Damn it feels good to be a gangsta

When the geek inherit the (gangsta) world.

There's a scene in the movie 'Office Space' where three geeks celebrate their mutinous insubordinaton against geekdom (corporate culture, coding, debugging, cubicles, bosses, printers etc) with reckless boogying to some gansta rap ("Damn it feels good to be a gangsta"). This powerful juxtaposition of geeks and gangsta rap convinced me that the music charts would soon be ruled by geeksta rap.

While many have tried (LudaKrishna et al.) to capitalize on the growing demand for geeksta rap, it was left to Monzy to use his wicked marketing genius and actually create a head-line grabbing east-west geeksta rivalry. The link points to Monzy's dis track of Purdue based geeksta MC Plus+ who has assured the geeks that "dire retribution is forthcoming".

Is this the most spineless thing...

our Dr.PM has done yet on this tour?

This whole foreign jaunt of Dr.PM has been a big let down. Right from thanking Britain for the "beneficial aspects" of their colonial rule to his address to the U.S Congress, our PM has shown that when it comes to foreign policy, he lacks vision and even the courage to envision India's deserved future.

The current geo-politico-economic strategy of all countries revolves around oil and natural gas. Read that line a hundred times until you see its implications in almost every article that you read. Given its importance, the proposed gas pipeline from Iran across Pakistan to India has immense consequences for the future. It is imperative that India get over Pakistan and give this pipeline the importance it demands. India and China, in a matter of a decade, have the momentum to cripple the US economy purely by dint of their surging oil needs. Unfortunately, our PM doesn't seem to have the spine for the task ahead.

Judicious

The Theory of Cryptography as Applied to Politics

A man's gotta do what he's gotta do...

The return of herbal fuel

Thankfully it isn't Ramar Pillai...

Every problem and every solution, it is often reported, can be found in India. But there are also a subset of problems that, to my great pride, are being addressed only in India.

For instance, I remember a computer science professor in my undergraduate school emphasising the need for making telecom exchanges (PBX) cheaper through technology. The affluent west, he said, could afford to achieve desirable telecom penetration at the current prices but the same level of reach can be achieved in India only through greater innovation. This is the kind of innovation that will sell only in Asian and African countries so the west isn't (wasn't) much interested.

Among the Asian and African countries, clearly only India and China are in a position to lead and deliver this kind of solutions. Let me actually gather all my biases and claim that it is India which is doing pioneering work in this realm. For example, though the auto and telecom industries in China are quite advanced, most of the models sold are exact replicas of the western ones sold by local subsidiaries. In India, on the other hand, considerable innovation in both telecom systems and auto parts has played a major role in maturing these markets. These solutions, hence are more suitable for use in say, African countries.

This bio-diesel (check the IISc profs report at the end of the article) and the group SUTRA are just another example of the many such projects in progress in India. The interesting diferentiator in these projects is that they are not intended to scale on capitalistic levels but are meant to be sustainable in smaller rural settings.

Musical Hallucinations

From the NYT

"Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy"
-T.E.Hulme, "The Embankment".

Pretty scary article for those of us who have had the misfortune of having a tune stuck in our head for days ... The article seems to suggest that insanity is just a step removed from ecstasy - maybe we'll end up like Schumann. Hey, I won't mind that as long as the tune I'm stuck with isn't some crappy advertisement jingle.

A DVD recommendation...

Curb your enthusiasm

All seinfeld fankind, the saying goes, can be divided into two - those who have watched Larry David's new show 'Curb your enthusiasm' and those who do not have HBO. Though I don't have HBO, I did manage to watch the shows (and in the process create a third category) by renting out a DVD.

The man behind the scenes is more than all the four Seinfeld characters put together. For those not in the know, 'Curb your enthusiasm' is a quasi-reality show where the actors improvise on-the-spot in each scene though the plot itself has already been meticulously worked out. The plot-lines are very Seinfeldian or, should I say, Davidian. I particularly enjoyed The Doll and The Group.