HE WEAVED HIS MAGIC AGAIN

Chetan Bhagat is back and this time not with a bang but with a ripe, matured love story but not unlike The Five Point Someone (FPS), One Night @ Call Centre (ONCC) or 3 Mistakes of My Life (3MML).

2 States - The Story Of My Marriage

is everything what FPS is not and its everything what FPS is about. If FPS was the best engineering campus-story ever 2 SSMM is more of a matured love story. And the funny thing is the story follows the storyline of Shyam of FPS (though his name here is Krish Malhotra). The similarities just start here; it has all that has become staple diet of Mr. Bhagat. An aggressive woman who always makes the first move, a seemingly loser boy (definitely not hero type), love, fun, complication, betrayal, tears and an almost bollywoodish and big-bang climax with odes to the youth of the country!! 2 States has it all in varying degrees and yet it is different.

The story starts with Krish with a psychiatrist going on a confession. The story of Krish is remarkably similar to Shyam’s…..same bad grades at IIT-D, affair with daughter of Professor, a dominating father at home,an ex-army who beats his wife etc….The story starts at the first week of IIM-A where Krish and Anjali meets. Anjali Swaminathan….smart, talented, beautiful tamil Brahman ( I heard they are called tambram…confirmation, anyone??). The first act follows typical Chetan Bhagat path. But it is different from the second act. Now thay have to make their families accept each other. That’s where the fun begins. An ostentatious Punjabi woman who thinks her only son is the best jewel of the whole world and everybody is out to steal him and a quite, orthodox tamil family who believes in knowledge and absolutely hates show-offs……sparks are bound to fly!!!!

The rest of the story is how Krish tries to find acceptance in Anjali’s family and Anjali in Krish’s family. It seems tough?? Well, compared to what to come….it was nothing. Now that have to make sure the families like each other and faced with instant cultural clash and suspicion it’s an improbable task!!

Unlike his other books, this one moves over the whole country and lots of social observation. It also doesn’t have Chetan Bhagat getting the story from someone and then asking him to complete it. It also follows up to his traditional style. FPS was a (I don’t know what genre it was..College romance??college life??coming of age story??...I don’t know), ONCC was a workplace romance story which was going good until that call from god and then that horrible harebrained scheme to dupe thousands of people to save jobs, 3MML was predictable from first page though the concept was good. 2 SSMM is not any of these genres; it has its own place. For the first time he asks questions about out strange social practices without making anyone look guilty. Romance or not, its definitely his first social novel.

I immensely liked this book. It has that same quality that makes you identify yourself with Shyam in FPS. He feels just like you….its almost like you can feel his emotions or what he is thinking and then you sit straight and realized you would have done the same thing in his place!! That’s why FPS was most loved book across the college campuses. 2 SSMM have the same quality that makes you identify with Krish Malhotra, be it his helplessness in fight between his in laws and his mother or his boredom with job or his pain of heartbreak. Chetan Bhagat has definitely reached another level with this novel. Makes you stop and think again about your life and what do you want in life!!!

My Rating

IF

Five Point Someone - What not to do at IIT-10/10

Then One Night @ the Call Center 6/10

The Three Mistakes of My Life 4/10

2 States - The Story Of My Marriage 8.8/10

Its an Earthquake!

The first earthquake I faced was when I was 4-5 years old. Well, the truth is I heard that I faced the earthquake, but I don’t remember anything.

At that time I used to live at Raigunj, North Dinajpur. I was taking my afternoon nap. My father’s friend Maity uncle was supposed to come to repair our TV. Later I heard that there was an earthquake that afternoon and while everybody was busy screaming and being stunned Maity uncle carried me out of the house into the courtyard. Being a very sound sleeper I naturally don’t remember anything of it. But everybody verified it to be true…so it must be.

The second time I faced an earthquake…….well I was sleeping then too. But this time I had the decency to wake up with the quake (I guess I am getting old, I don’t sleep such soundly anymore).

It was around 2-2.30 at night, I was sleeping after a long and tiring journey. I was also suffering from fever, though no one knew that at home! I was on the bed and my parents were sleeping on the floor, when I felt the bed shake. Now, I’ve felt beds shaken many times before thanks to my upbringing in many different places. There was this place at kalyani where the whole building used to shake when any heavy truck moved by the Highway beside.

So, when I felt the bed shaking beneath me and I woke up, I couldn’t decide it was a just a bad dream or realty. It took me few precious seconds to realize that it was for real. By then the quake has stopped. I thought about getting up and enquiring but then decided to finish the sleep first!! Just before drifting to mind-numbing sleep again, I heard father asking our neighbors if they felt anything.

Next morning news told us the details, that a heavy intensity earthquake has struck at Indonesia and what we felt was just a jolt! I later wondered, if a jolt was powerful enough to shake a three-story building like a cheap wooden table then what the real deal would have done!! I really don’t want to know that!

Slumdog Millioaire book review

By now most of you must have watched this movie and read atleast few of the realms of newsprint and articles written about it,so its too late to write the review of the movie.So, i tried the book instead and found it......well....lets save that for the last.There's no point is reducing the limited interest you have till now!!

First start with the obvious questions.What is the differences between the Oscar winning critical acclaim and the best selling novel Q & A (yes,thats the name of the novel,not slumdog millionaire).

To start with,the main character is named Ram Mohammad Thomas(RMT),an orphan.He was named so to prevent a religious riot for him.He spent his earlier few years at a orphanage where he spent his relatively good times.

The books too starts from the dinky police cell and with the beatings.But here a lawyer (female and pretty obviously...so much for stereotypes) comes to rescue him.Then this lawyer watches the recorded and yet un-broadcasted show ,one questions at a time and unravels the mystery of Ram's life.Here Ram has won the total money one the first day itself and the producers were unable to pay any money, so the tried to prove that Ram cheated.

The story doesnt go through the linear pattern of the movie.As the questions come Ram's story jumps with it.So, in the first question he flashes back to his adolescent years where as the 2nd question takes him back to his birth and earliest memories.

If you thought SDM was fantastic then you will be stunned by this.Here the stories are more fantastic...a closet gay superstar,gay priest of a church,voodoo magic,a foreign spy,spy camera,train dacoity,murder,burglery,contract killer,ex-superstar's suicide,juvenile jail,army deserter,incest attempt...phew!!!

Salim is his friend here,one whom he doesn't meet until he gets to Agra.The story of the movie follows the novel in a different way.

The anchor of the show is a spineless man.He does whatever the producer asks him to do.Be it telling the wrong answer or reverting the final question when Ram answers it correctly. 

Also there are more women the story and the love interest is Nita, a prostitute.RMT falls in love with her and wants to win the money to free her.

The writing is surprizingly very fluent.It never staggers.Even the most incredible plot twists work like a magic.Though I knew the ending I felt my pulse quickening towards the end.The final plot twist is definitely the spoiler of the story.No wonder it was left out of the movie.

In short it is definitely an enjoyable potboiler.

The best dialogue from the book.After RMT watches a realistic movie with he says,"What is the 

point of watching a film if you can see the real thing in your neighbor's house just across 

the street?"Classic!!!

That defines the whole of SDM!!!

50 day's itch!

[It is my blog, here I make the rules. Feel free to comment. If I don’t like it I will go snip-snip……]

 

Its been 50 days now! 300 people died, its just a number now. Too much water passed by marine drive since then, nothing happened to those plotted the biggest and drastic attack on Indian soil.

"Some philosophize in poetry. Some vituperate in words. Some candle in silence, some parade in demonstration. Some brood eventualities, some vocalize in visual. Some conference on strategy, some indulge in exploit. Some weep at loss, some weep at sympathy. Some courage in reconstruction, some repair in caution.

And some… sitting far, or within us, twitter and chuckle on the completion of a dastardly action…!!!"     -Amitabh Bachchan

 

Too much has already been said about it, every angel probed and dissected and wrung dry to feed the public knowledge. Every celebrity, politician, self-styled expert worth his or salt commented and gave opinion whether anyone wanted it or not.

Internationally it created a ripple as many foreigners died (it’s a fact, nobody cares when Indians die, not even Indian Govt.).Pakistan as usual denied everything and started to issue war threat, which the world particularly USA can not afford now.

So, that leaves us the simple and straight question: where do we get from here?

It’s been umpteenth time that such an attack occurred, nothing has been done about. As usual we adapted with it. People die, politicians thunder, security is briefed for a few days…after that….everything back to square one.

Just how long will this go on? A federal police force was formed after so many years of discussion and gain it has been derailed. Pakistan Govt. has simply refused to pay heed. Security is again limping back to normal i.e. casual state. All are waiting for the next attack after that things will happen in the same order.

What are our options, you might ask. Well, you don’t have to look far. Look at Israel or if you can without snickering look at USA. After 9/11 USA didn’t sat back and licked its wounds and indulged in diplomacy. It launched a counter-attack. The result is clear; USA has suffered no terrorist attack on its soil in last 7 years.

Tough times call for tough measures. Just ask yourself what would you prefer: 5 dead suspected terrorists or 100 dead innocent citizens? The choice is yours.

The world rule is quite unambiguous, blast or get blasted.

Our neighbor is a soon-to-be-failed state with nuclear power, when it fails whoever comes to power won’t wait to blast us! It’s a choice we have to make now for our safe future.

MILLION DOLLAR QUESTION

Yes, that’s true. If you solve this puzzle you get cool $1,000,000!! That is only the prize money, without considering the perks and fame that will come with it. You will be as famous as some Mr. Einstein or Mr. Newton. History will remember you as the person who solved a 150 year problem!!!


Yep, that’s right too!! It’s a 150 year old problem. For 150 years the best minds of the world tried to solve this problem and came up short. The great minds were convinced that a solution to this problem exists but were unable to find it. Even taking the aid of high performance computers couldn’t help the matter. Now, you must be thinking-“what the big deal about a damn puzzle!!”. Well, to answer that you have to understand the puzzle.

Let get introduced to the hardest unsolved problem in mathematics since 1859---“REIMANN HYPOTHESIS”.

And yes, I didn’t forget about the $1 million. Boston Clay Mathematics Institute declared in 2000 a list of 7 unsolved problem of mathematics. For each problem $1 million was announced as prize money. Since then 6 problems have been solved and the 7th and the most important one is still waiting.
In 1859, Bernard Reimann published his eight page article where he discussed this idea. It’s about prime numbers. So, let’s dig into the problem.
Prime numbers are type of numbers which can be divided only by 1 and itself. The series of prime numbers look like this.
1,2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23,29,31,37,41,43,47,53,59,61,67,71,73…and so on.
You can clearly see it. It is NOT a series. There is no sequence in the numbers. We can’t say what will be the number next to 59 without calculating individually each number. To make my point clear consider the following series, which is actually a series.
1,4,9,16,25,36,49,64,81,100,121,144,169,__.
We can see the sequence and we can also deduce the last number, it is 196. For the mathematically challenged people the series is simply the square values of natural numbers i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…and so on. We can even say what will the 500th number of the series without checking the in between numbers. By this definition the prime numbers do not constitute a series. It’s too haphazard.
But it is also mathematics. Mathematics can’t be haphazard. There must be a method in madness. People (not normal people, mathematicians I mean) tried and failed to find a formula of prime numbers. In a desperate attempt to find any resemblance of order they tried to find the occurrences of prime numbers. See for yourself.
In 1 to 10 there are 4 prime numbers, which means 40%, so there should be 40 prime numbers in between 1 to 100, but there are 25 actually i.e. 25%. In case of less than 1000 it is 168 or 16.8%.
And between 9999901 to 10000000 it is just 9. The next 100 contains just 2. This was a total chaos.
But, there are some who do not conform to the norms. They think in their own way using their own logic. We call them genius.
One such genius was Leonardo Eular. This guy found an order where seemingly everyone had failed. What he showed was not only remarkable was incredibly easy too.

1+ 1/2^2 +1/3^2 +1/4^2 +1/5^2 +⋯=2^2/(2^2-1)*3^2/(3^2-1)*5^2/(5^2-1)*7^2/(7^2-1)*…

It was really wonderful. On the left hand side was natural numbers like 1, 2, 3, 4…..and on the right side was the prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7…..
There was an order here. It was a start, but wasn’t an end. This equation was developed further and it was proved that the power of the numbers is not only limited to 2. It can be raised further i.e. the following equation will also hold true
1+ 1/2^3 +1/3^3 +1/4^3 +1/5^3 +⋯=2^3/(2^3-1)*3^3/(3^3-1)*5^3/(5^3-1)*7^3/(7^3-1)*…

and also if the power is 4, 5, 6 anything.

Now, the stage was set for Mr. Reimann to appear and did so in style. He developed the equation one more step and proved that the power of the numbers is not only limited to natural numbers, it can be complex numbers too i.e. the equation will hold true even if the power is a complex number.

Complex numbers are numbers which are created using rational and √-1. √-1 is square root of -1 which is an imaginary number.
Now, the question that naturally arises is that WHY THE HELL DID HE USED COMPLEX NUMBER????
Well, the answer to this question is the topic we started on. Reimann kept on developing the equation and discovered this


1+ 1/2^(0.5+7√-1) +1/3^(0.5+7√-1) +1/4^(0.5+7√-1) +1/5^(0.5+7√-1) +⋯=0


The most important aspect of this equation is that the co-efficient of √-1, which is 7 here, is of NO IMPORTANCE.
Yes, you read it right. It is of no importance as long as the first rational part is 0.5. You can change the co-efficient to anything you like, positive, negative, fraction, real anything, it doesn’t matter.
So, this is also same as the above.
1+ 1/2^(0.5+3√-1) +1/3^(0.5+3√-1) +1/4^(0.5+3√-1) +1/5^(0.5+3√-1) +⋯=0


This is Reimann Hypothesis. But it is never going to be possible to physically check every number imaginable to see if the equation works. Reimann said that the equation will be equal to zero if the rational part of the power is 0.5 and the co-efficient of the irrational part is any number. That was 1859.

150 years passed. So many other problems were solved using Reimann Hypothesis. They are proved as “if Reimann Hypothesis is true, then……”. So, if those answers are right then Reimann Hypothesis must also be true. But that doesn’t solve the problem. It has to be proved using mathematical logic and the quest still eludes the man. Solve it and the glory is yours. 1 Million dollars doesn’t hurt either!!

Copyright=My Right To Copy?

I687, London:
The tall guy was sitting under a tree in a park; sipping tea and thinking about the inflation and the grocery bill. Suddenly something dropped on his head.
-Ouch!!
He looked upwards and discovered an apple tree and looked downwards and discovered gravity (figuratively speaking of course!).He published his findings in “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica”


2008, Kolkata:
I was sitting in my friend’s house, sipping tea and talking about joining date of TCS and music of “Rock On!!” and listing to Debankar’s guiter .Suddenly something dropped on my head. I looked up and discovered a disk of “Munnabhai MBBS ”. I looked down on the disk and discovered copyright.

Actually I didn’t discovered copyright; I discovered the disk was original. Now that’s a bit complicated, what the hell original disk means? Most of us go through life without seeing a single original disk of anything i.e. movie, software etc. And here in my hand was an original piece, written behind “buy original CD or DVD, kill piracy”.

I heard so many times on TV, radio that musicians are requesting people to buy music and save their livelihood. I also saw people saying copyright means my right to copy. I looked at my computer, it was starting up. The OS was pirated Windows XP. The anti-virus was pirated; most of the softwares I use are pirated. Almost all the songs that sit on my machines are copyrighted and haven’t paid anything for them. The movies I have watched till now were all pirated. Where that does leaves me? In fact everywhere I look I see rampant copyright violation. I tried to calculate the damage done to entertainment industry by me. It came to around 500 movies and so around 20000 bucks. I alone cost that much!!! That too without considering the songs or eBooks collections that I pride myself. I didn’t dare to calculate further.

Then something struck me. I never heard any musician or author (of course of modern times) dying of starvation. That obviously doesn’t mean anything. I decided to probe further. An audio CD costs around Rs.100. Which is not very cheap considering it contains around 8-10 songs all of which are not good, whereas one can download it for free. And there is not much difference between qualities. So the choice is between high priced over hyped products and free illegal materials. No prize for guessing the winner.

I remember about a particular incident. It was 19th July 2007, Harry Potter and deathly hallows was to come out 2 days later and I was already reading it in eBook format. When it finally came out I have finished it by then. Now, if I was author it would be terribly distressing to know that my creation wasn’t fetching me anything or will it be? It would also probably mean that people like my writing so much that they are willing to suffer damage to eyesight by staring to computer monitor to read a book!!!

Actually it is very difficult to find a solution. One possible solution could be to lower the prices of original pieces or maybe to make the quality of original pieces better so that copying them damages their quality.

Its no point crying over piracy, otherwise it wasn’t possible to listening songs or watching movie so much. So, keep on doing whatever you do, just be careful to avoid using traceable downloads. CHEERS!!!

Browsing browsers-part II

Continuing from where I left earlier.

http://atanucybermidasblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/browsing-browsers.html

The times couldn't have been more exciting for net-addicted people like me;two new browsers are soon going to be launched and their beta versions are already available.

First,the old and much abused Internet Explorer is coming out with IE8.Its simply amazing to think how a once great corporation can come out with a worse version and declare it a new version.This happened with IE7;it was worse than IE6.Maybe it was more secure or things like that but its speed was awful.Hope that IE8 fares better.


Second and most important is Google Chrome.The product from the stable of the undisputed rulers of web world.I tried its beta version and its excellent.Its lightweight(takes very little resource) and slick.The only problem I can see is the customization options are very limited.Maybe it will be taken care of in the stable version.


Anyway thst was just to keep this blog alive.When the two browsers come out with their stable version I will write about them.