By-Two Kaapi in an oilfield

When the weather was beautiful I thought it was a waste of time to sit in front of the computer.

So said Theo Jansen.
And look what he has come up with ...



Since about ten years Theo Jansen is occupied with the making of a new nature. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic matierial of this new nature. He makes skeletons which are able to walk on the wind. Eventualy he wants to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.

The largest animal to walk the earth after the dinosaur.
More Videos of Jansen's animals.
Brilliant Interview!

I love it when he says in a BMW ad:

The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds.

CNN-IBN says in this report:

In October 2006, while various deemed universities in India said that they would wait, watch and ultimately toed the government line, BITS Pilani's bold stand that it would not implement quotas and reservations in admissions shook the conscience of the nation. For BITS Pilani, courage has always been what it takes to stand up and speak. It’s for nothing Andrew Jackson said "One man with courage makes a majority".

I love these guys at Warwick!
They've finally conducted that study that I always felt was needed. And the results are equally encouraging.

According to a study presented this week to the British Psychological Society Conference. Warwick University's Stuart Cadwallader, who carried out the study, says some of the brightest young people in Britain like nothing more than a monster riff to unwind to after a hard day of being a chess prodigy. The study found that one third of their sample - drawn from members of the National Academy of Gifted and Talented Youth, or Nagty - rated metal among their favourite genres of music, ahead of classical and jazz, two complex genres long thought to be the sound of choice for brainiacs.

Says here:

Researchers found that, far from being a sign of delinquency and poor academic ability, many adolescent "metalheads" are extremely bright and often use the music to help them deal with the stresses and strains of being gifted social outsiders.

And more:

In the savage 'uurrgghh!' of metal you can hear the collective human howl of disgust at a world gone mad. It's the sound of the rejected getting even, the trampled-on standing up, the unbeautiful settling scores with the buffed. Metal is the arena where the most unpleasant human emotions are let out to play - safely, for the most part.

It's back!
The Mother of all unconferences!
What better place than Bangalore!
Have heard so much, have read so much, have imagined so much.
Now it's time to be there. Or be square.

PS. I am going there as the cofounder of yofa.in - and brother, am I excited!

Next morning, as I sat in the front row waiting for my turn on the stage, the full weight of the event hit me. There were several thousand people in the room, and approximately 50,000 watching the webcast. It was the very definition of pressure. Steve started the segment that preceded mine, and my heart started pounding. I felt those hundred thousand eyes all about to be focused on me and feared I would crumble. I had done a bit of public speaking before, but nothing like this.

The assistant producer came over to me to guide me to the stairs at the side of the stage. I stood in the dark, watching Steve put up the slide that introduced me. Just then a wonderful thought hit me; in five minutes the whole thing would be over. If I could only keep going for five minutes I would be fine. I bounced up the stairs and on to the stage, and everything was suddenly OK. The demo worked perfectly, the audience seemed to love the product, and their applause was an incredible adrenaline rush.

That's a MacWorld Conference for you. [Courtesy: Behind the Magic Curtain]
And there's just one man who keeps throwing you off your feet every year during his keynote. The one man who can get the closest to a rockstar in Business - Steve Jobs!

I am amazed and stupefied.
At the sheer over-reactions in the blogging community about 'so-called' death threats to Kathy Sierra.

The internet has always been a place of slurs and swears and threats. And 99.999999% of the times, they are just a way to express your extreme anger and irritation. You are irritated at a person in front of you, you can convey that by your body-language. Whereas, if that person is a thousand miles away and you have never seen him/her, what's the easiest way to do it. Swear! [Agreed. It's a disgusting culture. It's something that I personally dislike and disdain from the bottom of my heart. But, let's accept it, how many times haven't we done it. Don't cheat yourself!]

If I say a 'Fuck you!' while commenting on somebody's blog - does that mean that I am threatening her/him with a sexual threat? Give me a break! The law might say so, but come on! We're reasonable men and women. How many times, haven't we said a 'Fuck You!' (at least to ourselves) when we are frustrated.

I have nothing against the blogging community. But then, I have always felt that these popular bloggers are just shit scared! They are people living in glasshouses throwing stones at any puny mortal creature roaming around, and shout and yell and create a huge fracas when somebody throws a feather at their glasshouse. They are the kind of people who would see a cockroach and yell:

OMG! A cockroach just stared at me

We've grown up in the internet culture. We've seen
How sex sells on the net.
How vulgarity is commonplace.
How innuendos are nothing different.

It is a disgusting culture. Utterly disgusting.
But this is not how you change it. By yelling about misogyny and death threats.

You change the attitude by
NOT giving a shit to all the crap that's on the net.
IGNORING these kind of 'so-called' threats and mocking at them. [Who would kill you for writing a blog called 'Creating passionate users' ?!?!?!]

All ye' bloggers out there - Grow up!

At times when you are on a fuckin' high,
You exceed the 'Line beyond which you are nobody!'
And what is more painful, is when you learn that the line has just moved closer to you.

Nope, it ain't about Glenn Quagmire.

It's about landing in a pile of rotten dirt (like the one I crashed into the other day) because of your choices. It's about making a choice, and asking yourself a hundred times a day whether the choice was right. All because, there is no way to find that out. It's about that fuckin' choice which you cannot backtrack on. It's about that choice which you repent making, every time your mind is idle. It's about that fuckin' choice which exemplifies 'Choice is an illusion'. You never made that choice!

Talking about choices:
Well, "Wow!" is gone. The Leopard is here.

It's been a filthy boring day. What it needs is a dash of Ludwig Van, for it is:

Oh bliss! Bliss and heaven! Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.

[Dali Art: Othello dreaming of Venice]

You dream of the gondola.
You dream of the moonlight Sonata.
You dream of a McKinsey interview.
You dream of singing 'Look how they shine for you...'
You dream of living in her afterglow.
You just dream ...

A post dedicated to Vishnu (my 'Rock' godfather!)




Three years ago.
In the corridors of Krishna Bhawan, BITS Pilani lay a cot.
On the cot was a discman with two speakers, and they blared -
Can I play with madness?
Today, I do.

Vishnu & me spent all our time staring at the clear Pilani sky listening to Bruce Dickinson utter the number of the beast. Those were the days when we vowed to God to touch his feet the moment we see him. Those were the days when Iron Maiden was our solace through a torturous lacklustre freshman year at BITS.

It's been three years, but not much has changed.
Iron Maiden are (even now) the much needed solace in this monotonous life.
Bruce Dickinson is still God.
Only Vishnu is a couple of thousand miles away.

But then that's going to change too. He's coming to Bangalore, and yes, we are going to the temple with every headbanging rocker in town.

Yes. I am going to see Iron Maiden perform live!
It IS the reincarnation of me.