Krishnan Ramaswami

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Am Krishnan. Single, Indian, Hindu, Tamil. Born and brought up in the southernmost metro of India - Chennai. Schooled in my hometown. Did my Electronics and Communication Engineering  in Coimbatore Institute of Technology and will be joining the 2007 class of Indian School of Business

I like reading though I do not read much of contemporary authors. Rowling is an exception. P.G.Wodehouse is my all time favorite. As a boy, I was fascinated with Sherlock Holmes (well, I have read ALL the stories and novels of Holmes!). Needless to say, am cricket crazy, but also play a little ping-pong. Crosswords often attract my attention, but being a fickle-minded idiot, I have never had the patience to sit over a complete session to solve a full puzzle. Like whiling away time with strategy games like AOE and its recent younger brother AOM. Kudos to the ensemble studios team for the entertainment.

Hey! By the way, catch my doodles here. And do not forget to sign my guestbook.

What's up:

[May 20, 2006] One-sixteenth of ISB year is over ;). Yes. Past the first Mid-terms. And about the mid-terms, the less talked about, the better. Soaked myself into ISB.

Read a couple of more PG Wodehouse. Apart from that, pretty busy juggling stuff in ISB. I miss those long TT sessions I used to have back in Pivotal.

[Apr 21, 2006] Settled in ISB. The orientation week is almost over and we start with the pre-term next.

[Mar 24, 2006] There's suddenly so much happening in life, thanks to the ISB admit. We have meets in Bangalore for the 2007 students, there is always something to be done on the admit front - Laptop queries, Pre-term modules, Loans and other sundry stuff. Well. Am not complaining!

Found a collection of PG Wodehouse books here! Also almost completed the campaigns in AOE III. The graphics are outstanding and Ensemble has lived up to the expectations of its strategy game lovers. One sour point is the hardware T&L requirement in the graphics card. Any graphics card that does not have hard-wired T&L algo.s will tremendously slow the game with the shader on.

[Feb 27, 2006] Man! This is big. Just got an admit from the Indian School of Business ! I'll be joining the PGP class of 2006-07. More on this in the coming days.

[Feb 17, 2006] Finished Freakonomics! "Insightful" is the word. well, as he himself states, the book has no unifying theme, which itself makes it a different one. The author has taken pains to remove all the gobbledygooks of economists and presents profound insights in simple English. Compelling read indeed. I must admit, though, that some case-studies seemed too far-fetched and unwarranted. I also think that the last two chapters won't cut much ice with non-American audience.

Watched "Kanda Naal Mudhal". You can read about it in my blog.

[Feb 09, 2006] Finished "Catcher In the Rye" by Salinger. It is a funny book. Some "really" insightful writing interspersed with lots of quotidian stuff. It is a quick, light read, I'd say. You can ponder over certain lines, but the language is so repetitive that it sickens you a tad, half-way through. Still trying to start with Freakonomics

Watched this Tam movie called "Gajini" last Sunday and man, it really spoilt my day. Damn! Why is that these days watching a Tam movie means that you need to throw logic out of the window? Imagine. The film says that you get 2,00,000 INR selling an old ambassador car. C'mon, give me a break!

[Jan 09, 2006] I watched the fourth installment of the Harry Potter Series in a CD yesterday. Though I agree that the director has tried his maximum to do justice to the book in recounting the 700-odd page story in two hours, to me, he has fallen short in a good couple of areas.

Firstly, some of the most important scenes have been omitted. Harry's adventure with Marauder's map in which he almost gets caught by Snape before Moody (or his imposter) comes to rescue him did not find a place at all in movie. This is significant as Harry starts trusting Moody only after this incident. However, the movie shows Snape warning Harry of intrusions into his chambers later. This, sans its proper antecedent, didn't make sense.

Secondly, while the story talks about growing mistrust of Dumbledore among ministry circles throughout, the movie hardly alluded to the fact. In fact the whole 5th volume is also about it.

Oh! Yes. The image of Death-Eaters didn't quite match-up to what I had conjured-up. (But so was the case with Dementors)

[Jan 03, 2006] HAPPY NEW YEAR! I would like to shout so that the whole world hears it; but then at least I'm happy that I can shout here so that the part of the world that looks into my website hears it! Trying to get a copy of Freakonomics.

[Dec 14, 2005] It has been a month since I came back from Vancouver and it has been hectic. I stayed in a friend's house for a couple of weeks and then shifted to a diagonally opposite corner of the city. I now live in a part of the city which betrays the city's identity of "IT capital" of India. Suffice to say that. You can figure out a locality in Bangalore that fits the description. (I rang Airtel a couple of days ago for getting their broadband connection only to find that the locality I live in is not covered by them at all!).

[Sep 7, 2005] Am in Vancouver for an official trip. Should be here for some more weeks. You can read more in my blog.

Just finished "Gone with the wind". the book is stupendously good. A million copies that were sold in America six months after the book was published should speak for its quality (it is another matter altogether that it still sells, 70 years after it was first printed). The most amazing thing about the book is that it is simple! Margaret has dropped from her mind to her nib (or her typewriter) near-perfect depictions of the thoughts that go through our minds as we go through our quotidian activities, has garnished them by capturing the subtle nuances of love - rather - what we love to love (phew), and spun the story around a great setting that serves like packaging for a product. Something that I could appreciate in the story was that even with my having with no links to the time and place where the story was set, I could appreciate every bit of it. And, to me, in it lies enough justification for all the honours bestowed upon this masterpiece.

[Jul 25, 2005] Finished the 6th edition of Harry Potter and I should say that I felt it depressing in a lot of aspects. Primarily, the characters (esp. Harry) seem to be moving away from what they were depicted to be good at. The deaths are just increasing to what appears to be build-up to a very cinematic climax.

Ensemble studios is coming up with AOE III. (I seriously can't understand why they named the page "teaser.htm"). I heard that the demo version should be available by October. Just can't wait to lay my hands on the game. The engine looks to be an improved one with some real-time destruction and tactical warfare.

[Jun 27, 2005] It has been some time since I posted last. Well. Nothing much has progressed really except that I finished a couple more of P.G. Wodehouse books thanks to my generous friend Amal. It's life just as usual seeing the Bangalore traffic which can be likened to a "bubbling and boiling stew".

[April 22, 2005] Today I finish two years with my present employer. Finished "Angels and Demons" by Dan Brown a week ago. This is the second novel of his I have read. Two things on that. One is the sheer timing that I picked up the novel - just after the demise of Pope John Paul II. The other was the striking resemblance in the storyline to his more famous "Da Vinci Code". I felt that I should have read Angels and Demons before Da Vinci code, for the sheer pace of the latter makes the former novel look slightly slow.

[Feb 4, 2005] Recently finished "Future Shock", a classic by future sociologist Alvin Toffler. Given that the book was written three decades ago, most of Toffler's predictions regarding jobs, economies and macro-political outlook are amazing to read as they have turned out to be true. However some of his ideas never sank in and probably would never do. Ideas such as deviating from normal parenting, living under the sea, human teleporting mechanisms look more like pages from a science fiction book rather than from the pen of a future sociologist. Well. Given that he is an American, we can expect these anyway. I felt that he hit the bull's eye in areas where he could actually feel the transition started, (for example, a penchant towards management in the 70s in America leading to more job switches and lifestyle changes to suit the switches) for that amounted to an easier extrapolation. However, in areas where he was to completely predict a start and the evolution, he has gone wayward. It'd had been nicer had he refrained from commenting on those.

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Last update 20-May-2006