Monday
Cardio bike
Tuesday
With Alex*
Wednesday
Cardio (bike) + Biceps (hammer curls) + Triceps (one arm extension)
thursday
Cardio (bike)
Friday
With Alex
Saturday
Cardio(bike)
Shoulders
Sunday
Cardio (bike) + Chest
* While I try to do an hour of cardio everyday with Alex means heavy 2.5 hour workouts mostly with weights . I bench close to 145 lbs ( 3 sets * 8 reps ) these days.
I have been in the USA for nearly 3 years now without a trip back home to India. For a long time nearly a year (before I came to the Bay Area) I had zero contact with any things Indian. Did not eat Indian food or watch Hindi movies nor listened to Hindi music. Here I am back with my friends from High School days and I get nearly all the Indian culture I can handle. Most of the time i wonder if India really changed so much in the 3 years that I was not there. A friend talks about a no strings affair he had when he was in India for an internhsip, other friends tell me about their Indian girl friends sleeping around. And then finally I watched this movie “Mixed Doubles”. I have not seen a bolder Indian movie.
The movie starts with a marketing executive Sunil loosing his libido and unable to satify his wife Malti (Konkona Sen Sharma ). He meets his US based friend who looks 10 years younger and attributes it to his swinging life style. Now that is the biggest piece of b. s. I have heard. I beleive I am fitter at 28 than I was at 24 when I left India. But that is because of the gym workouts and regular exercise as well as the high protein diet. I didn’t do no swinging. Any ways Sunil decides to adopt the swinger life style and finally finds a couple ready to wife swap.
The movie is beautifully made. There is nothing out of the world about this movie. From the cars they drive to the clothes the wear Sunil and Malti come across as the usual upwardly mobile yuppie family. Maybe that is the reason I found this movie so shocking. It is like the traditional orthodox India that I left behind no longer exists. In some weird ways I am truly uprooted. I am neither an American in the sense that I have not really adapted to the life here. At the same time the India I left behind ( in 2000 actually as I was mostly out of India after that) no longer exists. I need to find a wayout of this conundrum.
I had borrowed this movie from the Las Cruces city library, but the DVD I borrowed turned out to be kaput and I could only watch it half way. Tonite I finished watching it. As movies go this was one of the very best that I have ever seen. It has a beautiful story, brilliant screenplay and amazing direction.
This movie takes place in Germany after the reunification. It’s a period of considerable social unrest. The film’s plot is concerned with a single mother, Christiane Kerner (Katrin Sass) whose physician husband suddenly defected to the West years before. As the wife of a defector, Christiane initially faced a great deal of suspicion from the authorities. In the ensuing years, she raised her two children, Alex (Daniel Bruhl) and Ariane, alone, and she’s carved out a life for herself with the hand she’s been dealt. Christiane is a tireless idealist who now receives recognition from the authorities for her contributions to the Communist party and to the state. One night, Alex is arrested during a demonstration, and Christiane collapses and falls into a coma at the shock.
In the 8 months Christiane spends in a coma, East Germany undergoes permanent, irrevocable changes. People who’d built their whole lives around a political ideal lived to see it crashing down (literally) with the destruction of the Berlin Wall. East Germans rapidly embrace the changes–everything from clothing, diet, and furniture. Everyday life changes with phenomenal speed, and this all takes place while Christiane slumbers on.
Then one day, Christiane wakes up. And this presents Alex with a dilemma. He believes that his mother would suffer a relapse if she discovers the truth about the destruction of East Germany. Christiane’s friends, family and neighbours conspire to create the illusion that nothing has changed. Alex is aided and abetted in the deception by Denis, a would-be filmmaker. Denis and Alex’s efforts are hilarious, but there’s a serious side to all of this. The film includes footage of the wall collapsing, and the film really does a remarkable and amazing job showing how life rapidly changed for East Germans who were desperate to absorb Western culture. There are some scenes that are unforgettable. But apart from this, the film also is a moving story of the devotion between Alex and his mother.
I enjoyed this movie in various ways. I took in a few years of German when I was in high school. It was great to hear long forgotten words and phrases again. Some of the scenes in this movie are memorable. The shot of a helicopter carrying a statue of Lenin over the streets of East Berlin is unforgettable. It shows how a family is affected by a political upheaval and then makes no comments about politics itself. I concentrates on the characters and show how the change. I have often beleived that the greatest action is the what happens inside the heart and the mind. And it takes a really great movie to potray this action. Good Bye Lenin does exactly that.
Well the concatenation works only with string literals. For example this fails to compile
char *s1 = “Hello “;
char *s2 = “World\n”;
printf(s1 s2);
I am guessing that the concatenation happens either in the lexical analysis phase or during the parsing and not in the semantic analysis phase as Samat thinks.
void myfunc(char * msg)
{
printf(msg);
}
int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
printf(”Hello ”
“World\n”);
myfunc(”Hello ”
“World\n”);
return 0;
}
Well I did not know this but C concatenates adjacent string literals. The above example actually does print “Hello World” twice.
Rarely do I hear such words of wisdom when I am talking with someone
The only way to have a happy life is to develop one for yourself, then leave an opening for someone else to come and share it with you.
I had heard good things about this movie and also read that it was inspired by my favorite book and movie “The Godfather”. Well as a movie Sarkar is not in the same league as Godfather. I like movies that are realistic. So if a movie forces me to suspend disbelief then the price of admission was a waste. Sarkar is not able to match the realism of Godfather. Also the soundtrack for Sarkar is atrocious. There is this one chat of ” Govinda, Govinda …. ” all through the god damn movie. I guess I can just excuse Sarkar as the best that bollywood can come up with. The two Bachans are no match for Marlon Brando and Al Pacino. The other problem is can a story really be transplanted from one culture into another. In Godfather the Don might be reasonable but he is no less evil. In Sarkar the Don is almost a saint we do not see any of his nefarious activities. All in all I could have done just as well skipping this movie.
–
I rarely listen to music. I mean i never go out of my way to listen to music. Most of the time I use music ( western classical Mozart et al) to drown the background noise in my cube. As some people know i do not listen to music I watch music videos ( if you know what I mean ). However when it comes to popular music there is one artist I admire and she is Shakira. I still remember the first time I saw her “Whenever Where ever” video. Anshuman and I used to work as contractors at Confluence Networks ( a company that no longer exists ). We were late to go to work when the video came up on the tele. Both of us just sat our asses down and decided to watch the video before making a move. There is another of her videos that nearly as good “La Tortura”.
People who know me from my NMSU days might remember the huge stack of library books stashed away in my office. I am a big book/ book borrowing addict. I guess most of my discretionary income is spent on books and library late fees. Some pray for world peace all I want is an end to late fees.
The high point of my life in Pune used to be trips to BCL. The only expense I used to have has been the late fees. My fascination for libraries started even before my parents developed library software. My high school, Loyola, has fabulous sport facilities: – large playgrounds, beautiful swimming pool and a rolling hill to go along with it. However as a kid I was not interested in any of them. I spent all my time at the library. I read every magazine the library subscribed. I guess I had read nearly every book that was accessible for students in the high school. So when I had to (my low scores in SSC exams ensured this ) to go back to Loyola for junior college I got the opportunity to read all the books marked of for junior college students.
My summer holidays would start with me getting some money from my parents to join the local library. These libraries would have a policy such as only one book issued out per day. This would lead me to read a book a day. The usual schedule:- get up, wait for the library to open, read the book rinse repeat.
Sometimes due to work pressure or exams I would go for nearly a week or two without reading a book. During such periods I end up dreaming that I am reading something. I find that a prolonged abstinence from book consumption not only destroys my sleep but also my creativity. The only cure is to go grab a book and read it from start to finish.
In my copius spare time I watch videos from
http://www.cs.washington.edu/htbin-post/mvis/mvis/Colloquia
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=Google+engEDU
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/
Please point me to video lectures for Distributed Algorithms if you know of any