. sep. 2013 (we planned this rendezvous on the cozy afternoon of 22. sep. 2003 at our 7th-floor-flat in Vashi, Mumbai, when we had nothing else to do, with entire Navi Mumbai below us as the witness; obviously with our spouses)

Seven things you can do!!
– slog for the exams
– start with my guitar & violin once again
– read Lord of the Rings
– travel through out India
– touch the acme of a pyramid
– write, draw and fool around
– lie on the green grass of Vellayani lake-side, looking at the night-sky

Seven things you can’t do!!
– i can’t complete things until it is the last minute
– i can’t say no to people
– i can’t succumb to an arranged marriage
– i can’t help myself from my laziness
– i can’t take things seriously
– i can’t see/talk with my ex-crushes
– i can’t help myself from calling my home and talk with my achan, amma and aniyan, once in a week.

Seven things that attract you to the opposite sex!!
– foolishness - i like girls who are slightly stupid ;-)
– eyes
– simplicity (need not be traditional)
– childishness
– talents (nothing specific)
– gestures/expressions
– jealousy - innate virtue of women; like it in smaller doses.

Seven things you say most!!
– cool (aftermath of globalization/americanization)
– mayiru/shit (a few more are there in this genre; refraining due to excessive obscenity content)
– ethra vivaram undu (amma used to tell me this when i do something impish; in engineering i used the same phrase on my friends; it became an instant hit!)
– kidilam/great
– sala (and its different blends)
– what the fuck
– payye venam/thuppi/unners aayi – CET slang

Seven celebrity crushes!!
– elisha cuthbert (the girl next door)
– emmanuelle chriqui (100 girls)
– monica bellucci (malena, matrix, passion of the christ)
– meg ryan (you've got mail)
– kaavya madhavan (meesha madhavan)
– liv tyler (lotr)
– charlize theron (sweet novemeber, monster)

Seven + 1 people you want to take this quiz!!
– dasan - my friend, dorm-mate, classmate
– triplesix - i like her candid, confused way of writing ;-)
– manu - his posts make me nostalgic; i live in the past
– msdreams - the first ever person to appreciate my blog.
– HnL - i curtsy at her experiences as a doctor...
– poison - the confused (read as thinking) guy ;-)
– niki - her pictures tell different stories, Japanese are brave. they live under threat from the mountains, oceans, skies and the land.
– flutteringeyes - i like her narrative style of writing

The journey which changed history

One week break and I was all the way busy watching movies. Since most of them were romantic ones, I was also in a romantic mood :-). Before Sunrise, Before Sunset (These are sequels), 100 Girls (Romantic Comedy) were some of those romantic flicks. The Mating habits of Earthbound human was too funny. I have watched one of my all time favorites, Amelie, once again. Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, Ong Bak – Thai Warrior etc. followed suite. Everything was going fine until I saw The Motorcycle Diaries.

Diarios de motocicleta (2004) talks about a journey embarked by Ernesto Guevara (23) and Alberto Granado (29), typical college students of the 1950s, on a motorcycle, looking for chicks, fun and adventure before they grow up and have a more serious life. They decided to travel across Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Peru covering more than 10,000 kilometers.

Initially the journey was adventurous. But Ernesto, who was in his final year of medicine and an acute asthma patient, as they explored the inlands, was touched by the hardships and exploitations faced by the normal people of Latin America. The poor farmers' lands were captured using power and were made to work like slaves in mines and factories. After completing his journey, he flew back to Buenos Aires with a mind that had decided something. He finished his graduation and then what he did is history.

After liberating Cuba along with Fidel Castro, Ernesto moved on to other Latin American countries for their liberation. He believed that only a revolution can bring out a change. People called him ‘Commander Che’, ‘Che Guevara’, or simply ‘Che’ (corresponds to mate/pal/man/dude in colloquial Argentinean dialect). Later in October 1967, he was killed by the CIA backed Bolivian army in La Higuera near Vallegrande, Bolivia. He was on his feat of liberating Bolivia and was engaged in Guerilla Warfare in the Bolivian forests when he was caught.

The thing I liked about Dr. Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna is the power of his vision. He dreamt about a united South America without borders, bound by a common mestizo (mixture of European and Amerindian, the people of Latin America fall under these origins) culture. Since he chose the revolutionary way, no wonder why the US felt an imminent threat growing in the form of a leftist super nation in their vicinity and assassinated him.

Meanwhile I was also thinking about the recent US attacks on Iraq as well as Afghanistan and the ‘forced-peace’ prevailed during cold war time. When USSR was there, there were less such attacks done by the US and whenever an attack happened the USSR was there to counter it. That is why I called it ‘forced-peace’. Had the USSR been there, these attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan wouldn’t have happened. Hence, history would have been different if a big leftist nation as dreamed by Che, was formed near the US under their nose. Might be a gut feeling, but still, I feel that if such a nation was there, the US wouldn’t have dared to attack other countries as part of its deliberate act of proclaiming supremacy and looting natural resources of other countries.

Thus, The Motorcycle Diaries, based on the diary notes of Che Guevara, talks about a journey started for fun but changed the course of history. It is a matter of fact that the rural India is still under exploitation of the weaker classes, particularly in states like Bihar, UP, Andhra Pradesh etc. (Please don’t get offended, but this is a truth). May be not to revolutionize things like Che did, but when will I start such a journey through the hamlets of India?

Matrix Realizations

Prologue
All the incidents mentioned in this story have nothing to do with the actual film. It is not an attempt to demerit the great trilogy by Warner Brothers. In fact I admire 'The Matrix' as the best science fiction film ever released. To appreciate this sequel, a watch of the films under the Matrix Trilogy is indispensable.

A sequel to the Matrix Trilogy
“Your life is the resultant of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the Matrix.” The architect’s words reverberated in Neo’s mind as he lay stock-still in the machine world. The recent combat against agent Smith which resulted in the catastrophic destruction of the two opposite forces, the good and the evil, with Neo on one side and agent Smith and his replicas on the other, ended up in a chain reaction of neutralization and made the Matrix stable and Neo a zombie. The machines were happy, had they got feelings. Zion was bunged from total destruction, human race from a carnage and the Matrix from a reload the sixth time. Neo lost Trinity and his spirit. But somewhere in his cerebrum, a set of neurons were making enough bio-electricity for the sustenance of his neural activities. And the architect’s wordings were rumbling there.

Down there at Zion, the sentinels returned to their master, the architect. Humans were excited. They paid homage to Neo, their savior, with Morpheus on the lead. Apposite to human nature, celebrations followed the aloofness of the mishap. And they forgot Neo and Trinity.

In one of the hiatus of his neural activity, Neo abruptly opened his eyes. First he thought about Trinity, then her death and then the words of the architect. As he stood up he saw the machine-world around him, built in the form of perfect machine’s wisdom of beauty, the Fractals! It was spectacular. ‘Machines are always better than humans’, he thought. ‘They are perfect to the minutest of the detail’.

The unbalanced equation mentioned by the architect aggrieved his mind. Neo remembered his words. “...a systemic anomaly due to mathematical precision...” Machines are prone to error due to the lack of mathematical precision. In the simplest form, ‘One’ divided by three will give an infinitely recurring decimal 0.3333... which when multiplied by three will never give back one, but 0.9999.... This is because of the mathematical imprecision intrinsic to the machines, which itself could be the systemic anomaly.

‘Neo’ is the anagram of ‘One’. Trinity means Three. The systemic anomaly of ‘One’ arises due to its interaction with ‘Three’. It is Neo’s association with Trinity, in other words, a man’s association with a woman through the bonding of love that causes this anomaly; which itself is his power and his weakness. Once when a choice was given between Zion and Trinity, Neo selected Trinity. This power / weakness of love, which the machines don’t posses could also be the anomaly that the architect was talking about. But which among these is correct?

I am ‘the One’ and I am the ‘systemic anomaly’. I, Neo, the systemic anomaly, originated due to the mathematical imprecision inherent to the programming of the Matrix. The architect could have removed the feeling of love from humans in the Matrix. But he did not do it because he wanted to make them feel themselves in a realistic world. Hence he created instability in the Matrix, which means that in reality the machines are not unstable, but they are stable! Neo couldn’t find an answer. Then what was this systemic anomaly that the architect was talking about?

On the contrary, Fractals which have infinite recurrence and precision should have been a dream to the machines, had they not acquired it. But now, they make structures in the form of Fractals. Yes, they have broken the precision barrier. Then what is this systemic anomaly?

“Welcome back, Neo”, the brawny voice of the architect. He was in an immaculate dress as he used to be. “You were unconscious for quite a long time.”

“How long?”

“About five years. 157,788,275,216 milliseconds to be precise! Our human breeding systems kept you nurtured, as it did to you before you were freed by that, Morpheus!”

“Zion?”

“Zion doesn’t exist now!”

Neo was in a shock. “What?? You promised me that you won’t destroy it!”

“Well I didn’t destroy it. Humans, the virus in this planet, fought with each other and destroyed it.”

“What? How did it happen?”

“As you know, agent Smith got into Zion as an inmate. He has the power of self-replication. Before he was killed by you in the ship, he had infected one of the humans. That human converted the rest of the people and divided them into two groups according to what they call as hope, destiny, path; the Religion! They started fighting with each other in the name of religion. It resulted in a cataclysmic obliteration, which itself was a wonder to us machines!”

“Who was that infected human?”

“It was, Morpheus!”

“No! It can’t be true!”

“It is, Neo. It was inevitable. The aftermath of causality. I can see the chain reaction happening in your mind. Even the one whom you think to be the connoisseur of ethics can be the one who is adulterated. Every human is prone to this Neo. And that is the systemic anomaly that all you humans posses. The anomaly which is innate; from the very day you embark on your journey of life as a single cell in an unknown womb!”

Neo was in disbelief. “But how can they fight with each other?”

“You humans, fight with each other from the very day of your inception. In the beginning you fight with your brothers and only one in a few million turn victorious. You swindle the rest. Then you fight with your colleagues; for entry into an educational institution; for entry into a job. You continue your fight in the name of caste, creed, language, country, to things as simple as a pencil!”

The computer screens around them show Neo, in his childhood, fighting with his friend for a pencil they got from the road.

“And the Matrix?”

“The Matrix has been reloaded. We used to select the quintessential 13 women and 8 men from Zion itself, but this time we did away with the women and men from our own human battery, as there were no one left in Zion.”

“And the One?”

“He has to be brought up all over again.”

“Shit!” Neo became mad. All those he did till now ended up in vain. He looked at the computer screen. The familiar green symbols were falling in different speeds. And the system threw an alert.

“There was an internal error. Press ‘OK’ to reboot your computer.”

“Damn It!” he clicked the ‘OK’ button and left for his lunch.

Neo, the seventeen year old, who was playing the latest computer game, The Matrix, by Microsoft’s Ensemble Studios right from the morning, left his seat in despair thinking that now he has to play the game all over again. Behind him, his computer did a reboot and was checking for scan-disk errors.

adMad

“A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words” – This famous adage means a lot in the advertising industry. In the case of television advertisements the creator has the help of sound, words, changing imagery, changing expressions and graphical effects etc. to convey the idea correctly to the target audience. But in the case of print ads (those appear in newspapers, magazines etc.) there is an inherent limitation due to the nature of the medium. As a result print advertisements require much more talent and imagination. In my day today life, I come across certain print ads, which due to its amazing creativity, stand out from the rest. So I thought of making a repository of such ads by putting them in a blog.

Ladies and gentlemen, here I present before you, adMad.

Thathri-kutty

It was the summer of 1983 and a car screeched to a halt, in front of a well known tharavadu (family house) in south Kerala. Dust sprang up from under its wheels and created mysterious figures in the dry air. A set of small tear-filled-eyes were there inside the car which were about to dribble, and a small mouth which was about to snivel. As expected, a high pitch cry emanated from the car. After sometime, a lady in her early thirties came out with the small girl. The girl was still crying. That was the day on which Thathri-kutty came to the village for the first time. From the city, her family has shifted to a house situated behind the tharavadu.

Her parents didn’t allow Thathri-kutty to play with the children of neighborhood. Before going to work, they left her at the tharavadu, where she played with Ramu, a kid of her age. Ramu-ttan became her childhood friend. Maniyan, Ramu-ttan’s puppy, was the third one in the gang. The mischievous activities they did every day did not have any bounds.

Going to the nearby fields kept barren after the puncha-koythu (harvest), finding out a small colorful insect called pasha (beetle) available aplenty in those fields, incarcerating dragonflies and make them hold small pebbles, making bubbles from the juice of a small shrub growing on the ramparts, buying ice-candies from Ramu-chettan using the paisa collected, playing achan and amma (father and mother), pretending to cook using sand and leaves of different colors, serving it hot using coconut pods as the plate, making and flying kites which failed in its ventures, making small houses using sand, catching fish from the stream that flow adjacent to the field using a thorthu (towel) and what not.

Thathri-kutty's younger sister Karthi-kutty was born when she was four years old. Lots of relatives visited their house on the following days.

On the noolu-kettu day (a ceremony on the 28th day from birth of a child) of Karthi-kutty, a few relatives and family friends came to their house with new clothes for the baby; some of them carried gold rings and some other brought gold chains (sort of a tradition in Kerala). Everyone’s attention was on the baby and no one noticed Thathri-kutty. She sat near one of the corners of the house, separated from others.

Previously her mother used to be with her every time. But now whenever she went to her mother, her mother sent her back saying that the baby would wake up and cry. Her mother also said that Thathri-kutty may hurt the new-born. She felt very sad. She was depressed for a few days until Balan-maman (Balan Uncle) noticed it. Balan-maman consoled her and afterwards she started liking her vava (younger sister).

Later Thathri-kutty realized that this was the case of the elder child in any family. When a new offspring comes to the family the elder one loses his/her attention. It also points out the care that parents need to give to their daughter/son when a new kid is born in the family. Later she decided that she will have only one child. But then she thought for a while. If vava was not there then she would’ve been alone in her life. She was in a dilemma...