I witnessed someone’s will yesterday.

What did you do?

Inspiration, sometimes, comes from the strangest of places. For example, Top Gun. The movie is so obviously an all brawn, testosterone-fuelled, full-of-big-shiny-toys guy movie. Yet, I totally enjoyed watching it. “There are no points for second place” is a great phrase. And the planes were awesome. Hey, if chicks can watch (stand, or worse, enjoy) chick flicks, why can’t we like guy movies!

Another video that I really liked was Steve Jobs’ speech at Stanford. Whatever I may think of the man, I really do admire what he has achieved. Even if his speech did see to place luck and hard work on equal pedestals (that may be true, but I would be loath to admit it), the quote towards the end of the speech truly inspired me.

“Stay hungry, stay foolish”

I am not religious … but amen to that.

This is something I’ve been meaning to post for quite a while.

———–

I’ve been thinking. How is one remembered after one dies? There is a fundamental change happening here, something we probably don’t realise.

This is how it works now. Most people will be remembered only through memories. These don’t last. They will be soon forgotten, with only tombstones to remind us that these folks ever did walk on this earth. Others are more fortunate. If you have done something worth writing about, or if you’ve written something worth reading, that’s something more concrete. Then you’ll be remembered.

Yet, even then, people in the future won’t really know you. What you were thinking. What you believed in. Most of what we know about the famous personalities of the days gone by, is what others saw them as. Biographies. Memories. Newspaper clippings. How do I know what sort of a person Cleopatra, or Genghis Khan really was?

Now things are changing. They call it Web 2.0. It’s the power for you and for me to publish whatever our hearts desire. And these thoughts, blogs, scraps, pictures can last forever. Even after one dies, his or her contribution to the internet will stay forever. This is what fascinates me. In the future, there’s going to be a treasure-trove of material for people to pore over. To answer the one question everyone will be asking.

What was Shyam Jade really like?

Death, from Sandman

Update: Two of my friends passed away, and their orkut accounts still exist. It’s eerie and weird to visit them now, to say the least.

So, I am finally back in India! Mumbai! IITB! This, along with laziness, explains the large delay in me updating my blog.

I’ve spent the last couple of days re-adjusting to life back home. No driving on the right hand side of the road, no converting prices into euros and exclaiming how cheap stuff is (I will be broke soon if I continue to do that!) and no smiling in a friendly manner whenever a girl walks by (I shall suffer physical damage soon if I continue to do that!).

A couple of things I noted during this intern. They are in no particular order, and I may add stuff later as I remember more.

• The German word ‘kraft’ means force, energy and power. Go tell a physicist that!
• Spaniards, especially those on an Erasmus exchange program in south-west Germany, are always late for appointments.
• Introvert Peruvians who don’t talk at all, often turn out to be awesome dancers.
• Germans organise the best parties in the world.
• ‘Johnson’ is Valencian slang for a doper.
• Germans never share their food with others. At restaurants and even at lunch in the mess, it’s every person for him or herself. This attitude felt very alien to me, being an Indian, and especially being an IITian.
• When you’re travelling at 300 kmph in a thunderstorm, in a train, you can’t help but marvel at German engineering.
• The informal German word for ‘Goodbye” … Tschüss is very funny.
• Only the Spanish can take a dead pig, slap some salt on it and dump it in a cave for three years. And then consider it to be a delicacy. (Actually jamón isn’t bad, it’s pretty good …)

My blog is one month old. Since I am now acquainted with this phrase, I can use it — “Happy birth month!”

Anyways, I love graphs. They can tell you so much, or absolutely nothing. There’s a really cool ‘Stats’ section in WordPress. The main graph there tells you the number of visits to the blog. This is my ’stats’ graph for the past one month (the first month of this blog’s existence):

A couple of observations

• There are SO MANY lukkhe interns out there!
• The days when I posted stuff are clearly visible as peaks.
• WordPress tells you a lot of other things as well … like the what people were searching for when they came to the blog via a search engine like Google.

By the way, WordPress is smart enough to not count your visits to your own blog.

The story of Little Red Riding Hood. Such a nice, clean story. A bit scary, because of that big bad wolf, but then again, no one gets hurts, except for the nasty wolf. And it has a happy ending as well. A great story for kids.

Or so I thought.

I first read about it in Sandman, and I couldn’t believe it. I did a bit of research on the net, and found out that it was true. Little Red Riding Hood, as is the case with so many other happy fairy tales, has a dark and sinister past. Originally it was far more violent and it had a morbid ending. The wolf ate Grandma, and tricked Red into eating her flesh and drinking her blood. It forced her to strip and sleep with her naked. And then it ate her.

And then there is the question of interpreting the story. Today’s version can be thought of as a warning to kids. “Don’t trust strangers.” The original version is far more interesting.  Is the ‘wolf’ a reference to cunning, scheming men who seduce and trap young women? According to Charles Perrault, the Frenchman who was instrumental in giving the story it’s current form

There are various kinds of wolves. There are also those who are charming, quiet, polite, unassuming, complacent, and sweet, who pursue young women at home and in the streets. And unfortunately, it is these gentle wolves who are the most dangerous ones of all.

In various versions of the story the wolf is replaced by an ogre, or more excitingly, a werewolf.

The “Red” in Red Riding Hood is said allude to prostitution, the hymen, or the blood of the menstrual cycle — depending on which source you believe. Freud, for example,  would jump on the “attractive young girl going deep in the dark forest” part of the story and draw some very obvious conclusions from that.

There is a lot more to fairy tales than what meets the eye. I find this quite interesting, and would love to explore more.

A couple of interesting links, about Red Riding Hood.

• This page lists a several different versions of the story — http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0333.html
• A “politically correct” version of the tale — http://philip.greenspun.com/zoo/red-riding-hood
• This seems to be a course on Fairy Tales — http://www.northern.edu/hastingw/fairytale.htm

And ofcourse, the Sandman pages that sparked this post. Enjoy.

I stand corrected. Stuttgart is not the best city in the world. This is not to say that it isn’t brilliant. I would still love to stay there. It feels right, which is important in a place where one stays. It’s just that a lot of the things that I find really cool — are turning out to be quite commonplace here. Neat gardens and interesting city centres and beautiful landscapes seem to be everywhere in Germany! Which hurts a bit … there are so many small things in which Mumbai could be so much nicer. I hate to sound like a typical NRI — always cribbing about India, and how bad it is, and how the West is much better and all that. My only defence is that I sincerely do like Mumbai!

PS: This post has been been lying unpublished ever since I went to Munich and Vienna. However it was inspired by Munich, and definitely not by Vienna. Vienna is a dead city on a Sunday morning. I don’t care if Catherine considers me odd to have expected life in a European capital on a Sunday morning. I guess I am just spoilt by living in Mumbai and India .

A couple of pics to end the post …

Marienplatz — A typical Bavarian parade. Yet, I don’t know if they were heading off to war or to the nearest pub. They were marching with both swords and beer mugs

The Englisher Garten — A pretty amazing African music troupe kept me entertained.

The Austrian Parliament — Yup, that’s a house on top of the Parliament building.

Vienna fanzone — The stewards sure know how to have fun!

Where, oh where, would I be without the likes of xkcd, phdcomics and Sandman?

Sandman is in a class of it’s own, but xkcd and phdcomics can always be relied on to bring a smile to my face. For example, just came across this on xkcd … it’s infinitely cute, but so geeky!