Some observations

so the blog is finally up again! and the issue of DSP/VLSI was finally resolved! (unless expert systems messes it up again).

Recently i was watching a movie about aliens, The faculty, why i watched it... i don't know, it was pretty boring.... anyways while watching it a thought struck me that in Hollywood movies aliens are always enemies, they never coming in peace. the only 2 exceptions i could think of were 'Contact' and 'ET', but even here except for the main guys everyone else thinks of the aliens as enemies. then i thought of all those teen movies i watch when i have nothing to do :D, almost in everyone of them there is a group of 'cool' people who hate/abuse/mistreat the guys who are different( the studious types) and the 'cool' guys don't really know these guys. and as you know art imitates life, you can pretty easily conclude that Americans fear/dislike/abuse people who are different/alien to them. maybe you can generalize this for the whole mankind... i don't know. but it certainly seems true of Americans. So can you really blame the Iraq war on the bush administration? i don't think so.... they couldn't really help it, i mean from their point of view Iraq is a desert, Iraqis don't speak English but a strange language, they dress funny, they don't follow Christianity, they don't play baseball and football etc etc.... so they most probably must be enemies, and certainly not friends so no point in feeling guilty about killing them for oil.

While reading Johnny's post this again came to my mind: Sachin, the guy often called as god by almost everyone till the early years of this decade; the guy who was the only reason ,for almost all Indians, to watch cricket; the guy on whose arrival to the batting crease stadiums filled up and on whose dismissal stadiums emptied, the guy every kid wanted to be.... i can go on forever, is suddenly the guy who is often called as the devil standing in the path of youngsters(who by the way rarely do anything of note); the guy who's booed in wankhade stadium (i still cant believe this); the guy to whom everyone gives advice on how to bat( this is unbelievable, this guy has scored more international runs than anyone else, and its my guess he knows a thing or two about batting).
Conclusion public memory is even more volatile than RAM! And we Indians don't respect our heroes, probably this can also be generalized to all mankind, but i will stop short of that.

With reservations for backward classes in India and affirmative action for blacks/coloured people/backward classes around the world, I used to think someone from the upper caste/a white might someday say that he/she is being discriminated against. But i didn't think it would come this early and from Darrel Hair and on such a issue, where there was no scope of discrimination against anyone.

in 4 months time we'll be working, college would be over and with that life as we know it would be over as well, this is pretty hard to digest. and as Danny pointed out a few days back, in 9 yrs we'll be 30,i don't know about you guys, but i am old :(