money in new york

Despite having had a small town, third-world background I think I have unconsciously so, got acclimatized to the city-life. Slowly I see that it is more than just acclimatization that has happened over this decade that I spent in the city. I see things differently now, very different from how I would have when I first moved here. A thing about the big city that bothered me a great deal when I was a kid was the comfort with which city folks set money to be the most important goal in their lives, or judge everything on grounds of money. I used to think that dreaming of big money is really a lot about being superficial. Looking back I think it could have been because of having been brought up in a culture where I was not encouraged to aspire. I was made to choose one amongst the few jobs that were offered to me. Success was achieved by adaptability, not through working to make one's dreams come true. I still feel sometimes that I wasn't encouraged enough to be doing what I absolutely loved to do. Through years of subjugation and colonial exploitation, it was actually discouraged in my circles if someone broke free of norms and started anything with a fresh perspective. When I came to the city, I couldn't help but notice that people were not doing anything halfheartedly. If you were into something then it is so because you absolutely love it or at least convinced yourself that you do. Nobody chases money as such. Everyone is doing what they absolutely love to do. Money is only a measure of how good oneself is. It was surprising to see that dreaming to make money in the city is not at all about being superficial. It was actually quite the opposite.

It was difficult for me to choose what I wanted to do. At the point where I was I felt that I hadn't have enough opportunities or didn't feel confidence about myself to take charge of things - mostly because of personality and partly because of the background. Those two factors might not have been completely unrelated. But with time, I had chosen a way and was willing to make sacrifices for choosing what I loved to do. I remember having loved analysis a lot. When I talked about things they were abstract things - things that most people were not ready to grasp. People didn't like that. I still loved it. A human being rooted in his history and ready to understand his aspirations. I felt a sense of bliss in being that way. I swayed from being a conservative to being a liberal and sometimes a moderate, but all this while I think I maintained a sense of honest curiosity, something that I was made to develop by training in science. An education in science does give you quite a bit of money, but not a whole lot. No matter how good you are at something you have to be entrepreneurial after one point. I don't seem to have the opportunity, but if I am positive, I might grab an opportunity if I see one. But being extremely analytical makes you a cynic and somewhat of a pessimist, mostly because you can't connect with many people. I love this energy and vigor of the city, but because of my very nature I can't lie to people that I don't like making so much money. That usually hinders the process of adaptation to the city life and I think that is where I am at this point.

A friendly Map

I have been working on this idea that I haven't found enough devlopers for. The development is thus quite slow and of course, I haven't been able to get any investments either.

But here is the idea anyways. When you visit a new city (for purely tourist purposes) you have little idea of where your favorite places can be. Of course, it takes time to find out what your favorites are. But what if a friend could tell you where you should go, a friend who has known you for years and understands what kind of places you would be really interested in. If you are an art-lover like me, the friend would've told you about the museums and ongoing exhibition in the city, or may be a journey to the house of a famous architect outside the city followed by relaxing in a neighborhood bar where mostly artists hang out.

Well the idea is to have a website do that for you. networking websites like facebook, orkut already know a lot about you. They know what kind of a person are you and what kind of people you would share your interests with. Even if they don't a little survey can tell a lot about your personality, objectively.

I came up with a clustering algorithm, in order to organize people in different categories. There are no rankings of parameters in the whole algorithms. Everything is based on the distance from individuals. In other words, the algorithm doesn't try to calculate how much you like something but instead it only purports how far are you from a museum lover or a party animal (a distance metric based on the feature vector in the clustering).

One the algorithm discovers your personality - it suggests you what places you should go, fetches schedules from the museum sites and tells you what train to take. If the trains are not running, it tells you what other means you can take. It calculates fare as much as you can and adjusts the costs that you have already given to you. It even takes the weather forecasts and asks you not to go to the park when its raining... and a lot more.

Tell me which real friend would do that much for you..

The opposing argument is one that favors uncertainty. Of course, there is fun in serendipity. Nothing takes away the joy of discovering things that you hadn't planned. But i mean, you can't plan for accidental discoveries and that doesn't make planning worthless.

Hay Bale

Hay Bale
Originally uploaded by rachel sian

Izaura

A woman that sings in João Gilberto's sounds - Izaura - sounds like someone striking a glass gently. If I close my eyes I can see her wavy hairs, deep dark eyes, thin lips, a beatifully carved nose all that.. from just the very deep soothing voice. Wonder how the song tells all that to me.

Bengali and Eastern Hindi

Inspired by Language Log (and at times, being disappointed with its content too) I have started to log my own observations in South Asian languages.

My first observation is a simple one. I remember from my times in Varanasi, that the local dialects used "man karna" a lot. man kare to kar lo, man nahin kar rahaa. I was listening to an excerpt from Sunil Gangopadhyaya's ShreshTha galpa. I found that the same phrase is used a lot in Bangla too. The dialects in Bihar are quite similar to Bangla, but I wasn't aware that effects are reflected into far as Varanasi. The haven't heard this phrase being used in most of the khadi boli dialects and frankly not very frequently in literature either.

Urdu speakers hardly seem to use this phrase. I might theorize that man is not suited to Islamic metaphysics, but that is merely a speculation even though man is a Sanskrit word and has not much in common with Persian counterparts either.

Of course, usually one would find the official Hindi using an excessive lot of loan words from Bengali. In the excerpt itself, words like 'vastutaH','vyApAr','jal','nadi teere' that I hear in spoken bangla a lot, are reserved for official Hindi and are never used by Hindi speakers in their regular language (spoken Hindi would be replete with Urdu equivalents instead).

sanskrit dictionary

A great project. Finally we have a sanskrit dictionary that is really usable.

http://spokensanskrit.de/

A list of other interesting projects:

http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/
http://sanskritdocuments.org/doc_z_misc_subhaashita/

A track of BBC's language

I really have no hopes from Fox News, CNN and such as far as the just use of language goes. The American media openly admits that they want to use connotative terms more than denotative ones, because it is indeed their utmost responsibility to engineer a thought (and not letting the readers cultivate one). A time when I was checking CNN website extremely regularly (probably every two minutes, for a 6 hrs) was when the shooting at Virginia Tech had happened. I had graduated from there only an year ago and I was concerned and dismayed not just because I still had friends studying there. 2 hrs after the shoot out happened, the news agencies had started checking the background of the student. The headlines of all major newspapers were reporting the details of Cho, the student responsible for the massacre. It was unveiled in a matter of minutes by CNN that, " The killer came from Korea at ten". The news item was up only for a few minutes, obviously because of its political incorrectness. But it was enough for me to infer how deeply aberrant our media correspondents really are. Saying that "the killer is an immigrant from Korea" is a lot different from saying "the killer came from Korea" even though the facts are exactly the same. The latter is akin to suggesting that Cho was a killer when he was 10. Him coming from Korea implies that the killers are more likely to come from Korea. Of course most people don't take it that far. But such subliminal manipulation does work most of the time (e.g. in engineering a sense of xenophobia in this case). However this happens to be a very poor example, the reason why the item was removed almost immediately. American media is full of such connotations in their reporting. Most of the times people won't realize that they are being fed the us-vs-them ideology while they are casually reading the newspapers. My own friends have gone from mid-conservative to extreme right just by choosing to be more informed about the world events. It is not hard to find an American who thinks that everyone except some European countries hates America. The propaganda machines once employed in South American and other satellite countries are now so mainstream that it is hard to be unprejudiced about almost anything. I myself have admittedly started to have a skewed view of the Muslim world, after being fed years and years of negative stereotyping.

I had assumed for a long time that the news in Britain and other European countries would be able to survive this extreme right scheme. But unfortunately that isn't the case for BBC. BBC has repeatedly followed the same tactics as major American media over time. I would've thought that this, apart from usual sarcasm was reserved only for the third world countries, but it surely isn't the case, after I started taking a closer look at the coverage of war and economy at BBC. ( For an example on the third-world country, if BBC finds some villagers in the most backward parts of Bihar, India performing a witchhunt, the headlines might be - Indian witch-hunt being curbed by the govt ) . I would try to log more real examples by editing this post, but here are a few recent ones : "Passenger's arm sucked down French train toilet" -Mind you, it is the french train toilet, not the train toilet in France ( but the british have a good sense of humor of course) Two Britons found guilty of having sex on a Dubai beach - The britons were guilty of breaking the law, not of having sex. The preference of word "downturn" over "recession" is actually official for BBC. That might I say, is only the tip of the iceberg. Updated (on Nov 01,2008 ): -- BBC just came up with an item that is very close to the example that I had provided: Pakistan "child wedding" halted -- Food body says 'avoid Irish pork' -- Ancient Persians 'gassed Romans' - As the report says it were the roman soldiers that were gassed. Indian Owl Problem. Apparently Indians like to sacrifice owls for their "black-magic" rituals. I hadn't known about it and still don't know anyone would would do something like that, but according to BBC that is something widely popular in India. Rather funny to see this 16th century style smearing of Indian "pagan" practices.