Carthik Sharma

I don’t know if the people that used to read my blog read it anymore. There were many that I turned away by not writing regularly (or at all for a while), and by switching the URL for my feed. All capital sins.

So if you do read this blog, and think that you are one of the people I think read this blog, leave me a comment.

Or better still, take a look at this iBook for sale. If you need an iBook G4 that works, this is the one for you. It works, flawlessly and has been lovingly taken care of by someone who loves me.

Filed by Carthik at 2:28 am under friends, Yours Truly 3 Comments

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I have been fascinated with names, and how different societies follow different conventions. When it comes to a unique descriptor for a person, it is hard to beat a name, and so I am always interested in knowing more about how someone was named, what it means, what its components are, the right way of pronouncing it, etc. I have a very good memory for how exactly to spell and pronounce someone’s name too. The pronunciation might suffer due to my Indian/Malayali/Tamil exposure etc, but I love remembering the spellings of names.

I read this wonderful article on naming conventions around the world from the perspective of a software designer who designs forms that have to be internationalized, and am already feeling really happy for having read it. Read it, and become a little more sensitive to the different folks you’d be working with.

A similar article can be written about how folks are named in different parts of India. Also about how imposing local customs by force of law can make things all the weirder. The state of Maharashtra required people to have three parts to their name - “Family name” “Father’s name” and “Given Name”, if I remember correctly. That is just so insensitive to those from outside Maharashtra who have to get a birth certificate for their kids, or register their kids in a school there. Bombay, or Mumbai is in Maharashtra.

I find it very strange to have two “given name”s in my name - “Carthik” and “Anand” - neither of which are my father’s name, or my family name. I also find it strange that in our family, we use two family names, or “surnames” - Iyer and Sharma. Most of the cousins on my father’s side are “Iyers”, while I am a “Sharma”. My sister was an “Iyer” before she got married. None of my relatives know me as Carthik. They all know me as Anand, or call me Nandu. I sometimes wonder if, “Carthik”, “Anand” and “Nandu” have different personalities - whether when someone who only knows one of these meets someone only who knows another, they’d be totally surprised to learn about the other side of me.

Filed by Carthik at 11:14 pm under traditions, Yours Truly 2 Comments

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When I was a little boy, I used to get frequent stomach aches. Almost everytime, my grand mother used to heat a dosa kallu (a flat, heavy non-non-stick frying pan). Then she’d roll up a long piece of cotton cloth, make a puff out of it and heat it on the kallu and transfer the heat to my tummy - it was a very good feeling. The pain would gradually subside, and after 15-20 minutes, get reduced to a minor irritation.

Turns out, scientists at the University College at London just verified the fact that heat helps combat stomach pain. They didn’t need to have done the research to have known that, really - all they had to do was be a little boy, and go to my grandmother complaining of a stomach ache.

And to think that I used to think that it was the magic in her hands that took the pain away…

Filed by Carthik at 12:44 pm under Yours Truly, Science 2 Comments

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Now don’t you wish you could say, like I can, that you are a Smartist (Smarta to be precise), or that you are a follower of Smartism?

I guess my claim to be a follower of Smartism is valid. I was reading up the article on Wikipedia following up on a lead that Aldous Huxley was a Hindu. I have often wondered, since there is no space for proselytization and conversion in Hinduism, as to how someone could become a Hindu if they wanted. The last I thought about it, if one beleives in some fundamental precepts and lays claim to being Hindu - then that is the end of it.

I wish I could say, now, that I am a practising Smarta, which I am not, right now.

Filed by Carthik at 4:48 pm under Yours Truly 1 Comment

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I haven’t written here for too long now. I have been modestly busy with my work. It is imperative that I graduate by the end of the next fall semester, and that would mean a lot more work. I found things that are distressingly wrong about my work habits, and have been trying with moderate success to change those things. I believe that the reason people get “hardened” into believing that their way is the “right way” is because we tend to continuously validate out point of view, or practices to make ourselves believe we are doing the right thing, or that “this is what works for me”. My style of working harder when the deadlines are nearer is an example. Obviously, the quality of the work that I do will be much better if I start earlier, and work more consistently. The number of hours invested will be the same, but due to the thought put into the action in the intervening breaks, the quality of the output will be much better. So far, I may have been misleading myself into thinking, at the end of a task that I get finished just in time, that. “I got it done, and it got done fine considering the amount of hours I put into it,” and virtually pat myself on the back. The more I do this, the more “right” it seems, but maybe it is not right.
Over the past couple of weeks, I had some success taking what seemed like a difficult problem that was stalling my progress and setting myself to the task, everyday, till it got resolved. Assuming things will just resolve themselves is not the right way, I now realize. Some (or indeed most) of this will sound obvious to you, but for me, it is the beginning of a change. By the standards of how “well” I worked last week, this week has been bad, but I will get back to it. Getting it done now, and getting it done when it really needs to get done are both equally rewarding, in their own ways, but getting it done now seems to put me in a more positive frame of mind during the time it takes till the work is complete.
On the personal front, I am still learning. Most of my thoughts center around how fitting into the thought patterns of others is so difficult. Others don’t think like you, and trying to guess or understand how they think so you can shape your words to suit them isn’t always easy.

Filed by Carthik at 2:37 pm under Yours Truly No Comments

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Getting the most out of knowledge workers will be the key to business success for the next quarter century. Here’s how we do it at google.

Me read that as “The company with the most employees without an inkling of what’s going on (out-of-knowledge) will be successful.

(From this newsweek article…)

Also, I started debating whether it should be “key to business success FOR the next quarter century” or “key to business success IN the next quarter century”. Also note that the “g” in google is not capitalized.

Time to sleep, I suppose.

I am the black kettle calling the pot black, I know, being not so careful with my grammar and spelling up here, but yet, I miss the days when finding a spelling mistake, or incorrect grammatical constructions in the daily newspaper (The Hindu) used to make my day.

And no, The Hindu is not in “Hindu”. I have had no less that 3 people ask me, “So you’re from India, eh, do you speak Hindu?”

Quick Quiz - which is the fourth most-spoken language in the world? No searching in Wikipedia, or elsewhere - only top-of-the-mind answers allowed.

Filed by Carthik at 1:39 am under Yours Truly 4 Comments

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I was with a friend when I saw a pretty girl, and I said, “Oh no, she’s just a kid - she must be 18 or 19.” My friend agreed.

“So 18 is ‘too young’ now, eh, Carthik?”, said me to myself, “You must be growing old, then.”

Filed by Carthik at 10:15 am under Yours Truly 3 Comments

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All my computers are quitting on me. First it was the desktop and now it is the faithful old laptop. I woke up this morning to the sound of a grinder. My hard drive, apparently, thinks it is one now. I hope that replacing the hard drive will fix it. I had almost all of it backed up except for the photos from the most recent India trip. Trying to recover data will be fun, hopefully.

Filed by Carthik at 1:39 pm under Yours Truly 2 Comments

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This is the day I got a metal tooth for keeps.
No, it is not made of gold.

Will the metal detectors at airports always go “beep” now?
Can I still put my head in the microwave oven?
Is the metal magnetic? (Can I get a ring stuck on my cheek, without the painful piercing?)

It feels so smooth to the tongue… irresistibly smooooth. Almost good enough to make me want to get all my teeth capped.

Filed by Carthik at 8:14 am under Yours Truly 5 Comments

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Update: If you are a friend/foe staying in Bangalore, and would like to talk, or meet, mail me your phone number at mail@carthik.net and I will call you.

It’s been a week since I landed in India now. My plans for taking lots of photographs fell flat on it’s face since the battery charger does not work on 220 V/50 Hz. So the camera is out of power for now. I will fix this soon.

So I arrived in a terribly silent Bombay airport at 3 AM on the 3rd of July. I said “thank you” to the customs clerk, who stared at me for one terribly long second. That screamed “Welcome home” more than anything else. No “thank you”s or “sorry”s in my land. The shuttle that took me from the international airport to the domestic airport travelled under the nose of the plane I just landed in, through the runways - very exciting.

I had a long 9 hour wait at the airport, so me an my friend headed out. I decided to risk it all and had a dosa and a tea at a dinghy looking restaurant. My tummy is not the same as it was in the US, but I am up and about and everything is fine. The dust, smoke and pollution affects my nose, but then again, I am okay, so everything’s good.

I attended my friend’s wedding, and then another, and had two heavy meals after what seems like an eternity. Grandma, my father and everyone else are fine. It is amazing to see how the old change, and so fast, while the young - folks my age - do not change. I would have expected it to be the other way round.

I left with my father for Guruvayoor, Trichur, and now I am in Bangalore, alone, at my sister’s place. My nephew is active, and lively, and talkative, and quite a trip. The candies and GI Joes survived the long trip from Walmart to Bangalore remarkably well.

Yesterday I met Siddharth after three years. He was once my roommate and is a good friend. He looks a little thinner, and is quite the same.

I browse in fits and starts at browsing centers. Thankfully, due to the dollar - rupee conversion rate, I don’t feel the pinch here, though things are a lot more expensive.

All my friends and relatives go to work during the day, so I have nowhere to go right now, and dial up internet is too slow.

Lots of time for introspection, and speculation.

Filed by Carthik at 1:34 am under India, friends, Yours Truly 9 Comments

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My Desktop was taken down yesterday by (I presume) an electrical surge during a thunderstorm. It powers up, and the fan sounds funny, but that’s about it. It could be one of
1) a fried motherboard
2) a busted power supply

I will head home with a voltmeter/ammeter to see if it is the power supply that’s busted.

In the mean time, one logging bot, and one plotting bot are now inactive, thanks to the bust. What worries me infinitely more is that I now won’t be able to have remote backups on the machine, and that the ssh tunnels are dead.

Both the desktop and the laptop are now pushing on in years. I know it is time to replace the laptop (Don’t we all just get that gut feeling at about the right time?), the desktop is no biggie, I can use a Pentium-III 900 MHz driven desktop, which should be cheap, but buying a new laptop seems impossible, seeing as I’d like to buy a 14″ powerbook, and that it costs approx. $2000. I just hope my old faithful laptop doesn’t give up any time soon.

Filed by Carthik at 9:16 am under Yours Truly 8 Comments

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I find myself remembering a lot of old friends today. Heightened demands at work/research seem to make my mind so much more unpredictable, and all sorts of interesting thoughts, quotes and people pop up more frequently than otherwise.

So how do you decide who is a good friend of yours, someone you can count on? According to one, very highly trusted friend of mine, it is really simple — keep track of people you see in your dreams. Seeing a friend in a dream is a reasonably rare occurence, and should help you find out who you subconsciously trust, and love. Someday, when I have the time, I will make a list of friends I have seen in dreams. And yes, I see some people in dreams that I have never seen in real life. Am I alone in this? - I would think not.

Another wise friend introduced me to the concept of circles of relationships, with you anointing friends to a circle of people whose opinion really matters to you. Anything said by anyone outside the circle should then have no influence about how you judge yourself, and does not, in effect, form part of the feedback loop that we all need to live in this world.

There is another related thought I had when I walked in the rain towards the department building. I remember the circumstances, what the thought was about (about something “automatic” and how it is remarkable that when “a” is “missing”, things automatically roll back to “b”, or some such), and who I was thinking of when that thought occured. I can’t remember the thought, and I feel sad, since I cannot share it with you. Strangely enough, I am also afraid I might have thought a neat thought forever — do you ever get this feeling? In the normal scheme of things, come tomorrow, the thought, and the memory of it, will be history, and I won’t know what I lost, or that I lost it. This post, though should remind me that I had this thought, with the words in quotes I mentioned above, and maybe, tomorrow, when I read this, I will remember it again.

Filed by Carthik at 9:35 pm under friends, Yours Truly 2 Comments

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Oh, and by the way today is New Year’s day according to the traditional Malayalam calendar we follow. So Happy Vishu, everyone.

The Calendar followed in Kerala starts a new year on a different day, ever since Raja Udaya Marthanda Varma “declared” a new era, and a new new year’s day circa 825 A.D. The new year’s day celebration occurs on the traditional new year’s day. Confused? So am I, a little, when it comes to all things traditional. The “Hindu” calendar is totally different from this Malayalam calendar, too. Read that article carefully and you will find a month that shares it’s name with me. Thousands of years are too long to conveniently call history, so some of it becomes tradition, some myth, and some religion.

Today I was supposed to wake up and see some flowers/fruits first thing in the morning. I made-do with my face, which is not too bad, really.

Yesterday, a program I was writing gave in to my will. It’s working in the background as I write this. I have some other writing to do, too, but have to wait for some results. Today’s gonna be a good, busy day. I hope the rest of the year is as good as well.

Filed by Carthik at 10:18 am under traditions, Yours Truly No Comments

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Ladies and Gentlemen,
Please welcome Sumant - the man with the biggest heart in the world. Sumant was my roommate before he outgrew his Masters and found a job. I wait for updates to his blog, anxiously.

Filed by Carthik at 9:22 pm under friends, Yours Truly No Comments

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