Revisited

Movies.
I always thought, there is no fun in watching a serious movie for the 2nd or 3rd time. In my terms if one thinks to watch something again it should be like Chupke-Chupke, Gol Maal (ones by Hrishikesh Mukherjee, and not those new stupid ones), or Khosla ka Ghosla and Bheja Fry and Pyar ke side effects or if it comes to Hollywood, it could be She's the man or Alvin and Chipmunks. This is my definition of comedy, and I can watch them again and again and keep on laughing, in moments of boredom just catch a glimpse of few scenes and feel lighter. But gradually I realized I have watched them so many times that I wanted something different. So lately I have been revisiting many movies. I am simply amazed, wondering how entertaining they were despite of the fact they had serious issues. Sometimes I liked the tender treatment of the emotions, sometimes the energy of the characters, at others it was the life and its twists and turns which sounded so real or the people behind the scene made it sound real, and sometimes it is simply the LOVE ..my all time favorite topic :P ;) This is my revisited list.. Shawshank Redemption, Love actually, Letters to Juliet, Taare Zameen par, Dasvidaniya, A Wednesday. Watching these there was not a single skip-this- part feeling.

Pyramid Scheme.
Not everything so easy and fun when you revisit it. Sometimes it turns you into blues. For some reasons I have to reread my 4th semester project (something I did almost 2 years back). I thought it would be a pretty easy task. I had certain impression in my mind about so many things. But as in movies, when we watch them for 2nd time we realize that there are so many facts that we either missed them while watching for the first time or they totally slipped out of our mind in the mean while when it was kept aside. Same is here. I have started feeling that there are so many problems/loopholes in it which I am unable to understand now. Deep thought led me to certain justifications for these issues, which can not be actually justified :( :-/ We could have simply missed the details (we weren’t doing research back then, so didn’t have that researcher’s eye ;) you see).. or probably back then we had explanations for what we did, but since that part is not noted anywhere (to my knowledge) I am unable to locate what possibly they could be. I realized how clumsy and bad we were in report. The linkage between the literature and new theoretical work is too loose. It was possible to come up with project which was far better in terms of clarity and formulation. There was a nice paper which could have also been included (don’t know why we didn’t read it). I am surprised to realize how poor an M.Sc. student could be. I am even more surprised to see that our project topic had the possibility and scope of getting into advanced theories from stochastic.. like stopping times..

a gift

Many a times we are looking for a gift for someone, we are confused and then we end up taking suggestions from people around. Even I have done that so often. But today I realised that the most special gifts for special people in our life come straight from the heart. Because what our heart knows no one else could suggest. Next time you are on it, just ask your heart. Go for any cute perky thing that might make the special being feel more special.

Though that might appear a kuchh bhi stuff to others, and you might not be able to explain its significance, but the one for whom it is meant will be not only pleasantly surprised but will fall in love with you all over again..

PS: I am smiling looking at ..

tortsie's froggu

all that can be said has been said

When I was a fresher to blogs I always missed the presence of friends and acquaintance to the blogger world. Everyone around used to be stranger. But now when too many people are around, who are not so stranger, my feelings have turned around. There used to be a time when I felt so light once I penned down my thoughts. Everything moves on eventually. It isn’t same now. Now whenever I write few people are always there with some or the other kind of reaction.. some kind of a teasing remark, care and concern on my problems, questions and queries about the situation which led to the post, consoling in a don’t worry manner. Nowadays so often it happens that I am feeling bad, low, worried, perplexed but thought writing couldn’t be a right way out, because I don’t want sympathetic reactions. I miss those days when I used to write most depressing posts one could ever write, and don’t even have to care about reactions. Sometimes my space is all what I need. I started writing to pour down anything which I am unable to express and share with friends and family. If someone comes asking me face to face it isn’t serving the right purpose. Then comes the time when I couldn’t write anything for a while. Why I feel so answerable in every such situation. I don’t want to give any explanations beyond what I wrote. I remember a friend saying All that can be said has been said.

Sometimes I wonder, How will it feel like, turning into an anonymous blogger.

I know I sound insane because everyone in the world expects reaction on what he writes. I know I sound so contradictory at the same time because after all it isn’t my personal diary. You might title me as world’s biggest weirdo. It could be highly probable that it is just my false belief. Few might be let down/ hurt/upset. I am really sorry. But this was there in my heart and mind since long; and it has served as a block to lot of thoughts that I intended to write in last few months. I know few of you might even feel like disconnecting/stop-following me, because of this attitude, which could appear immature and arrogant. I accept it is rude. But as I said sometimes my space is all what I need.

All I want is to get back here and chatter any blah, like that sparrow in the balcony, and some space to fly. I am scared in posting this, but this is the only way that I can make my wings feel lighter, so that they are ready for the flight.

Journeys end in lovers meeting

Watched LETTERS TO JULIET and THE HOLIDAY recently.. One may find nothing very remarkable in them..might appear as usual love stories. But I loved them.. there is something different. I don't know what it is, but there is.. May be something which tells you what love could possibly be..

Loved the dialogues as well as songs from both the movies. The chemistry between Arthur and Iris in The Holiday was unexpectedly beautiful; and even in Letters to Juliet the best character was that of Claire. It seems the older people appear more captivating and more efficient in portraying soft emotions, than the trail from new generation. May be that was the reason I loved Driving Miss Daisy so much, despite of the fact that both the leading characters were around 60.

I accept I am crazy for love stories, but still my Statistics stacked brain is left with some ability for discretion. I would strongly recommend them, if you intend to enjoy something soothing this weekend and end up having a smile :-)

keeping track of the lineage

Long back, when I was in M.Sc, while performing the Google search for one of the professors, I came across Mathematics Genealogy Project. I searched for few teachers I used to idealize then and about whom not much was known (like GBM), but could not get fruitful results. Last year, when I was already more professional in browsing, I stumbled into the same place. This time I was with Akanksha.

The fact that, once you get in, you can go on and on looking at the academic families, made it a very appealing & captivating.  More than once we have had jaw dropping experiences looking at unexpected lineages. One feels a sense of proud, when he realizes, who is the great-grand-daddy of his own family. But to our surprise, after some in-depth re-search of website we realized that not many entries belonged to the University of Pune. Even amongst these (14), Statisticians were hardly able to make a significant contribution, despite of the fact that actually our department has nurtured so many, well known for their work. For those who were there, the information was incomplete. 

A screenshot of the record for Uni Pune as per on 5th Oct 2010

And as you might have already guessed, we got motivation for including our ancestors in this project. We started with collecting the information from departmental library and inflibnet centre about past Ph.D. students of the department. The data typically included name of the guide, year of award and thesis title. The website gives user friendly forms for entering (correcting/updating) new (existing) data. We started somewhere in October.  Data entry took quite longer than expected, because we had generations to enter; and we moved to next only when the previous was published, which generally took 2-3 weeks from the time of making entry.

It turned out to be such an interesting experience, that we not only made entries for the folks who did doctoral research from this department, but few more in the vicinity (like CUSAT, NMU etc.), who were related to dept in some or the other way. So now overall count of entries made, stays little more than 75 (initially the count we targeted at was simply 25), though information about GBM still remains unknown.

The Project is amazing place for minds, curious like ours. Nowadays whenever we hear any new name in the field similar to ours (could be author of a book/research paper or developer of an R package ), we cannot resist ourselves from having a look at his/her clan. It is so much fun to realize different academic relations; like Billingsley was Feller’s student (OMG one could never picture that, given the books each of them authored), never imagined that Krishanu could be Resnick’s (author of Adventures in Stochastic Processes) student, there is my favorite Alok Goswami as Feller’s grandson, the man (Athreya) who was explaining the extinction probabilities other day, is Karlin’s academic son…!!! Another remarkable feature of the project is the MathSciNet links it automatically provides for the people in database.

It was really an immense and very innovative effort by Harry Coonce. An effort that needed lot of courage in the situations in which he had made his brainchild sustain. I salute his spirits. To read more about the history have a look at this article. We should all contribute to the project, by submitting information. Here is a  video which could demonstrate you its massiveness just in few minutes.

Note: Sometimes the website is not accessible due to technical errors. In such a case one may get access through the mirror sites available. Like at this moment I am in through AMS.

PS: I will get back to you with another similar joint venture (by me & AK) accomplished during my hibernation. In the meanwhile, you may go ahead and sneak a peek about your to-be-clan.

PS to PS: Once again, it has been 21 days, since I blogged. Irregularity is becoming a habit. Its not that I don’t have things to talk about; I am not even blank or thoughtless this time; but I am post-less. For me writing involves two steps. Firstly the generation of thoughts in the mind and then the actual movement for annealing those thoughts into words. I guess nowadays the threshold level required for that movement has increased so much, that energy of my spirits is hardly able to intersect the threshold. Anyways for now it looks that I have managed a temporary victory over my indolent-procrastinatory-being.

So when I was out there in hibernation, I was not completely cozy sleeping. This was a glimpse of what was happening.