Baboon Logic

Much goes in the name of science in this country, and if I were to believe what I read, the rest of the world is not much different.

My personal favourite is Ravan and his Pushpak Viman (a flying machine that he used to kidnap women). Whenever priests, old men and the wise old men of the community described to me the greatness of the ancient Indian civilisation, all of them came to this inevitable conclusion - the western science is now trying to rediscover / reinvent / imitate what had been done in India 5000 years back (the number of years varies from person to person).

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The Unix Millennium Bug started getting noticed (in 2006), exactly a billion seconds before its sceduled execution, after there were some mysterious crashes which were finally traced to the definition of time_t in unix-like operating systems (and more generally, in the ubiquitous C (the programming language)). From a thread in PIClist, I also found this webpage which claims to have been written in 2003 (in case the opening paragraph looks familiar to you, yes, the whole page is a mostly plagarised version of the programming challenge in the introduction to the excellent book Expert C Programming by Peter Van Der Linden, a book I would recommend to anyone).

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If somebody had told me five years ago that I would one day come back to this old place, I wouldn’t have believed him.

That is a bit of irony considering that ten years ago I wouldn’t have believed that I was going to be away for so long.

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For a very long time I had made no effort to understand Shakespeare, owing principally to my belief that he was overrated. Then I saw Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet (even though I couldn’t stand Leonardo those days), which used the original text of the play without modifications (except for omissions and rearrangements).

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