Sayontan Sinha's Page » Eloi and Morlocks » Blog

Sun, Moon and Machu Picchu

Jan 232009

This is something I have been wanting to post for a very long time. While watching Satyajit Ray’s last film Agantuk, featuring Utpal Dutt, I was very impressed with one observation. The reason I hadn’t published this so far was because I wanted people to watch this clip, and the VCD was not available at hand.

For those not familiar with Bengali, here is the translation:

Utpal Dutt: … What did I say the name of the city was?
Kids: Machu Picchu!
Utpal Dutt: Machu Picchu… Here, take a look at this (shows photo)
Kids: Wow! Have you been to this place?
Utpal Dutt: Of course! It was I who took this picture. I had gone there 20 years back, riding a mule. Looking at the city I was awestruck. It was made entirely of stone, but there was no stone to be seen nearby. Where did they get the stone? How did they raise the stone up the mountains (the Andes)? Nobody knows. The Incas were a wonderful civilization.
Kids: Tell us another story.
Utpal Dutt: No, no more stories. Let me show you a magic trick (takes some coins out of a pouch)
Kids: What are these?
Utpal Dutt: I am going to ask you a few questions. Let’s see if you can answer correctly. Ready?
Kids: Ready!
Utpal Dutt: OK, which one is larger, the moon or the sun?
Kids: The sun!
Utpal Dutt: How did you know? Wait … (lays two coins of the same size side by side). This is the moon and this is the sun. They appear to be of the same size in the sky…
Kids: That’s because the sun is a lot further away.
Utpal Dutt: How far? Let me tell you. The sun is 95 million miles from the earth and the moon is just 500,000 miles away.
Kids: That is why they appear to be of the same size.
Utpal Dutt: Now let’s say that the moon wasn’t 500,000 miles away, but 200,000 miles away.
Kids: Then the moon would appear much larger.
Utpal Dutt: (Replaces the “moon” coin with a larger coin) Like this, right?
Kids: Yes
Utpal Dutt: And what if the moon was 800,000 miles away?
Kids: It would appear a lot smaller.
Utpal Dutt: (Replaces the “moon” coin with a smaller coin) Like this, right?
Kids: Yes
Utpal Dutt: But that did not happen. The moon was just far enough to appear to be of the same size as the sun (puts back the original “moon” coin). That is why when the moon comes in front of the sun and slowly covers it, the edges match up perfectly…
Kids: Solar eclipse!
Utpal Dutt: Total solar eclipse. And when the earth’s shadow covers the moon, again the edges match up perfectly.
Kids: Lunar eclipse.
Utpal Dutt: Total lunar eclipse. How does this happen? (The kids look at one another) Don’t know, right? Ask the greatest scholar on earth – even he wouldn’t be able to tell you. Nobody can tell you. This is a puzzle. In my opinion this is the biggest puzzle in the universe. The sun and the moon, the king of the day and the queen of the night, and the shadow of the earth on the moon – all circles of the same size. Magic!

I found this quite profound, and indeed a very big puzzle. Of course, some of you might argue that for the moon to cover the sun during a solar eclipse, the moon has to appear smaller than the sun, not the same size (think cones), but the fact remains that the moon covers the sun perfectly during the total solar eclipse. Intriguing, right?

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Kids and the Darndest Things

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Jan 222009

Ever since my son Aikataan was born my wife Sutanuka and I have had a lot of moments to treasure. And wonder. Most have to do with the fascinating way a child’s mind goes to work.

Is this all mine?

I am sure there are medical reasons for most things, but contrary to my nature this is one case where I don’t want to know the answers – the wonder of not knowing is much better than the satisfaction of knowing.

Almost as soon as the child is born, the mother is asked to feed him (I know I should be adding the “/her”, but that is too painful and I don’t want to refer to a child as “it”). How is it that the child knows he has to suck in or swallow?
How far can a child see when he is born (much to my consternation I was told the answer for this)? How far can he hear?
Is he afraid when he is still an infant? When slightly older, why do most babies feel afraid of the sound of hissing steam or a vacuum cleaner in action?
When does he start feeling protective of other babies?
One morning I was having my breakfast, when Aikataan was about one year old. Since we were training him to eat with cutlery, he could hold a fork in his hand and make attempts to eat. Also, he was in the habit of getting tiny morsels from us when we were eating. On the morning in discussion, I offered him something from my plate, on my fork. He refused and quickly ran away. A little while later he came back with a plastic fork in his hand, ready to eat by himself.
In what way do they miss people? Aikataan and Tanuka were in India for the last 4 months, with my parents and Tanuka’s. He rarely asked for me and always refused to talk to me on the phone. But it wasn’t like he had forgotten me, since he was quite enthusiastic during video chats. But once he returned to the US he refused to leave my side. He even shunned an outing with his mother to stay back with me and watch Superman Returns.
How well-developed are their memories? What are things that they remember? Aikataan has often helped find things that he had seen others misplace and I am sure other kids do the same.
My friend Arunda was telling me about this incident where he was assembling an air-pump for his son Ruman’s bicycle. Ruman is around 3.5 years old at present and he pointed out to his father by showing him the assembly manual that there was one component that was wrongly attached.

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Oh Gallery, My Gallery!!

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Jan 182009

After my previous post I set about to do one of two things:

Create a full-blown application for uploading photos – My way of uploading photos was a multi-step process:
1. I would select photos I wanted to upload and put them in a separate folder on my local disk
2. I would then use Picasa and export the subset of photos as a web-page. This would automatically resize all images and create the thumbnails.
3. Next I would create a file with image names and descriptions. I had a script on my home-page that parsed this file on the fly and displayed the album.
4. Then I would upload the photos, the thumbnails and the file with the names.
Use a package and customize it using a template – This would require me to operate within the constraints of the application that I was using.

I ultimately settled for the customization of a package. Writing my own photo-loader was way too much effort to handle in the hours after work. I considered a lot of options:

Picasa web albums
This was my first choice, because I love Picasa and I use Google for a lot of things. Moreover I could really harness a lot of things like Cooliris’ PicLens (which is awesome) and create some snazzy stuff. Unfortunately what got in the way was Dreamhost. While very good in most aspects, Dreamhost didn’t provide out-of-the-box support for Picasa. So I would have to customize my Dreamhost installation and make some changes to my PHP configuration for this. As it would turn out, this was less than a stellar idea because I had to run “sudo” on Dreamhost and I did not have the right permissions for it. While I did not get any email saying “Sayontan, you are a bad, bad boy”, I did get a return message on the command prompt notifying me that this incident had been reported!!
ZenPhoto
ZenPhoto is one of the two packages that Dreamhost provides. I tried it out, but unfortunately this falls under the category of software that you cannot customize on Dreamhost. So, two down.
Gallery
Technically Gallery was the first thing I attempted, even before my misadventures with Picasa, mainly because it was available with Dreamhost and secondly, I could customize it. However, I found it extremely counter-intuitive to use when I first installed it. But after I exhausted my other options I was compelled to revisit this. My typical style of using anything involves first fiddling with it, then reading the documentation / manuals to clarify any doubts that I have. Most software and hardware today have very friendly interfaces, so this approach works very well for me (as it does for most other people, I am sure). Naturally I had very little joy with Gallery the first time. But faced with no other choice to bundle on my website and with a mounting stack of photos to process I bit the bullet and dug in. Piece by piece it came together and with a few hours of effort I got the basic layout figured out. There are, however some annoyances:
1. The BreadCrumb
  This is a pretty nice feature that could do with a few configuration options that would enhance control. E.g. I cannot ask it to exclude certain levels or to show the caption / title of the image rather than its name
2. Sub-albums / Album groups
  This is a hard one to explain. On my earlier site I had groups like “2004″, and then separate albums under it. On the main page I would see both, 2004 and the albums under it. But I cannot conceive of a way to “tag” my albums without using sub-albums, and if I create one album called 2004 with a bunch of sub-albums, I cannot see the names of the sub-albums from my main page.
3. Slideshow control
  One good thing that Gallery did is an integration with Cooliris. But now I have a new problem: I want to define things like the pause between two photos in the slideshow, I want to remove the links that show up at the top etc. I am sure I can figure it out, but it isn’t obvious.
4. Square thumbnails
  This is a major gripe. Gallery can display a sized down thumbnail, but it feels the need to pad it with some solid color. The other option is to use a square thumbnail, which does away with the padding. I wonder, though, if it will allow me to set no colour for the padding.

Anyway, I guess it worked out alright in the end. There are a lot of things I would have liked to improve, but as is the case with packaged software, the best plan is to wait and play along. Most of the stuff comes by anyway. Of course, if you believe I botched some of the implementation or missed some features, please let me know – I would love to hear from you.

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Phew!! This was a BIG Effort

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Jan 032009

I recently did a couple of web-pages:

Something nifty with Google Maps API
This was a LOT of fun. The API is excellent, though poorly documented. In the process I learnt how to do Geocoding, some AJAX and a bunch of other things.
It was curious how I got started on this. My friend Munish Singla asked me for the whereabouts of another friend. I did not have the latest coordinates of the latter, so I looked up Google and got a few hits, which I provided to him. Singla then remarked that he thought my database would have the lates details. Since my database was stone-dead for the last few years, I decided to pinch an idea that another friend Vaibhav had earlier and I went about implementing it.
The output speaks for itself, I guess. The next steps would be to add things like photos, employer’s name and a self-service site, but those can wait.
A WordPress Theme for this site
This was tough. I had the same blog at Blogger, but my main gripe with it was that I never could figure out how to do my own theme. WordPress seemed much better organized, and the fact that I own my domain helps. However the layout of my homepage doesn’t lend itself very well to reuse, particularly with blogs. Again, the result speaks for itself! By the way, the background that I have used here is based on Iceman’s Emulation Page. Though I had to change a lot of things, including some icons, I really liked the background of the original, so I used it.

Enjoy!

Sayontan.

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And the Fun Goes On

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Mar 112008

At the end of the Commonwealth Bank Tri-Series Cricket tournament in Australia in March 2008, there was a hilarious comment posted on the website of an Australian newspaper:

Securing the services of Matt Hayden: $375,000
Securing the services of Ricky Ponting: $400,000
Securing the services of Andrew Symonds: $1,350,000
Making these Australians eat their own words in their own backyard – Priceless
There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else there’s BCCI.
- Comment by “Sagar”, Melbourne Herald Sun

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An Interesting Story

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Jan 032008

As an addendum to my previous post, here is something that I saw someone else post on Aamir Khan’s blog. It is a pretty interesting story by an unknown Canadian student.

Once upon a time the animals decided they must do something decisive to meet the increasing complexity of their society. They held a meeting and finally decided to organize a school. The curriculum consisted of running, swimming and flying. Since these were the basic behaviors of most animals, they decided that all the students should take all of the subjects.
The duck proved to be excellent at swimming, better in fact than his teacher. He also did well in flying, but he proved to be very poor in running. Since he was poor in this subject he was made to stay after school to practice it and even had to drop swimming in order to get more time in which to practice running. He was kept at this poorest subject until his webbed feet were so badly damaged that he became only average at swimming. But average was acceptable in the school so nobody worried about that – except the duck.
The rabbit started at the top of his class in running, but finally had a nervous breakdown because of so much make-up time in swimming – a subject he hated.
The squirrel was excellent in climbing until he developed psychological blocking in flying class when the teacher insisted he start from the ground instead of from the tops of the trees. He was kept at attempting to fly until he became muscle bound – and received a C in climbing and a D in running.
The eagle was the school’s worst discipline problem, in climbing class he beat all of the others to the top of the tree used for examination purposes in this subject, but he insisted on using his own method of getting there.
The gophers of course, stayed out of the school and fought the tax levied for education because digging was not included in the curriculum. They apprenticed their children to the badger and later joined the ground hogs and eventually started a private school offering alternative education.
- “The Animal School – A Parable” by an Unknown Author

Ciao.

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Floored. Completely.

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Dec 292007

My absences keep getting longer and longer. Luckily I decided to write something today, otherwise I might have finished 2007 without a blog!! Anyway, here is something I actually posted as a comment on Aamir Khan’s website (http://www.aamirkhan.com) about his recent movie Taare Zameen Par. It is tough to do an “Eloi & Morlocks” analysis for this movie, so the comment is general. Aamir’s blog has a limitation of 1000 characters per comment and my first draft was 3772 characters long! So I decided to split it into sub-sections and tried my “precis-writing” skills. I eventually brought it down to 3 sections from 4 and posted it. Here is the content.

Aamir,
(Here is a really long comment that I have split into 3!)
Part I
My wife and I would like to first thank you for making a splendid movie. We sincerely hope that the movie makes a lot of money otherwise the message will not go to the masses. That being said, the movie set us both thinking.
I have, for the past few years, been a contributor to a group called Parivaar in Kolkata. Parivaar takes complete care of destitute and vulnerable children. Two things stand out when you visit Parivaar – the children and the administration. The children are in many ways like the ones at “Tulip”, but they are not suffering from Down’s Syndrome or autism or other congenital ailments. Instead they have been given up by parents who couldn’t take care of them. The founder is a young man in his twenties with degrees from both IIT and IIM, who chose not to pursue a life of luxury and dedicated himself to helping the underprivileged.
(Continued …)
Part II
My point in the above is that most of us lack the courage and conviction to do something so radically different. We forget that the smiles on the children’s faces are often a greater reward than any other. Why is it that most of us want our kids to grow up and become doctors or engineers? It is due to our conditioning. An average Indian is by nature more conservative and risk averse than say, an average American. Not our fault – there are more jobs and benefits available to a mediocre engineer than to a good artist. So the parents feel more secure if the child is in a low risk track. To that extent I sympathise with Ishaan’s parents – how is a child to survive in the rat race without the 3 R’s? After all, no parent wants his or her kid to do badly. It is just that in India our inherent nature really narrows down the range of “doing well” to academics. Come to think of it, even TZP’s ending shows that Ishaan has become better in academics.
(Continued…)
Part III
I think that for the movie to make a tangible impact to society, everyone has to accept that there are more choices than becoming an engineer or a doctor. Moreover these opportunities really have to be available, profitable and visible. Our taxes should be used better to build a good infrastructure for handling unemployment. Once this happens TZP can go down in history as the movie that kickstarted a progressive society.
High points:
- Darsheel. It was astounding how he conveyed so much by speaking so little. Besides the “3 x 9″ sequence, I believe he has less than 30 lines of dialogue, which goes to show how well he emotes with his eyes. The scene where his mother tells him that she cannot visit was top notch.
- The song “Maa”. And the music in general.
- The script and the direction. I now fully understand your comments on “Black”
- The research. “Solomon Islands” was a gem
Sorry for the rather long-winded comment. I hope I haven’t worn you down!
Sayontan

Coming soon – a tribute to our soon retiring generation of great cricketers.

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Sorry, couldn't resist!

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Apr 062007

Reams of newsprint have been expended on India’s recent Cricket misadventures. I resolved to keep myself away from making any comments, but felt inexorably drawn towards breaking my resolution. Well, anyway, the straw to break the camel’s back has indeed landed on the camel’s back, so let me get started with it already.

A few issues keep popping up and that make me believe that this whole drama is more due to misrepresentation of facts in some media reports, misreading of media-reports in some other cases or reading a bit too much between the lines in a few others. I will cite two articles here:

Quoting from the first:

From all accounts, Chappell’s report, due to be submitted to the board before April 6, will be scathing in its criticism of the attitude of the senior players including Sourav Ganguly, Sachin Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag and Harbhajan Singh. It is learnt that Chappell, and some members of the board, believe that the return of Ganguly, and later on Tendulkar’s captaincy aspirations, had a destabilising effect on the team, forming groups within the eleven and perhaps stifling the growth of some of the younger cricketers trying to make a mark.

As a direct fallout of this report, most of the cricket fans in India went up in arms against one party or another. Some people went about rubbishing Chappell for his high-handedness and others wanted to consign Tendulkar to a similar fate for his poor form over the past few years. But the operative phrase in the report was “From all accounts, Chappell’s report, due to be submitted to the board before April 6, will be scathing in its criticism of the attitude of the senior players including …”. Did Chappell’s report on April 6 actually do that? I will address that shortly.

What happened next? Tendulkar spoke out to the press and said (from the second link above):

“Again, it’s not that we are defending ourselves. We do realise that we played badly and, as a team, we take full responsibility for that. But what hurt us most is if the coach has questioned our attitude.”

Again, the operative word here is “if”. Tendulkar never said anything about having a bad day or even about having a rift with Chappell. His only remark was that if the coach questions his attitude, he will be hurt.

The rest of the report is speculative:

His statements come in the wake of reports that many members in the team have rallied together against Chappell and Dravid and want Tendulkar to take up their case to the board. Cricinfo had reported on the crisis in the team , one largely owing to the rift between Chappell and the senior players, and Tendulkar’s statements reinforce the players’ stance.

I don’t see any comments by Tendulkar in the entire article making any allusion to a rift or to players asking him to pick up cudgels on their behalf. So isn’t this a case of reading too much between the lines? I think a lot of people let emotions override their thought process and jump into hastily formed conclusions, causing massive misunderstanding – something that never gets corrected. The press is a major reason for this, because it tries to sensationalise irrelevant bits of news with attention-grabbing headlines, then leaves the fire simmering. I guess this incident will go the same way.

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The Art of Bad Examples

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Oct 132006

After a prolonged absence, I am back! I had initially intended to publish at least once a month. However, with August rolling by and September too failing to motivate me to write, I decided to finally do something about it in October.

How often has it happened that while you are having a debate with someone, your opponent gives you a rank bad example to make his / her point? I was trying to recollect various instances in which this has happened and not so surprisingly, I found three such cases in the past 6 months. The first two, incidentally, happened on the same day, with the same person (which perhaps goes to speak volumes about his having a completely wrong hold of things).

I am notorious as a person with a strong dislike for Bombay. Readers might jump at me for not using the politically correct Mumbai, but then I say Madras and not Chennai and Calcutta and not Kolkata. To hell with political correctness. While I do agree that Bombay has a lot of merits that help it sustain a burgeoning population, I believe that most of these merits stem from a typical Bombayite’s (or Mumbaikar’s) immense patience and inherent sense of discipline or order within chaos. The city itself is chaotic:

The weather is quite lousy
It takes an incredibly long time to get from one point in the city to another, thanks to traffic
The public transport system, though good, is grossly inadequate. Dissenters simply need to look at a local train station there during the peak hours.
Real estate prices are sky-high, without much justification. Yes, people will claim that there are more opportunities there, but the ratio of opportunities is disproportionate to the rents that people have to pay to live there. New companies shy away from setting up centres there (this includes companies like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo – all IT companies, as the doubting Thomases will agree)
Roads are no great shakes in most parts of the city. If a road is being repaired, it stays that way for months together
The political environment is quite horrible – there were talks of banning non-Bombayites from purchasing real-estate there and of mandating a “Bombay visa” for people to get into Bombay.

But the people are good and friendly and the food is perhaps the best among all places in India. Anyway, liking or disliking a city is more a consequence of a man’s personality rather than anything else. I prefer quieter areas, so Bombay grates on me. I like to call it the largest village in the world, much to the chagrin of my acquaintances from there. I agree that I am being quite uncharitable there, but the fact that the largest slum of Asia, Dharavi is in Bombay only strengthens my case.

But I digress. One fine morning I had a lively discussion with two Bombayites who claimed that their city was the best place to live in. Not to be outdone I put forth my arguments, which, needless to say, didn’t gel well with them. I argued that Delhi is a much better place, thanks to excellent infrastructure (it is remarkable how Delhi went from being the most polluted city in India to becoming a very clean city – a feat that other cities will find hard to match). On the topic of real estate being very expensive there this was a discussion that ensued:

Opp: Let me give you an example. Have you ever been to a casino?
Me: Yes, quite a few times
Opp: If there are two tables, one where you bet $1 and the other where you bet $100, which one will have a higher return?
Me: If you win, then obviously the one with $100
Opp: Then you have answered your question yourself
Me: Really? Then let me ask you – where are you going to lose more if you lose?
Opp: The one with $100
Me: Then you have contradicted yourself.
Opp: …
Me: In a casino you are gambling – not investing based on sound principles. There you have a greater chance of losing, since the house always wins. And when you lose at a big table, you really lose there. On a $1 table even if you lose frequently you will not feel it much.
Opp: You are taking my example too literally.
Me: That’s because it is not the right example to give. Real estate investments are more a study of trends rather than gambles. In most cases if you have done your homework well you will leave with a profit.
Opp: …

There was some rubbish that I had doled out too, but luckily his example was too off-centre for him to come up with a counterpoint.

The same afternoon this gentleman and a few other colleagues of mine were having another discussion. This time the topic was companies using an outsourcing model. The company I work for is a pretty big consultancy firm with well over 100,000 employees worldwide. It does have a couple of big centres in India too. This gentleman was singing paeans of people in the US centres, saying that they are much better employees, since they have equal technical skills and much better presentation skills. While I agree with the presentation part, the technical skills, I believe are a whole different ballgame. But that is a subjective issue and is best not discussed here, lest it gives rise to some unhealthy “us vs. them” debate.

According to him if he had a person working under him and that person couldn’t present his point, then that person had no business working for us. Not a bad point to make, though that would make our organization a bad place for people who are off the charts in technical brilliance but are quite lousy in presentation skills. It would also reflect poorly on the organization’s ability to mentor such a person and would undermine the value of teamwork – the panacea of disparity in a firm. The organization might actually let an uncut diamond slip through its hands if all its managers take this attitude.

On the topic of outsourcing itself, we were remarking how the quality of work coming in from places like TCS and Satyam in India is at 70-80% that of homegrown consultants from our firm, but the price is probably just about 20-40%. In this aspect this gentleman decided to throw in another of his brilliant examples:

My friend: What I don’t understand is when other companies in India like TCS or Satyam or Patni provide almost the same quality as our firm but at a much lower rate, how does our firm expect to survive?
Opp: Let me give you an example. If you have to buy a shirt from Macy’s or Walmart, which one would you choose?
Us: Obviously Walmart (unanimously)
Opp: …

Obviously he expected us to say “Macy’s” (unanimously), but this was an outright horrible example: a much better example might have been a choice between Walmart and a factory outlet of a named brand.

Anyway, this discussion concluded with another set of contentious statements:

Opp: Can the Indian offices of our firm survive without the US offices? No. Can the US offices of our firm survive without the Indian ones? Definitely.
Me: That is rubbish. Without the Indian offices you would be so undercut by Indian firms that you might end up getting no business. In fact a couple of years ago the CEO of the firm had said, “There are four new threats to our company. They are Infosys, TCS, Wipro and Satyam”.
Opp: Again, you are taking my examples too literally.
Me: Well, you are behaving like a child. You start of by trying to give an example and when it turns out to be a bad example you protest if anyone points it out.

The fact is that people providing bad examples simply don’t know how bad their examples are (I am pretty sure I have used a fair number of them in my blog). Very often you have people who try to use a word that they have just read or heard, thinking that they are being very erudite in doing so. I once had a person who had heard the term “comparing apples and oranges” being used quite frequently against him. When two competetive methodologies were being discussed, he said, “That is like comparing apples with oranges”. Luckily for him he got away without much being said.

End of rant.

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Let Me Check My Skejule

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Jul 082006

While working for WebTek in 2000 I happened to be speaking to a colleague from overseas who said, “Let me check my skejule and get back to you”. At that time the sentence created a jarring effect on my ears. A few days later I happened to be watching a movie which had me laughing with respect to the skejule.

An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him,
The moment he talks he makes some other
Englishman despise him.
One common language I’m afraid we’ll never get.
Oh, why can’t the English learn to set
A good example to people whose
English is painful to your ears?
The Scotch and the Irish leave you close to tears.
There even are places where English completely
disappears. In America, they haven’t used it for years!
Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?
- Prof. Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady

An erudite British colleague of mine once pointed out certain differences in accents between speakers of American and English. “Nicaragua”, he said, “is pronounced ‘Nicaragyua’ by the English and ‘Nicaragooa’ by the Americans”. That shed some light. Friends of mine who had joined universities in the US for higher studies provided further insight, “Americans pronounce words like they are. Since ‘school’ is pronounced ‘skool’, ‘schedule’ becomes ‘skejule’.”

Really? Why is “argue” still “argyu” and “tongue” still “tung”, then? I also reasoned that it should have acutally been ‘skedule’, but then figured out that ‘individual’ is pronounced ‘indivijual’. The American interpretation of the language is actually just that – an interpretation. That isn’t to say that it is wrong. Language, after all, is how you define it.

A lot of words have been taken liberties with, not only in terms of pronunciation but also in terms of their spelling and meaning. Being from a place that was a British colony not long back and working in the US most of the time poses a difficulty of switching contexts every now and then. I am in the habit of writing “civilise”, “analyse” etc., which my word-processor has a ripe gripe with. I also write “fulfil” as opposed to the American “fulfill”. “Program” has made its way into my dictionary, but only when I am talking about a computer program. I guess things will get really creepy the day I start saying “I cannot believe where I am at.”

Raymond: That is what has got me to where I am at.
Marie: Where I am at?
Raymond: Where I am… where I am.
Marie: Have I taught you nothing?
Raymond: I know, I know. You cannot end a sentence with a proposition… A preposition.
- Everybody Loves Raymond

That is gross. Truly gross. Another thing that vexes me is the use of “presently” to mean “currently”, while it actually means, “in a short time”. “Prodigal” is another word whose meaning has changed quite a lot in the last couple of decades.

As a general rule I have decided to stick with the English roots rather than the American variants because I believe that in most cases the American variants start out as idealistic approaches and then lose their way. Moving beyond the realm of language, I recently discovered the discrepancy between and American gallon and an Imperial gallon (which is used in the rest of the world, wherever the FPS system is still in vogue). I believe that I can be forgiven in this regard because India uses the SI system, which is much easier to handle. But what is the point of having two different measurements with the same name?

Then there is the custom of left-hand drive and right-hand drive. And here is a curious thing – there is a reason for travelling on the left side of a road. In medieval times when Englishmen travelled on horseback, they used to doff their hats at people coming from the opposite direction using their left hand. That way if they saw an adversary coming they could have their right hands free to draw their swords and fight (most people were right handed). It thus made sense to travel on the left side of the road. This practice extended to horse-driven carriages and eventually automobiles. I don’t know the reason for driving on the right side of the road, though I can only guess that since most people in a sample set used to be right-handed the tendency was to choose the right half of the road (assuming that you weren’t going to be fighting while using a road).

An interesting digression – why are a large number of Chinese left-handed? Again, here I don’t have a concrete answer, but I do have a theory. In February this year while my wife and I were doing the Singapore tour that Singapore Airlines provides, the tour guide showed us the “Suntec Building” that was shaped like the left hand. She explained that it had everything to do with Feng-Shui and Yin and Yang. The right hand gives away wealth and the left hand gets in wealth. In places where such beliefs are strong you would naturally encourage your children to be left-handed since that would be considered auspicious.

Back to Americanisms. Actually another digression. I have a large number of vegetarian friends. Some of them claim that they do not eat meat because it is cruel to animals. And they continue to use leather purses/wallets, belts, bags, jackets and shoes. Another attempt at starting out idealistic and stopping midway.

Anyway, English as a language is fine. And the American interpretation is fine as well. As I said, language is all about communicating. And both the versions are mutually compatible. They don’t castigate you for not getting your pronunciation right. So everyone is happy. And let me schedule my next blog update.

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