An attempt to translate

Every tamil writer would have tried to emulate Bharathy atleast at one point of time. Here is my earnest effort as a translation

Nandhalala

My sensory perceptions


Are thy manifestations.
All the colors in my world are thee
The crows show me thy black
The trees remind me thy green.
Every sound heard
Enthralls me as thy music.
Even the burning flame
Gives the pleasure of caressing thee....


I tried not to follow Bharathy's verbatim. Just give the idea of that poem and ofcourse its beautiful metaphors.
Talking of metaphors, I read a book "Jonathan Livingston Seagull", excellently metaphorical. Will blog about it later.

Theory of Massive Algorithm

It was a usual day for me at the office, I started home biking my way through congested Chennai streets. Believe me I am no Yogi, but that day I was thinking about God, Life, Nature etc.
(1.No, I didn't booze that day! 2.I didn't watch Matrix movie the night before)

Nature appears to be sporadic and arbitrary at micro-level whereas at a macro level we find it to be very regular and perfect.
Why did that yellow chudidhar girl preferred to look at me while there were atleast 5 guys around me? Why did I wear my Lee jeans instead of Levis when both were equally dirty?

On the other hand why is moon placed in that exact orbit around Earth? A change of few km will make earth wobble more, drastic change in climate and probably no life at all. Is God really throwing a dice?

At first look it seems that the system as such is hybrid, in some cases it is predictable and in some cases it is unpredictable. At a closer look one can see that these cases are mutually exclusive and widely dispersed...so it can't be Hybrid by Nature...probably it is apparently Hybrid and deep inside it has a Massive Algorithm that governs the process.

Through out the course of evolution, mankind has been able to understand that algorithm in bits and pieces. A kind of black box testing...The test cases and reports enable us figure out what is in that black box, likecycle of seasons, alcohol, eclipses etc. But you see the algorithm becomes verycomplex at micro level, so complex that even with millions of test cases we get different answers every time...

Ahh our hands are tied with lack ofdata. If I could switch places with Bill Gates I will spend all my money to record every day of every man's (woman's) life. Probably after few thousand years with millions of Terra Bytes of data we will be able to use a powerful data-mining algorithm and dig the hidden patterns revealing that Massive Algorithm.

Then we would have conquered fate. We can predict every test cases output. We can say what will be the name of your girlfriend, we can say what will be your appraisal rating. Indian victories in cricket matches and even the days on which you will have constipation are predictable.

Bam Bam..zzzzk Savugrakki vutla sollitu vanthutiya?
I found myself before the green-yellow city bus with my bike just few feet in front of the bus. And the already irritated bus driver fondly (!) asking me whether I have informed my house that I am going to die in an accident today. Embarrassed I moved my bike away from his line and tried starting it again.

Hey! wait a minute how did he ask me about predicting an accident, is he aware of the Theory of Massive Algorithm? I should have asked him, but who listens to a software engineer...see even you are laughing.

My Name

This is one subject that many would have spent time in researching.
Everyone is interested to know what their name means…probably because they didn’t choose it!!

My saga of understanding my name started when I was in class 8. All those days I never went beyond my mothers description – “Nandhakumar is the name of Lord Krishna“. It was my Tamil aiyyah who started it up. He was asking everyone what their name means.



Guys like Suresh, Sanjay couldn’t think more than it is ‘their name’.
When my turn came I said as boldly as ever “It is the name of Lord Krishna”

“So what does that mean?”

I had never encountered such a question before, “It means, it is name of Krishna”
The class erupted into laughter. How could some one justify likes of Suresh and Sanjay laugh?

“But even it should have a meaning, don’t you think so?” aiyyah asked once the class settled

“But … aiyyah, no one asked Lord Krishna about his name”. This time aiyyah himself started the laughter.

“No, every name is a noun. And broadly, noun can be of two types, one is when you have a reason for it…a root noun sort of. Second is you don’t have a reason for it…it is called so because it has been associated with that sound, phonetic either accidentally, or deliberately”. That’s what aiyyah is….his classes never bore. He starts with some thing funny and ends up with the lesson he wanted to cover for that day.

“Probably mine is of the second type aiyyah” I said with the satisfaction of cornering him with his own words.

“No. There is a meaning in your case, probably more than one meaning”

With that he ended his class, leaving me ponder over “what could my name mean”. That day I did ask my mother…and she came up with the usual answer – “It is the name of Lord Krishna” and punctuated it with her semi-closed eyes, trying to bring the deity of lord Krishna in her imagination, uttering “Hare Rama, Hare krishna!”

I tried to explain my mother what aiyyah taught, but she found the sambar boiling to be more interesting than tamil grammar.

I had only one source of help. The next day I found myself standing before aiyyah's staffroom desk.

"So you want to know what your name means. Nandha has a root which means something like eternal, unstoppable, and can’t-be-put-off. Kumar means son. So if you put these together you get…"

“Eternal son”, I interrupted before he finished

Well it can also mean “Son of The Eternal, if you consider the possibility of grammar rule which allows one to ignore the apostrophe in usage. I mean it can also mean ‘Nandha’s kumar’ i.e. Eternals’ son”

Oh aiyyah please, but I just told, Thank you aiyyah” and left.

My God, what a name I have got.

That night I tried to explain my mother and got a “Hare Rama, Hare Krishna” as a reply.