Lonely Planet on Madras

Lonely Planet, while a generally good travel guide, has depicted my unique hometown in a rather unflattering light. What irked me when I read their article on Madras was the clearly partisan viewpoint that celebrates in other Indian cities the same deficiencies one sees in Madras.

Krish Ashok absolutely nails it when he lambastes the obvious bias in the article, and demonstrates that a similar article could be written about any of the large cities in India.

Allow me to add my own Rs 0.02 to his points.

Notes:

• I use "Madras" instead of "Chennai", because no matter what the politicians say, that is how I will always identify my home town. I am however, forced to use the word "Chennaiite" to describe people like me, if only to avoid the once-inoccuous term "Madrasi" which has been forcibly turned into a pejorative by ignorant Northerners.
• I recognize that people love their cities for different reasons. I may not prefer to live in certain cities mentioned in the LP article, but I promise not to diss them.
  

1. Madras is hot. Get used to it. A real Chennaiite jokes about the weather, owns one sweater for when he/she has to visit Delhi, and gets most of his/her work done in the morning and evening.
2. Tamil film stars are 'not that hot'. Let's see. In approximate chronological order, Waheeda Rehman, Vyjayantimala Bali, Hema Malini, Rekha, Sridevi, Meenakshi Seshadri, Padma Lakshmi. I must be missing something. The only other state that has contributed a comparable number of female headliners to the Hindi film industry must be West Bengal.
   
3. Madras lacks 'historical drama'. Ok, seriously? Madras may not be as old as Delhi is, but it has had a long, distinguished history of its own. It is home to several stunning temples, some of which are more than a thousand years old, and a culture and tradition that has flourished for much longer. It has also had some unique moments in modern Indian history, like being bombed during World War I (any schoolkid in Madras will tell you the name of the German ship that did it - The SMS Emden), being the final resting place of the apostle St. Thomas, featuring prominently in the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, among others.
4. Madras lacks the 'optimistic buzz' of Bangalore. We Chennaiites take that as a compliment. Perhaps this sense of realism comes from firm grounding in tradition. Our city grooms us such that we never lose touch with our roots, whether it is celebrating a traditional kolu during Navarathri, learning classical music and dance the traditional way, or even being polite. Madras chooses to assimilate influences into its culture, rather than let them replace what exists already. The strength of its culture also explains why for an Indian city, Madras has a surprisingly large foreign population. The Hindu for example, frequently showcases Russians, Japanese, Australians and Americans who origanally came to Madras to learn classical dance or music, and have since made Madras their permanent home.
   
5. Madras is difficult to get around in. Krish Ashok has already touched upon this, but let me reinforce that Madras has long boasted of one of the best (and cheapest) public bus systems in the country. Add to that an efficient multiple-route suburban train system, and the much awaited Chennai Metro, and you have a good model for public transport that other cities in India could take a leaf or two out of. Autorickshaws are another matter altogether, but the emergence of share autos (or tempos, if you prefer) and call-taxi services has somewhat relaxed their once firm grip on our purses.
   

Its problems notwithstanding, Madras is a wonderful city with plenty to offer, but only to those willing to partake of it. To all the others, we politely say "Thank you for coming. Please come again, and perhaps you will realize the magic of this place next time."

Edit (20/10/2009): Removed Vidya Balan from the list of Bollywood actresses of Tamil origin, since it turns out she's a Palakkad Iyer and not a Tamil Iyer.

Hobby-horse

Warning: Poor, really poor, absolutely impecunious humour follows.


Q: What did the destructivist artist's two-year old son call him?
A: Dada!

An even more esoteric version that uses the same punchline:

Q: In the dark recesses of an avante-garde museum, a little urinal whispered something to the big urinal next to it. What?
A: Dada!


And so the descent into anarchy continues. Stop me when it stops making sense altogether.

P.S. I can sense the questions. Why "Hobby-horse"? Why a urinal? Why this post? The first two questions can easily be answered. The last question is one for the ages.

A (Self-)Balanced Diet

Continuing the previous theme of festivals, geek humour and south Indian cultural references, here is something that struck me while contemplating yesterday's lunch (says something, doesn't it?):


Q: What's self-balancing, takes O(log n) for common operations, and consists primarily of vegetables and coconut oil?

A: An AViaL tree.

Happy Vinayaka Chaturthi.

For the benefit of our friends from north of the Vindhyas:
AVL Trees
Avial (I resent the insinuation that the dish is not an integral part of Tamil cuisine - we've clearly been eating this stuff for centuries)

Dvaitamu sukhama, Advaitamu sukhama?

Yesterday was Janmashtami. In keeping with the Tamil (South Indian?) tradition, my Mom always draws a set of little white footprints leading from the door to the puja room, which is supposed to signify Lord Krishna coming into our house to accept our offering of sweets and delicacies.

This past year, our house has undergone some renovations which for various reasons, have resulted in us having two entrances to the house instead of one. Hence, my Mother strove to cover all bases, and drew two sets of footprints, one from each door, meeting near the puja room.

You can tell that I'm not touched by the festive spirit, since the first thing that struck me when I entered the house was: "In addition to his normal, particle nature, I now see that Lord Krishna also exhibits wave nature".




As always, if you don't get it, consider yourself lucky.

And don't even get me started on the title of this post.

On the Borel-Cantelli lemma

A recent chat session with one of my most jobless (in every sense of the word) friends went like this:

Him: Prove the Borel Cantelli Lemma
Me: Cogito, ergo sum. Q.E.D.
Him: doesn't prove anything
Me: proves everything
Me: Alternatively, by trivially extending the Carter-Bogdanovich Hyperplane section theorem to include heteromorphic Giandellian spaces, one arrives, by a series of obvious reductions (carefully handling the occasional Jovikechian singularity) to the Borell-Winspolsky theorem. I won't insult your intelligence by pointing out that the Borell Cantelli Lemma is if anything, a weaker statement of a small part of this theorem.

Astute readers would have figured out by now that there is no such thing as the Carter-Bogdanovich Hyperplane section theorem.

(Still more astute readers will realize that if there were, I'd be a mathematical genius. Proof by contradiction.)

My "proof" was therefore nothing more than pseud-sounding gibberish that was the result of being highly caffeinated on a Monday morning at work. However, what struck me when I took another look at what I'd written, was the subconscious influence of things around me.

For instance, Ghirardelli (not Giandelli) is one of my favourite brands of chocolate, and I've been having a lot of their dark chocolate with mint filling in recent times.

Peter Bogdanovich is a legendary Hollywood director, and I've been trying to find The Last Picture Show on DVD for a while now. People who know me will have no difficulty in believing that I almost always have movies on my mind.

Winspolsky was an obvious amalgamation of Windows and Spolsky, the latter being of course, Joel Spolsky whose Joel on Software blog I read as part of my morning routine.

I haven't quite figured out how I came up with Jovikechian, but my friend hypothesized that I must have been subconsciously thinking of the planet Jupiter. Seems plausible, as I was reading about the possibility of life on Europa only last week.

It's interesting to see the kind of meta-semantics that emerge when you let the mind wander. In retrospect, my apparently random statement seems to have been a sort of exercise in free association.

P.S.
For those of you who are interested, the Borell-Cantelli lemma is an interesting result in probability, which seems to be a sort of converse of what is popularly known as the Infinite Monkey Theorem.

Shame

Pseudo-journalists like Rajdeep Sardesai, who think that the television media (meaning himself) should be appreciated for exploiting viewers for 62 straight hours, bombarding them with foolhardy speculation, irresponsible allegations and rampant fear-mongering, all set to tear-jerking music, when all people wanted from them was honest reporting.

A government which is trying to distance itself from the morally vacuous, quintessential Indian netas whom it designated to protect and serve us all, who were appointed not for their abilities, but for their loyalty to the party.

A Home minister devoid of any shred of human and moral decency, who finally deems it fit to resign under pressure from the said government, but did not feel the necessity to do so after any of the nine terror attacks in the last six months.

An opposition which projects itself as the champion of the masses and our only defender agains terrorism, but whose own record includes Godhra where more than a thousand people officially died, the 2001 attack on our parliament, the Akshardham horror, and whose head was personally responsible for the blackest day in modern India.

A vitriolic, hate-spraying fascist who claims to work for the good of Mumbaikars, but who is unsurprisingly toothless in their hour of greatest peril.

An unsolicited text message that I received on Saturday, which read "The tragic events in Mumbai remind us all of how precious life is. Call XXXXXX for information on life insurance policies."

Perhaps what we lack most as a country, is a sense of shame.

Installing Compiz on Hardy Heron with KDE

Who doesn't like cool desktops?

I first tried setting up the Compiz compositing manager for Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) earlier this year, but gave up after encountering far too many errors. A few days ago, I attempted the same with Kubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and found to my pleasant surprise that the installation was a comparative breeze.

These were the steps I followed, collected from various tutorials on the web.

Caveat #1: The actual steps may will differ depending on the version of Ubuntu/Kubuntu you are using and the graphics card on your machine. Google is your best friend.
Caveat #2: As of this day, Compiz is still relatively unstable, despite the huge number of improvements that have been made to it. Therefore, proceed only if you don't mind the occasional screen freeze, slow response or BSOD.

This is the configuration I used:
OS: Kubuntu Hardy Heron (v8.04, kernel version 2.6.24-16-generic)
Hardware: Dell Optiplex 745 with Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6400 @ 2.13GHz, 2GB RAM
Graphics: ATI Technologies Inc RV516

With that out of the way, let's get started.

The first thing you need to do is replace your X server with Xgl in your /etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc file.

Install Xgl:

# sudo apt-get install xserver-xgl

Edit /etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc and replace a line that looks like this:

ServerCmd=/usr/bin/X -br

with this:

ServerCmd=/usr/bin/Xgl :1 -fullscreen -ac -accel glx:pbuffer -accel xv:pbuffer
# Just so we don't lose it, the old command was ServerCmd=/usr/bin/X -br

Now restart your (KDM) session and hopefully, you will have Xgl running instead of X.

# ps -eaf | grep Xgl
root      5128  5121  4 11:54 ?        00:01:12 /usr/bin/Xgl :1 -fullscreen -ac -accel glx:pbuffer -accel xv:pbuffer :0 vt7 -auth /var/run/xauth/A:0-lpQc9n

Note: If you have any problems running Xgl, you will need to dig a little deeper to figure out what to do. Google with your graphics card info. In the worst case, you can switch back to X by reverting the kdmrc change that we did above and restarting your session.

If you find the performance unacceptably slow as I did, add a line enabling some options in your "device" section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Option      "RenderAccel"           "true"
Option      "backingstore"          "true"

After restarting your session, you should see things work considerably faster.

Now, install compiz itself:

# sudo apt-get install compiz compiz-kde

To enable translucence and shadows, edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add the following lines if they are not present already.

Section "Extensions"
Option      "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

Also edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add this line to the "device" section:
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"

Install compizconfig-settings-manager to help you configure compiz:

# sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

Finally, run compiz:

# compiz --replace &

If you've successfully installed compiz, what you probably want to see is the famous "desktop cube" effect shown in the first screenshot. To enable this, run "ccsm"

# ccsm &

Now under the category "Desktop", enable "Desktop Cube" and "Rotate Cube". Then under "General Options>Desktop Size", set "Horizontal Virtual Size" to 4 and "Vertical Virtual Size" to 1. Press Ctrl+Alt and drag your left mouse button, and impress your friends and colleagues!

If you want compiz to start automatically the next time you login, add a kde startup command:

echo "compiz --replace" > ~/.kde/Autostart/startcompiz.sh

There are several very cool effects listed in ccsm - be sure to also check out "Cube Reflection", "3D Windows", "Window Decoration", "Ring Switcher" and "Negative". Here are some samples:

Window Switcher (similar to the photo browser on the iPhone):




















A "ring-type" window switcher:




















The "Desktop Wall" effect: