Is it Anyways or Anyway?

Is it anway or anyways? You may ask me why I am asking this question? It is because, increasingly, people seem to be using ‘anyways’ and I think ‘anyway’ is correct. Again one may point out that languages, like so many other things in this world, evolve. Then some enthusiastic persons could even go on to accuse me of not believing in the thoery of evolution at all. But I am not all against the evolution of languages or so many other things in this world. In fact evolution makes life less monotonous and more interesting.

But, I feel ‘anyway’ is correct in a sort of logical way. Again those overenthusiastic persons start jumping to say that there so many things illogical in the English language. Alright, but why make something which is already logical illogical. Infact why not apply the theory of evolution to make the illogical parts logical.

Now why is ‘anyway’ more logical than ‘anyways’? Use of ‘any’ inherently implies a set of objects is under consideration and that there is a choice that can be made. Regardless of one’s choice, if the end result is the same, then one would say ‘irrespective of the choice or path…..’ or ‘anything leads to …..’. Or if we consider the choice to be a variable ‘x’ then one can say ‘irrespective of the value of x …’ or ‘for any value of x …’. These different ‘values of x’ are different paths or ways and hence the previous semi-statements can in short be expressed as ‘anyway’.

Travails Of A Young Sportsman

I am starting a new category today, which goes by the same name as that of this post. The posts in this category will be based on my experiences at school ( roughly between 6th and 12th standard ( for all those morons who try to ape the U.S in every small thing, 6th and 12th grade)), generally related with sports or games, or on those experiences that caused some trouble.

Since FIFA worldcup is in progress, I'll start with football. To be more precise with an incident in my 8th std., which, had Gurinder Chadha been a witness to, would have led her, GC , to name her movie as 'Bend It Like (Well, You Know Who)', instead of that good sounding, but not so appropriate 'Bend It Like Beckham'.

PS: This doesn't mean it is an end to CSC. Crow Shit Chronicles will be back soon.

PPS: I have got this bad cold tonight. So, the first post will have to wait a little longer.

CSC Page

Crow Shit Chronicles is developing into a very interesting idea. So, obviously, I might feel the need to edit some of the earlier posts or rearrange the posts to create something which is even better to read.

The chronology of ‘revelations’ may not be the right chronology for telling this epic story. But the chronology of the divine ‘revelations’ cannot be tampered with, just to satisfy the whims of a story teller. So, I have decided not to change the order of the ‘revelations’ on this blog. But to satisfy the whims of a story teller, I have arranged the links to posts on the index page to have the epic story in a form best for story telling.

Crow Shit Chronicles

 

I have started a new category – Crow Shit Chronicles, inspired by innumerable Near Death Experiences I have had while dodging the carpet bombing from the heavens above, which is a regular feature of the weather in our campus. I envy all those crows on the lush green trees of our campus, whose only aim in life seems to be to shit on as many people for as many times as possible. I don’t envy them because they try to shit on as many people for as many times as possible, but because they have such simple aims in life ( from their perspective ofcourse. For poor souls as myself, their aims and sports are a mortal danger).

This work is dedicated to all those unsuspecting souls who ( or should I be using which ) have been tormented for ages by such sports which harm the delicate peace and balance of our nature.

PS: I considered naming the category and the series of the blogs that are to follow as ‘ A Feast For Crows ‘, or ‘Crow Shit Series’ but finally settled to ‘Crow Shit Chronicles’. Let’s see if it needs to be renamed as the ‘revealed’ chronicles are published on this blog. Suggestions are welcome.

Orkut – Web of life

I have recently joined orkut community and it seems to be very interesting. If you visit somebody's profile, it shows a chain of friends at the top, the first one in this chain being youself, then one of your friends, then one of his, and so on till the person whose page or profile you are looking at.

Now, that is really interesting. So, I went to the search page and opened profiles of people at random, and surprisingly the chains had 5 or 6 people in most of the cases. Out of 49 randomly chosen people, only two of them were connected by a chain of 7. I have only 2 friends, so there was already a big handicap on my side of the chain. In my sample space, there were 26 Indians and 23 foreigners ( all Brazilian, probably leaving out 2 ). Out of 23 foreigners, only 2 had a chain with me. But 23 out of 26 Indians had a chain with me and that includes many with 1 or 2 friends only. I have put the results in this pdf file. The first column shows the number of friends the person has and the second column, the number of people in the chain connecting us.

So Orkut ( or Google ) must be doing some sort of shortest path search. But the Orkut web has millions of members. So how does orkut do this in such a short time? ( it probably searches among those of the same country first and so on ). But remember, one can join the orkut community only through invitation. SO, this probably helps orkut in maintaining a sort of hierarchy among the members, and this could very well be the feature that minimizes the search time drastically.

I salute to the ideas generated at Google.  

PCman

I have recently excavated this game from some odd site and nostalgia caught me. This wonderful game was designed in 1982. It takes no time to learn the rules of the game and one can easily get addicted to it. I first played this game on a 286 machine some 14 years ago. Now I find it extremely playable again.

Migration Complete

So, managed to import the posts from my blogger blog.  

Life is just

Hello. I have just migrated to WordPress from Blogger. Life is so just here. The first user name that i had tried worked for me. I don't remember an instance when this happened to me earlier. Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, Blogger, …… On blogger i had racked my brains to come up with something that hadn't been taken already. Oh, life is so just here.

Then, the look is so cool. So, many more features here than at blogger. Don't have to bother going into the html code for each minute change.

I even saw somewhere a feature to import posts from blogger.

Arjun Singh’s Hidden Agenda

Decision on quota is final: Arjun

In an interview with Karan Thapar, this is what Mr. Singh said. Take a look at his answers, not a single question answered properly. He had nothing to say to any of the statistics and figures provided by Mandal, NSSO, National Family & Health Survey, media, UGC, IITs, Parliamentary committees.

All he has to say is that everything has been decided already, or that the group of ministers is looking into it. "So far as I can see, it is a closed chapter and that is why I have to implement what all Parliament has said".

I am not talking now about the desirability of the reservations. That is a different issue. I am talking of the attitude of our HRD minister to such an important issue. At times he says that a decision cannot be taken by just a few people and the very next moment he says everything is decided. "I have said what I had to say and the point is that that is not an issue for us to now debate". Then in that case, why is he not forthcoming in providing the details. If the government wants to implement some scheme without regard to public or expert (National Knowledge Commission) opinion and push it down our throats, then all one can say is that government and in this case Mr. Arjun Singh in particular has a 'hidden agenda'.

Congress was among those who shouted till they were hoarse for five years during the BJP ( NDA) rule, that the BJP had an 'hidden agenda'. Regardless of BJP's intentions, they had atleast talked of having a national debate on some of their controversial aims. Makes me wonder who is more 'fascist' Advani or Arjun Singh?

A Two Party System in India ?

Rajinder Puri writes here how we can move Towards A Two-Party System in India. But I am surprised how little he has analysed and written about why the present situation exists. He mentions the lack of intra party democracy, but at a very shallow level. There are no state units in congress. Even the appointment of the Chief Minister of state is first decided by the ‘high command’ at Delhi, and then the chosen person is ‘voted’ by the MLAs as the CM.

Then, there is the problem of ageing leaders. Arjun Singh, Vajpayee, Advani, Karunanidhi, Achutanadan, Bal Thackery. They just don’t want to retire. In U.K, U.S, where the two party system seems to be working so well, the leader of the political party resigns and retires from active politics if his party loses the election. There they have a huge process to elect a political party leader, in which the opposing candidates fight it out as if it were a true national election. We have none of this. None of the parties have it, national or regional.

Then there is also the problem of party whip when parliament or sate assemblies vote on a bill. So, no MP or MLA can have an opinion different from that of his party. I agree that there have been many cases of horse trading, but then the Parliament is divided into rigid blocks and the way these blocks vote is completely determined by a few individuals, the so called ‘high command’. What it means is that there is a lack of democracy not just within the party but even in the parliament and hence in the country. That is why we have so many breakaway parties. The younger leaders’ aspirations and ambitions cannot be met with such a scenario.

So, as Mr. Puri suggests, if we have a quasi national party, then these problems are still not solved. Hence, it is not possible and probably not desirable either.
But with so many small paries, there is also lack of stability sometimes. Sometimes the elction results are determined by the alliances rather than the issues and the performance of the government ( ex: TN in the latest election ).

I feel that alliances of ‘blocks’ ( controlled by ‘high commands’ , and ‘ammas’ ) is still the better option.