8 random facts

I was tagged by Amit for this seemingly harmless activity. It has taken a LOT of my time to do this! So here are the rules for this game:

1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
3. At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment and tell them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
4. If you fail to do this within eight hours, you will not reach Third Series or attain your most precious goals for at least two more lifetimes.

I am pretty much a goner when it comes to #4, cause I am doing this five days late! So I am not reaching Third Series and will not be attaining my most precious goals for at least two more lifetimes. Not very different from what it is now...!

So here they are - 8 random facts about me.

1. I love being busy. I am not a workaholic, and I love my weekends - but I must be doing something at all times.
2. When it comes to organization, my friends tell me that I have OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive *Delight*)
3. I am supremely accident prone. A classical case of trouble-magnetism. And I have a natural flair of making a complete fool of myself in the most impossible of situations.
4. I dig reading user manuals and safety manuals. That's the reason whenever my friends buy something new, I am given the user manual! As a gift. :D
5. I hate my glasses, but I love my wristwatch. I never take it off. Never.
6. I love watching movies of all possible genres. They could be foreign languages, limited edition movies, art movies, animation... but I choose what I want to watch.
7. I like meeting people. I don't care if my acquaintanceship lasts less than an hour - but if I end up having a nice rich conversation with this person, I feel great about it. But it's really difficult to find people of the same wavelength, and more so when they are strangers.
   
8. In my mind, I put things (people, activities etc.) in patterns. I don't use it for making judgments, but I just enjoy doing it.
   

Hmmm. So these are 8 random facts about me. And to continue the chain, I tag Abheet, WhoDunIt, Shreya, Saurabh, Dimple, Gaurav, Deepika and Shreyasee. Have fun!

Prangstgrüp

Columbia University. It's a quiet afternoon in a library, with everyone spending all their time and energy in the upcoming tests.
It was more than the occasional cough that tore through the silence in the Columbia University library that afternoon.
A voice sang out in Broadway style...
"What's this?
What's this on the page?"
I can hardly believe my eyes
Every page I turn is a new surprise
And I'm doin' it all because I'm reading on a dream!"

All students looked around awkwardly - not sure if to tell him to shut up or whether to laugh along. He went along to sing a whole song in these lines, with supporting members giving the music and a lady friend who danced a complete routine.

YouTube Video © Prangstgrüp (3:00 min)

All students are enraptured by what was going on. Then the "pranksters" left. Like the way they came. Prangstgrüp had struck again.

This is the boldest group of students who come up with these audacious campus pranks - be it a really long and loud computer startup tune in the library, or giving "accurate" lectures in the NYC subway (on optics, combinatorics etc. with assignments and all) to people caught totally unawares or even bursting out with a song in the middle of a lecture they are not even originally a part of (see video below)! Go ahead... spend a few minutes with these really amazing artists! They have 17 masterpieces so far - all of them hilarious, and really bold! (Somehow they always manage to videotape it very well.)
This is TEACH: A lecture musical.

YouTube Video © Prangstgrüp (3:07 min)

Anorexia

Came across this advertisement on Anorexia. It blew my mind!

Google Video (39 sec)
Anorexia Bulimia Contact | Mirror

Creative Director: Martin Stadhammar, Grey, Stockholm, Sweden
Client Service Director: Sigrun Yngvadottir, TCB, Stockholm, Sweden
Director: Oskar Bård, Hobbyfilm

Related post: Perception of beauty

Just around the riverbend - II

I'm female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That's all you need to know. It's all that matters these days anyway.

In March last year, I had made an entry (Just around the riverbend) about Baghdad Burning, a blog by an anonymous Iraqi woman who goes by the name Riverbend. She has been posting entries in this blog since August 17th 2003 - her entries being true tales of a life governed by fear, hate, misery and distrust. The italicized text above was her very first entry in her blog.

Well, her blog was converted into two books: Baghdad Burning - Girl blog from Iraq and Baghdad Burning II - More Girl blog from Iraq. The first book went up for the $52,000 Samuel Johnson Literary prize, chronicling three years of war and destruction in Iraq, with no filtering whatsoever from the media. The publishers maintained her anonymity at her request.

Riverbend continued blogging, giving a painful and bitter description of the corruption running in politics and how the armed forces now getting involved in raping and killing the very citizens they are supposed to be protecting. The frequency of her blogging reduced greatly over the last year because it took a lot out of her to write about things she hated and could do nothing about. The recent-most raping allegation that happened in February was cleared in less than 14 hours and the accusing woman was thrown in a bad light. That was her entry in February. After a long period of silence, she wrote her last entry in April.

She's now leaving Iraq. Her home country.

So we've been busy. Busy trying to decide what part of our lives to leave behind. Which memories are dispensable? We, like many Iraqis, are not the classic refugees- the ones with only the clothes on their backs and no choice. We are choosing to leave because the other option is simply a continuation of what has been one long nightmare- stay and wait and try to survive.

Riverbend, April 26th 2007

Extract from Google Book Search:
In August 2003, the world gained access to a remarkable new voice: a blog written by a 25-year-old Iraqi woman living in Baghdad, whose identity remained concealed for her own protection. Calling herself Riverbend, she offered searing eyewitness accounts of the everyday realities on the ground, punctuated by astute analysis on the politics behind these events. In a voice in turn eloquent, angry, reflective and darkly comic, Riverbend recounts stories of life in an occupied city-of neighbors whose homes are raided by US troops, whose relatives disappear into prisons and whose children are kidnapped by money-hungry militias. At times, the tragic blends into the absurd, as she tells of her family jumping out of bed to wash clothes and send e-mails in the middle of the night when the electricity is briefly restored, or of their quest to bury an elderly aunt when the mosques are all overbooked for wakes and the cemeteries are all full. The only Iraqi blogger writing from a woman's perspective, she also describes a once-secular city where women are now afraid to leave their homes without head covering and a male escort. Interspersed with these vivid snapshots from daily life are Riverbend's analyses of everything from the elusive workings of the Iraqi Governing Council to the torture in Abu Ghraib, from the coverage provided by American media and by Al-Jazeera to Bush's State of the Union speech. Here again, she focuses especially on the fate of women, whose rights and freedoms have fallen victim to rising fundamentalisms in a chaotic postwar society. With thousands of loyal readers worldwide, the Riverbend blog is widely recognized around the world as a crucial source of information not available through the mainstream media.

To-WAR-ds nowhere

While reading about the current crisis of Hamas vs. Abbas over Gaza, I saw this photograph in Reuters.

© REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa (GAZA)

A Hamas fighter takes position inside a scanning machine in the customs hall of the Rafah crossing border, between Egypt and the southern Gaza Strip, after they captured it, June 15, 2007.
I wonder if the scanner ever went off because there was a gun inside it!

Then I recollected this strip I had read in Calvin & Hobbes a few years back.

© Bill Watterson, United Press Syndicate

Romeo and Juliet, 4000 BC

I started out on Google at 3:00 pm today for some information on emulsions, and at 3:20 pm I was looking at this. I felt vaguely strange.

Picture courtesy: CNET News.com

Archaeologists have unearthed two skeletons from the Neolithic period (5000-6000 years ago) locked in an "eternal embrace" and buried outside Mantua, Italy, about 25 miles south of Verona. Sounds familiar? It's the same city where Shakespeare set the tale of Romeo and Juliet. Here's the bigger catch - In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo is sent to Mantua for killing Capulet in a sword fight. Romeo then leaves the city and returns to Verona when he hears that Juliet has died.

It was found at the site where a factory is planned and many have speculated on the circumstances this goosebumps-giving spectacle. Flint tools, including arrowheads and a knife, were also found alongside the couple. Their teeth being intact, it is thought that the couple died young.

They are face to face and their arms and legs are entwined and they are really hugging.

When I was reading through the user comments on the related news pieces, almost everybody had the same thing to say - of not to disturb them from their grave. Unfortunately, it has already been done.

Doomed love?

Other sources of information:
BBC News
Dailymail.co.uk
CNET News.com

Whatsisname

Americans pronounce Indian names better than Indians do. Or at least they do it more accurately. Yes, it's true! I am not kidding!

The most ludicrous habit of many government officials in India is look at the first alphabet of your name, and then at the last, and fill up the rest themselves. Some of them even decide to correct the way it is spelled and then put in on record.
I have ended up being named (on official records) as Kokanad (most common error), Kokanand, Kokenad, Kokonath, Kokanath. Without the blink of one or more eyes.
On one hilarious occasion, my brother Sayontan was called Shaitan.
Prayatn became Prashant. Anushaily became Anshuly (Anshulee).

Correcting the mistake on an official record in India would be a big headache, but if I write about that it should be classified under the label *Sigh* in my blog. So I am not going into that now.

Americans do have a tough time understanding the complicated concoction of syllables in Indian names, but atleast end up reading it thoroughly and even pronouncing it right! And the icing of the cake lies in the fact that each and everyone asks if they pronounced it right. Your face invariably breaks into a smile. A lab mate once approached me with the name "Ramachandran" and asked if "Remakandran" (accented) is the right way to pronounce it, because she didn't want to embarrass herself.

My friends and I had been witness to this incident...
A good friend of ours, ABCXYZ Singh, has had a crisis since she landed in the US, because she decided to dump her last name. Now here's the catch - in the US, it's extremely difficult to survive without a last name because every official record is on the basis of a last name. So they found a workaround and made her first name ABCXYZ as her last name and attributed "Unknown" as her first name. So her name, officially is, Unknown ABCXYZ. While we were getting issued our State ID cards, our first names were being called out. When it was her turn, there was a voice from a sweet old lady -
"Un-known"?
While we all giggled away, our friend walks up to the counter. The old lady is visibly embarrassed because she is sure that is not the right way to pronounce "Unknown".
"Oh honey, did I get your name right?"

Just a note: For many who ask me this question, the meaning of Kokonad is "red lotus" in Sanskrit.

Energy saving

After having been to Boston, New York, Las Vegas etc. and gasped at the beautiful night views of each of these cities, I have often thought aloud - US has a lot of energy. And a lot of this energy goes just into aesthetics and ambience. That's a lot of waste in India, where we always switch off the light and fan when leaving a room.
I was just wondering, how many villages in India could be lit up 24/7 if all the advertisements on Times Square were pulled off the circuit. Or may be Las Vegas?

Talking of energy savings, visit Blackle. Blackle is a *suggestion* which is based on a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year (January 2007) where a theory was proposed that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. So this guy, Mark Ontkush (Occupation: Green Computing Evangelist), did the math and figured out this (from his blog post) -

Take at look at Google, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let's assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that's $75,000, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes.

I liked it. Of course, there has been skepticism the world wide about whether the contribution of the energy savings is significant. And, as you might have noticed, the readability of black web pages isn't the best.

Still, as the About Page puts it, "We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up."

Go ahead, search something on Blackle.

Show me the funny!

Russell Peters. He's got lots of famous ones... about Indian parents beating their kids, British accents, terrorists... just name it! I came across this one about asking directions in Toronto. It's hilarious!

(YouTube video, 38 seconds)