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Showing posts from October, 2011

What I Missed While Walking Past the Kanchi Mutt

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A place I passed every day without really understanding it. As a kid growing up in Malleswaram, devotion wasn’t something we discussed — it was just in the air. The smell of agarbathi in the evenings. The noise of vendors lining up on 8th cross before a festival. The quiet expectation that you showed up, bowed your head, and moved on. Ganesh Chaturthi. Varalakshmi Vratam. Deepavali. Janmashtami. Ugadi. The calendar moved, but the pattern stayed. The Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham in Malleswaram was part of my daily route to school. Not something I questioned. Not something I deeply understood. Just… there. Every morning, on my way to school, I would slow down for a second in front of the Mutt. Just enough to bow my head toward Kanchi Kamakshi from outside the gate — and then hurry along before the school bell. It was a ritual for as long as I can remember. I don’t know if it came from devotion. I did it because my parents did it. The street...
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Two of an era - Jobs and Ritchie

The last couple of weeks have been particularly bad for technology related stalwarts.  If the death of Steve Jobs hadn't even sunk in, it was even more painful to read up that Dennis Ritchie, the father of C programming and co-developer of Unix was no more.  Dennis Ritchie may not be as famous as Steve Jobs is to the layman, but there is no denying that without C, one cannot fathom the existence of these super powered smart phones and almost every other embedded device today. It was in my Engineering that I was first exposed to C.  Already, the message was spreading quick and fast. If you miss even a single semi-colon, you are in trouble.  It is so difficult to debug.  And, maybe for the fun of  it, somebody added a comma as well.  Given a choice, my fellow batch mates would have added every punctuation mark to exaggerate the whole thing.  There were also suggestions that it was mandatory to add two slashes after a semi-colon as a part of the p...
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Turning 30

I was getting up, and slowly my email inbox was getting filled with the usual suspects.  These people never fail to email me on my birthday.  I had a few calls as well.  Again, these people never fail to call me on my birthday.   So, how's the feeling? Pretty much the usual, I replied back. So, turning 30, haan? Everyone had to ask this, unfailingly and unflinchingly. Yeah, I let out a couple of the usual, monotonous jokes.  It means, they don't deserve to be called jokes in the first place. In the midst of all the jokes , I also tried to act all grown up (am sure I failed miserably at this). I have to say that Afridi and I have a lot of things in common apart from a few obvious differences.  Firstly, he is supposed to be a totally hot cricketer, according to the girls.  OK, even the guys know it.  I leave it to my friends to judge whether this is a similarity or a difference.  They know it.  I know it, too. Secondly, Afri...
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