Neuron Frenzy

The Chequered Game of Writing

2011-12-31T23:35:00.001+05:30

I think I have finally come across a nice analogy for why people write novels/stories (fiction, to be vague). This is mainly because, when I started reading fiction for the first time, it made me wonder why did someone take up so much time in their life to sit down & write this book, this story, this whatever?

When I wrote my first short story & posted it on my blog, I realized it instantly, but only subconsciously. It took me about 3 years to finally come to terms to understand consciously what it was I had learned while writing the story.

It is just like a game. To make the analogy better, let's assume a Game of Chess. What is a game of chess, really? A board with black & white pieces &, black & white squares with some rules. Same applies to writing fiction, there are some basic rules - there ought to be characters in the story, they have to do something, that should bring out something much bigger than the face value of the characters' actions. To simplify, the actions mentioned in the story (includes dialog, physical acts, emotions, etc) must represent some broader or a smaller, or any concept which is outside the story. A sort of underlying message or philosophy. The writer should make that connection instantly instead of lingering on & almost trying to reach it. But the best part about this process is evident from millions & millions of writers writing more or less similar plots in so many different ways. Just like a game of chess, despite being centuries old, still has the ability to come up with new moves as new players improvise their games independently.

So the game of chess begins when both players sit across facing each other's arsenal. One player has white which begins the game, the other has black. I think these colours also symbolize a lot more than their intended use of mere distinction. It is a difference in ideology of the writer & the reader. They don't come from the same background & same beliefs. So the writers' words are in fact bearing a different meaning for each of the readers. The white always begins, because the intention is clear, to start off with the game in a peaceful manner, no matter how it ends. The black represents the critical aspect of the game, which has to enter into the game with a defensive manoeuvre. Then the game can progress with one player being offensive & the other defensive irrespective of the colour of the pieces. The reader must be able to critically assess the work in his own head to better understand it within their own context. In short, it has to be understood in some relevant way.

So in the fiction business the game begins with actually writing and publishing the material. That's the first move. The reader being the other player enters into the game by deciding to read. This I presume is a defensive move because we have to react to an impulse which actually made us want to read that work of fiction. We don't know how the game is going to turn out just in the same way we don't know how a chess game is going to end because there is clever tradition of not including a contents page.

So after entering into the game, each player gets settled by aligning their pieces. The writer starts to transmit ideas in a variety of forms, through characters, through narratives, through examples, through analogies & so on. The reader reads these ideas & interprets what the writer is trying to say, literally trying to get into the writer's head. The writer through his words tries to elicit some emotional response to either uplift the reader or to break him down. This is exactly what chess players do. They try to get into each other's heads while the game goes on revealing layers after layers of intentions. These intentions best decide how the game turns out to be. Some players are more perceptive than others so they can guess the opponent's moves & plan better whereas some not so good players end up spending huge amounts of time deciding their next move by brute force. So in the same way good readers, will guess what the author is trying to say judging through the author's words & explanations, whereas bad readers end up hacking their way through the writer's work trying to make sense of the words. Most often without any success.

Similarly good writers understand their own ideas better & can project them in a much better way than bad writers. So the bad writers end up wasting a lot of time reaching any relevant point because they don't know exactly what they are getting at. I think this is also a serious reason for writer's block, not knowing exactly what we are trying to convey. In the game of chess, good players know their moves, styles & their ability to play so well that they don't over reach & set up game plans accordingly. A bad player sets up unrealistic goals & fails to plan or even change plans mid-game & doesn't think through moves because he doesn't really know how to steer the game. The bad player is always at the mercy of a good player's sword (I couldn't resist the pun, in case you missed the pun - you should know who the bad writer is by now).

A good chess player always knows if he is about to lose. That player will know when to forfeit a game, if the odds aren't in his favour. That's also a remarkable trait of a good writer. Sometimes it matters a lot what you don't send for publishing. If everything that the writer thinks is published then it may or may not be up to the same standards that he has set up for his work. This requires remarkable work ethic. It requires huge amounts of ego to suck it up & sit on it. The other end of the spectrum is again trying hard to change the outcome of an out-of-favour game. This usually fails since probability isn't biased. Also good readers tend to move around a book very easily & know when to throw a book away. Bad readers tend to keep reading crap even when they know it's crap, but hope that it might get better.

I think the whole book publishing industry is based around catering to the really good readers & writers out there & making the bonus on being able to sell the stuff to mediocre readers who cannot differentiate good material from bad. Incidentally there are also good publishers that are different from bad ones who don't know when crap is crap. I think the new self-publishing platforms are pretty cool since it creates a good & fair market for good reading material & bad reading material. The crowd decides what is good or bad. I love free markets for this precise reason. The idea is of deserving the fate for a piece of work. Also in the game of chess, if you are pitted against a good player & you are a bad player, then you will consistently lose until you get the message & rework your game.

In the end, like I said earlier, it is a clash of ideas & opinions. The writer reveals himself as much as the reader reveals himself while reading. The only difference is that the writer reveals to himself & to the world but the reader reveals only to himself.

But what is true for this game, is also valid for most of the things worth doing in life. All these things can be improved through focused practice & by slowly but painfully learning what not to do.

That's why good writing is as much fun as reading a really well written book, really well. Just like in the game of chess, there can be moments of great excitement when good players battle it out till one of them bows out.

Opening the gate to Normal Land

2011-11-19T09:00:00.001+05:30

Lately I have been soaked in this thought about what does it really mean when we say that something is 'normal'. Are people really trying to imply this is how it should be? Why is it so rewarding to be normal for some people? Is this like an ultimate ride into conformity land!

I grew up with this idea that if I think someone is weird then there must be some other person who definitely finds me weird. There is still no doubt in my mind about it. It sounds so obvious to me that well, here is this person I really don't enjoy being with because I find that person weird so how weird would I be to someone else? There is no context in my head to this thought because I cannot possibly predict what feature or bug in me is going to make me feel weird to someone, so I just never think about it. But in the same way that I feel liberated by this idea, I have seen that some people find it extraordinarily difficult to deal with the fact that anyone can find them weird. Then begins an exercise into finding reflections off other people & trying to look good in their mirrors of opinion. This sucks. I find this sort of an exercise extremely distracting & can't possibly imagine doing it myself.

But some people do. I don't necessarily think that they are abnormal or weird, but they have a different point of view which I don't or I won't share. They believe in fitting in entirely. But for anyone who has exercised even a bit in their life can tell us that there is a limit to which we can stretch our bodies, but there is no such tangible limit to stretching our minds. This puts us at a complete loss, because once we are convinced by some idea we just kind of get sucked into it. We start slipping into that thought pool & can only get out of it if we have the adequate will power to face the limits of that thought.

So being normal, or watching people scorn other people for being abnormal or weird is perfectly acceptable for most of us, because we have already been sucked into this quicksand of normality addiction. There is different normal for different people, so how could we possibly imagine what a general idea of normality is? For a serial killer who has no moral burden over his actions against his victims, killing can be a perfectly normal state of mind. Maybe that's why TV series like Dexter are so successful, because it puts us into a totally different realm of a concept we (non-serial killers) can so easily believe to be absurd.

So this whole normal business leads to a big bunch of dissatisfaction amongst the lots of us. I have seen so many people get consumed by being accepted that they totally forget about who they really are. I was like that once, trying to live up to the expectations of other people around me, but somehow the tide reversed in my favor. I could easily detach & forgot all about it as I grew up. Good for me.

Take a hippo for example, because it is a really huge example & it is easy to pay attention to big bulky things than a small pin lying on the floor. If some person tells us that when it rains & there is mud all around, he likes to roll in it & enjoy the feeling. This may not be a perfectly normal activity to expect from a sane person, but from a hippo's point of view - well it will definitely find it cool. It will join that person in rolling in the mud & maybe both of them would have a really great time. Just rolling & getting dirty in the mud slush.

So this whole business of preferential normality, or in english, my normal is different from your normal, leads us to this really boring conclusion about how cults or groups are formed. People who think something is normal for them & find other people who do it too, will find each other & will come together to share their normality. For them perhaps, if they aren't so open minded, will find other people's normal to be really obnoxious & something to stay away from. The tragedy here is that a lot of people wish to impose their view of normal on a lot of other people. Would a mother obsessed with cleanliness & perhaps having OCD for keeping things clean, force a hippo out of the mud? It will sit on her to begin with, just to protest.

History is filled with such examples of people imposing normality on others, colonisation perhaps, religion definitely, philosophy for sure, political ideology & all those pretentious things people tend to believe when they think they know it all, or worse - they know better.

That just shows perhaps how difficult a political idea like democracy can get, which can become an ultimate exercise in conformity. What most people believe is good for all, is the law & the rest who don't believe it to be good are, well just the abnormal minority. That's why it must always be fun for politicians who get to steer the majority opinion in their favour by not usually putting up great solutions for society's problems in front of the people, but just a thought which most of the electorate will believe to be in their favour. That's it, & the rest is taken care of on the election day.

So how do we deal with this normal bug? How we as a species deal with something so basic & fundamental to our thought process, & change it into an unpleasant experience of being open? I know it is possible & it makes finalizing judgments rather difficult. It takes a whole lot of time to take a stand for or against something when we are being too open about it. Open may not always translate to making the right / contextually appropriate choices. Only in hindsight can we say if being open was really the right way of doing it & there couldn't have been another equally efficient alternative solution. Being open is like being in a constant state of motion & some people tend to get motion sick.

Because, being open may not be everybody's normal.

The Stuff of Inspiration

2011-11-07T12:38:00.000+05:30

I have a theory. Like many of my other theories this one is also based on an entirely unoriginal & mundane idea. I have often wondered how different people have managed to inspire themselves to do a lot of things that they have done. Often while reading interviews of great writers, inventors, et al, it is usually a very common question which pops up on an average 15 minutes into the interview - what has inspired your work? Most people give generic answers & list other people's works or ideas. They speak about their influence on the way they think & approach their process. But all this is merely deflection. What is the true source of inspiration which makes use of that influence, what springs us into action to do some of our greatest works?

Bored.

To take a shot, without any fear of missing the point, I think the biggest personal motivator for people to move on & do their best work might be - dramatic pause - 'Boredom'.

I read Joseph's Brodsky's interview where he analyzes the idea of boredom. Another article on Boredom. Brodsky terms boredom as a 'psychological sahara' - that starts right into our boredom & spurns the horizon. The most important part about boredom that he mentions is about humility.

Boredom is a minion of time. It is a realization of the existence of time behind everything that we do. It allows time to invade into our minds, to hack into our regular thoughts & slow it down to a grind. It makes us believe in our finite existence. Since time has plenty of time to just go & on, we as humans who benchmark our lives to time, follow it helplessly & also hopelessly. There is always this ticking clock inside us, the number of breaths we take in our entire life time, the number of heartbeats, the number of hours of sleep we allow ourselves to get, the number of minutes of workout, the amount of time we spend at work, the amount of time we devote to our leisure. It is more ruthless than money & the advantages of economizing on time far out-weigh those of economical use of money.

This finite life form versus an infinite force, forces us to realize our insignificance in the entire scale of time. If we try to visualize one human being's existence on the so far known scale of time, we would be measured in million nano meter units. But thats not the point. The point of boredom is not it's existence, but the thoughts that it brings to our minds about ourself & about our abilities. What we can & cannot do with that time!

To quote Brodsky, "If it takes will-paralyzing boredom to bring your insignificance home, then hail the boredom. You are insignificant because you are finite. Yet infinity is not terribly lively, not terribly emotional. Your boredom , at least, tells you that much. And the more finite a thing is, the more it is charged with life, emotions, joy, fears, compassion."

I'd like to imagine, though inaccurately, how the typical life of an average prehistoric human would have been 500,000 years ago. Hunting & foraging for food & spending large pockets of time during the day doing, well, absolutely nothing. There would be a spurt in activity for specific times during the day for hunting & collecting, but beyond that, due of lack of any civilized construct to follow, there would be nothing left to do. True idleness in the wilderness. Now the idea of Psychological Sahara becomes a wonderful metaphor to show the limits of activity in an ocean of nothing. What would this prehistoric human, with an outsized brain & the ability to walk upright do in times of complete nothingness? I just have to look at this computer screen right now to imagine what that human must have done. Because that human was bored with a unique circumstance to actually feel the boredom, he might have spawned an entire process of innovation by mere observation & re-invention. I have heard that necessity is the mother of invention, but who is the father? Among many candidates & due of lack of DNA profiling, I assume it is boredom. An entire thought process developed due the insecurity that boredom creates. We have leaped from a stone tool to an iPad. The sophistication of such a thought only seems to have emerged from something very primal to us.

Why is it that such a vital part of our thought process remains so under appreciated? Well it is in fact not under appreciated, it is acknowledged every single time we check our email, check our BBM's, check our apps on a smartphone, watch a film, use drugs, do mind blowing work, basically get busy. It is everywhere. It is the exact opposite state of focused activity.

I'd read somewhere that, 'Adversity introduces a man to himself only if he allows it to'. What better adversity than being bored to death, unable to lift even a toe in any direction. Well the most important thing about boredom is that it doesn't kill - at least physiologically & whatever doesn't kill us, makes us stronger. But the main question is how should we objectively look at boredom when we are actually bored? This is a more daunting task than actually suffering it. This somehow feels like a massive exercise into our own masochistic ego.

The Island of Incomplete Illusions

2011-11-06T19:16:00.000+05:30

It is always easy to get lost in an illusion which we end up believing. We think it is so true that there is no escape from it. We enter it with an anticipation of honesty, fun, thrill & recognition. Sometimes we get what we are looking for, but in small portions & there are those other times when we get so much more that we forget the need for illusion altogether. It becomes us.

(Poster from imdb)

Such was an illusory experience watching Woody Allen's latest, A Midnight in Paris. He is so unassuming about the audience's taste, perhaps that comes with his age, that he clearly forgets that someone else is really going to watch his film. He characterizes himself into a much younger man, with a similar large nose & goes about trotting along the streets of Paris into the night.

He harbours illusions, so strong that even the most objective thoughts about the film & plot quickly dissolve into his imagination. Perhaps thats what really great story telling is all about. The audience must get so absorbed about asking "why" about the right elements of the story, which lie at its heart rather than asking why about the plot. Immersive.

But is it really necessary to have any illusions, can we help it? Can we avoid it? I think illusions are like milestones, they show us that there is still distance to cover till you truly reach your destination where ignorance doesn't matter. It perhaps is a product of not knowing what we exactly want from ourself. If we knew completely, in very simple terms what is it that we really want from every single action that we take, it would be pretty close to predicting our own future, minute by minute. I believe the fun in the future is to live it gradually & reach there to find that there is still more of future to cover, like a never ending Escher drawing, but unlike it until the point where we reach the end of our personal road & face a bottomless pit. This edge is our launching pad into the next phase of life, that is in plain english - no life. We leap off that edge without knowing if we will float upwards or sink like a brick. But the best thing is the final glance that we must take at the road walked so far. I would prefer jumping off the cliff with my back towards it, so that I can watch all the things that I have done behind me, good or bad, staring back at me for that one final moment as if to say 'goodbye' or in most cases, ' good riddance'.

Watching Woody Allen's film shifted me into an alternate tab of mine. Into the tab where another fresh webpage was just loading. This is a tab which lists zero personal accomplishments, pretty similar to the other tabs, but with a slightly different template. It put me in state to reassess all my illusions, haven't been successful at all in doing so. I only realized that what I really passionately believed in, was true & not really an illusion. It was real to the point where I could hack through other emotions & watch these glow. But the illusions were more deceptive that reality. The moment I tried to look for them, they disappeared. This is where life imitates quantum physics. That constant state of shifting focus from one illusion to the next, not knowing where to land as if floating in a hot air brain full of helium like ideas zipping across various lands where sometimes thoughts grew like weeds & sometimes like oak trees. I could at least begin to see where I might want to land. The places where I had landed in the past & took off from were great launchpads & new areas await.

(Photo From: http://battleshippretension.com/)

I was hardly ever inspired so much by a single piece of work, but perhaps it's the Woody Allen effect, whose films I grew up watching. I realized that during my most formative years where I started to realize who I was & what I would like to do, I had laced my thoughts with a lot of ideas, including Woody Allen's works. I might have been looking at his latest work not from the point of view with which he presented it, but the point of view with which I had perceived it. But that I think works most of the time, because other people's thoughts sometimes seem like worse illusions than our own.

But nothing is complete without a satisfactory ending. I think this is where the greatest stories differ from the rest. What thought does the piece of work leave in our minds at the moment it ends. This post is perhaps the thought that I was left thinking about in between shifting the tabs from illusions to reality & back, I feel quite contented about it.

A Reluctant Historicist

2011-09-12T00:52:00.001+05:30

"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

I have grown up reading that quote. But what should we learn from history? Should we just learn about what happened in the past or should we learn from the actions that were provoked because of what happened in the past? Everything there is to learn from history gives us a chronological story of when & how the events took place. This can breed in us a misplaced arrogance of probably identifying a pattern or a trend in which history proceeds to become the present. We might get tempted to say, "of course, that was going to happen anyway, what else could happen?" These patterns might very well exist, but each of these patterns is tainted by our own way of looking at it.

Karl Popper, in Open Society & its Enemies calls this imagination of a historical trend as Historicism. Although this term predates Popper it's a good place to start thinking about history. A historicist looks at the past & starts drawing conclusions based on facts & interpretations to come up with a theory of historical development/evolution. It is akin to irresponsibly use a spreadsheet to drag a trend to eternity. This so called knowledge of the evolution of history seems mystical but at the same time is an important part of the fabric of assumptions of how any society grows.

For a long time I assumed that the system that we are living in is a good one. I mean, the democratic system, where anyone can do what we want to do under the common context of the law. I still think it's a great system. But perhaps due to lack of any major turbulence in my life or perhaps sheer ignorance about what's happening around 'my' world, I began to believe in its obvious permanence. It seems obvious, only due to a lack of understanding of how it feels to be in any system other than my own experience. Now I begin to question, if this experience was worth anything at all! The ignorance, the assumption of permanence & taking the system's function for granted. One of the major traits of an historicist is to passively assume that the system will remain the way it is & it will have a DNA of its own. All the good & bad things about it will continue to be so (within an assumed historical trend) but with minor modifications as the social context changes with time. So my assumptions about political, social, educational, economical & the capitalist system that it is the way it is & will remain the way it was, were based on nothing but a Thanksgiving turkey like assumption. I believed that I am safe because I was fed & taken care of all year long. Well what will happen when my Thanksgiving day arrives & my theory of this world is roasted in a big fat oven?

My assumptions about the complex adaptive nature of the universe are also based on a similar mix of arrogance of knowing too much but not knowing the full importance of what I already know. I tend to assume that when things are in a flux, they very well might remain in flux until a trigger brings them back to their so called, Mean Value. But this is one man's stupidity speaking. Imagine a world of people where we each have our own opinions of our systems around us & we each approach them in our own way. Some of us will be allowed & applauded to think on our terms where as the less dominant (popular) ideas will be suppressed. Democracy.

If we see a nation coming together to protest against something as hard to prove & easy to prosecute as corruption, we can observe the anti-historistic attitude in the minds of these people. They seem to assume that they can control their system's fate (which ideally they should be able to, in a democracy) & steer it into a direction of corruption free growth & prosperity. How many of us have honestly visualized the after effects of this, in a country like ours? There are various models to refer in other countries, but what about a model state of affairs for our nation? What will it finally mean to take charge of the course of this nation's future history? Do all the people standing with a candle in their hand & cap on their heads actually understand the economic, political, social impact of their actions when they face the same incentives & threats as the people they wish to prosecute? I don't know the answer.

I have begun to believe that there are two types of historicists. One who truly believes in his version of historical evolution & hopes that the cycle will repeat the way it has in the past. The other type of historicist is a reluctant one, who has to accept that without a movement as viral as the current protest against corruption & without serious resources to protect against personal vendetta from the affected parties - it is nearly impossible to get the system to move one way or another. In short, become a fish big enough so that other fish can't hurt me & my cause. I guess I have become a reluctant historicist, which deeply bothers me since I believe in taking charge of my own life & not succumb to any patterns or trends that I am 'supposed' to follow. That's a weird contradiction to live with, but this time I can't seem to figure which of my assumptions is wrong?

The Sport of Investing

2011-07-24T22:48:00.000+05:30

Cross posted from our company blog - The Sport of Investing

I have always wondered if investing is a sport or a profession. What I mean to say is that should investing be about competition or should investing be about generating good returns on investment. Although a lot that an investor does, especially a very public one, can be qualified as a sport when we use league tables to judge fund managers, private equity investors, etc. But is investing really a sport or just another professional activity?

Well professional sportsmen will surely differ here, saying, ‘hey, even we are professionals.’ Sure they are, but the context is different when emotions are involved. It is weird since both investing & sporting involve the same level of emotional demands from the player. (S)He has to make decisions in a cold and calculated way which can make the difference between glory & defeat. An investor faces the same emotional dilemma, but not with glory or defeat (entirely), but with money & worse – other people’s money. So the emotional motivation to get glory at all costs is the fundamental difference between sporting & investing, because an investor can’t bet the ranch when the odds are not in favour (at least that’s what should happen in a rational universe).

The reason I compare these two activities is because I watched a documentary about the legendary (late) Formula One driver, Aryton Senna. Its called “Senna“. A wonderfully made, heart wrenching film about the driver’s meteoric rise, the sport of formula one & his untimely death in an accident. The end reminded me much about how investors & traders can also feel the colossal effect of a fatality (not with life but with money) of a decision gone wrong. But you still live another day for the next round, unlike in Senna’s case. In his interviews which have been restored from archived footage, he talks about what he feels of the sport & his skill as a racing driver.

To give some background, Senna had been penalized for an accident while he nicked his car against team-mate & arch rival Alain Prost (of McLaren) which meant the end of the race for Prost & Senna continued with relatively less damage to win the race & the championship title. The race victory was stripped away from him as a penalty. In an interview later, the former Formula One driver Jackie Stewart asked Senna how was it that he was the most accident prone driver in any given stretch of 36 month period in the history of the sport? (which in fact is not a relevant comparison since nobody really drives in a race for causing accidents). To which Senna replied very emotionally that, “When we call ourselves racing drivers we see a gap, we take it. If we fail to do that, we can no longer call ourselves racing drivers”.

Isn’t this what investing is all about? We try to find gaps in the value of an asset, a security & we try to take advantage by acting on the gap. The gaps in the race are chances to move & exist only for a limited time frame of a second or two. But in investing the gaps have been known to exist for a lot longer than that & also some exist for a very short time. But this gives us even more reasons to rejoice so that we can keep on taking advantage of the gap as long as it exists.

Investing is not a sport, although its risks are real just like any sport. It isn’t necessary to compare one investor with the rest because all we are dealing with is past performance based on situations which had existed at those times. Its really the process that comes to work in the end. A racing driver can have a few fluke victories, but a sustainable, long term great performance is only possible when the driver has developed a process with which he uses his ability to race.

Buffett used to say in his partnership letters that our only benchmark is the S&P 500 index & Dow Jones Index, & that he would be glad if he could consistently beat it with a few percentage points difference over the long term. Well, he has done a lot more than that, but the point is taken. How any investor will perform in the future depends on a lot of factors and skill & luck are a very large part of them.

Unthinkable

2011-07-07T01:31:00.002+05:30

There is a quote in a Saul Bellow book,

"We're funny creatures, We don't see stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects, but endless fire."

This is precisely what it makes us think when we face a moral dilemma. We want to see the correctness of our actions as a vindication of our conscience. We want to look moral & fair in our own eyes. We want to live with no guilt for our decisions, but only glow in the relief of a favourable outcome. But what if the outcomes are not in our favour? Most of us don't have the strength to gut it that it's not us who failed entirely, but also the odds were against us. We miscalculated & erred & that's that. We can come up with thousands of post hoc explanations, but that isn't going to resolve the failure of that one action.

Basically, we have to live with it.

I think a lot of religious texts create this disconnect between the process & the outcome. If we are at least following a process which we think is correct at the time, we can detach ourselves from the outcome. We can say, we tried our best - & that would be true in that situation. Perhaps thats why there is a constant focus on rituals, to engrave the importance of the process.

I watched a film recently (spoiler alert), called "Unthinkable". I picked it up with no expectations, being a direct to dvd film. It turned out to be a crazy ride down morality lane & a very well acted one too. I don't think any amount of ethics lectures are capable of preparing us with how to deal with the threat presented in the film.

An American citizen releases a video tape of planting three nuclear bombs across the country. Then ensues an enquiry, everybody till the very top is rattled by the threat & especially since there are no demands made, yet. Then a secret military operation, involving the FBI for the bomb hunt & the military, who have already captured the terrorist. Till this point we are led into the trap of assuming how straight this film is going to be. It's a typical terrorist situation, "We don't negotiate with terrorists" blah blah & then the investigation to find & disarm the 3 bombs. But the situation is far too complicated under the surface. We come face to face with a series of moral dilemma's. This is, as it's obvious by now, the interrogation of the terrorist & the methods used thereof. We are aware of the various ways torture is used to extract information, by using intimidation, scare tactics, physical abuse & finally, leverage. What we don't naturally think of is the limit for all these actions. How far can we go with this one person, who clearly intends to harm other people, to save millions? We also fail to look through the eyes of the torturer. We look at him as a heartless human being, perhaps as bad as the terrorist itself. But we never really try to figure out the nature of his actions. The nature of belief that he creates in the mind of the terrorist - that all this will stop if he reveals the locations of the bombs. That's where we fail. That's where we do not understand the limits of both the terrorist's ingenuity, his tolerance & the torturers ability to withstand the personal, moral guilt of inflicting the pain.

We must stop to question, then are the terrorist & the torturer made out of the same fabric of thought? Do they share the same mental makeup to inflict pain & suffering upon their own kind? How do they individually assess the morality of their actions? In short, what is right & what is wrong for each of them?

Sadly the answers we get are not black & white. Throughout the film we watch the brutality of the torturer in detail & his cold & calculated ability to deliver pain. We also face the cold & calculated suffering of the terrorist, who is one of the military's very own & his ability to withstand intimidation. These scenes feel like a slab of ice against the cheek, after a point we give in to the pain of watching it. The terrorist puts across a lot of moral points, chief of which is the ability of humans to torture or hurt one of their own, under some pretext. In his case, a terror suspect. The point is, should the terrorist as a human being have any rights & the dignity of a fair trial? Surprisingly, this question is not as easy to answer as it seems, when we have to work within the terrorist's rules of sharing the information. Then should we applaud our Indian judicial system to win a trial against a terrorist or should we applaud the tortures being conducted all around the world under some or the other pretext of counter-terrorism? Both can act as a deterrent to terror, but which one is more effective?

The torturer, it seems is not part of the moral quagmire that regular people face. He is like the prosecutor who has to prove the guilt of the suspect & extract vital information to proceed with the investigation. Both work within their systems, one, within the system of man's fear & pain, the other within the system of law. The torturer knows that he has to deliver, he must have the strength to make those tough choices about the limits of pain & rely on nobody's judgement. He can't give in to the weakness of human dignity & suffering. He has to push through & in many cases make enemies for life, of all the torture survivors.

The film is a lot more than what I am trying to convey. For obvious reasons I won't discuss the ending. On watching the reactions of all the other characters facing certain death if the bomb explodes along with a few million more deaths & the torturer's fight with himself & the terrorist, brings this film to a hair raising conclusion. The torturer is focused more on the process of getting the information out whereas all of us want to get the information (outcome) & move on with our lives. It makes sense when we read Saul Bellow's quote now, that we try to look at things for what we think they are rather than what they actually are. We choose to be blinded from the obvious & are happy to live within a perception, of course until the bomb blows up in our face.

Why is Literature Important?

2011-04-24T09:13:00.001+05:30

"If they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers."

This is a line from Thomas Pynchon's famous novel, Gravity's Rainbow. A similar situation arose from asking questions to businessmen while researching their companies. If the questions that I ask them are not relevant according to them, then they don't need to worry about answering them accurately. Any answer would suffice as long as my sense of curiosity is satisfied. It takes to be a really good financial analyst, to figure out the relevant questions & to be a very good conversationalist in order to put these questions in the right context. Unless these questions are asked properly, the relevant & really important information that we seek, lies hidden.

I think this is also the nature of literature (or fiction, in general). There are questions & there are answers - they are not always pleasing to everyone. But they need to be put into the right context so that their answers will have some relevance to our life. We humans lead contemplative lives throughout which we ask these questions, about ourself, about the state of the world, about nature of things around us. And mostly we fail. Most of us don't get to see the answers the way they should be because we have our own lens to look at the world. The questions are tainted by our own observation & interpretation of things. Things are unresolved in our minds which is usually mistaken as a clear viewpoint whenever it becomes part of a chain of thought. The belief that if its a thought in our minds then it must be a tangible understanding of some concept seems wrong. This misleading judgement pushes us in two directions. The first one is the passive, complacent acceptance of our own ideas as the right version of everything. The other is an unsettling need to find several other versions of the same truth. In our confusion we try to compare our life with how others are living theirs & come up with these hopeless benchmarks of right / wrong ways to live.

Truth is not some abstract understanding of the world, but perhaps a way to frame the question properly so the answer emerges out of it.

Why are these questions important & what is the use of those answers?

The questions are an inevitable part of being human. In our truly idle moments we spend painfully long hours in connecting the dots. Dots that would be any parts of our life. Life is an abstract concept which is only finalized by the reality of death. Such a binary outcome of our existence seems too daunting to go through without some clarity about who we are & what are we doing here. The questions seem to form a part of this process to connect the dots between our existence & its significance. Its significance to us & relative to the world around us.

The job of a writer is not just to create a fantastic world view & an entertaining plot. Its job is to create a world which we can relate to. Once we can relate to this world thats been verbally pulled over our eyes, we start imagining ourselves as a part of this world. We truly connect to the symbolism, to the characters & their relationships amongst themselves. We start seeing things from their perspective, just in case, to understand what we would do in the same situation. This adjustment of worlds leaves us totally vulnerable to these questions & thus we become more receptive to our own thoughts. We start treading cautiously into the unknown territory, we are wary of the imagery & begin to anticipate what might happen on the turn of the page. And when we least expect any looming thought around the curb of the next page, the writer introduces these questions. The very same questions that we ask ourselves, to get to know who, why, how, what we are. Of course they are not so obvious, but they start to emerge from the text. They build anxiety, they build doubt & they build confidence at the same time - that we can at least take a shot at answering these questions. In our fear of finding the ugly truth about ourselves, deeply hidden within a labyrinth of our thoughts, we finally start seeing light. It seems less embarrassing to ask ourselves those pointed questions & make meaning of our lives. It brings us the courage to come face to face with the fact that we have been what we have been so far, does it make sense? Is this the best I can get or do? Whats more? Am I pretending to be someone else?

Countless amount of wealth is spilt on psychotherapy, by millions of people to find the same answers. Or even to be able to face the same questions. Fear of the unknown is a natural part of our thought process & its evolution's ironic gift. It teaches us our limitations & at the same time keeps us from crossing them. But most of the fears that we have can be resolved mechanically, if not logically. But the fear of truly knowing who we are & to be afraid to find out that the answer might be unpleasant - is present in all of us.

The writer & his literature then becomes a tunnel for us to guide these thoughts to the light at the end. The light does not symbolize any clarity or the tunnel doesn't lead to any field of answers to our questions, but it leads us into a light of our own thoughts & our own ability to ask ourselves - 'Who am I'?

But one question remains, which only the reader can solve for itself - If we truly find out what we really are & it's unpleasant according to us, can't we do something about it & change it into something relatively better or do we seek comfort in not finding the tumour & let the cancer spread till it eats us alive?

Protecting Values

2011-03-26T15:57:00.005+05:30

Why should rich world powers involve themselves in the internal conflicts of the countries with oppressive regimes? Like in Libya.

Two options lie ahead of us (whether of rich or poor-oppressed nations):

We can tolerate that other people are being oppressed & they should rise up against their own evils.
Another approach is that we should intervene and get rid of the oppression & help those people stand up on their own feet, sooner.

What are the pros & cons of such an approach?

To intervene or not intervene?

The foremost reason is "trade" or "economic relations" between different regions of the world. When it was easy to get away with not moving around & live within self sustainable means, there was no incentive to reach out to see what the world had to offer. Even if there was an incentive as we can see in hindsight, it wasn't always economically viable. Instead local economics dominated over the minds of the locals. Since there was no conception of what goods/resources the world can offer, there wasn't any desire to explore the possibility. Fortunately not all people thought this way & some of them explored (mostly for the search of treasure to loot or countries to colonize) but nevertheless ventured out on funded expeditions. Once the goods from the new lands were brought back, there was an immediate comparison between its value with locally available goods. This might have created a dichotomy of value, what can we make better than them & what can they make better than us?

Stealing ideas & designs was probably as old as then. But it doesn't change the economic basis of trade. We buy what we think is more valuable than the money we spend on it. If we believe that someone in a far away land can make something better than us & it can be economically transported with the least possible risk - we can hope to buy it at a reasonable price. This is the basis of international trade or at least the version that the WTO wants to believe.

With massive explosion in distribution networks, it is far more prudent to find such economic value in a lot more nations than our own / our neighbors. So if a supply chain is disrupted on account of internal conflict in some part of the world, it automatically affects the lifestyle & economics of the nations that depend on the output of these strife led countries.

But are there rules of protecting such economic interests of the world?

Are there rules of engagement meant for the rich countries, which can be relied upon to engage in such situations?

What should be the priorities of the intervening nations - to protect their own interests or the interests of those oppressed?

Can being selfish truly absolve the world's conflicts & create a better environment for trade?

So intervention even if it sounds ridiculous in the newspapers & borderline meddlesome - does it not ensure that markets remain free & their access remains equitable?

I think international diplomatic relations are much more necessary to protect the smooth functioning of the markets as much as they are important for usurping oppressive regimes. But it will be exceptionally naive to assume that all the intervening parties will have the best intentions in mind. All of them, under the guise of freeing markets can have ulterior motives to control or dominate the region for themselves.

Will this lead to controlled colonization of the nations under strife?

Should a super power be trusted with the authority to benevolently return the state to the rightful rulers after the conflict is over?

This was exactly the reason why most nations came under the oppressive regimes in the first place. Laying tremendous trust into the hands of someone powerful, in order to run the state as they please, until the state stabilizes. Besides, the rulers never left. Remember Caesar?

The power, it seems, to turn the wheels of global trade & commerce will always lie in the hands of the powerful. As Muammar Gaddafi quoted in one of his speeches, 'The Strong will always rule".

Is power of the people stronger than one regime?

Is the wit of the people greater than one regime?

Is camaraderie a reliable force to sustain trade?

Finally, why does it always end up being a question about sustainable trade? Don't we have anything better to do?

There are examples of good governance leading to tremendous improvement in the standards of living of people. Singapore is an example that comes to mind. There are contradictions in the way the world works & they more or less evolve from they way people think about their values. The most ancient dichotomy lies between the values of the West vs the East. Western nations believe that free trade is the way ahead & they have evolved their political systems surrounding the assumptions arising out of it. Since they have been more prosperous with their approach, despite the price paid in history - this model of global capitalism seemed very juicy not to adopt. If these values spread, it will not only benefit the West, but also benefit the nations who adopt them. This has also been demonstrated by India, China, Brazil, & so on. So there lies an economic incentive in spreading your values & protecting your economic interests.

The East on the other hand has perhaps evolved its idea of capitalism from a more socialistic or a communist point of view.

But, as your interests more & more depend on how other people lead their lives, it becomes necessary to set the path straight once in a while by intervening & suppressing the volatility in policy, The Economist has a brilliant argument, which seems logically correct so far - that in order to be able to promote its model of economic well being, it has to intervene & the moment it sacrifices its values by not intervening, the economic model will blow up in its face.

As for why don't we have anything better to do than just trade?

Well, we weren't always like this. In Matt Ridley's book, The Rational Optimist - he cites that 'Transacting is not a natural phenomenon'. Humans developed the idea of trading/exchanging at least 100,000 years ago. They seemed to have figured out the logic, that the more you trade the more you prosper. Animals, although show examples of transactions in isolation it is nothing compared to the way we humans have evolved. If trading was such a dominant revelation in human thought, then it is necessary to ask, why did the industrial revolution not happen sooner?

Now comes the biological kicker - human tendency, like other animals is to isolate & create special factions which share amongst themselves but not with outsiders. This has hugely restricted new ideas & inculcated group think amongst cultures. Well the obvious advantage of trade, specialization, production & consumption is apparent from our current urban lifestyles. But is it worth protecting? Are these values really so important that we have to try & show others the right path towards them?

What if, there is some hidden, unknown sense of life underlying the values of oppressed state - that the intervening world fails to see?

To answer that I'd like to cite what Ridley cites which more or less sums it up for why protecting markets is sometimes more important that protecting political ideologies -

'Political decisions are by definition monopolistic, disenfranchising and despotically majoritarian; markets are good at supplying minority needs.'

- simply put - if we don't like an outcome of an election, we have to live with it. But if we don't like a hair dresser, we can always look for another one.

Sucker for Critical Inquiry

2011-02-26T19:30:00.002+05:30

I read an interview of Gurcharan Das, about his latest book "The Difficulty of Being Good". Here he casually mentions that in order to research The Mahabharat he went to University of Chicago & sat among grad students to learn along with them. What's surprising is that a person can learn such a text with little cultural relevance to western philosophy, in a western university. I am pretty sure I have never come across any formal university course teaching The Mahabharat in India, where it was scripted.

When asked why he chose to learn at the University of Chicago rather than in India, he said he didn't want to escape into Indian past & wanted to do a critical inquiry. I am not surprised by the answer, since this statement immediately took me back 10-12 years when I was in school & had started developing a decent amount of curiosity about history. It still remains my favorite subject to date. History was among the thinnest text books we had ever used. Second only to the Civics text books. Most of the assessment was done on the basis of how much we remembered from the text books (the dates, the figures, the people & their references, wars & other such details). I still don't remember learning history as a way to understand a way of living at that time, or even its contribution to how we live now. I would have loved to understand the importance of the freedom struggle of India in the context of why 'freedom' was a goal & what were the alternatives? Instead the focus was on atrocities of the British & how several movements fought against them with detailed facts & figures. Well, great lessons in anarchy, but what about infrastructure, governing & stability? Our civic & legal structures still mimic the british system which was instituted by them when they ruled. What has changed? Why should it change? Why was it considered bad? - these things were never discussed (emphasized).

When some non-Indian authors write about Indian historical figures, they run a risk of getting themselves & their books banned in the country - which becomes a major disincentive to promote critical study of history within India. Churchill reminded us that "History is written by the victors", demands that future readers of that history use a lens of doubt to study those events & their interpretations. A political cult of a common version of history destroys the sanctity of facts & doesn't allow anyone to ask questions which might challenge that version of the truth. Instead it breeds complacency among the students to ignore history & treat it as a topic which gives them some extra credits in their final exams. It also breeds a sense of belief that it has nothing to do with their lives.

Well to be precise, if there is no history, there can't be any future ahead. No matter what the history text books, political opinion or even expert opinions believe - what has happened in the past, has happened for a reason & that reason is what must be emphasized. This precise lack of respect of what caused the events to take place makes people insolent towards the outcomes. No wonder people still litter at historical places in India. Nobody cares why that historical monument exists, but well its a great spot for a picnic, isn't it?

Is this a job for education, politics or parents? Who decides what we must learn from history? I don't know what the right answer is, but its worth figuring out. Who can control our understanding of our culture & make people realize why it is not a good idea to write "I love you" on the walls of Ajantha Caves?

A recent article from The Economist casually mentions a very important point at its conclusion.

"21st Century skills may help our pupils become better workers; learning history makes them better citizens."

Loss? of a vision...

2011-02-13T19:34:00.000+05:30

Modi Road at 8:30 AM

I love walking down the streets of Mumbai. DN road, which on any average day is full of the sound of a cash register ringing in some shop or the other, or the sound of a card being swiped so that somebody could buy what they want to. But on a perfectly sunny morning - at around 8:30 AM - it is something else altogether. I don't know what it would look like if there was no british construction there. But the way the sunlit street shines up, waiting for opportunity to pass by every day. The sun light hits the architecture creating shadows of the past, giving those structures a purpose of being there. No matter what atrocities transpired within those bricks, it still was our moment back then. Its magnificent. I regret every single time I walk past this vision, without my camera. I don't know what I am supposed to be capturing here, but that moment is raw, thawing out there to be felt before it melts away.

The moment I cross the street to reach my workplace, the vision is gone, the sun has moved up a few degrees & the moment is no longer raw. It dissolves in the light - maybe someone has seized it & maybe it will be available for me to seize it on some other sunny day. But no one knows when that will be. The sun will have moved a few degrees away & the rays will not fall in the same way. If that moment was captured by someone, it could have lived an eternity.

I watched a film called The Fighter & the same thoughts rushed back. The boxer (Micky) who could have been a great fighter, was living under the shadow of his brother who was his hero & trainer. A former boxer, his brother Dicky was looking for his brother to be a great boxer but was pulled down by his drug habit. Eventually Dicky sobers up, Micky moves ahead without his brother's help but only because of Dicky's training. They get back together again, train harder & Micky wins the welterweight title at the fag end of his career as a professional boxer.

Mark Wahlberg (Micky) during a 'fight'

The movie also speaks a lot about how opportunities come & go in our lives & we know when they are staring right at us. The look is penetrating, it makes us feel inspired & ready to go get it, but circumstances or our weakness holds us back. It is never clear what happens to the opportunity once it moves away. Maybe somebody else grabs it & makes good for themselves. But what happens to us, we end up staring at the empty road trying, yet again to put out our best effort to win another such opportunity back. Very few, I have observed are lucky to get such a chance again (like Micky was). But even then, it is up to us to realize that chance. The odds of winning will never be the same again.

There are so many such instances in life I am sure I am missing to see, although they are staring at me intently. I know some of them, others I wouldn't even know about. What happens to those I know about & don't act on?

Just like a photographer who has lost his vision, who has lost the opportunity to capture the light bouncing off those structures & the opportunity to immortalize that vision. Light had reflected upon the culture & had shown him a piece of history which was itself built on other such pieces of opportunity.

That vision is lost & the lens has to move on to the next one.

Life to be...

2011-01-12T19:43:00.000+05:30

I remember starting this blog for stroking my vanity, but it turns out people have been reaching out to me to tell me that they read it too. Well, it is in the public domain so I can't blame them. I am surprised, shocked and even humbled that how life for most of the people who commented and talked back at me about the blog can be remarkably similar and different from mine at the same time. The social context changes but the plot remains the same. The hunt for stability, the hunt for the right person to spend our lives with, the hunt for security & finally the hunt for purpose. I contradict with myself in most of those hunts but sometimes I also rhyme with them.

I have been writing at the end of every year since the past two years, about what I did in the year that will end and what I plan to do in the year to come. This time I deliberately broke the spell. There have been some fundamental changes in the way I perceive my life now and most of the previous view points will need a few alterations.

2011, is a year of decisive change, just like 1985, when I was born. I got married in 2011, on the very first day, to a very sweet woman. Although what she means to me & what I feel about her strictly stays with me, locked in the secret chamber of my metaphorical heart. But all I can say is, she is awesome to be with.

The most common question I got asked was - "So, how does it feel after getting married?" - & I must say incidentally it always came from unmarried friends. I imagine that married friends don't wonder about it now :). The answers that raced through my mind were not exactly what I told them. I was thinking - wow, yippee, yeah, way to go - what I said was - it feels warm, it feels nice, it feels real now. Well all that and more, I finally got to ask myself. How does it really feel to be married? Is it any different from before when we used to spend enormous amounts of time speaking about anything with each other?

I think it is different, because now it has materialized. The day I so eagerly imagined & awaited just came and went but left with it a lot of incredibly beautiful memories. Now with things slowed down, I can finally reflect upon how the whole event was. Now its just me & her and our life together with our family. I can't imagine how big an adjustment it must be for her. She will be staying with us in our home and leaving her maternal home for good. The daily life, the daily chores, the daily noises around the house, the dog that used to occasionally wander into their compound, the garden in her backyard, will all be replaced with a different landscape. The landscape now would be our home, a new life and a whole lot of dreams to make real. For me, possibly the adjustment was easier than hers. She was there on the phone a few moments ago, & now she is here for good, a few moments later. Yes, the loud music, the action films, the inordinate amounts of time spent reading will all have to make its room around my new life now. But that is nothing as compared to what she has to go through.

Does it say that a relationship means sacrificing one's lifestyle for fitting into a new one? I don't know what others feel, but I believe it is more of an adaptation than a sacrifice. The semantic difference may not be much, but there is a big difference in its interpretation. We as humans, I believe, have evolved to face social changes. Changes which involve things to do with other people, and the situations surrounding people. We are incredibly adept at getting used to social scenarios and not so much to physical scenarios. Thats why emotionally we are more malleable. Whenever a physical change faces us, we change the environment or our physical appearance (wearing a sweater during cold & so on). But I am no expert on relationships, not even on my own relationship. But I can be sure of one thing that, it definitely feels awesome to have someone sneak into my life and change its perspective from within.

Another thing that surprised me the most was how an atheist like me, took part in a religious wedding ceremony. Well to be honest with myself, I couldn't resist seeing everybody enjoying the wedding. My whole family is religious (meaning, has faith in a higher authority). But I turned around from this faith a long time ago. But even with our differences we had lived & shared all moments of joy & sorrow. I think there is no logical barrier required to enjoy any celebration. The fun in such an event is the usual chaos & the precision of all events. The rituals & their significance was interesting to know, but it has honestly lost its relevance in the modern times. The duties of a married couple which are eventually explained through all these rituals, are socially bred into us right since our childhood. Possibly several thousand years ago, the wedding ceremony might have been the only place to impart such an education to the couple. Most people believe that the whole Indian wedding is sexist and biased towards treating woman with less importance. This I take objection to, because no where in the entire ritual it is mentioned that woman is secondary in marriage. In fact to be honest, there is no room for even the ritual to take place if there is no woman involved. A woman is an integral part of a family and thats what the ritual indicates. Despite having known the symbolism people still prefer to carry out their celebrations with rituals. This indeed is very surprising to me as a skeptic.

Well I think I stumbled upon a reasonable explanation in E. O. Wilson's book, Consilience. He infers that, "Ceremonies stripped of sacred mystery lose their emotional force, because the celebrants need to defer to a higher power in order to consummate their instinct for tribal loyalty." This can be an empirical truth, since I have seen people bonding together very well during ritualistic celebrations. The organized preparations, the delegation of different work to everyone, the sheer excitement behind the ceremony is very obvious from the energy with which everybody prepares. After all, for me religion has always been close to emotion. In my case my emotion is derived from logic, but my family doesn't necessarily share that point of view. They still derive a lot of emotional pleasure from rituals, ceremonies & togetherness. Perhaps this is the tribal loyalty E. O. Wilson was talking about. I must agree, it was a whole lot of fun to enjoy this way with everyone, despite my lack of faith. Since, faith doesn't play much of a role here after a point, once the symbolism is understood.

This wedding has brought me closer to my family. I didn't know that I had drifted away so far with my thoughts. But now I have come to infer that differences of ideas, logic or opinion don't really matter when you still have the capacity to empathize, understand & love.

Ineffectively Effective

2010-10-24T11:37:00.002+05:30

Its a crazy notion to have after a decade's worth of usability experience. After I have graduated to using good technology in the form of my new mac, it suddenly dawned on me that whatever I know about computers & IT systems (those necessary and unnecessary details), I owe it to the pain and suffering of my Windows-PC days.

I think this human brain is not equipped to enjoy life's simplest pleasures but to constantly mull over details. But I like this idea. I don't know a lot, but I know more than average about computers than there is to know. Apart from my graduation in the field of IT, I wouldn't have had the claim to knowing anything I know about computers. But this education begun a lot earlier in my childhood.

There was a dutiful windows PC at my uncle's place, which me and my cousin used to tinker with. Then there came a PC at my home, which I used to tinker with. The tinkering was less due to curiosity and more due to some abnormal machine behavior. To come to terms with it now, it was more about curiosity than about abnormal machine behavior. I distinctly remember dis-assembling my computer for the first time, each part lying on the floor as a spare part in a broken machine. I also remember what happened after that, I forgot how it looked before and how to put it back together again (big oops there). Then came a horrible 5 hour zig-saw workout, trying to put humpty dumpty together again. I put it back together and there it was, working like a charm. After that I knew a lot more about the relationships of various parts in the computer than I knew before. No college degree in IT can teach you that so effectively.

I had developed a new found respect for closed systems because of this experience. The kind of software environment that windows has, also makes it easier to get various software applications to use for any of your needs. This is thanks to a very strong developer community which fed the outsized market share of Windows. Understanding how the hardware works, understanding the software environment have surely helped me appreciate the system more when I started programming. I think I owe my "big picture" viewing skill to my early days of suffering with my PC.

To make the picture even bigger, I think suffering and pain have a lot more to offer than pleasure and satisfaction. Suffering creates a desperate need to get out of that feeling, and it probably is the source of the urge to act, to move, to aspire and to achieve. Suffering is also an extremely good educator. It holds us up by our heel, upside down, shows us how bad it can get, effectively pointing us to hell. Then it drops us and hopes that we land on our feet. If we fail to land on our feet, we succumb to the suffering and if we do land on our feet, we learn about our ability to stand amidst any great fall.

My PC days were filled with remarkable ineffectiveness and lots of lost productivity. I almost always ran out of Memory (applications became more powerful than my ability to upgrade my computer's memory). I always had the processor 5 times less effective than the one needed to run what I wanted to run. I was always ran out of hard disk space (data grows on you, mysteriously, until there is no space left on the disk). So all these things, could have held me down and I would have constantly demanded a better computer, almost every 6 months, which I did. But my father knew something I didn't, perhaps. He never gave in. So now I had to be satisfied with what hardware I had. It taught me amazing lessons about living within my means. Even now, I tend not to exceed my means (in money, time, computer memory) even when I have enough of it. I use it conservatively remembering the times when all these things got used up a lot faster when I didn't keep a check. What a way to learn to be frugal, I think!

So I owe most of my simple ways of life, to my small tete-a-tete with technology (or the lack of it). I am sure living in a urban setting has the same effects on the human mind. There is usually no adversity of opportunity, which teaches us to take it for granted. But I appreciate the people who come from the country side or from under privileged part of the society, where the opportunities for growth (personal and social) are so scarce that they grasp to any opportunity, big or small, with the same fervor.

I think there are more lessons in adversity worth learning than we normally want to get away from.

I think I am beginning to agree to what Marcel Proust said, "We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full".

Balls

2010-10-03T13:19:00.000+05:30

A while ago I read a typical Wall Street Billionaire's profile. The article like any other biographical work, misses the finer details and focuses merely on the material achievements of the person. But that wasn't what intrigued me. It wasn't the first billionaire bio I was reading. All the billionaires who I had read about have been babies of opportunity, as I would like to call them. They saw the same world that we all see, but observed opportunities. Now out of all those who observed the opportunities, only a few billionaires had the "balls" to do something about it.

It got me to think, where do I get these pair of balls to act on an opportunity when everyone around me is telling me that 'I'm being an idiot'?

But like all things worth acquiring, there is an equal amount of luck and skill involved in getting them. One widespread idea which can be seen floating around almost everywhere like oxygen, is lifestyle. In better words, 'looking like your bank statement'. I have seen so many people, including me, fall prey to this idea. Its a networth obsession. Nothing seems to be enough if measured strictly by the size of our current bank statement. The author Joseph Heller made a remarkable statement when compared to his billionaire friend. He said, that 'I have something which he can never have, the knowledge that I have enough'.

Back to balls, I think the idea of having the balls and audacity to do something about an opportunity comes not just from the detachment from the networth effect, but also from the idea that its irrelevant in the long run. Why so? Its probably because of greed and fear again. Greed to have more and fear of losing it all. That greed works miraculously in our favor when we are pursuing that opportunity. The Hunger to do it better than the rest, hunger to learn, hunger to test our limits, hunger to test the boundaries of everything. This greed pushes us far ahead than the rest. This is not just about the money, by the way. I have seen so many folks working in NGO's driven to such an extent to their cause, that they would actually get deluded from the reality of the world around them and indulge in idealism. Idealism is good, only if you can live to talk about it.

How long does this hunger last? Is it part of our character to be hungry for something all the time? I think every person is hungry for something - love, attention, respect, power, money, envy of others, knowledge, social welfare, fairness, equity, and all the other things that drive people. This can very easily transform into greed if it is made an important benchmark for wellbeing - darn dopamine. This hunger might be sufficient to identify opportunities, identify ways to get ahead of others.

So what stops most people to go after what they are hungry for? - Well one hypothesis can be that we don't necessarily know what we are really, consciously hungry for. Or the other side of the assumption is - Balls.

I think fear sets in a lot sooner than hunger, probably even before hunger/greed. Since there is a fear of not doing well for ourselves, not being able to achieve what we wish to achieve, it might also drive the greed to achieve it. From the profile I mentioned in the beginning and all the other biopics of these billionaires (by wealth only), all of them show remarkable similarity in one form of behavior. They aren't afraid of going to zero. The person in the interview, David Tepper (hedge fund billionaire) says when asked about his abnormal confidence to achieve what he does, "I was never afraid to go back and work in the steel mills." Not being afraid of losing a lifestyle. I always wonder what would make a normal person take that kind of a risk? I still don't know, maybe hunger for more is the answer, but only maybe.

Probably this is what is known as balls, the ability to detach from a social benchmark of well being and being focused on what you can and want to do. Disagreeing with the rest of the world and defining my own boundaries, probably is a better way to look at the idea of having balls to do something. Otherwise why would there be any progress? No food will be made without being hungry enough to eat it. This biological response to hunger for food is so easy to understand, then why is it usually difficult to understand the psychological hunger for something/anything?

Stop Spam. Read Books.

2010-09-15T19:59:00.000+05:30

This is one of the most brilliant user messages I have read so far.

Stop Spam.

Read Books.

This comes from reCaptcha, its the most unconventional way to digitize books. The part about digitizing is the least exciting. How they digitize it, now that is fascinating. Internet in all its glory, passing through the digital lives of several million people a day (its still million, what a shame), helps digitize the written word.

We have encountered several login pages in our net time. After logging in, we are sometimes welcomed by two weird looking words, and a blinking cursor that wants us to identify them and type them in the text box. What for? To know that we are not programs but humans capable of deciphering those letters. But aren't we all programs in one way or the other? Well, that later.

The prompt helps curb spam and it also helps digitize books. Each of the two words is from some text (books, newspapers, etc) which is being archived in digital text. With every person logging in, and identifying the words, they indirectly help digitize those two words.

A lot can be achieved by collaboration, but I never thought of this one :)

Good work Captcha...

PS: How does the system know that words being typed are correct or not, if we are the one's to identify them? -

"Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct."

- from reCaptcha website

Loose Ends

2010-08-23T21:28:00.000+05:30

While reading the paper today I came across a comment - 'I love to watch films with no loose endings'. I don't remember the context anymore, but it definitely was a very unique point of view. Especially unique because I have the exact opposite one.

I tried to dig deeper in this obsession for loose endedness. I don't know why incomplete information doesn't bother me. But it was fun to run through a few experiences where uncertainty had been really wonderful. In my work usually all the decisions are based on interpretation of incomplete information. At first it would only seem logical to find the entire picture and then decide what is to be done. But the best (for some, the worst) part is that nothing that we see in life is entirely obvious. Things are so dynamic, that even the want for complete information seems ridiculous.

But here's the kicker, even if we have complete information about something, how do we know that it is complete?

I have prodded a lot over this and came up with nothing. I can either accept at face value that I love to deal with uncertainty and probability or I hate the discomfort it causes. I love it because it is fair and unbiased. Everybody gets the same odds of winning or losing given the same amount of information. Probably this is why there are complicated laws against insider trading which will reduce the chances to tilt this balance of information towards the insiders.

Its nothing bold to love uncertainty. Its in fact fun to build an idea of the world on expectations and odds. Since this obsession, life has been cut in several parts which have gotten an automatic sense of probability. 'What platform a train will arrive at?' - given a choice of 4 empty platforms its usually fun to calculate these odds. 'What are the chances that the business I put my money in, would go belly up?' - well some decisions are complicated some become extremely simple. Probability automatically builds this rating mechanism which cuts through our decisions and saves a lot of time. Its not necessary to use a calculator to find the odds. Its just a inner sense of identifying more probable outcomes.

I can only imagine where this sense has come from, since even nature leans more towards probabilistic thinking than towards pre-determined actions. An ant colony doesn't get built by itself. There is an intricate system of close co-ordination of pheromone traces left by ants which indicates the odds of finding whether the path leads to food, or building an anthill, etc. Older traces of pheromone are colder than the newer traces, indicating that the newer trace has a higher probability of finding something of value, usually food and so on.

While reading about this, I came across swarm intelligence. It had changed my entire perspective of decision making a few years ago. Even though I only read about swarming a few hours back, but I had been introduced to it in a cruder form. The wisdom of crowds - as an investor it is a very important variable in understanding how crowds behave. Its fun too.

I don't know how a brain thinks, but I can now imagine a better visual picture of my thought flow. Probably any thought flow. There are so many pieces of the brain that work at the same time in tandem in order to create this sentence out of previously understood information. These processes make no sense as a standalone function. Only when all these various parts of the brain swarm together, can we get complex thoughts emerging out of it.

Its weird how this same information can also be learned by studying the elements of a thought one at a time. But swarming makes it a lot easier to visualize.

Why can't all films have happy endings? Why can't all decisions be made with complete information? Why isn't probability taught at the 6th grade? Can religion be classified as a swarm effect of conclusions based on incomplete information about our existence?

Well, more questions....

iThink there's justice in the World

2010-07-26T20:17:00.000+05:30

After years and years of screen refreshes, task manager priority settings and Ctrl+Alt+Deletes, iThink justice might just have prevailed in my end of the universe. The judgement wasn't delivered in any court that man knows, but within the court every man knows - the limbic brain. The idea that there needn't be any friction between man and machine - has come true here with my new macbook pro 13".

Thank you Apple.

Building the Nest

2010-07-11T21:06:00.003+05:30

My empty room, waiting to be rebuilt

This is amazing I thought. I always imagined this moment to come a lot later in my life. Here I am, staring at the empty room which was once my 'Den', my "goto" place in times of despair, my "sleepover-pad", the place where me and my buddies had shared a drink. My Bedroom, this word had lost some of its meaning now.

I am staring over the empty space, littered with dust balls trapped under the furniture which was once my bed. My launchpad for the day, from where I used to bounce out of every single morning. The bed - moved, the computer - moved, all my books - moved, the guitar - moved, the huge map of the world - moved, my chair which is as old as I am - moved. All these things had meant something to me, just me. But now they will re-enter this room meaning something to somebody else as well. She will occupy this space along with me, starting on a journey we both are amateurs at. It seems more like two amateur pirates on a deep sea voyage, the bed - our ship, the covers our sail and we both as captains of this ship (each wearing an eye patch on the opposite eye, just for effect).

But here I am, in this room. 25 years is a long time - its one term cover for my life insurance. Really huge time. But it just feels like two seconds ago. Wow, I am going to be with her for ever and ever. How much is forever when you can't even feel how long 25 years were?

Standing in this room, I feel more like a bird. Before he gets his girl, he has to build a nest. The nest symbolizes his vitality, his ability to provide a secured shelter & his willingness to court. I didn't quite look at it that way when I was clearing my room out, for the decorators. Its just that, after watching the empty room, my evolutionary sense of building a nest emerged out of nowhere. Its an amazing feeling, I almost felt like bringing down a brick wall and re-building it with my own bare hands.

Song for the moment: Sigur Rós - Fer

Boston Legal

2010-06-22T20:40:00.001+05:30

Recently I have found a new muse. I have been watching the series Boston Legal for a while now. Normally most of the things that I watch deserve the merit to enter my head and make me think about the underlying context or about something totally different from that experience. Boston Legal had the same effect.

Long time ago, I had developed a theory about cultural media. For me cultural media includes, music, films, tv, conversations, art, et al. So my theory was that, if all these things induce a thought inside my head which wouldn't have normally come to me, then it deserves some time inside my head. This theory has made me exceedingly curious at experiencing these things with a decent amount assured new brain activity.

The case with Boston Legal is quite different in many similar ways. Anybody who has heard or even watched one episode (accidentally), will know that it involves a lot of lawyers, intermittent humor and some really quirky characters, some of which want to chant their names multiple times within a single episode. On face of it this seemed very vile to me. When I watched it a bit seriously and serially I was proven dead wrong.

Legal profession invites a lot of moral issues, especially because its a profession based on laws set my humans who are free to interpret it according to their own convenience & better judgement. This increases the frivolousness of lawyers which leads to genius lawyers exploiting the system by creating a philosophical debate inside the minds of the judge, the jury, the defendant and the plaintiff. There is only one other profession apart from Psychology which engages in these games and that is Lobbying.

Although 80% of this series can be easily disregarded as a time filler, there are small moments which are built on our deep seated assumptions (Biases) about life, people, morality and education. These small moments occur during the trials. The whole 80% which we can disregard so effortlessly builds up to those few moments where we are put in the pilots seat to steer our own thoughts till the verdict is announced. I have watched a lot of legal dramas and know that all these trials are fictional, but putting myself in the context of either the defendant, the plaintiff, the lawyers, the jury and the judge suddenly became extremely difficult and riveting.

It wasn't difficult because it was fictional, but it was difficult because it could have been real. Real situations, real people, real life, real everything. What if?

Although the creator of the series, David Kelley, cleverly lightens the whole process with some humour (sometimes good, sometimes really good), it still leaves you with a full awareness that this could have been a real situation. The idea of a work of art for me is that it should make the me (the observer) experience it from the lens of my own life experience. Taint it with my image of what it means to me personally. From that point of view, Boston Legal does stand out as a good example of talented writing in those small places where it really matters.

My Woody Allen Moment

2010-02-21T13:33:00.000+05:30

My Woody Allen Moment

These are the big glasses I found on the streets of Fort, Mumbai. I instantly decided that this is something I'd love to wear when I'm 40.

It's not the glasses that made me feel older. It's the idea that if I'm not as crazy at 40 as I think I should be, then probably I wouldn't buy them then.

Maybe it means that I don't mind thinking that I'm crazy when I'm not, but to know that I'm really crazy when I 'really' am, would be a totally new experience :-D

Recurrence

2010-02-13T22:04:00.000+05:30

I was told as a kid to keep a diary of my thoughts and it would help me back-test my thoughts as I grow older and reflect upon my own writing. I now realize how useless that attempt might have been if I had been successful. I don't find enough time to think as it is about what I am reading, how would I have found the time to back test my own theories? Well, as much as I loved the idea then, I had kept a small notebook to note down my thoughts. Well this notebook of sorts was not very unique. A very complacent green cover with a small picture of an elephant on it. I often wondered why they decided to use a small picture and leave the rest of the cover space empty. Were there other elephants expected from somewhere? Were my tiny little theories going to turn into elephants?

I loved the idea of the diary eventually, but hated the execution. I was forcing myself to come up with theories and sometimes, most often, crappy ones. So I just decided one day to burn the damn thing, after removing the elephant from its cover. I don't know why I did that, I was 8 years old. Maybe in hindsight I would like to paint another theory that I did it because I thought that the idea that I wanted to write something that was inside my head, was that first elephant that had appeared on the cover.

12 years later, I get the same idea again, I remember the hatred for executing it, but I do it anyway. This is after I found out about blogging. But nevertheless, I found the idea of typing my thoughts on a keyboard, a lot more entertaining, because if I didn't like a thought, I could just erase it. Where do we get this luxury inside our heads?

Well, I deleted that folder too, eventually. Same boredom, same anxiety. But computer's are funny little things. They have the ability to surprise you when you least expect (not directed to windows PC's, so mac users can stop grinning now) it.

Given the fact that I had deleted the folder, very sure I had shift+deleted the damn thing. There was a file tucked safely in a very old backup of my 'My Documents' folder. "Ok", I said to myself, what is this word doc doing here and why does its name give me a weird feeling that I have read it before somewhere? This is exactly like the time when I meet a few of my school mates, I know this guy was there somewhere around me during my school days, but who is he anyway?

A small word doc, tiny little 30 Kb-ish. I opened it and 'rubbish' was not the word to describe the look on my face. I was happy and happy at the same time. Something from the past had traveled and reached out to me. I felt like a part of some history which I had created and now I am looking back at it, with the same anxiety as I felt when I created it. The fact that history can be so misleading that it can also make you forget that this file was password protected by me just to avoid the same look on my face. Another wave of rubbishness went past my face. What could be the key, to unlock this piece of history? I instantly created three identical copies of me inside my head. I wanted them to stand facing each other forming an equilateral triangle, trying to figure out the mystery and the camera constantly rolling around them like a house fly around my favorite muffin.

There were no answers in this dramatic sequence. I cut the scene and tried, this time seriously, trying to figure out what was I thinking when I created this file. Well I came to the conclusion that the answer has to be obvious, since this file was left here for a reason and if I wanted the future me to find it, then the past me - who was stupid enough to password protect it - would have also kept a key under the rug. I typed the words - "thisisstupid" (this is stupid) & the file opened.

Without further incoherent slurrrr, here's what I found under the title of "Recurrence":

Recurrence -

"When I first realized that I could write and that too (self assessed) sightly better than what I had perceived I could write, it came as a surprise that words were automatically taking shape inside my skull. When I wrote them, it always felt like a tap was leaking somewhere in the house. Wasnt sure if it was the kitchen sink or the bathroom, but something was definitely leaking. Its rhythmic dripping syncing with the clattering of my keyboard.

The second realization was slightly more subtle. Watching my words on the screen taking shape into a coherent thought which didn't really exist few minutes ago, was pleasing and disturbing at the same time. 'What do I make of all this?' It is not easy for me to look at my own thoughts out there taking tangible shape. I thought it might cause havoc if set free. Like a convicted serial killer who escapes from prison aided by a corrupt prison guard. Corrupted as my mind could have been, it is capable of inflicting even more pain, drip by drip, word by word with the help of a publishing medium which doesnt really give an ass about anybody. Blogging became the new anxiety tool which drove me out of my convicted dormancy to a place where I can use Chinese torture techniques on some helpless readers. Even Genghis Khan must have done target practice on some sheep.

But most important was the time when I realized that this isnt a medium for dumping angst, but a bloody blank slate. This I believe might have been my most factual moment. Factual, because facts are always harder to digest than fiction.

Its a wonderful obligation to have upon myself that my mind has found an escape hatch for himself. He wanted to be free and I had been denying him the pleasure of freedom. But how does someone go about doing the listening business?

So my mind could speak with me. Now what? There was a moment of silence I had never experienced inside my head. I thought to myself, "thats all there is to it. its the ice breaker thats the most difficult to find."

So the conversations began. Rounds after rounds of debate, agreement, silence, contemplation and finally focus. This gave way to a torrent of activity. I noticed that this was my unnecessary hurdle. I wrote not to my heart's content, but to my mind's breathe."

Reflections from Walden Pond

2010-01-29T23:39:00.001+05:30

This is more like an after thought than one of my sudden bouts of writing. I had read Thoreau's Walden a few months back which had evoked some difficult issues. Some questions that I have been dying to ask myself, but I didnt have the time to face them. Last night, the family who lives just above my home had a huge fight. The father was practically yelling, no yelling is too small a word, how about this: practically breathing fire down his son's throat - thats more like it - ... down his son's throat to drive him out of his home. There are issues under which this happened, but while trying to drown out that noise I was trying to intently focus on my books and study. I could to a certain extent but later I just got drifted away.

Every syllable, although incomprehensible evoked a small feeling of derisiveness that, its people and the way they think or perceive reality that drives them crazy and not the circumstances. Lawyers know how to play the circumstance card in the big UNO game of the courtroom - its their wild card. But can all humans play the circumstance card? There is a wonderful mention in this book about how man should never feel self-pity. I dont recall the exact words, but he calls it pretty close to a sin to pity ourselves and our condition. From what I understood is that its not that pitying himself/herself is bad in its own way, its just that we dont want to stand up to our own guilt and accept it - and move on - but rather stand there and think: "why does this always happen to me?"

After all this why do we even bother to worry?

It also led to thoughts of several references to the grinding, grueling effect of the mundane daily existence, which many people, who are creatively inclined (self-diagnosed 'right brain heavy') believe they should get away from. I have noticed so many people shun the idea of day-to-day living for seeking more adventure, blaming the former as a mediocre way to while away our lives. I have begun to wonder, whats not exciting about something so trivial and simple as a mundane life when weekends can be spent in the warm winter sunlight with legs facing north and a book balancing on the tummy? This want for excitement, I believe, also creates a want for belonging to some adventure and not here, not now. Not accepting whats here and appreciating how it got to be that way. There is more materialism (I chose not to use that word, but there are some thoughts that are to be expressed with exact words) in constant thrill seeking than just wanting material happiness through spending more money. This is by no means an excuse for complacency - every adventure has its own time & its own definition for us.

Thoreau quotes some fellow named Chapman:

"The false society of men - for earthly greatness

All heavenly comforts rarefied to air"

I must admit, this wasnt so obvious at first, but I went back to this line last night to find that there is a constant obsession for some security, although there is no thought given to how to earn this security while having fun at doing so. I also admit, I love the idea of money and what happens to it once it is invested into the right assets for the right (rational) reasons. I also admit, I hate to spend it - doesnt make me a miser in my own eyes (some people do think about me that way) but it surely does allow me to "create" more security for later when I really need it by allocating it wisely right now. Not just allocating it, but having fun while I am at it. I think the sole nature of hating the mundane and the daily stuff of life is only because of the fact that people dont know how to have fun while generating security for themselves. Now Chapman dude feels so correct after thinking through it. There is disheartening realization here that this lack of emotional security while getting more security is turning normal people into savages. I dont think "savages" would suffice, but for clarity it works here.

There is a lack of self-sufficiency. A friend once said to me, that local trains in Mumbai are the classic example of mediocrity - I disputed jokingly that they are the bedrock for opportunity - since we want to get off it as soon as possible so that we could go on with our lives. He refuted. I think there is some merit to what he says that the opportunity that I was talking about also lies in finding a sweet spot inside a crowded train wherein not many people would step on my shoes and I would have that sacred spot to myself. Thoreau says that, " I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion". We put ourselves through all that misery every single morning just to reach where we want to reach to fulfill what we set to do. The idea of homely comfort still beseeches us to find a similar comfort outside our homes. Which makes every single person on the platform including the most mild mannered fellow go wild and slightly aroused as he watches the train approaching. His hands, his feet, his eyes assess complex physical realities to deal with that one ideal flick of his calf and ankle muscles to jump on that train to comfort. What happens when this is multiplied by 100 on just a 6 ft wide door?

It felt like an hypocrite as I do this every morning, but with less fervor and less risk. I too care for that sweet spot amidst all that testosterone pumped compartment, but I care for my life more to jump on to it. This is my pumpkin it seems.

Can I do what I love to do, for the rest of my life? Will it make it any more or any less mundane if I choose to do what I love, every single day? I'm still not bored and I don't presume I'd be bored. It then seemed to me like a constant struggle for happiness. This passive hedonism is justified in many ways. Although misery also catches up pretty quickly if there is no choice involved in what course we have to take. I am one of those lucky bastards who does what he enjoys. This also allows me the privilege to filter all thoughts about other activities which I enjoy doing, when I am focused on one. I spoke to many people, who have confessed of being in the wrong jobs, doing something they dont think they want to continue doing - but their reasons were usually material - good hours, good money, "this is my fuck you money", "what else have I got to do?". Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't - it works for some, it doesn't for others.

I found it really worth knowing which category of people I fall into - nothing wrong in being either one of those people - to each his own, I believe.

PS: I also realized as I proof-read this - that I need to add a tad bit more humor on my reading pile sooner than later :)

My Reality for me

2009-12-30T09:38:00.008+05:30

Exactly one year ago, I wrote -

The old man said,

"People hate reality, people don't like common sense, until age forces it upon them."

It is still true.

I had made a wishlist and it was probably already embedded in my thoughts even before I wrote it down. I dont know how to feel, but I have not been off the mark on my own thoughts. I did all the things on that personal wishlist and I am still doing them.

So this brings me to this year's wishlist - which I am not going to make.

I am really confused by one of my wishes - to empathize more. Which I did and found it rather annoying sometimes when the one's I was trying to empathize with didnt appreciate it and reciprocated rudely. I dont care, but it set a few thoughts in motion. I wonder, why is it that the one tries to understand has the toughest time? Its not a duty or obligation, but its just an openness to different opinions and different ways of looking at the same stuff we go through everyday.

Although it doesn't bother much when I move on to the next thought and get consumed by it, so its hardly anything.

I think there is a sort of optimism or hope (for excuse to my poor vocabulary) about things in general. I have noticed apathy in my behavior with a fine mix with empathy. I dont know what it stands for, but its a new feeling. Maybe its the things happening in my life, a lot of wheels are turning and a lot of activity has suddenly kicked in.

As a last thought to part with this year, I do wish I can use some more time for thinking than stuffing my head with information.

Thinking has never been more fun.... can't have enough of it.

Song for the moment: Eminem - Encore / Curtain Up

No Condition like the Human Condition

2009-12-08T10:10:00.000+05:30

As I grew up to what I am today, one thing that I looked back at, was the constant lack of any aspect of me being this (human) animal not being taught to me in detail. The social sciences was the only crooked window into this soul-searcher of an infant being aware of his own existence as a moral animal. Disgusting as this seems now, it took a series of novels and a dose of nobel literature to drill this point into my head. 'We are humans and we are subjected to the same conditions of existence all over the world.' There are exceptions of course, some of us tame ourselves to the suburban meaning of life, while others break free and suffer scorn of the so called urban intellectuals.

I know I am being condescending about some of the elements of my own species, but I am not worried of being chased by a lynch mob on this one. They know it already. Literature has been incessantly focused on this difference, even media calling it a very difficult to pronounce (and spell) word: the 'bourgeoisie'

I am not even sure if I like this term. Its not like I care. The human is fun.

The appalling thing I was talking about earlier, about not having been taught about being human and all, well I learned about it a few years back, it was called another idiotic, obvious name: the human condition. I began to wonder why we make things sound so obvious? Why not get out of the bourgeoisie jargon and get on with our sorry little lives and enjoy the finer aspects of language. 'The human condition', it has a serene air of mystique around it. It doesnt allow the audience, the pleasure of knowing what it means, instantly after hearing it. They have to use their PDA's to refer to the wikipedia entry on it. They have to, I mean, there's no way that anyone can possibly make an obvious interpretation out of something that is made to sound so obvious.

Well thats the catch, its not as obvious as it seems. Its usually polluted by a mine-field of dissertations and intellectual type academicians. They all want to claim that they have somehow contributed to the explanation of what it means to be human. Can you imagine a bunch of zebra's claiming that they are trying to understand, 'what being a zebra actually is?'

Well, they are doing it, not the zebras, but those solemn intellectual types. They also use fine rim glasses sometimes. [for the record: I gave up my fine rimed glasses in exchange for the new thick rimed glasses, just so I could make that statement with no guilt]. The parenthesis explains yet another face of the human condition, claiming not to belong to a group and yet advocating something similar, but not quite so.

Why now? I was thinking about it in the form of an idea of travelling back in time. Back in time in my mind of course. This is just to re-iterate the experiment of testing what I felt was rational back then, was really rational or not. This whole quest for finding the rationality bug under rug got me to thinking how fragile our sense of understanding is, when it comes to future outcomes of our actions. This makes every decision we make, impulsive. If everything we do is impulsive, then every rational thought is also subject to the same impulse.

Well, rationality, like the human condition is another of those obvious words without obvious meaning. Its different for everyone. If I believe that I have been rational about some decision of mine, then for some observer, my actions might seem to be cultivated out of some bias. My rationality is my conviction. For an observer, my rationality is a bias towards my world-view.

This was interesting for me, since I noticed I was looking at decisions differently now. If I try to do the right thing for me, it would be frowned upon by some observer since it would lack the same context. The fun part is, we can also have observers running around trying to figure out the exact nature of our actions (posing to be rational). 'Cool' I thought, this is Calvin and Hobbes all over again.

Calvin: "I'm a misunderstood genius.".
Hobbes: "What's misunderstood?"
Calvin: "Nobody thinks I'm a genius."

Song for the moment: The Killers - Human

November Rain

2009-11-10T09:50:00.000+05:30

I always wanted to experience that one song, by Guns n Roses, which had such an impact on me as a kid. I loved this song regardless of the fact that I didnt understand its meaning at first. Being with her made me truly learn what it meant. Isnt it proverbial in some way that the year we decide to make it official I get to experience something that I have never had the opportunity for. November Rain. But there is nothing cold about this November Rain.

This is for Puriya: November rain by GnR

When I look into your eyes
I can see a love restrained
But darlin' when I hold you
Don't you know I feel the same
'Cause nothin' lasts forever
And we both know hearts can change
And it's hard to hold a candle
In the cold November rain
We've been through this such a long long time
Just tryin' to kill the pain
But lovers always come and lovers always go
An no one's really sure who's lettin' go today
Walking away
If we could take the time to lay it on the line
I could rest my head
Just knowin' that you were mine
All mine
So if you want to love me
then darlin' don't refrain
Or I'll just end up walkin'
In the cold November rain

Do you need some time...on your own
Do you need some time...all alone
Everybody needs some time...on their own
Don't you know you need some time...all alone
I know it's hard to keep an open heart
When even friends seem out to harm you
But if you could heal a broken heart
Wouldn't time be out to charm you

Sometimes I need some time...on my
own Sometimes I need some time...all alone
Everybody needs some time...on their own
Don't you know you need some time...all alone

And when your fears subside
And shadows still remain, ohhh yeahhh
I know that you can love me
When there's no one left to blame
So never mind the darkness
We still can find a way
'Cause nothin' lasts forever
Even cold November rain

Gyroscopic Inertia

2009-11-06T10:20:00.001+05:30

We master the physics of motion so easily as we grow up, then why is it so difficult for us to master the physics of emotion?

I was standing in the bus fighting its centrifugal force as it made a sharp turn across the road. The sudden jolts when the driver hit the brakes, the sudden pull backs when he accelerated on a miraculously empty patch of road. I felt everything and even before the inertia could make me lose my balance, I controlled my muscles to stay put. I did lose my sense of the center of gravity, but it was easier to balance with just the muscles in my feet.

Some of my recent experiences have taught me so many valuable lessons about having been able to develop my fictional muscles which I can use to control my emotions. I don't know how effectively I would be able to grasp them, but its still fun to flex them nevertheless. Sometimes things just hit me point blank even before I am allowed to realize what I am supposed to think about them. Each of this instance is a test of my instinct, although largely the actions that follow then become the test of my emotions. I do face an inability to perceive what the outcome can be or should be, but I am slowly learning to bridge this gap.

I have been observing people around me, mostly elders and their mannerisms & how they have been handling some of my shared experiences. I must say there was some amount of experience embedded in their actions, although there was mostly that instinctive response that we could expect from someone who would go through it for first time. It taught me something that even after having tonnes of experience in handling such family issues and tackling such situations, there can be an element of surprise (or lack of recall of the action taken earlier). It bothered me when I realized that this could also happen to me as I grow more experienced. In investing, maybe even after learning from some of my mistakes I can eventually endorse to my intuition for guidance at the same time rely on facts to back me up. It may not be in that order & thats where lies the rump.

Indulging in classics helped me grip reality at a whole new level, especially learning from putting myself in their shoes. One thing which is supposed to sound like a management lesson from the 30's is, "Don't try fixin' what aien't broken." Its fun to read this thought, because most of my actions were tending to fix things that "I" perceived to be broken. So if my perception was so strong as to lead me to act when no action was necessary, would this perception drive me to make similar mistakes in my investment decisions?

Yes, some thoughts have haunted me, some have sobered me & some experiences have humbled me beyond recognition. This seems like living in a pinball machine, bobbing around bumping onto experiences to get reward points of knowledge.

Or.... maybe I am reading far too much into my own deluded reality!

Last Chance to See, One more time....

2009-11-04T22:01:00.000+05:30

I remember writing about the Carl Sagan book, "The Pale Blue Dot", almost more than a year ago I think. That was one humbling experience traversing the length of space to turn around just one last time to take a look at our mother planet. All that we stand for and care a lot about, is just one small pixel in the peta-tera-giga-pixel picture of the cosmos. Why should we be any more significant then?

I watched the series, "Last Chance to See", specially remade to re-trace Douglas Adams' and Mark Cawardine's journey after 20 years. The book was an immensely satisfying experience, which brought home the message of wild-life conservation out to the mainstream. Its not just another experiment to control populations of obscure species. Several reports have come after Adams' trip to those places and documenting their experiences in their book, how popular these conservation attempts had become. People sent money, aid and a whole lot of things to facilitate the conservation attempts in one way or another.

This time, Stephen Fry and Mark, go through the same experience along with BBC, to catch up with the conservationalists to check up on those near extinct species. I can't say that I havent been deeply moved by what I got to watch. I remember sprawling on my bed reading through Adams' Last Chance to See, enjoying every moment, every trek, every description in his own quirky and witty manner making it even more enjoyable. I could hardly imagine that someone would want to capture this on a camera and make it into a TV series.

Its the most humbling experience, so much bio-diversity we have around us and we are merely just a tiny blip on the map, yet have such a lasting impact on it. Human intervention and colonization have long introduced extraneous elements onto a landscape and destroyed its ecological balance. Its sobering to realize that some of us do in fact give a damn about it and do enough to care to change the irreversible effects of our encroachment.

The more I write the more it gets diluted, but I want to recount one experience, the very end of the series, the final episode which follows the Blue Whale. Majestic animals, jumbo-jet huge yet with an almost royal elegance, 'fluking' their way towards the abyss. Some of the moments they have captured on tape are breath-taking, almost unreal. I have been raised on discovery channel and NatGeo but never was it so personal. The sheer size of this animal and yet we control if it deserves to live or not, is a gross misstep across our natural boundaries. The song of the humpback whale, almost feels like being trapped in a Sigur Ros song with the Auroras dancing around us.

All this does drive home a point. All the things we humans seek: love, compassion, acceptance, companionship, courtship, kinship and parenthood are all present in this dynamic biodiversity. Yet most of us fail to recognize the deserved gratitude that we must show towards it.

Nature is only once, the only place we have left to be. This certainly wasn't 'the' last chance to see...

Learning to learn

2009-10-22T10:05:00.002+05:30

Charlie Munger, is one of the most famous personalities in the investment world today. He is much more than just a role model. He is an investment manager who has been yawping from the rooftops about the importance of importing ideas from other disciplines into our own discipline or profession.

But much has been said about the benefits of this tendency of interconnecting ideas or principles between disciplines. No one really talks about how to do it. I was really surprised by the lack of or the abundance of pretentious material which dealt with this topic. But nevertheless, I took it upon myself to understand which would be the most efficient way of learning to forge interdisciplinary understanding of things.

After reading about Munger and his approach, it became clearer to me why it was difficult to propagate a standard means to learn how to learn. It's easy to realize that everybody has a different learning pattern. It becomes exceedingly difficult to import someone else's chain of thought if that person isn't in sync with our pattern of thought. It may sound possible ideologically, but it's very difficult to implement practically. But in that case, each and every thought must be difficult to import. But that's not so. Logically it might seem that it's difficult to import thoughts from other people and implement in our own thought process, but intuitively we all thrive on the same hardware for cognition. Awareness can only be converted into actionable thoughts by going over the same concepts in different contexts.

In one of the Annual Shareholder Meetings of Wesco, where Charlie Munger is a Chairman; in his address to shareholders he mentions Alfred North Whitehead who said that "Civilization itself progressed rapidly in terms of GDP when mankind invented the method of invention". I think its a very beautiful thought to carry around. Despite of a ring of entitlement to the statement, it deserves every bit of merit in saying that if I think I can learn in a particular way, that process of learning itself must be imprinted upon the way I approach things. Once I am comfortable with a particular learning process I can very easily use it to learn whatever else I want to learn. Why wasn't this idea so obvious in the way I learned things as a kid? It's a shame I had to spend so much time till I finally came face to face with this thought.

Another thing I found very difficult to understand, but have finally realized it, is that 'extreme loyalty to an ideology or an identity destroys cognition. I can't be restrained by the power or irrefutable logic of some thought or an idea. If I am, then I have a serious handicap in considering any other thought which is not congruent with it. That means I have less opportunity to learn that I can be wrong and face the consequences of being wrong instead of being aware of it and avoiding it.

And finally, I am beginning to wonder why I enjoy refuting my own arguments sometimes when I can very easily stick with them for the rest of my life?

What's wrong with the world?

2009-10-15T10:24:00.000+05:30

I always wanted to ask this question, to everyone I knew. As a kid I wasnt really aware of the gravity of what it meant, but it did mean something. It was like having a doubt that there's something stuck in my teeth, while I prod ceaselessly with my tongue, the entire dental length and breadth for the answer.

I didnt have the tools to ask the question, neither to answer it. I cant claim to have them now either. But I have one small advantage over many. I can say calmly, that yes, there 'might' be something wrong with the world after all.

Long ago, back in school I had heard of the idea called 'reinventing the wheel'. It probably meant that we shouldnt try to make things all over again which are already made. This is probably the premise of the patent and IPR laws, replicating an invention deserves no credit. This idea works phenomenally well with physical and tangible objects. Nobody will go and reinvent a spoon if a sudden desire to eat arose in a person. But will we go ahead and reinvent the way we live if one decided to live long enough and embrace circumstances?

I have some reason to believe, and this is my theory, that everything there is to know about the human condition, has already been written down. But unfortunately known only by a few. Misery, a concurrent theme in many people's lives (at least I have seen it in the form of insecurity), is long to be known as a serious waste of a precious resource, thought. What good is the human race if it shuns the idea of learning from the past? Where to find this epic body of knowledge which deals with these kind of issues?

I dont like to ask other people what have they learned from a book, or a film, or from an experience. Ok, perhaps I am not so lenient about the experience part, but I dont like to ask the former questions to them. Strictly because nobody knows until they come face to face with that same fact in some other way. Learning then is totally experiential (my theory again). Even learning from what somebody learned from their experience can give volumes of insight only if its described properly.

So other people who can be a store-house of this knowledge of life (how the wheel was made, so to speak) are a very limited resource for such an experiment. Other resources I found was observing people and films. These two things go hand in hand since they offer a window into the life of someone else. These windows allow me to imagine me on the other side of that window and understand my own responses to those circumstances. Yet the films are not a really good resource, since they only go back a 100 years or so of human existence trying to cope up with something which is 10,000 years old.

The most efficient resource I found then, were books. Probably books written way back even before my forefathers were born. I found a lot of insight about day to day life and questions about why we do what we do, to have been elaborately described in classics. The most beautiful thing about these classic texts is that they have a unique, dated way of explaining life. They create that sort of imagery, which would sound ridiculous if not seen in context, which makes it even less appealing when read from an unobservant point of view. Great detail hides in these words, which lead to even more thoughts about more 'why's', more 'what's', more 'how's'.

I finally came to a point of asking myself the question, what's wrong with the world? I dont know, but I know only this that there is a total disregard of the ancient written word with people living nowadays. Not many really want to put themselves through the pains to understand how life had been lived and how todays questions of insecurity had already been solved eons ago. Whose job is it? Should we take it upon ourselves to learn these things or should some medium be present to propagate these ideas, once again.

I personally prefer the first option, taking it upon ourselves. There's nothing better than a realization that happened to me than to some other person. The amount of responsiveness I'd develop would not be matched by the latter. Another medium, I found so gladly lacking the adequate machinery ( a receptive mind ) is the schooling system. American military, perhaps had a saying, "Get'em young!" The same applies here. Any reasonably sound person will understand that a child's mind is the most receptive of all. If only they could open our Veda's and other ancient scriptures to the minds of these kids, we could save a lot of generations from the same old misery of the mundane.

I agree with what Thoreau had to say about this:

"No wonder Alexander carried Iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of relics. Its something more intimate to us than any other work of art. Its the work of art nearest to life........The symbol of an ancient man's thought becomes a modern's man's speech."

What's wrong with the world then? - We're probably not paying enough attention.

Song for the moment: John Mayer - Waiting on the World to Change

Found it, have I?

2009-10-13T20:48:00.001+05:30

I was stirred by a simple realization that, how do I cultivate myself in this vast variety of influences? Henry David Thoreau said, "Every man is the builder of a temple called his body".

Murakami's book on running rewired me (What I Talk About, When I Talk About Running). It recharged a part of my brain which was already aware of these thoughts but had somehow sidestepped it for a want of better clarity. I was trying to grapple things too quickly which was only resulting into disappointment in failing to grasp them completely. For want of a better understanding, I was standing in the shadow of giants in my field, trying to import small portions of their wisdom. They had been momentous in their achievements and complete in their own way, perhaps. Their achievements were an outcome of decades worth of incessant practice of their art. I thought, yes, work then becomes art when you tap your abstract to get the next insight. If not, what good is the brain if we are hoping for just mechanical outcomes? Even a machine can do that.

I have always believed that changes are hard to come by. It requires some special gene in us, which will help us to biologically embrace change, thats what I felt (sarcastically, of course). But I have incorporated some changes for good. I have started changing things in my lifestyle, which were holding me back from doing what was really necessary. One of the major changes I had started some 2 years back, was to quit watching TV. This has resulted into a lot of free time and also helped me seek quality entertainment options rather than watching some drab stuff. This made me realize that when I have free time suddenly pumped into the system, I don't know what to do with it exactly. So I started exploring and found my true calling.

One thing I had learned that evening, when I read pages 76-77 in Murakami's book, was a blinding flash of the obvious. This was something I had known and had believed in for a long time. He mentions about the three most important things for becoming a successful writer (success not by just being a best seller, but being a novelist). He latches onto; Talent, Focus and Endurance. Too many motivational books also describe these as some of the most important factors in becoming good at something, but there was a difference. He said that Talent is abstract, but focus and endurance are more definite. I wondered why this thought was so important out of all the things that I have personally understood. It dawned on me that focus and endurance were the most undervalued aspects of my activities. I appreciated focus and endurance, but I took them for granted as a part of my nature.

But in spite of all the talent, focus and endurance I might have, can I assure a favorable result? What would I get, if I got to know the result? Its like staring at a crystal ball, the ball's guess is as good as mine. I have been reading about the idea of process v/s outcome in almost all books on investing. How developing a process is more important than just having our eye's on the prize. I love this thought, it allows me a lot of freedom to squeeze out all I have, to test it against the logic of my actions & then sit back and watch how it works. Tinkering, Tinkering & more Tinkering.

Alone!

2009-10-13T20:28:00.002+05:30

They laid on their backs, staring intently at the clear night sky hoping to witness ‘a’ stellar movement, any stellar movement. Of course they were 8 years old & wishing for the stars. But the innocence in their wish almost made the universe transpire that event.

Remo had just finished reading a sci-fi story about how humans meet with aliens after a long, deliberate struggle to find if there is life in the universe. The story captured the essence of mankind’s dream to find the answer to that question, ‘Are we alone?’ He had also enjoyed the story of Carl Sagan’s Contact, which his dad read to him, about an astronomer who decodes an alien signal & also gets to go on a journey to meet with them. This sort of imagery always fascinated him. He couldn’t fathom the fact that this sort of thing isn’t already happening. After all the advancement he knew & read about, it seemed so odd that there hasn’t been any contact with any extraterrestrial species yet. He had almost started to believe that the enormity of space is wasted if there is no one else to share it with.

Dex had heard his friend out, patiently, all the while when he had voiced his concerns about ‘we’ being alone in the universe & had shown a slight distaste for Remo’s penchant for desperately trying to find some other species out there. He had never given a second thought to it, although he was extremely curious himself to figure how the answer would turn out to be. He even scribbled pictures of alien encounters & drew large bug sized creatures communicating with the humans. He had an elaborate idea for a comic strip, but not enough punch to believe in it himself.

Dex was one of those odd little 8 year olds who knew that there was something wrong with the equation. Something didn’t make sense. He had been learning in school about the history of the world, the animal kingdom & how animals have been living with the humans since millions of years & so on. All this seemed very peculiar to his mind. He always believed it to be very obvious that when humans meet another species from outer space, it would be the same like meeting a totally new species of animals or plants or other humans out here on Earth. What would we do when we finally meet them?

Hollywood had too many scary answers & he spun out all the DVD’s to find a sensible solution. None emerged. Not equipped to understand the human condition, he was thinking purely from the world eye view of a novice, juvenile, yet dangerously curious observer. Almost with a scientist’s skepticism for the mystical, he realized that why would someone want to travel all the way, spending so much effort just to see if there’s anybody else out there? Isn’t it peculiar that the transit must pay for itself?

Remo objected, “What fuel are you using?”

Dex was caught by surprise. He hadn’t thought about it. If it’s cheap enough to make the trip, the answer becomes worth knowing. But Dex went to a different line of thought.

“Hey Rim! Do you think we are alone for a reason?”

“What!!!?” Remo jumped back, almost sitting upright on this ridiculous remark.

“No, no listen!” exclaimed Dex.

He asked Remo to be patient, his eyes oozed of grave doubt & uncertainty over his logic, yet he showed a different determination on his face. Remo sensed a whopper coming. Dex was never this serious, unless he had a really good argument, he knew from experience.

“Look at it this way, Miss D from our school, you know; she lives alone, ok?” asked Dex.

Remo nodded in silence, waiting for the punch-line.

“I heard when she was talking to my mom one day that, she thinks she’s going to be alone for the rest of her life”, said Dex.

Remo was still waiting.

“But you see Rim, she has so many people around her, which she seems to not notice”, Dex was really concerned.

“She thinks she is alone, because she wants to believe it.” Remo finally moved some cheek muscles, but with enormous effort, “But what do you mean? Why we are alone in the universe has nothing to do with why Miss D thinks she is alone.”

Dex grinned. “Yes there is.”

Dex jumped back after an extra second’s pause.

“We are so used to finding ourselves alone ever since we are looking at the stars, so like Miss D, we might have gotten to believe that there is no one out there. Maybe our need to find someone isn’t great enough to actually go & find someone.”

Remo gave a hearty laugh. “What about all the space missions?” asked Remo.

“What fuel are you using?” Dex asked with smug delight.

“Ok, I get you. You think to find something quicker we need to use different means to find it, not the same one’s which match our needs here on Earth?” Remo crystallized it.

“Yuuuppp!” Dex pursed his lips, but not with the final word.

“You know what worries me Rim, I think we might be living in an illusion of being alone.” Dex came back with another one.

“Ok, What?” Remo had his smug moment now.

“I think we have been found already, we just don’t know it yet, since no one has made any announcements to us through the media that we use”, Dex did have a point.

“You mean we have already got what we want to know, we just don’t know how to read it?” Remo was back with one of his clarifying tones.

“Yuuppp!”

“Wow! I’d have never thought of this”, Remo frowned with a tinge of curiosity.

“But Dex!!!” Remo called back in a hurry, this time he actually got up.“But, if, we have already been found, then what do you think are those species thinking about us? I mean, we have such old technology which clearly can’t even know that they are talking to us, what would they think of us?” A small ball of sweat rolled off Remo’s brow.

“Slaves?” Dex came back with the most obvious HOLLYWOOD solution to Remo’s ingenious question.

“What!!” Remo was furious. “I won’t be a slave to some slimy creature just because he can travel all the way to my home planet. I don't want to be no slave to a Columbus.”

A lightning bolt struck in Dex’s tiny brain. “That’s what we would have done.”

Remo booed off the idea, “No way! No way at all. We would be much nicer to them & we would learn their technology, their culture, their lifestyle, everything about them. We would never make them our slaves. Never ever.”

After a dramatic pause, Dex came into the spotlight of the argument. “Even when we know that they would be defenseless to our technology, we would still want them to be our friends or worse; would we still treat them with respect?”

“Yes! Why not! They are surviving the same harsh space as we are, they deserve the same credit of free existence as we do”, Remo raged forward again. He almost resembled his dad.

Dex frowned now, “look at most of the species here Rim, look at them real hard. Who do you think is their boss?”

“Mother Nature ofcourse” came back Remo.

“I wish it was that easy. We read about the Aztecs right? What happened to them? Some conquistador came in & destroyed their culture, they had primitive technology & they refused to give in.” Dex recounted history. “Look at all the animals; we use most of them as our food, as our slaves, as our pets, just because they can’t revolt.”

“But they can revolt” Remo had a point. “Why? Do you think animals are dumb?”

“No Rim” Dex reasoned, “I think some of them like the idea of ‘life’ instead of a ‘struggling life’. They get food, place to live.”

A tiny glimmer of insight was being forged in the fires of Dex’s mind. He was finally coming face to face with the human condition, thinking beyond his ability to pursue such a thought. He was, as we know it, at the brink of a moral, philosophical revelation. This was Dex’s stellar movement. The universe has ears which listen farther than we can imagine they could listen.

Their hearts pounded in their ribs. They thought about everything in one second. All life on Earth would be a meaningless existence if it would be found by any other species, before we find some other species. All those years spent in research to find something more, something better, this ever evolving technology would vaporize in a puff of slavery, as we are ill-equipped for an inter stellar struggle for our freedom. What fuel would we use?

Man’s penchant for tinkering renders it impossible for him to stay put & always throws him at crossroads of an explorative journey, just to know what else he might find out there. Are we using it right?

Football

2009-09-02T10:25:00.000+05:30

This world is full of people who don't think like I do, thought he. He was looking out through the window of his desolate room at the kids playing football in the yard. They passed the ball to each of their buddies hoping that they would carry the ball and maneuver it to its ultimate becoming, the goal. He wondered how a simple sport like football can teach these kids so many lessons about life and having goals, that these kids will not realize even if they read 100's of books and consult their parents an equal amount of time. The ball's only 'goal' is to reach the goal post, all these players are mere an incidental force focusing that ball's desire to reach it. There will be obstacles in the way, there would be forces that would want to stop the ball and steer it into some other direction, but the ball must persist amidst all these influences, to reach its goal.

How flawed is then, our sense of control, when all the ball has to do is wait for the influence from the players who will reshape its direction at every kick? Control is an illusion which the ball can afford to exert onto itself, thinking that it might only move to its goal if it could remain inflated throughout the journey. It must not allow these forces to deflate its enthusiasm.

What a sorry state to be in? We all believe that we control our goals and take requisite actions to reach them, but all this time, our directions to reach those goals are being shaped and reshaped by several external forces, which may or may not want us to pursue that direction. The ball's story, is a constant fight for direction, its round shape doesn't help at all, it bounces off these forces to eventually realize that its internal compass hasnt been working for a long time and it's being driven to its destination.

What then are my goal posts? How many do I have? Which forces will stop me from reaching each of these? When will I be kicked in some other direction and when will some other force kick me back to my track? The ball only anticipates, expecting jolt after jolt of passive movement in some direction or the other. But there is one thing, the ball doesn't realize, the Earth is round. Being on a round surface it always rolls off into some new direction, wherever the slope might take it. That's the advantage the ball should think of, the price to pay for constant movement, is a directionless motion devoid of influences. For without an influence, no goals could be reached.

The only consolation the ball has is to make sure that it is kicked around by really good forces. Forces that wouldn't allow the ball to reach any other goals, but the ones desired.

Why Love, My love

2009-06-30T13:56:00.001+05:30

He said, "Every great romance involves a monumental struggle to find the proof of love."
"What??", she exclaimed.

"Yes, I honestly believe that love isnt something for the weak hearted, only the one's who could endure the struggle & stand tall till the end, find each other at the end." he said with a cautious approach.

"Ya, I think I agree, but why 'every romance', arent there exceptions?" she asked with a quizzical movement of her eyebrows.

He retorted instantly in one breath, "I dont know, but it seems every person ever have been involved in even the slightest hint of a romance, shows depths of maturity which only a lifetime worth of experience can bring."

"aah, thats unfair, my neighbour's dog also shows depths of character without having been in a romance with another woman of its kind." she mocked him, but very carefully as to not hurt his feelings & also poke some fun at him.

"Who said that the romance has to be with someone else?" he asked in a deep philosophical huskiness in his voice only championed by Gandalf.

"aaah, oooh, self love you mean to say!", she added playfully, poorly imitating his manner of speech. She had begun to realize his point, he could tell. One way or another, she was supposed to understand that love, is afterall just a word used to conveniently explain a feeling which no one is even capable of understanding in its entire form.

"Yes, but I wouldnt call it love. Love is too shallow a word for such a beautiful feeling. 'Romance'", his eyes gleamed with a mysterious sparkle, tracing the edges of the constellations when he stared up into the sky.

"Do you really think that you will be capable of allowing anyone else to be romantically involved with you, if you dont believe it yourself?"

"haaaan!!!" she exclaimed with all the confusion she had ever felt.
"Wait, wait, wait, slow down a bit", she added wiping the confusion off her mind.

"I love myself, so I believe that other people can love me too?" she asked, clarifying his idea.

"Doesnt it sound like cheating on yourself?" she made her point, just to watch his face squirm.

She giggled losing all control of her facial muscles, but not at his ingeniously obvious realization, but at the idea that he was so passionate about it.

I am not what I will become

2009-05-28T10:29:00.004+05:30

Years of exposure to Tyler Durden & actually believing in a minimalistic approach to things, doesnt really leave me with much choice but to see the merits of Tyler's words. I first believed that it was cynicism at a whole new level, but then I realized it was just anxiety that made his words resonate louder than ever.

With the arrogance of generalizing my assumptions, I believe that people "in general" are afraid of the future. They cant digest the uncertainty, or can partially manage to digest this uncertainty by using mechanisms like evasion, ignorance, self-deception, projection & the most dangerous; elimination. Evasion sets many people apart, they believe that the future is uncertain anyway, so why bother! Ignorance will mostly constitute of those people who have gone beyond evasion, they totally decide to ignore whats coming & fail to be ready. Self-deception involves a very close tryst with trying to convince ourselves that we know what the future holds & then make decisions based on these assumptions. People projecting discount various scenarios based on the probability of their occurrence. Eliminators believe that there is NO UNCERTAINTY.

I have been playing this game for a very short time now, I have seen the ropes just yet, grabbing them is a totally different story. Yesterday morning I heard a song by Kaiser Chiefs called Ruby, which has these lines:

"Due to lack of interest,
Tomorrow is canceled."

I dont know which category this lethargy belongs to, but I believe that this could be an amazing way to look at the future & the uncertainties lying ahead. Eventually I need to get used to the fact that 'Right now, I am not what I am going to become'. Its fun to extrapolate our current life & drag it ten years ahead & dream of an ultra comfortable scenario, but reality has its own way of catching up. I dont think what Kaiser Chiefs said should be taken literally. It should be read with a close watch on what assumptions can be made under that context & we should read between the lines. I prefer this version, The future is uncertain alright, I have seen a dream alright, can this dream be realized, no idea, but should it stop me from doing what I really want to do? If I am on a trajectory towards what I want to become, then whatever I do now should be in tandem with that becoming. So what the Chiefs are trying to say behind the slashing guitar would be, am I doing what I want to do now to become what I want to be tomorrow? How? Well its easy, if tomorrow would be canceled would I stall & not live today? I know, metaphysical, it is to some extent, but I have the luxury of disproving what I believe in. :D

Song for the moment: Ruby - Kaiser Chiefs

Blending Perceptions

2009-05-26T12:48:00.003+05:30

I consider this as one of my greatest gifts, if there is such a thing, that nature might have bestowed upon me. Which is the ability to document my own thoughts as they change. I know this is a fairly common gift which all people have, but "mera vala laal" (my kind of red) is also another gift.

I have been devouring on books, films & conversations for a long time now, trying to figure how the world works. I am not even close to saying that I understand how the world works, & I wouldn't want to know how it works. But I have experienced a wide ranging feeling all these years throughout all these experiences. I have seen how my own perceptions towards these experiences have changed over time, parallel to my life experiences. This was very odd to document, since there is no tangible anchor to say that I felt "X" in this year & now I feel "Y" in that year. At first I believed this to be a form of confirmation bias, where I was deliberately trying to figure a connection by attributing my experiences alongside it. But I might have been mistaken. This was a change in perceptions. If change in perceptions is misleading, it can be very easily said to be a change in observation.

In any experience it is important to know what to observe. Since what I will observe will determine what I will comprehend from it. This is not as easy as it sounds. There is always a subtext to every experience which I was missing invariably. But as life experience caught on, I realized that I was discounting this life experience to figure out what I ought to observe & became a better observer. This is still a skill in development. Observing this habit taught me a very important lesson which I want to translate into my work as an Analyst. Experience teaches which parameters to focus on. Once these parameters come in my cross-hair all I need to understand is how much weight I need to assign to each of them in every situation.

One example on the top of my mind is when I watched the film Godfather III recently. I knew even before I decided to watch the film, what I was supposed to expect from it. There was at least a gap of 4 years between the prequels & this film. 4 years back, I can vaguely remember, it was all about crime, action, deceit, acting. Now while watching this film, I could feel myself relate to artcharacter, family values & relationships. This isnt a momentous improvement, but I figured how I had missed these parameters which were already present in these films which were unlocked after my 4 years of film viewing & life experience.

This usually sounds like an experiment in hindsight but it in fact it is an experiment in hindsight. I was amazed when both these memories of parameters were accessible to me, parallel to each other, which I must say, enriched my film viewing experience. Translate that to observing these nouveau parameters in my work I might know how better to leverage my knowledge from whatever I have done before. This isnt an unlocking of potential as such, but this is a delayed realization to what I have subconciously been upto.

It has always been fun to discount such new realizations in my present purview of thoughts. It helps me realize the importance of otherwise seemingly futile actions which might add to my pool of analyses. Looking at businesses from "X" perspective will allow me to observe only those parameters which will affect that perspective, maybe a more conscious effort to bring in all the perspectives available, will help me look at the same business with different assumptions/facts/ideas & opinions.

To be observed....

My Kind of Resolve

2009-05-13T10:25:00.005+05:30

What is the ideal price one should pay for rationality?

This is a rather discomforting thought, why do we choose to be rational or make rational choices? Is there a pattern to rationality or is it just another form of thinking?

Love has raised rather interesting questions for me, on the lines of morality, making the right & rational choices & also working my way to avoid hurting others along the way. But this brings me back to my original logic, which has been wedged into my forehead since a long time, the role of selfishness in love. People say love is self-less, I beg to differ. I dont think anything we do is self-less, not even charity. I have my own reasons to believe, one of them is that self gratification is the only way we can understand what will satisfy other people. Although not with the same things or same circumstances, but the idea of gratification, satisfaction remain universal.

My selfishness or inability to avoid being selfish, has put me in a situation where I occasionally sit down & resolve things for myself. I try to figure out what I want & what I need from the world around me; emotionally, materially, personally & socially. Not always do I conform to these wants & needs since not everything we plan can be achieved. But the agenda exists. My non-conformity allows ample of space for non-linear & random events to take place in my personal life. The trend, for lack of a better word, has been that I allow these events to take place which more than usually define a new course of thought & action for me. Indulging in this moment of clarity I happen to resolve my deep seated anxieties with it. For me the last word is that everything is uncertain, but to acknowledge the uncertainty & use it for decision-making is something I always seek.

A lot of uncertain consequences for my actions lie ahead. I dont know how these things will turn out. But going back to my concern about rationality & morality, I have to pause for a while to think if all my actions which lead to uncertain outcomes are right or wrong. From a biased bird's eye view, some might believe my actions to be morally wrong & irrational; for some they might be morally neutral but irrational & the last but not the very least would be being morally right & irrational. How do we deal with this irrationality which love & life offers to us? I have come to believe that love is a largely irrational feeling, especially romantic love, since there is no tangible reason to fall in love but we just glide into the situation even without being aware of it. It is something early morning jogger's experience when that first wiff of fresh, unadulterated air gushes down their lungs & makes them believe in the certainty that this is what they wanted & this is going to be everything they will ever want.

Why is love irrational then? (opinions are extremely personal)
The notion of informed choice is what I think makes it irrational. One of the most important aspects of rationality is to make informed choices. We fall in love with another person without knowing much about them. As we fall in love we yearn to explore our feelings & the person itself. So we plunge into the idea of love without adequate information, only to be backed by some invisible, undefinable intuition. We learn more & more about this person as we grow. Even when new information keeps pouring in, about this person, we seldom end up comparing this new information with the original feeling which we had when we fell in love. In any rational scenario, it is deemed necessary to discount new information, but in love we rarely do so. We accomodate. For our selfish desire to be with the person, we accomodate with the new information & create room for imperfections & outliers. We want to endure with this person which we so deeply love & also want such a mutual reciprocation hoping that the other person might also accomodate our imperfections. In a way, love is the reason The Beatles sang "All you need is love." Is this behavior moral? Is the inability to discount new information into our decisions right or wrong?

But life is seldom this simple & ideal. Rationality, being the epicentre of human thought (or not), always tries to interfere with that selfish sense of love. We try to rationalize the situations depending on our social obligations & prevalent beliefs. We want everything to be normal with the least amount of friction along with the freedom of choice.

Paolo Coelho says in The Alchemist , "Because when we love, we always strive to be better than we are." Another look into the irrational perhaps. Why would something or some feeling engage us in being better than before? Isn't growth a natural part of life! As we grow older & experience different aspects of life, we inevitably become better than what we are. Some people who become worse, on the other hand have external circumstances to blame for. Being better has been a natural tendency of life. So why does love become an extraneous factor to make us become better than what we are?

Another disturbing moral hazard of love which has deep seated implications to the argument of love being rational or not is the sense of trust. We trust the person we love, implicitly. So great is this trust that we occasionally end up giving the person we love, the power to completely destroy us & trust them not to. Why?, even though it is the right thing to do!!!

So to ask the impossible question, is love the price to pay for rationality or is rationality a price to pay for love?

Define

2009-05-02T10:09:00.007+05:30

I read a very insightful & meaningful discussion on one of my email groups that I have signed into. This thread was about which careers purely require broadness of expertise & knowledge. The discussion was pertaining to high IQ individuals who often wonder if they are making full use of their gift or which ways exist to fully utilize it.

It began with a simple question, which career options are available that allows broadness or a macro understanding of diverse skills to function in it? The answer wasnt as easy or as difficult as it seemed. The discussion is still active, yet the replies so far, are very insightful.

The source of the question was an FT article on how people with high IQ's end up doing too many things & don't gain expertise in one domain thereby not maximizing their gain from their professional selves. How the high IQ allows them vivid comprehension which inevitably makes them fall into various interests & then dilute their focus. So which career would require the use of this specific skill set?

From the article -
Abnormally high IQ scores, by their nature, often speak of a brain too general to be of much use. "Effectively," said Rust, "you are mastering far too many things."

From the answers so far, I found a few very interesting ones & obvious ones;

Entrepreneur: Nothing offers wide-ranging challenges quite like having all the operations of an entire business rely solely on you. You get to be a CEO, a business developer, an accountant, a marketer, an account manager, an HR person, a project manager, a creative, a tech, and that's all *aside from* the actual product/service your business is selling. You wanna hustle like a jack-of-all-trades on fire? Start a business.
Peace Corps/non-profit/NGO: Working in an underfunded, low-resource, struggling area is an incredible way to make use of a stupid number of talents and skills. If you can show up on the scene, quickly master any training they need to give you, and then apply your brain to innovating the things that aren't working so well, fixing the things that no one else can fix, teaching what no one else can teach... You'll wear as many hats as you can fit on your head. There's no shortage of people with the *potential* to change the world, there's just a shortage of people actually doing it. And you've probably got more potential than many.
CIA operative
Parent: Parenthood challenges you in teaching, planning, psychology, health, patience, emotional resilience, creativity, your own flaws, and wide knowledge of the world -- both because they'll ask every question, and because you'll be obsessed with watchfulness about the world they're entering.
Politics: Know a little bit about everything & work on good ideas
Law: Gain expertise one a particular case / topic & move to next case / topic & keep moving.

From these answers & a few others, it became apparent to me that every profession no matter how mundane or exciting, requires a multidisciplinary approach towards thinking. The concept of visualizing everything in mental models & then crossing over into other fields of knowledge & vocation along with expertise gained from previous experience. I believe that this is what each successful approach in any career demands. Some people are high on professional experience, the specialist in their domains, but might be handicapped when it comes to applying some other concept out of their field of specialization to their field of specialization. Doesnt this severely limit the effectiveness of a professional.

My personal motto has been to constantly keep myself updated on whatever I am interested in. Sometimes this knowledge or even information leads to dramatic revelations. My understanding of systems approach to learning, which was reinforced when I applied it beyond its original intended domain of operations management, to learning & understanding everything has helped me learn more effectively. Encapsulating knowledge & expertise to use it in isolation, i think, is a definite way to implode our potential to excel.

I am not a great fan of the idea of IQ & its measurement, but I do advocate the fact that people, all of them have an inherent sense of interest & curiosity for things around us. So some of us learn to channelize it properly & others don't. It does matter what profession we pick for ourselves & how we function within it, but it also matters how we relate our work with what the world is doing so as to get this broader insight into our role & make it even more interesting. Maximizing value of any field of knowledge & vocation, I believe, comes not from rudimentary, linear growth but from unconventional & non-linear things that we allow into our lives.

The Sweet Aroma of Success

2009-03-15T00:17:00.004+05:30

Does success have a smell? How do we know that we have succeeded? Is it just the material effect for the cause of our effort or is it the emotional kick we receive?

I was compelled to think of this on my idle lil train journey, back home from college. That unassuming moment just passed me by & it took me a full minute to realize its impact.

A boy (possibly aged 10 or 12) boarded the compartment at a station. The next station was 10 minutes away, atleast. He carried a sling bag on his right shoulder, with a pair of rubber slip-in soles in his left palm. His face was dark & covered with soot, his eyebrows mixed with the toil of the day. Hair silky yet disheveled, sweaty & dusty. He wore a GnR T-shirt with an indistinct cloth underneath which I presumed to be his shorts. He was the 'local train shoe shine', carrying his mobile business from station to station, from compartment to compartment, hoping that his next meal would come from shining a leather shoe. Before the pitch, he hummed a very fine tune under his breath. Totally unrecognizable but a tune nevertheless. His eyes gleamed with a sense of pride & sunk into a pitiful despair when the first prospect turned him down.

Unrelenting, he moved on from one alley to next in the compartment, soliciting his shoe shine service. He had no hope on his face, yet he knew the rules of the game. He knew that its not necessary that every person wearing a leather shoe will always have his shoes shone from him. Did this realization permit him the strength to skip a meal?

Still humming under his breath & only momentarily pausing while approaching a prospect, to ask "suu polisss", "suu polisss" & resuming the hum in perfect rhythm with the clanking of the train's wheels. His proverbial "suu polisss", "suu poliss" also seemed like a part of a song, with the clanky beat trying to convey a sense of integrity to not steal his next meal, but to work for it.

Finally, just a few minutes before the train arrived at the station, a prospect is converted into a customer. His brown shoes dont prove to be a challenge & he pulls out all the tools of the trade. Like an expert soldier re-assembling his firearm for the next round of fire, or a chef getting ready to make his best meal ever, he draws all his tools & small tin containers with a wax based polish. Within the next 20 seconds, the whole compartment's concentration is broken by a distinct "sqweaking" of the cloth licking the shiny surface of a shoe, rejuvenating it to its ultimate glory. The sunlight from a window nearby left a spotlight on the shoe which shone brighter than the brightest diamond that kid had ever seen. Five rupees went into a small slit of his sling bag & a smile went on the corner of his lips. Not trying to conceal his joy but also trying not to look too eager & show a professional class, he stood near the door.

A few seconds before the train came to a halt, he did the most unthinkable of all things. He discreetly drew his fingers closer to his face & had a whiff. The smile, now radiant & streak of jubiliance on his face, his hair responding to the pounding wind, in that moment of victory he gets off the slowing train & vanishes into the crowd.

Everybody in the compartment watched his gesture but I am not sure how many might have contemplated it this way. He smelt the aroma of success, that victory for which he toiled all morning. However miniscule it was, his tiny brain, over who knows how many years, had conditioned his response to that aroma. The sweet smell of success possibly will drive him to some other compartment of some other train waiting for his next fix.

Does success then become an addiction? Do we realize the importance of the hours gone in reaching it? I had read once that the anticipation of success is what drives us & not the success itself. For when success is achieved, the hype of the anticipation has already made us high on it, even before reaching it. Does it mean that this little boy, awaiting his next fix, didnt realize what he was losing in the process? His circumstance making him shine stranger's shoes, unfortunate enough to not enjoy a normal childhood, makes me question what is this normalcy anyway?

I have seen people getting so high on their success that next time they forget to try as hard as they had tried before & lose. For does the smell of success condition you to this response as well? Is the smell any sweeter when we have had it more than once?

Questions, questions & more questions cloud my mind even more driving to a high, anticipating the next moment of clarity.

The Philosphy of Russel Peters & The Art of Total Humiliation

2009-03-02T21:30:00.004+05:30

"Be a man, do the right thing." the dj spun endless loops of this along with some other Russel Peter's classic phrases, scratching all the way till the applause faded.

I was watching Peters' performance in NY in Red, White & Brown, what I believe to be one of his latest stand up gigs. Peters is known to be one of the proponents of racist comedy (dont know the technical word for it, so till then). This has been the third Peters' standup act I have seen, but it struck me now how important this act was. How important racist comedy actually is!

Peters, somehow has found the ultimate weapon of mass humiliation, which ends up bringing together the neo-liberal junta from all the races he publically humiliates. This is a significant moment in time for people are tolerant & have a sense of humour decent enough to keep his act going. Its not just the freedom of speech or freedom of expression, its not just wise anecdotes & observation, but deep down we must have a sense of common belonging to the same species. Races or no races, we are humans rising out of the same conditions, living in different ones but sharing the same problems of the human condition. The racial bigotry we see around which seems to have no solution, has finally found one in humour. I asked myself, if Russel Peters was a political science professor or even worse a philosophy professor talking about racial anectdotes, would he be received with the same enthusiasm & cheer? Is it possible to believe that this sort of humiliation would work in any other context other than standup comedy? Do people react to his observations because they agree with him or do they react because of the way he enacts them? What part of public humiliation of their race do these people find funny? And the last & most important question, why do people of all these races come together to watch him rip apart the things that define their racial existence?

I love Peters' comedy, its in your face nature & his total disregard for being politically correct. But is public humiliaion of each other's races a major way to release our racial identity & the awareness that people of other races are also as messed up as people of our race ? What happens in our heads when we watch him make fun of our race or make fun of someone else's race? Does the reaction invoke the same sort of synaptic response or do we go into defensive when the joke is on us & back to normal when its on someone else?

Humiliation, is yet another beautiful tool. Probably as beautiful as humour which acts as its medium. Humiliating someone takes a lot of effort, especially to get the person intimidated in the first place. If there is no insecurity within a person about himself/herself, that person cannot be intimidated, let alone lead to humiliation. The embarrassment that we exhibit when we are humiliated is yet another way to release the truth about ourself out in the open. What Peters accomplishes in his 2 hour acts is very nature of exposing the racial prejudices & mannerisms which might be extremely juvenile & embarrassing once they are assessed by a third person. Again I bump into some questions, why arent these embarrassing qualities readily apparent to us once we are part of that culture/race? If we so zealously believe in our way of life & cultural mannerisms, why arent we aware of the most fundamental tenet of this belief, that its all human?

The acts of total humiliation which he subjects his audience to, the audience lap it up withhearty laughs & claps, with no visible aggression whatsoever. Does humour release some chemical in us which pacifies our racial identities?

"Be a man, do the right thing".

Tornado in a tea cup (a short story)

2009-02-16T22:40:00.002+05:30

“Are you serious?” she asked with disbelief & concern in her eyes. “Let me repeat what I just said, ‘Are you actually thinking of going through it’?” She still wasn’t sure if she had understood him right. “Okay, I know how absurd this sounds to you, but this what I need to do. This is my true calling.” He said this without even sparing a glance for her & just packing away some old dusted books in a plastic bag. His sack was ready, compact & durable, just as he always liked it. His dream of just packing bare essentials & some ideas together & walking off leaving the whole world behind, was finally coming true.

Nothing made sense to him. At least at this hour, his passion was his own undoing of a primal desire that life should be simple. It should be free of all shackles, no mental leash, not refraining to think about anything at all. This past year, he had grown more & more restless. She could tell by the way he started to stare at long distances a second more than he already used to. She could see him grow distant day by day, trying to slowly rationalize his fate like a prisoner in a Chinese torture camp, wishing anything but that seat. He had once mentioned on a quite evening on his terrace about the brutality that people had allowed themselves to be subjected to. He couldn’t have told this to anyone but her, she was probably the only one he thought, who knew where it all came from. She listened intently & couldn’t help but smile at his child like desire to touch & feel every emotion in his brain & link it to something tangible all the time. His idea of brutality was simple, not entirely unlike the barbaric interpretation of the word. He said that subjecting our mind to anything less than an idea which leads to deep articulation in the brain, anything which makes us feel that we have reached the end of it or anything that encourages the ghastly motive of not to think; is brutality in the purest form. He used to joke that he would now like to carry a cyanide pill as a locket & fondle it with his finger with intent to swallow it at any moment, whenever the person in front of him would insult the human faculty of thinking. He was mostly referring to his lectures. She knew, she had witnessed it too in one form or the other, but being a woman gave her the advantage of being slightly more impervious to bull shit.

He was about to graduate. He was part of one of those lesser known B-schools which sprout now & then like weed. Many of the best B-Schools, he said, were weed at some point in time, which no one cared to remove & now when they have become a forest, no on can dare to remove. It’s funny how quickly we assert our own standards to be the right thing to do & make it into a trend which ultimately leads to a collapse, when some contradicting faction emerges. Sadly for most of the business education institutes, there hasn’t been a truly viable criticism, yet. He felt that most of the really good B-Schools have become good because they can live in a self sustained state of hype. The world refutes his logic at face value, but he is known to have been cynical anyway, & also apathetic.

That evening when they were walking fingers in fingers near the lake side, he told her that he got the job that he always wanted. She asked him all about it & allowed him to indulge into his quasi fantasy job description. She understood & that was enough for him. He told her everything, everything. He always used to care for her, even for the silliest things. The one time she went for a short trip up north during winter, he helped her pack. He was a packing freak, with a hope that ‘we can pack everything that we want to carry & not feel even the slightest burden of the weight, if it is packed the right way’. Fortunately, he hadn’t read any book on packing techniques to convince her with his analytical reasons to pack underwear before the socks & gloves. Sometimes he was so concerned about her that he would leave an email early morning, before the world woke up, just to check if she had a cold, because her voice sounded a little weird on the phone last night. He was protective, but not obsessive. He was indulgent, but not perverse. He was afraid of her most of the time, because he thought that she was the only one who can tame his hunter-gatherer urge to explore. But the fact prevailed; he was all in it for himself. Somehow his curiosity & she had ended up into a symbiotic association, which even a hundred thousand years of evolution wouldn’t dare to mutate.

“Are you sure?” she kept on insisting. “Please think again, please let’s run through this one last time, for my sake”. “I don’t want to rationalize my emotions” He said. “Aha, so you know it’s an emotional outburst, you can’t be thinking rationally at this point, can you?” She thought she had him. “I wish you could have just slapped me instead” he uttered with a frown. His eyes were steamy through out the entire time, when she had entered his room & found him packing. “But why now, why out of the blue” she implored for his logic. “You have known of this all this time, you faced it all along, why now? When you have been given a new beginning, the coveted job, the kind of life you always wanted. Why give it all away in the hope for your intellectual orgasm?” There was anger in her voice now mixed with concern like a dirty margarita. The lemon & tequila hit his soft spot. “Because, I have now come to realize the purposelessness of it all” He said as if shrugging the world away. “The job, the idea of this life, is ever so enticing only to a point where I will realize that it was just a ploy to allure me into believing that the world cannot be changed & I have to live forever in the chains of thought cleverly constructed for me by the this culture of intellectual arrogance”. Her eyes widened with disbelief, “What are you talking about baby? Where is all this hate coming from? What happened to you since last night?” He replied with utmost formality, “This isn’t one of those moments when a simple hug or a peck to the cheek will resolve the situation.” She glared angrily at him. Her fury could have melted the sun. “Have you been drinking?” “How many glasses of vodka have you had?”

He spotted the tone of disagreement & anger lined with concern. He calmed down, breathing heavily for a minute & broke into tears.”I can’t stand it anymore, I just can’t”. She sat by his side sliding her hand across his shoulder & kissed his ear. “Sshhh, Sshhh, Sshhh”, she tried to console him, “don’t be weak in one of the toughest moments of your life. Your tears will not wash the logic away. You know better than that.” He stared at her incredulously with tears rolling down his cheeks, astonished by the sheer maturity of the thought & precision with which she spoke. He couldn’t help but smile. “What’s the grand scheme? What is the Nobel Prize Winner of Anarchy going to say that will make the world stop turning just for a moment?” She said it with deliberate sarcasm, which he always enjoyed when she criticized him with it.

He started, “Well, to begin with…”,”Fuck you, fuck you for doing this to me & to yourself”, she interrupted, startling him. “Can you be more prosaic about this? Is this your way to begin with one of the most intimate experiences of your life?” “Wyell, tuh beghin with, blah blah” she imitated him with a horrible accent, which made him wonder did he actually sound like that? He didn’t apologize, “Well to being with..” deliberately stressing every word, “I plan to let go of everything material, letting go of every attachment which will inhibit my mind from doing anything less important than thinking about everything.” Her face had gone back to normal, a strand of hair was tracing the contours of her face which made her look less real. He explained his logic, step by step, methodically unfolding the evolution of the thought & the idea which led him to packing. She listened to his voice dispassionately like she had once listened to a heavily decorated woman in one of the soaps her mom used to watch every evening. But she knew better, that he was right. She went back to that place inside her head, ‘The Idea Engine’ she would call it, where everything that he said was making sense in an uncanny way. It was like he was the pied piper alluring her to this mystical reality of an existence, which will lead to a life time of self introspection & learning. The coup de grace was when he said by actually meaning it, “You know, sometimes the simplest things in life are the hardest to find”. She almost melted in the impracticality of his decision. “All I want to do is to sit, read, think, write. Period.”

“But what about me, what about us?” She was surprised what made her say that. He chuckled when he saw that look on her face knowing exactly what had just happened in her head. “I would be the luckiest, the happiest man on this planet if I get an intellectual companion in your form & thought”. She knew it was a trick, a mind game which he had resorted to, to convince her that he was right. She knew that he knew that she cannot live without him. His cold articulation, his wit, his cute hatred & his way of spearheading into a problem, had always made her respect him; not as a minion respects her master but as a human respects another human. He knew better than her that living one day without her would be like a permafrost for his mind. He had almost had himself believe that she was his ‘Idea Engine’. She inspired him to aspire.

“What will you do now?” She inquired in despair, angry at her own helplessness because she couldn’t help him in this moment’s worth of madness. “I will carry these books, this back pack & hitch hike my way to the country side. I will live there & work there, appreciating the pleasure & integrity of manual daily labor. I will work on a farm under some unknown farmer. I will live the simple way of life & read in my spare time. I will save money to buy more books, I will write, write till my fingers will move. I will….” “I, I & more I. Its always about you & your ideals & your puh-spectives” She mocked him with her new weapon, the feminine angst. She knew this will certainly throw him off balance since it had been one of his greatest weaknesses seeing her trapped in a corner. He hated himself for doing this to her & it showed. He frowned, almost apologetically but the flame of the thought could be seen clearly in his eyes, just simmering in a small gust of wind to regain its full glowing glory once the wind faded.

“What about your Job, your pending term? What will you tell your parents?” “I haven’t thought that through yet” He admitted apologetically. It was then she realized that something wasn’t right. This was totally unlike him, he always thinks every little detail through & runs simulations in his head for gods sake. This is not him. She started walking away from him towards the bed, to sit down, because this was too big a moment to stand & endure. He sat besides her, holding her hand in both palms as if protecting it from the harsh reality of life. He enclosed it like he did with the luminous flame of an idea of a life draped with a simple living, encouraging the freedom of thought that every man always desires. This is the same freedom that a man seeks when he looks up at the sky at those birds flapping away into oblivion, desiring one life time with wings which will lift them of their ordinary existence. But no one ever wonders about the gift that nature has offered as a sacrifice to watch a specie thrive while making others around it fade away out of existence. He always believed that the human mind must be used for what it is made for, articulation of the facts of life in order to live better off. Everything can’t be known, everything can’t be imagined by one man, it takes a generation, an era, and an epoch to recognize the truest achievement of any species. It’s one of the nature’s most cruel laws, endure & you shall be rewarded. It’s the time value of life, he thought. Discount this value with the inability of the general human population to ignore its natural impulses to stretch in the wrong directions & to get tangled up in the rat race of urban chaos. His eyes gleamed with a rhetorical stare, looking at nowhere in particular wondering about why he had to make this choice. Did she deserve this?

She mustered up the courage to finally stand up, facing him. He was still sitting by the edge of the bed staring at the floor with his eyes all red, with the friction of ideas, beliefs & emotions. She walked closer to him, holding his head in an affectionate embrace & thrust it gently against her belly. Her bosom was radiating a feeling of care which only a woman can offer. Her maternal instincts allow her to deconstruct the problem in manageable emotional chunks so that she wouldn’t feel the pain all at once. She kills herself a little bit with every emotional note passing through her like the angry precision of Beethoven’s fingers on his piano. Yet the comforting embrace is all that is necessary since the beginning of time, to endure that turmoil. She offered it to him, embraced him tightly so as to hold him there with her & not allow him to go. He gave in, & hugged her hips & sobbed. She caressed his hair, ran her long slender fingers through them & made him believe in the affection. I don’t think any animal in the entire classification of fauna is capable of this ‘touch of belief’. He let go of her, staring right at her with wet crimson eyes. “Can we do this together? Can we live through this life with a hopeless dream of simplicity & thought in a world where no one will appreciate it?”

She started to weep by the time he finished his sentence, “I don’t know, I really don’t know, but isn’t it exciting, this feeling of not knowing. This unbridled uncertainty of life. Why run away from it with a false excuse, why choose certainty for the sake of choosing it. Let’s not kid ourselves into believing that the grass will be greener on the other side. Every way of life has its own set of realities & its own set of oddities which will again inspire us to get disgusted & realize that it wasn’t simple all along. Instead, the surest test of natural selection would be live through & survive through the path & the habitat that has been offered to us.”

He saw the fallacy in his logic, the escapist zeal which had had him blinded. He stood up held her by her shoulders & hugged her gently & held her in an embrace till so-called eternity in anti-gravity.

Purple Wings - A Short Story

2009-02-01T13:41:00.001+05:30

His pert black hair reflected a slight tinge of crimson when hit with the afternoon sun. Just like every school day, he walked back home on the beaten down path with his abnormally heavy sack & freshly muddled khaki half pants, who couldn’t distinguish itself in a line-up. He loved playing in the mud. His fascination for beetles emanated from an extraordinary experience in one of his friends’ garden. He always carried shiny greenish-blue ‘Alphonso’ in his left pant pocket, in a carefully reinforced matchbox with adequate holes for Alphonso to breathe. At first he didn’t know what to do with the beetle, but then he started to feed it with leaves, bugs & whatever else his tiny little imagination would allow him to feed it.

He developed a strange new bond with the bug. He had never felt like it before. It was almost like someone was at his mercy for the rest of its life, yet not a slave to him, but someone who he was responsible for. A slight fear went past him everyday, when he woke up. He always wondered if he was feeding it right, taking care of it in the way it would naturally look after itself if left in the wild. He felt sad one evening when staring at the bug, who was desperately trying to enjoy the confines of a display jar which the boy had managed to make out of a pickle jar he had stolen from under his mother’s nose. He had tied a piece of cloth tightly across the rim where the lid was supposed to be & secured it with a rubber band so that it could be removed effortlessly when the bug was to be transferred to the matchbox again. The boy was sad by looking at the bug trying to climb the slippery walls of the jar & reach the cloth. He couldn’t understand why was the bug in this desperate attempt to climb something which it knows is impossible to climb. Was it tired of just sitting around? Was it tired of just looking at the floor & wanted to see what’s up there? Why didn’t it fly when it had wings to reach the top?

The boy couldn’t figure out the notion of freedom. For him, it seemed natural to take care of a tiny little thing as this bug, who he believed, without his help would surely be eaten by some bird or those fierce red creatures that had haunted him one night when he dropped a lot of biscuit crumbs on his bed.

One morning as he woke up, he was astonished to realize his own stupidity as he hadn’t already figured out such a simple thing. He realized that the bug must have been bored of just sitting around & probably misses his toys. That whole day, in school & on his way back, he was constantly trying to imagine how a beetle’s toys would look like. Would it have a small bicycle with six paddles or would it have tiny cars which it would play with on the branches? He was completely befuddled when it dawned on him that how would someone grow up without having a reasonably large collection of cars to play with? It was unconceivable for him. So he tried to make a tradeoff. Since the pickle jar was not big enough to fit many of his tiny toys inside, he decided to go with the car & the branch theory. He put a twig inside the jar & then one of his small convertible cars which was a gift from his aunt, last diwali.

He watched with amazement as the bug was impervious to the Porsche but hung upside down to the twig. He thought of that boy from his school who had won a gold medal doing exactly the same thing with two bars at the sports meet. ‘It’s smiling’, thought the boy with delight when after an entire week of his transfer to a new home, the bug had finally opened its wings. It was incredulous for him for something so small could possess such fantastic colors under its skin. He wondered for a moment whether even he had such wonderful colors underneath him. Would he ever have wings & then spread them wide apart & show the world his true colors, in the magnificent glory of the reflecting morning sun? The purple shade on the bug captivated him & he stared for hours at a stretch observing the slight change in shade as the light played with it. He remembered that one evening at tea time, how his mother was sitting near the window with a cup of steaming hot tea reading her book & the mellowing sunlight made her eyes look brown when they were in fact, jet black like his hair.

He wondered if ever his mom would have thought about her own eyes being a different color when observed from a different direction. His mind was totally consumed by this optical illusion that nature had to offer. He also figured out the mystery of the orange ribbon on the hair of the girl who shared the desk with him at school. He couldn’t help but think about her & wanted to show her what he had been hiding in his pocket everyday. She had asked him many times to tell her what he did every now & then with his hand in his pocket? He used to throw a lie at her to make her mind her own business, but secretly wanted to tell her everything about his new friend. He wanted them to be friends too so that they can go out to play in the evening together & not have to sit in the room. The toys had become monotonous & he had lost all interest in them. His bug was his new muse towards figuring out a responsibility which his tiny mind had no need to know.

He enjoyed the feeling of not telling his parents about the bug. He hid the jar every time he heard them approaching his room. He couldn’t figure out how they would respond to having a pet animal in the house without their knowledge. So instead of facing them with the truth, he managed to live with the lie. It was agonizing at first since he had no idea what the bug might go through it left all by itself in his room. What if someone or something might break the glass jar & take Alphonso away or worse, eat him? The thought gave him shivers. In fact his parents knew about the bug long before he had decided to hide it from them, for they were amazed why their son was sleeping with a glass jar in his bed. So they used to carefully place the jar on his study desk & tuck him in bed when he was fast asleep. He never figured out how the glass jar always, every night managed to slip through his hands & reach the study table. He was so confused that he stopped figuring it out & wanted to believe that the beetle with its super strong wings made the jar fly along with him to the table so that it could stare at the night sky & the stars.

It was approximately two weeks of confinement & the bug had slowly become less & less motile every passing day. It had stopped spreading its wings wide open & the boy thought that it must be sad. The boy wondered when the bug’s birthday was & do all his friends come to his home to blow the candles on the tiny cake. What gifts did beetles give each other on that day? Do they wear clown hats & run around in the house jacked up on sugar? He wondered why the beetle did not want to go to school. Didn’t he have an orange ribbon wearing desk mate of his own? Didn’t he feel like telling her what he had been doing all this time away from her?

It was one weekend when his parents had decided to visit their vacation home just at the outskirts of the city. He was terrified since he would have to either carry the bug with him & reveal the secret & face the music or he could figure something out. He had the full day of Friday to try to figure out a way till the morning after. He paced his room frenetically thinking of ways to put it delicately to his parents. But he decided otherwise & thought that the bug would take care of itself if it had adequate supplies to last for the weekend. So he went to his garden & plucked one leaf of every kind making it a total of ten leaves which he thought that the bug might love to eat that weekend. He filled a small bottle lid with water & lowered it carefully into the jar with his tiny, agile fingers. That was to be the bug’s water supply. He shouted jovially at the bug, “Take a bath for a change you filthy little bug”. He was delighted at his genius & figuring out a way of having his cake & eating it too. He secured the lid of the jar & watched Alphonso lying there, least enthused about the sudden inflow of supplies. The boy took it for a heavy-heartedness of parting company for two whole days. He spent the better part of the evening convincing Alphonso that he would be back shortly & then they can play again together. But Alphonso’s frown couldn’t be wiped off.

Finally Saturday morning arrived & the boy kissed the glass jar & left his room & then his home for their trip. Throughout the journey the boy was sad for leaving his friend alone. He didn’t say a word & only answered when asked upon. They had a good time that day, spending time with mom & dad just like old times.

On the evening of Sunday, as the front door opened, the boy dropped his bags in the door & rushed to his room. He could not contain his shock, the visual impact made a slight concussion to his innocent mind. He started sobbing heavily but not uttering a sound until he could figure out what went wrong. The glass jar was lying on the floor, cracked open in a thousand pieces & the leaves scattered across the rug. The lid of the bottle wasn’t seen anywhere. Then his eyes searched the region around the glass pieces & found the shiny greenish blue remains of Alphonso lying belly up with his legs in the air as if trying to call for help. The boy fell to his knees, a piece of glass jabbed sharply at his tender skin making him bleed inside his pant. The pain of the shattered piece of the jar was significantly less than the loss of a dear friend. He had failed Alphonso, he thought to himself. He had failed his friend when he had promised to look after him everyday. He had failed in his duty to take care. The boy’s sobs became audible cries & then he suddenly broke out. Yelling at the top of his 8 year old voice, “I’m Sorry Alphonso, I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I’m sorryyysssss”.

Heeding to her boy’s ominous yelling his mother ran to his room with a worried look on her face & saw a small pool of blood on the floor. She picked him up gently yet swiftly with an expertise of a fireman & hugged him tightly. She instantly parted with him to assess the extent of the wound & it was a small cut to his knee. She plucked out the glass shards from his pant & took him to the kitchen to give him a glass of water & first aid. His father came to the kitchen with a small furry cat in his hand, asking his wife how this little thing could have gotten into the house. The boy stopped sobbing for a moment, tears still fresh & rolling down his cheeks. He gave a grisly look at the cat, which was busy licking its own fur in his father’s hand. The cat seemed totally oblivious to his grief & was taken outside in the courtyard to be set free.

He looked down at the floor in a melancholy mood facing something his young mind wasn’t equipped to understand. His mother tried to console him, but his ears were shut off & his mind was wandering with an image of Alphonso hanging upside down to the twig like the boy from his school. He started sobbing with convulsions & hugged his mother. He whispered softly in her ears, with a deep note of acceptance & admittance.

“Mommy, He had purple wings”.

iConverse

2009-01-19T12:03:00.005+05:30

I have been watching movies all my life, but I only asked this now, for no apparent reason,
‘Why do I like films which circle around personal conversations?’

The camera seems to be hovering around the two characters, following them through time just to observe that connection of the minds. The camera is not judgmental about what the conversation entails; it just follows dispassionately & allows the subjects to get passionately involved into each other’s minds, making even the silence seem less awkward.

I think the question I ought to ask myself is, ‘What do I find so appealing in other people’s conversations?’ I am not even sure if that’s the right question. But yes, that has been a trend. I may have rationalized my opinion over the years to like such an uninteresting thing, no activity, no movement, just actors wasting precious screen time walking around & talking. I believe that the ability of cinema, the actors, the story, the director & finally the cinematographer to capture this almost divine moment is something that should not be missed. Probably the most important evolutionary force which keeps the human race together, the idea that there is someone somewhere who wants to listen to what I have to say, would respond to it with the same passion or the same intellectual capacity as I would respond to my own thoughts. I have noticed the phrase ‘meeting of the minds’ so often that I had begun to perceive it as a cliché. But it isn’t, although however corny it sounds, for lack of better words, it is still the sort of thing that keeps us from being sociopaths. This is the juice that helps me realize the only connecting link between me & any other human roaming on the planet.

I take myself back in time picturing the earliest humans, hunting & gathering, living on everything that they can have only at that moment. There is only this slight concern about the future & what it holds, although they are stripped off their material urges & are there in that very moment. What excuse other than a physical intimacy would their over developed brains have, to stay with each other? What incentive other than passing their genes to the next generation could their being together possibly express? None, if looked upon from nature’s point of view, but a lot if seen from a social lens. Staying together, has to have some incentive; & to make it bearable, there was conversation. The stage was already set; we had evolved into beings which used their brains for far more complicated mental functions than nature had allowed us before. These brains evolved language, apparently (just to speculate) as an alternative form of expression other than physical expression.

A conversation is almost like a non-zero sum game. My thoughts induce your thoughts & your thoughts induce mine. It is a self-energizing engine, where each stimulates the other conversing mind. I believe that this activity is hard coded in our brains over millions of years of cultural evolution, that we hardly ever notice it, let alone extract it out of our daily lives.

A conversation is a duel between minds exploring the limits of each other’s thoughts, learning what the other mind is capable of discerning. It doesn’t have to be verbal; it can also be signs, expressions, and body movements. There is no language to thought, but only for its expression. When two minds find themselves in a situation where they confront each other’s primary function, thought, every pattern of movement exhibited by the opposite body becomes a variable in that equation. Every action, word, sign, expression adds up to the mathematical reality of that moment. If this exchange is sufficient to engage both the minds, then they become oblivious of the surroundings & get consumed in the expression.

Kids exhibit this more readily than adults, since they haven’t yet learned the ability to mask their boredom. The only reason the kids unadulterated mind will pay any attention to a conversation is that pre-historic urge which allows it the liberty to try & understand the mind that is trying to speak with it. If the speaking mind doesn’t allow the kid’s mind to engage in self reflection & ask itself ‘if this was something that will be useful to me’, then the interest in the speaking mind fades away. I say “useful” in the previous sentence not in its garden variety meaning, but as an idea which makes me think about my own thoughts or actions in someway or the other. It doesn’t always have to be materially significant, but something that tells me more about myself, which I didn’t already know.

There are so many small moments in a film where the actors don’t speak with each other at all, yet they converse with their bodies & their dialogs are louder than their words could have ever been. I had never understood the urge of expressionism in us. Why do we always want to project ourselves to everyone? Those blogs, those books, those films, those poems, those paintings, those conversations, what do they all signify? What made us change the evolutionary mold & get out of our primal desires to procreate, live eternally through our offspring to engaging in these secondary forms of living?

The Fountain

2009-01-13T00:04:00.003+05:30

It was, quite easily, a month from today, when I opened my old stationary closet to look for my black-ink bottle. I was half hoping it to have dried up for not using it for a couple of years. But to my surprise it was still half full. I dipped the delicate metallic tip into the bottle, barely touching the surface & it inhaled the dark liquid. I could feel it energizing itself with every drop until it was full & there was no more room left but just for the occasional air bubble. It dripped of the dark fluid & looked like a vampire coming back to life after its first prey in a thousand years.

The silver metallic surface slipped against my forefinger & positioned itself for its first flick in a long time. It traced my name with my usual strokes, but it felt oddly unfamiliar since it was slower than I would have usually moved my wrist, yet with better grace & determination. Its silver tip scrapped through the rough paper surface taking tiny, microscopic layers away with it, thus smoothening the next letter. I had to move my hand away from the surface for a short while noticing the watery black impression I made on the paper, just like I would have if I would’ve held a feather tip 200 years ago. The slight blot, the occasional dark ink pools at the beginning of each letter & those long, laborious strokes to reach the last word, all made me feel like I was able to stop time; just for a second.

I had almost forgotten the joy of writing with my fountain pen, my beloved partner in thought, when we used to spend long vacation afternoons sketching on a diary whose pages immediately went to the trash can. I remembered how much I used to love the long stretches of time taken to finish a simple wire sketch, just lines connecting each other trying to depict some form or the other. I remembered how much I had loved it when I used it to write that letter which never went to her. Every word unconsciously, yet precisely calculated to serve the impact of each word. I knew it then & I know it now as I clutch the cold steel surface in the grip of my fingers to drive it across the page just to get that boost again.

In a conversation with a friend, he was saying something about how meditation helps us slow down our reference of time & make us evaluate a situation in ‘bullet time’ when the whole world whizzes past us & we think about it in slow motion. It is a popular yet ancient technique to channelize our intuition & instinctive responses towards the situation at hand by slowing down the speed of the world from our frame of reference & objectively analyze the situation. I think that’s how a fireman’s brain works, he sees blazing fire right in front of him & in a split second he knows where to aim the hose & calm the flames.

The fountain pen works like a time capsule for me, which diverts me to this slower lane of time & makes me think of the next thought I am about to think in gradual motion instead of the regular synaptic speed, thus giving me a moment’s lead over what I am going to think & consecutively note it on the paper. It gives me that extra boost of time to re-think my thought.

It is therefore, probably, a bad tool for a university exam, but an excellent one for self reflection.

Need to, Want to, Have to

2008-12-29T12:21:00.017+05:30

Just like every December for the past i-dont-know-how-many years, has the time come to come true to myself. To measure up to what I had set forth to do this year & see if I had done it. I had made very modest plans for 2008, simply from experience, since modest plans are most likely to be fulfilled & need a lot of determination to stick to them. Although this is the first time I have ever said this to anyone.

I had set forth to make modifications in the way I perceived things, I did. It hurt at first but now I know the merits of the choices I had made. Some unexpected developments did shatter my deep seated beliefs about myself & I am glad I could experience them in first person for a change.

Physically, I am healthier & stronger by the end of this year. I have been back on my previous fitness regime & eating a lot healthier than ever before.

Emotionally, I have made peace with a few of my demons & have begun to explore a lot more into thoughts I never thought I was capable of exploring.

Intellectually,unfortunately has been a step down, since this year I saw myself engaged into activities I have begun categorizing as, "essential waste of time" activities.

Socially, it has been a brilliant year since I had an opportunity to broaden my network & meet new people & new ideas. It has been the most interesting year in this sphere.

Professionally, it has also been a productive experience, reinforcing some of my beliefs of what I would "want" to do & what I "need" to do. In my case, I learned it the hard way, that they coincide.

Literally, I have begun to appreciate many forms of expression, especially poetry, which had been a mental block for a very long time. I dont know how far along I have come to enjoy it, but it sure does feel different & good.

Honestly, I noticed a few changes in my own thoughts & beliefs & have become more attuned to objectively & critically assess my own thoughts. This was a giant leap for me this year, to take this even further into other spheres of my life will be the major challenge for the years that follow.

Now is also the time of the year, when I set forth to make some more modest plans for the year to come.

I Need to
Learn Music, deliberately engage in difficult discussions which cross examine my own beliefs, to empathize more, socialize more, let go

I Want to
Explore the logic of cynicism, learn to appreciate non-prose forms of expression, enjoy theatre

I Have to
Put myself through the rigor of understanding the sense of responsibility to myself, as I will step into a new world in which I am accountable to my own choices, beliefs, actions & thoughts

One thought or quote did wonders this year, in reshaping a lot of thoughts. It reinforced a few beliefs & helped me destroy that sense of pseudo-reality I have been trying to convince myself with. I had been reading Graham Greene's 'Loser Takes All' which has a wealthy, rich, old guy in it who says the following lines to a middle-aged man who has achieved what every man covets but has lost everything he stood for, in the process.

The old man said,
"People hate reality, people don't like common sense, until age forces it upon them."

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Song for the moment: Brand New Day by Sting

Re-Do

2008-11-16T00:20:00.002+05:30

Today, I had a very revealing conversation with Paresh. It made me rethink some of my very core beliefs. The conversation taught me something about myself, which I had not really encountered before. He made me look back at the roots of my beliefs & I found some inconsistencies.

So this post leaves me at a point where I need to literally, go back to my cave & think, think in its classic sense of the word. Read, till thoughts take some cohesive shape, read till consilience emerges once again.

Heads up,
Sabbatical ahead.

The Insomnia Diary

2008-11-08T17:10:00.007+05:30

The facts: Total Sleep time = 20 hrs (just this week)

The lies: I am, OK!!!

I have been caught in this meritocracy of idiocy since the past one week. Days have been fleeting by me & the nights more so. I remember reading in Fight Club, “when you have insomnia, everything feels like a copy of a copy of a copy”. It’s true. The words coming out of the keyboard seem like they have been out on this screen from weeks, a moments attention & they become real again, freshly typed, cursor blinking.

The exams lurk in the background. 6 papers through & I have still not slept 6 hours in a day. I don’t know how this affects me, but it sure does numb the pain of the exam. I remember getting bored once & I had indulged myself into a hobby after that boredom which I am very proud of. But I don’t know what this momentary boredom holds for me. The test paper has become a symbol, a symbol that says in the same tone & voice as Darth Vader tells Luke Skywalker, “I am your boredom”. Its odd that there is no background thought in my mind the moment I see the supervisor walking towards me, with the stack of papers in her hands. She seems to have this calm demeanour indicating a good night’s sleep & a happy married life, kids in the school, mother-in-law on her spiritual journey out for a month. Nobody notices the test paper grinning. Its grinning. That smirk on its face says volumes about what it holds. But its not true. When I hold the paper in my hand, still warm from the copying machine or the supervisor or both, it reeks of sarcasm. “This is bloody stupid” I think to myself in an English accent before regaining all my calm & just before I automatically start scanning through it.

Its easy, its not challenging, its a joke. Usually I love jokes, but this isn’t funny. Everyday after the paper, I, out of habit or chance bump into a professor & they ask me customarily, “So, how was the paper”. I think I said, “it was fine”, but I know I said, “its boring”. It turns out to be the same professor whose paper I just answered. He sighs, gives me an honest smile & says, “You, are wise. Now go get ready for tomorrow.”

I have reason to believe that the human body is made to sleep, not out of necessity but out of tradition, so as to say that, “Look, you need to sleep, nobody can tolerate you for 24 whole hours every day, not even you.” Everything happens in slow motion. Even studying seems like there are 1000 pages to read, but with my personal speed of time, it shall be done in no time. No Time, there is no time, I read just till the fine shade of dawn fills the sky, sleep till it’s totally dawn. But when I look out the window, it feels like a midnight in Icelandic summer.

All conversations seem automatic. As if, I have stepped out of my body & my body is standing in front of me, in autopilot having an animated conversation. Every text message, every chat on the phone, feels like its not me. But somehow it is. I go back to reading, the same way the cave man went in his cave. I paint the notepad with my pen; write sweet nothings from the passages I am reading, which would be the outline of my answers the next day, maybe. But its all so unreal.

The small oasis of sleep a few conversations here & there, a (super) very few hours each day, leads me to dreams which have no end. They all start with me sleeping on the bed & waking up, everything else seems blurred. Then the proverbial alarm clock begins to ring. I tell myself in my sleep, “Now that sounds familiar”. I yell at it once to turn itself off. When it doesn’t I pick my body up & lunge towards it. It begins to frantically ring at a faster pace, as if scared by my predatory moves, with a sharp tone which would wake a whale up 100,000 miles away. I stare at it to find that, it was right all along. I had to wake up. I have my paper today, I don’t want to waste my night’s preparation on my sleep. I walk towards the kitchen, watch my mom make breakfast & I put my hand forward in the general direction where I see my tea waiting for me.

The thought never enters my mind, that this is all a dream. I suddenly wake up, still lying in my bed, with my covers on me & staring at the table which keeps my alarm. I get out of bed, fold the covers automatically & take short but firm steps towards the table. There’s still 30 mins left. I ask myself, will I wake up after 30 mins if the alarm goes off? I smile, stop the alarm & go to the kitchen to get my cup of tea.

Today I feel fresh, why, because of the two day vacation for the next three papers. It delights me that I might get a chance to get my well deserved sleep. I feel for those who had to converse with me for this week, for I don’t know what was the intent of the words I had spoken to them. I looked at the mirror this morning before splashing my face with water. I had involuntarily turned on the tap & my hand was just barely licking the stream of running water. It was oddly cold & it felt like all the conversations I was trying to have. The speed of the stream overwhelmed me for a second & then I filled my palms with fresh water. The water is for waking me up from the aftersleep but my eyes still said with a faint hint of smile, “please don’t, wake me up”.

The Consilience Club

2008-09-23T21:45:00.002+05:30

A few weeks ago, I floated this idea of a club which would enable interaction amongst all the stakeholders at my B-school (GNIMS). The result is this following thought which will be implemented shortly & I also hope will last till perpetuity enriching the experience of every student stepping in to the institute.

The Consilience Club

Why?

We live in the primeval land of education, where knowledge is still looked upon as a function of how much we score in the exam. This unfashionable attitude towards education ensures that we have been successfully diluting our knowledge but not improving it. It also proves a fact that the human brain is perfectly capable of forgetting huge chunks of meticulously collected & churned information in a matter of weeks. Although we thrive on this system & the system thrives on us, some of us constantly look for a way out.

So is there an escape hatch?
What is this Consilience anyway?

Consilience, adopted from the title of E.O. Wilson’s book, literally means a jumping together of knowledge. Each branch of knowledge is fundamentally interconnected with each other. Each acts as a study of a subset of reality. For instance, Physics is the study of the smallest particles to the basic forces. Chemistry is an interaction between these smallest particles & the emergent outcome of their interac-tion. Biology on the other hand is a study of properties emergent from the interaction of millions of chemical particles forming biological life, in the form of cells. Psychology is a study of interaction be-tween billions of cells forming complex neural connections. Sociology, anthropology, economics, each in turn studies the emergent properties from the interaction amongst individual humans. Similarly man-agement is a study of how well these individuals interact & how productive they can be. From the hard sciences to the socio-economic sciences, we can always draw parallels of thought.

To understand these inherent interconnections, we need to understand the relationships between them; how each field derives inputs from every other & their feedback. We read textbooks, we attend lectures, but does it occur to us what we actually take back from them? It is indeed an endeavor for the mind to really comprehend the implications of it all. We read, we watch movies, the same en-deavor is necessary to take some inherent understanding from these media as well. The Consilience Club aims at not just enabling the mind to observe & learn from various media, but also to help us un-derstand better. Through interaction, through each other’s experiences, we can strive to reach a level of abstraction that we would seldom achieve through rote classroom learning. The club doesn’t act as a substitute for the lecture or textbook, but a supplement for the mind to interpret what we are actually supposed to interpret & with 10 times the fun. Through discussion, analysis, review, brainstorming, we can be sure to hope to find the elixir of management. After all what good is management education if we just walk away with the jargons !

The club consists of two attempts to make the afore mentioned possible, in the form of books & movies. “On the Same Page” (title borrowed from Legg Mason's book club) is an earnest attempt to create a platform for discussion, review, critique, appreciation or even outright debate (with some chair throwing) about something that we might have read, found interesting & would love to share. The benefit of this exercise is to come up with a thought that we found interesting in some material that we might have read & to enlighten others & inculcate an urge within them to read & share our insight.

The exercise not only results into updated knowledge but also, maybe an epiphany about some-thing, anything that might turn into an original thought. Serendipity strikes us when we least expect it. We can be sure to expect that this would make text book gyaan a lot more interesting & would actually make us aware of what ammo we have stacked in the library.
“ReeLearn” is another such attempt, with an exactly overlapping purpose but with motion pic-tures. We review, discuss, appreciate, & debate on movies, documentaries, TV shows, short films, ads & anything & everything that has moving images in it. The idea is not just to learn from them, but also to know each others opinions & expresisons a little better in the process.

How?

The Consilience Club meets at 1730 hrs on a Thursday of every week in the college campus. On the Same Page being a book review activity, it will be scheduled every alternate Thursday. It will in-volve [absolutely] anyone, voluntarily coming forth with a discussion, debate, review or anything in that ballpark about a book, an article, a research paper, or anything printed that has caught our eye & is worth sharing. The activity will involve an informal discussion or even a formal presentation about the object being reviewed. The club is open for membership for students, teaching as well as the non-teaching staff at GNIMS & costs us nothing but small chunks of our time.
The ReeLearn activity will be scheduled every alternate Thursday at 1730 hrs in the campus, We watch a film & using it as a backdrop try to derive a parallel with what we otherwise call classroom learning; a film with an immanent management theme or even anything generally interesting.
The member(s) initiating the reviews need to submit at least a 200 words synopsis a couple of days prior to the actual club meet. This is to ensure a workable schedule to be put up a day before the meet.

Take Away
We study in the same campus, we use the same resources, we spend more or less same time at the same place, but how well do we know each other? We as a management students need to develop an extremely important & yet taken for granted skill, networking. The more we interact, the more we know about each other, the more we listen to each other’s views the more we develop our own & even better, criticize someone else’s with flair. A network is built on not only what we can take from the network, but also with what we can add to the network.

What we so easily claim to know as Value Addition, can soon be turned into Value Addiction & set us on a trajectory where we learn & belong to a common goal.

Reforming Links

2008-09-23T20:50:00.009+05:30

After a long time I sat down with Alawani sir to talk about his latest trip to IIM-A for a workshop on teaching the subject of Operations Research. I was least expecting to gain some perspective on OR but as it turned out, I got a hell of an insight into the whole purpose of management education.

OR, one of my most favourite subjects last semester, mainly revolves around contraints management. Now what that actually means, is to get used to the fact that I have limited resources & whatever I choose to do, I need to do within those resources. Unfortunately the problems that the university expects me to solve around unrealistic assumptions of contraints, mainly the number of constraints & they also moronically expect me to solve the equation. But the place where a MBA student must fit is not to solve the equation, but to reach the equation. Problem formulation is a lot more important than solving the math. We live in a world built on spreadsheets, & so many tools which await our command to churn that number for us.

Management education according to Sir thus can be summarized as, frustration management. The ability of the problem to frustrate you (read, stimulate you intellectually) is directly proportional to the difficulty of the problem situation, but with the constraint of the student's interest to solve, student's capacity to solve & at the same time the problem's dynamicity (adaptation to the students understanding). It all means that, a student will learn the concepts, yes reading books as fat as my thigh to drill a concept into my head, but how is that concept useful to me in the event of encountering a problem situation. So the whole purpose of concept drilling is not to memorize what the concept says, but to try & look at a problem situation through the lens of that concept.

A case study approach is much appreciated for this process to materialize. A company's predicament say for instance, opening a new outlet in a new location, can be so easily given to the student in the form of a solution which a student can read & discard the moment it is not required anymore. But on the contrary, if this case is broken down into several functional concept heads like, marketing function, finance function, HR function & IT funtion, we can look at the same problem through these different conceptual lenses.

Now it might seem that this pattern of learning is too obvious to pay any further attention to, but its practise varies from student to student. Setting up a new outlet entails tremendous amount of consideration & lots & lots of efforts go into constructing models which might reveal the expected profitability through tinkering with the numbers. But thats just one real world aspect of the job. A management student is supposed to do this when he joins the firm, but how can he develop that tinkering ability is the question most management students must ask themselves. Now from a student's perspective, when a real world 'outlet opening' case is dropped in my lap, I will be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of variables I need to consider to successfully start this outlet. But thats the whole point, to get frustrated to the point where no apparent solution lingers on the horizon. The lack of a solution is the fact that the student is not expected to solve it as soon as he gets the case, but to see what the student does when put in a maze.

It sounds sadistic to actually put someone in a maze & see how they try to overcome the problems, but the second step proves it otherwise. The sadism is countered by figuring out what concepts actually go into understanding the case. For instance, to open an outlet, the several funtions listed above, will have micro concepts, like finance will focus on "COST" of setting up, "FUND RAISING" for setting up, "WORKING CAPITAL MANAGEMENT" & so on. Now what the lecture can enable is to direct a student to these precise concepts. A contact session with the professor is just to get leads to concepts & possible help in understanding it better. But the real analysis lies in how the student actually identifies the concept's interrelation with the case at hand & constraints attached to every concept. Thus management is all about constraint management.

Now comes the part where sadism becomes humanity, the professor judging the frustration, removes the constraints & makes the problem a cakewalk. The lowest possible difficulty level required to solve the problem using unlimited resources. When a feasible framework is achieved (which is easy when resources are unlimited, leaving aside exceptions), slowly & steadily constraints are gradually introduced. Now each of these constraints like before is seen from the lens of the underlying concept, thus re-inforcing the concept & at the same time re-inforcing the usability of the concept. This kills the great divide between the uselessness of management theory with current practices. Unless the concept is crystal clear, the appropriate application is next to impossible. So re-introducing the constraints gradually increases the complexity of the problem & which helps the student get a firm grip of every step of the analysis, finally reaching to the same complexity which had earlier frustrated the student.

The main idea of this thought experiment was to drill down this vital piece of the management zig saw, that concepts are learnt with a tangible goal attached to it. The goal was to solve the problem underlying the case. Imagine solving several cases with the same philosophy or process, the kind of insight achievable is remarkable. The management graduate is thus chosen for his knowledge base not in terms of memorizing the concepts but in terms of the knowledge of the processes through which he uses those concepts. So far I was blinded from this obvious fact, since I was trying to piece all the data, I was churning, together into a cohesive structure. There is no cohesive structure unless the concept is bounced against a problem wall to test its applicability.

So for the time already served & the data already churned, it becomes vital to stick the data to a problem pin up board just so as to get my coveted systems view.

Clerks

2008-08-16T23:28:00.001+05:30

Ages after having a thought to watch Kevin Smith’s Clerks, I finally got to watch it. This is after the Clerks 2 was released. Haven’t watched the sequel yet, but had lingered on two of his characters though, Jay & Silent Bob movie. Silent Bob being played by the maestro Kevin Smith himself.

This movie opens up with a garden variety theme, slapstick humour just to get you engaged with the characters & really makes you feel that there is not going to be anything more in this movie than meets the eye. The characters seem loosely drawn, the plot missing & all that.

What you fail to see is how quickly, amid all this laughing & giggling over stupid ass jokes, this movie could turn into a philosophical window into our very own growling egos. The characters Dante & Randall, two college graduates(maybe can’t afford to make it to grad school), work at a convenience store & a video rental parlor, respectively. Jobs involve the typical daily tripe, the customers, the monotony; et al. Dante is very serious about his job as a store clerk & does whatever it takes to make a decent attempt at running the store, Randall on the other hand is the Tyler Durden of store maintenance. He hates customers because they all annoy him & “they always rent the dumbest movie on the shelves, as if they have IQ’s the size of their shoes” (in his own words). Also, the stores being adjacent to one another, Randall locks his store up when there is no customer, & joins Dante in the convenience store to share a chat over worldly discussions on moral issues such as treating customers like trash & so on. The exchange between these two characters is insanely hilarious, but most often very deep & thoughtful.

Randall suddenly became my favorite character; he is the road-side philosopher. Dante is afraid of change & blames everything else in his life because he can’t do what he wants to do. In fact Dante is clueless as to what he wants to do, but finds the security & comfort of his clerk job more attractive to take a risk to venture outwards, towards education, a better job, a better life. The character is so starkly drawn as it becomes obvious later in the film that, he says a remarkable dialog about his inherent risk averseness & his inability to become a change agent, “when I was 3, I saw the toilet lid closed so I shit in my pants”. This sort of remarkable inability to face change has crossed my mind several times. I just didn’t look for it, I suppose. Taking the same train every morning trying to comfortably board the train & commute easily, masquerading under a false pretence of “preserving my dignity”. It all made sense to me while I watched this film. The comfortable commute, yes is desirable since I don’t just commute, I also read alongside. That is a better reason to take a train that’s comfortably filled rather than getting squished for no apparent reason at all. I tried to go back to my old self, the thoughts I had back at school. They are inconceivable now. Many things have changed since then, especially since I have read Ayn Rand. I had started taking a little more responsibility for my actions & my interactions with all the systems. But the trouble with that is, maybe, I have begun to take it for granted. That’s one of the main reasons Randall’s road-side philosophy made so much appeal to me.

Randall is a character in himself, designed for perfect humiliation. Who else can spit a mouthful of water on a customer’s face just to prove a moral point? Randall’s pragmatic approach towards life in general seemed a little hollow, since he was stuck at the same job & wasn’t doing much about it himself either (other than tormenting unsuspecting customers). But the character’s history isn’t shown as such, so the reasons will always remain unknown. Until now Tyler was my ideal choice for a conscience personality (a personality with whom you would like to debate with about your own philosophical/real world dilemmas). But since Clerks I have seriously begun to contemplate having Randall as my conscience personality. Yes, having such a personality for thought experiments is lame in itself, but that’s just the top of it ;). The point of contention here is that being afraid to change was not just a state of mind. In fact it had turned into a way of life living in Dombivli. That’s one of the main reasons I would love to get off this town the first chance I get. Again, the chance of moving out, is something I wait for, the inherent weakness of this thought itself symbolizes that I am waiting for something to happen instead of making it happen. I have many options which I can very easily use, if I wanted to, but the failure to commit a thought still lingers on. I don’t know if it’s genetic, inherent in all human beings, or am I just being paranoid about my instincts, but it is definitely for certain true that unless we step in and do something; the bystander gets no action.

I have noticed this same paradox of choice, in my volition to start investing. I know I have the basic skills to start investing (dubbed, I know 1+1 =2 & I know what is supposed to happen with the money once it is invested). I come up with all sorts of rationalizing arguments about why I shouldn’t invest just yet. I know I am not waiting for a right time I know I can start anytime I want since I have been reading more than average about the subject itself. But failure to begin may be a sign of slight inaction. I have counter arguments for it but they don’t do much help for the thought flow here. But I have also been doing things, which I wouldn’t normally do, under the circumstances mentioned. I wanted to start a book club & a movie club in my college, ideated, pitched, it hit the spot. Now in a matter of weeks, me, a professor & a bunch of guys would be the first ones to ever start a book club in my college. This will to do something came out of nowhere (so it seems), but I know where it came from. It came from the fact of reforming my thoughts about education, knowledge & how it is useless to just read & read & learn & learn & apparently fail to share. Failure to share my thoughts & knowledge was one of the major impediments in school, which I realized just while watching this stupid ass film. It’s simply unbelievable, how twisted & complicated this whole structure of memory & thought is, by picking a few strings, it creates a harmony of thoughts like none other.

In the end, Dante & Randall after a physio-philosophical fight, decided to clean up the store for the night, & decide to return to their same jobs next morning. I didn’t really want to find a indicator or a meaning for this scene, but it’s inevitable. The characters in the bout of rationality made the whole point of having the philosophical argument, but at the end of it all, they have accepted that, change however desirable, is inherently slow. The first thing that is necessary to steer a car in any direction is to turn the steering wheel slowly towards that direction until it seems the right turn. I believe, that’s the whole point, you need to steer the thoughts in the right direction until you actually steer yourself into the desirable direction, but the catch is, we never know when it’s right!!! :)

Dodgeball Education

2008-07-21T20:28:00.001+05:30

Douglas Adams said,

"A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did?' Don't do that.'"

By that standard, all I have done in terms of formal education till now & to some extent am still doing can be called a "Learning Experience". Being a kid who wants to learn, I suppose, was a crime. I always couldn't figure things out & the school never encouraged. It took me ages to realize that it’s not enough to have a want to learn, but to learn to want more to learn. It’s a feedback loop, the more you learn makes you learn more.

I had the best time of my life in almost three months of my summer internship at PPFAS & I am not exaggerating. Jigar, who heads the research team, looks ditto like Archie from Archies Comic’s, ditto, minus the red hair. I still remember the first time when Jigar told me, 'I don't know what you have learned about this, but we will start from scratch.' That was a sharp thud to the back of my head, wiping the slate clean was never so much fun. I still don't claim to understand as much as Jigar wants me to understand, but it’s certainly an improvement. For the first time I felt as if I wasn't playing dodge-ball with my education.

I believe that the journey to the office isn’t much of a thing to talk about, but since in our Mumbai, everyday in the train is a new experience. I usually read on the train, not an ideal way to learn, but it sure does help you forget that you have lost your dignity in trying to stand in an overcrowded compartment & your own sweat holds a minority interest in your shirt. I loved waltzing around the crowd outside of CST station towards my match-box shaped bus # 111.

Then began the sector study, I started off with reading reports, stuffing information, ruminating & guzzling copious amounts of tea to keep that engine running. For the first few days it was like throwing coal on the hearth, then gradually a spark & then there was ember. Things started crystallizing, what we can call a business model, didn't seem as daunting a task as before to figure out. When things settled, concepts took identifiable shapes, and then came the companies. It was like a beauty contest for me; although I claimed to do almost any company Jigar would have told me to, I picked up those from the list which I felt or had heard of being any good. A company "Being Good" was such a loose concept for me, that by the time a few weeks had passed in learning about these companies, I realized how difficult it was to form an opinion about any business. In spite of doing exactly the same things, how these companies managed to scale up their business & yet differentiate amongst themselves & maintain their niche, is nothing less than outsourced magic.

IT sector always felt like housekeeping to me, except for a company here or there, they never seemed to own their own hotels, they were always the housekeeping staff (although some of them are the best housekeeping personnel you could find). They made the beds, cleaned the sheets, scrubbed the floors & made the room habitable for the client without making him feel awkward about the brand of cleaner used, or the washing powder used to wash the mattress, or even the vacuum cleaner used to dust the room. The analyst, I felt, always got the worst; he had to understand the brand of the cleaners, sometimes also its ingredients & all the details that he would need to judge the competence of the support staff. Now imagine; many hotels, many hotel rooms & different housekeeping staff to keep these rooms clean for various clients, various brands of cleaners, washing powders & vacuum cleaners. Furnished with all this jazz, the analyst has to build his own conception of how all these things matter, how they are interconnected & how the hell do all these things help the housekeeping staff make money.

I felt a pang when I saw so many companies, catering to clients, ranting about how innovative they are, how disciplined & efficient they are (although they are); it was unsettling for me to believe that none of them had something genuinely simple & effective that even a layman can understand. It was always outsourcing, not "creating" software, but just lines & lines of codes with superlative efficiency in implementing it on the client side. I think I was hoping for an Indian Silicon Valley, where companies with diverse ideas, products, software, hardware & sometimes just business models, would compete & kick some ass. But this turned out to be a beehive & IT cos the worker bees. Here no one had time to look at each other's asses; they all were busy tapping clients’ shoulders asking for servicing contracts. But on the other hand I also realized that this can be one of the best examples of taking advantage of a global situation. Settling into the globalization gap like water settles after eons into a massive crater made by a meteor collision.

Equity Research is basically an ornate type of pimping, you have a product (a research report), you know the client (Fund managers, et al), and you have a business (broking). All you do with the product is to use it as a USP for your broking business. In caveman logic - Fund manager likes your report, you get broking business. So the research is more or less a competition about opinions & expectations. How good is your opinion, how rational are your expectations, will determine the quality of your report. Although it’s not as easy as that. One of the important things I learnt from Jigar is, what he told me two weeks into the internship @ 7:55 PM in the eating area sipping on tea; 'Raunak, learn to form an opinion about the business, understand the company's business, where the money comes from where is it used, but don't slot the business into good or bad, because valuing a company is relative & highly subjective to your understanding. Do the business models, financials will be a breeze'. I think if I want to encapsulate my internship in one line, or maybe two for that matter, those lines would be it.

I got an informal & a very thoughtful performance review at the end of it all. It was more of a life choice review unfolding layers of me which I have always tried to grapple. I know my limitations; I know what I do not want to do which opens up a huge unused bandwidth of choices. To put my foot down on a thought, I need to grasp the concept of priority. Have a good grasp of how to effectively use mental masturbation. I need to realize the source of that fuck-off money or should I? He is right.

I made a lot of mistakes, lot of silly errors of non-logic. I should have known better, but in the excitement I used to wantonly screw things up & would run to Hiren or Jigar for clarification; only to realize it was always under my nose. Watching Jigar tally a balance sheet or clearing up my messed up cash flow statement was like watching Mozart play. It was then it dawned on me how much does experience & knowledge channelized in the right direction count! At this point you don’t do your job, you become your job. Like Nic Cage says in the Gone in Sixty Seconds to those lil 8 year old go-kart drivers, “You are the car, the car is you”.

Another jovial character I will always remember is Ridhim. The eclectic sales exec who loves to read & enjoys it as much as he likes to share it with others. I enjoyed conversations with Ridhim, they were short, precise & always about something interesting. One of the memorable chats we had was about leverage & how maintaining it is the real essence of keeping the system balanced. It was truer than we know.

During this time, I got a real glimpse of what’s possible in the field of Behavioral Finance. To get a chance to work on a project which no one else seems to work on is surely exciting. Deepa was a good guide who managed to give me a bird’s eye view of the project, this is what will occupy my Monday’s from now on.

I had heard of learning by doing, but in this case, I believe that I learned a lot more thru conversations & interactions, doubts & mistakes, tea & more tea. Like the management of HCL Tech likes to say, this was collaborative transformation, where we strategically aligned the service offerings with collaborating partners.

Wittgenstein says that every problem in philosophy is basically a problem of description, I have stumbled upon the same, and there are so many small incidents, so many people who have shaped up my internship experience, that to summarize it would be like deflating it.

In the end, the question always poses to me, why did I choose PPFAS? It’s just the thought that I might learn something here, which I won't anywhere else & that is all that matters.

Like Ayn Rand says in Atlas Shrugged,

The choice--the dedication to one's highest potential--is made by
accepting the fact that the noblest act you have ever performed is the
act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four.

Crimson Tides

2008-06-16T22:07:00.001+05:30

I heard the familiar splash against the wall, the trickle of satisfaction flowing freely across the paint surface. The man with the paintbrush disappeared at the end of the staircase leaving just a shadow & his art work on the wall. There it was, that crimson feeling we call....actually we don't call it anything at all. But I would love to call it some sort of an artwork. Even the creators of CSI couldnt replicate that splatter detail.

The anonymous painter, left his mark & some of his DNA on the wall. I wonder what was going through his head, murder, despair or just plain "aim & fire". All this makes me feel that people should actually stop treating every place they go as their home. No offense, I know if they make believe every place to be their home, its good for the whole brotherhood aspect, but there are just some places where you 'cannot' under any insane circumstances scratch your crotch, blow your nose, worse, dig it & actually enjoy it, burp loudly on a stranger, put a towel or a handkerchief in your shirt to wipe the fruits of an honest day's labour or leave an impressionistic motif on the wall or even easier just throw whatever you don't want to throw in the dustbin; in the middle of the street. Its not just wrong, its the new "in" thing.

Imagine..... if everyone thought that the whole world wasn't there home, wouldnt they think twice before doing all that. Wouldnt they wonder if, someone's watching!!! I know, the Municipality have been trying to induce a sense of homeliness through their massively unsuccessful campaigns to treat the city as your home & don't litter et al, but all this has resulted into everyone actually stealing away those cute green lil dustbins off the street corners. Anyway, thats all that. But these modern day picasso's aren't really content with just painting the walls. There is this sudden wave of creativity & artistic genius which happens to put them in a state of rapture, that they overflowww this town with a crimson tide.

And then there are these other things, which I wont use to decorate my blog. Well, with this sad sickening note, allow me to wish all these impresarios from the bottom of my bowels....

"Let the juices flow"

Every Page Wants to be Read....

2008-05-25T01:17:00.003+05:30

It took me a minute to register what that sound was, it was menacingly loud & very shrill like a 5 inch man yelling at you from the floor while you stand. I instinctively stared down, but couldn't find a small human figure to associate that voice with. At first I thought I was hallucinating, was I? I couldn't possibly ignore that voice & couldn't figure out where it was coming from. So I did the next best thing, I tried to listen to it. It was a constant, almost rhythmic yelp, it screeched onto my ear drums like a finger nail scratching on your high school black board. It said, & kept on saying, "hey, how are you, why don't you put your eyes on me, don't you find me as good as page 102, don't like to know what I have to say?; hey, how are you, why ....." & the same thing all over again.

I thought I was positively going mad, but I wasn't, I knew it because everything else still seemed possible apart from the voice. Then I really decided to pay some attention from where the voice was coming from. I bent down to look under my table, I heard the voice getting a little weak. Then I stood up again & on my way up I passed by the book lying open on my desk & page 103 was fluttering. The moment I stared at page 103, the voice stopped. Then again, I moved my eyes to something else & just as the voice began, I stared at the page once again. Dead silence. I picked up the book & started to read the paragraph which I had left just 15 minutes ago before dozing off on the table. The voice has subsided since then.

But seriously, does the above story provoke something in me, really made me say something which could have been said in just a few insignificant lines? I think it did, thats what an unfinished book must make a bibliophile feel. There are some feelings which we can't find words for. Such feelings, or such thoughts occur to almost everyone I presume. But what really happens when someone else gives your thoughts, the words, the meaning, the purpose, the spin. Such sultans of words live amongst us, they keep on feeding our vocabulary of thoughts with the exact words which we always wanted to say but just couldn't.

Like the story, which was inspired by what Taleb said in the Black Swan, in the chapter, "Umberto Eco's Anti Library", "You will accumulate more knowledge & more books as you grow older & the growing number of unread books will look at you menacingly". This was such a profound thought, almost like an epiphany, exactly my thoughts printed on a paper, in one of the most influential books I have read so far.

Such books live in my room, almost like migratory birds. Once finished they change places with new books. Sometimes they are on my computer screen, sometimes they are on my shelf & sometimes (but most often) they sit right in front of me just a few inches above my computer screen. Whenever I look at the computer, my peripheral vision is always occupied with at least one book staring at me. I don't know what the book is thinking, but it just looks intently, waiting for someone in its vicinity to pick it up & start flipping through its pages, with a deliberate precision.

Imagine what every page while being printed & bound into a book must be thinking. It only has a singular wish that someone will posses the book which its a part of & then reach that page & read it & make a difference in that reader's state of mind. I don't think any page thinks otherwise, school text books might. The page has one desire, it wants to be read, it wants the reader to reach a level of abstraction in thought & in action which he didn't have before reading that page. Maybe that page contains the climax of a soon-to-end mystery thriller or maybe its the page that makes the whole difference in understanding a concept. It can also be that page, which has no great information, but might lead you to the moment-of-truth. The brotherhood of pages which we read all the time, has that singular obsession to fulfill its hearts desire, make every one who reads them, be bestowed with at least one zillionth of a new thought, a spark or even a contemplation.

A book which doesn't think on these lines, a page which doesn't have this obsession can be easily called a text book. But I think even some text books have made me feel; They have occasionally made me sit up an take notice that there are many other books on my shelf which I am not reading. Well thats a thought, I thank all my text books for that.

In the pilot episode of House, there is an insanely hilarious dialog by House who in his classic demeanor to avoid work, says, "as the philosopher Jagger said, ' You can't always get what you want '". I think there must be those disappointed pages living their unread lives on someone's bookshelf or even in some forgotten warehouse. Well, allow me to repeat what philosopher Jagger said...

They didn't get a chance to reach that brain which would have cherished their company, they didn't get a chance to change the world; to make that small dent to someone's thought. They didn't get the chance to prevail in someone's memory of them, who would remember exactly where they are & would read them time & again to relive the magic of reading them.

But to House's wise line, Dr Cuddy (his boss), replies at the end of the show, "I looked up the philosopher you mentioned, & he also says, ' if you try sometimes, you get what you need' ". This just might make that unread page feel some satisfaction that someone thought that it was worthy enough to have something printed upon it.

Song for the moment: Rolling Stones - You can't always get what you want

Technorati Tags: Taleb, Books, Joy of Reading, Dr. House

Parallel Encounters - Redux

2008-05-17T21:32:00.001+05:30

A recap of parallel encounters, it is a form of parallel learning which involves use of multiple media to educate yourself. These media may include TV, movies, books, internet, radio, nature, life, people, inanimate objects, experiences, et al. What it doesn't mean is, to just observe these things & forget about them. It is the conscious observation of the afore mentioned media to learn as much as we can about life, areas of interest & think of possible applications of the concepts learned into our respective professions. This isn't meant to sound so formal, this is what we humans normally do, but some people have surpassed the natural limits of doing this, to gain that coveted niche which everybody seeks. Learning was/is/never will be a dull activity if we substitute our lack of love for a particular medium with some other media. Its always possible to learn, which way we do it, is totally a matter of taste.

There are many pioneers of this concept, who have chosen specific media to teach themselves & subsequently apply their gained knowledge to their respective professions & achieve 'super-normal' results. Some of them made it so big that they became doomed to fail (reasons infinite). But I don't think they failed because they learned, I think they failed because of some inherent recklessness on their part, or being succumbed to cognitive biases or .... we can give any reason under the sun, in hindsight everything seems possible.

Why is it so important or even necessary to some extent to do this? As I mentioned Sir Ken Robinson's views in my previous post, we have reached intellectual inflation, what needed an 'X' degree now requires a 'X' PG degree & so on. So in the wake of all this, when we are doing what everybody else is doing, how unique are we? This applies necessarily to the investment profession. If you don't have a variant perception, you will always under perform as compared to the market average. But if you have a different way of analyzing the same information which is available to everybody else, quite possibly you will come up with a diverse outcome or a diverse theory. Its not about theorizing or diverse outcomes I am worried about, its the process of approaching the problem.

Everyone approaches problems in a slightly different way. A person trained in math will approach a math problem with a different perspective than a person trained in arts. Why does a disparity exist in their approaches? Is it because they were trained differently? Quite possibly, YES. the subjects they learn, the concepts they encounter, eventually result into setting their thoughts in a particular pattern. Where a scientist will look at a problem with the question "why", an artist will look at the same problem with the question "how". This generalization may not prove much, but these systemic differences in people's approaches can be readily observed. Ask those people who are afraid of numbers or math equations, ask them why they are afraid? They usually don't have a convincing answer, at least no one has ever convinced me about their fear of numbers (needless to say, post a comment if you have a convincing answer :) ). i think, it is because, they don't know why they are afraid. With enough practice these same numberphobics will solve even differential calculus with the same concentration as a math grad. This is because their brains have accepted the pattern due to excessive practice, or even developed heuristic techniques to solve those problems.

The point is, "process is king". The way you approach the problem is vastly detrimental to the outcome of the problem (solution). The legendary fund manager of Legg Mason Capital Management, Bill Miller, uses multiple sources of knowledge to design his investment process. For instance, his investment strategy team includes, a Roman historian, Bill Miller himself is a philosophy major, then you will find regular finance grads & the most important association, Santa Fe Institute of New Mexico. Imagine the brainstorming they have. I can't. Santa Fe Institute is a premier research institute catering to various subjects which eventually merge at the study of Complex Adaptive Systems. So the combined knowledge from all these sources & the basics of valuation & value investing or some other investment theory, Bill Miller comes up with killer investments with almost contrarian & diverse processes. At the end of the day, all one wants from an investment is a good return. So whats wrong in thinking in a different way to maximize it?

Another example I would like to cite, is of Victor Niederhoffer, the twice bust speculator, who otherwise had a tremendous streak, writes in his biography (The Education of a Speculator) about his education from various sources. A curious glance through the chapters of the book would clearly show the various sources he cites (although very impressively). From his training at his childhood neighborhood, to his squash training, from history (books), from professional experiences, from other people in his profession (peers & great speculators before him), from sports & board games, from gambling & betting, from sex, from academia, from music, from markets, & so on. The list is endless & he delivers extremely detailed analyses of which source has resulted in imbibing which quality in him. I am not really interested in his professional streak or the way he speculated, but I am mainly interested in the way he made use of all these sources to do what he did (sometimes even better then others, till he failed twice).

Even looking at my intellectual hero, Nassim Taleb, reading his books is like reading 100 books at once in consolidation with a theme or a backdrop. There are so many books that I have picked up from the library shelves just because Taleb cites some argument or example from that book. Almost always, those books turn out to be insanely amazing. Taleb also recommends, movies, research papers, history, philosophy, his books are a cornucopia of subjects, concepts & eventually decision processes. Taleb's books are the only one's I have found with a very thick bibliography, citing amazing reference material.

The lesson which I take from these people & many more, is that, learning is a dynamic process. It doesn't stop once you leave a classroom. It improves your understanding about things which you wouldn't normally think about, it helps develop an approach which you wouldn't have normally chosen to adopt, it helps spawn those ideas in your head which (maybe) nobody around you is thinking of. Bouncing ideas of these various media has another advantage. Suddenly trivial arguments become less tasking & heavily enjoyable :).

Like Douglas Adams said: "I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."

Split wide open

2008-05-15T22:50:00.004+05:30

"It is widely known that we have two sides to the brain,...."

That is how I wanted to begin, but instead I think I shouldn't .....

"I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life."

There are ways to describe intelligence, creativity & all that jazz. People have come up with amazingly subjective explanations like, he is so intelligent he practically taught himself calculus at age 13; or he is so creative that no one had to teach him to paint & he became an impressionist. There are variants to these sentences thrown around by parents & peers alike to describe a relative measure of intelligence or creativity. But underneath it all, is nothing but an organized pattern of neurons. How they network is the cream of some other argument.

A professor Allan Snyder of the University of Sydney, has made a very compelling research in the dominance of left hemisphere over the right & right over the left. All he does is, use Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (in human words, temporarily numbing a region of the brain with the help of strong magnetic fields disrupting the usual circuitry in that region). This is an ingenious technique to study the effect of dominance of the regions of the brain. For instance, his primal argument is that everybody is a born genius, we just grow into ordinary people (or not).

As it is known, the right hemisphere usually handles the creative (read, abstract) half of the thought whereas the left hemisphere deals with the logical (read, mechanical or deductive) half of the thought. But is also observed, that as we grow up, we are molded into a thought pattern which ideally decides whether we become left brained or right brained i.e. more inclined towards towards logical reasoning or more inclined towards abstract reasoning, or quite possibly both.

What Snyder does with his experiments is, he asks a subject to draw any sketch, as accurate as they can, of some object which the subject has commonly seen or know of. For instance, a Horse. The subject using his normal, regular faculties of drawing, draws a picture on a piece of paper. After a 45 minute (totally harmless) magnetic numbing of the left brain, the subject is asked to re-draw the same object on another piece of paper. What professor Snyder found was remarkable & truly amazing. He observed that the sketch made before was just a play of lines to construct a similar looking object on the paper, whereas the sketch made after the numbing of the left brain was a far more detailed and close to accurate representation of the thing being drawn (by the same person). He also conducts other memory tests & tests which are used to determine creative potential. These custom made tests also concluded that the creative score tips considerably when the left brain is numbed. After an hour or two, when the left brain comes back to normal, the results again are agonizingly close to the results before the numbing process.

This speaks volumes about the dominance of a thought process. The left brain clearly dominates over the right brain. There are many theories proposing why this happens, some attribute it to the chemical imbalances during the process of birth within the womb, or some even attribute it to the gradual dominance of a hemisphere over the other. The brain works on an amazingly simple technique, "use it, or lose it". If you fail to take advantage of your brain's abilities, you are bound to lose the functionality from your brain & that dysfunctional region instead of just being idle, is utilized by some other brain function. So if you do not make use of your language part of your brain ever, ever since you are born, then that region of your brain would be hijacked by some other dominant function. Eventually you will lose your ability to use speech or language as a medium to communicate & it would become incalculably difficult for you to learn it once you have grown up. Imagine, no language, no thoughts, the brain just sits there and your body just floats around like a unguided zeppelin.

This takes me to another, really crucial argument, why do we lose creativity when we grow up? Do we actually lose it? or do we forget we have one? (just like Snyder proves).

An amazing & amusing video of Sir Ken Robinson at TED, asks a vital question; 'Do Schools Kill Creativity?' The moment I read that title, I almost unconsciously whispered, yes they do. I have been through that unlearning phase which has taught me never to get caught in that same maddening pattern again. It is more liberating now than ever before. But why? why do schools have to kill creativity? He puts forward a simple point, about the classification of fields of study & how they got to be classified that way. He says that every education system in the world is based on the same hierarchy of subjects, Math & languages at the top, the humanities in the middle & the arts at the bottom. The idea is, the most useful subjects for work at the top & descending from there to the subjects where you wouldn't make it worth a living. An unmistakably horrifying thought today when we know how much proliferation creativity has today. This has spawned due to the industrial revolution, which basically decided which subjects will help a kid grow into an adult who will be able to contribute to the working of a factory, a machine & so on. Abilities such as math, logic & mechanical / technical rigor are often encapsulated in the top echelon subjects, where as the professionally less important subjects are relatively below them.

Robinson makes another claim of academic inflation. With the growth in population, of students and the institutes coaching them, more people go through the same type of education which results into a diversity breakdown. This leads to people (who can) adopting to higher education. So a job which required a degree 50 years ago, will now require a post graduate degree & a job which would need a PG degree will now require a PhD or maybe even more. So what happens when we exhaust even that resource of vertical growth. Do we grow laterally & acquire more badges on our sleeves?

The whole point is, the education system forces use subconsciously to become left brained. It teaches us the logical deduction of things, it teaches us to follow patterns & algorithms & we do without asking why, why, because frankly most of the time even the teacher doesnt know the answer. Whom do we owe this unintellectual debt to, once we grow up? We grow up invariably without our choice into number crunching calculators dreaming that everything is part of an efficient system.

But imagine that mind, which has liberated itself from that left brained linearity. Imagine a mind who thinks in abstracts & believes in random patterns & derives every thought on its backdrop. The possibility of such a mind having a niche in the market where everyone has the same kind of thinking is undeniable. We have seen master investors, great artists, out of the box thinkers, basically rock stars of everyday life, are these the people who have let go their left brain dominance?

What is intelligence then? It is, the ability to look at things in diverse ways, from interdisciplinary approaches. This is only possible when you have let go your standard patterns of understanding things. One of the fascinations of the Systems Approach, for me, is in spite of propagating a logical & left brained idea of systems having step by step iterations, it also allows us to think of interconnections among systems. It doesnt stop us to believe that every system is invariably connected to every other in form or the other & realizing this, it allows us to somehow deduce that intelligence can only be possible when such diverse connections become comprehensible.

Although I have too many personal experiences to relate, I need to think on the following concepts..........

- Connecting this dichotomy to parallel encounters & its implications
- Dependence on Academics & the classroom numbing
- Use of psychology to "left brain" normal people
- Finally, forcing the unlearning process through deliberate & new thought patterns