It was three days ago, in an early morning email, that Anil informed me of a certain event in India - in Bangalore to be precise. Why did I have to be told by someone else, about an event of that magnitude? Simple answer follows: I watch news while having breakfast and/or dinner (about 20 minutes max) on CNN and if CNN doesn’t talk about it in those 20 minutes, then I don’t hear about it. So was the case with Tsunami also and this one was no exception. Event was certainly not a happy one and most people would, in my opinion, not have wanted to bear witness. Cutting the long story short, Raj Kumar, a Kannada theater/movie artist passed away. Everybody will agree that not all his movies were great but some of them certainly left a deeper/ever-lasting impact. Some aspects for which I personally liked were the following - unlike many other artists, he never did in any language other than Kannada, never misused stardom to venture into politics and in many ways, was decency personified.

Though I am few thousand miles away, I can still imagine pitiful state the society has been reduced to - much of this imagination coming from a past experience, when the same person was kidnapped. Though I have heard several versions of that story and know the actualities of it, I will reserve them for some other day. With all due respect, on a day as sombre as this, hearing about utter lawlessness, sheer disregard for decency and dignity, chaos, thoughtless laughter amidst pathetic situations on the streets of IT proud Bangalore, being perpetrated by hooligans, mobsters, gangsters, criminals and such other varieties belonging to the cruel, crude, callous and morally deprived parts of the state, all under the pretense of expressing sorrow at the loss of their idol, makes me feel glad that I wasn’t there!

Based on the fact that I have been away from that state (or India for that matter) for nearly four years, some of you (especially those of you who carefully read this) might wonder why do I even care?. Simple anwer is I do and I do feel ashamed of hearing/reading about such insensible behavior. Moreover, being in India, I feel, is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition to feel for Indians.

A Kannada movie starring the same person who died had the following song…

huttidare kannada nADalli huttabeku…
…
mundina nanna janma baredittananthe brahma illiye…

meaning in essense that the creator has promised my next birth to be in the same land. I am convinced that if there is anything called rebirth, the eminent artist will definitely have second thoughts after learning about the chaotic events on the day of his cremation!

Amongst other things, our research group has couple of visitors - both of them aren’t new to Houghton/Michigan Tech. I have had some wonderful opportunities to shoot longer exposure pictures and the first meeting softball managers went on pretty smoot. I am eagerly looking forward to the new role/responsibility of co-ordinating the entire league, and playing for our team. I worked on an important problem today - one that has been bugging me for a while. Our cluster has three products whose licenses are handled via FlexLM (Flexible License Manager). But I couldn’t run all of them at the same time as only one lmgrd could run. After reading some manual (simple one though), it was pretty straight-forward to configure lmgrd such that it handled all three of them.

Amongst things to do over the weekend list, in order of importance, are the following:

1. Fine tune the presentation and participate in the Sigma Xi Multi-disciplinary research colloquium on Saturday morning.
2. Have fun (and good food) at Dr. P residence Saturday night.
3. Work on replacing Gaussian03 by DMol3 in a certain set of codes, mostly on Sunday.