Archis's Blog

It’s been a while since I last blogged. I just had the ultimate realization that there is no escaping getting older. Sure, you can mentally keep yourself young, but it sure takes a ton of effort to maintain. Over the last few months, I’ve been going through a major contemplative phase – thinking about what I want from life and all that shit – in short, a mid-life crisis. I know I’m the last person in the world to be thinking this way, but whatever the reasons, I was thinking about it.

There are several circumstances that force you to this realisation, some of them being:

1. You can mentally be prepared but your body doesn’t support it anymore. Working all day in a chair made me realise that I just couldn’t move the way I used to while swimming. I’m gaining my agility back, but it’s a realisation that your body won’t fix itself without some hard work on your part. A friend of mine suffered a severe stroke of carpal tunnel too, which reinforced this realization.

2. You start caring about “grown up” stuff. When I moved out of my parents’ I would pay anything that a vendor would ask. Now I negotiate rates with the house maid, I find best deals on groceries and I survery three or four LPG agencies before I book a connection. I keep updates on shares of various companies, I invest carefully, I followed up on this year’s budget, etc.

3. You start feeling lonely and cling on to stuff. Mostly I miss my dog! He passed away a couple of months ago at my parents’ house in Pune. I plan to get a new pup the minute I find an apartment that will allow it.

4. When with friends, you discuss increasing rates of cooking oil and such stuff! All the stuff we teased parents for discussing, we began discussing ourselves recently. What’s more wierd is that we were actually interested in the discussion.

5. When you reach a plateau in your career. Up until now, it was a constant struggle upwards. To find fun and exciting work! Once you’ve found it, you lose focus of what you want in life. There’s nothing to look forward to. No major challenge to be overcome. No major hurdle to be crossed. Life becomes slightly mundane and boring.

6. You don’t know any single people any more – this one comes as a shock overnight if you’re like me. I always locked myself up in my robotics and signal processing and stuff. Then one day, I wake up and find that almost all my friends are either married, or about to be married, or committed. You stop knowing any single people anymore. You miss making fun of married/committed people since you don’t have a circle to joke about them anymore. This one shocks you more than anything else! It means you’ve “grown up” now! Marriage is the ultimate realization of getting old!

So trust me people – if you’re young, enjoy it. You’ll wake up one day and realise you wasted your life building robots or analysing wierd EEG signals, and all for what? You spend your like thinking marriage is like a hundred years into the future – something only grown ups think about – you’ll think about it in a few decades. The real kicker is when you get that first wedding invite from a friend – then you know you’ve reached your middle ages.

I’m signing out now to continue through my mid-life crisis. If anyone has tips on how to get over it, don’t hesitate to leave a comment!

Pretty harsh words – yes, I know. I was just wondering, is it just me or has everyone at one point or another actually felt ashamed of their college?

Let me try and clarify the definition (as I always do) and distinctly separate it from feeling sad about your college’s condition, or feeling angry at them or feeling dissatisfied about them. When I say ashamed, I mean truly feeling that you wouldn’t want others to judge you by what happens there?

Now let’s get one thing straight – I’ve seen the worst in life, and I’m living the best in life. I studied in a rural school as a child. A school which today, eight years after I left, has 3 PCs with 486 processors in them running DOS 6.22 on 4 MBs of RAM. I remember my “computer education” in school consisting of writing programs on gw-basic. I’ve been laughed at amongst peers who hailed from some pretty fancy-sounding schools whose notions of good schooling consisted of using the words “bloody”, “dude”, and “cool” in wierd non-Indian accents (which certainly didn’t sound anything like either American or British).

And yet, I’ve always been very proud of my schooling. I made good friends there, and learnt a lot (really learnt). Given a second chance, I wouldn’t go to any of the reputed schools and give up the amazing friends I made in my school. I’ve definately felt sad at the school’s condition. I’ve sometimes been angry at their policies. And I definately feel dissatisfied at the the lapse of quality in many cases. But I’ve never been ashamed. This is exhibited in the fact that I’ve never ever blindly defended the school where I felt it deserved criticism. I would never be a part of a signature-campaign to protect a teacher if ever a complaint was made by a student (I’d more likely go talk to the student and figure out why they complained in the first place).

After some soul-searching, I began to nail down exactly what the difference between my school and post-school education has been.

The biggest difference I noticed was the willingness for improvement. My school never was much, and it still isn’t much. But it has certainly improved in the last eight years since I passed out. They struggle to improve. The pride I feel is in the fact that they’re way ahead of where they were last year, and the year before that. Institutions that I studied in later have had big names and high reputations, but they’ve never really wanted to improve. They never wanted to be part of the competition. They’ve all exhibited a sour-grapes syndrome where they convince themselves that the world doesn’t understand their grandeur and hence they choose to ignore the world.

I just wanted to know – from you other “big college” people, if you’re willing to let your ego down for a minute and comment honestly – have you ever felt ashamed of your colleges?

First look at some of the screenshots from the link below: http://content.zdnet.com/2346-11470_22-188303-5.html

Let’s first make allowances for the following:
1. I work for Microsoft and will by definition criticise anything-Google.
2. ….. well, there is no point number two, but I know most of you will be just repeating point one constantly instead of really giving me reasons to like the Android UI.

Good heavens! After all that hype and after all the criticism I dished out to WiMo, I was expecting something more! I admit this may just be a prototype, but after the iPhone, I was expecting something a lot cooler.

The UI is just a been-there-done-that kinda thing. No fancy scrolling, or multitouch, or stuff like that. Some stuff I find on my Pocket PC at the bottom is at the top. Some stuff I find at the top on my PPC is sometimes at the top. But apart from that, I saw all the same options I’m used to seeing.

Sarcastic as I may be, an idiot I am not. One thing conspicously missing from the screenshots is even the slightest hint of the browser/web interface – the real killer everyone is expecting from the device. So perhaps, I may be a bit premature in my criticism, and perhaps the best of Android is yet to come……

A common comment in any debate involving computer science or software or technology is, “Let’s leave the politics out of it.” More than often, it is the losing side that makes this comment.

Over time, I have learnt that there is no such thing as a “non-political” decision. Every decision is opinionated (opinionated by the decision-makers). Every decision has a reason behind it – people don’t just take them randomly. Now while you may say that a decision was objectively taken to fit certain criteria, who guaranteers that the criteria to begin with are themselves non-opinionated?

I’m not trying to lecture in some kind of patronising holistic manner here. I’m speaking out of experience. Till about two years ago, I lived in my own virtual shell where I believed there is no politics. I believed there can be places where people work purely towards altruistic goals. Over time I realised that my views were not necessarily mutually-exclusive. Altruism requires politics. Mohandas Gandhi (for those who may disagree with his Mahatma status) may have been altruistic, but you don’t get independence without laws, and a government. You don’t rally people towards a common cause without being political.

“Open Source”, “Freedom”, “Copyrights”, “Usability”, etc. is all politics. That doesn’t mean either that being politics makes it bad, or that it’s not important or necessary. But you need to factually accept the fact that we live in a world with passions, whims, opinions, and egos.

And you know what? That’s what makes the world so great! Richard Stallman firmly believes in his altruistic vision where software shall be free. To come and tell me that he’s not a political guy would make me lose all respect for him. Of course he’s political. Of course he’s passionate about what he feels. On the other hand, I also know people who have been ruined by opening up their ideas and others making money out of them. Therefore there are people who passionately believe in intellectual property rights. Afterall, it takes hard work to publish a paper and if you’ve ever studied in the University of Pune, you’d know just how valuable “intellectual property” is. The value is as complex to measure as the intellectual property itself. Many a student has been harassed, tortured and abused before they could do anything productive. That’s the “price” of intellectual property, and it certainly doesn’t come cheap (let alone free).

It’s important to separate the election-oriented party-politics from politics in general. If we didn’t have passions, if we didn’t have opinions and if we didn’t have beliefs, humanity would have been lovable, cute, adorable and ultimately inconsequential pets of some alien species.

So think again before you try “taking the politics out of computer science”.

During discussions on various algorithms communities, and with friends and colleagues, I found many people having skewed notions of the words “probability”, “randomness” and non-determinism. They use the words out-of-context or with inaccurate semantics.

This blog was motivated in part to dismiss some inaccurate notions regarding these phrases, and also to present some interesting examples which may help you appreciate the subtleness of expression science requires. I am writing this on a very tight schedule, it may end abruptly (I shall follow up with entries in the near future).

This topic is highly “academic”, and you may appreciate that academicians, not throwing fancy words all the time, when they do use a word, they mean it! And I hope to cultivate some regard amongst CS students for the highly precise nature of the mathematical science they chose to study.

Randomness:

Let’s begin with a fun example my dad used to tell me (he’s a statistician). Imagine there are two people reciting numbers progressively. And there are two observers writing down the numbers spoken by the former candidates. Some information regarding the numbers they’ve provided:

1. Candidate one has said: 1, 5, 2, 9, 7, 3, 2, 1

2. Candidate two has said: 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2

Checkpoint1: Now I ask you, can you predict the next number that either of the candidates will utter? Also, please do write down the reason(s) for your answer.

Keep that answer to yourself for the moment. In the meantime, some more info about our contestants:

1. Candidate one is a professor of statistics who specialises in pseudo-random number generation.

2. Candidate two is a mentally retarded person (so far as our contemporary understanding of his condition goes).

Checkpoint2: Now I ask – can you predict the next number either of them will utter? Keep your answer to yourself once more.

In the meantime, some more gossip about these candidates: both people were initially told to produce random numbers.

Checkpoint3: Again, note down your answer and the reason for thinking so.

Let us now try and debate which of the next number to be obtained from either candidate would qualify as “random”. Let us assume that randomness is the property of being unable to predict the next number that will be produced.

1. Candidate one: He knew he was supposed to generate “random numbers”. He is a professor aware of the properties of randomness of a sequence of numbers. And the sequence he has generated does exhibit some of those properties. I shall venture to make a comment here and you can make up your own mind – given enough numbers that he has generated, and if we assumed he is going to follow the “statistical properties of randomness”, it would fairly narrow down the possibilities of the next number he would generate (since it would try to maximise the adherence to the properties of randomness).

2. Candidate two: He probably has no idea what he is supposed to do beyond generating numbers. While we do know that he has generated a sequence of ’2′s consequtively, we cannot assume any properties or any process by which he is generating the sequence. Maybe he has OCD and is generating a specific number of ’2′s before he switches to another number? Maybe the only number he knows is ’2′? Maybe he’ll stop at the next number just for the heck of it?

Based on the definition of randomness that I stated above (conceding that it is my subjective definition), I am compelled to find that the series of ’2′s is a random series, whereas the first series is not, in fact, random.

This is a critical property of randomness that very few people seem to grasp. Randomness of an outcome is a property of the process used to generate the outcome, and not the outcome that was actually generated.

To provide a simpler analogy, will you assume that just because your home had tap water for the previous one hour, you are going to get tap water indefinately? Or conversely that because tap water at your house keeps getting disconnected abruptly, it will never come back? As you can see, the way you’d predict the outcome of the supply of tapwater is based on the process used to provide it. It is the same with random series, and making assumptions based on the numbers themselves is synonymous with predicting tap water availability based on how much water you collected in the bucket.

Sidebar: Frequently, people use the word “random” to indicate “high variance”, which is technically inaccurate.

Law of Averages:

Another fun statistician joke: A guy goes to his doctor for heart surgery. The doc tells him his chances of survival are 100%. The happy, yet skeptical patient asks his doc, “How come? I was told that the survival rate in this surgery is only 10%.” The doc promply replies, “That is precisely correct. And it is because all my previous nine patients have died during this surgery, that I am supremely confident of your survival!”

This example in part shows the danger of predicting future outcomes of a process, based on purely the past outcomes, without looking into the process. Look at it this way, would you yourself go to a doc, who’s had a 100% fatality rate for all his prior patients? However, if it were the best heart surgeon in the world who’s had extreme-stage cases for the past nine times, would you rather trust him or another doc who’s has a zero fatality rate but has left patients with a permanent disabilities where any other doc would have been able to provide a full recovery?

Essentially, I want to reinforce two points:
1. Randomness is a property of the process, not the outcome of the process. Never ever make assumptions of randomness based on purely the outcomes of the process (cryptographers would tell you the extreme dangers of that).

2. Randomness is about unpredictability! It is not about a high variance in outcomes. It is about not being able to predict the outcome. Basically, even if you get a million ’2′s in a row, if you are unable to predict the million-and-first number, it is a random sequence. On the other hand, if you find a sequence of four statistically random numbers, and can predict the 5th number, it is NOT a random sequence.

Non-determinism of outcome vs. Non-determinism of process:

Everyone, I hope is familiar with Schr��dinger’s cat. I keep facing many queries in algorithms forums for “non-deterministic” algorithms, when people really cannot distinguish between determinism and accuracy.

Schr��dinger’s cat is a perfect example of non-determinism or unpredictability or randomness. There is really no parameter in the experiment that allows us to explain the state of the cat while the box is closed. The outcome of this experiment is non-deterministic in the sense that a decision based on this outcome will change drastically since the outcome is discrete and binary.

Another example of non-determinism is that of probabilistic primality testing. Given a number, you may have false positives and false negatives.

Let me put it this way:
In non-deterministic outcomes, the outcomes themselves are well-defined and you know all possible outcomes, only that you don’t know whether the outcome you obtained was correct or incorrect. A non-deterministic Turing machine is a good example of this. Like Schr��dinger’s cat, an NTM can be in multiple states at the same time. However, for each state, the decision to be taken next is well-defined and deterministic. Similarly in a probabilistic primality testing algorithm, each step is well-defined and accurately executed. The algorithm itself has no non-determinism built into it. Given the same input, the algorithm will behave exactly the same every time (although the answer you get may be different). To put in another way, an algorithm to test for the survival of the cat calls for the opening up of the box. This alg
orithm is invariant. You always deterministically open the box and look inside to obtain the outcome. The outcome itself is something you don’t know until the algorithm has completed.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying a non-deterministic-outcome algorithm has to be deterministic in it’s process. These two are orthogonal properties. Let’s look at non-deterministic-process algorithms:

Random algorithms, on the other hand, use some kind of entropy within the algorithm itself. The processes of such algorithms are themselves non-deterministic. Ideally, until you reach a decision point in the algorithm, you’d have no way of forecasting what decision would be taken at the point. Monte-Carlo methods are an example of such algorithms (but pseudo-random numbers do in fact allow us to predict their decision points). Let me put that another way – if you run the same Monte Carlo method twice, you’d follow different steps. So a Schr��dinger’s cat experiment with Monte Carlo methods would vary based on the parameter you’re making non-deterministic – for example, it may open the the box after different time intervals each time you ran it and you’d have no way (ideally) of predicting when the box would be opened.

An example of a non-deterministic process leading to a deterministic outcome is the use of Monte Carlo methods used to approximate PI (the most common example of Monte Carlo methods), or to get more deterministic, roots of polynomials. The algorithms used generally won’t ever follow the same state transitions twice, but they always lead to the results which are always deterministic and identical (in any case, even if the algorithm doesn’t reach the deterministic answer, there does exist a deterministic answer and the algorithm gets _closer_ to it progressively).

Which brings us finally to:

Approximations:

Approximations or near-optimal solutions are the third orthogonal property we need to consider. The notion of “close to” the answer comes into play here. And this is difficult to differentiate from the property of high-probability of an answer.

An easy way to understand this contrast is to think of prime number generation vs. primality testing.

1. Assume a function F(x) which returns the x-th prime number. Due to computational limitations, there will be loss in numerical accuracy and the number we obtain won’t exactly be a prime itself (and in all likeliness not an integer at all). In this case, the better the numerical accuracy we provide during our computations, we arrive “closer” to the prime number. If our numerical accuracy is infinite, we obtain the perfect integer. But in every case, we are aware that there exists in fact a prime number without any doubt in a neighbourhood of the number we obtain. You can bet your cat’s life expectancy to be propertional to closeness of the outcome, and you’d get a pretty healthy cat.

2. On the other hand, consider an F(x) that returns 1 if x is prime, and 0 if x is non-prime, and any x in (0, 1) by attributing a confidence level to the primality of x. Essentially if you tested a 100 Xi’s, (define Yi = F(Xi)) and if Yi > Yj, then more Xi’s are primes than Xj’s on average over time. However, by increasing Yi, it doesn’t make the number Xi any primer. There is no such thing as “more prime” or “less prime”. Even with a Yi of 0.99, Xi may turn out to be composite. Hence, this is not an “approximation”. This is non-deterministic, probabilistic and perhaps random. But it is not approximate. To say that “X is approximately a prime number” would be a gross misrepresentation (and I’ve heard this statement made more than once). If you bet your cat’s life on this, you’d be playing russion roulette with your cat.

Essentially, in a surgery with chance of 20% tissue damage, all 100% patients would come out with (upto a maximum of) 20% damage to their muscles. In a surgery with 20% mortality rate, 80% people would come out alive.

Such distinctions become very important when you’re in any kind of business that supports decision-making (programming being one of them). Imagine if someone sold you an investment-advice program that had a 0.01% failure in predictions, and another guy sells you a program with 10% loss of accuracy in predictions. It’s important to know these distinctions before evaluating any decision choices. Don’t misunderstand me – I’m not biasing on either side. I personally would buy the first one (since I’d like to make lots of money fast and risk the total loss of all my money). But that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t understand and appreciate the distinction between the two.

This concludes the post for now. I need to go watch He-Man for a while and get motivated and punch in a lot of code.

Within the company we’ve been hearing rumours and whispers since last year, and especially a lot of employees who passionately believed we needed Yahoo. But now it’s official. Microsoft has made a proposal to acquire Yahoo Inc. now.

A quick review of what this may mean for both the companies and how this may really be the biggest (in terms of consequences; not money) merger yet.

1. Yahoo has great content and retention capacity. Yahoo knows how to get users, and make them keep visiting Yahoo regularly. Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Mail, and the most popular, Yahoo Messenger. You use it and you _want_ to use it daily.

2. Microsoft has platform. If you’ve seen Yahoo Mail Beta, you’ll find their AJAX kinda sucks and is bloated. Microsoft knows good AJAX and good programming. The combination of the two would be to die for!

3. Microsoft doesn’t have content and content-providers. Yahoo Answers is something where you can really see the kind of user-attraction Yahoo has. There are so many people who actually take time to seriously answer questions. Similarly, on my “My Yahoo” page, I can see recommendations for movies, movies have reviews, reviews have trailers, and it’s all inter-connected. Microsoft doesn’t have all that content in our Live properties yet.

4. Microsoft knows management – trust me – I work there. We know business. We know how to leverage our value-adds, and how to keep employees happy and productive, how to manage various assets and integrate them together. People and HR practices are something I totally admire Microsoft for – I just don’t know any other company that can match the business practices of the company.

All in all, I’m too excited to blog right now. Got so many things that come to mind and so many things I can’t speak of. In any case, you will find out eventually through our public relations team, so wait and watch…. and go buy some stock while you’re at it.

Many of you may not know Heath Ledger – but for us true believers in Batman, Heath Ledger was about to become a legend!

Heath Ledger was an actor little known to me too before I found out he’d be playing “The Joker” in “The Dark Knight” (the sequel to “Batman Begins”). There were many apprehensions and doubts regarding whether he would be a “good enough” joker compared with Jack Nicholson (to quote some website: Jack Nicolson’s joker was like an angry old uncle).

When we saw the pictures, we were convinced that Heath Ledger was born to play this role. When we heard his voice and especially his laugh, we know this guy would become a legend! When we finally saw the theatrical trailer for the movie, we were all speechless. Heath Ledger brought out the real joker – the psychopathic killer without a consience or emotions. I cannot express in words the kind of joker Heath Ledger played – his portrayal was beyond words to say the least. If they ever give out an Oscar for “Best Psychopathic Criminal”, this would be it.

For the record, I am willing to state that he tops my list of “Best Villians Ever” even above Darth Vader! (Yes! Believe it! I, of all people, really think so!)

I was expecting a continued performance from him in the sequel to “The Dark Knight”. Heath was found dead in his apartment with cause of death unknown as of yet. Some speculate his death was due to an overdose of sleeping pills that he had to take since his performance as the Joker caused him severe insomnia. If this be true, I bow down in respect for a man who dedicated himselef to bringing to life a role that will be remembered for many years to come. I assure you – Heath Ledger’s Joker will not be forgotten – not due to some crap sympathetic reaction to his death – but because no Joker can match it EVER!

My heartiest condolonces to his family, his loved ones and his friends. This was a sad bit of news. If he is watching us at this moment, I hope he knows that we all admire his performance!

As we all know, a lot of internet traffic was generated by this news over the last couple of days. In a local mailing list, I read this comment:

WOW!!! US$ 1Bn for that.
This could be any eye-opener for the people who say there is no money in FOSS

Below is my response to this comment (which I have posted on that mailing list too – but my blog is a good place for me to talk instead of having to listen to abstract philosophy in every other sentence):

I’ll interpret that as, “For people who think money cannot be made from owning source code to a FOSS project”, which nobody has ever debated . (I can feel the flames coming.)

The billion-dollar question (it’s very rare occasions when one can use such a phrase figuratively and literally one one shot) was, “Can I make money by _using_ GPL’d code” and the question just got answered!

MySQL was GPL’d already – and Sun could have just bought a copy (or licence or support or whatever MySQL sells) to get their source code (assuming Sun was already stupid enough not to download a tarball (further assuming I’m not stupid to have assumed a tarball is available for public download)).

The real key here is ownership of the copyrights to the MySQL codebase. That’s what sun paid 1Bn for. In that case, the money went to buying out a copyright. Can’t really understand the merits of the code being GPL’d or otherwise – people pay money for copyrighted code every day of the week.

Nobody had ever debated the prospects of making money so long as _you’re_ the owner of the codebase. In fact this is an eye-opener for those who were being told, “Hey, you can make money from MySQL because it’s GPL’d.” Now if a company with Sun’s magnitude and power and influence and fan-following can’t make money from the GPL’d version, it’s hard to believe that an individual might make money from it.

Of course, I’m not at all saying MySQL isn’t “free as in free speech” (lest I should be mailed a whole lot of philosophy), but since “money” is considered orthogonal to freedom, I’m simply talking on that aspect.

Since we’re on that topic, there was an interesting post on a zdnet blog recently about “definition of freedom” and a comparison between the BSD-style licence which allows you to make proprietary forks of their code and the GPL. Ultimtely it’s upto the benelovence of the “owner of the code” (I have to agree with Torvalds here), to maintain “freedom”.

1. In the GPL licence, you have the freedom to do anything with the software except sell it’s source code separately (as a separate entity from the binaries). This means that whoever owns the copyrights to the code (Trolltech, MySQL, etc.) could just fork a proprietary version without you being able to do anything about it (do not misinterpret that; I admit _most_ of those who ask for transfer of copyright are in fact benevolent; all I’m saying is that this is not a licence-imposed necessity). The average guy still competes with other players who have the GPL’d code.

2. Under the BSD-style licence, if one guy makes a proprietary fork, then so can you. You can go head-to-head and try and kill each other off. If Berkeley makes a proprietary fork, every single person on earth can do the same and neutralize the playing field. (To answer all those who were wondering why after having funded PostgreSQL so much, Sun bought out MySQL). If they’d bought (without need) the PostgreSQL codebase, every programmer on earth worth his two cents would have made a proprietary fork to compete against Sun. With MySQL…. well you get the picture.

Please do not misinterpret this post. I’m sure Sun will ensure everyone gets all the code and we already know Google is planning to give back a lot of their in-house modifications to the public code-base. All I’m saying is, the 1Bn of money that was paid, was paid for the conventional thing you pay any proprietary company for – the ownership of copyrighted code.

You’ll find a review by one of my friends (Prameela) linked here and I have to say, I agree with her. After a long time, a movie that makes sense. A movie with substance. A movie with an opinion.

I’ve always said it and it always needed to be said at a global level. Finally someone actually used an analogy that I believed in – “Indian families are Stud Farms where kids are simply toys for the gratification/amusement of families and the bidding that goes on over their races is probably way higher than the bidding that happens on horse races.”

The movie makes a good point of showing our ignorant system, our holistic quest for “marks”, and our struggle for a safety-net. Now, I’m not saying that a safety-net is bad. But there are those who want to go out there and risk it. Those who don’t care about a backup, but want to go and do something cool!

And I’ll go ahead and say something even Aamir Khan didn’t dare say explicitely. He seemed to show society as being ignorant. I’ll tell you society is far from ignorant. But pretending to be ignorant allows them to behave ignorant. In reality society is selfish. When Ishan’s (that’s the kid-with-dyslexia’s name in the movie) parents are asked to consider the possibility that Ishan may “have a psychological/psychiatric condition”, the look on their face and their attitude just brought in a surge of hatered in me for a moment. Their first reaction was, “you mean to say my son is retartded?”

Wat the hell? He has a “condition”. He’s not retarded! Moreover, both parents instant thoughts in their minds must be, “How will I show my face to my friends/family/etc.” For God’s sake! He’s your son! How will he show his face in society if you don’t give him proper support and give him self-confidence?

I do hope we see more movies on themes of how our society and so-called-self-declared “ancient culture” is destroying the childhoods of so many kids all over the country. And I’m not talking about illiterate families. I’m talkng about families in cities and metros.

Part of the reason I feel so angry about such people is perhaps I went through a VERY mild dose of what that kid must have gone through – and believe me – a movie can’t even begin to depict what he must be facing. Imagine a world where people don’t understand you because you’re thinking in a different fashion (or perhaps because you are thinking). A world with retarded people who can’t see your intelligence – and in turn calling you retarded because they can’t understand shit you say.

That poor fellow must have been so frustrated and frightened every day of his life! His parents wouldn’t even take him to a psychiatrist. They think forcing him in school would just make his problems “go away”. Who do you think is really retarded here? They’re not even ready to give him a diagnosis.

Is this our great “Indian non-materialistic culture” as opposed “those materialistic westerners” who treat their kids like human beings? Is this our great Mahabharata/Ramayan-descended society? Really? Does anyone of you really feel proud to go out and tell others just what greatness we descended from while treating our own kids like animals in our homes?

I live in an awesome apartment, and don’t want to let it go if I can help it. Hence looking for a flatmate. In case you’re interested, or know anyone who’s interested, do get back to me ASAP. The property listing is given below in detail.

http://www.indiaproperty.com/property/IA202850