My ranked list of Bollywood actors & actresses; a discussion with Haritha precipitated this post though I have been meaning to blog on this topic for sometime now. So here goes …
Top 10 current Bollywood actors:
1. Abhay Deol
2. K.K Menon
3. Paresh Rawal
4. Nasrudeen Shah
5. Om Puri
6. Boman Irani
7. Vinay Pathak
8. Anupam Kher
9. Manoj Bajpai
10. Aamir Khan
My list of next best actors:
1. Amrish Puri
2. Ranveer Shorey
3. Sharman Joshi
4. Amitabh Bachan
5. Ajay Devgan – in serious roles
6. Akshay Kumar – in strictly comedy roles
7. Saurabh Shukla
Special mention (one trick ponies):
1. Sanjay Dutt & Arshad Warsi – for Munna Bhai
2. Shahid Kapoor – because woh fa ko fa bolta hai
3. Shahrukh Khan – for not being Shahrukh Khan in Chak de India
Bottom of the pile: Everyone else (including the special mentions)
Rock bottom (curse of the industry): Vivek Oberoi
Posted in Uncategorized.
By Saju
February 27, 2010
Antiquity Blue, a whisky from the UB group, is usually rated as one of the best generally available Indian whiskies in the market.
There seems to be a lot of confusion on the internet about exactly what kind of whisky it actually is. The marketing blurb on the UB website doesn’t help either. So, here is the deal … “Antiquity Blue” is a Blended Indian Whisky. Antiquity Blue is blended from scotch & indian malts and indian grain whisky. Antiquity Blue is NOT a Single Malt whisky, it is not a Vatted Malt whisky and it is very definitely not a scotch of any kind. What it is though, is it’s a very interesting Indian Whisky – nicely balanced and not heavy on your pocket.
Recommended for when you don’t have a JW or Teachers handy.
Posted in Uncategorized.
HRD minister Kapil Sibal recently mooted the idea of applying a cutoff of between 80% – 85% in XII board exams to be eligible for the JEE. There are 2 problems with this idea. The first is the assumption that all boards (ICSE, CBSE, state & others) have the same syllabus and use the same marking regime. This assumption is false. It is common folk wisdom among students that boards vary in toughness (or perceived toughness), some boards have a more lenient marking system than others. It is easier to get higher subject scores in some boards than others. Boards vary
Till recently BITS Pilani had no entrance exam, students were admitted on the basis of their XII marks. Since BITS Pilani recognizes that “Boards vary”, they tried to map the percentages to percentiles in an attempt to create uniform merit lists. They have since dropped this scheme and setup an entrance exam – BITSAT. BITSAT performs one function – “normalize” the marks of all applicants. This ties in with my second point & the second problem with Minister Sibal’s plan — Minisiter Sibal is ignoring the one great virtue of the JEE exam, that it is a “great normalizer”. Irrespective of the board you are from you must pass one common exam, based on one common syllabus. All the variations between boards are smoothed out by your performance in this one common exam. If a high board cutoff requirement is enforced, all the syllabus & marking variations between boards will get magnified. The higher the cutoff, the greater the board differences come into play.
A direct result of enforcing a high board cut-off will be that students & parents are going to demand lenient marking systems. In my opinion this will most certainly cause leniency in marking standards of state boards. Because state boards are smaller than central boards and it is easier for people to petition their state education minister, it is very likely that state boards will be the first to loosen up their scoring system. This will lead to increased competition between boards in the scoring & examination system, a state board can give more people a shot at IIT by making their exams easier, which defeats the raison d’etre of a high cutoff filter
The JEE system should be improved from the inside and not by tacking on an arbitrary external filter.
Posted in Uncategorized.
Here is my 5 step process (patent pending) for dummies wanting to self-mummify.
1. Eat only seeds and nuts for 1000 days while doing some serious physical work. This will bring your body fat down to extremely low values. Body fat, as all dummies know, decomposes easily. Removing fat helps preserve the body after you are dead.
2. For the next 1000 days eat only the bark and roots of pine trees. This decreases the moisture content in the body – and makes you look like a living skeleton.
3. Towards the end of your “bark & root” eating period start drinking tea made from the leaves of the Urushi plant. This poisonous tea will make you vomit, sweat & urinate – drastically decreasing the water stored in your body. The lesser the moisture, the better the ultimate mummification. More importantly, bacteria and maggots don’t like the poison building up in your tissues. That helps with preventing decomposition.
4. Finally, brick yourself into a completely enclosed tiny space just large enough for you to sit in, with only a small air pipe running through it. Keep a small bell handy. Have your best friend listen for the bell everyday. Once the bell stops ringing (i.e you are dead), he should remove the air pipe and seal you in.
5. Your friend should open the tomb after 1000 days and if you followed all the instructions correctly – then viola — you should look something like ..
(psst: ok, I lied. This idea has already been patented – by the Shingon Buddhists from Japan)
Posted in Uncategorized.
By Saju
September 10, 2009
1) Travel – to many many places
2) Read Physics (& some Mathematics)
3) Setup a SETI station
4) Do optical astronomy
5) Get a Dog
6) Write a Sci Fi book
7) Write a Travelogue
8) Learn LISP (& some Haskell)
9) Finish own OS
10) Wreck diving
11) Add more things to this list
Posted in Uncategorized.
ORA-0600, “The database has been completely destroyed”
Cause: You fucked up
Action: Stop fucking up
Posted in C, Uncategorized.
So why doesn’t ssh read password from stdin ? Security ? bah ! – Excessive hand holding I say.
It’s alright for ssh to not read passwords over stdin by default – but ssh should allow for a command line option to enable reading password over stdin. Not allowing any technique to read passwords over stdin means people create alternate (but cumbersome) techniques to work over the problem – programs like sshpass and the expect library are used to supply passwords to ssh over stdin.
“sudo” doesn’t read passwords over stdin by default – but you can use the “-S” flag to tell sudo that you want it to read the password over stdin. With the “-S” flag you are telling sudo that you understand the security implications of reading passwords over stdin and you know what you are doing.
ssh should come with “secure” default behaviour but should also understand that a user willing to read the whole ssh_config manpage to figure out how to supply passwords over stdin and willing to research expect and sshpass probably understands security implications of reading passwords over stdin and knows what he is doing !
Posted in computers.
If the mountain wont come to Chuck Norris, the mountain is in deep shit.
Chuck Norris holds Infinity in the palm of one hand, and a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun in the other one.
Chuck Norris doesn’t travel by plane. He can’t remove all metallic objects from his pants.
Chuck Norris puts the ‘I’ in ‘Team’.
Posted in Uncategorized.
Kandisa is a prayer in ancient Aramaic, a 3000 year old Semitic language spoken throughout large swathes of the middle east then. Ancient Aramaic is the language that Jesus Christ spoke. A modern version of Aramaic is spoken even now in parts of Syria. Most interestingly the Syrian Orthodox Church still retains portions of it’s liturgy in ancient Aramaic – and in due course this liturgy found it’s way into the syrian orthodox offshoots in Kerala, India.
Indian Ocean, the India based rock band has rehashed Kandisa into a superb song. The liturgy is word for word spoken as is – in ancient Aramaic. Pure genius. Highly recommended. The wannabe historian in me gets a kick out of the fact that I am listening to practically dead, 3000 year old language. The “average joe” in me gets a kick out of a very well played song.
Kandisa – the song
Kandisa – the prayer
Aramaic the language
Indian Ocean – the band
Posted in Uncategorized.
By Saju
February 13, 2009
