Fictional heroes

I have talked about Aravinda de Silva before, who is my hero from time immemorial, but this article is going to be for some men who are totally fictional. Even with their virtual status they still mean a lot to me and I hope, to humankind as well.

1. Sherlock Holmes

'...when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'

I was thinking that when I meet someone, what appeals to me the most. The first thing I like is a person's honesty and the next, invariably is intellect. Sherlock Holmes has everything that appeals to my mind. A strong capacity of observation and clear reasoning. I said once that a software tester needs to be like a detective. That is why I appreciate Holmes even more nowadays.

I was reading his quotations and almost all of those I can apply with software testing. You can't assume, you shouldn't guess, you can't make exceptions. Science has no place for exceptions. It is not logical, they do break the rule and not prove it. And then is his take on data. He always said don't guess the reasons for anyone's action and then get everything to retrofit. You should not come to any conclusion before you have data.

The sharp grey hawk eyes, that tall and thin figure in great coat and deer stalker cap and the famous pipe...I can visualize him in his study, at Paddington, around London...the man who stirred up our reasoning capacities and who made us use our grey cells a little more.

2. Arjunbarma

My beloved romantic hero of all times. I don't have a picture of him to share, but I have a vivid picture of him in my brain. A tall and strong young man of twenty one, who left his home in search of a kingdom where he would not be forcibly converted to another religion. The melodious story teller Saradindu Bandopadhyay walks us down a part of Arjun's life. After he saves the king's bride to be from drowning and she falls in love with him, how the king who was once his patron tells him to leave the kingdom. Arjun and his friend were at the border of the country when they saw enemy soldiers trying to make their way in stealthily. In spite of the king's order, Arjun still went back to alert the king about this enemy intrusion and finally saved the country. The king changed his mind and decided to unite the lovers.

Arjun brings back memories of my teenage, the time when girls start to become fans of movie stars and sportsmen. I did have my fair share of those people as well, but Arjun's virtual presence made him my most loved hero. He is always perfect because he is in my mind and he never changes, he would never grow old. Even when I will be an old woman in grey hair, Arjun will still be able to bring back the romance I first cherished in my teenage days.

3. Atticus Finch

I have to mention here is that this character made a greater impression on me because of Gregory Peck. There have been very few incidents where a character in the movie matched the my imagination and in this case I think Gregory Peck is the only person who could fit into this role.

“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.” 

When I think of Atticus Finch, the first thing that comes to my mind is strength of character. All the characteristics people like in a "man" were brilliantly present in him. A loving father and an unusually modern one who let his kids call him by first name he had the perfect balance of how much to control his kids and where to let go. Then came the lawsuit. I don't intend to narrate the whole story here, but my idea is to convey why he is one of my favorite characters. He was a brave man. It is one thing to fight a war, but another thing, and maybe a more difficult one is to fight against stagnant societal rules from within the society one is living. He stood up for justice, he did the right thing. No he didn't win, but he still did what was right.

Atticus Finch is not just an iconic literary hero, but he is and should be an inspiration. If you do the right thing people will still go against you, call you names and even threaten will all sorts of consequences. But some people still do the right thing. He was one of them.

As you can see, all these three men are way different from one another. They span not only over space but time as well. I admire them for different reasons and they bring out different facets in myself.

Summer time reflections

From my third speech at ToastMasters

Coming from a tropical land, I didn’t really have any reason to celebrate summer. It reminds me of heat, sweat and power cuts and other than the occasional thunderstorms, it is a dreaded season in my memory. Also, I am not a person who can sit quietly or peacefully for a long time. Must be because of my over active brain, I always need to DO something. So my summers were never idyllic as such. In fact they were the only time when I could get a lot of things done. I was busy!

I see a summer holiday is a big thing here, no school for months, outdoor activities and all. We were not so lucky. After our finals were done in late March we had no school for around two months, including summer vacation, but we had loads of homework to do and regular study sessions. Sometimes we’d travel with families but they were never adventurous and very little exciting. However, I found things to amuse myself. My main attraction was my laboratory at home. It was a broken wooden bench on our open terrace where I had my beakers (empty jam bottles) full of muddy water which I filtered. I mixed water color and saw the sun rays gleaming through them with the airs of a professional chemist. I also measured rainfall in a glass jar. You might think that my teachers and elders should be really proud of my scientific attempts, but sadly that wasn’t really the case. Anything outside of school books were considered a waste of time, so even though I learned science, this was technically my play time.

After a few years, my experiments changed in form. I started getting interested in physics, especially the night sky and optics. As my knowledge of science increased, my experiments started succeeding as well. I bought a science encyclopedia with gift money and delved into the projects section of it. Funny enough, the book was printed in the US, so even though the materials they suggested I use are easily available here, getting them in India was next to impossible. Would you believe I couldn’t get a box of tissue papers, aluminum foil or play dough back home? But I found my work around. Many of my experiments failed but like everything else in life, the ones which succeed after so much effort put into them are the ones that stay etched in our memories. The optics light overlapping experiments never came out well, my water wheel splashed water everywhere and the paper wheel got soggy but my pin-hole camera was perfect, I could separate sodium and chlorine by electrolysis table salt. The smell of chlorine is not nice, but it really made me happy that day as I copper coated a paper clip. My most successful experiment was a sun dial. I worked round the unavailability of cardboard but I got stuck at the need of a compass. How would I know the exact north without a compass? I had to align my sun dial on the north-south line to mark the shadow cast every hour. Mind it, this was a time before Internet was widely available, so all I could do was brainstorm. Then like the ancient sailors, I turned to the night sky to guide me. I went up to the terrace at night with a bit of chalk and a ruler and found the big dipper shining brightly. Well, if there’s the dipper, I joined the first two stars in the scoop and traced down. Oh no! There is a huge hospital blocking most of the north sky. Well, ok I still know where Polaris is. I put a mark on the ground and drew a straight line pointing north-south. Next morning before the sun rose, I went to align my sun dial and mark the hours on it. And then the best thing in science happened – if you follow the right steps, you are bound to get the right results!

So you can see even with the discomfort of heat and humidity, summers were really quite nice. In my university days in the south, summers gave me the time to spend time with my friends and I really started cherishing this sunny season after moving to Seattle. I don’t have summer breaks any more, but I still get to do simple things that are very new in my life, like camping in Mt. Rainier or tending to my little kitchen and herb garden. This season has given me the chance to find myself. It’s not really a horrible season after all.

My guy friends

With Fathers' Day coming up tomorrow and the ongoing World Cup, guys seem to be getting some importance after all. So I decided to dedicate this article for my guy friends from the world over - everyone from the mischievous classmates from South Point to the fun co-workers in my professional life. They have been great, they have opened a whole new world which has enriched my life a lot.

Long before I got married and started living day in and day out with a guy, I was appalled at guys' manners. How they can comfortably wear one pair of jeans for a month, not wash their cooking utensils, drive nonchalantly seventeen miles over the speed limit and do many a weird thing that girls can't even think of. My jaw-drop moment was when a friend, on seeing his gym pants torn from the ankle to the knee immediately stapled three pins in there! Another one once told me that he used rubber bands to hold the sleeve of a torn shirt (which he tore during a school fight). Though I still have my "really??!!" moments after five years of marriage, I think my friends did help me in knowing guys well.

Not many people have siblings these days, so they might not get the chance to grow up with a brother. Those classmates were the boys I first interacted with in a regular basis. I saw what sports fanatics they were and how they tirelessly played cricket and football even if they got a ten minute break between classes. They did not spend time gossiping like the girls, they were busy. The college friends were into rock bands too besides sports. They would play the guitar, they introduced me to "the summer of '69" explaining that it has the best guitar played ever by any human. It was clearly apparent that they were budding engineers as well. During my birthday, I remember three friends crowded in front of the TV, trying to find out how to display recently captured pictures of the party on the TV, which cables to connect to which port. This comes effortlessly to boys, technical or not. I remember them as my team mates in the quiz club, my partner as the class monitor, my companions on the tram rides to and from school, my IT guy when I needed software, music or games, my competitor during NFS car races and in general people who would bug me, drive me nuts, call me at 11:30 in the evening to ask me if the grades are out but the ones I still enjoyed spending time with.

University introduced me to guy friends the world over. They differed in looks but not in behavior. I accompanied them to some "adventures" where I probably wouldn't have gone alone or with girls. They explained that scrambling over prickly bushes was fun, climbing walls to see what's inside a deserted home was "cool" and scaring people on narrow hiking trails, pushing them in swimming pools were all totally ok stuff to do to friends. Those are the friends who taught me to ride a bike, they were the ones I played badminton with on Saturdays. They were crazy but when it came to accompany us back to the dorm after evening or give a ride they were the ones who stepped up. There was a whole new responsibility that showed up in them during those times. They knew how to take care.

Co-workers can't really be friends, but when you spend more than eight hours everyday with some people, you are bound to get close. As it is common in our field to have very few girls we really have no other option but to be with a bunch of guys in our teams. Here, they are mostly not in the same age group as me, but that did never stop them from being my buddies. Talks of cars, beer, football, the latest smartphone crowd the team lunches. Activities like skate boarding competitions, gun ranges and dirt biking get talked about, Wikipedia articles on guns are read and discussed. If Sounders lose, there might be an ambiance of mourning around, weird jokes and out-of-the-world crazy things like Uni-baby (reference: http://axecop.com/characters/) are discussed with deep interest. That's a world very different from the one I grew up in, that's the world my guy friends have shown me.

These guys have made me laugh, come out of my comfort zone, look at things from a different perspective and have made me feel special. Guy friends are the ones who make us understand our future husbands in a better way and I wish more girls had the chance to grow up with fun boys like I did.

Creative engineer - the non-oxymoron

What comes to your mind when you think of the word "creative"? I invariably think of colors. Splashes and strokes of colors on a canvas. Colors like the ones in "holi", too much of them. You might think of authors or musicians, artists or even chefs.

Now what comes to your mins when you think of the word "engineer"? I visualize two things - either a factory like the Boeing one in Everett - conveyor belts, people wearing hard hats and overalls, or I see code. Plain simple programs running on command prompt. Black and white and dull.

Where is the connection between these two words? Creative and engineer? Is that an oxymoron? People would think so. I mean why not? The left brained analytical nerds don't come close to the right brained colorful people. How can they be related?

Here's how.... what do you exactly mean by being creative? Wikipedia says creativity is the way in which something valuable is created, ok? Now think of the valuable things mankind has produced. While I agree that art and literature has been extremely valuable to humans, but think of the more practical things you know like the house you live in, the street where you drive your car, yes the car itself, your smartphone, computer, the Internet... who created them? Engineers! The boring blueprints, pencil marks on butter paper, T-square, etchings on a screwhead... no they are not as pretty as an oil painting, but they are the base. Scientists show the way on which engineers build a highway, they scale it up, make it possible to bear load and also to maintain it for generations. Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose told us what radio waves are, but it took an engineer to create a smartphone out of it. An artist will cherish the view of a waterfall, a poet may write a lyrical poetry describing it and an engineer will conceive a way to harness that power and set up a hydroelectric power plant to supply electricity to an entire city.

A blank canvas and a blank notebook has been talked over a lot for expressing thoughts and inspiring creativity. Blank programming IDEs can do that and much more too. One day you take a fresh clean Eclipse IDE without a single line of code on it and you create a software program that automatically sends requests to servers and gathers the responses. Like a robot, it reads the responses and lets you know if your product is ok or not without you having to do anything. That's a very small scale engineering, but none the less it can empower humans to sit on the same seat as the Creator if there is one :)

Who is a Bengali?

Last year just before Durga Pujo I bought my first saree and my first designer saree. I am not a fan of designer wear. Actually, if I like the shape and color of an apparel and it fits me then I don't care if it is coming from the sidewalk vendors in Calcutta, from Walmart, Macy's or someplace fancier. I bought this saree because it struck me as something very creative - Bengali calendar print in black and white with a solid red border. It has something very Bengali in it with just the right amount of color and an out of the box creativity. So I went for it. Recently I was looking at a few more sarees designed by the same lady Paromita Banerjee. Almost all of them have this right balance of color and a uniqueness which tells me about the refined taste of the designer. With the very limited exposure I have in fashion, I think she concentrates on just one thing in a saree. For the calendar one, her main focus of course was on the Bengali print, so she kept it at two colors. She didn't keep on adding more accents or flashy stuff. In another one, the off white body and golden border has bright red pleats in the center. That's it. No more color, no more decorations...just one thing. I very much appreciate her taste. Before this article becomes one on fashion, let me come to the main point. I so liked Paromita's concepts that I looked her up online to see more of her designer clothes and her professional profile, etc. I found she writes a blog and her topics along with her command of the English language gave me an idea of her - a well educated and cultured Bengali girl. "Cultured" is the thing I am coming to, that is the kind of people I used to know Bengalis as.

Most probably due to the Bengal Renaissance of the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, Bengalis evolved as a race who could think. They were conscious of the political situation of the country, the reformed the society and they questioned and rebelled rather than accepting something as "tradition". A bright band of stalwarts like Raja Rammohan Roy, Vidyasagar, Swamiji, Rabindranath, Acharjya J. C. Bose, Acharya P. C. Roy, Netaji, Sarat Chandra, Nazrul trailed till Satyajit Ray in all fields from politics to religion, science, arts, literature, music, sports lit up the cultural field of Calcutta, a city which was the jewel in the crown, the city of joy.

I was not as lucky to be born at that time, but I at least was born in the city and had the opportunity to grow up learning about these people and as a book lover, reading stories of these people and their own writings. I always say that for a person who reads (he/she most likely thinks as well) the world becomes a single nest spanning both space AND time. These people imbibed in me and to those people who fit my definition of a Bengali some cultural values which are not easily shaken off.

I see in Facebook - 15 reasons why you should date a Bengali girl, well they are funny when read with a light spirit but that is not all. There are much more stuff in there besides the ability to sing Rabindrasangeet or having a cute nickname. To me Bengali culture is not limited to going to coffee house or sounding intellectual, it is about realizing the things our beloved and revered stalwarts taught us and following their paths. It is about rebelling like Derozio by breaking all chains of dead habit, about loving the most downtrodden countrymen as our our brothers like Swamiji, finding solace in Rabindranath, feeling the deepest sorrow of the poor villagers like Sarat Chandra, on being the firebrand that Nazrul was, making the impossible possible like Netaji, cherishing the children in us like Sukumar Ray, finding our ways in the dark with the help of knowledge like Jagadish Bose...with that comes a race of people who value knowledge and education above everything else. A refined taste in music, arts that also reflects in clothes and dresses. A sharp intellect that gives rise to wit. Creativity that shows up in various places from food to baby names. A questioning spirit that made us liberals who might believe in god, but would not become vegetarians just because some people interpret Hinduism like that.

In Satyajit Ray's famous movie "Agantuk" (the stranger) Utpal Dutta, a character who was interested in anthropology and spent many years among different tribes of the world was saying that before he left home, all the works of the most famous literary people of both English and Bengali were instilled in him. That is what I feel too. In all my steps and my behavior, if the teachings and ideas of these people shine through then I would be able to become a true follower of all these people whom I so dearly love.

Coke Studio

Indian classical songs and music seem to live in its own bubble. Whenever I try to visualize them, I can only see people clad in traditional attire, very seriously singing something in the accompaniment of a tanpura. In most cases, the songs are totally devoid of words, they are just some notes. There is an aura of seriousness always hanging about the musicians. Everyone talks about how hard they have to practice and how much dedication they have. Even though I like classical music now, I really don't understand how and why people so ardently admire the songs. I feel utterly bored listening to them and to be very honest they don't sound very nice to me either. I also don't understand why the whole ambiance has to be so boring.

Then I listened to Coke Studio. They looked like the typical MTV teenagers at first, until this girl started signing Miyan ka Malhar. It was so unexpected! The first pre-req of listening to fusion music is to have an open mind. Especially in Coke Studio they fused ancient classical songs and very common folk songs from all over India into something very creative. Rock music like guitars and drums don't really match with our idea of tradition but my point is, why not try something different if it sounds good. The main goal of songs is to sound nice, isn't it?

Miyan ka Malhar

A girl clad in a short dress with motorbike gloves don't look incongruent next to a girl in saree in this Coke Studio set-up. Nor does a Buddhist monk and an Arabian Nights style girl sound crazy in a duet. I very much like traditional values, but I love it more when traditional things go through a test of time, change forms but still keep on charming us. When A.R. Rahman sings a rabindrasangeet in Bengali and when an African musician accompanies a Pakistani singer singing a song almost five centuries old I really feel that music definitely is beyond any sort of barriers.

Indian politics

I had never been as busy as I currently am. For some reason, the days and weeks and months seem to just fly away. I love staying busy, so that's not really a problem, but that dropped blogging to the tail end of my to do list. Also, if all I am thinking about is work, it is difficult to find a suitable blog topic. Agile and scrum methods for software testing or how to test web service calls would not make the right type of articles for this blog. Anyway, what happened yesterday (or rather the night before that) in Indian politics brings me to my first political post for my blog.

Narendra Modi.

I didn't think much about him, to be very honest, I didn't have much information other than he is the current chief minister of Gujarat and that he is a strong Hindu nationalist. After the landslide victory and his party emerging as the single majority after thirty years, I started looking up in YouTube for his interviews. The first one I found was him interviewed by this guy called Arnab Goswami, who apparently can make seasoned politicians stammer. If I didn't watch any other political debate that Goswami had conducted, I would think of him to be a very docile and mellow person because Modi seemed to be the one who was dominating the entire interview. This is not the first time I am seeing any Indian politician speak, I have been brought up in a family that closely follows politics and we discuss it all the time. What struck me about Modi is that - he makes complete sense! His thoughts are clear, his speech is very simple to understand and he speaks to the point (which itself is a great virtue considering politicians).

Bengalis are known to be "seculars". I don't mind being secular if you actually take the word in it's true meaning. Why I put quotes around it is because in so-called "liberal" Bengal, "secularism" has become a synonym for bashing our religion of Hinduism. That is what I object to. For those people who are calling him communal just because he openly projects his religion, I just want to ask a question - is it bad to love one's religion? In the so very democratic country of USA where everyone has the freedom to pursue their own faiths (much more than they have in India) the people are proud of the country being founded on Christian values and they say "In God we trust". Can we do the same in India, ever, without being called "communal"? I see no problem in him bringing Hinduism up front. He is a follower of Swamiji, so why shouldn't he do it? And why should we complain and cringe if he brings up our traditional values? Isn't that what we are proud of, as Indians, our roots? By the way, Wikipedia says that Modi decided to demolish 200 illegal temples in Gandhinagar. If that is indeed the case, then I hope the unbiased leader is very much visible.

He is a great orator and coming from a humble background, I hope he will be able to better relate to our masses than any other person brought up in a lavish, royal style family. I really like his vision and his way of thinking about the entire country on issues like infiltration from neighboring countries. Have we ever heard any Bengali politician, let alone a non-Bengali one saying "mera Bengal"?

It makes me feel really good when I see the youth getting involved in politics. They are the future so shouldn't they be the ones to take major decisions? It is them who would benefit or suffer based on the current decisions. On Facebook, I see most of my friends and young relatives happy about the change.

Leading India is probably one of the toughest leadership tasks in the world. So we shouldn't be expecting too much out of Modi just too soon. However, if he really does concentrate on economic growth and putting the corrupt politicians in jail, I think we would be on the right track.

PS: I can't help but think of Netaji when these sorts of things happen to our country. What he thought of in 1938 hasn't yet been implemented. Shall we ever get a leader of his stature? Are leaders like him made these days? I wonder...