May 11th 2001. A day when the world lost one of the greatest writers ever. Yes. It’s the day Douglas Noel Adams (aka DNA) died of a heart attack, age 49. He might not have been Infinitely Prolonged like Wowbagger, but he certainly achieved immortality through his creative works which have gone on to influence so many new generation writers like Neil Gaiman and Samit Basu. His nuggets of wisdom shine on. RAmen.

Wretched, isn’t it?

- Marvin the Paranoid Android

Coming to his works themselves, one of their best characteristics (for me) is that apart from their stupendously funny take on the Whole Sort Of General Mish Mash, they are all inconsistent with each other. Now that’s generally considered to be a bad thing, with everyone from Harry Potter fans to Lord of the Rings fans crying about ‘discrepancies’. For The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy however, it is this same inconsistency that makes it more fun. It has been made into so MANY avatars that if they were all kept the same, it would become a tad boring. And ‘a tad boring’ is EXACTLY what Douglas Adams wasn’t.

Getting a movie made in Hollywood is like trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it.

- Douglas Adams, on getting a movie made in Hollywood. After all, the h2g2 movie spent so many years in development hell!

Some stuff you might not have known about Douglas Adams:

• Douglas Adams was an atheist, a ‘radical atheist’ according to him. He said he used to be an agnostic earlier, but after reading The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, he made God vanish in a puff of logic. Richard Dawkins is a biologist well-known for his support of the theory of evolution and atheism. Read his books - they really ARE quite good. Apart from the two mentioned earlier, another nice book by him is The God Delusion. Richard Dawkins was a good friend of DNA, and it was through Adams that Dawkins met his future wife (thanks to Ashwan for pointing out an error in this one!). Richard Dawkins was also a speaker at one of the first Douglas Adams Memorial Lectures. Fans of South Park would also have noticed Dawkins in the episodes Go God Go and Go God Go XII. Note to self: I *must* attend THAT at least once in my life. Think of it as my Mecca.
• Douglas Adams was also quite interested with music. He played the guitar, left-handed, and had quite a collection of left-handed guitars. Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd was his good friends. In fact, Pink Floyd even let Douglas Adams play with them at one of their concerts - as a ‘birthday gift’ on his 42nd birthday. In the h2g2 book series, the band Disaster Area was based on Pink Floyd (because of their extravagant concerts). Also, Michael Nesmith of the band The Monkees was also a good friend of DNA, and was supposed to be the producer of the h2g2 movie (initially).
• Douglas Adams was a big fan of Apple. He is said to be the first guy to buy a Mac in England, with Stephen Fry (the ‘voice of the Hitchhiker’s Guide’) being the second person to buy a Mac. There’s a veiled attack at Microsoft (”overhyped bloatware”), in the Quandary Phase when Ford Prefect (referring to Sirius Cybernetics Corporation) says:
  

  You know how I hate those smug Sirius Cybernetics salesmen, who sell computer operating systems which crash more often than aircars built on the Friday shift.

• ‘Ford Prefect’ is actually the name of a car, released in England in 1970s. In the h2g2 movie, Mos Def is shown trying to shake hands with a car (he thought “cars were the dominant life-form on this planet”) - that car is an actual Ford Prefect.
• DNA was a big environmentalist too. He supported Diane Fossey’s Gorilla Fund, and also the ‘Save The Rhino’ campaign. He even dressed up once as a rhino to raise awareness for this cause.
• ‘h2g2‘ is an actual user-edited encylopedia. One of the first, in fact.
• Although he died in 2001, DNA appears in the 2005 Tertiary Phase radio series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy made by BBC. He plays the character of Agrajag, who claims that he gets killed in all his incarnations by Arthur Dent. This was done by digitally editing a recording Douglas Adams made for an audiobook of h2g2. His first words as Agrajag in the radio series were: “Bet you weren’t expecting to see ME again, were you?”. He also makes a cameo appearance in the last ever episode, again as an incarnation of Agrajag (who, again, gets killed because of Arthur Dent).
• Other ‘quirky’ appearances in the h2g2 radio series include:
  • Christian Slater (remember that guy from John Woo’s Broken Arrow?), as Wonko the Sane. He was a good actor, and I thought he’d been crushed under a truck in Alabama before hearing him on the radio series.
  • Bruce Hyman, the producer of the new BBC h2g2 radio series, makes a cameo as a dying Arthur Phillip Deodat - again, an incarnation of Agrajag.
  • Fred Trueman and Henry Blofeld, BBC cricket commentators also appear as themselves in the Tertiary phase - in two episodes. And boy are they funny in the second episode of the Tertiary phase as commentators at an Ashes match at Lord’s. “Fred my dear old thing, what on EARTH is that?”. Indeed. The second appearance is a cameo explaining the rules of Brockian Ultra Cricket.
  • Sir Patrick Moore, British astronomer comes in the Quintessential Phase, talking of “high-level talks between Xaxisian diplomats and some iguanas”.
  • Geoffrey Perkins, producer of the first two radio series’, makes an appearance in the Quandary Phase as Arthur Dent’s boss at BBC. Yes, Arthur Dent works at BBC.

Douglas Adams playing at a Pink Floyd concert

May he rest in peace. It’s only this year I’m writing about this because I finally feel that I’ve spread a good level of awareness among peers in my school (and others too) - and that was needed because otherwise this post would have been lost to the audience. Sure, it took a bit of over-the-top promotion of forty two, but I did get the point across. I think.

VIT University announced VITEEE 2008 - its entrance exam’s - results today. If you haven’t your result already, then click here to know your VITEEE 2008 result.

My results can be summed up in the following way:

There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying.
The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
Pick a nice day, it suggests, and try it.
The first part is easy.
All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and willingness not to mind that it’s going to hurt.
That is, it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground.
Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.

I failed to miss the ground too, and I failed to miss the ground very hard. I wouldn’t have really bothered to join VIT if it wasn’t for computer science engineering, or information technology; so let’s just say I’m not getting that and I want to end the discussion here. Maybe I’d get any of the others, like mechanical, civil, or chemical - but since none of them are fields I’m interested in, the result doesn’t really matter to me. No, I’m not (manically) depressed about this.

Right now, I’m pretty much in ‘NTU or bust’ mode. THAT’s an exam about which I can say I gave a good shot. THAT would be the one I’d be disappointed about if I didn’t get into, because quite frankly, it’s the only exam I really worked for.

I’ve also heard the results of a few friends of mine, and it seems that the overall performance of students in VITEEE went up this year. A few folks I know knocked up quite a respectable score, and yet, would be in the same state as me - if only slightly better. Sure, admissions in VIT apparently go up to rank 10,000-12,000, buy you really WON’T be getting computer science or electrical engineering, the most in-demand courses. But I’m also guessing, from the score vs rank relations I’ve gathered so far, that the cutoff this year for VITEEE has probably gone up; and admissions will close at higher ranks.

Best of luck to all students who DID get a good rank in VITEEE. For others, people STILL have time to pull their ‘jammy’s up and give BITS a good shot.

PS - Wanna know who the top 10 rankers in VITEEE 2008 are? Click here to have a look at the geniuses. No sarcasm. Honestly. These guys did a great job in an exam where top score goes pretty high. Take a good look. Maybe some of these will show up in JEE result lists too.

PPS - I can’t individually tell each and every one what stream they would be getting, and mind you that mine is still a guess. However, for whatever it’s worth, here’s my take on what your VITEEE rank can get you:

• Rank 1-2500: You would probably get any stream you want. Reason is that in this top bracket, there’s a lot of overlap with other exam results, like JEE / AIEEE, etc. A lot of the people in this group either don’t turn up for counselling, don’t want to join VIT, or simply want to wait it out for the other results, and don’t want to commit to any institute so soon.
• Rank 2500-6000: Once again, there would be overlap with other lists, but to a lesser extent. You probably won’t get computer science engineering towards the lower end of this category. However, there’s a very good chance that you can still get information technology, electrical etc.
• Rank 6000-10000: Yes, that’s a very big category to club together, but the reason for this is that in the bunch, most would get civil, mechanical, chemical and others which they have like BCA et al. If you really want to do a computers related course, consider the dual degree option in IT. Yes, you’ll have to pay more for it, but you’re more likely to get admission dual degree easily than information technology directly. Biotech would probably be available towards the starting few thousand ranks of this category.
• Rank 10000 and less: VIT’s admission list sometimes extends on up to rank 12000, so those till that mark still might have a chance. You certainly won’t have much of a choice on stream though. Rest of the folk need to think about other options for colleges.

Also, bear in mind that VIT calls for counselling in TWO batches - one up to rank 6000, and the other from 6000 to up to 11000. So you DO have a chance in the second phase of counselling. Note that this is only my interpretation of what I’ve gathered from score-rank relations of what students have put up on mine and other sites, people who study at VIT, and a heady dose of conjecture. I hope this provides the answer for most of the queries people have been posting. More than that, I can’t reply to each one individually.

In life, there will always be good news gnus and bad news gnus. And there will always be people who’ll try to thrust such atrocious puns to the rest of humanity. Douglas Adams quite rightly said:

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news gnus.

The point in life clearly lies in avoiding the whingeing sack of (bad) gnu droppings, and moving on. That gets a bit difficult to achieve, especially when life is like a very rotten and moldy grapefruit. Wish some good gnus come along and it up.

After all it is the Answer. GQ’z going to like this one. Money, Entertainment, and flying leather. And the Answer. Read On.

BTW got a customized toolbar for my site. Nice lil’ gadgets in it, and, well makes life simpler…