He Longs, She Longs....

  

Old Hindi romantic song, raised to a new level  ....

'LUV & KUSH' Of Ramayana !!

  

Ramayana is a Hindu religious epic and a few movies and TV serials have been made in India on Ramayana. The story of Ramayana is that of a King Dasharatha's family set in Ayodhya in ancient times. The part relevant to the post is the part when Rama, Sita his wife, Luxman his younger brother  and his loyal bhakta Hanuman return home after completing the period of exile and after rescuing Sita from the demon king Ravana.

The entire kingdom is joyful on this auspicious occasion; people are ecstatic at the return of their young godly king and his wife after missing them for 14 years. However, Rama and Sita have only rested for few days when a conversation between a dhobi (clothes washer) and his wife reaches Rama's ears. The dhobi had doubt about Sita's chastity because she was captive in Ravana's Lanka for a long time. Ravana wanted her as his own bride but she adamantly refused to marry him. She was Rama's wife and was devoted to him. But who can stop wagging tongues ! Rama therefore had to give up Sita and send her back to the forest while she was pregnant. Such is the life of a righteous King !! Sita meets a fatherly sage in the forest who agrees to give her residence and take care of her. A queen is forced to lead a life of a poor peasant. There two sons Luv and Kush are born to her. The sage trains the two boys the art of using divine weapons and they soon became experts . [The weapons, you see, gain special powers when in the hand of a trained yodha].

Rama, in order to consolidate his Kingdom and find out the loyalty of the rulers of neighboring kingdoms, sends a privileged horse and some of his skilled warriors to each of these kingdoms. Anybody who stops the horse would face a battle.  Luv and Kush challenge the horse and knock all the warriors unconscious with their divine weapons !  The two kids defeat all of them and tie Hanuman with a rope. Rama then comes to see for himself who these brave warriors are and decides against harming them when he sees that they two young boys. However, Sita gets angry at her two sons when she hears that they have been fighting their own father and relatives. She wants the two to apologize to Rama.

The Song (Katha) in the video:

Luv and Kush go to the castle of Rama and request him to listen to their Katha. They sing of Rama's birth and subsequent achievements as a warrior and as protector of the righteous even at a young age. They sing of how he broke Shiva's bow without much effort and thus became worthy of marrying the bride Sita.  While singing the Katha, the two slowly unveil the story of a queen who now lives in the forest and suffers great hardship everyday. They question the way in which people of Ayodhya had treated the queen based on a clothes washer's word whose profession is to see 'dirt' !! They ask the sages and wise people that adorn Rama's court why their hearts did not melt at the misery of  Sita ? How could they be so harsh and exile her to the forest? And towards the end of the katha, they declare to the assembly in a very humble tone as they bow to Rama, that Rama is their father and the sati Sita is their mother. The entire assembly, including Rama, are surprised at the declaration.....This is the summary of the song in the video. The Katha holds a very special place in the heart of the devotees. Ramayana would be incomplete without it.

A JUNIOR IDOL : HARSHITH NATH

  

He is only 13, has a female voice and looks 'rollee pollee' and yet he can render a popular Kishore Kumar song better than many grown-up imitators of the singer on the TV show,   which has a surprisingly professional group of musicians to accompany the singer. Incidentally, his choice of songs are also my favorite songs of Kishore Kumar!

Infused with difficult Urdu words, the songs have been 'miamed' by many an adult singer ! However, the difficult words do not deter our 13 year old Harshit, whose pronunciation and modulation of voice has remained flawless. That is why the audience and the judges have their hands stretched out and mouths open in awe.

He rendered the difficult song  'Aane walla pul..' in chappals on the stage; perhaps he is/was poor and very humble! However, in subsequent songs, he was dressed quite well. If he remains humble and learns his craft as he grows up he might become a phenomenon.

I hope he sings the difficult 'Zindagi Key Safar Mein Guzar Jaate ...' if he is still around. I watch the reruns on Youtube, you see.

SHARK TANK: Sharks And Roaches !!

[The word 'roach' is used to address candidates by one of the sharks.\]

Where can you learn about investing in a business and  terms like valuation and equity ? Where can you watch perfectly good inventors being thrown out in tears and two geniuses get tens of thousands of dollars for selling potatoes with hand written messages ? ! Where can you watch sharks in tears as they listen to the life struggle of a candidate or dance  in circles when their offer is accepted ? It is SHARK TANK, the popular show on CNBC where you can see Sharks invest half a million dollars in exchange for 10% of a company and gobble 60% of another candidate's company who is seeking only hundred thousand.

The show is hosted by five or so billionaires , who throw out candidates in unison but then insult each other like kids as they fight over whose offer is better for the potentially profitable idea presented by one of the candidates! In one show the billionaire Sir Richard Branson, playing a SHARK, empties a glass of water on the face of another SHARK who  annoyingly keeps interrupting him.

Yet, the show is educational because one gets to see the process of selling part of a business/ innovative idea in living color rather than reading about it in a magazine. Some inventions presented are new and amazing while others are a new twist on an old idea.

A Personal History Of Technology by Ellen Ullman

As I read the book 'LIFE IN CODE:A Personal History Of Technology' by the author named Ellen Ullman, it occurs to me that she has humor (like Ellen Degeneres) and technology bandwidth just short of a Computer Science teacher/professor (Aho Ullman)!  This book is not a history of Computers but more of a memoir about her interactions with the computer world and the people who become famous and rich by predicting the future of technology. The book bobs up and down between esoteric philosophical discussion and everyday programming issues. Ellen has immense facility with words. She discusses all sides of the issues very patiently and very rationally before stating her own point of view at the end of the discussion. I have been reading it by jumping into various chapters at random! It would be a useful addition to an old programmer's library who is trying to catch up with the latest happenings or moms who are in sync with today's technology!

There are chapters on cats and robots with complicated terminology that might seem scary at first (Programming The Post Human, Dining With Robots). That brought to mind a one page story I had written in 1982 named '1000 PH' (PH = Post Homosapien) about a nuclear war in the future that wipes out all humans leaving behind wise robots that are programmed 'in the image of man' !! However, my little story does not in any way compare with pages and pages of serious discussion about technology's future in Ellen Ullman's book including spiritual robots. Are all the names in the book of real people (Breazeal, Toughgarden etc)?

[It is hard for me to believe at this stage that robots might one day become independent 'creatures' living and making decisions on their own, independent of the human 'programmer'.]

Both of us started in software around the same time it appears from the book. I would like to say that her professional experience mirrors mine except that she deals with a much bigger world of symposiums and conferences and ivy league American universities while I lived in the shadows of IT departments of a few US corporations working on COBOL projects similar to what EU mentions in her book. However, unlike her, I never had the privilege of working on a bug in a business application that has been lying unsolved for over a decade causing much anxiety among the management!! 

In the chapter titled Outside Of Time she attempts to discuss the difference between higher and lower level programming languages. Yes, we as computer science students always looked down upon the 'higher' level business applications and hoped to get jobs in systems software doing 'lower-level' stuff designing internals of OS and algorithms and firmware written in assembly language ! Here lower level means jobs that required in-depth knowledge of the insides of the computer unlike the 'higher' level business applications. 

Ellen fondly recalls the calamity of Y2K bug in What We Were Afraid Of As We Feared Y2K. The assumption that the applications would not last beyond 1999, implicit in the various business databases that recorded dates with only a 2 digit year was a problem that we faced at the company I was contracting at, at the time! I believe I might have been involved in some part in fixing the Y2K bug at that corporation. I was more used to writing new code than supporting existing software so that was a challenge that caused some nervousness!!And we did buy extra soup cans and a hand cranked radio in case the power went off in the middle of winter in the North East US.

When I explain to non-technical people that I recently fixed an important bug that had been sitting unsolved for a long time, the inevitable cynical question they ask is 'so how has the program been working so far ?'  As Ellen explains in Close To The Mainframe ,when she encountered that decade long mysterious bug which printed $0 on a important business report she could not locate the source of the bug initially. So she wrote a workaround program to extract that missing piece of information on a separate report. After burning many neurons, the mistake was found to be in the naming of a variable inside the program inserted by a programmer a decade ago. He/She had erroneously used an underscore instead of a dash in a variable name in a very lengthy Cobol program. 

I have lost much hair in solving  'bugs' like that over the years, including the missing 'period' problem where the code falls into the wrong piece of logic causing erroneous results . Therefore, I have put forward the suggestion that IT people use the 1985 Cobol standard rather than the older 1964 version. The newer version allows structured approach using scope delimiters for all statements.

Hope the book gains sympathizers for the balding and graying software people with curved spinal cords who are lost in their own internal world . At the beginning of the book EU informs us that programming is like getting on a train and never being able to get off. I say it is like living with the constant fear of being thrown out of that fast moving train if the programmer cannot come up with a convincing answer to the management's question about why we cannot merge two trains traveling in opposite directions to save money!

Andrew Zimmern In Your Kitchen !

[This article was posted in 2016 in my old blog and is being moved here as part of the re-organization process _ RL]

Andrew Zimmern is a 'staple' of  the Travel network these days! His show, Bizarre Foods is always on. Andrew travels the world's remotest places to seek unusual foods and gets immersed in the experience with gusto! Some of the foods on his show are 'repulsive' to me as a vegetarian from India. However, he and his hosts seem to enjoy these as if these came from the Queen's pantry! The food he eats are squids and octopuses, fresh from the sea and sometimes  uncooked and filthy. Other animals I have seen Andrew eat are coyote, alligator,varieties of seafood, goats, pigs and cows that were alive a few minutes before the hosts and Andrew began tasting these. Nothing is wasted and in some cases even the blood of the animal being consumed is used to enhance the taste !!

When I was in high school, me and my friends sometimes wondered what would happen to us, as vegetarians, if we were left on a deserted island! Andrew and shows like 'Naked and Afraid' answer this to some extent! It is obvious that we would have to shut down our religious channel in order to see another life extinguished for our benefit - but  it is also obvious from the show that other cultures have compromised and made peace regarding the issue long ago....or maybe they did not have any choice.

After consuming so much sea food, Andrew himself looks like a creature from the waters, at least his face does! And he eats with ordinary people most of the time and not at fancy restaurants - that is the show's appeal!