Dark Depths

In the darkest depths of the mind
Deep beneath the mask outside
Black hole of false desires
Strives to pull me inside

Violent storms surround the depths
Unleashing caustic torrents
Tornados of turmoil
Wreck havoc on the simple life

Is there a relase from the depths?
Will there be ever be light again?
No answers from near or far
Hope keeps the door ajar

Leaving a Mark

Time: 14:30 ... just before I dozed off.
Place: Humanities Lecture in the HSS Department with a bunch of zombies listening to a cabbage.

I was thinking about the four and a half years spent in this zoo and a question came to my mind --> "Did you leave your mark in IIT ?"

Yes I did ... on the benches.

Manchester United 2007-08 Season Review

Amazing season ! I had my brain nearly dissolved when Heskey put that header just over the bar ... what a brilliant way for Ryan Giggs to equal Sir Bobby Charlton's record ... the Welsh Wizard who single handedly demolished Juventus at Turin sealed victory !

1993, 1994, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2007 and 2008 !!

SAF is God

Looking back at the season

# We were at one point of time in the relegation zone (18th) for a few hours ... a nightmare start which included draws to Reading and Portsmouth and a painful derby day loss to City. Nani, the new blood from Portugal scored that blockbuster against Spurs and Ferdinand saves off the line from Berbatov and we got our first win !

# The chain of 1-0 wins in the EPL and CL followed when the ironclad defence simply refused to let in goals and this according to me was absolutely bloody season defining .... Rio, Vida, Evra and Brown (bows)

# Finally we broke free in the home game to Wigan in a 4-0 rout .. I still remember that Tevez goal which set it all off .. he ran and ran and turned one defender after another before finally slotting home. Our attacking machine was kick started and there was no looking back now (Ronaldo had scored only once until this match). We then followed this win by scoring 4 goals for a good number of games. We nearly beat Arsenal 2-1 before Gallas scored that heart breaking equalizer in injury time and the Gooners were celebrating as if they won the title.

# Saha, Tevez and Ronaldo were involved in the best counter attacking move this season (United's trademark strength) to slice up Blackburn at Old Trafford

# Anfield is our home away from home .... the scousers were finally confident that they would put one over us but Rooney and Tevez combined in one of the more intelligent set piece routines to seal a brilliant 1-0 win

# Ronaldo's freekick against Pompey !! OMG ! that match was a blitzkreig attack on hapless Pompey ... bang bang ... game over

# Carlitos Tevez .... if Ronaldo was our stock scorer .. this beast was our attacking engine + big match player. He slotted home some crucial goals in the dying minutes

Spurs away (injury time)
Lyon away (87th minute)

amazing season for him ... and in all probabilities his loan deal will be made permanent

# Another crucial point in the season was the 4-0 thrashing of Arsenal in the FA Cup. The gooners were leading by 5 points in the EPL and we had just suffered a most humiliating defeat to City on the 50th anniversary of the Munich Air Disaster. Rooney, Fletcher and Nani destroyed Arsenal that day .... and their confidence was damaged and it showed ... they started dropping points and never recovered ... this was a crucial stage when United managed win after win in a most ruthless fashion

# Wes Brown becomes an unlikely scorer in the crunch match against Liverpool and the way Old Trafford erupts when we score against them is orgasmic ... those are the moments we cherish for life as United fans !

# "Ronaldo ... the impudent devil who strikes like lightning" ... this was the cover page of a newspaper in Rome after Ronaldo evades his marker and rises like beast and scores a thumping header against AS Roma ! This was a defining win for United in Europe where our away form has been generally poor over the years (We only managed wins against Benfica, Lille, Lisbon and Kyiv until that match) ... Donnie Darko and myself watched this match together and we knew then and there that we had a real chance in Europe this year

# Finally we beat Arsenal in the League to shut them out once and for all ... the Hargreaves precision freekick was a season defining moment !! ... I had to face two humiliating defeats (September 2006 + January 2007) of United to Arsenal and a near win at the Emirates this season .... a 2 year wait ended this day. Beating Arsenal always gives a special feeling. I must admit however that they played some good football this year and probably deserved more.

# Tevez's reflex header in Blackburn ! ... Brad Friedel was having the match of his career ... United were a goal down and were making attack after attack pounding the Blackburn defence with no avail ... I remember watching this game in absolute frustration cursing Friedel and then Tevez comes up with this most precious of goals and the relief in the room was so obvious (I kicked a few chairs myself )

# Scholes stunner in CL Semi .... After a poor show in Nou Camp the pressure was on United not to repeat the Madrid experience. Cometh the hour .. Cometh the man ... and Scholes steps up from a poor clearance from Zambrotta and scores one of the most important piledriver of his career .. the way his boot continued to move after the ball left showed how magnificent the shot was !! United held on in the tense final minutes of the game to reach Moscow and a CL final after 9 years.

# Giggs wins the league for United ... no need for description ... watch it again and again ... a goal for the ages to come !

Best Heavy Metal Songs

I will attempt to list down the best Heavy Metal songs that I have listened to so far in no particular order.

# Holy Wars ... The Punishment Due (Megadeth) --> This surely has to one of the all time top heavy metal songs ever made .. the lead guitar work in this song is out of this world.

# Sonne (Rammstein) --> Ich bin der hellste stern von allen .. he he.

# Overkill (Motorhead) --> This song gets your blood pumping.

# Hallowed be thy Name (Iron Maiden) --> Classic heavy metal, brilliant guitar and amazing vocals by Dickinson.

# Electric Eye (Judas Priest) --> Electrifying guitar by Glenn Tipton and KK Downing .. the opening sequence blows you away

# A tout le monde (Megadeth) --> Awesome song with haunting lyrics ... this song always gives me the high especially at the part when the machine like guitars step up.

# Asche zu Asche (Rammstein) --> Primal guitar.

# Ace of Spades (Motorhead) --> Two words, Lemmy Rocks ! Fast paced and razor sharp tune.

# Hammer smashed Face (Cannibal Corpse) --> Brutal song with supersonic guitars and gutteral vocals.

# Addicted to Chaos (Megadeth) --> Amazing power chords.

# Riding on the Wind (Judas Priest) --> Tipton and Downing at it again with powerful lyrics rendered by Rob Halford.

# Chop Suey (S.O.A.D) --> Brilliant song ... the song alters between a powerful machine gun pace and a haunting melodic trance.

# Paranoid (Black Sabbath) --> The song and album are clearly the defining elements of heavy metal music

# Du Hast (Rammstein) --> A brilliant industrial metal song.

Manchester United 2006-2007 Season -- Defining Moments

The 2006-2007 season turned out to be a magnificent one for Manchester United and I thoroughly enjoyed the ride. These were for me the moments that defined our season and yeah finally .... We have got our trophy back !!

# Old Trafford - EPL -- Date: 22nd October, 2006
Rio Ferdinand scores the second goal against Liverpool (2-0), his second goal against the scousers in two seasons and Old Trafford erupts like what I have not seen for a long time.

# Old Trafford - EPL -- Date: 4th November, 2006
Ronaldo free kick against Portsmouth ... it had tremendous power and wicked swing and the celebration was awesome

# Old Trafford - Champions League -- Date: 6th December, 2006
Vidic heads Manchester United into the knock out stage after being one down to SL Benefica ... what a header and what a center back Vidic turned out be.

# Old Trafford - FA Cup -- Date: 7th January, 2007
Larsson scores his Manchester United debut goal against Aston Villa (1-0), it was literally a pass into the goal !

# Craven Cottage - EPL -- Date: 24th February, 2007
Ronaldo produces a magical moment (to me the season defining moment) to carve through the Fulham defence and score one of the most important goals of the season

# Anfield - EPL -- Date: 3rd March, 2007
John O'Shea gets the winner in injury time against Liverpool and stuns the Anfield crowd

# Old Trafford - EPL -- Date: 17th March, 2007
Rooney scores against Bolton in the best counter attacking move of the season involving himself and the peerless Ronaldo

# Old Trafford - EPL -- Date: 31st March, 2007
Scholes cuts through the Blackburn defence and scores a super goal in the 60th minute. United were trailing the Rovers by a goal and this Scholes special inspired us to a 4-1 victory

# Old Trafford - Champions League -- Date: 10th April, 2007
Alan Smith scores against AS Roma on that wonderful night (2-0) as Manchester United announce their European ambitions in style ... this match could be catalyst for a United revival in Europe in the seasons to come

# Old Trafford - Champions League -- Date: 24th April, 2007
Rooney scores the third goal against AC Milan (3-2) in the 90th minute to give United a win against the eventual winner of the competition

# Goodison Park - EPL -- Date: 28th April, 2007
What a day ! ... United and Chelsea were playing at the same time and and at one moment Chelsea cut the points gap completely. Rooney scores against his old club (3-2) and Bolton hold Chelsea ... you could see Ferguson gesturing tothe players towards the end of the day ... '2-2 Chelsea ! ... its finished'. Man United finished the day 5 points ahead of Chelsea and the title race was almost over

The beauty of Functional Programming Languages

I was always and will always be an admirer of the C programming language. It is the language of hackers and it is a language from which I got so many of my 'aha' moments. You tend to keep getting surprised by C all the time and the journey never ends.

However, today I was thinking of a problem, a simple one --> to find all permutations of a given list of numbers. I tried to solve it in C and realized how ugly it would get. Then I sat and coded the problem in Python and it reminded me of the good old days of CS 152 programming, a freshman course in my college. I present the code here .... just look and marvel at the elegance of Functional Programming (FP) . Python is not a strict FP language but it has inherited a lot from Lisp, so it has a good number of FP abstractions built in.

Here is the code




The best part is that the code follows the inductive definition of the permutation itself !!

Determinism and Causality

Its time to look at some of questions which perplex me the most which are -> " why are we there here in the first place ? " , "Is there any purpose for human existence ? " , " Are there any reasons or answers for this ?"," Is it reasonable for everything to have reason ?", Why am I searching for reasons for everything ? It seems that we are locked or bound by the law of causality which is why we keep searching a cause for every effect. This is a possibly endless chain which starts from an axiom. The axiom is the only statement or truth we accept without any cause. So it seems that organic-carbon based logic is constrained by the cause and effect principles. The question is whether everything can explained by such logic , now this statement is ridiculous as "explain everything" inherently means finding the cause for a perceived universal set of effects. Is this thinking attributed to carbon based organic thinking , What if had a silicon based brain , would I still be constrained by causality ?

Coming back to axioms it seems that human beings are surprisingly different in the set of axioms they start off with. There are these religious people (the worst of the lot) who have a zillion axioms which begin with the concept of god, then we have the mathematical/rational people who accept only the most atomic truths as axioms. Yet the rational man as well as the religious one has to accept that inbuilt in our brains is the notion of survival , ultimately a man only strives to maximize those objects that increase the chance of his survival and this unfortunately has been programmed into us through the complex and chronologically gigantic process of evolution.

Now there arise interesting questions regarding rationality and human behavior. Its often seen that we criticize a person accusing him of taking incorrect decisions during a bout of emotional outburst. We tend to classify human behavior as rational or irrational as to whether the person's current action leads to a perceived increase of objects that lead to a greater survival probability (for example increasing his financial stability -> and note that concepts like finance , jobs etc are abstractions of basic objects needed for survival). Now looking deeply into this we find something quite funny. Was the person who took the so called "emotional" decision really in control ?. Lets define the state of the human brain in terms of a finite number of variables or parameters (most of these parameters would probably be electric potential values and chemical states of the brain). Now given a particular state of the brain (which is supposedly an emotional state) and the input stimuli to the brain it can be possibly predicted as to what the next state of the brain is. Thus the action taken by the person was not in "his" control but was predetermined. Now arises the bigger question -> does there exist anything called free will ? I will quote my friend's magnificent quotation here -> "Free will is merely the result of the computational complexity of determinism" .. yes given the millions of possible states and multitude of stimuli the problem is hard.

On a more observatory note (and assuming that people do have free wills) I feel amused on looking at the lives of so many people who wade through life , it makes me think that a majority of us are overgrown and biologically complicated ants running along dabbling in trivial things for survival or its extensions. I really appreciate people who strive to push the boundaries of thinking , reasoning or logic in any field from Computer Science, Neural Research to philosophy . Only an advancement in human thinking can be considered as a non trivial achievement (if at all there exists a notion of non triviality for triviality is relative) .. the rest of human actions are repetitive, predictable and boring.