Mortality Vs. Saturation

Recently I read an article. Between the lines, it passed a very strong message of how short the life is. The article was about making a balance in life, giving time to family and loved ones because "having a promotion on the day of your break up is not enjoyable" and so on.. It was discouraging the idea of working stressfully on the weekdays and giving time to the family *only* on the weekends. It very objectively said, if you live say more 50 years from now then, its just 2600 weekends in your life left. So make a balance and live each day fully. Okay, the message is very ordinary which we hear often. But I must say, I had never seen so direct measurement of my life and visualise the end of the life in few hundred weeks time. This is directly related to mortality.

A few days later, a thought on  Indian Vedic Ashram System came to my  mind. More objectively the third stage "Vanaprasthashram". Most of the above-average-ambitious people think to achieve a goal for their life or professional life (more suitable here) and they think, after that they would like to get settled and take it easy with life. Ambition is a very good virtue and mostly the success is driven by an ambition. But ambition is quite dangerous as well. How? You will know in a minute. Now lets talk about over-ambition. The problem with over-ambitious people is, most of the time what they had tried to achieve, sooner or later they could achieve. And that's how they had become over-ambitious from being ambitious. Nobody is born over-ambitious, its a gradual transformation from being ambitious. Now here is the catch, for them, finding a new height in the life is not difficult and most of the time they know, they can do it and how. This becomes a loop and they find joy in it even though at some point their family stops enjoying it. Naturally, time flies and finally, how much does it take for a weekend to pass  when you are chasing a longer goal (may be one after another). These people start noticing harm in this when their body starts to show them the age.

Now let me relate this to Saturation. Saturation from life. This is a feeling of relief in life. Which in Hindi is called "Santripti".

For example,

Situation 1: You just have drunk two glasses of water and somebody told you that there is no water in the world for 2 hours.

Situation 2: You are damn thirsty and somebody told you that there is no water in the world for 2 hours.

Yes, this is as simple as that. The over-ambitious people mostly find themselves in the Situation 2. Many people just get settled and start enjoying life. Why some people desire immortality so much? Because they are thirsty. They did not have enough water before water was gone. If you have had enough water already, you really don't care about water and that's the ideal situation. I think the worst case can be "dying thirsty". I think the whole point of Vanaprasthashram is to make you drink enough water and minimize the probability of dying thirsty to almost zero. So, don't forget to drink enough water!

Shame: Arresing someone for expressing an opinion on Facebook?

This is the perfect example of how the democratic nation should *not* behave. It is more shameful because it happened in the world's biggest democracy - India. I was taught in the school that in a democratic nation you get a freedom of speech.

Background:

There was a "shutdown" announced in Mumbai for one day after the death of Shri Balasaheb Thackeray. A girl expressed her opinion on the shutdown. She was arrested based on the FIR lodged by the same party member. Moreover, her friend was also arrested for "like"ing that post. Before arrest a clinic of an uncle of the girl was also ransacked.




I deeply admire Balasaheb for his personality, sensitivity and of course sharp fearless remarks. I think he also might not have liked this kind of arrest where freedom of citizens is at risk. What amuses me more is when an FIR is lodged, without investigation a young girl was spontaneously arrested. Though later released on bail it is questionable that was it necessary and more importantly legal to arrest someone like this? Even more miserable is the friend who was arrested, because she just "liked" the post.

Now the government of Maharashtra is facing strong remarks from across the nation. Justice Katju was nice to write personally a series of emails to chief minister of the state to release them immediately, dismiss the charges and take actions against those who were involved. I admire you sir that you work out of your way to uphold the values of democracy and freedom of the people.

In the hope to have a better and safe future "Satyamev Jayate"!

Bag of 'Bugs'

A couple of days before, I met a coder. We started talking casually about the things and I noticed that he was carrying a small diary. Usually I am very bad at noticing unless something is really conspicuous, just in case my girlfriend is reading this. In the conversation I realised, that was the log of errors and the 'hack' he had come across so far in the life of coding. This reminded me my undergrad days when the easiest measure for geek quotient was the number of bugs one can spontaneously reciprocate. People are also used to search the error messages a lot on the web to seek the solution which I can notice from the "query suggestions" in the search engines. Okay let me say something about how the "query suggestions" work. Basically the search engines keep the track of all the queries fired and accumulate the frequencies and some advanced statistics on that. Based on these statistics, the probability of the most likely query for your already typed word/s or characters is calculated and presented in the decreasing order of probability/score as the suggestions. Mostly the query suggestions come from the previous queries and the top suggestion is the most frequent one and so on. Sometimes, these suggestions become really funny, for the fun type "nobody uses" in Google and see what are the suggestions!

Okay coming back to the original point, I think at the end of the day the knowledge is how many bugs you can solve. Here, the scope of the term "bug" is quite large. I see a strong analogy to this in the life. We call somebody 'veteran', why? Because s/he possesses a long experience of the field and intuitively can handle/hack most of the situations arise in that domain. That knowledge comes from an experience and ends up in some physical or virtual diaries somewhere which I refer as a 'bag of bugs'.

How you want to be treated?

The first point that arrives in picture when you take any service which can be from simple dining out to a long international trip : "How would I be treated?". More than five years ago, I remember when I underwent a summer training of customer dealing, I was taught "Remember! You are the face of the company. You portray the image of the company to the customer. So think of your actions and words." This is so true. Each good and bad experience with the companies around reminds me the same lines. I try to see the same point from the both perspective an employee and a customer.

The rule of the world is very interesting: the customer is an employee somewhere and deals with fellow customers directly or indirectly. This makes the situation very easy to understand. For example, we all know that how the bureaucracy sucks sometimes, but only one person sitting on the other side of the table has the power to turn our experience upside down or otherwise. If that person "treats the people as he wants to be treated" the world of bureaucracy will be much simpler. Unfortunately, this is somewhat related to corruption but I do not want to talk about it at the moment. On the contrary, the inverse is also true that "I am treated very badly and the same will now be reflected in my services!" :) So these are directly related nodes of the chain "the customer and the employee".

I hope to see the chain in proper direction and would end with related lines: "Treat the people around the same way you want to be treated!"

Do you have 'Frames'?

Yesternight I was watching Vinod Dua Live on NDTV, well its my one of the favourites and I feel bad when I miss it. He has the vision and is outspoken though he does his research before making any point. Basically an ideal piece of impressive and effective journalism. He speaks only for 15 minutes and it feels like he has conveyed something that some ordinary person will take whole day to convey.

This is just a recent show video for your reference (Click on the image):



Personally I don't want to be judgemental about his reports nor am here to increase his fan following because it is none of my business though I am a big fan of the show.

Okay coming back to the title: 'Frames' a concept I was taught by somebody in the school that "If you don't want/like something then just put a denial frame in your mind and then you will realize, that thing is no longer a problem for you. Basically your mind learns to ignore that thing very easily."

We have lots and lots of frames in our mind. I don't want to enlist them because they also include some of the social stigmas. Now, why I introduced Mr. Dua's show? Whenever I watch his show and listen to his sharp comments, I feel he tries to break the frames in the minds of India - the frames which are very bad but we are not ready to break them. He tries to make the point and if a citizen tries to incorporate some of them to which she herself agrees, significant improvement would be visible in the society. Basically I don't like to give any advice but I am extremely sorry to say this piece of advice here as I couldn't help it. I think those frames are so strong in our minds that even such strong opinion and sharp journalism is weak to break them.

"Isi Umeed me ki hamara aanewala kal aaj se behtar ho" I sign out!

Dust is settling down in Spain!

The whole experience of coming over abroad and settle here was beautiful and very emotional. The experience can be seen in three different phases. I try to see an analogy between the situation with the sequence of the events when you first time go for a sky diving. The phase one, is the pre-processing step: It is the time until the day of the flight. I would call that part 'Excitement'. I was so happy and excited to come over and start my work because I was taking a very well deserved vacation of 3-4 weeks after finishing some tight deadlines like: Master's Thesis, Google Summer of Codes, PAN-2011 track participation etc. In the excitement you generally don't think the topic which in this case is to "go abroad", in more depth and knowingly you don't let any negative thought come about your adventure because you are just excited. You want to experience it and also you have to stand by your decision. It is same, when you have decided to go for sky diving and you enjoy your decision, thinking that what a great time you are going to have. Then comes the day of flight. On that day the situation seems real and apparently more real on the airport when you see your family bidding you the final goodbye. Remember, you are still in the excitement phase. As soon as you land, you find somebody to pick you up and you chit-chat for a while and then you go to the house. Rarely you find that you have reached the destination and your luggage has not! Yeah, exactly that happened to me and I was told that my luggage will not be available for two more days because on Tuesday Turkish Airlines does not have any flight to Valencia from Istanbul. Murphy's Law. Then you go to home and sleep tight because you are so tired of the journey and Jet-Lag. The very next day starts the phase called 'Nervousness'. You feel nervous because you are in a completely different environment. You see different people around, sometimes it happens they don't speak your language and even worse that they don't understand your language. Somehow the day is spent and gradually you see your over-ambition for the trip. As soon as you reach home back, you are all alone and you don't have internet and a phone to connect to your world. Now what you have is, a photo of your family and some letters from your girlfriend or wife. That's it, this is the night you are going to cry and repent the decision of coming over. All the negative thoughts which were forced underneath will come out. You somehow take hold of yourself and go asleep. This is the moment which is very crucial for one's stay abroad. It feels the same as when, you are in the airplane for sky diving and your other three friends have already dived and now its your turn. You have to deal with that crucial moment and yes it is crucial because you have always a choice of not to dive! I have seen many people returning to the home country in merely some weeks or a couple of months saying it was very bad there and they didn't like it at all. At that time I used to think why would someone do that. Now I realise, it comes under the phase of 'Nervousness'. Actually in the days of phase 2, if someone doesn't think much about going back and try to see the good things around, it would really help. I started crawling over all the plans I had made before coming over and was searching the reasons which really made me excited to come over. I suddenly noticed, doing that makes me comfortable and I liked that feeling. I notice the improvement in the mental comfort day by day and week on week. Now I really like it here. The dust has settled! Now I realise that I have time for all those things which I wanted to do like walking, cooking, spending lot of time on the research problem I am dealing with and much more. Yes I cook my dinner and weekends' lunch as well most of the times. You can see some of the photos here.



Now starts the third phase called 'Thrill'. The moment you dive, in some time you start enjoying your adventure and you are thrilled! Exactly same is the feeling when you convince yourself that I like it here. In this whole process of settlement, I rejoiced my confidence in self and it is an earned confidence and not the granted one because you see how beautifully you have tackled the situation. This experience is great and has taught me a lot for life!

Listening to Your Heart!

One thought dwindled in my mind for last couple of months, that Am I doing What I really want to Do? You may also think of it in this way that you really want to go out for some great natural pictures if you are a photography lover, or you may just want to sit with your guitar and want to try some great songs, or you wanna see whole bunch of movies in your 1 TB hard disk in one week or may be you wanna code something really useful and wanna produce your masterpiece. You may feel indifferent if what you wanna do is not listed above but if its there then you may certainly feel excited. We will consider all those things you want to do as listening to your heart. So you really want to do something but something is stopping you from doing it may it be your job or studies or laziness or any thing. But you should really ask this question to yourself that is it worth not listening to your heart?

I am just coding for my Google Summer of Code project in my college lab and got struck in one nasty error, which I just managed to solve after playing with it for last 5 hours. A sudden smile came to my face as I solved it and that inspired me to share this thought with you all. We can be really very happy if we choose to work what we really like. It is very rare that you get a profession which is very close to something what you really wanted to do in your heart and if you belong to that set then all cheers and you are enjoying what I mean. But if you don't fall in that category then you really should listen to your heart and figure out what is stopping you from doing it and take some time out of your routine and plunge into hearty desires. You will smile someday. Its true. And best thing about it is, smile doesn't take much long to come and you will enjoy.

Another benefit of doing this is you spend some time with yourself, and a bit away from those social networks and you get to enjoy some eternal moments which exclusively created by you and exclusively for you which you really don't want to flaunt on those profiles.

So the idea is you must listen to your heart i.e. should do something what you really like. That may fetch a great happiness to you and sometimes recognition is a by-product of the process.

Should we make machine Intelligent?

Well some days ago I heard from someone that teaching process is changing so rapidly that there will not be any pen and paper in use. I remember my primary school days, when my teacher used to say all these stuff about the (future) technology. I used to feel so thrilled about it at that age thinking 'Yes.. it would be the great day!'

Now when I am an M.Tech student with specialization 'Machine Intelligence' , where we are taught to make machine intelligent so that one day a human can be replaced by a machine at many places. Well let me define what we mean by 'Machine Intelligence' for those who are new to this term, cause my mother asks me this question twice in a month. I will try to make it clear using an example. If you put one apple and one orange in front of your computer, turn on the camera for it and ask it to identify which is an orange? It will see the objects through a camera but probably you will get no answer, because your machine can not make decisions i.e. it is not intelligent enough to "infer". If you perform the same exercise with your 4yr old niece, she would spontaneously come up with the correct answer. Well, here one branch of machine intelligence 'Pattern Recognition' plays a role. Here we make these things easy for a machine. We can provide it some shapes and colour data to make decisions. Still there isn't any technology that can let your machine smell the object and perhaps taste the object!

In 'Machine Intelligence' we are directly in race with the Nature. Though we have started just 50-60 years back in this race, we have reached quite far but still a long way to go. At many places we have replaced the human effort. Like, where you had to keep a door man to open the gate only when, yours or your relatives', cars come, There are automatic Door opener with the system installed with desired Car number plates data that "if any car with provided numbers comes then only open the door" kind of instructions.

I see a danger in doing so. Population of many countries is increasing with a rapid rate. Then how will be the scene after 50 years when we would have enough machines to do all the work. What shall people do if there is a machine to do that. And always human labour is costlier than machine so I am sure what would industries prefer.

Other concern I see is, some conventional methods, i think, are still needed. Like, I find teaching on the board more effective than that through slides... Rough work/drafting with pencil and paper... Chapati made by your mom.. printed photos than digital on screen photos and blah blah..

So sometimes I get confused, should we stop this race or continue with increasing speed. Though as a student I will continue doing my assignments  still this topic is rolling in my mind quite often.