Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

Are we as a country loosing our self identity and are no longer proud of ourselves?

I don’t think so. But thats what some of the people I have talked to have told me. Being proud of one’s heritage is good but being militant about it is not. Take regional languages for example, in the Tamil Nadu Tamil is the dominant language, till 1998 they refused to talk to you if you spoke to them in any language other that Tamil. Now when I went there in 2007 that had changed. They still speak Tamil majority of the time but have stopped being militant about it and actually answer you when you talk to them in English. Does this mean that they are not proud of Tamil anymore? I don’t think so.

One of my friends in college was south-Indian and he used to joke that the south Indian languages sound like you take a box of cornflakes and shake them(He actually spoke pretty good tamil). Does that mean he is not proud of his language? Nope. It means that he had a sense of humor.

When I talk to someone who talks using big complicated words I have a tendency of making fun of the words they use and joking that people don’t understand half the words they use. Is it me being ‘not proud’ of Hindi as a language? I personally don’t think so… but others have told me otherwise. So I wonder…

Does having the ability to joke about something mean that you don’t respect it anymore? Or should you be a person who walks around with a stick up their backside getting upset about stuff that people joke about?

If you don’t have the ability to laugh at yourself then you have lost an important part of being human and you are on the way to believing that everything you do or say is correct and others should follow that. That in my opinion is what creates dictators and/or megalomaniacs.

Am I proud of being Indian? Definitely. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t joke about stuff that Indian’s do… I read Hindi books and novels, infact I have read a few hundred hindi novels. Does that make me a better Indian? If so how? Does preferring to read english novels (Hindi novels don’t usually cover sci-fi/fantasy) make me a person who is not proud of their heritage/culture?

What is the culture of a country? Is the culture we had 20 years ago the true culture of India? What about 40 years or a 100 years ago? Any culture continuiously evolves and attempting to stop the process at a specific time period doesn’t make sense and is not possible. Any person/country/culture that stops evolving will die and will be forgotten.

Just as an example, today if you ask someone to name the traditional dresses for women in India they will tell you Sari and Salwar-Kameej. However 100 years ago, Sari was considered to be something only girls into fashion wore, something that people nowadays have forgotten. Now Sari/Salwar-Kameej are the traditional dresses and Jeans/Skirts are something that girls into fashion wear. So culture changes. People evolve. Deal with it.

I agree that some jokes are bad and in poor taste, but that doesn’t mean that any jokes about that particular topic should be banned. As in all things a balance has to be maintained.

Well this is all for now. Its time for me to get off my podium and go read a book.

Cya,

Suramya

Like I said in my last post, I had reinstalled XP on my system because Surabhi and Vinit needed it for some work. After I installed it I went to visit friends over the weekend but gave them access to the PC (Just the windows partition). This was a basic install of XP with no service packs etc installed so Vinit installed Service Pack 2 on the system. Everything seemed to go fine till the system had to reboot, then we would get the boot screen and after that just a blank screen.

After I came back we tried reinstalling XP again but everytime I installed the service pack I would hit the same issue. The funny part is that this system was running Windows XP fine before I had removed the partition. So I know it supports it. In any case after 3-4 attempts we gave up and tried using it without the service pack.

So we were trying to install their software but the system would read the USB drive as a blank disk but when I plugged it in to the laptop I could see the data on it. While this was going on Vinit noticed that my bluetooth dongle was connected to the system so he suggested removing it. Sure enough as soon as I removed the dongle the system started reading the USB drive. Now I am pretty sure if I boot into windows and install the Service Pack it will probably work if I remove the bluetooth dongle.

The other annoying thing was that my Microsoft mouse was having issues in XP, it was really slow and the system had trouble reading the clicks. It got to the point that we started using the keyboard to control the mouse. The same mouse works great on the same system when we boot into XP.

In any case the task we needed XP is done so I guess I will be removing the XP installing from my system again. (That will free up 7 GB of space) I will probably install XP using Qemu incase I need it for something but for most part (99.9%) I don’t think I will need it. Although I will probably install Office 2003 using Wine. This is because for certain documents I need to use Word otherwise if I create them using OpenOffice the format looks bad in Word.

Ah well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

Watched the pilot episode of Virtuality today. Its a new show where Earth’s first starship is on a ten-year journey to explore the Epsilon Eridani star system. To keep the crew sane VR (Virtual Reality) modules are installed on the ship and the crew uses them to decompress.

The pilot was decent, I mean it wasn’t awesome great but watchable. If it was going to be produced as a full show I would probably watch it. It has a lot of room for interesting developments. Plus I liked the ending of the pilot.

Basically the main idea behind it is that there is something wrong with the modules and it looks like someone hacked the system, but since the spaceship is beyond pluto, only someone on the ship could reprogram the modules. At times it took a few seconds to figure out if a scene was a VR scenario or the actual show. Another thing that got irritating was the frequent views of the ship from the outside from one of the exterior camera’s. They were interesting at first when they followed the captain through the ship but later they added no content/anything to the story and just took screen time for no reason.

The show is a pretty cool take on how future astronauts could spend long periods of time in space without going nuts.

Catch the pilot if you are interested in these kinds of shows. You just might like it.

– Suramya

As I mentioned before I recently saw the Angels and Demons movie and when I watched it I didn’t remember a lot of the book so I wanted to read it again to a)see how the book was different b) the plot was interesting.

Yesterday I finished reading the book and I am happy that I didn’t remember the plot/ exact details while watching the movie as some of the changes they made in the movie would have irritated me while watching it. A lot of things were changed in the movie to make it simpler and more straight forward. I think the movie was toned down a lot in comparison to the book to reduce the opposition from the Church and religious community. But the good part is that they managed to do it well enough that the movie came out well and was not a complete disaster like the Da Vinci Code.

In all most changes were minor but a few stood out.

1. In the movie there is very little involvement of the CERN, and none at all of its director. In the book he is the one who tapes the branding of the chamberlain while in the movie its recorded by the security camera’s installed in the office.

2. The movie completely glosses over the whole debate of proving genesis using the anti-matter which is covered in great detail in the book.

3. In the movie the last preferiti survives and is confirmed (?) as the pope but in the book he also dies.

4. In the book the final brand used is the Illuminati Diamond (see image below) which is an ambigram of the four elements arranged in the shape of a diamond while in the movie they use the Vatican’s symbol as the final brand. This point irritated me the most and what point was served by changing this is something beyond me. If one of the readers can explain this to me I will appreciate it.

The Illuminati Diamond

While writing this post I found out that some parts of the movie were censored in India (Source: The Hindu) so now I want to watch the uncensored version to see what was different. For that I will have to wait for the DVD to come out, which hopefully will not take that long.

The final verdict? The movie was good but the book was better. 🙂

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya