| My Interests |
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Blowing My Own Broken Trumpet
During my free time...which is not very often, I like to surf the net or just do nothing.
I like reading, sketching, listening to music (Hindi, Bengali, a little English, Punjabi bhangra and Hindustani & Western Classical.
A MIDI file of Beethoven's Für Elise is here. It is a very haunting, unBeethoven-like piece centred around the a single note (E), and making playful excursions, but always coming back to the central theme; could go very well as the background music of an Agatha Christie mystery novel 
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Of all things, I like most to spend time with my family.
Books have been a friend for a very long time. I had got myself a pair of horrible spects before I was eleven; my friends used to call me the then-equivalent of a nerd - a bookworm.
The writers I like are, in Bengali - Rabindranath Tagore, Rajshekhar Basu, Narayan Gangopadhyay ( the Tenida stories), Premendra Mitra ( the Ghanaada stories) and Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay ( Duurbeen to name one).
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I have always liked Tagore's poems and songs, many of which he himself set to tune, more than anything else. Tagore has been a source of inspiration to me and a million others like me. Of the many of his songs and poems I adore, a few are on the page devoted to Rabindranath Tagore. |
Among English novelists, I like Dickens' plots, his compassion, a touch of melancholy in his writings, but not his Victorian style. At one time (ninth standard), I tried to copy his style for a few exercises; the result was too bombastic - according to my teacher.
Poems of Lord Byron's and William Wordsworth are another eternal favourite; the most loved them are on my English Poetry page.
...Urdu
I also take an avid interest in Urdu sh'iri, and tried to learn the Urdu script (modified Perso-arabic) from the UKIndia website. I can read an Urdu newspaper at present, although very slowly.
I have been trying to learn Persian for some time, although I don't know when I'll be able to really get to business. Here is a good site on Amir Khusro's Persian Poetry; the same site hosts Ghalib's Urdu poetry.
| In some past lives, I also liked sketching - in this life I don't get time ... though I do sometimes just sit down with a pencil and paper. It's a thing which should come naturally, if it is to come at all. I mean, one can't just sit and say - okay let's draw. And life's just full at the moment. I never had a formal training in art beyond high school, so its very amateurish. The one on the right has been inspired by one of the Bengal School artists. The towering figures of this late 19th century school were Nandalal Bose, Jamini Ray, Abanindranath Tagore and Rabindranath. Here are a few more. |
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Programming is an addiction. I used to like to program in C++ and C
mainly, sometimes also dabbling in Perl and Tcl/Tk. Apart from official work(software modelling of electronic circuits at this particular time), I like to write Linux/Unix programs, little command-line tools or just tweaking around on my computer.
Update: The above was written sometime in Junly 2001, when I was working with SPICE netlists mainly, apart from Verilog. I don't work with SPICE anymore.
It's only Verilog, and Verilog only now (2006). In between, I'd done verification using Synopsys Vera tools as well.
