Saturday, May 13, 2006

A poem

When I born, I Black,
When I grow up, I Black,
When I go in Sun, I Black,
When I scared, I Black,
When I sick, I Black,
And when I die, I still black..
And you White fella,
When you born, you Pink,
When you grow up, you White,
When you go in Sun, you Red,
When you cold, you Blue,
When you scared, you Yellow,
When you sick, you Green,
And when you die, you Gray..
And you calling me Colored ??


-written by an African kid.........


I came across this poem in my mail and felt like posting it.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

I have had a lot of spare time, this past week or so.On one such lazy night, i decided to watch the tamil movie- Anniyan, having heard that it was a very well made movie.

I won't comment about the movie itself.....

I became particularly interested with the references to the Garuda Purana. All that i knew was that the Garuda purana is read at the time of death, before the cremation etc. I decided to dig a little for some more information.Here is some of the info i found about the various hells and the punishments meted out to sinners.

[Believe all that is written below, if u wish!!]

When a person dies, Yama’s messengers (yamaduta) come to take him to Yama. Yama’s messengers are terrible of appearance and they hold sticks and clubs in their hands. The atman leaves the dead physical body and adopts a very small form, as long as a finger. In this form, the dead person is taken to Yama’s abode. The actions performed in one’s life (karma) determine what is going to happen to a dead person thereafter. He is first sent to hell to serve out his sentence for the sins he has committed. Thereafter, he is born again. And what he is born as depends on the karma of the earlier life.
To take care of different types of sinners, there are different narakas.

The most important naraka is rourava, reserved for those who lie or bear false witness. The hell has a long expanse and is full of huge pits. These pits are full of burning coal. The sinner is let loose at one end of the hell and is made to walk to the other end. Naturally, he keeps falling into the pits and gets severly burnt. When he reaches the other end of the hell, he is released from rourava. He then goes to other hells if there are other sins to be accounted for.

Another hell is named maharourava. It is covered with burning sands. The fires that burn there are so bright that they hurt the sinner’s eyes. The sinner’s hands and feet are tied and he is thrown into the hell. There he burns. To compound his miseries, the hell is populated by fierce crows, vultures, wolves, mosquitoes and scorpions. These bite him and sting him and eat his flesh as he burns. After several years spent in maharourava, sinners are released.

Unlike rourava and maharourava, the hell named atishita is extemely cold. There is no light there and everything is in total darkness. The only heat that sinners can generate is by clinging on to each other’s bodies. There are hailstorms which make the skin smart. And there is no food to eat. To satisfy their hunger, the sinners end up eating each other’s flesh and blood and bones.
The hell named nikrintana is quite different. There sinners are tied to stakes and their bodies are sliced with sharp chakras. The slicing begins with the feet and then moved up the body to the head and then again starts with the feet. The tragic part of this is that the sinners do not die in the process. For as soon as a part of their body is join up again. Thus a sinner does not die, but continues to endure the misery. And so it continues for a thousand years before there is release.
A hell named apratishtha is a place where sinners are whirled round and round until they begin to vomit blood and their intestines come out of their mouths.

Asipatravana naraka is a huge expanse. The edges of the hell are extemely hot and there is a grove of trees in the centre. The centre is also cooler. The sinners are let loose at the edges and they suffer so much from the heat that they dash towards the centre. Asi means sword and patra is the blade of a sword. Vana is a forest. The hell is so named because the trees in the grove have leaves that are as sharp as the blades of swords. When sinners dash into the grove, their flesh is sliced with the leaves of the trees. And the grove is also full of fierce dogs which immediately eat up the torn flesh.
Next is the hell named taptakumbha. This has hot (tapa) pots (kumbha). The pots are full of boiling oil. The sinners are hung upside down inside these pots and roasted. And while they are being boiled in oil, vultures tear apart whatever portions of their bodies continue to be exposed.

There are many hells. But the seven major ones are the ones that have just been describedrourava, maharourava, atishita, nikrintana, apratishtha, asipatravana and taptakumbha.
All the hells are located under the earth. The hells are so terrible that a single day there seems like a hundred years on earth. Imprisonment in any naraka is for a fixed term. When all these tenures in different hells are over, it is time for the sinner to be born again. And what he is born as is determines by the karma of his earlier life. The greater the sins he committed in his earlier life, the more inferior the form he is born as . And so the cycle of birth, atonement and rebirth continues.
Rewards for punya are received in heaven. But these rewards are not forever. Once the term is over, the person has to be reborn.

The Garuda purana deals with not just on how the dead are punished for their sins. It deals with a whole lot more.
The Garuda Purana has nineteen thousand shlokas. It is a medium-sized Purana. The thousand shlokas of the Garuda Purana are divided into two parts, a purva khanda (first part) and an uttara khanda (subsequent part). Each khanda has several chapters (adhyaya). The purva khanda is much longer, it has two hundred and thirty-four chapters. The Uttara khanda has only forty-five.Garuda Purana is in the form of instructions by Lord Maha Vishnu to Sri Garuda (The King of Birds). This Purana deals with astronomy, medicine, grammar, and gemstone structure and qualities. In addition, the Garuda Purana is considered the authoritative Vedic reference volume describing the [Nine Pearls], which includes not only the well known Oyster Pearl, but also the Conch Pearl, Cobra Pearl, Boar Pearl, Elephant Pearl, Bamboo Pearl, Whale Pearl, Fish Pearl, and Cloud Pearl.The latter half of this Purana deals with life after death. .This link gives a lot more information about the Garuda purana. I have not yet read it completely[nor am i sure of its authenticity], but it does make for an interesting read.

Thursday, May 04, 2006

Mediocrity!!

It was supposed to be a day spent in relief,after completing the end term exams with only one project demonstration remaining.I hardly slept the previous night despite being sleep deprived for over a week.By around 5 in the morning, I had managed to complete the remaining work in my project and went to bed, with the intention of speaking to my prof later in the morning to get some feedback about the work.A careless mistake while demonstrating resulted in unexpectedly bad result from my program. So the prof decided to take a look at the code to identify the cause of the anomaly. Having taken one look at it, came a most surprising comment," There is no good in just getting a code from somewhere, you gotta understand how it works atleast, before demonstrating it."

This comment shocked me !!Being a mediocre programmer, i usually start my coding work, from a template and build on it, seldom starting any programming from scratch.However, this was one occasion where i wrote every line of code, with meticulous commenting and following almost every trivial Software Engineering ritual, maintaining the date of creation of code, date of modification, versioning scheme, a few lines of introductory comments about how to run the code, etc.[This was something that this very prof espoused in class saying,"maintaining good documentation is very important, even if your code is not working, these rituals must be followed-will help in debugging and maintaining the code later on!"]
This sort of organised method of working is probably best confined to speeches and not practice and was probably not expected of us..
If any work which is done with diligence can be met with such reproach, no wonder we are content to do amateurish work and be satisfied with it, coz that is what is expected of us. Going the extra mile to do things in an organised manner only lands us into trouble, resuting in comments from well meaning peers," Why did you need to do it that well, they will obviously suspect that you flicked it from somewhere".
I guess, there is some truth in these comments afterall.
My first time doing a decent programming job and i get this!!I can only say "Idu yentha lokavayyah" where mediocrity is the norm and hardwork and effort count for nothing and leads to suspicion.

Lesson from this incident: NEVER FOLLOW SE practices. If you do, then you will land in trouble. I always knew that the profs were only Bull Shitting us in the weekly 4 hours of SE lectures every week .But now, speaking from experience, i can be certain!!