Ambarish's musings

Eyes are hurting. Ears are blocked. I can't hear anything. My legs are paining. My ankles don't want to support my body weight. My fingers are cold, and wrinkled. Every muscle, every sinew in my body is screaming. My arms don’t want to move. My shoulders agree with my arms. My heart is pumping the fastest it has ever, even more than when it was in awe. My back doesn’t want to stay upright. My brain is aware of all this. Even it is a little tired, after a long day trying to convince people to write code in the best possible way. But it is just too excited. Adrenaline has taken over me. My mind is ready to go again, even after doing it 20 times in the past hour. Before you get a dirty thought, I am of course talking about swimming. It has been 3 days since I joined a swimming class, and I feel like I learned a lot. I can float, I can swim the breadth of the pool 20 times in 40 minutes. I can hold my breath under water for 20 seconds. I still have a lot to learn, ...

I just had one of the best days of my Hyderabad chapter! I went to Amit Trivedi's concert at BITS Pilani, Hyderabad campus(btw, why can't it be just called BITS Hyderabad? Is BITS Pilani a brand or something?). Amazing as much the music was, the artists were scintillating! Amit Trivedi, as everybody probably knows, is one of the best musicians of the current generation. All his songs have something very different in them, and he is just a joy to watch. For the concert, he brought a few other artists, some of whom were unknown to me, but by the end, I became a fan of them all. Jonita Gandhi was part of the chorus group! The song selection was spot on, with majority of the songs from Kai Po Che and Queen, where he was the music director. Some were classics like "Chaudhari", which is one of the favorite songs of a colleague from Rajasthan. "Udta Punjab" was one of the more recent movies, whose songs were in full flow. I got the songs which I wa...

I might be 6 years late, but here is my review of this Bollywood movie, starring Sridevi. Directed by Gauri Shinde, this film tackles some This film is freakin' awesome! I can't believe I hadn't watched this movie before. And if you haven't watched it, I suggest you clear out your calendar for tomorrow and grab some popcorn. This is mostly a serious movie, but the lighter moments are well placed, and make great viewing. The plot, the dialogues, the screenplay, everything is perfect. This movie is worth paying big bucks to watch on the big screen, unlike me, who watched it 6 years late on a 14 inch touchscreen. Sridevi is absolutely mesmerizing. Her acting in this movie is one of the best acting performances I have ever seen. When you watch her, her struggles become yours. You feel her happiness and sadness. You want her to do well. You want her to show the world, how much she can accomplish. Anything more I say here will be spoilers for the few people w...

Let me start off by saying I have utmost respect for Arsene Wenger, and I have always wished him well. What he has done for this football club puts him in the pantheon of greatest managers of all time. He deserves a statue for sure. The day he leaves Arsenal FC will surely be sad, and I'll always thank him for all the magical moments he has given us, and not to mention the beautiful Wengerball, which we absolutely adore. Needless to say, Arsenal FC are in a slump of a whole new magnitude unseen in the entirety of Wenger's tenure at the club. Form is nonexistent, results are predictably negative, performances have dropped below the standards usually set by a team destined for relegation. Fans have nothing to cheer about, players don't seem to care. The manner of every defeat has remained the same over the past few years. A culture of mediocrity has developed at the club where excellent was the minimum requirement. The board is seemingly happy with this mediocrit...

Your beauty has enchanted me, Your wit has stumped me. Every time I talk to you, You amaze me! Your eyes do kill, Your sly smile does thrill. Everybody bends to your will, You are a romantic's destiny to fulfill. Girl, be free as a bird, Be bold as a lion. Be tough as steel, Don’t show them your Achilles' heel. Be shy like a teen, Maybe not so mean. Because in the palace of my heart, You rightfully rule like a queen.

Debuggers are some of the most beautiful pieces of code ever written. They are every developer's oxygen tank in  the deep treacherous waters that is the world of software engineering. They are tools which help us figure out  what went wrong, and where. Now, apart from software development, where else can we use a debugger? Life, of course! Imagine if we could debug our life! Add breakpoints, inspect the local and global variables in  various scenarios, and change values if need be. We could take ourselves wherever we want… But, wait! I forgot a fundamental assumption. While debugging code, we manage to replicate the exact same  scenario any number of times we want. Absolutely not possible with life. Life provides you with one chance for a scenario, and you simply can't debug. A debugger for life is a powerful, yet useless weapon...

Let us take a moment to appreciate the people that we have known, interacted with, seen, heard about,  had a crush on, that have broken our hearts, who made us dream, and who brought us back to the harsh reality  of the world, who made us laugh so much that we had tears in our eyes, and who made us so sad yet we couldn’t  shed a single tear, who became our best friends, and who became cold and distant ghosts, who pushed us towards the finish line, and those who saw weakness in us and ran away, who we love, and who love us, and cherish our  presence and miss us in our absence, who made our days special, and who have made our days a nightmare,  who lent us their shoulders, and who kicked us when we were down, who dazzled us with their talents, who were mesmerized when we showcased ours, with whom we shared meat and mead, and all the people who gave us  a lifetime's worth of experiences. These are people who made us into what we are. Th...