What do i think?

Come Friday and I don't want it to come!! Before the weekend begins I am already planning how to stuff it with all the pending things. By Saturday afternoon I finished about 10% of the work and suddenly I remembered Bala's cousin's husband was on his way. He wanted to meet two more cousins and Bala's mami too. It was easier to meet at one place. All of them arrived and plans for having dinner in a restaurant surfaced. Of late we are very hesitant to go out for dinner 'cos both kids become cranky and managing them becomes a huge task, leaving us no enthu for social talk. But all cousins and Mami were too geared up to go out and kept insisting we are all there to take care of sundu and hari. Hari had three more people to pose his questions. He was excited to get answers which are much different from the usual... "you talk too much" or "thats not for you" or "okay I am your mom, so do as I say" or "ENOUGH" as finale. It was so go...

Peter or petering is a slang that is widely used to denote those who love to show off their knowledge (or ignorance) in something that is totally alien. For eg., I was somebody who did not know a thing about the computer, net, middleware etc etc. After marriage, I started petering about CORBA and middleware (thanks to the evil of continuous checking of emails and writing code by my husband). The boyz/galz who drank tea from the local potti kadai till yesterday, say today, " you see, in the US where (pronounced whezh) ..." Thats petering for you. Guys who want to fit into a crowd try stuff like seeing vonly inglis philims and hate anything that has to do with bollywood, tollywood, kollywood, follywood and any other letter you can add at the beginning. Munna is our hindi peter . Despite not having crossed the borders of Tamilnadu, our munna loves to sprinkle his speech with accha, nahi yaar, and chalte hain... She sees sirf hindi philims. Her favourite is Shah rukh, Aamir, Rani...

A hot summer’s day. The harvest is over. The lands await ploughing. The ground is parched Await the rains like Chatakas. The brilliant Sun is furious. People venture not from their homes. As the train crawls, I see not a soul – Not even a cow. A village or two pass by And the third is seen. From the distance I notice A half-naked urchin. No shirt, no shoes. He runs as if his life depends on it. As the train slows to a stop, He reaches my window. He gives me an innocent smile. His face radiant with joy. I ask him, “What?” But receive no answer. As the train starts, he calls to me And waves with all eagerness. What would I not give to acquire a smile so innocent? His only worry – he mightn’t reach in time to wave! How I long to be pleased by such small insignificant things?

"எனக்கு நினைவு தெரிஞ்ச நாளிலிருந்து" music season has always created a sense of excitement in me. It was a season of endless kutcheri hopping, eating out and gossip. When I was young, I remember going for concerts with my Dad. The two that I vividly remember were S Balachandar at MFAC and S Kalyanaraman in Academy. I was thoroughly impressed by the former because I was learning violin then and thought I had to go for a lot of instrumental concerts. And not impressed by the latter, yet had to say he was good because everybody at home thought he was good. After 1993, I had my manni's TVS 50 at my disposal, college bunk adichi, attending concerts was a big thing(not that I missed anything or anybody missed me at college). I would generally, sit in a concert, listen for one song, search for any friends and start talking for the rest of the concert. This is first season I have sat through a couple of Sanjay's concerts without talking and actually listening.

In a effort to pen my thoughts in संस्कृतं, I have started a blog in samskrtam .

When we look at what sort of research work can be considered for a PhD degree, translation is definitely a no-no. Why? There is no individual contribution, value addition or in-depth study involved in literal translation of any work. Personally, I feel it is a routine job once the initial spadework is done. For eg, translating open source software strings would not be easy if a glossary of common words was not done earlier. Getting the glossary done is a major work. Once that is out of the way, the rest is easy and anyone with the glossary on hand can do the rest of the work. It gets more interesting when there are sentences to be translated. Windows, Openoffice and other software in Hindi and Tamil are being used widely (definitely in government organisations). But, why sanskrit? The best answer I can give is "Archival purpose". Someone somewhere might use it. Would I use Firefox in Sanskrit? Maybe not now. I might try it but I would most definitely like to see something fam...

For the past 1.5 years I have been working as part of CDAC-GIST team, translating open source software into Sanskrit. CDAC recently released a CD of software tools and fonts in Sanskrit on November 25th at Tirupati. Click here to read the press release. Thats the official post. A more personal post follows.