What a waste of time …

I was in the midst of writing a highly intellectual blog entry about how “chill through spine” might be a glorification of a certain liquid state of affairs, resulting from a barrage of horror movies, when a good friend of mine, during some conversation, bluntly put forth the premise of how movies could be equated to being a waste of time. Of course, this blog isn’t a direct consequence of the statement, I’ve been pondering oh-so-often writing about the issue, but it certainly acted as a catalyst.
Obviously, this is not an innuendo by any means; I’m utterly incapable (in terms of both literary and intellectual abilities) of such high-level constructs of cynicism against peers.

I could easily just replace ‘movies’ by ‘books’ in this entry, but I’d rather be slightly prudent and be presumptuous about a topic that I’ve relatively more experience with (note the emphasis on relative). Books have their own place of course, there is no better means of deconstruction of a story, scenario, or character as a great writer can achieve. However, I am of the opinion that, successfully expressing all possible complexities in a span of a few hours, is a greater (and more difficult) achievement. Obviously, artists in both realms have different means at their disposal to exploit; if one has the advantage of loquacity, the other is armed with the power to tingle multiple senses extraneously. Anyways, comparisons among the two art forms is a topic of its own, let me not digress, and rather try to absolve films (great ones for that) from the aforementioned allegation.

I don’t deny that certain movies are nothing but a gross waste of time, and I don’t have a problem with people stating the same. What I do have a problem with however, is generalizing the premise of a movie, any movie, to be a waste of time.

However one might try to glorify commercial cinema (commercially viable I mean), there is not much doubt that the truly great movies are the ones from the parallel genre. Movies from the intellectuals: directors that are constantly facing a paradox of acceptance of their ideas and imaginations by a wider audience, for a constant want of appreciation where on the other hand, they couldn’t care less about the commercial success of their ventures. Movies where clichés are not thrown around like peanuts, instead a few hours are meant to leave an indelible impression on the audience.

What constitutes a great movie? A compelling story is certainly an advantage, but I’ve inevitably discovered that great movies are considered those which are reflections of the artist making the film, most usually the director. Great films are akin to philosophy; making you think, appreciate and self-discover.

Not to mention, there is some sort of sadistic pleasure one drives out of a surreal, cryptic, perverse, ambiguous movie that is open to interpretations; that drives you wild, constantly in the search of achieving parity with the director … and I’m sure the feeling’s quite prevalent considering such movies are alluded to be masterpieces from their creators, be it in the form of Persona by Bergman, Interiors by Allen or Mulholland Drive by Lynch.

Great movies are ones which consist of unforgettable (be it gratifying or harrowing) images, ones that contain stylistic statements probably resulting from personal references and beliefs to an extent that every scene has an identity of its own, carrying a mark of the director with it, for instance, you can identify a Bergman or Scorsese movie quite easily without exercising too many grey cells.

It is stupid (for lack of a more subtle term) to categorize the movies I’m talking about to be inaccessible. Inaccessible, to one’s sentiments, for reasons of alien dialect, austere plots, cultural references, cryptic ideas, etc. With the risk of sound preposterous, I would attribute such illusions to be an inability (probably resulting from inertia) to embrace a movie to be an art form, with all its dimensions, and not just a titular existence meant only for purposes of senseless entertainment.

I’m not saying I’m completely oblivious of the horrendously corny, stupidly slapstick, glaringly redundant movie that often comes out, and I’m certainly not proud of my inability to be so. Everything you see, everything you read, must ideally leave an impression on you; make you grow, realize your mistakes, or consider a new approach to life or a circumstance, marvel at the beauty of the artist’s vision, or his ability to implement it so flawlessly on celluloid; or what the heck, simply shed a tear or two, from sadness or joy.

Anything else, yes, is certainly a “waste of time” …

What’s the deal with home-made food …

Now, here’s a question that has plagued me for ages … well, atleast for the past 2 years. In my humble opinion, home-made food and staying away from your home (I mean, where you and your parents stay) don’t go hand in hand. I’d try to give a proof, mainly by empirical observation, bar the use of any magic numbers or hand-waving techniques whatsoever. Any critiques will be politely, albeit blatantly disregarded …

Where I stay, there are not a whole deal of options when it comes to eating out. There’s a pretty cool Thai place, another Thai place, an Indian place that takes ages to reach, some burger places, and some other crappy places that no self-loving food-indulging human would think about going to. However, I would argue that any of these are certainly better than cooking at home.

Now c’mon, why would you wanna go through all the toil, the sweat, the pain, the anguish of cooking, when you’ve so many options right outside your door. This especially when the university is dumb enough to pay your tuition, and give you a stipend (that’s good enough to make an Indian grad student feel that he’s the king of the world), which will easily cover for your food related indulgences. I’d say, go to the nearby Thai place, enjoy the cuisine, the spice so fine … come back home, and you feel so relieved. So relieved as to you didn’t have to waste your time cooking, mostly food that’s inedible to anyone other than ‘good-food-deprived’ grad students, who’ll happily live on noodles for the rest of their sorry grad lives. Also, to think about the time saved – cooking, washing, pondering about how bad a cook you are, and so on …

Instead of the bliss, we choose to cook ourselves, bruising our egos everytime we do so. Getting our hands dirty in washing utensils, many a time, of others, who might be too busy to wash a spoon, or a zillion of them! (no offense to my dear loving roomies … ) Rather, does anyone realize that the whole ‘people dumping stuff in the sink during your washing turn’ phenomenon would be eradicated when you don’t have big curry utensils to cover the sin being committed, all so innocently ?? … Hell ya, so you see, not cooking at home can be a boon in more ways than one .. !

Unfortunately though, my voice is only loud enough for the person inside me to hear or understand. People think I wanna eat out because I’m too lazy to cook … bah ! … inertia was unknown to me until I looked it up in the dictionary yesterday. Well, in addition to all the incredibly convincing evidence I provided above, the sad fact is that I can take about 2 hours from cutting the onions to putting them into the vessels, which makes the entire cooking endeavor a looong and painful adventure for me. And hence I try convincing my liability-ridden, thai-hating, phone-loving roomies to join me outside … alas … the philosophy of today is common-sense only tomorrow …

Having said all these, there are times when you wonder otherwise … more on that next time !

‘Course’ – grained or not ….

I often wonder, why can’t you have an extended Masters program, that comprises only of courses. Graduate courses all around the place, whichever department you wanna take them in, how many ever you want so. Heck, I don’t think in 2 years of Masters, you can take all the courses that you might be genuinely interested in, and that might because of scheduling conflicts, load balancing, or whatever reason it is …

However, the utility of courses in the long run, especially if you’re targeting the industry, is questionable according to many. My roomie Vineet gives an especially compelling argument everytime the topic is brought up, and most of the times, I end up agreeing with him. Well, if you think about it, what skills does the industry (specifically, the software industry) require you to possess. Coding, for sure … a few courses, depending upon the industry you land up in, most probably related to Operating Systems, Networks or Distributed Computing. In that case, why don’t we just concentrate on getting these core courses out of the way and not really be concerned about any more (interesting) courses that might lie on the horizon.

Well, ofcourse, a compelling argument it is. However, whether you can ‘curb your enthusiasm’ when it comes to learning something important (… from a perspective standpoint) or new (to you… ) or orthogonal (to others … ) is a different question altogether. Every semester, when the course schedule for the next semester is put up, there’s almost a chill that passes through your spine, which talks about the endless possibilities you might explore in a hour or so of a lecture. Whether this enthusiasm is slowly dimmed as the semester progresses and you find out that 3 courses might be well over your head, and you’re not able to do justice to all of them, … , is an issue worth ignoring in this discussion (else, there’s no point of one … )

And yes, if you think about research, then the entire course thing might again be considered dicey by many. Well, why take a course when you think that it might not be related to your research area. I say, why not take a course that you’re curious about, who knows whether the area contains some problem that can be seamlessly (exaggeration … ) solved by some concept in your area of research. If you don’t know about the other field at all, you’re completely oblivious of the same … not to mention, the kind of insight you might be able to provide in a classroom scenario. I’ve seen amazing discussions resulting from a merger of areas, like linguistics, computer science, mechanical engg and neuro-science guys in a Cognitive science class ….

Maybe all this is directly proportional to the wonderful lecture given by Dr. Chase today, or somewhat log(n) proportional to the actual feelings that I foster on a sem-to-sem basis. In any case, I have one more semester to explore a few more courses at UTCS, and encapsulate pretty much the best courses it has to offer. Good enough argument for me alrite …

Celebrity marriages and the Free press !

So Abhishek and Ash are getting married, great … after many partners, many fights, confusions, temples, they finally decide to get together. Thank the almighty, we’re probably saved from any more speculation about their future together by the press or the media who nowadays are content on filling up their columns with inconsequential crap regarding the two of them. So, they went to some temple somewhere, millions go there, what’s the big deal? So the Bachchan’s prayed together, why is the press so damn happy about it? … rest assured one of the wishes would be to stay away from the glaring eyes of the media.

And now that the cat is out of the freakin’ bag, all hell seems to have broken loose. It’s front page news! Man o’ man, Tony Blair is getting married to Laura Bush! No, its just poor ol’ Abhishek who seems to have gotten the role of his life, thanks to the maestro Mani, and really ol’ Aishwarya who’s riding on the back of the bandwagon that international people have joined in, that she’s really beautiful. Yes, thanks for letting us know … we didn’t have a clue guys! Every paper you turn to, there are pages dedicated to this occasion, apologies to the people who’re really sentimental about their wedding and hope to get mental solace out of it, but frankly, everything seems such a waste of trees! Isn’t there anything better to write or report on, than this. Daddy Amitabh is very happy as well, elated, says that its the happiest moment of his life, that his son’s has decided to settle down. Of course, this must be deja vu for him, considering the entire Karishma Kapoor episode. Oh no, let’s not talk about that, the press certainly seems to consider that as taboo, not even a single mention, maybe not necessary either, but which among the accounts being written currently is indispensable ?

So the groom’s family decides to give a Banarasi lehenga worth more than 2 lakhs to Aishwarya. Freakin’ awesome! There are accounts of a secret shaadi mantra, front page material in the Mumbai Mirror, excluding the two entire pages of utter nonsense tracing the history of their relationship, their future, who’s designing who’s outfits, and what not. Why can’t they, for god’s sake just take something from the nearby Sawan Bazar and get the whole thing done with?

And the press seems to be like a bloodhound over this piece of information, invaluable to the global peace of earth. My last two mornings have been spent looking for pages without a mention of this occasion. I’ve always been a strong supporter of increasing editorials or opinion columns in papers. After all, isn’t press and journalism about freedom of expression, and facts are certainly not expressions. You can report as much as you want, but it’s also important to have a certain voice about the paper, important to let the public know what highly educated people think about issues. Solutions to problems everyone might be finding. After all, there have been so many things happening all around us, in the world. Why is it that our papers give zilch value most of the times to international happenings and prefer the marriage of celebrities to that? I don’t remember a single international newspaper which seems to have put so much emphasis and real estate space on the paper for such an incident.

I’m completely ignorant about how a national paper and a press works. I would like to assume that a paper should aim to represent the voice of the people. Especially today, when most of our politicians seem to be a mockery of democracy, and it required films to evoke the slightest bit of patriotism within us, we need the press to be the backbone of our society. All important revolutions, have been because of opinions, not because of a single person as many would believe, but because of the collective. People long to be important, even the most unimportant of them. They like to be in the scheme of things, they would love to tell their children that they’ve made a difference. Revolutions are created because of such a need, sometimes unfortunately because of a manipulating hand over them, but nevertheless. The press has to realize the importance it holds in today’s society, in times which are troubled not on the surface but deep within, where problems are tended to be avoided rather than tackled head-on.

In such light, what does the Abhishek-Ash wedding signify, is anyone’s guess!

The utopian interview ?

In the academic sphere, where the adrenaline is often not so obvious, finding motivation to put yourself through hell is quite a difficult task. Unlike in sports for example, where you can pump your fists, shout a word or two, I wonder how many times one feels an emotion like that in academia. Of course, the task in hand would be as difficult in either case, but to find motivation coming out from a desire to work like crazy, not leave a moment to anything else, is a wonderful kind of sadism. The results, unfortunately might be different in some cases, for instance mine … … but, however stupid this might sound, the whole process is something you look back with an amazing sense of relief, happiness, and contentment.

Now, whether the entire ordeal makes ’sense’, is subjective. From a third party perspective, or from a job perspective, it might not really make a lot of sense to take courses all around the park, and eventually end up with skills that won’t really be appreciated in industry. You cannot really blame the software industry for this phenomenon, most jobs are coding jobs and the requirements are really simple, coding! You go ahead during the interview, bantering about the courses you’ve taken, how they might make a difference, how they might enable you to think in a dimension that others might not conceive of, a dimension like a merger of two fields. Of course, this is more applicable to those visionaries who’re the ones to carve a new field altogether, or find efficiency or better throughput in existing tasks in such a merger. But, aren’t things like thinking in a broader scheme of things something you wish for, and be successful in, the raison d’etre for every human. And won’t something like this be helpful to the company as well, irrespective of which position you hold within the company? Or is it just that you need coding skills, and a broad knowledge of a few algorithmic techniques, which if put your mind to can be mastered (w.r.t an interview) in a few days?

Ideally (of course, I “might” be a “bit” subjective here), an interview or an interviewer should take under consideration, what the candidate has done, in terms of courses or research so far. It should never be a black and white interview, where you either answer something or you don’t. Now, many would say that interviews are mostly gray scale, but I beg to differ, and feel quite the contrary. When you have a ton of candidates to choose from, there would be an obvious benchmark in place, like the GRE for admissions, and most interviews tend not to be the best interviews they can be.

Whether knowing about Computer Science, taking courses, being passionate about the field itself counts in the industry, is debatable in itself. But as I mentioned before, the software industry should look for people who ’simply’ know more … rather than something really specific. One must have the capability to analyze and understand the depth of knowledge a candidate has, and how can he be useful in the bigger scheme of things. Why should an attitude like this only apply to people in management, where you find people who can be useful in the long run, who show promise from the outset, rather than an ‘do you answer all my objective questions correctly’ interview? Every aspiring software company should look for people who know Computer Science. Lets not forget that software is essentially a brain-child of Computer Science. Only good computer scientists, can move the company to a direction that is beneficial to the company and the individual himself.

I’ve had interviews where I’ve had lots to talk about, but they don’t fit in the interview anywhere and am quite appropriately bumped. Let me be clear however, that this is not a postmortem of my interviews, even though they’re worth exactly that and nothing more. What I’ve written here is my (as it might have been apparent, not necessarily “humble”) opinion on what interviews should be like.