Jaane Tu ... Ya Jaane Na...

Finally saw the movie... intersting timepass movie.. nothing special about it... But it did get me thinking... not about love and friendship and all that... but about the whole rathore and violent streak thing...Basically, the hero hates getting into fights and does everythign possible to avoid fights. I've actually never understood how ppl get into fist fights. Granted, there have been times i've been really mad at people but those generally end with either me walking away or shouting at the person concerned.
It must be really intersting ot get into oneof those movie style situations were the circumstances fill you with righteuos rage so much so that you can beat a sword yielding karate black belt with your bare hands. Frankly, i doubt i'll be able to work myself up to get to the righteuos rage...let alone beat him with my bare hands. I mean tae kwon doe was great exercise and fighting ppl on the floor was fine...I guess i do have the ability to beat the guy to pulp... but the desire's lacking... which brings me to something else...
Desire...or rather inspiration... People who have it underestimate it's importance... I'd do anything for it... I know I might have the ability to do a lot of things... but i lack the inspiration to actually try doing anything... well enough of the babbling for now... Gnite!

To Believe or not to Believe

I remember i had a lesson once about God and religiousness and related stuff. After the class our teacher asked our class of 50 students, how many of us believed in God (in any form) ... I don't remeber the exact numbers... but about 40 45 students stood up and said they did believe and about 5 or 10 said they didn't... I was the only one who said i'm not decided... somehow the teacher thought this was pretty funny and so did a few others... (I've still not forgiven her for that and many other things... but that's a story for another day and another time)
It's been some time since then and nothing's really happened that's changed my opinion...I mean i still go to temples with my parents, still make a show of asking someone up there for help whenever i go for exams , start driving or do whatever the hell i'm doing for which a bit of extra help might come in handy. But I've never truly believed that there's anyone up there and even if he is...i don't see why he should want to help me... i mean...there are a lot more deserving ppl... And personally, I still don't know which God to worship... there are supposed to be so many of them... There are lot's of other problems too to becominga believer... it seems you might have to give up on a lot of logic which just doesn't seem possible for me to do... so there you go i don't believe in Him
But all this doesn't actually mean i'm an atheist either, at least i don't think i am... The total lack of belief in something supernatural seems a very depressing thought.... it's always nice to beleive that if you've given you're best you'll get what you want... but anyone who's done anything knows that that's not how the world works... there's always that element of luck... and if staring at an idol and chanting a few names brings me that luck... then so be it...

Sometimes i wish i was a believer .... then again whenever i try, there's always that little guy on my shoulder saying..."come on... you don't seriously expect praying to help, do you??? " ... maybe there's a life changing experience that's going to come to me sometime that'll make me start beleiving... but until then... i'm just a sad lonely boy wondering hw the hell did everyone else decide wether to beleive or not to beleive....

“To believe in God is impossible - to not believe in Him is absurd” : Voltaire

RESERVATION AND ALL THAT JAZZ

Its 5 in the morning and i'm not sleepy, So i thought i'd write something random(as usual). I guess it'll be about one of the things that chased me out of india in the first place. Its recently come back into debates with the SC taking a strong stand against it.
Frankly i don't see the point in increasing the reservation by giving 27% reservation to OBCs. It just makes no sense at all... we've been a republic for 57 years and then suddenly one day a Mr Arjun Singh thinks y not get a few more votes by increasing reservation a bit?
It 's just brilliant.. who's gonna oppose him anyway? they all want votes. It's gonna help a lot of poor chilren get education. what total absolute crap!
Actually lets put the arguement for reservation first-
1)These ppl have been discriminated against for centuries and so they need to be given reservation to rise to the levels of the other ppl
2) They were discriminated against now they need a chance to discriminate(crazy! but its really the arguement in some places)
3) They're poor and incapable of studying as well as the better of ppl so naturally they need to be given reservation

OK... i don't know y i need to argue against these points but... i'm bored and an insomniac..so here i go-
We 've had 23 % reservation for 57 years now... way past the initial period of 10 years set my ambedkar... i don't mind it having been exteded say thirty years or something, so that the actually poor SC and STs get to know about reservation and they utilise it and these ppl who benefit would help there succeeding generations to study and be well preprared and competitive with the rest.. Has this happened? actually what has happened is these ppl think that we have reservation so what s the point is studying so hard...and they get into seats which more often than not someone else deserves more. But you cna't blame these ppl ofr having gotten used to it.. you should keep reducing reservation slowly say by 2 % a year or something and get it to 0 reservation instead of suddenly making 50 % resrvation
Another thing is that OBCs have never got reservation - so giving them 27 % is not like increasing reservation... true, but OBC ppl have been studyhing colleges and schools for 57 years without reservation, true they might have been fewer than upper class ppl, but they're defenitely increasing because they are getting more educated, this sudden increase in reservation will reduce their determination to work hard.
Thirdly, reservation i aggree will have helped a lot of poor ppl to date... i'm sure there a lot of stories aobut how poor ppl were saved my reservation. But have these ppl passed on what they have benefitted to the rest? if so y do we still need the same level of reservation(let alone increase it) shouldn't we start decreasing it? If not , then what s the point of reservation? it' s not served it purpose till date y perpetuate such a collosal waste pf resources which could be spent on more talented ppl?

Lets say you refuse to think logically, and you want reservation because it helsps uplift the backward ppl... then y not give them reservation in institutes other than IITs, AIIMS and IIMs which are the crown jewels of the indian education system?I 'm not saying these ppl are less talented or stupid..what i'm saying is what abt the poor little rich kid who wasted two or more years of his life for that entrance..bear in mind that JEE is regarde as THE most meritocratic exam in the world...so money hardly comes in the picture.

Then you might say the backward ppl don't have access to the education facilities that the upper castes have..In this regard i have two points... firstly there are hardly any schools today which do not give you education just because you are an SC, ST or OBC.
Secondly reservation in higher education institutes is pointless because we need to give them basic education first before giving them reservation in higher institutes.

One more point is , y do we need reservation in jobs and post grad courses...these ppl got reservation as an undergrad, they studied in the same college living together with similar ppl (only maybe an upper caste person) have'nt they had the same opurtunities and education now? Y give them any furher reservation????

and so i end this pointless arguement by saying again that increasing reservation is total utter crap.... and that i need to go to sleep

p.s. i'll be back soon... i've got more random stuff in this brilliant head of mine... what with exams going on and lots of time in my hands....

'FEAR CAN KEEP YOU PRISONNER, HOPE CAN SET YOU FREE'

I just finished watching one of the best movies... ok, maybe not the best, but surely one of the most inpiring and beautiful movies i've ever seen- 'the shawshank redemption'. It was released in 1994 or something and stars Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman.. brilliant story, brilliant cinematography, awesome acting and great(for want of a better word) naration by Morgan Freeman....It's about the lives of two people in prison and spans around twenty years... it's like most prison movies but there's just something about this that captures your heart... the naration, the story i don't know what... the story kinda slows down in the middle... but that just increases the beauty of the conclusion of the movie... the final redemption...
A must watch movie ... worth not doing your economics and electronics tutorials...bad comparison... but i'd better get back to doing some questions

Are languages disappearing?

a very interesting question that cropped up when my roommate and i were just sitting and talking.. my roomie is a big tamil buff and knows the thirukkural and all(i don't even know how to spell it).... and here i am... a mallu who doesn't know how to write malayalam properly... it's really sad.

He was just saying how tamil and sanskrit are the only two languages which have developed to an unparalleled level... and they used to exist side by side in india... without one affecting the other's development in anyway...but now the villian in the form 'English' comes...(witha small role played by hindi)to such an extent that sanskrit has disappeared from daily use. and tamil according to my roomie is also disappearing and in twenty years time there would be no tamil..... im' not sure if he's talking about classical tamil or about just normal tamil. whichever he was talking about...i don't think there is a problem about a language like malayalam even... let alone tamil disappearing. because of the basic fact that so few people in rural areas get english education... is that good? or bad? on the one hand it is argued that Tamil-medium or malayalam-medium are not as good as english-medium schools... i see two main reasons for this.....firstly and i think importantly... this prejudice that this is true... most good and capable students move to English medium schools and secondly GLOBALISATION... it is absolutely necessary that we know english to survive in this modern world where everyone and everyplace is connected....

which brings me to another interesting question... is all this networking and making the world a smaller place really good for humanity.... it's quite an obvious fact that smaller communities will be able to develop faster...i read that in some michael Crichton book....he explained with an example of how a group of 4 people will be able to make a decision and solve problems much faster than a group of say thirty.... so with all these advancements in technology and telecommunication are we really going to slow down human evolution?

or am i just really sleepy????

Randomizing 2D arrays

Hope that sounds technical and random enough for me to begin my blog. Actually i'm just a student of computer engineering first year... but iwa s pretty intersted in programming and did a lot of it in my eleventh and twelfth. One of the most interesting problems i ever did was randomizing a 2D array. If you don't even know what an array is go no further.. this is not for you...
if you are a software engineer or an expert in programming please don't be too harsh on me while commenting...:-)
When you want to randomly generate a 1 dimensional array which has no digit or character repeated. the easiest way would be to just make a for loop . generate a random number and then check if that number has appeared before the current spot. if it has... generate another number..else go to the next posittion in the number.........All well and good
But now... what if we have to randomize a 2D array.. as far as i know there are atleast four ways-
1) take pen and paper start writing it down.... this method is fast for small matrices but for larger numbers it becomes tiring :-)
2) generate two 1D arrays(as done above) and combine them(yep... really simplebut crude,wierd, and slow ).I actually haven't tried it but i know that a typical 4*2 matrix would take close to 30-50 seconds atleast to load(in C++)
3)generate the 2D matrix as in the method above(for 1D arrays)... ti's different from the first in the fact that only one 2D array is being generated and traversed on(if you know what i mean!!!)
this would be faster than the two above but still would take a long time to load(atleast 10 seconds )
4) The last and most interesting one is my method (naturally!!!).. you can actually use this for 1D 2D or even 3D arrays (yep!...its possible.. i used it to make a sudoku generator) and that too instantly...Here goes.
the basic trick is instead of traversing an array and generating a random number for each position.... you can actually choose one number and randomly select a location for it to be entered... get what i mean???
For this we would need two identical matrices...the anolgy would be that we have a table or matrix..which is initially blank(1st matrix) and all the postions are covered with a mark or something(try it out with a paper and some tokens)(2nd matrix). and we have a box of the numbers which we have to put in this table.
firstly we take one number from the box and generate a random position..... if this is covered.... we take another position.... and check if its occupied if tis not we put the number there. then we take the next number from the box and continue....

try and write the code for this.... if you really want this program... just comment...

The two reasons for this being fast are-
1) there is no needless traversing of the array each time a new number is generated(to check if that number already exists)
2) it's a computer for goodness sake!!!

you can generate almost any large array and even my old PC gives me the result instantly.