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The scoop:

    Yeah right, as if you care. As a hardly working CS grad student, I don't get the opportunity to indulge in a massive bout of "I,me,myself, oh boy, I am an interesting person" kind of talk too often; to be more candid, nowhere else. So, here goes.

   I was born and brought up in the great city of Madras (since renamed as Chennai) in the south of India. My alma maters are Shrine Vailankanni Senior Secondary School, T.Nagar and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Not surprisingly, my world view was significantly enhanced when I stepped out of Madras for the first time and entered College Park.

    Coming to America for graduate education has helped me realise one of my important goals in life, which was, er, to read all The Adventures of Tintin. Not too bad a goal, eh ? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's me. Believe it or not, I actually got a friendly neighbourhood librarian to place an inter-library loan to get me my comic books. These days, my literary taste has significantly matured to the level of reading Harry Potter.

Humour

Geeky
  • Tips on writing a statement of purpose.
  • A spoof on proofs in Computer Science.
  • Some PUN (Pure Unadulterated Nonsense) stuff.
Non-geeky

Poetry

  • Hymn on Ramana Maharshi (Sanskrit)
  • Hymn on the vidyA devatAs (Tamil)
  • Hymn on the Divine Mother (Tamil)
  • Poem on Ramana Maharshi (Tamil)

My family

    My dad holds a Ph.D. from CMU. He is currently a full professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Madras. We call him The Buddha of Tanjore Road affectionately. The Buddha rarely opens his mouth - sometimes, even when spoken to - and firmly believes in his hypothesis that expressing human emotions is the cause for all trouble. He is a perfectionist for everything including etiquette and actually believes that I should carry on conversation without ever swearing. He is known to be immersed in his calculations for some result in quantum computing of late.

    My mom holds a masters from the University of Madras. She used to be a college professor in Economics. Command decisions for our household usually originate from her, and we call her HQ - short for Head Quarters. In addition to rescuing our small world from one problem after another, she involves herself in social service. Her ability to network with people is legendary and would put any computer scientist to shame.

    I have a younger sister who considers it a cardinal sin to accept the fact that I am the elder of the two. She graduated with her bachelor's from the Anna University. She has inherited my mom's networking skills. So much so, her birthday is celebrated as a day of great joy and cheer by her adoring minions at AU.

Religion

I want to know God's thoughts... the rest are details -Albert Einstein

    Our family is nominally affiliated to the Kamakoti Peetham at Kancheepuram.

    The Kanchi MathA is one of the monasteries established by the foremost philoshopher of India, Sri Shankara Bhagavatpada, to expound the monistic philosophy called advaitha vedAnthA. The mathA holds the moolAmnAya status, and is the place where Sri Shankara ascended the sarvagnya peetha. The other AmnAya mathAs are Shringeri, Puri, Dwaraka, and Badrinath.

      The mathAdhipathis of the Kanchi Matha hold the position of ShankarAchArya and adopt the Indra Saraswathi title of the dasanAmi sampradAya. The current ShankarAchArya of Kanchi is H.H. Sri Jayendra Saraswathi. The previous ShankarAchArya was H.H. Sri Chandrasekarendra Saraswathi, popularly known as the mahAswAmi and the mahAperiyavAl. An erudite exposition of the raison d' etre of many aspects of Hinduism by H.H. is available here. Here is a benediction by H.H. especially apt for our troubled times.

      I have been attracted to the teachings of BhagavAn Ramana Maharshi of late. An excellent site about the recent ShankarAchAryas of the DakshinAmnAya Shringeri SAradA Peetham can be found here.

Peer Review

     An explanatory note: This was what my peers at IITM had to say about me. I am not responsible for the language. They didn't show me this review ! In case you are wondering, ACV is a TLA of my name. They knew that I would end up in networking, see :)

ACV
   What do you say about a guy who likes Irodov, Keshav, Tanenbaum and gardening ? To those who are not his branch-mates, we have an announcement: This guy is called Arun Chander Vasan and he belongs to Godav. He even asked to be excused from this Rogues' gallery because he spends less time in Godav than Cookie.He is probably the prime reason why Staff C is still declaring a profit. He is also the prime reason why we get such low net speeds. He sits in Networks lab and, using his rapport with the VSNL guys, conspires to consume half the available bandwidth with his browsing of the web pages of every university in the world. He is the ultimate authority on the life history of every CS prof in the US. He can tell you the latitude and longitude of every univ. besides the maximum and minimum temperatures in every season. If you want to include any book in the references part of a paper or a report, ACV is the man to turn to. He can give you the reference in perfect IEEE format, including the year, the publisher and the location. If you don't have a head for English, you'd bettor stort lookin for ACV. He'll help you out with your spelling and grammar, no matter however private the communication. He works in Security, so he knows a thing or two about privacy. In his third year, ACV was a non -resident SUN lab occupant. This year, he has undergone a paradigm shift and has switched over to the Net lab. He is also gung-ho about teaching, being an NSS volunteer and then a coordinator. The coordinator, one should say. He is one more guy who didn't have to spend a dime on his apping, having got UMCP last sem. You can catch him there for the next 4 years.
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