On the role of the media in sports in India

September 13th, 2008 admin

Some things are only visible from the corner of the eye; they vanish when you try to look at them directly. Similarly, I believe, the best approach to religion  is not a headlong dive to grab its elusive essence, but rather, an indirect infusion of those ideas and ideals via a more concrete medium. One such concrete medium, which India seems to have never given much chance to, is sports. My friend, Akshay, sent me an article by Professor V. Raghunathan (author of the book “Games Indians Play: Why we are the way we are”) on why India’s performances in sports in general and Olympics in particular falls way short of what one would expect from a nation of over a billion people. The article is called “Games Indians Don’t Win“.

I agree with most of Dr. Raghunathan’s observations though I find that some of the arguments could be further strengthened by factual details. I also felt that the article does not point out one factor which can elevate the status of sports in India - media. I see many children and young people nowadays finding no outlet for their natural instincts to exercise their bodies and minds via sports. Instead much of their energies are being channeled towards unimaginative, creativity-sapping shows on the TV and the inescapable din created by the industry that religion is becoming. Lot of it is because in population heavy urban areas, there are not enough facilities and open spaces for the young to play. In rural areas where there are open areas and, arguably, time at hand for kids to explore sport, facilities and, more importantly, awareness are severely lacking. There is no incentive to try to be great at a sport.

The young minds of the country, with no reason or facilities to go out an play, are increasingly being moulded by what the see on the TV. Some get influenced by the western media and the western culture they see on the TV and blindly jump on to that bandwagon. The remaining shun the western influence so much that they lean to the other extreme, and get swept by fundamentalist religious rhetoric. In either case, the TV influences their ability to think for themselves. Instead of making the youth broad-minded in their approach to cultures, science and entertainment, it makes them confused, at first, and, dogmatic and narrow-minded, eventually.  Religion in India is losing its real meaning; it has become a service industry. It is encroaching the airwaves via loud speakers and TV and radio shows. It is encroaching every free piece of land, which should have been left as play areas for children, by temple construction projects. It is sucking up every rupee anyone can and cannot spare to feed its furnace of the self-fulfilling prophecies. It is taking over people’s ability to think. Its misinterpretation and misrepresentation over the years is reaching a point where sense and rationality no longer prevails, and democracy itself, that fairest social system, might no longer be able to see right from wrong. The opium of the masses, as Karl Marx called it, is finally taking over the sanity of a democracy. If a majority in a democracy are disillusioned, I wonder what keeps a democracy from self-destruction? The economic prosperity that India now enjoys is a great opportunity to keep religious and other extreme influences in check by clearly communicating to the masses the true reasons for this economic upturn; this upturn is in spite of the religious fervor gripping the country, not because of it.

Coming back to the topic on hand, I think the media is best equipped to extricate the population from such extremes and let some sense prevail. Sports is a great leveler and is one of the best ways to bring a nation together. The media has a huge role it can play to help kids play in their free time, rather than watch soap operas and immerse themselves in religious discourses. Here is a snippet from an email I wrote on this topic to some of my family members.

“Media, especially television, has a tremendous control over the nation’s psyche. Media can make or break national opinions. The current fascination with game shows, song-and-dance competitions or soap operas is by and large a media created state of mass-hypnosis. The same power of the media can get people to start appreciating the importance of physical exercise and sport. More importantly, it can be an enabler for pulling in interest and, therefore, money into regional and national sporting events. An example is the recent city-based cricket leagues. An entire industry, a multi-billion dollar enterprise, can be built around sports in India. It is an largely untapped market. Doordarshan’s depressing, half-hearted, monopolistic attempts at covering sporting events in India makes people even more reluctant to try sports professionally. Sports is real-life drama and entertainment. It needs professionally trained media-men to bring out that drama on screen. Once that excitement, that tension, and the drama can be conveyed, the audience will pay attention. This might require bringing out the personal backgrounds of the players, their histories, their stories of hardships and determination to the people. Once people are latched, competition increases both in the sport and the coverage of the sport. The advertising revenue starts to flow in. With money flowing in, there is a feed back effect. More people want to take part in sports, more people want to watch sports, more people want to cover sports and make money. For example, why do we prefer Harsha Bhogle to Sanjay Manjrekar in the cricket commentator’s box, and why do we prefer Star Sports to Doordarshan for sports coverage? Quality. People can perceive quality differences. Similarly, why is Praveen Kumar, the cricketer, evoke national interest? Because of his background as a wrestler from a small town. These small-town heroes are the media pets. They help catch the public’s fancy. “If it can be him…it can be me!”, they aspire.

In India, shooting, archery, wrestling, boxing are relatively easy to make popular. The sports persons have to be cast into media demi-gods… only then will people know their names and their existence, let alone pay much attention. When the drama of sports is discovered and conveyed by the media to the audiences, even shooting can be made into a heart-racing, edge-of-the-seat thriller.”

One thing that I should clarify is “Why should children play sports - a rather mundane, pointless exercise?”, “Why is winning medals at the Olympics that important?”, “Why not let the entire nation, instead, spend all their energy and time learning their place in God’s scheme of things?”. The answer, I think, is because they will discover their God, their place in the scheme of things, their goals, better, by participating in sports and playing their heart out, than by cracking coconuts, lighting agarbattis, exchanging bananas or watching TV.

Posted in Experiences, Friends, Information | 2 Comments »

On Choice

September 11th, 2008 admin

My friend, Sandeep, sent me a link to a very interesting talk given by Dr. Barry Shwartz, a sociologist, who observes and persuasively argues that excessive choice is bad.

I agree with this observation. More generally, this observation applies to any kind of decision making. We make many decisions in life - in everyday life and in the grander scale of life. In everyday life, we decide on things like which vacuum cleaner to buy, or, which hair conditioner to buy, both of which were decisions I had to make last week. In the grander scale of life we need to make decisions such as who to marry, or, which profession to work towards.

To make a decision we weigh pros and cons across several dimensions and finally settle on a decision. If we do a good job at making the decision, we have considered all the dimensions and all the pros and cons along those dimensions. We are happy that we have come to a global optimum across the search space of the solution, and we can pat ourselves on the back for it. As the number of dimensions grow, however, the search space explodes in size. The resources and time to do this optimization become overwhelming. We are forced to work with a smaller search space that we can handle within the time we give ourselves to make the decision. Say we have an hour to kill and feel like watching come TV. We sit in front of the box, pick up the remote and flip through channels. We want to decide which channel to watch. We do not want to spend that hour trying to optimize that choice. To make a decision in some reasonable time, we need to make more decisions first. We need to decide which dimensions of choice we want to ignore. This is choice-pruning. For example, we might not care for a show if it is not in Hi-Def. Then the choice-space shrinks by an order of magnitude. However, once we do shrink the choice-space, we have to settle for something that may be a sub-optimal solution compared to the global optimum. And that can take away from the satisfaction you draw from your, potentially sub-optimal, choice.

For some of these decisions there is no way to know the optimality of the solution. For example, once you marry a person, you better make appropriate adjustments and make happiness out of it. There is no point comparing the decision to anything - what if I had married someone else, what if I had taken up that other job offer 10 years ago? In some ways not knowing the optimal solution is a boon. You can rest assured that there is no such thing as an optimal solution in that case. The decision you make is the only decision that matters. No one can prove to you that a different choice would have definitely been better. It is calming to know that your decision is beyond judgment. Still, too much choice can be paralyzing in this case also. The only saving grace is that almost any decision is really a pretty good decision.

For some other decisions however, there is a direct measurable impact. These are the decision that can haunt. The stock you choose to invest your money in may tank, while that other option you were considering just as fervently, does really well. The vacuum cleaner you chose sucks, while the one that your friend bought for just a little bit more money, sucks better. And it is for these decisions that too much choice can not only be paralyzing, but also be humiliating. You blame yourself for the sub-optimality of your choice; after all, you have proof to justify that blame.

I routinely find myself presented with this overdosage of choice. And being mathematically and engineeringly inclined, I tend to at least give choice-pruning and optimization a fair shot. As I wrote to Sandeep in my response email:

“Being an engineer I tend to compare the available choices across many dimensions, and the search space grows multiplicatively. I was looking for a hair conditioner yesterday, the dimensions were - ingredients (should not have any obvious bad stuff), the company (should be something I have heard of), the quantity (should not be measured in gallons), the price (should be reasonable), delivery mechanism (spray vs cream), application time (dry hair or wet hair - further subdivided into needs rinsing after application or not) etc. Comparing all this across the 30 brands in the store left me tired.”

In fact, excessive choice wastes time and energy, and therefore, wastes money. Just by spending 20 minutes to decide on a hair conditioner, I am sure I bumped up the price of the produce by a few dollars. Time is money, and this was time I could have better spent elsewhere.

And the solution to this problem of excessive choice is not communism, or even reducing choice, necessarily. Availability of choice is not the root problem. The problem is the excessive demand excessive choice places on the decision-maker. The decision-making has to continue to be streamlined. The choice has to be presented to the chooser in a structured, standardized, unbiased way. This is really a service, which I like to call “choice pruning”. It can be an industry in its own right. An example of this is epinions.com, where people’s past experiences with their decision-making about buying a product are collected, analyzed and presented to the customer to help speed up his or her decision making process. The opinions are not strictly standardized, and I can spend days reading through the reviews there, as I recently did when trying to decide on a vacuum cleaner; but still, it does help. At least you know that with hundreds of respondents, there is a chance that any biased views and any person-to-person variation in the interpretation of the measurement scale are evened out.

By spending time on what we are choosing, we affect what we are choosing. If I spend 5 years to decide which stock to invest money in, I have already lost more money than a sub-optimal decision could have cost me. In other words, as the time to make a choice increases, by the time you finally choose, the choices available to you might end up being different than the choices you optimized for! Thus anything to speed up the selection, anything to assist with the optimization, anything to reduce future repenting, is a much-needed solution. For me, rigorous, instinctive, choice-pruning, indifference to the actual choice made, and a poor memory, help make this process faster, reasonably optimal, and guilt free.

Posted in Experiences, Philosophy | No Comments »

The purpose of life …

August 31st, 2008 admin

Kavita is driving her Pontiac Vibe south towards Charlotte, North Carolina, and eventually Atlanta, Georgia; it is still the beginning of this Labor Day weekend. I am settled is the passenger seat with the laptop in my lap and Louis Armstrong’s Greatest Hits enveloping us.  The sun is setting to my left, lining the edges of the blue-gray clouds in brilliant yellow-orange.My thoughts drift in and out of a notion I stumbled upon a couple of weeks ago. It came unannounced and in a spark of realization. However, it has stayed with me for quite some time. And I now think that it deserves some more inspection and hence this write-up. The notion, the thought, was with respect to a question all of us ask ourselves, and wonder about, at some point in our life. Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? Are we simply on nature’s rollercoaster, evolving forever to be able to survive, as the conditions allow it? Is life just purposeless meandering of helpless beings? Is purpose something we concoct and associate with life to try to give it some shape and meaning? Are we just telling ourselves stories to make passing our time here a little easier? Are these stories about the purpose of life, and we know there are many versions, with many names, just the grandest of the entertaining illusions created for us and by us, entertainment-seekers?

Mankind is different from all other living creatures, mankind claims. Why? That is the question. And in that “Why?” lies the answer - reason - the ability to reason and the thirst for reason. The ability to reflect, to introspect and to innovate is a manifestation of the same distinction. The introspection that helped us identify this distinction, and the introspection that is the distinction, are one and the same. The question is the answer. And though this kind of an answer seems vaguely incomplete, almost too obvious to be significant and only escapist wordplay, this general principle of self referencing is central to intelligence.  Humans are considered different from other living creatures because they are intelligent – capable of participating in a closed loop of self-evaluation and adjusting behavior to the findings of such an evaluation.

Before trying to experiment with the notion of self-referential answers and self-fulfilling prophesies about the purpose of life, let me go back and try to work on one of the questions that I raised about the need for a purpose of life. We could say that our existence is just a chance happening that rolled out of millions of years of chemical reactions that happened simply because the chemicals were in the right place at the right time. These chemicals were helpless and had no say in the reactions at least until a point when the chemicals became sophisticated enough to preferentially seek out the right place and the right time. Prior to such time, the direction such reactions took were driven by the state of affairs in the rest of the universe, or, in other words, chance. Gradually, the chemicals involved in the chemical reaction became more sophisticated and were able to extricate themselves somewhat from the mercy of chance. The beings, like humans, had the power to identify and appreciate to some degree, their position in the scheme of things, their significance and insignificance with respect to the rest of the universe. Even if they did not have the answers all worked out, this chance chemical reaction had reached a stage where it was curious enough to question the need for that very reaction. The reaction itself started off as a mathematical probability. The direction the reaction took, the continual readjustments to keep the reaction alive, though also not immune to chance, does seem to point towards something more than just survival. The evolution of species, most recently humans, sometimes seems wholly unnecessary. Other animals alive today are perfectly suited for today’s environment. Yet there was something guiding the chemicals to continually keep reacting in a way so as to develop newer species, not necessarily any better suited to the environment, but definitely better suited to think about this question - What is the purpose of this reaction – the reaction which has reached a scale where it can finally identify its existence and think about itself? And when we pose the question thus, the answer seems to scream out at us. The reaction has reached the point where it can identify itself, and is trying to figure out where it is headed. Maybe that is the goal of the reaction, at least for the time being – figure out where it is headed. Put another way, and this is the claim I was driving towards, maybe the purpose of life is to figure out the purpose of life!

I have not established a reason for why there needs to be a purpose to life. I have just tried to argue that there must be some other reason to life than perpetually trying to be best suited to the environment we find ourselves in. But maybe that argument is unsatisfactory. Even so, coupled with the reasoning mind, that argument, at least, nudges us towards a related, yet different, purpose - trying to figure out if there is purpose to life and if so, why. Not what, but why?

Either way, that is whether we say, “The purpose of life is to figure out the purpose of life”, or, “The purpose of life is to figure out if there is a purpose of life”, the open-endedness of this simple closed-loop recursion is similar to the answer to why is man different from other beings.  Stepping out of the mind-warp that this self-referential statement can lead to for the time being, I would now like to think about the similarities that this notion has to the many other answers to the same conundrum. This quest has the quality of being never-ending - an infinite, perpetually uplifting, notion, which is a quality found in any religion and any other answer to this question. The notion of self-referencing has a powerful individual appeal. Each thinking mind can seek to define its own purpose of life based on introspection. This is like each person defining and following his or her own religion, and more importantly recognizing that everyone else has a different, unnamed, religion.  Whether one chooses to figure out the purpose of life or to figure out if there is a purpose to life, they have a purpose in life. This seems better than any rigid doctrine that disallows continual refinements, and is certainly better than the aimlessness of a skeptic who either says, “I will never know the purpose of life”, or “I don’t care what the purpose of life is”. In fact, this self-referential notion allows the skeptic to hold his view as long as it seems reasonable.

I found this relevant quote today (09/24/2008):

“The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one.” - Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents.

Posted in Philosophy | No Comments »

Notes on Memory Consistency and Cache Coherence

June 27th, 2008 admin

Here are some of my notes on the topic of memory consistency and cache coherence, and how uniprocessor and multiprocessor cores have to be built to support the consistency models. Most of this was written up when I was preparing for my Qualifying Exam at NC State University last semester. This is a relatively complicated topic to understand well, and there might still be several mistakes in how I understood the ideas. Also, this might only make sense, and be interesting, to people familiar with these areas of computer architecture. Here’s the pdf file: Notes on Memory Consistency and Cache Coherence

Posted in Information, Tutorials | No Comments »

Protect your platinum - catalytic converter theft

June 25th, 2008 admin

Someone neatly sawed off and removed the catalytic converter from under Kavita’s Pontiac Vibe yesterday while it was parked in the Friday Center park-n-ride lot in the UNC, Chapel Hill, campus. When Kavita started up the car, it started up with a loud, complaining roar rather than the usual hum. Clueless about why the car was so loud, she stopped the car and started to look under the hood to see if she could spot any obvious problem, when someone shouted from across the lot, “Looks like your catalytic converter was stolen as well.” He was another of the many victims of such theft yesterday. He called campus police, which was good because Kavita was not sure what she should do next. She tried reaching me, but I was in the gym, away from my cell phone. So she called Anant in California, got my gym’s number and had the lady at the front desk in the gym call for me over the PA system. I came home from the gym, got Kavita added as an associate on my AAA account and ordered a tow-truck to get the car to our mechanic at Wasp Automotive. Meanwhile, the campus police officer, a lady, stayed with Kavita until I reached there. This was nice of her. With typical wait times of 60 minutes for the region, we were expecting a long wait at the lot for the tow truck. However, he showed up a few minutes after I reached the Friday center in my car. He noticed that Kavita’s license plate had expired and the tow-truck guy could not, therefore, tow the car as part of AAA’s services. He was a nice guy though. He had a huge lump of tobacco pushed against the inside of his left cheek wall, and in between spitting, he informed us that in the very same lot, last Wednesday, there were nearly 40 cases of the exact same incident. He had himself towed many a cat-less car that day. He said, “If you want me to tow this to Wasp, I can do it, but you can save yourself a hundreded and twenty five dollars by just driving it yourself. It will be loud, but fine.” He wanted us to file a complaint with the campus police since they had not provided any protection to the lot in spite of the sudden spate of these thefts since last week. We thanked him showing up at such short notice, and for not charging us a penny for his time and effort. His trip must have cost him at least a few bucks of gas. He did inform us that the state will slap a $250 fine on us because of the expired license plate. I drove the car with the emergency blinkers on to Wasp and left it there with a note that the insurance people want to take a look at it before we start off any repairs. So with the $250 fine, the insurance deductible (assuming they pay for it), this misadventure will cost us upwards of a thousand dollars. With our trip to India planned for this Sunday, I am not even sure if the repairs/insurance claims etc will be done before we leave.

In any case, the point of this whole entry is that catalytic converters are a relatively easy part of your car to steal. They contain precious metals like platinum, palladium etc. and when mined for the metals can fetch $50 to $100. Replacing them, of course, costs more than a thousand dollars usually. There is nothing you can do to avoid such theft except avoiding parking in desolate lots. When parking in public areas make sure you park at a location that is visible to pedestrian or vehicular traffic. Such visibility maybe a deterrent. Park close to mall entrances if malls do not have police cars driving around the lot or surveillance cameras. Comprehensive insurance is a good idea, as long as the deductible is low enough that you don’t end up paying the whole amount. Park inside a garage where possible. If you have any other ideas about how to reduce the chances of such theft, let me know.

Posted in Experiences | 2 Comments »

Niagara Falls, Niagara Uplifts

June 7th, 2008 admin

Last weekend, Kavita and I visited our friends, Vishal and Nimisha in Rochester, New York state. We met Vishal’s father too, who is currently visiting them. The highlight of the trip was the trip to Niagara Falls, an hour and a half’s drive away from Rochester. Niagara Falls consist of three main falls - The American Falls, the Bridal Veil Falls and the gigantic, Horseshoe Falls -and these three can be seen in this order in this picture from Wikipedia’s article about Niagara. Comprehending the immensity of this behemoth is hard once you are in the waters below engulfed by The Horseshoe Falls on three sides, especially if it is raining hard at the same time, as it was for us. There was only one escape with the rain pelting from above, swelling waters below, and the unstoppable din from the freefalling 50-meter walls of milky whiteness closing in on three sides - turn around and head to safety. And, thankfully, that is what the boat we were on, eventually, did.

Here are some pictures from the trip.

Posted in Travel | No Comments »

A Sunday afternoon stroll

May 26th, 2008 admin

Kavita and I walked around Lake Raleigh in the NCSU campus. Here Kavita discovered a treasure of mulberry trees lining the lake. She was so excited, she started to eat the mulberry fruit within 3 seconds of the discovery, without giving me a chance to think through the implications of eating some wild berry off of a wild tree. She enjoyed them so thoroughly that I was tempted to try it out, and it was, indeed, sweet. Later, we went to the DH Hill library (the main NCSU library). I wanted to show Kavita the Digital Medial Lab at the NCSU library. We also tried the long-distance wireless talking device on the lawns outside the library. This is a pair of pink stone (or cement) blocks with a concave piece gouged out of each and made to fact each other, with about a 100 feet between them.

I came back home and double-checked to make sure that we had not ingested something crazy and found out that what we ate was, most likely, morus rubra (red mulberry). Here is the wikipedia link to mulberry.

Click on the picture to go to the rest of the album.

Posted in Travel | No Comments »

Mau’s Question

May 24th, 2008 admin

There is a matrix of numbers with n rows and m columns. The matrix consists of integers taking the value 1 through n. That is, at any given cell in the matrix the value is 1 or 2 or 3 or … or n. We want to find out how many such matrices exist in which you can always find n cells, one per row, that together have all the n unique integers in them.

Here is my approach and my solution to the problem. This solution has not been verified by Mau or anyone else, and there is a chance that I am missing some aspect of rigor required to make the proof watertight and, thus, self-verifying.

Approach

The space of all nxm matrices can be divided into a disjoint set of matrices that completely span the space. This disjoint set comprises
- matrices which have no row with all n numbers
- matrices which have exactly one row that contains all n numbers
- matrices which have exactly two rows that contain all the n numbers
… so on till
- matrices which have exactly n-1 rows that contain all the n numbers
- matrices which have each of the n rows containing all the n numbers

Now we can solve the problem for each subset that makes up the disjoint set that spans the space of mxn matrices, and add up the individual results. Interestingly, working backwards makes more sense to me. So let’s look at the subset of matrices which have all the n numbers in each of the n nows. There is no candidate matrix here that fails our criterion. All matrices will satisfy the criterion. Let’s call the set of matrices that satisfy the criterion, the set S and those that fail the criterion the set F. Therefore no matrix in this subset adds to F.

Next, let’s look at the subset of matrices which have all the n numbers in exactly n-1 rows. The remaining row, whatever be the number or numbers it carries, will cause the matrix to satisfy the criterion. Therefore no matrix in this subset adds to F.

Next, let’s look at the subset of matrices which have all the n numbers in exactly n-2 rows. The remaining 2 rows, will cause the overall matrix to fail, if they have no more than 1 number in them. That is they remaining two rows must be full of only one number. If a second number exists in either of the two rows, the matrix satisfies our criterion.

And so on.

So, the number of matrices in F is a sum of the following product over all values of i:
(how many ways can we select n-i rows)(how many ways can all n unique numbers show up in each of those selected rows)(how many ways can the remaining i rows contain, at most, i-1 unique numbers)

Solution

Basically, out of all possible matrices with n rows and m cols such that each element is an integer between 1 and n (both included), I try to figure out the number of matrices which do NOT satisfy the condition we are after, i.e., for these matrices you CANNOT select n elements, one on each row, such that the n elements are the n unique numbers, 1 through n. Call this set of matrices, which fail the condition, F (for fail). We are trying to find how many elements are in the set F.

The final answer for the number of matrices the satisfy the criteion, therefore, will be n^(n.m) - |F|, where |F| represents the cardinality of F, that is, the number of elements in set F.

To get to |F|, my line of thinking was:

F =
matrices for which there are, at most, n-1 unique numbers in the n rows
+ matrices for which there are, at most, n-2 unique numbers in n-1 rows and all n numbers in the remaining 1 row
+ matrices for which there are n-3 unique numbers in n-2 rows and all n numbers in the remaining 2 rows + … etc.

By ensuring that all the n numbers show up in the remaining x rows we are making sure that the matrix that satisfies a given term in the above summation does not satisfy the the previous term, and thus avoids being double counted.

Substituting terms,

As a summation, this can be written as

Here is how to understand each term in the summation above:
is the number ways can you choose n-i rows
is the number ways can you choose the n-i-1 numbers that will go into the selected n-i rows
is the number of ways can those (n-i).m elements in those n-i rows be filled with the chosen (n-i-1) numbers
is the number of ways we can guarantee that the remaining i rows each contain all the n elements.

Posted in Tidbits | No Comments »

Annamacharya Jayanti Celebrations in Morrisville, NC

May 22nd, 2008 admin

On May 17th, Kavita’s music teacher, Mrs. Anuradha Chivukula, organized Sri Annamacharya Jayanti celebrations at the Hindu Bhavan Hall in Morrisville, North Carolina. She has been organizing this event every year for the past 11 years. The main purpose is to celebrate the great 15th century poet-composer-saint Sri Annamacharya by bringing together the local Carnatic music and Indian Classical dance talent to participate in the celebration. This also gives a wonderful opportunity for the local and regional audiences to enjoy some beautiful music and dance, and socialize. Many of the participants and members of the audience also bring food items and this provides for a large pot-luck style lunch and is an added draw for the audience. Of course, all of this is at no cost to the audience! Kavita participated this year in the event by singing, as part of a group, 4 kritis composed by Sri Tallapaka Annamacharya.

Here are some video snippets of the event.

 

 



 

Two girls (whose names I will provide as soon as I can find out) did an awesome job singing the kriti, “Vande Vasudevam”.

 

Kavita’s music teacher, Mrs. Anuradha (in the center in the video) along with other participants (Left to Right: Mrs. Jyothi Sadhu, Mrs. Srikanthi Gunturi, Mrs. Anuradha Chivukula, Mrs. Lakshmi Putcha and Mr. Subramanyam Darbha) sang the 7 main compositions by Sri Annamacharya, called Saptagiri Kirtanas. They were supported by, Mr. Kalyan Sundar on the veena, Mr. Vikram Raj Kumar on the violin (Vikram is an NC State student) and Master Arjun Raghavan who did a splendid job playing the mridangam.

 



 

Kavita and friends (Left to Right: Mrs. Sumana Nanduri, Mrs. Kavita Krishna, Mrs. Usha Jayanthi, Mrs. Lakshmi Karra and Mrs. Uma Gorti) singing some kirtanas.

 

Posted in Events | No Comments »

Comments on my older webpage

May 20th, 2008 admin

March 22, 2005 - 08:22 PM

Vijay Vadali: Akka told my friends and me about your website.”You have made imagination turn real”. Some of my friends are so inspired by the pics of your house that they now are drawing inspiration. Wonderful pictures.

Anil’s Response: Thank you (also for bringing to my notice the problems with the previous guestbook)

March 22, 2005 - 08:22 PM

Venkat Moncompu: Hi Anil, It’s by far the most well created website by a working individual that I have come across in the recent times. The pains taken to keep it chronologically and meticulously organised, speaks for the enthusiasm and effort that does go into such an excellent website. One of your picture - that of the cyclist in motion - fascinated me since I’v been always wanting to take one such picture at high shutter speed. Have read about the techniques in photography books but never tried it. Looking forward to meeting you in early october.. till then. cheers, Venkat

Anil’s Response: I’ll tell you more about how to take such pics the next time we meet which I suppose would be this April!

December 22, 2004 - 08:22 PM

Saurabh Mishra: Awesome job anil!! Very well organized and excellent collection of poems, pics, thoughts and just everything else. Keep up the good work. Best wishes to you and Kavita for the wedding. -Saurabh

Anil’s Response: Thank you

March 22, 2005 - 08:22 PM

Prashant Kaushal Hi Anil, Congratulations for maintainig such a wonderful site. Good Job!. Also, CK’s pictures were great. Cheers, Prashant.

Anil’s Response: Thank you, CK’s pictures are usually great!

March 22, 2005 - 08:22 PM

Meenakshi Chandrasekar: anil!! ur poems are awesome!!the website on the whole is great! meenu

Anil’s Response: Thank you Meenu. Keep in touch!

March 22, 2005 - 08:22 PM

Giridhar Appaji Nag: Anil, surfed over here from Samya’s site. Good to read your poems again.

Anil’s Response: Thank you and your webpage inspires me. Good stuff.

March 22, 2005 - 08:22 PM

Babji Gudapati: Good work Anil. Keep it up. Picures are very good and your sketch work is excellent.

Anil’s Response: Thank you for your kind words!

March 22, 2005 - 08:22 PM

Amit Juneja: Great website, Anil. It was nice to put the tips for parents’ visit to the US. Of course, great sketches and paintings. And what is mango dal? Next time we meet, you are cooking this for us!

Anil’s Response: Most certainly we shall make mango dal the next time we meet!

Anil Krishna: The guestbook items posted March 22, 2005 are actually collected over a period of about a year or so prior to that date. The reason they all show up on the same date in this guestbook is because I moved these entries from my previous guestbook which did not have the date information

Posted in Friends | No Comments »