Friday, August 14, 2009

Google and Me

Google. I have realized that I cannot live without it.


Not a single day goes without going to this site. In fact I believe I access this very site every 10 minutes of my present day life.
What I search ? Pretty much everything. News, articles, blogs, and anything interesting and anything that I didn’t know.

I remember the first time when I searched in Google – it was darn slow. Though don’t remember what that search was for. Although I guess it was for porn :P

But I do remember what the last search was for – conversational maxims.
And today was the day in which I had used it to the limit – every other word in the article I am reading is new, who coins the word like conversational implicature, systemicity and compositionality. Thanks to Brin and Page for giving Google, she, (yap it’s a female), had the answer for everything (muah!!).

I sometimes thing why not have a Google API infused into our brain, at least we can stop using our eyes to track the result of the search. Yes, I know my daughter, ya it will be a daughter, will be using the same.

Sometime back, I had dedicated one day entirely to Google – know all-about-Google day. And it was then I learned about Stanford story, the first data store, the page rank , the HITS ,teleport vector, rank convergence, the crawling , the SEO industry, Ad sense and almost everything related to Google and just today about
Caffeine too . I realized that it’s like a giant spider which had data about everybody on this planet. Just imagine a day when Google just crashes. It would be worse than a 1000 catastrophe hitting the mankind together.

After writing the above line, I just wonder, should we allow this? I say NO!. I don’t want to be a slave of anybody. This is what I would call a digital slavery. A technical blasphemy that is slowly killing mankind’s ability to think in a comprehensive pragmatic manner with patience. It’s nothing but making the whole world follow a pattern subjecting to dictation of a chose
n few. We are at mercy of a mammoth machine to know what we want. And god knows whether it’s really showing us everything that we need.

I forgot the last time I took a book to find the word that I needed to find. Earlier when I look for a word I used to find another 10 words adjacent to it in a dictionary. Now the did you mean…
……. is just killing my vocabulary.

I need to stop.
And so I have decided to stop using Google (for a day :)), starting from now.

So the word was conversational maxims….where the heck is index for this book!!!!

pic curtsy: http://www.ecofriendlyinternship.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/evil-google-logo.jpg

Wednesday, August 12, 2009


No name.

Kasargod, a small town in north Kerala, was my destination. And I wanted to be there at exactly in between 4 and 5. PM. In theory, the light during that time is the best: it’s soft, dense and so full of life. I wished for one more thing; to have a rain while I was there. So my overall wish was to see Bekal fort in the evening with a slight drizzle.

And if the dream was realized, I promised myself photos which captured my caption – loneliness and me.

I was not alone. But then there was nobody with me also.

And nuisance of English language is that even though pragmatics allowed many words that I could coin out, semantics restated that it would be just lonely.

As soon I stepped into the fort, it started drizzling, as if welcoming me.

The fort transpired another side of it, from being bastion of defense; it showed me its tender side of veiled love and serenity. If there was anything that I could describe as beautiful, it was that.

My camera clicked from the moment I entered, effortlessly and incessantly. One after the other frame of the same story was written and re written in those clicks. There were families, friends, couples, and kids. They had come Sunday outing, to bask in the sun and then to have bath in the sea. I wish I too hadn’t come alone. But then I wouldn’t have been happy otherwise too. A companion, my friend had once told me, was there to talk about things which would seem silly but later on is what you would judge as life.

I climbed to one of the old outpost overlooking the sea, and sat there. Behind me, I heard laughter of some happy couple. Even though it was my first trip there, countless dreams of me picturing just the way I was, came flashing to me.

I smiled. May be this is my life.