Once upon a time, there lived a man in the outskirts of Quantum Village. Schrödinger was his name, and he had a cat called Schrödingerscat. Schrödinger loved his cat, and he had lived in the village for many years in peace and contentment.

Now Schrödinger was a smart man, and he liked to perform many scientific experiments in his lab. One such experiment consisted of a little box with a piece of radioactive material in it. Who knows what he was planning to do with it? Schrödinger was a smart man.

One cold winter day, Schrödingerscat went missing. Smart man that he was, Schrödinger realized that his cat must have wandered into his lab, and must have shut himself inside his little box filled with radioactivity. Now, Schrödinger faced a dilemma - should he open the box to free his cat?

People like you and I might wonder what the fuss was all about, but Schrödinger was a smart man. He realized that as long as he didn’t look into the box, his cat was both dead and alive, thanks to the wonderful and mysterious laws of Quantum Village. But if he ventured to look inside the box, the cat could either be alive or dead, but not both. Schrödinger was perplexed; what was he to do? Dare he risk opening the box? After several hours of indecision, Schrödinger finally decided to look. “I might as well open the box and learn the fate of my dear cat,” he thought aloud.

Alas! When he opened the box, poor Schrödingerscat was lying there, dead. Schrödinger was stricken with grief, and it is said that he was never quite the same again.

Moral of the story: Curiosity killed the cat.

I watched the season finale of Heroes last week. Needless to say, they’ve upheld our glorious tradition of disappointing endings. It wasn’t any more disappointing than the rest of the season, though…but it still qualifies, right?

Another great tradition that is followed by television and cinema is that everything must be explained by science. Genes being today’s fashion, everything in Heroes used to be explained by those little bits and pieces in our cells. Instant healing, reading thoughts, creating illusions, flying, traveling through time, painting the future and everything else used to be manifestations of the amazing potential of the human genome. The laws of physics are so ‘yesterday’ after all.

This time though, they invoked the mighty Einstein. You see, there’s this girl who can travel really fast, and this guy who can supercharge other people’s abilities. Guess what happens when they come in contact? She travels faster than light of course! That’s where Einstein comes into the picture - by travelling faster than the speed of light, she actually travels backwards in time, that is, into the past. With this super-ability, she travels into the past, rescues one of the good guys and gets back. Cute, huh?

But wait - the writers pulled a fast one on us: it’s all very well that she went back in time, but how on earth did she get back? Oh, whatever.

I also ended up watching old episodes from the first season during the last couple of weeks, and with all that wisdom, I feel obliged to share a bunch of dialogues that would summarize those twenty-three episodes -

Noah Bennet: I’ll do anything to protect my family!

Claire Bennet: I want to be normal. Boo hoo!

Peter Petrelli: I have everyone’s powers, but I’m still afraid and need my brother to hold my hand. I love him (sob, sob).

Nathan Petrelli: Don’t worry Peter, I love you and will help you just as soon as this election is over. Oh, and by the way, can you get this knife sharpened for me? I want it ready so that I can stab you in the back.

Matt Parkman: I’m a loser.

Hiro Nakamura: Don’t worry Parkman, I’m a loser too.

The Haitian:

(blanks out)

(…and now, a preview of the next season!)

Maya Herrera: I’m the reason why all those people died…waaaah! waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! (Somebody please shut her up.)

I’m probably obsessed with this music player called mpd, but what the heck. I’ve good reason to be, especially since I listen to music for the greater part of the day. Having a good music player is like having a good chair to sit on. Sure, no one thinks it’s that big a deal, but paying attention to posture helps your health in the long run.

To clarify, I’m not obsessed with mpd per se, just the concept of a modularized client-server architecture for playing music. mpd is the server, gmpc is the client that I’ve chosen to use, along with a couple of other components such as scmpc to scrobble my tracks and musictracker to update my Pidgin status. I also found an XFCE applet that can control mpd. As an added bonus, it turns out that I can adjust the master volume by scrolling my mouse-wheel over the applet, something I’ve wanted for a long time. Sweet.

After the tragic attack on Mumbai on Wednesday and Thursday, the question that we must all ask ourselves is not, “Who is behind these attacks?” as many news channels and newspaper columnists have kept repeating mindlessly. No, what we must ask ourselves is, “Will this change anything?”

This pessimism is not unwarranted. India has a long history of so-called ‘patience’ with respect to terrorist elements, something that the sensible citizen knows to be a euphemism for cowardice. The pattern is well-defined: a speech condemning the act and claiming that ‘the country would not put up with terror’, followed by a long, drawn out investigation by a committee of politicians, and then a few years in court with nonsensical judgments. Meanwhile, the media would do its bit, rising to the defence of the poor terrorist (who has a wife and kid after all), twisting the truth in the quest to entertain the public.

The situation in Bombay is not under control yet, and already we have a hundred and thirty known casualities. How did we let this happen? I say ‘we’ because, at the end of the day, it our own fault that we let down our defences. When a tree is a rotten at its core, any passing storm can tear it down. And so, instead of pointing fingers at our oh-so-friendly neighbors, we must do what we can to fix the larger problem facing the country.

Why was there no patrol around the coast intercepting the terrorists in their boats? Perhaps there wasn’t enough security in place, or perhaps not everyone was doing their job. When fishermen reported that they had seen armed terrorists, why did it take so long for the police to get their act together? Indeed, why did it take so long for our security forces to cordon off a building infested with armed gunmen? Shouldn’t they have evacuated the adjacent buildings immediately? I won’t claim to know the answers to these questions, nor am I an expert in these matters, but it seems to me that there is absolutely no system in place to deal with such a situation. Policemen are not trained to deal with such crises, nor do they have the appropriate equipment.

And yet, how could we have such expectations? In India, a policeman’s job is hardly one that the common man respects; we might fear them because they have certain powers, but it is fear mingled with contempt, because we know, just as they do, that they’re part of a highly corrupt system. As for equipment and training, the money allotted for this purpose lines the pockets of middlemen.

If security were the only problem, it could be fixed rather easily. But the rabbit hole goes still deeper. Terrorists live amongst ordinary citizens and carry out their activities with audacity, only because there’s really no way for us to tell if an individual is an Indian citizen or not, let alone enforce security measures at the border. Passports are forged, because there are people ready to supply them for their own personal gain. Politicians hanker after money and votes, and in the process, they disregard national security and the welfare of citizens. Today, politicians have destroyed our educational institutions in the name of reservations, damaged the unity of the nation in the name of caste, religion and language, and hampered the progress of the country by disregarding merit and appeasing the incompetent. At this moment, we are proud of how our country is becoming a global economic power, but the educational policies of the government will come back to haunt us ten years from now. This is the kind of pride that comes before a fall.

And all this while, why is it that we value the lives of our countrymen so cheaply? I read a headline from an Indian news source yesterday that I can paraphrase as, “6 foreigners amongst 80 killed…” - as if the lives of the six foreigners were somehow more important than all the others. This is not an isolated case; it’s almost as if, for the Indian media, these are mere numbers that contribute to the excitement, and the more the merrier.

So when I said the attacks were tragic, it wasn’t just because a hundred people were killed, but also because our enemies have once again made it obvious how weak the foundation of our society truly is. In happier times, I would have said that we must do whatever little we can to push forward on the path of progress, but today, little is not good enough. Now is the time for us to get together and tear down the bastions of corruption and incompetence, before it is too late.

The terrorists have been at it again. On Wednesday, November 26th, India’s financial capital Mumbai was rocked by a series of attacks that took more than a hundred lives and injured thrice as many - according to the last count. Some people are being held hostage by armed gunmen even now, and the situation is still very tense.

–

Now what?

A few days ago, I wrote a poem that I called ‘Tomorrow.’ Now, Vaibhav Garg (DAIICT’s cherished song-writer) has given it a tune of its own. Brilliant!

…hold the Earth in the palm of my hand and spin it around,
…leap from planet to planet, laughing in glee
…play hide-n-seek with the Sun and the Moon
…run along a beach that goes on forever
…sit in a boat that bobs up and down with huge rolling waves
…feel the world sway beneath me as I sit on a garden swing
…sit alone in a room and listen to absolute silence
…have the conviction that nothing matters and nothing ever did
…live in a single moment with no memory, just bliss.

Tuesday is the longest day of the week. It has all the enthusiasm - but none of the energy - of a Monday.

The Indian Space Research Organization has been doing a number of cool things lately, the most recent achievement being the successful launch of India’s Chandrayaan-1. As a frequent reader of Slashdot, there are primarily three kinds of comments that I’ve come to expect each time a major announcement is made regarding India’s space program.

The first category contains jokes, often related to call-centers. These can be safely ignored. The second category includes comments congratulating human-kind for its achievement. While overly repetitive and probably unnecessary, such comments can be easily tolerated.

Finally, there is always a bunch of people whose argument goes like this:

Why is India wasting money on space research when there are millions afflicted by poverty?

This line of reasoning is flawed for a variety of reasons. Here’s why:

1. The argument assumes that there is no (or very little) benefit accrued by spending money on the space program. Further, it assumes that money not spent on the space program would be used to fight poverty, whatever that means.
2. Poverty is not caused by a shortage of resources. There are individuals who are very rich, and yet there are communities that are facing starvation. If the solution were as simple as taking wealth from the rich and giving it to the poor, all the socialist countries would be models of good governance.
3. Wealth is not something that moves from one individual to another; it is created. As a silly metaphor, think of it as a flame that keeps you warm: you need to keep adding fuel if you want it to last.
4. Teach a man to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime. Charity as a way of life is detrimental to the progress of society.
5. We can’t wait to solve the problem of poverty before moving on to the Next Big Thing. That way lies madness.

According to this press release by ISRO, India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft successfully hit the Moon as planned on November 14th 2008. An excerpt:

In a historic event, the Indian space programme achieved a unique feat today (November 14, 2008) with the placing of Indian tricolour on the Moon’s surface on Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s birthday. The Indian flag was painted on the sides of Moon Impact Probe (MIP), one of the 11 payloads of Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, that successfully hit the lunar surface today at 20:31 hrs (8:31 pm) IST. This is the first Indian built object to reach the surface of the moon. The point of MIP’s impact was near the Moon’s South Polar Region. It may be recalled that the modern Indian space programme was initiated in 1962 when Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime Minister of India.