talking to people when depressed…

For most of the first half of last year, I used to turn to her whenever I was depressed. She was a great listener, used to patiently hear me out, suggest steps for further action, and by the time I hung up the phone I would actually be feeling great. And the feeling was mutual – she would turn to me in similar situations.

Yesterday (as is my habit), I was feeling really low, and as luck would have it she came online on GTalk. After much deliberation I pinged her and we quickly settled into a good conversation. As luck would have it, soon enough I had pissed her off enough to say “you really put me off!” and she chose not to continue the conversation then onwards.

What followed was this strange feeling of joy. Joy that I had pissed her off! Joy that I had pissed her off and didn’t have to apologize. This time last year also she would get easily pissed and many rupees of Airtel bills were spent apologizing to her. And here I am, pissing her off for the very same things, and I didn’t have to apologize! Soon enough my depression had all but disappeared and normal life resumed.

Wonder what make me so happy that I had pissed her off. Am I that sadistic? I don’t really think so. Well, she hasn’t exactly been nice to me of late. In fact I thought there was a period when she was really nasty to me. Was this my little way of extracting revenge for that? Or was this simply the joy of freedom – the freedom of saying certain things and not having to apologize for it anymore?

Nevertheless, last year talking to her would bring me out of depression. Same is the case this year, but for a totally different reason. Such is life! (wondering how many blogposts i’ve ended with this phrase!)

cricket roundup

If you remember, an “Australia A” team played in the 1994-95 world series cup in order to “compensate” for the weak competition offered by england and zimbabwe. Surprisingly, Australia A made the finals where they came close to beating the senior team in one of the games.

Anyways, today I had a look at the team that played one of the games. Look at the batting order. Let me shuffle it around a bit and you get Hayden-Langer-Ponting-Martyn-Blewett-Bevan! Has any other national second string batting order looked so familiar? Hats off to Australian foresight/perseverance.

Then in the ongoing ranji trophy, almost all national team players seem to be doing really well. Ganguly and Sehwag have scored quickfire hundreds. Laxman and Jaffer got good 70s. Dravid’s 56 against Saurashtra pales in comparison actually! Bowlers have also not done too badly – RP Singh and Agarkar have picked pfeiffers michelles. VRV and Pathan have four in an innings (and pathan did it at an economy of 2.4!!). Only Harbhajan seems to have performed badly. (for the record, Tendulkar and Munaf are not playing because of injury; Kumble and Zaheer have been allowed to “rest; Sreesanth and Dhoni can’t play since their states haven’t qualied for the plate semis)

Wondering if this tells a story about the gap in standards of international and domestic cricket. Wonder if it also tells us what needs to be done in case a player is doing badly internationally – ask him to play Ranji! Among other things, Uthappa seems to be playing really well and is knocking on the doors of the national team yet again. Same is the case with Badrinath and Ranadeb Bose.

The five wise men will sit down this evening along with the captain and coach to name the 30 probables for the world cup and the team for the first two ODIs against the west indies. Will be interesting to see how much experimentation they will put for the eight ODIs before the world cup. My take is they will rotate amongst a small pool (of around 16-18), unlike in 1999 when they got a tournament against Kenya and Bangladesh where an almost A team played.

tam names

Two days back I received an email from my HR informing everyone that a certain “rokini” was celebrating her birthday that day. Initially i found the name very unusual for a tam (her last name gave it away that she was tam) but then realized that it was just a “different” way of spelling “rohini”. Thankfully she didn’t spell it as “rogini”, which in sanskrit based languages means “diseased woman”.

Thing with tamil, as i have explained in my first ever blogpost, the tamil alphabet is very limited and practices polymorphism. For example, a single character represents K, Kh (as in khaana, khanna, etc.), G, Gh and some vague guttural version of n. Apart from polymorphism “along the rows”, there are some other peculiarities as well. There is no H sound in tamil, nor is there a letter to represent S or Sh, which are both represented by the “ch” sound.

What has happened is due to increased aryan influences, a number of tams have sanskrit-based names (in fact most tams I know have sanskrit names). Unfortunately, many of them can’t be accurately written in Tam, and hence get grossly mis-spelt. So you get Rokini for Rohini, and Braggasam for prakasam and gobal for gopal etc.

\begin{Update}One of the most popular bloggers in India is supposed to be Kiruba Shankar. When I first heard his name I burst out laughing because in Kannada, “kiruba” means “hyena” and whoever would have such a name! Then i realized it must be “krupashankar”. Writing “krupa” in tam and then transliterating it to english would yield “kiruba”. Strong. \end{Update}

So my dear tams, in order to prevent us from laughing at the funny ways in which you spell your names, I hereby exhort you to take on purely Dravidian names only. Listen to Periyar. Remember the dravidian movement. Chuck all the sanskrit in the names. And take on pure tam names. I’m sure you can’t misinterpret spellings with “Senthil” or “Anbazhagan” right!

Postscript Speaking of spellings, I don’t think the way I spell my name (Karthik) is accurate enough, though it is the most widely accepted spelling. Something like “kaartik” might be more accurate. However, it all depends on how you want to transliterate the Ta (as in tomato) and ta (as in pasta) into english.

101704

Having been to two schools with a strong campus lingo, I find it difficult to talk in “normal English”, and often break off into a combination of IITM and IIMB dialects! only saving grace is that a part of it is common to a number of other campuses in India, so people do understand me.

The other day I was telling God that every new school you go to, your vocabulary expands. He counterd by saying that it could even contract and there’s hajaar polymorphism in most lingo. For example, the number of meanings “put” has in IITM can even rival “set”.

Of course, I’m extremely proud of the fact that I’ve been party to introduction of a number of new words to the IIMB lexicon. Words like “are” (means really good or really awesome), or “jai” (borrowed from RVCE which in turn is borrowed from gen Bangalore Kannada slang, but given a whole lot of new meanings). Are.

Anyways, I’ve put enough cock now, so I’ll tell jai. But wait, just have a look at this arely are MA thesis (came out a year back but don’t think i’ve linked to it yet, so doing it now):

Click to access MAthesis_EvelynRichter.pdf

PS: two of my most popular “tags” – general and arbit are campus lingo!

This time the lenses weren’t at fault

It’s not too often that i write a serious story. I can’t recall having written too many of them. They take too much time to write, you need to go through multiple iterations, and you need a good storyline.

I have been working on one such for the last six months. The first draft came out in early june. the inspiration for the story comes from a personal experience of course. The characters in the story are BASED ON real people. The story itself, though, is a work of fiction and any resemblance it bears to any real incident(s) is unintended and purely coincidental. I begin.

Continue reading “This time the lenses weren’t at fault”

pertinent observations

During an ego-surfing binge yesterday, I found that searching for “pertinent observations” turns up this blog as the first result. And googling for “skthewimp” also yields similar results.

Of course, having a common name such as Karthik or having an english word such as “SKimpy” as a nickname does complicate matters – my blog shows up nowhere in the first few pages if you google for either of these. My oldest nickname “SK” falls in the same category – again too common a set of initials for me to be significant.

My other nickname “Wimpy” yields better results though – notwithstanding popeye and the burger joint. This blog ranks seventeenth (as of yesterday) in all searches for “wimpy”. However, searching for “wimp” doesn’t yield much luck.

Combinations of names of course yields much better results “karthik wimpy” and “sk wimpy” both lead to this blog. interestingly “karthik skimpy” throws up my defunct blogspot account (which i use only for commenting) as the first result, with this being a close second! maybe it’s got to do with google’s bias for blogger!

Anyways the search threw up some other interesting stuff. For example THE’s description of how i got my nickname (it’s a long and painful post, ctrl+F for wimpy to find the relevant part) and some of my other posts.

Oh yeah, the search also led to the first ever twisted shout story written by kodhi. Good stuff. Unfortunately for reasons unknown to us, we stopped that journal in the second year. Else I would’ve had another nice bullet point in my CV!

How do you guys know each other?

It’s happened twice in two weeks so it’s not funny. Two sundays back, I bump into Vyshnavi and Kavya at the Deep Purple concert. Last monday, I see Kuku (as in arvind, not ) and Ranjani at a Barista. And each time there are three of us simultaneously asking one another “how do you guys know each other?”

Ranjani was my classmate at NPS and Kuku was with me at my JEE coaching factory. As far as I remember, I can’t think of any “affiliation group” they are both part of. She went to RV, he to BMS. They haven’t worked together, they haven’t been to the same school for sure. So I ask them “how do you guys know each other?” And it so happens they choose the very moment to ask the rest of us the same! (for the record, Kuku and Ranjani didn’t know each other till ten minutes before I met them, and they were at Barista meeting a common friend)

Vyshnavi and Kavya were my classmates in two different schools. So I meet Vyshnavi at the concert and see this girl with her who looks extremely familiar but I can’t place her. Since I know vyshnavi through “the SAMS affiliation group”, I search in the SAMS list in my head to try and place the other female. I can obviously not place her since Kavya was not in SAMS – she wsa my classmate at NPS! So after a round of apologies, I pop the usual “how do you guys know each other”! (as it turned out, in this case too those two had met ten minutes before i met them – they had come to the concert on the meherbani of a common frined who had supplied them passes)

Interesing “social graph” these occasions display. A very strong “rectangle” (consider me, the two friends i’m meeting and their common friend to be the four nodes) and a “weak diagonal” (my two friends who had met ten minutes before) and an even weaker second diagonal (on both occasions i’m introduced to the common friend).

I’m wondering about the incidence of such “diagonal less rectangles” in our circles..,. probably i need to get data from orkut and check it out…

successors…

I hear that Turkmenbashi Sapurmurat Niyazov’s successor as president (or king or whatever) of Turkmenistan is the one who looks closest to Turkmenbashi! Though the logic may seem weird, i’m not surprised at all. One thing turkmenbashi did during his rule was to erect thousands of statues of himself all over the country! and given the madness of these guys, his successor is expected to do the same, costing enormous amounts of oil dollars! `

but with a successor woh looks like his predecessor, there is actually no need to put fresh statues! all they need to do is to change the nameplate!

amazing stuff! our politicians should learn a thing or two from these central asians when it comes to costcutting…

Why isn’t adeep lahiri an IITian?

When Satyendra Kumar Dubey was shot last year the papers were full of “IITian killed”. He got loads of footage in the TV media, and a lot was made of the fact that he was an IITian!

Now, three days back when Adeep lahiri gets killed in bangalore, he has been downgraded to a “techie”. Some papers even went to the extent of calling him a “BPO guy”. Only some painful reading of the detailed news items revealed he’s a graduate of IITKgp.

So does that mean IITKgp isn’t as IIT as IITK (dubey’s alma mater)? Does it mean that an IITian stands to lose his IIT status if he does MBA at SPJain? Does it mean that an IITian is not an IITian if he’s in Bangalore but he is more IITian if he lives in Bihar (of course, IIT has greater brand value in bihar htan in bangalore – i’ve had embarrassing situation where people asked me if i joined IIT because i didn’t get a seat in RVCE… or if i’m studying at ITI… etc.)?

My disgust iwth the media remains.