chaotic order

Jottings: Slice of life I have a friend, who has this rather quaint habit of correcting English pronunciation, whenever he gets a chance. It could happen in the middle of a serious conversation, or it could happen just out of the blue. Either way, I find it very funny and sometimes irritating. You may ask me: what gives him the right?. Well, here is the thing. He has done his schooling here in the US for couple of years, went back to India and returned many years ago. Now anybody, who has gone to school in the US, as a young boy or girl is bound to pick up the nuances of Western accent. It is common fact. All our children are examples of that. Most of us find it difficult to understand our four year olds speak English. Quite Natural!!. When they spend hours and days together in an environment where nothing but proper Vocal training and pronunciation is enforced, they will end up picking it easily. Nothing surprising about it. Also, it is very easy to acquire accent neutral language

The Painted Veil – A study in Human foibles Among all the novels and short stories of Somerset Maugham, none reflects the pathos of human relationship, its pettiness and its greatness with as much poignancy as “The painted veil”. Maugham wrote prolifically. His plays, short stories and novels run into more than couple of dozens. And in all of them, there is an underlying current of Human fallibility that strikes the reader with great force. Whether it be “Of Human Bondage” or the “the razor’s edge” or his beautiful evocation of South Pacific seas in “Moon and sixpence” or his numerous collections of peerless crafted short stories – Maugham unfailingly depicted the simmering tension between Husband and wife, Man and his lover, rationality and instinct with an eye that few contemporaries of his age could master. His characters also displayed hostility and a certain of sense of introspection that made them look cruel and unapproachable. Perhaps, his misplaced childhood, a life long li

Last words.. However well a man may have lived, his death, or at least the last words spoken on his deathbed, lingers for a long time like perfume in the air. The words end up taking even greater importance if the person was a legend in his life time,or has martyred to a cause, was a soldier or a statesman , or was a religious Saint venerated or desecrated during his life time, or sometimes, it could be common man whose daily life is lost in the obscurity of history but elevated by chance to pedestal of glory through few dying words - giving them immortal fame. History overflows with such individuals. And, for some strange reason, we, the educated public have great fascination for those final words. We have the capacity to forget and forgive everything else about a man, if his dying words carry significance beyond the grave. They become hallowed individuals for us, like Gods - worshipped, venerated, to be emulated . We like to cling on to them in our memories as they presented them

Jottings: Slice of life Each month, a nearby senior housing facility brings all its inhabitants ( or those that are interested) to a Goodwill store close to my home. The Saturday they arrive is usually a bustling day at the store. There are on an Average about 25 of them, dressed casually in Pants and light tops, wrinkled skins of different ethnicities ,covered with white or grayish hair tucked with no specific care, leaning on Walkers or walking sticks, walking through all aisles with the intensity and joy of a five year old, calling aloud to their friends when they spot something interesting or identify an item they have specifically been looking for. All around, there is tremendous enthusiasm when they are there. On the day they visit, Goodwill takes on a facade of high class store with all eager elderly shoppers romping around with eyes wide open and chattering incessantly, when on other days, the same store wears a subdued look of a charity house where people mostly with long

Jottings on a Tuesday evening.. While we celebrate the victory of artificial intelligence over Man in a game of chess or Go, I would like pause and think on what do we mean by this word intelligence. Chess or Go, if you come think of it, is in essence only a series of computed moves based on logical rules accumulated through experience, culminating in a decision triggered by a previous frame of reference. Which means, if a piece of software can be programmed recursively for all possible combinations of moves based on a variable or a set of variables, then it is not at all surprising that we would eventually end up building a machine capable of holding billions of instructions to be served at moments notice. Given the state of computing today, this is child's play. Machines are unemotional, psychologically irrelevant, relentless, methodical, error-free and they don’t suffer from the vacillations to which Human beings are naturally prone. Hence anything that requires tireless per

"The Reader" - shadow of the holocaust (PS : This is a pretty long essay. A Good friend of mine requested me to add a note on top (specifically on FB) whenever my writing crosses 1500 words. His reasoning was it makes it easier to find enough time to read. It seemed good, sane advice and I decided to incorporate it straight away.. Thanks Old boy.. ) Enough has been written of the holocaust; more reams of paper have been filled with the gory details of how more than six million Jews were incarcerated, brutalized, broken physiologically and physically and finally exterminated in the most inhuman conditions conceivable – than any other subject in the last seventy years. Scenes of Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald have arrested our attention in thousands of biopics, to the extent that many of us have become in-sensitized, accustomed to its horrors, and anesthetized against the sheer “banality” of evil committed during that span of five years between 1940 and 45. No amount of

Jottings in Boulder... The city of Boulder in Colorado is one of those eclectic places in the US. Something similar to Berkley or San Francisco in California. An university town; sizzling with energy of young people, a flamboyant attitude and a sense of raw life coursing through its veins. Surrounded on all sides with beautiful mountains, the city itself nestles in its arms like a child in a mother’s. The name of “Boulder” is apt. In a land of Mountains, it evokes a sense of big stones.. There are no multi storied buildings around; Boulder city prohibits building any, and all its establishments have distinct architecture reminiscent of those built decades ago - flat style colored in deep brown, blending seamlessly with the texture of woods enveloping them. After work yesterday, Sameer -a senior tech developer took me home with him. What a beautiful home, and family!!. Sameer is one of those immigrants who came to the United States in early nineties, straight out of a premier inst