When women were service-driven

Maybe, the 'were' in the 'Memories of Madras' section should have been 'bold' (pun intended). The another part that I empathized in the column was

The malls are quite vulgar. The amount of food thrown into the dustbins in kalyana mandapams is heart rending. Weddings are all show. Everyone stands in a queue like a conveyor belt today, and there is little warmth.

I remember being very amused to see people standing in a queue, when I attended a marriage in Bangalore (early 2000) after I joined Texas Instruments for my project work. I remember mentioning the same to my roommate and he said that it is the case 'everywhere' :o I had not seen such a thing in my state, ie Tamil Nadu then. As always, being part of India, the rot comes into Tamil Nadu too, albeit a bit late but latest ;)

Today, they want marriages on weekends and I guess they attend it 'religiously' so that they can avoid cooking :( Coming to 'cooking', the quality of cooking has gone to the abyss. I have not tasted a well-cooked 'home food' for decades. Of course, my mother was always exceptional, maybe as they say that you cant beat Tirunelveli women in cooking. For the modern womenfolk, medium becomes the means. They spend a lot of time on 'frills' and 'garnishing' to make it 'look good', not taste good. My maternal grandmother was good, unsurprisingly, though I think she was not 'exposed' to different genres of food, having lived most of her life in Sri Lanka. She was very very ordinary when it came to roti or food out of wheat in general. Unfortunately, culinary skills of my sisters remain very ordinary. They can take comfort that they are like the rest of the world :o In marriages, they talked much about giving dosai when the trend started, instead of the usual pongal and idli. Now it is probably a surprise if dosai is not given in a marriage.

Lot of choice but no variety :(

Volcano in Iceland

I associate volcanoes more with equatorial region than above tropic of cancer or below tropic of capricorn, of course without any reason. When I first saw/read about volcano in Iceland, I was amused. There is a country called Iceland and it has a volcano which has become active. I remember seeing one James Bond film about Iceland and since it is a film, I thought it is just 'fiction' and thought of it to be a near 'virgin island' or to put in Tamil 'கன்னித்தீவு' just like the one Tom Hanks lands in 'Cast Away'.

Today I first read the grim prognosis. Then I read about the Icelandic plume and the plunge. To quote, Grounding of 17,000 flights for the last three days makes it the biggest airspace shutdown since the Second World War. First I saw how far Iceland is from Europe, rather mainland Europe by checking the map. It seems to be atleast 1000 kms from London or Frankfurt :o I remember one volcano erupting in Andamans which is nearly the same distance from Chennai. I dont remember any flight disruptions in Chennai, though Chennai was not a 'busy airport' in those days.

Maybe the volcano in Andamans is just active for the sake of being 'active'. I remember Mount Vesuvius (somewhere in Europe) being the active in the past century. It is time that nature gets back at humans ;)

Online accounts: The name of the rose?

I was never 'tech savvy', rather I never liked to be one. Of course, I knew what the 'in-thing's were but never liked to be part of it. In my college days, creating email accounts were 'big'. For one, we had to pay for 'browsing' and also I am not a 'surfer'. Unless I had some specific purpose, I dont wander around amidst lot of pages. It is natural that I dont know lot of websites. Banking or booking tickets in the net is a necessary evil and I dont avoid that. Already there are too many 'names' and 'passwords' for such account, that I find it ridiculous. There are billions of people in this world and 'raghuraman' is not always available. It was ok till last year when I was able to manage many accounts with a simple (some would say silly) password and good memory. Creating these 'tough' passwords is a NP-complete problem for me :o It is amusing therefore when others created accounts for me!

I have a lot of 'hangover'. So the accounts that I create on my own are most often college or employee ids. I use 'a0756945', 'maa9716', '1015' (if I dont get raghuraman or raghuraman.r)! My passwords are even more ridiculous. It used to be rcube or rrr and it was good then. Now all websites, especially banking ones, want us to have one password with one capital letter, one special character and all that nonsense :( When I was in Texas Instruments, there used to be one system which will generate passwords and we had to just choose. I used to love that because it relieves me of a 'big problem' ;)

I think the first problem happened when a person created an email id 'raghuramthegreat' in yahoo out of 'whatever' :( It is not in my nature to 'naturally' hurt and so I used that id for sometime. I read her 'so well' that she also used to login to see if I am using :( I dont know how but this id 'spread' to few others as well and I was not amused when one MBA guy in my college mentioned the same in front of my class. I couldnt shrug it off like Atlas, atleast till some years ago. I thought I am 'relieved' but the bogie is continuing. I never liked facebook (because it is popular in US?) and one guy has created an id all the same using my picture in Orkut. I dont know why people dont mind their own business :( He has put my date of birth as 14 April 1970 and one of the photos from orkut as well! I dont know if I look 'so old' but the unkindest cut was my name was given as 'Raghuraman Ramaprasadh'! Who is Ramaprasadh? I could have well ignored this 'id' but changing my father's name forces me to intervene.

To hell with all these accounts.

My hit at NP-completeness?

Superficiality has been the bane of Indian educational system. Most of us are 'Jack of all, master of none' types. We know, but we dont know! It is hardly surprising that India may have the highest number of engineers in the world, even 5% of them may not be real engineers. We dont care about efficiency as long as they think it is 'effective'. One of my managers in AMD thought EDA tools were great as far as algorithms goes and maybe thought that I underestimate their 'sophistication'. I am still of the opinion that EDA tools are just 'good enough' and not always the best. I wont be surprised if some of the algorithms used are pretty naive. No wonder, I am seeing that ATPG tools have gone up in performance over the decade. Why should they become faster, when designs are becoming bigger and bigger? The algorithms employed initially were more focussed on 'brute force' methodology rather than 'efficiency'. The time to market is probably one bottleneck why these tools were not fine-tuned to begin with. I am supposed to have done Masters in Computer Applications like thousands of others over the past few decades, but I am dead sure that not even 1% would have even heard of (forget reading) Rivest, Cormen and Leiserson. I infact think that instead of having a curriculum with those ridiculous, 'SAD - System Analysis and Design' or 'Software Engineering', the entire course should have ONLY ONE subject for the entire three years (to put it simply, just this book alone) and that would have brought out more promising students, rather than these 'we know (a bit of) everything' fools. As always, I got books long after I finished the courses ;) 'Real Analysis' and now 'Introduction to Algorithms'. I have to get a new edition of 'The C Programming Language' by Kernighan and Ritchie.

P versus NP problem attracted me the first time that I was told about it. Not surprisingly, I realized that this most important open question in mathematics was prized (priced) at a million dollars. As always, stunning beauty of mathematics is its simplicity. Just like Fermat's Theorem, it is so simple to state, but impossible to prove. It is hardly surprising that relevance of mathematics in 'social sciences' was talked by 'Graph theory' expert Frank Harary. It is tougher to prove theorems in abstract terms, but to extend to social science is taking to the end of the galaxy. A simpler rendition of this NP problem is the subset-sum problem. To extend into social realm say politics, given a set of political parties, is there a non-empty alliance of parties which can win over the rest?

Let us stick with mathematics. I found the NP-complete boolean satisfiability problem resonating a lot with Sudoku. I also read an article, Anything Su Doku, I Can Do Better

Sourendu Gupta and others (http://theory.tifr.res.in/~sgupta/sudoku/expert.html) have calculated the real total to be 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960!, where the author’s final “!” is an exclamation, not a factorial!

It was also mentioned that 17 is believed to be the minimum number of clues needed for a soluble Su Doku. I had thought about this when I was working in SAP Labs and I learnt about Sudoku from a girl who was travelling in the bus with me (of course, I dont think either of us knew the other even by name). After I started improving in Sudoku, she thought she can go one step better by starting to do crosswords. I didnt follow. I allow people to have their moments of satisfaction/happiness ;)

Coming back to Sudoku, my initial take on computation of total number of Sudokus has to start from central triad and then extend the central row towards east and west and central column towards north and south. I also knew that the numbers didnt have any value and can be substituted by anything. I finally arrived at
. The central triad can be formed in 9! ways and extension of either side would make it 9!*6!*6! ways. I dont know how but I thought this should 'uniquely' define a sudoku. This has 21 clues but I knew that (5,5),(5,6),(6,5),(6,6) are redundant and thus it comes down to 17 clues!

If my initial premise of 'uniquely' defining a sudoku is right, then 17 clues should also be right. I guess new sudokus can be just formed by moving rows and columns appropriately. 17 clues are enough to satisfy a complete sudoku. If I get time and chance, I would like to spend more towards the final 'summit'.

IPL: Touch wood, courtesy Tharoor!

I just mentioned the farce called IPL in my previous post. Now, it is that another nut from Kerala who has really made it explicit in connivance with another Modi nut in cricket. Tharoor's IPL googly is hat-trick for Manmohan should be one more evidence against Kerala blood. In some sense, I cant blame them. If we have Chennai Super Kings, Royal Challengers, Bangalore and Deccan Chargers from Hyderabad, can other south Indian state, Kerala be a spectator, as usual?

Now, the claim is that Tharoor abused office and expectedly, opposition party asks for his removal from cabinet. Maybe Tharoor thought that he was like Obama and resorted to tweeting first. Then, his 'cattle class' remark found some spotlight. Then 'interlocutor' and now this IPL. Maybe it has come around a full circle. Congress is better off without this nuisance or at best, ask him to shut up and do the job that he is supposed to do. Expectedly, Rendezvous alleges breach of trust by Lalit Modi and Tharoor also cries 'betrayal'. Congress can be better off without such problems from a 'junior' minister or maybe it is trying to distract the attention of the people and opposition parties from even more serious issues. If latter is the case, then it is a job well done indeed. Maybe (D)MK has given a good coaching programme to Congress on how to run a government :))

No princIPLe!

I had not mentioned much about IPL except maybe for passing remarks. I have not been following much because as mentioned in that post, I thought exactly what Hindu's cartoon referred and was not interested in such an 'entertainment'.

I am not sure if it is slowly dawning on ICC or rest of the nations that it is just becoming an exercise to show its financial power. The financial power obviously comes from millions, if not billions, of fools who pay and watch such crap matches. So when I recently came across a recent note on the state of IPL, I was amused but not surprised. I knew just what BCCI and Lalit Modi are capable of. I dont know still why Ian Chappell considers Modi as a 'messiah' of sorts. I view Modi as the most likely contender for the first defendent in the murder of cricket. Maybe, cricket-ki-maut-ka-saudagar ;)

Two articles came in cricinfo presented some perspective - 1. What the IPL says about India

Brash, loud and vulgar, the IPL can be seen as a symbol of the country where it took birth: an India full of a recently acquired affluence and confidence; but there's more to it than that

Several social historians over the past three years have argued that the IPL manifests the emerging India and its lifestyle eloquently: that this event fulfils the aspirations of achievement and self-assertion in the globalised world, of which India now finds itself a part; apart, of course, from providing full-scale entertainment.

Rather it is the "obscene" display of money, the apparent intrusion of the sponsor and advertiser onto cricket's hallowed ground and into the live coverage, and the massive amounts for which teams and players are bought and sold that appear to have exercised the world's finer minds.

2. The IPL and the limits of the free market

The Ravindra Jadeja verdict suggests the IPL is attempting to put in place checks on player power in an effort to protect the league's interests

Just as season three of the Indian Premier League began, Ravindra Jadeja of the Rajasthan Royals was banned for attempting to renege on his contractual obligations and sign with another franchise. Midway through the tournament, his team appealed that it had lost a player for no fault of its own. Unable to recruit an alternative at a late stage, it wanted the prohibition removed.

At the end of March, the IPL Governing Council appointed a one-man committee comprising Arun Jaitley to hear the Jadeja appeal. President of the Delhi and Districts Cricket Association (DDCA) and a member of the IPL governing council, Jaitley is also a former Indian law minister and one of the country's best-regarded lawyers.

As Jaitley says in his ruling, "Leagues such as the IPL will survive only if utmost purity and honesty is maintained. There must be a strict compliance with the rules. Money has value, but in a league like the IPL, loyalty has a greater value."

Having taken the step towards money, talking of loyalty (is morality too far?) is ridiculous. Why should a player be loyal? If he is professional, he should be allowed to play for whoever pays him more. Dont we hop companies for money or other reasons? If they want to call or think cricket is a professional sport, then they should be ready to handle attrition as well. Going towards courts and lawyer infact reminds me of first ever round table in Cricinfo where Ian Chappell did talk of (to roughly quote)

...political judgement, trying to keep everybody happy
...game run by the legal eagles
...events, races are sorted out in front of the judiciary

Judgement reserved (for sure, atleast for me) ;)

Adopted 'brother'?

I dont know how/why but I never liked anybody, especially females, saying that some male is 'like' their brother. Usually this tactic is adopted to 'ward off' some males who may develop some 'dangerous motives'. To add fuel to fire, some guys take this to heart and really act like brother. I have heard that Sivaji Ganesan used to send gifts to Lata Mangeshkar. With three elder sisters, I am not sure of this 'new brother' relationship. I think that sibling relationship is one that is natural by virtue of their growing up almost under the same roof.

Ideally if the guy is 'sensitive', he will know that his presence is not entirely appreciated, if not solicited. The female can always pass these hints in a subtle manner (do we have to teach them that? ;)). I am reminded of the hard-hitting dialogue in Aval Appadi Thaan, especially because it is the girl who is offended when the guy takes umbrage under 'sister'.

Despite some 'history of misbehavior, misconceptions and misjudgements' in my paternal family, I have never been involved in any sort of 'controversy'. For one, it never crossed my mind to see them other than 'just relative'. I didnt even consider them as 'friend' :o I also dont have the habit of 'gossip'ping or 'backbiting'. If I was told anything directly by them, it never went into 'relayed' or 'retold' to anyone else. It stayed as just 'told'. Maybe I inherited that attribute from my maternal side, especially my uncle in whose house I nearly stayed most of my high school and college days. Maybe that is one reason why I was considered 'safe'. Anyway, my chithi didnt have a son and so I performed the role of 'brother' to her daughter during the engagement yesterday at Chennai. Her groom (rather his sister) was no 'stranger' and 'world is too small a place' was reaffirmed yesterday.