Machaan - a colloquial term of endearment typical of the streets of Madras, and even more so in its "effeminate" form, in the movies of Kollywood. Officially, it refers to one's brother-in-law. Unofficially, it is just about as random as rand() can (try to) get.

Vaandhi - unlike its title predecessor, this has exactly one meaning - vomit.

This is what I intend to do, vomit my thoughts and then analyze what my brain ate that day.

For a long while, I have put away placing my thoughts for the public eye coming up with one reason or the other. The most oft-quoted reason was something along the lines of "how blogging is everywhere and since I am a rebel, I cant just be toeing the line, so give me a break."

Now, I realize being a rebel has nothing to do with not blogging and everything to do with sharing rebellion with your fellow rebels. Or, at least that's my rationalization for the actual reason which is ... drumroll... drumroll... man is a social animal.

I have the habit of making notes on whatever I can lay my hands or neurons on whenever I come across something that fires off a few sparks in my cranium. Of late, this has happened more than ever as I come to realize the scope of my ignorance, and so, continue to delve in to even more abstruse stuff about the meaning of life.

One fine night (to read as 10 minutes ago), while reading many a blog on science and how curiosity if shared multiplies manifold, I realized that one very evolved chimpanzee making random notes has less chances, probabilistically speaking, of deciphering the meaning of life than a million very evolved chimpanzees making random notes (though not completely i.i.d events - i.e., independently and identically distributed). So, why not throw open my random notes for others to fill in theirs and vice versa, and lo and behold, we have solved what one Greek philosopher (with his coterie) couldnt do by himself and what so many Indian philosophers of yore seem to have done but have so very well covered their tracks that not even their own kind recognize the fruits of their labour.

As you can make out from the above post, my posts are going to contain a multitude of random stuff linked together in convoluted English. For the untrained eye, in the paragraphs above, indulge me when I say I touched upon linguistics, pseudo-random number generators, social psychology, neuroscience, probability (and especially million monkeys typing away creating Shakespeare), and Indian philosophy. Expect more of this kind.

In the days to come I am going to try to bring some order in to some of the random thoughts I do have. Ultimately, I am hoping that this blog will be more for myself to look back on many years hence. If, in the best case, I do manage to attract other chimpanzees like me to share their randomness, this random night's neuronal firings would feel vindicated.