Modesty

I am a modest person, modestly speaking. I go about living day-in and day-out modestly, without realizing even once that people around me are immodest, or not quite modest at the very least. In fact, I learnt recently that the virtue of modesty (yes, it’s still considered a virtue by some) is dying! If you don’t believe me, here’s the modest article about its demise.

As we all know, I am sort of an expert in MATLAB. People come from far and beyond to ask me how they can improve their MATLAB figures, codes and apps. In return, the only thing I ask from them is they start using at least one of my MATLAB programs regularly. And then they never speak to me again or they switch to a ‘Mac’. Anyway, since my daughter has not done either of those two yet, I thought of gifting her a MATLAB program on her 5th birthday.

SixDoKu Solver 1.0

Surprisingly, she was more receptive of my program (her present, that is) than I had imagined. That felt really good. A week or so well-spent! Perceptive among you may have realized that I made a 6×6 Sudoku Solver (or Sixdoku Solver) for her and it is not just a copy/paste of my well-known (9×9) Sudoku Solver. Well, the logic behind solving a Sudoku is mostly copy/paste. (I was quite surprised how easy it was to recast the logic code for my 9×9 solver to this 6×6 one, proving how good a theoretical physicist I am since generalizing a specific example is what I achieved here!) But the visual layout: the four buttons, the background, the upbeat colours / emojis / messages / texts and the functional aspect of the 6×6 grid  are totally new and – as Microsoft likes to put it every so often – built from the ground up! Literally so because the Sudoku Solver is built in GUIDE (will be removed in a future MATLAB release) while Sixdoku Solver in built in App Designer (the default app development environment now).

I won’t bore you with any more details about the program but why Sixdoku? I hear you ask! Because my daughter has been subscribed by her mother to “Young World”, a children supplement from “The Hindu” newspaper, and one of the ‘fun’ activities there is a Sixdoku. I saw them ‘struggling’ to solve it and I thought, “Well, well, well… What have we got here!” and the rest as they say is her present. Some of you familiar with my usual Sudoku Solver may complain that my program does not actually help her solve one on her own. As it is not made with that in mind, for example, if she wants to solve a Sudoku with just the notes it is not so user-friendly in that regard. And that’s why I’m Dharmesh and you are not. As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, the grid has been totally rebuilt from the ground up and it allows writing over the notes to enter a single number. It doesn’t update the notes after that though, but that helps her to learn to remember and see what changes lie ahead. So it not only allows her to solve a Sixdoku on her own, it also ‘teaches’ her to follow the changes in her own mind to solve it faster. (These are not just hypothetical statements. She has indeed explored the functioning of my program by trying to make up her own Sixdokus and trying to solve the proper ones from the Young World on her own after writing the notes.) And that is how one learns to live one’s life.

Talking about living one’s life, I found an inspiring Japanese poem by Kenji Miyazawa about just that topic. What a coincidence, you might say! I will leave you with its Wiki page (with a translation) and a different translation. Pick what you like:

Wikipedia / Kenji-World

September, End of.

Warning: Filler post begins. Well, when one is writing a post per month, one does not have the liberty to tag a post as a filler willy-nilly. But that should not stop one from getting disappointed as the end of this month approaches and only a quarter of the current year remains. Also the time left for Nokia to update (my) Nokia 9 PureView phone to Android 11! So whether or not this post qualifies as a filler, we will talk about a lot of stuff in this post, like Anime, Shers, Movies, TV shows, etc. Wait a minute, that amounts to just two things, once everything is said and read…

Anyway, to the first topic of Shers (I recently learnt that ‘Ashaar’ (अशार) is the plural of ‘Sher’ (शेर) but old habits die hard as old dogs say!). The following two are from poet Mukesh Aalam:

अब तो सारा आलम ही इन रंगों से शर्मिंदा है
मज़हब वालों ने कुछ ऐसे फर्क बताए रंगों के

Ab to saara aalam hi in rangon se sharminda hai
Mazahab waalon ne kuch aise fark bataae rangon ke

Even the whole world is now ashamed of these colours
The sectarians told such differences among the colours

मुझे दुनिया के तानों पर कभी गुस्सा नहीं आता
नदी की तह में जाके सारे पत्थर बैठ जाते हैं

Mujhe duniya ke taanon par kabhi gussa nahin aata
Nadi ki tah mein jaake saare patthar baith jaate hain

I do not ever get angry over the world’s taunts
All the stones sink to lie down on the riverbed

–मुकेश आलम (Mukesh Aalam)

The first sher is a Maqta (of course) where the word ‘aalam’ (आलम) is the poet’s (pen)name but also means the world, as required by the Sher to make sense. The second sher got chosen not just because it was easy to translate but also because it tries to weave an allegory in the two sentences. It also involves the world but with another word ‘duniya’ (दुनिया). I struggle to come up with synonyms for ‘world’ in English. Words like ‘cosmos’, ‘universe’ sound too grand whereas ‘Earth’ sounds too flat (no pun intended; in fact, there is none). The full video, where the above snippets of Ghazals can be heard (in the poet’s own voice), follows:

That leads us smoothly to the second topic of Audio-Visual stimulations. I finished watching an anime series on Netflix a few weeks ago. I had started it sometime last year, no idea why. It was/is titled “The Disastrous Life of Saiki K.”. It is a ‘slice of life’ anime about a psychic high-school boy who is an all-powerful being able to use psychokinesis, teleportation, and whatever the author needs him to be able to do to get out of situations where his powers are in the danger of being discovered by people around him. Only his parents (Spoiler alert: and his elder brother {more Spoilers: and a couple of his classmates [Spoilers keep coming: and later his grandparents too!]}) know about his powers. The whole series is then about him trying to hide his powers from the whole ‘world’ and seem as an average high-school guy (literally average, as in class rank, athletic abilities, etc.) but he keeps getting into situations from which he ‘always’ escapes unscathed. Enough with the summary of the series, let me tell you about what it feels like watching Saiki K. It is fast-paced with incessant gags/jokes after jokes/gags, full of parody of other manga/anime, parody of its own source manga, consistent breaking of the fourth wall, hilarious and ridiculous pandemonium. The only other manga/anime (among the ones I know) that surpasses such chaotic pandemonium is ‘Nichijou’ and I’m not even going to try to describe it (because I didn’t dare to describe it here either). But both are highly recommended viewing/reading for this year, or any other time for that matter.

Moving on to the touchy topic of Movies and Movie theaters. The latter are starting to open up again after a long break (who knows why?) and we are starting to cautiously venture out in search of ‘good’ movies to watch and eat bucket loads of popcorn. (The latter is just my superpartner but since the bucket gets loaded, I also dig in more often than I’d like to admit.) The first movie we watched (since the re-opening this year) was “The Green Knight” because we went to watch “Reminiscence”. The second movie we watched was, of course, “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” because why not! The third movie we watched was “Free Guy” because we haven’t watched “Deadpool”. The fourth movie we will watch will be “No Time to Die” because it features Nokia phones… WOW! The fifth movie we will watch will be “Eternals” because I haven’t read any Marvel comics. The sixth movie we will watch will be “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” because I have no idea what this movie is about but the name sounds familiar! The seventh movie we will watch will be “Spiderman: No Way Home” because it has Spiderman and Dr. Strange. The eighth movie we will watch will be obviously “The Matrix Resurrections” because what’s the point of life, otherwise!

Showing some restraint, I now move on to the funny topic of (British) TV Shows. The new seasons of “QI”, “The Russell Howard Hour”, etc. have started this year. A new show “The Complaints Department” is also funny enough to be watched weekly. Another ‘new’ show “Late Night Mash” is also watch-worthy. The hardest quiz show “Only Connect” is also running along. VCM is particularly funny this series. But DM has yet to feature, maybe he will in some of the upcoming episodes. “HIGNFY”, “Question Team” and the year-end specials are (of course) the things to look forward to in these stressful times. Especially, Charlie Brooker’s take on 2021. What the hell is he doing these days, anyway? I get that he’s now a father of a few kids but then one 2 hours show at the end of each year along with Barry Shitpeas and Philomena Cunk isn’t asking too much, is it? Sadly, one person who is being/will be missed in the panel shows is Sean Lock. He died recently (16 August) of lung cancer and “tears can’t be written down, Jimmy”.

July was the month when the world lost two great (particle) physicists: T. Maskawa and S. Weinberg. Not to be outdone, September turned itself to be the month which took away two more physicists: Antony Hewish, an astronomer and Thanu Padmanabhan, a cosmologist. To be frank, I did not know about Prof. Hewish due to massive ignorance on my part. He had discovered pulsars and was awarded a Nobel Prize for that. Prof. Padmanabhan’s research contributions include cosmological structure formation, dark energy, and quantum gravity. I have a slightly more close connection with him (though, I never met him personally) as I started learning about path integrals from one of his many books when I was an undergrad at IITKGP. It is a bit strange that my initial exposure to General Relativity was from a particle physicist and to Quantum Field Theory from a cosmologist!

Last Words

I Don’t Say Doesn’t Mean I Don’t Say…

My Superpartner came up with a grievance few weeks ago. He thinks that I don’t talk about him with people around me. The fact though is that I don’t tell him enough what I tell about him to others. For example, the other day I told my friend that ‘There are several reasons but the primary one is: Because Dharmesh is the least judgmental person I have met’. I’m not the kind of wife who makes the husband feel good all the time or bad all the time or good and bad at different times; I’m the kind who says nothing at all and just enjoys the ‘it is what it is’.

So I’m going to share some interesting trivia about him. Some of you might already know few of this. For others, I hope it is of some entertainment value.

My side of the family thinks he and I are a mute family. They always had the impression that I don’t speak much. I was the heights of speechlessness and no opinions. When they met him, they realized that there was one more. But if you have ever walked with him, you would say something else. When he is walking with me, he doesn’t let me speak. And he speaks very strange things. When I say strange, I mean that he is talking of higher dimensional Physics.

He is ready for breads all the time. When he is fully full, when it is time for bed, when it is the middle of the night, just anytime. To completely comprehend what I mean, watch Dylan Moran here.

He thinks that nobody likes him and nobody should like him; Why should anyone like anyone anyways? What a pity, he doesn’t know some things here.

He plays Disney games! Awful & Terrible, isn’t it?! There are times when I’m talking about worldly things when he says, ‘O let me open my game’.  And for the next half an hour or so, he is playing with Mickey Mouse, Goofy and feeling sad that he is not been able to introduce Cinderella to his amusement park yet.

While he is doing nothing [read anything] he is pulling his eyebrow hairs (like now, literally now!). I wonder why he has some hair left there even now.

If there was some Guinness record to award someone who has read the most Japanese Manga and watched British shows at the same time, he would be making and breaking his own records.

He has made some excellent programs which haven’t been marketed well (not marketed at all, in fact). There are days when he comes up with some enhancement ideas and you can guess what happens after that.

He has some strange hobbies. One of them for example is to read about the upcoming Windows 10 builds. Recently, this happened too

and I think such notifications just encourage him more to keep following those hobbies. O God!

That’s all for now, If I go any further than this, I might touch upon some cheeky, funny elements which we keep for later. And after all this, here is our favourite VCM who talks about DM once in a while.

Happy April Fools’ Day!

Filler Posts - I

As none of you know, we aim to have a multiple of 12 posts every year. And that number seems quite far-fetched to arrive at this year. So as a last ditch effort, we’ll have a post every alternate day starting today on Christmas till the New Year’s eve.

As all of you have guessed by now, that means there won’t be any agenda to any of these posts! That also means my Superpartner won’t be participating in this futile effort as She thinks this is beneath Her. So I will have to fill up this self-imposed criterion on the number of posts while she photographs Cats unlike Sora.😢

Hence let me tell you what I’m looking forward to in the last month (mostly week, actually) of this year:

• Mock the Week [14/12]
• Would I Lie to You? [19/12]
• 8Oo10C Does Countdown [24/12]
• The Big Fat Quiz of the Year [26/12]
• Jonathan Creek [28/12]
• Charlie Brooker's Year Wipe [29/12]
• Cunk on Christmas [29/12]
• 8Oo10C Does Countdown [30/12]
• Sherlock [1/1]
• The Big Fat Quiz of Everything [6/1]

These are, of course, Christmas / New Year specials of British comedy (panel) TV shows, except Jonathan Creek & Sherlock, which are detective shows but they do have some comedy so no problem putting then in the list above I guess. In addition, there are weekly shows currently on-air:

• Only Connect (Mon)
• 8 out of 10 Cats (Tue)
• QI (Fri)

And a few that have ended recently:

• Dave Gorman: Modern Life is Goodish
• Have I got News for You?
• No Such Thing as the News
• Women Talking about Cars

That’s it for today and do follow the link below for

More Details

D. Bones & Clocks

How many of you remember the cartoon called “SWAT Kats”?

Doesn’t matter… This post is NOT about cartoons featuring cats. This post isn’t about the book by David Mitchell either. The novelist not the comedian, who is also a great read / listen / watch.

This post is about photos of the book cover taken with my Panasonic GX7 under various circumstances. Let’s go through them one by one:

Manual: f/5.2, 1/100s, ISO200, AWB with Flash (Vivid Colour Style)

iAuto: f/4.0, 1/20s, ISO3200, AWB with No Flash (Standard)

The following photos showcase some of the built-in Art Filters I find interesting.

Expressive: f/4.0, 1/15s, ISO3200, AWB with No Flash

D.Monochrome: f/4.0, 1/20s, ISO3200, AWB with No Flash

Impressive Art: f/4.0, 1/25s, ISO3200, AWB with No Flash

Toy Pop: f/4.0, 1/13s, ISO3200, AWB with No Flash

One Color: f/4.0, 1/20s, ISO3200, AWB with No Flash

Finally, a proper full-on cover-shot:

Manual: f/8.0, 1/125s, ISO400, AWB with Flash (Vivid Colour Style)

Hope you’re buying the latest in the GX series…

85/80/7 Mark II

So Long 2014!

That’s it then. But before we bid you good bye this year, we thought we would write about something worthwhile. Since this blog mostly focuses on photography, poetry and general rantings, we thought we would write about all these three subjects in this post! Let us start with photography.

On this fine sultry day, let me show you what MICE is good for. Even those who suffer from the genetic disorder that makes their stomach upset at the mention of the word ‘Microsoft’ – so severely that they have to replace ‘s’ by ‘$’ in order to continue living in this world bombarded with MS softwares / products / services / news / ads – have to be aware that MICE is one piece of software that doesn’t have ‘s’ in its acronym. Even the hugely popular Photosynth ‘app’ now uses the advanced MICE stitching engine to generate panoramas.

Moving on with the tutorial now, let us take this scene as an example.

Do you see something wrong here? Yes,  of course! There is that long antennae (outlined  in red), dish & tank (blue) and the roof (green), which shouldn’t be there in the photo as they obstruct the view of the otherwise ‘pretty’ landscape in the background. In order to correct that we zoom in, and take shots of the scene from different angles while avoiding the problematic elements. In the above example, I took these 6 shots:

   

4 from left side of the tank and 2 from the right. (I didn’t have much room to move around so the roof couldn’t be avoided.) After that I let MICE do its magic on these 6 shots and generate this pretty landscape ‘panorama’.

I leave the blank space at the bottom to stress that some parts of the scene may not be totally avoidable! But in most cases, it should be possible to crop sensibly and showcase what is important.

Now let us talk about poetry. Poetry is an integral part of ‘Hasya Kavi Sammelan’ (for those who are not familiar with this Indian tradition, it is a grander version of ‘stand-up comedy shows’) and there are poets who recite as well as sing their creations. A decade or two ago, there used to be a great supply of audio cassettes of HKSs. One such cassette is owned by one of my uncles and I like to listen to it whenever I visit them in SDGH. During my last visit, we were listening to it and a suggestion cropped up to record and make a digital copy of the cassette. Somehow, making an audio CD was not feasible so we recorded 2 (out of 9) performances and we share one of them below. This is the last recital on that cassette by Prabha Thakur, which emphasizes the irony in our struggle to survive. The first two lines sum it up as follows: Our desires lead us throughout our lives as if enchanted by mirages, this madness is so strong that our hunger is never sated. For the first time we try to embed an audio on this blog via SoundCloud… let’s see how it goes (the usual Hindi text for the poem follows after that).

भटकाती रहती हैं तृष्नाएँ जीवन की
फिर भी हसरत बाँकी हद है पागलपन की

सुख बोया दुःख काटा हर सौदे में घाटा
सारा विष खुद पीकर मैंने अमृत बांटा
अनजानी लगती है देहरी भी आँगन की
फिर भी हसरत बाँकी हद है पागलपन की
भटकाती रहती हैं ⋯

मन को समझाऊँ तो तन बागी हो जाएँ
और तन सिंगारूँ तो मन बैरागी हो जाये
आँखें ही बरसे तो कीमत क्या सावन की
फिर भी हसरत बाँकी हद है पागलपन की
भटकाती रहती हैं ⋯

जितना सुख सौरभ था किस्तों में दे डाला
मुरझाईं जाती है रिश्तों की वरमाला
अर्थहीन लगती हैं बातें अपनेपन की
फिर भी हसरत बाँकी हद है पागलपन की
भटकाती रहती हैं ⋯

– प्रभा ठाकुर

Finally, we do a big fat quiz of the year… err… general rantings regarding the last year. As in that TV show, we will talk about things that made our anxieties bearable, weekends merry and kept us looking forward to the next week, month and year.

1. TV Shows: We followed a great number of British shows – 8o²10C, HIGNFY, MTW, NMTB, OC, QI, Sherlock, WILTY, ⋯ Apart from these, we also watched a Swedish show, few stand-up shows of various comedians like Alan Davies, Bill Bailey, Eddie Izzard, Trevor Noah, ⋯. We prefer these shows because their humour is subtle, deep, has a way with wordplay such that once you get used to it, everything else feels amateurish.
2. Movies: We tried watching some of the movies that made it to top of the ‘charts’ (and also some that did not) – From Up On Poppy Hill, Gravity, Guardians of the Galaxy, How to Train your Dragon 2, Interstellar, Transcendence, The Wind Rises, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Chennai Express, Highway, Queen, ⋯. We like these movies not just for the entertainment they provide but also for how they make you think with their portrayal of various aspects of life like dreams, emotions, relations, survival, technology and so on.
3. Music: Some of the songs we liked in no particular order – Hamdard & Banjaare ko ghar (Ek tha Villain), Main tenu samjhavan ki (Humpty Sharma ki dulhaniya), Sunona Sangemarmar (Youngistaan), Bang Bang & Meherbaan (Bang Bang), Tum Naraz Ho & Nadiya par par karke (Coke Studio), London thumakda (Queen), Kashmir to Kanyakumari (Chennai Express), Baby doll (Ragini MMS 2), Hangover (Kick), ⋯. We did not discover another A.R. Rahman in the Indian music industry this year but there were definitely many new Playback singers and some of them are truly brilliant.
4. Books: We read some old and new books this year like The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Half Girlfriend, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Nature’s Futures 1, The Devil and Miss Prym, Moving Day, ⋯ (in some order that you need to figure out).
5. Mangas: The major event in this year was the completion of ‘Naruto’ and what an end it was! (I’m not going to divulge anymore, you are welcome to discuss in the comments…) I also read the reboot of Rurouni Kenshin manga and watched its first live action movie, which is quite enjoyable. Though different from the original manga at significant story points, it doesn’t leave a sour taste in one’s brain as watching just the first 2 minutes of ‘Dragonball: Evolution’ does. For other ongoing manga, look at the relevant tab above.
6. Programming: MATLAB got on to a new start by updating its graphics engine ‘drastically’ and in the process broke almost all of my programs. I have restored all of them except Polorama Generator for which I have a different plan, like incorporating the Keystone Correction that I demoed here. Let’s see if PG v3 sees the light in the new year.

That’s all for now. To all those souls who made this year enjoyable, Merry X-mas and a Happy New Year (in advance). Since this is a month full of festivities,

Happy December

Spring

… is here:

And people are getting engaged left and right or rather east and west.

We got to know about the engagement of one of our friends from IITKGP (let’s call him BD) a few days ago. I should remember to get him a wedding day card like I did for the others. This takes care of the east.

Let’s move on to a more interesting engagement in the west, that of Mr. D. J. S. Mitchell (in short, David Mitchell) and Miss V. E. Coren (in short, Victoria Coren). You may ask, “Who are they?” And I may reply, “What the hell are their names hyperlinked for?”

Now that you know who they are; let’s celebrate their engagement and what better way to celebrate their engagement than to witness their brilliance in their brilliant works. And watching them share the same screen-space would be akin to ‘fragrant gold’ as they’d say in Hindi. So here are two such instances:

DM & VC on You Have Been Watching

DM & VC on Would I Lie to You

It seems they met ‘first’ on a show called ‘The Bubble’. Finally, I leave you with more opportunities to see them

Together

A New Year

So what?

Apparently, some people don’t say, “So What?” and go along with others to parties, uh… I don’t know what else they do. But another ridiculous thing they indulge in is making resolutions:

• Like eating less sweets or snacks or both as if that’ll save them from listening to others’ comments about their health;
• Like exercising as if there’s no next year;
• Like being polite as if the world-peace depended on just that;
• Like learning something new everyday as if that’ll make them more appealing to others;
• Like being more secretive as if people cared in the first place;
• Like being less secretive as if people cared in the first place;
• Like trying to overcome one’s phobias as if it were a life-or-death issue;
• Like ranting about day-to-day stuff as if that’ll increase blog traffic.

Before I start to get self-aware, let me just wish you a very Happy New Year and point you to the photos of my recent

NYC trip

Beginning of the End

How can it be correct if it isn’t even consistent.

–Warren Siegel

That title may feel a bit odd at first but by the end of this post, it will still feel so. Anyway, I’ll be talking about beginnings of a few shows/series in this post:

First of all, I started to read a new ‘Slice of Life’ manga (like Sketchbook) titled “Lucu Lucu”. It has a weird theme but if you ignore that, it is quite enjoyable. Well, even if you don’t ignore the theme (where demons are the ‘good guys’ & angels are the ‘bad’ ones), it is still relaxing & calming very much like another SoL manga titled “Yotsuba&!”.

Second of all, new episodes of two British panel shows have started airing again: “QI” Series I (‘I’ as in 9) featuring Stephen Fry & Alan Davies and “Would I Lie to You?” Series 5 featuring David Mitchell, Lee Mack & Rob Brydon. These series basically point to the beginning of the end of this year (if you are too picky in wanting to connect the body of this post to the title!).

Third of all and the most important one that gave me the idea for this post is the beginning of the scanlation of a ‘Samurai-based action comedy’ manga (the genre which includes gems like Rurouni Kenshin, Samurai Deeper Kyo, Samurai Champloo) titled “Samurai Usagi”. The scanlation stopped in 2008 and a new group picked it up nearly a month ago after more or less 3 years as seen on this page, which makes me happy that there are some ‘kind’ souls existing even today. [But, where are they when it concerns “Embalming”? Though, I think the absence of new chapters may be due to some other factors too!]

So, there you have it: a list of things that can keep you occupied till the end of (and beyond) this year. You may as well start with

Lucu Lucu

Coercion

So you are sitting there peacefully waiting for the sweets to arrive but when they arrive they aren’t put in the plate, instead a hand supports the back of your head and the other hand shoves the sweet(s) in your face. When you refuse to let the sweet(s) be delivered in your mouth like that, the person asks, “What’s Your Problem?”. [This scenario is pretty much common in Indian weddings or at least those few that I’ve had the misfortune to attend.] Thus, proving the said person (‘it’ will be substituted from now on) has no concept of irony.

Similar situations arise when it asks you to sing or dance or play or participate in any such activity you loathe or are, in the very least, disinterested in exerting yourself. Obviously, such irrelevant trivialities are not really worth anyone’s time apart from a few eloquent professionals, who sometimes choose to speak on other people’s behalf. For example, Surendra Sharma does so on behalf of all the husbands! That’s why, I fill the following space with a David Mitchell Rant:

DM’s Refusal Rant

More of his Rants