Why Ajmal Kasab should NOT be hanged

The capital punishment awarded to the Mumbai attacker is, in a way, representation of Indian public’s emotion; terming Ajmal Kasab as a “killing machine”, the judge awarded him death penalty, putting it amongst “rarest of rare” circumstances.
First of all, I must clarify that as a human, and more importantly as an Indian, I have no sympathy whatsoever for Ajmal Kasab in particular and terrorists in general; and my mind fills with extreme abhorrence against everyone who is involved in the heinous act of spreading terror. I can, at best, pity their perverted, depraved and sadistic mindsets, who believe that by killing and terrorizing their own fellow humans they can achieve their objectives – and to top it all, nobody knows, not even they themselves, what their objectives are; having said that, I still feel that Ajmal Kasab should not be awarded death punishment.
There are several reasons for this kind of iconoclastic belief, first and foremost being that I am against capital punishment – it is one of the those remnants of law which has managed to trickle down since barbaric times. It has no place in a civilized society because an institution (governments in this case) has no right to take something which for which it cannot provide any compensation or alternative. It goes against the very principal of natural justice.
Secondly, though by hanging Kasab Government of India will try to bring a closure to the families of victims – there are terrorist camps operating across the Indian borders where the trainers will present him as yet another martyr who suffered by brutal hands of Indian government. They are going to make Kasab a role model and train hundreds more like him who will be ready to unleash the atrocities upon the command of their masters. So, effectively what the government is doing right now is killing the pawn when the Queens and Kings are secure elsewhere.
Thirdly, and there is a philosophy attached to this argument, the idea of punishment is twofold; to make the culprit realize that he did wrong, so that he could never do it again and also to deter others from doing the same by setting the culprit as an example in front of them. Having this idea in mind, we can clearly see that fear of death has never prevented a terrorist from wreaking havoc – on the contrary, they have been brainwashed to an extent that death appears very romantic to them, so capital punishment has not proved as a valid deterrent to terrorists. Now for terrorist, in this case Kasab – I think death will be a too easy punishment for him, a better punishment for him will be life itself.
It is not hard to imagine that a condemned prisoner in death row is more worried about himself and his life rather than pondering over what he did wrong. Under Hindu philosophy, life is like a jail in itself – those who are able to get past cycle of birth and rebirth are those who attain moksha – freedom; is it right to set him free without even letting him contemplate the gravity of his crime? A better punishment for him will be to let him rot in prison, where he gets to ponder over what he did, without the fear of capital punishment, but knowing fully well that he is not coming out of the prison.
A better idea is to go all out at the countries which conspire against India and have them disassemble the infrastructure – which fortunately, Indian government is doing very well.That will present India as a compassionate nation – a great country which is that lets live petty individuals and provides them with means to correct themselves – yet strong enough to uproot the terrorism itself.

Mumbai attacks anniversary and media's unrelenting hype

I, as an Indian, feel deeply disgusted by media’s unrelenting hype around the Mumbai’s attack. It was, as per the media, the Indian 9/11 – comparing the intensity of attacks and global media attention given to the attacks equivalent to the WTC attacks in New York. While the attacks were indeed tragic, it feels so unfair to rest all the attention on one single event given that Mumbai has seen so many other attacks in last fifteen years. A quick search through internet gives us the following list:
12 March 1993 - Series of 13 bombs go off killing 257
6 December 2002 - Bomb goes off in a bus in Ghatkopar killing 2
27 January 2003 - Bomb goes off on a bicycle in Vile Parle killing 1
14 March 2003 - Bomb goes off in a train in Mulund killing 10
28 July 2003 - Bomb goes off in a bus in Ghatkopar killing 4
25 August 2003 - Two Bombs go off in cars near the Gateway of India and Zaveri Bazaar killing 50
11 July 2006 - Series of seven bombs go off in trains killing 209
26 November 2008 to 29 November 2008 - Coordinated series of attacks killing at least 172

As is seen, the maximum people were killed in the serial blasts in 1993 – the Mumbai attacks of previous year come at third place in terms of number of casualties but let alone the remembrance walks and media series of talk shows, articles, editorials and analysis, I have not seen even a single article in newspapers about the blasts on July 11, 2006 which was fondly named by Indian media in lines with the tradition set by US media as 7/11.
To me, it makes sense if Americans light candles, organize remembrance walks and build memorials for those victims because for them it was truly a shocking moment. America is very well protected against any terrorist attacks by vigilant intelligence agencies, honest and effective police force and above all a political will to effectively deal with any country or organization who even thinks of having malicious plans against America’s well-being. The 9/11 was a moment of shock for them, their invincible nation was attacked and it was something completely unthinkable for them.
In India, however, I have to shamefully admit there has been shameless addition of dates ever since the popular culture of putting dates as event reminders has been started by 9/11. There has been 12/6, 1/27, 3/14, 7/28, 8/25, 7/11 and the latest 11/26 – so many dates and so many casualties that I am sure, if God forbid any other blasts takes place that martyrs and victims of previous year’s Mumbai carnage (so-called 11/26) will be quietly forgotten and there will be another laser show on some other date to remember the latest victims. The problem in India is that latest terrorist attacks overshadow all the previous ones and there have been so many of them that media, politicians in particular and people in general are just happy to rub the latest wounds of public memory so as to gather maximum attention – which results in high TRP (thus revenue) for media and a larger vote bank for politicians.
The US, in contrast, has seen only one such vicious attack in decades – there has been no attack on US soil by foreign elements before and after 9/11. The American politicians, fire and police department and the intelligence agencies learnt their lessons after the 9/11 attacks and carefully improvised their operations to such an extent that there has not been even a single such repetition of 9/11. In India – particularly Mumbai, I am yet to see any effective disaster management plan even after two decades of terrorism. All I see are the laser shows, lighting of candles, special series on televisions, tough talks by politicians and Mumbai police brandishing their newly acquired AK47s.
This hype is a great injustice to the families and victims of previous attacks. It belittles the sacrifices of policemen, firemen and others who fought equally bravely against previous attacks and saved precious lives. For the sake of departed souls of 11/26 and all the other previous attacks media, politicians and others should immediately stop the crass commercialization of terrorist attacks.

Old song

When I was a child, I used saw a movie and took fantasy to a song of Ashok Kumar called "naav chali". Sadly, I did not remember the name of the movie nor anything else and those were the days when you could not log on to the Internet for your answers.
After a long gap, I finally found the song on YouTube. The song is from movie Ashirwad and is sung by Ashok Kumar. It is said to be the first Indian rap songs!
Here is the link (the song begins at 4:40): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcLrPIE_18o
And here are the lyrics (I wrote them myself at HindiKalam):

नाव चली
नानी की नाव चली
नीना की नानी की नाव चली लंबे सफ़र पे

सामान घर से निकाले गये
नानी के घर से निकाले गये
इधर से उधर से निकाले गये
और नानी की नाव मे डाले गये
(क्या क्या डाले गये?)

एक छड़ी एक घड़ी
एक झाड़ू एक लाड़ू
एक संदूक एक बंदूक
एक सलवार एक तलवार
एक घोड़े की जीन
एक ढोलक एक बीन
एक घोड़े की नाल
एक जीवर का जाल
एक लहसुन एक आलू
एक तोता एक भालू
एक डोरा एक डोरी
एक बोरा एक बोरी
एक डन्डा
एक झंडा
एक हंडा
एक अन्डा
एक केला एक आम
एक पक्का एक कच्चा
और...टोकरी में एक बिल्ली का बच्चा

फिर एक मगर ने पीछा किया
नानी की नाव का पीछा किया
नीना की नानी का नाव का पीछा किया
(फिर क्या हुआ?)
चुपके से पीछे से
ऊपर से नीचे से
एक एक सामान खींच लिया

एक बिल्ली का बच्चा
एक केला एक आम
एक पक्का एक कच्चा
एक अन्डा एक हंडा
एक झंडा एक डन्डा
एक बोरी एक बोरा
एक डोरी एक डोरा
एक तोता एक भालू
एक लहसुन एक आलू
एक जीवर का जाल
एक घोड़े की नाल
एक ढोलक एक बीन
एक घोड़े की जीन
एक तलवार एक सलवार
एक बंदूक एक संदूक
एक लाड़ू एक झाड़ू
एक घड़ी एक छड़ी

(मगर नानी क्या कर रही थी?)
नानी थी बेचारी बुढ्ढी बहरी
नीना कि नानी थी बुढ्ढी बहरी
नानी कि नींद थी इतनी गहरी इतनी गहरी
(कितनी गहरी?)

नदिया से गहरी दिन दोपहरी
रात की रानी ठन्डा पानी
गरम मसाला पेट में ताला
साढ़े सोलह
पन्द्रह के पन्द्रह
दूना तीस
तिया पैंतालीस
चौके साठ
पना पच्हत्तर
छक्के नब्बे
साते पछलन
आठे बीसा
नवा पतीसा
गले मे रस्साSSS...

Bed Bugs and Us...

“I finally found the proof of existence of bed bugs in our new house” – my roommate comes shouting with joy from his room. The joy on his face could be compared to space explorers just after having discovered life on Mars.
This discovery, howsoever trivial, was important. This single-handedly explained all the red marks and rashes on our skins. The bedbugs, our common household pests, have been like our pets for more than a year now. In our previous apartment, after having lived in denial for five months, we had found some small ant-like creature crawling on our bed and we threw away the bed immediately. The reason for shifting our apartment lay in confusion regarding the property deed between bedbugs and us. We thought that we had rented the apartment for a year, while the bedbugs insisted that we had encroached on their permanent residence. After seven months of bitter battle in which we lost litres of our blood, the bedbugs finally won and we came to our new apartment eight weeks back.
The new apartment, seemed a promising one with spick-and-span look, clean rugs and no sign of bedbugs, but itches and rashes started their surprise apparition on our skins all over again. I was living in denial till my roommate showed me a living proof of our tiny guests. In all these months of war with bedbugs, this was the enemy’s first soldier we had caught. Despite all the pent-up rage, we were faced with moral dilemma. I posed following question before him:

1. Does Geneva Convention apply in this case?
2. Should we treat this single bug as a prisoner-of-war or put charges of waging war against us and treat accordingly?
3. If prisoner-of-war, PoW for short...

The last question is deliberately left incomplete because at this point my roommate picked up his slippers and literally beat the pulp out of the bedbug in question while murmuring choicest of abuses in Hindi. R.I.P. bedbug!

Krishna Preachings

It’s been a little more than a year that I have been going to Krishna Lunch at Florida. The meal is tasty and really cheap – 10 meals (now they have reduced it to 9 meals) for $30. Beginning 2009, I came to know about Krishna Dinner (though they write it as Krsna Dinner – awful transliteration) every Friday, which is for free. The catch is, you need to listen to their pravachan (preaching) for about an hour and half. While some enjoy it like a story, some listen to it faithfully like word of god, few call it “payment” for free meal, and some take it as suffering they need to endure for manna. I, maybe there are few more like me, take a critical view of the whole sermon. So critical that if I were ever to express it in front of them then there is very high chance that I won’t be welcome there anymore.
I start with an old joke, but before that some background for uninitiated. It is said that uncle of unborn Krishna, called Kans was steering the chariot of newly wedded Devika (Krishna’s mother) and Vasudeva (her husband). While driving the chariot, a prophecy was made that eighth son of Devaki and Vasudeva would kill Kans. So, Kans imprisoned his sister and brother-in-law and started killing Devaki’s children. The joke goes thus: that if Kans knew that his sister’s eighth child would kill him, then why did he keep his sister and brother-in-law in same cell? No Krishna devotee has ever been able to answer that… and yes, Hinduism does not believe in virgin birth.
So, Krishna grows up, and since he is God himself, girls start falling in love with him. In all of the painting and photographs, Krishna is showed alongside Radha. The two of them are idolized together and prayers and hymns have their name together. Reader might be tempted to think of Radha as wife of Krishna, which is absolutely wrong. Krishna’s wife is Mandodari (and ten thousand more) but not Radha. So, was Radha mistress of Lord Krishna? No again, Radha was married to Ayan. Then isn’t it T adultery by God himself? if I were to pose this question to preachers, then they’ll probably answer that God can indulge in adultery because he is God! Right ho! Q.E.D.
Then they preach about benefits of vegetarianism. Vegetarianism is good, I am a vegetarian myself. However, their reasons for being a vegetarian are farcical, absurd, preposterous and derisory. They say that we accumulate negative “karma” (deeds) because of killing animals. If that is correct, then aren’t we killing the plants too? Isn’t there any negative karma about that? It’s like changing methods of capital punishment in name of making it humane and less painful. It may be humane and less painful, but not for the condemned, instead for those who watch the condemned die. For all we know lethal injection may be more painful than beheading, but the witnesses do not see the gore so it is alright for them. Same is with plants, death may be painful for them too but since we do not see any suffering it’s ok to eat a dead plant. For animals, that is a different matter, they make noises – it’s gory to watch that.
This has really made me curious about religion and its various interpretations. The god they pray openly committed adultery; we do not have any proof that he did not eat meat; he certainly did not preach monogamy because he himself had 10,000 wives. When we hear the ISKCON interpretations they are paradoxical, in fact, they go diametrically opposite the path God showed us. Are the interpretations asinine? I should say no, the literature is written by most learned people of that time. Then is the interpretation correct? I am not sure about the correctness, but I am not in position to refute them altogether. You answer.

How to build a interpreter? - 1

I recently got a project to build an interpreter for RPAL. The first part of project was to build a 'scanner/lexical analyser' and then make an Abstract Syntax Tree for that. So far so good, but when I went ahead to create a scanner most of the help on the internet said that scanner is a deterministic finite automata and blah blah blah...
So, I decided to write something myself in the hope that people will find it useful. Here's a sample grammar, very small so that it doesn't inflate the post size and yet enough to show all the concept. Oh, and by the way, this will be a LL(1) parsing technique, which means we will be reading the file (which we need to scan) from left to right, and creating the tokens from left to right and we may sometimes look one character ahead to decide exactly which token to formulate.
We will also be taking care of some standard issues such as left-recursion.
In next post: The grammar

The real champions

Pakistan won the ICC T20 world championship for 2009. India - the (former) world champions, could not even make it to semifinal stage this time. This was despite being labelled the best team of the lot in formidable form.
Now, please pardon my heresy, but Pakistan were as good as world champions last time too had it not been for a suicidal shot of second last ball. For me, they were as good as winners last time too because India's victory was not emphatic by any standard, it was just fluke, just a lucky day for Mr. MSD.
Our beloved captain needs to understand that cricket is not entirely a game of luck, had it been so I would have been playing at Lord's today instead of writing this blog post. He, and other players, need to take adequate rest rather than sell watches, motorcycles, insurance, chyavanprash etc.

Fun at Starbucks

When you buy something at Starbucks, they usually ask for your name and call your as soon as your coffee is ready. The process is neat and efficient except for the fact that the Americans never seem to quite get a hang of Indian names and usually you have to spell it to them. Even spelling out your name is difficult because they usually misunderstand 'v' as 'b'.
One of my friends, having quite a complicated name by American standards, came up with ingenious solution. He started giving his names as Bumbles, which Starbucks guys understood without a hitch. I liked the idea very much and next time I gave my name as John, and it was the quickest service I ever received at any Starbucks. Next time, I tried Ben, then Ryan, then Chris and each time the service was just marvellous.
Now, after ordering for some time, I hit another idea - I decided to derive some (sadistic) pleasure out of ordering the coffee. Next time, when I ordered my coffee, I gave the name as Anam (pronounced Ay-nAm - a girl's name) and watched them struggle with spelling, but only a bit. On my next order onwards, I let my wildness loose and came up with name Chattopadhyay, then Chittaranjan, followed by Ananthsaynam and then the killer - Kozhikode (an Indian city) - each time it was quite fun to watch then requesting me to say it again with an 'eh, what?' expression and then finally asking me spell that while a long queue of impatient customers waited behind me. Even with spelling, they had trouble because the stream of characters never seemed to end for them, imagine me spelling Ananthsaynam real slow on a morning rush hour, and the counter clerk trying to rush things through. Once, the girl just stopped me at 'Ananthsa' and told me that I will get my coffee. All this while, I worked hard to keep a straight face and gave the name in matter-of-factly way.
Quite fun to do once in a while, for now, I am back to John!