So I am scared

There is some poor little sod who got slammed by a defamation suit for “slander against Shiv Sena” or stuff. So umm, I am scared a bit if you ask me. Now that my blog has received like 3000 hits(also counting the ones on blogspot lol).

So anyways, my point being, guys relax, I am not waging a crusade against you people, you can all be the very same douche bag superstitious inbreeding sons of bitches that you are and I don’t give a damn okay.

Well I am like totally scared now, and can’t really think straight, but going to jail isn’t really on my bucket list.

No defamation intended. So you’ll be a fool to take my words at face value I guess.

I’ll put my legal arguments in after I have thought them up.

For Some Reason

I feel depressed. Win7 works alright on my laptop.  I did some amount of work that I need to do too.

Its not something I can pinpoint to and say ah here you go, this is source of all my disquiet. There just isn’t one. It is just I guess a lot of overlapping reasons together snowballing or something and together it is all too confusing. I mean I am supposed to not care, right. I don’t give a damn fuck or something I tell myself. But, it feels inadequate at the moment. The song playing is rather nice and I am trying to lose myself in the words. But it is hard man. It is too hard. And I fucking can’t stop thinking at all. Or maybe it is that I want to think, I can’t decide fucking which it is. Crap what shit am I typing? I am clueless. I just am in a cluster-fuck at the moment. And well it is tiring to think all the time. So I’ll try to sleep it off. I will publish this only because well, windows live writer is the first fucking desktop blog publisher that I actually like and can think of using again. Oh and I a big fuck you too to Flock. It is the worst browser known to man. And I hate winfags too. But no less than lfags to tell you the truth. While I admit that I think that linux will win the os-wars, the greatest war of this century. I imagine a world where all people fight over is which crappy os to use.

It is a nice image though and it makes me sort of happy. Ahm… hmm… don’t really have much left to say. So I’ll say it anyways and hope no one I know reads. Which is probably hoping for too much as blogs are meant to be read.

So anyways, what was it, yeah right. I don’t care at all. I just fucking don’t. Honest.

Windows 7 is awesome

This is a trial test mode.

Is Dilli6 the Antichrist?

Sonam Kapoor’s character spits a mouthful of aqua on Abhishek Bacchan and I get filled with trepidation. Can this film actually be good? Now don’t get me wrong. I saw RDB and enjoyed it. I love Main Hoon Na and it is actually the only movie that I can see an infinite number of times and still want to see it again. What I basically mean to say it that over the years I have found a few good Hindi movies that are not just thought provoking, but slickly shot, have an awesome soundtrack and a treat to watch. But our movie industry has a tendency to shoot itself in the feet. Movies like Roza, Maqbool, Gangajal, Rangeela are now years old but at the same time we have had to endure Sarkaar, Lal Badshah, Saawariya et al(to just name a few). So everytime Bollywood moves a step forward, it then takes three backwards.

I have not really done any real research on Dilli6, but from the promos here is what I have gleaned: Abhishek Bacchan is a tech-savvy NRI who has come back to India, presumably to get married
or something like that. So apart from the really glaring product placement of Motorola and iDea (of which Abhishek Bacchan is the brand ambassador) this is some sort of a coming of age story with romance, because hey, movies in India don’t work without romance.

Why the antichrist? Well I remember reading somewhere that the Antichrist, when he comes would be hailed as a saviour. A movie like Dilli6, coming so close after Slumdog, potrays a very different
India from the one we saw there. Sonam Kapoor spits on Abhishek Bacchan, and everyone of has at some point in their lives spit on someone else. I think. Does that make us a race that doesn’t think about its personal hygiene? The truth is very different from that. Indians are as a rule a very passionate people. At the same time, we are very relaxed. That is probably why people think that we’re a soft state. We’re not easily roused. Why worry? We eat and have fun. Spend our times busily gossiping about our second cousins and how they haven’t returned our calls since their son got that fat paying job in the states. So the spit is because, well why go through the trouble of going down to the basin when you can just spit out through the window?
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that this scence captures the essence of India. I mean I am probably over reading and the scene is just intended to show how kawaii Sonam Kapoor really is. No one really saw her in Saawariya as she had her face covered all the time and when she didn’t the male lead(forgot his name) was dropping his towel. I acknowledge that reading too much in between the lines is that surest sign of one’s faggotry, but yet, in that case my argument is that a Sam Mendes or a Guy Ritchie(or their scriptwriters, who really remembers the name of the script writers?) can’t think of this scene. Not becuase they’re not as good as this guy(I know he also directed RDB, but I don’t know his name). But because well nothing in their lives prepared them for thinking it. There used to be a saying that I heard a lot as a kid, about India, it went like “kos kos pe badle paani chaar kos pe baani” kos is a measure of distance, I forget how many kilometers exactly, so this basically means that the taste of water changes every kos, and the language that people speak changes once you have travelled four kos. A homage to how varied the Indian culture is.

I am scared to think that the movie would not be as good as it seems to be. Yet nitpicking is of no real significance. The film would release soon enough so we’ll see then.

Oh and Abhishek Bac-chan just thought i should point it out

Now I think that there is some amount of double role-playing going on in this movie.

Me and Janis

Softly swaying to the beats of that infernal drum,

toying with me heart in that rythm.

She sings another song

softly the words hit me

like a silver dagger in my gut.

And I bleed joyous emotions.

And she moans ever so slightly

I realise I want her and can never have her.

You died too young I complain.

Now we can never be.

In my graveyard of failed aspirations and useless dreams.

I grieve her passing.

She just smiles as she looks at me.

She says I can see your face again.

And no one has been so goddamn blind as I had been.

You don’t know what is love. She tells me.

The Ever Awesome Indian Media

So howdy guys. Anyways this here is just a couple of thoughts I just had, that I decided I should share; you know, for posterity’s sake.Yeah I just love using semi-colons. I am that awesome.

So anyways, I go to the canteen and there is some Indian news channel covering some war with Indian soldiers fighting. So my first reaction being, when did we declare war on Pakistan?

So anyways turns out the war is being fought in(or at?) the Gaza strip. So firstly I am not sure if the Indian army is fighting for or against Hamas. Probably against. But then if I remember correctly, India recognises the Palestinian nation. I’m probably wrong, but isn’t Hamas the elected government/ representative of the Palentinian people?

So anyways other than wondering who is the terroist in the whole scenario, here is what I have to talk about.

The channel carried a huge banner in a really garish font which said something to the effect of “The only Indian channel on the frontline, covering the Gaza conflict.”

Now apparently, that is a big fucking achievement. But, here is the question that I feel compelled to ask.

They’re in the middle of a war that feels more like a fucking pogrom. So what are they proud of? Are they proud of being there when innocent people are being killed? Or are they proud of being in a war? What are they so proud of? What is there to be proud of? Or are they proud of how many people they see dieing? Or are they proud that they got to cover a fucking war and can hear actual bullets? Or are they proud of all the big fucking explosions all around? Or are they proud because, hey the guys who bombed Bombay were Muslims, and guess what, so are the Palestinians. Can someone tell me what is there to be so proud of?

Sorry ignorant arses all of them. Except for the chick reading the news. She was kinda cute. And hot.

Gaza Strip

Why do I even try?

Seriously. Why do I?

Dylan, Is Ramona the Aphrodite?

Dear Aphrodite, I am drunk,
from the poison with which your bow was strung.

Aphrodite, Aphrodite, your songs I have sung,
and silver now slithers through my lungs.

My thoughts are no longer mine.
My mind wanders free out of space and time.

Aphrodite, your arcane magic.
your keen eyes,
your haunting music.

Aphrodite, the water of your fountains is pristine.
Your majestic halls,
fairly contrast their humble design.

An image that haunts me too much.

Aphrodite, you my love,
with poisoned lips and a hunger for thirst.

A zest for life I have found,
boundless mirth and laughter abound.

My smile now brightens your courtroom.
Hungry crows feast on my costume.
My mask is now torn and ripped to shreds.
My face is now an icon of dread.
An abomination of hate and fury,
I hunger, lust and crave for glory.

Aphrodite, Aphrodite, grant me the power to,
make sense of what to do.

In exchange my fairness,
consume my soul and devour my flesh.

For my bones still do rot,
o’er yonder in yer courtyard.

Behind the clock back there you know.

Aphrodite, Aphrodite, my sweet love,
make promises that you know will rust.

For time I have seen marching in a line,
and it twirls its bowler hat once more with style.

Pleasant verbatim post modus-operandi
poste haste dues ex dogmatic buffonery.

Longly recorded synthetic laughter,
burns my toast this fucking camcorder.

A motion to halt a marching order,
a smile to deflect the incoming border.

The laughter that springs in years gone by,
the flowers that blossomed and have since died.

Plesantly poignant poised expectations,
filling dictionaries with utmost revelations.

Aphrodite, Aphrodite, I know you know,
that the world has got no fucking clue.

Sunder and Keening in my hands, while
I march forward to distant lands.

Backtracking all over the Capital Wasteland.
Cars do make quite a bang.

Arbitrary expostulation hastily recorded,
the meetings minutes summarily discarded.

All of hell is rock and bone,
the world is harsher than sins can atone.

Life that lived itself nonplussed.
Sweet Aphrodite it reeks of dust.

As this banal banter draws to a close,
hearken, say forever oppose.

Aphrodite, Aphrodite, my meaningless love,
if this is what you want, I must.

The so called molestation horror at IIT Kanpur Antaragni

First things first, here is the link for those who don’t know about this.

http://dubeat.com/2008/11/molestation-horror-at-iit-fest/ copy-paste, too lazy to embed links.

Now I know, I know, I don’t follow current events around for they’re so transient, yet this one made me think.

Being one of the people who carry the IITian tag with a modicum of pride if I might add, I feel compelled to eke out my thoughts on this whole charade. That and the fact that the original thread is now locked and I cannot comment there.

As someone wise once gave a rule that effectively says that the longer a thread lasts the more it gets filled with bull, that is to say the longer a thread lasts, the more it devolves to petty flaming.

So first a big fcuk you to all the wannabe flamers, thank you guys, and I know some of them were IITians and while the comments were funny (undoubtedly), a serious topic like this, which effects the way the world percieves us demands greater justice.

Of course you would say that we’re too cool to care, which is exactly where you would be wrong.

The first word that crossed my mind when I read the link was “wtf”. Since I did not attend the concert so I do not really know how bad the crowd situation was. So what can I really have to say?

Here’s the line that really got me worked up.

/begin

One volunteer, feigning deafness allegedly pressed unnecessarily close to a girl in order to hear her complaint.

/end

Now, I was a hospitality volley myself. Its a first year kid for chrisakes. My point being, that this is a guy who has just spent two months in IITK, is still a teenager, and since he is good at studies, a bit socially awkward too. I know I was there. To those of you wondering what exactly is the point I am trying to make, it is briefly, there is a fcuking rock concert going on, you’re in the front rows right next to the stage, how much is audible? I mean what is the big deal if he leaned in too close? He is trying to help, he is no professional volunteer, he is trying to learn as he goes and how can he help when he can’t even know what he has to help about?

Yet this is not all. Someone once said, it is not what we say, but what we leave unsaid that reveals a lot more about us.

First of all a little disclaimer. I have never been molested, since I travel mostly on general class, I am accustomed to physical jostling, but I have no idea what it is like to be molested. So if I sound offensive then I am sorry, my bad. Now to the issue at hand.

A girl complaining about a guy leaning in too close on her. What is this 1420 ad? I mean, please can you be a little more insecure? If you have issues with people who are trying to help leaning on you, to try and understand the problem, keep your distance.

It is the stereotyping that gets me all worked up. So you’re in a crowd that molests you, and you decide that since the grounds are in IIT Kanpur, the guys must be IITians. Brilliant. I wonder how you didn’t get through JEE.

So when words like cream of the country and premier institute are thrown around with such gay abandon, I cannot help but wonder. Who or what do you think an IITian is? I mean sure we have much higher IQ’s, and are fast learners, but other than that? Do you mean to say, that if you girls were molested back home in DU or BITS or some such two bit school then it would be okay? Does it hurt when I call your sorry school two bit?

Of course I can take the lame position that there is no proof that the guys who were hooting were IITians. I would be right and wrong. Infact it doesn’t matter if I am right or wrong. The fact of the matter is, even if assuming that the molesters were IITians, which is preposterous, incredulous and other synonyms in my opinion, what does it prove? Are you by any means trying to imply that since a bunch of girls got molested at IITK by guys who might not have been IITians, that we IITians are lecherous lust driven creatures with no moral standards? Great job, I see where Aaj Tak recruits its talent from.

I am living my frigging life here people and I frankly could not care less. But when you write up such nonsense, and gossip like “you know, I used to think that IIT guys were such saints, but infact they’re all jerks, I know this because I got molested in IITK”. Duh.

First, I’ll let the statistics talk, how many news paper reports have we read of girls getting molested in DU or other universities? And how many times have you read a report that has IIT and molestation in the same sentence? Exactly. Other than the fact that there are too few girls (which is something that guys here often lament and a bit funny, and I cannot resist the urge to mention this), the fact remains that once you get into an IIT, it is something that you cherish and no one in their right mind tries to throw away a chance at getting a degree from here. A student caught molesting on campus would be thrown off before you can bat an eyelid. A crime like molestation is often a crime of opportunity and hence statistically, you’ll find that the perpetrator would be someone from outside, one who is likely to commit a crime and able to slip away at a moment’s notice, because lets face it, a cul fest lasts such a little time, that by the time the girls complained, the actual criminals could have easily left the campus. That and the fact that the administration here has no real authority over the conduct of the participants, other than disbarring from the event.

On the other hand a guy from campus would think a million times, and always decide that touching a girl inappropriately is not something worth throwing your degree away. These guys got through JEE, so we know that they can think rationally.

This is it, I guess, or as close to being it as I am ever going to get. So the next time you think about stereotyping people, here is something that I want you to know.

I had a friend, who had contacts in our shopping center, and every year after Antaragni, he’ll tell us how many condoms were sold. I know it was demented and yet hilarious.

Anyways, the last year, about 3000 packs of condoms were sold in the three days. That makes a 1000 condoms daily. Assuming for the moment that there was no boy on boy action, that means a 1000 girls had sex daily.

So am I right in thinking that the girls from DU are filthy disease ridden whores?

Why Linux?

I wandered onto linuxhater’s blog. It makes compelling arguments as to why Vista > *nix, in a very tongue in cheek and into your face kinda humor, and it makes you laugh. Before long you’ll find yourself agreeing to what he says. If I am lucky, he’ll link to my poor blog.

And for good reason too. So, of course I can’t rebut him, because I am not sure of my own convictions. So let me start by telling you guys about basyt the luser.

I am a noob. I can write pretty simple codes in JAVA in C, and that’s it. I have a DELL XPS 1530, which has a T8300 2.4 GHz Geforce8600m 4GB’s ram 250 GB hdd. So I am basically an lnoob with a pretty sweet laptop. I was on Ubuntu for almost 2 years on and off before that. Which was because, well you gotta start somewhere, I inquired amongst my friends who were using *nix about what to use and they suggested Ubuntu with wine for the softwares(read utorrent, others don’t have NAT enabled) that didn’t have a proper opensource counterpart. I am not entirely sure why I needed Ubuntu in the first place, but that is a moot point now. Anyways for the last 20 days about I have been using archlinux, the 32-bit version only because of no flash love for the 64-bit versions.

And here is a list of my gripes.

1. My shiny media control buttons don’t work. Not even volume. Atleast which worked out of the box on  ubuntu.

2. My touchpad now works, barely. Earlier, I had the erratic touchpad behaviour problem. It is now fixed by adding a line i8042.nomux=1 to the grub boot parameters. It was a very very strange problem to say the least, in that my touchpad would either have no response or would move arbitly across the screen where it pleased at a very very high speed. Now my touchpad(alps) works. But no vert/horiz scroll, or any of the flashier features. I installed gsynaptics. But it gives a SHMConfig must be on error and exits. Never mind that I have that line in the proper section in my xorg.conf.

3. mp3 support somehow got added when I installed amarok, but its resource usage is so unbelieveably high, that I use mpd+ncmpc. Still despite having all the codecs, my mplayer doesn’t play the propreity codecs. Thankfully vlc does, but its subtitles support is highly suspect. It shows them when it is in a good mood. Never mind that I am trying to watch animes. Ofcourse the fact is that, my lappy is quite top-of-the line, atleast by Indian standards, so I shouldn’t mind if amarok uses a large amount of memory or takes a gazillion years to start up. Yet I think of my computers as sentinent, so I don’t like the idea of stressing it beyond its limits. If I can do something for only 1-2% resource usage, why should I do the same for 30-50%?

4. Compiz-fusion. It actually makes gnome worth looking at. Yet, at what great price. Try turning on motion blur. I am just motion-blurring windows no? I am not playing COD4 at all details maxed out. Yet still I have unbelievable slowdowns. Why linux why? On my desktop, I used to think that it was because I have a crappy 7300. Now I have a 8600, and nvidia are kind enough to release their drivers. So you’d think that if you have the latest drivers, a properly built up video card, then you can just use compiz at everything maxed. Apparently no.

5. I don’t file bug-reports. I have read a few bug reports and for the most part, they’re Trollsville. I admit that I have had help from them. But reading through 100+ troll grunts just to get to that amazing dev who writes i8042.nomux=1 is too much work for people who have things to do other than sit in front of their computer and wade through oceans of turd in the nude. hehe.

6. I use the numpad with my fn key. It usually works nicely, but every once in a while, a single press will result in it just spamming the output and me ending with a line full of pluses or asterisks, which frankly pisses me off a little.

7. The brightness changes, but there is no feedback on the brightness bar. Which looks absurd.

So every time I boot to vista, I am so wowed. My remote control works. My media buttons work. My touchpad works exactly as I want to. Vertical scroll. Horizontal scroll. Webcam. Fingerprint reader.

I formatted my laptop, removed all the dell bloatware and everything just works. The word for this is magic. Took me probably 20 minutes and one restart to install all the drivers from the dell official cd. You don’t need to restart everytime you install a new driver, as some lusers claim incorrectly. Just install them all in one go. There probably is no need to install updates to drivers, except maybe for video. The stock ones work pretty well imo.

So why linux? First a disclaimer: Your mileage will vary. If you are my mom, or your mom, then vista is made for you. My mother is still wrapping her head around vista. So if you need an os for ‘light’ tasks, forget linux. And don’t in any case trust any luser who says the opposite. Forget Arch or Gnome, even installing Ubuntu with all its much hyped 6 click install is very complicated for many people. Setting up a dual-boot for example, reduced me to tears. I still can’t add proxy support by myself. I don’t really know much about OSX so I won’t be talking about it. Except that quicktime and itunes suck awesomely. I sync my itunes using gtkpod.

So anyways, linux is not, never was and probably will never be for the common man who just wants to send mail and watch his xvid porn. The main reason is probably the fact that Unix was an OS by programmers for programmers. The same guys also wrote the C compiler too. Of course there is OSX, but then Apple knows exactly what hardware it’d be running on.

On the other hand are *nix devs, who for some reason want to support everything from amiga and saturn to supercomputers on the same kernel. Why? I think that they probably get off on this kinda sh*t. Nerds you know who you’re, just pawn off your saturns and move on with your life pretty please. Its not that hard is it? Every app on windows has a system requirements on it. It is a neat idea, it establishes a baseline against which the software developer builds his binaries(this is of course from whatever little understanding I have of the process). Vista e.g makes people upgrade their hardware, here, distro devs spend valuable hours enabling support for old redundant hardware.  Its probably because of the lwhiners, who will crucify them, if their latest hardware whims are not properly placated. I think distro binaries should be for newer hardware only. If you have to have something on your ENIAC go ahead and compile yourself. Does that make sense? I have never used compile flags or compiled a kernel so I am not very sure how correct I am being.

I know that the solution to most of my gripes are just a google query away. Yet I don’t have atm the kind of time to spend goosing around.

This hopefully concludes the why linux why? part of this post.

Looks actually do matter.

Why am I still on linux?

1. As is clear from the screenshot, looks matter to me a lot.

I have always spent a lot of time trying to make my desktop look exactly the way I want it to look. In fact I could probably have solved all my problems if I had devoted time to that instead of browsing through gnome-look. And the almost countless customization possibilities it implies. The idea is that, even if a few features do not work if it looks the exact way I want it to look. Everything else is for me acceptable collateral. This is something I know will not win me any supporters for linux. So maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned that.

2. A recently growing sense of responsibility.

To make any complete use of Vista, you need tons of propriety softwares. Adobe, Office(which for some reason is never bundled with Windows, which is just plain wrong), Visual Studio(which costs more than all of Bhutan and Ghana combined), etc etc. I am but a poor student with no income of my own and buying software that costs thousands of my parents hard-earned rupees is not a feasible option for me atm. One solution is to use free alternatives whenever you can, which is something I now do, as much as possible. The other is piracy which I was majorly into till some time ago. Also fact is that software is incredibly hard to get in India, outside of metros, where the software available even in respectable shops is pirated, not because they’re trying to make easy money, but a) most of the vendors are virtually computer illiterate, they have been shopkeepers for all their lives and computers have only now began to penetrate to any limit and b) the sick Indian mentality(or human??) of trying to get as much for as little, even if it means resorting to piracy, peeing on your neighbors walls, stealing fruits from his garden, underpaying your employees, child labor, throwing your garbage on the roads…  using linux, I sleep better.

3. You need to write code.

Like linux and casual users is the case of Vista and programmers. Matlab will kill your computer simply by overheating it. If you’re writing c on vista, then you’re probably using eclipse and mingw(the free alternatives) and my latest switch to linux was completely because of this. For some reason eclipse would not compile and things like this drive me crazy.

4. My take on the old anti-virus, anti-spyware defragmenter thing.

I have a very secure campus. Its like completely firewalled and everything else. So I have never felt need for either of the two. I stay away from the grayer regions of the internet. Do not install anything without thinking first, no clicking on pop-ups, etc. In fact I do not even use any anti-virus, spyware, defragmenter etc. So why I am I raising this issue? Because of the huge performance overhead they have. If your net is not as secure as mine. You’ll need them, and their scans really kill hardware. Norton on backgrounding still used to take like 20% on my old pentium 3.0GHz HT. Linux just bypasses the whole problem.

5. Shells are way too powerful.

Unlike windows. Shells here are overpowered. And its not just moving around files using regexps, which is what I am doing most of the time. Shells offer an amount of control that you can’t have in windows. Again, if you’re casual, then you don’t need it at all, you’ll be happy to cntrl click and shift click all your life. Shells can cut that time down a lot. And since we move around files everyday, you know where this argument is going. It is a wee bit dumb so lets just leave it at that.

6. A legacy computing experience.

I am here refering to init 3. My lappy uses like 128-140 Mbs in text mode. And virtually everything I need to do, I can do it from text-mode. links, pine, vi, ncmpc+mpd. I really don’t need anything more. The only reason for me sticking around in init 5=> eye candy. Compiz you mayn’t be perfect, but I love you still. hehe.

Thats about it. For now.