!avanT gardE

Catharsis

2011-09-25T23:53:00.002+05:30

I don't have the guts to break away from the rut and do something different. I don't even know what different is anymore. Somehow it was easier to define when I gave it much less thought. Being a JK Rowling is different? I don't know but I have this funny feeling that my blog will help me break away. I don't know how. I have this funny feeling though.

Advancement in technology has brought people closer? Virtually or whatever. I am not happy with this new world. It's like a crowded street. The oxygen is getting sucked out and its giving me a headache. I lived in a small world. I liked that. I don't like this new world. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing. That is gratifying for a couple of minutes but it kills the spark. The spark in new conversations lies in discovery. With all the crap floating around and you know how everyone look, looks and will look and did, does and will do, there's nothing new to find anymore.

I mean if Columbus were given a picture of how all the world looks, it would have killed him. May give him a jolt or a kick for a minute but then the pain of knowing that everything to find is already mapped is annoying.

We'll probably become like the wildbeasts migrating across the serengeti. (okay, punctuations are annoying me now so less and less of them) living the cycle of life by moving away from dry land - to the rains - to the lions - to parenting - to the leap of faith - to the crocodiles - to death to some and ageing to others.

Boredom

2011-09-25T23:42:00.002+05:30

This need to minimize uncertainty leads to small bits of happiness, gratification in rewards at work, compliments from the boss, admiration of the peers and the intensity of each of these little things diminish over the years because they become routine and present less and less of a challenge. You either look at everyday as an opportunity to find a happy moment or as a challenge to minimize unhappy moments.

I nailed the spikes of facebook phobia. I don't hate it but there's too much noise for my liking. I enjoy my solitude. its easy and peaceful. It's less painful to live in your own of expectations and likes. Whatever keeps you happy lets you sleep at night. it doesn't matter if you spent your day swabbing away a toilet.

Listening

2011-09-25T23:30:00.002+05:30

The idea of listening to life closely is compelling. The idea of fate is compelling. Every turn can be attributed to an incident. You never expected the incident or planned for it but it set your bowling ball on a very different lane. Sometimes you missed the pins completely, sometimes you did okay, sometimes good but the only thing that probably still matters is you still don't have a strike. The pins are formidable and you wait for years to get the perfect shot. It is the perfect shot that eludes you. Probably because the idea of perfection changes continually.

Inertia

2011-09-25T23:22:00.002+05:30

It's been more than a year since I posted here. I guess I chickened out in between. I didn't have the guts to be judged. Maybe I got bored of the intellectual masturbation. A lot of water has flown under the bridge since.

I was becoming too boring to myself. I couldn't think outside my work. I want to get back to reading and writing. Its like a note only I enjoy. The fewer the readers, the better. I am happier to be secretly admired by few than be berated and admired by many. Its a quieter life.

Long time

2011-09-25T23:19:00.003+05:30

I am afraid of taking risks. Therefore I seek instant gratification

For all the men who seek smart women - Go for the one you can write a book with

J.K. Rowling at Harvard

2010-03-09T21:11:00.003+05:30

http://harvardmagazine.com/commencement/the-fringe-benefits-failure-the-importance-imagination?
J.K. Rowling delivers an Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.The choice of words, use of language, tone of voice and unsophisticated delivery. As magical and captivating as her novels.

My favorite snippet - "You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default."

India's B-schools

2010-03-05T14:01:00.003+05:30

Good article on the top Indian B-Schools
http://www.ankit9doshi.com/dope-on-b-schools-in-india-mba-1/placements-at-b-schools-in-india

Images of words

2010-02-05T09:49:00.003+05:30

the distant green, a field in fall,
the remains of a hurried man
a streak of bright light oblivious to covers
a jittery bird by the sill, brown, ruffled
the artist commits colours to images
the poet commits images to words

Kahlil Gibran on...

2009-11-23T18:57:00.005+05:30

My favorite snippet from Kahlil Gibran's poet, madman....

....Children

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts.

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

... Marriage

You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.

You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.

Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness,And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:

Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.

Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,

Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.

For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.

And stand together yet not too near together:For the pillars of the temple stand apart,

And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.

Innocence

2009-11-22T23:13:00.000+05:30

Zipping across the lawns of fantasy and reality
The little child, unaware, darts and jumps
bounces back two decades later and zips
across the lawns of fantasy and reality, unaware

A Quarter, Half Full

2009-11-19T21:36:00.004+05:30

My favorite Quartrains from Vikram Seth's All You Who Sleep Tonight.

God's Love
God loves us all, I am pleased to say -
Or those who love him anyway -
Or those who love him and are good.
Or so they say. Or so he should

Pendulum
The nervous mother shouting ceaselessly
At her roped children swinging from the tree
Remembers with a start she once was young
And terrified her mother as she swung.

Advice to Orators
In speech it's best - thought not the only way -
Indeed the best, it's true, can be the worst -
Though often I....as I had meant to say:
Qualify later; state the premise first

Mid Summer's Morning Dream....

2009-10-27T13:03:00.004+05:30

I am struck by a draft of soothing peace. I chose to skip class to slow things a little. Took a walk across our beautiful serene, green campus. I sauntered back to my room and listened to my favorite Mandolin recital followed by Mohan veena.
The fields outside my room look impeccably artsy. With a pleasant summer and brilliant music, I am taking in the air from the balcony, sunbathing and enjoying the colors of the afternoon sun. I see peacocks being chased by foxes in the fields...its weird...4 months and I never realized this was an intiguing sight...because the last time that happened, I was busy memorizing bits and pieces of Management Accounting and Kotler. Now the entire campus seems to look beautiful because I chose to slow down my clock a little and extend the day a little more.
I seem to have acquired a certain degree of stoicism to this rat race and I am proud of it! This is exactly what I have been wishing for.
I think I finally found my calling. I am not DNA-ed for this rat race. If I were, I would not be internally detesting it so much. All my life, I have camouflaged this by running this marathon. Now I choose to pass on the baton to the next aspirant who chooses to ruin his life.

All I really want, is to live a simple quiet life, play a sport, listen to music, catch the weekend movie and pizza, spend time with my family, celebrate festivals, eat an extended lunch, wake up a little later than 9, wear casuals to office, enjoy a coffee, enjoy my reading, write poetry, watch one of those late night comedy clips, enjoy a shower, relish the evening chai, write a book......That's all there is to it....Some day, I want to remove the "office" part in this talk and sit back home and engage in my favoritest (for crying out loud, add this word to the dictionary...favorite lacks juice) hobby - Creative Writing.

I remember rocky (our Operations professor - the best!) at our induction who said "MBAs take themselves too seriously....deep within they are terribly mediocre but cover up well by complicating something as simple as selling a soap...and they continue to fool the world" .... I remember the TOI article where the author bemoans this stupidity that IIT and IIM advocate in the garb of competition...well, I wouldn't give in totally to that cynicism...The IITs and IIMs are doing what they were meant to do, that is their purpose...its up to you and me to take it a little less seriously...

Life's calling, I am taking this one! I don't care if I have to count bank notes at Bank of Baroda after a pedigree education and a pedigree job....if that gives me time to do all that I mentioned above, I am game. If you are a BoB guy and you are willing to make me an offer, then drop me a line!
Right now, I am reading this fantastic article on cooking gobi in 4 easy steps...Plan to spend the day touching up my culinary skills. Bon Appetite Ladies and Gents! I am off to La La land!
Never been at peace from the first minute I landed at IIM. Now I am a lot less stressed...Life always finds a way. I think the gobi can wait...I feel a little sleepy right about now...the summer nap is terribly inviting...zzzz

Smiling in the present...

2009-09-21T23:06:00.003+05:30

I see the point of acknowledging the present for its worth after all..taking the abstraction out of my mind with an abstruse poem that will make sense to only two people...

Oh the eye sockets and the happiness
Here and every moment now
ticket to a smile's expression of pleasure and pain
better than bouts of Nostalgia
and an hour's worth of what could have been

some(,) smoke for thought

2009-07-25T13:01:00.006+05:30

Based on a survey of sorts which solicited responses from frequent/infrequent/social smokers, I have a strikingly simplistic suggestion. Make smaller/variable size cigarettes. The whole idea of smoking seems to gravitate around

1) "It clears my mind up", hence a perceived stress buster

2) "Its about the mental jauntiness", a mental titilator..

3) "its a style statement, a coming of age" for the noveu freed types.

When you make variable size cigarettes (retain the filter size), each size caters to a different occasion and in all probably causes less harm because all it needs is a couple of puffs for a stress buster and not a full length smoke. The same applies to mental jauntiness. Hence you have people taking in fewer puffs througout the day...its the same as borrowing a smoke for a couple of puffs....imagine having that convenience at your desk.

some, smoke for thought and some smoke for thought

Pearls of Wisdom

2009-07-18T14:41:00.003+05:30

Budget 2009

-Subroto Bagchi
I grew up in the tribal districts of Orissa. In places like Koraput and Keonjhar where my boyhood was spent, the nearest railhead was a day’s journey from home. The tribesmen made a living by cultivating the slopes of the mountain, gathering forest produce and tending their animals. Many who lived high up in the mountains were seasonally disconnected from the district administration during the monsoon and the pigeon mail was the only way to contact the marooned. There was a place called Telkoi in Keonjhar where the lone Public Health Center had only two medicines: one for dysentery and one for constipation. The reason was simple. The tribesmen ate mango and jackfruits in every form - from the time they were small to the time they ripened, they ate the seeds and of course, the mango kernels as well. As a result either they had lose motions or none at all. When the government tried to demonstrate them how to cultivate the Taichung rice, they watched intently until the rice formed milk and then they simply sucked it and did not let the rice wait until harvest. That was forty years ago.
After I grew up, at 25, I visited the Simlipal reserve forest in Mayurbhanj and stayed there for a week. My guide was a forest guard who had brought his bride from the village haat and was living-in with her. He had not been able to save up the bride price to pay the father-in-law yet, so they remained unmarried. They were raising his nephew whose father was serving a life-term for murder he had not committed. The man had simply surrendered to the police and agreed to the allegation because that was a more peaceful thing to do. The alternative would have been exposing the women and the children. Fast forward to 2009. Not much has changed in Koraput and Keonjhar and Lalgarh. The veneer of development has been replaced with that of law and order.
The idea of India is very urban. The idea of progress is very urban. The idea of government is very urban. The idea of civil society is very urban. The places I talk about fall in the penumbra of our urban consciousness even today. When we think of people who live there, we see them through the eyes of a government that has the same empathy that the British rulers felt for the urban populace. They are them, they are not us. That is why Korput to Lalgarh evoke thoughts about insurgency more than they do about development. That is why silently, the patches of ungovernable areas within the country are growing while we are making our cities gated communities.
In the tiny places I lived in, the annual budget exercise of a central or a state government meant nothing to people. It came and went; in the few educated homes the passing item of interest was the excise duty on consumable from cigarettes to cement and later on, it was the personal income tax slab. Decades after, the middle-class mental poverty has expanded just as government receipts, spends and deficits have.
India needs change at the level of her soul.
The people who are in-charge of the budget, those who go spend the money and the rest of us who fill our stomachs with it until the next year, need to believe that the country outside the cities need to be included. That they are us.
Before you think I am a cynic, I must tell you that my staple diet is hope. That is how I have come from where I was to where I am today. There are two things I want to tell you in closing.
When I was in the US for the first time in 1990, I met a grand old man who said he used to be a Peace Corps volunteer teaching people how to raise poultry in Madhya Pradesh in the 1950s. He chuckled while recollecting that the volunteers had to “go” to the fields with lanterns at night. I immediately told him that a lot has changed since then. But after that patriotic refrain, sobriety returned to me with the realization that outside the cities, even today, there is no sewage system. And drinking water does not come out of a tap.
Every policy maker in India, every bureaucrat, every businessman must read a book titled Paraja - this is a novel by Jnanpith winner Gopinath Mohanty. Fortunately, an English translation by Bikram Das is available today. It is the story of a tribal from Koraput whose life is in the clutches of petty government officials, moneylenders and the police. The story is set in the early days of post-independent India. Decades after, his lot has not changed. Only his innocence has been lost.
On that note, goodbye until the next budget.

The Black Swan and other stories...

2009-07-12T00:07:00.003+05:30

I was unwillingly thrust into a very very humbling experience at IIML today. I had to get it out my system...The Black Swan makes perfect sense to me now...I see no point in undermining the chaos that destroys all the planning that you do, it makes no sense. Emperically, chaos always beats planning. This is not to undermine planning, but to enhance the awareness about the significance of randomness in the world and how each of us are affected/effected by it.
As abstract as that may have sounded, lemme paraphrase AKR's poem here.
Suicide
A man committed suicide in a city pond,
with all his clothes on
Few strip even for death.

Take away: I guess i have camouflaged myself so much that i have become a bit of a stranger to myself. Time to strip.

IIML : First few weeks

2009-07-04T21:47:00.003+05:30

Its been an intense burst of activities in the two weeks here at IIML. To cut to the chase
High Points:
1) AMAZING BATCH PROFILE!!!
a) IIT JEE two digit rankers with amazing profiles
b) Ex I-Banking folks with fantastic IIT CGs
c) Purdue undergrad and Top 40 tennis champ (Wanky, if you are reading this..go slow on the gloating)
d) National Cricket Captains
e) Guys who cracked IISC, stanford etc etc
f) Guys who can crack the rubik's cube in 30 seconds - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVi4JmwRbTU
g) Guys with fantastic work experience from top notch techi companies - Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe ...name it!
h) 70 odd IITians in the batch with top notch ex-jobs
i) Extremely involved senior batch which is working its ass off to build the brand image
j) Work experience at an average of 3 years.
k) Fantastic organization and professionalism in all if not most aspects of managing the school
l) Amazing campus - Green and huge
m) Unbelievably talented peer group - Dance, Singing, Guitar (Chutiya..this is for you!) name it..

Low points:
1) Far too rigorous a program that tests your sanity
2) ramfication of above - You lose it
3) ramification of above - You unhinge
4) If you are from bangalore, lucknow is a village
5) Weather - Hot enough to bake bricks.
That about it for now. That apart hostel, food, rooms etc are good to go....if only the weather was cooler...i wouldn't miss bangalore

CAT Calls!

2009-06-11T16:17:00.004+05:30

Five cents :

1) CAT is an intriguing journey full of learning. Each time you succeed or fail in a MOCK CAT or in THE CAT, you learn something new about yourself - fear/strength/dream/desire. If you haven't, then you've wasted your time. Introspect and mull over the failure. What caused it and how you can over come it. The very idea of thinking analytically and solving a problem is the first step to an MBA. This is essentially the whole idea of CAT. The idea is to impel you to think analytically. This exercise is vital. if not anything, you are at the least smarter to a problem. Simplistically:
a. Define my problem/weakness - English Grammer
b. Root - Bad Fundamentals from High School
c. Factors affecting solution - Time, Need etc
d. Solution (based on the cause and inclusive of factors) - ?

2) CAT is crackable by law of averages, so take repeated attempts as long as your sanity stays put. Again, if not CAT then XAT. if not XAT, then something else (GMAT may be?) There are a host of good schools now. So no worries. Deal with it and move on. If you can't move on, then write CAT again. These are your only two options. Face it. Either settle for a lower B school or keep trying.

3) No one is weak/strong in any section. I believed in this for years. I fooled myself into believing that English was my strong section etc...This is just a psychological barrier. For most, this mental block is so strong and so persistent that it becomes a reality. Keep an open mind about all three sections. Its ultimately Logic+Speed. Keep an open mind. Never let any past bias or performance taint your present.

4) If you are unable to overcome this mental block, then go for the workaround - Maximize your strongest section and try to clear the cut offs in the other two. I am a classic case of this point. I did english great (99.7) , cleared Quant (93 - Except C and A which want 95) and DI (97) to add up to a 99.7. More than half my marks (154) came from English (83) . While IIM B, L, K and I are okay with this, C is a no-no. While Each IIM has its own contention, none of them have a fool proof methodology. They have their own views, none of which are infallible.

5) Some "Oh man, i deserve to be at the IIM moments" and Back-to-terra-firma reality.
5a.Every time you come back home and redo a Mock CAT paper, It seems trivial.
Reality: It doesnt matter how easy it looks on post mortem. Don't dabble in self pity. You didn't do it when it mattered. Go over why and how it can be bettered.
5b.You do a yester year CAT paper and you smash it, with 20 minutes to spare. You clear the cut offs by a mile. You are smug and happy that 6 calls are shitty easy.
Reality: CATs taken at home are to be discounted by quite a bit. Don't even bother gloating. When you sit on the final day, in a bench with your TR number scrawled on it thinking about all those people who wished you the best for this year's CAT (too?) or/and think about how much you hate your job and have to get out of it and/or think about how you have to prove a point to some high school buffoon or a nose-in-the-air-aunty, you inevitably feel the real thing. In here, unless you are really smart or lucky or both, you will probably be left wondering why there was a huge disconnect between your Mock CAT scores and your actual performance.

Solution: Learn to Surmount Pressure in whatever, whichever way you deem suited to your need. The rest of the blah - Mock CATS, Practise sessions, strategy et al, just go by your intuition. If it works the first time - JackPot, It doesn't...then keep trying. Stay Foolish, Stay Hungry.

Art of SOP Writing

2009-05-01T23:02:00.007+05:30

Just a little heads-up before we begin.

1. What professors read between the lines: motivation, competence and potential.
2. Emphasize everything from a positive perspective and write in an active and in first person. [Indians some time go "One loved playing with the transistor when one was five..." who are you? Jesus ?]
3. Demonstrate everything by example; Don't bother launching rockets with your verbal prowess unless you have a tangible claim in the form of a certificate/paper/award.
4. Don't make excuses for your goof ups, explicate the learning from your fallacy effectively without trying to be a reverend.
5. If there is something important that happened (poverty, illness, family death) which affected your grades go ahead and state it, but write it affirmatively, that is, in a way that shows your perseverance.Don't beg for pity. Be strong.
6. Make sure everything is linked with continuity and focus. Don't go from being a child prodigy to writing code at TCS. [Typical Indian SOP = Start out solving complex advanced math as a child and then end up with a "top entrance test rank = CET/TNPCEE/EAMCET" and then go on to "one of the top engineering colleges in karnataka/TN/Andhra = holy crap" and then end up in "one of the best MNCs in India = ....."..who are you fooling?]
7. SOP should ideally be 1.5 pages in length. Two pages is acceptable in most [Purdue asks for half a page and Vtech doesn't need an explicit SOP. Their application has fields that cover all aspects of a SOP.]

Part1: Introduction:

This is where you tell them what you want to study. Don't begin with fluff about how you cracked the rubik's cube as a five year old and then loved logic and decoding soon after. In essence, if you are really not a John Nash, then don't try sounding like one unless you want to give the professors a funny. Tell them straight how the interest began and how it transmuted into a field of interest.

Part 2: Summarize what you did as an undergraduate

1. Important class or classes you took which stimulated your desire for graduate study, such as a specific project for a class.
2. Research you might have done Indicate with whom, the title of the project, what your responsibilities were, and the outcome. Write technically, professors are the people who read these statements.
3. Work experience, especially if you had any kind of responsibility for testing, designing, or researching a product or apparatus.

Part 3: If you graduated and worked for a while and are returning to grad school, indicate what you've been doing while working: company, work/design team, responsibilities, what you learned. You can also indicate here how this helped you focus your graduate studies.

Part 4: Here you indicate what you want to study in graduate school in greater detail. This is a greater elaboration of your opening paragraph.

1. Indicate area of interest, then state questions you might have which are associated with the topic, i.e. what you might be interested in studying. You should have an area of emphasis selected before you write the statement.
2. Call the department or look on the web for information about the professors and their research. Are there professors whose interest's match yours'? If so, indicate this, as it shows a sign that you have done your homework and are highly motivated. (Be sincere, however, don't make up something bogus just to impress people.)This part however is probably the most important. Universities love to see homework on the SOP. if you want to crack the university, you should have researched on every thread in every professor's domain. This way, you are certain which classes to take and which minors to choose, which professor you would want to approach, which professor you want to mail for AID et al. If this sincerity comes out in your SOP and you have a good profile to back it up, no university is ambiguous.

End your statement in a positive and confident manner with a readiness for the challenges of graduate study and the college in particular.

SOP is your mouth. Keep it simple, keep it technical and Keep it sincere. Your SOP, Profile, GRE Score et al add up to a persona that the university either chooses to admit or reject.

PS:
[1] SOP cannot be a maker unless you have the profile. Don't apply to MIT because your writing skills are highly persuasive. Every university ultimately wants a great engineer not a hot shot writer.
[2] Its okay to embellish a little. Don't stretch the truth beyond recognition though.
[3] Unless you take up core projects at the very onset of engineering and have a high clarity of thought in engineering, you will probably end up applying to n universities aimlessly as a fresher.
I am in favor of applying after gaining significant work exp. It helps you take some time to understand why, how and where = Gain some clarity.

In Essence, if you did do good work as an Engineer or at Work, it will reflect and it should reflect in your SOP. Top this off with strong and sincere passion for the research at the university [this SHOULD be backed by your homework on the University. Globe from a friend on how NC State is hot for networking should not go on your SOP directly without a first hand read and understanding] . Good English and writing skills are an upside but not the movers and shakers. You can, for example, use small white lies about your love for a particular school's research although it may not be your top choice. This is human, no harm done.

Your SOP can help you explore and introspect. Take time on it and get it reviewed by the been-there-done-it-well folks.

Post a comment for queries.

Margayya!

2009-04-25T11:10:00.002+05:30

Margayya reminds me of the characters in Asterix where each name had a significance. I loved Bachelor of Arts, when i was 15. When i read it again at 24, i found it simplistic and shallow. But i guess i lacked the discernment to read the voice of the author from the many voices of his characters. For some unknown reason, i have always felt RKN's stories lacked a sense of intensity and energy that i seek in my reading.

Financial expert: Malgudi On The Mississippi
By Niranjan Ramakrishnan

I was gratified the other day to discover a good collection of R. K. Narayan's novels at our local library. Among them was The Financial Expert, a story I had been meaning to re-read for some time. This novel's hero, Margayya, is often acclaimed by critics as Narayan's most memorable character, Margayya. Now the novel itself may also prove to be his most prescient -- the way it captures today's economic meltdown in the microcosm of its tragi-comic hero's rise and fall, it might have hit the shelves this month to win plaudits for its timeliness. Actually, it was published in 1952.

The book's title is in keeping with Narayan's other works - The Bachelor of Arts, The Vendor of Sweets, The Guide, The English Teacher, The Painter of Signs -- Narayan's lulling patina through which we are shown the narrow highs and lows of petty bourgeois existence in Malgudi, Narayan's imaginary South Indian small town. Save for a few passing references, Narayan stayed mostly away from the peasantry in his writings. He gave the proletariat a complete miss, as he did caste. Still, he managed to capture something essential about the Indian lower middle class. In the words of VS Naipaul, Narayan's novels comprise "small men, small schemes, big talk, limited means". Anyone familiar with India and with Narayan's works would find in that observation an adequate measure of truth.

The one character that breaks out of this mold is Margayya, "The Financial Expert". Unlike Narayan's other protagonists, all drawn from the milieu of a benign South Indian fatalism, Margayya's is the soul of the stereotypical American go-getter, bursting with energy and ambition, driven to make things happen for himself. An Indian George Jefferson in mentality, one might say, only sans race (or in Margayya's case, caste).

The novel is not a mystery and I shall be giving nothing away by sharing its storyline. It begins with Margayya as a small-time 'lobbyist' in a small town, except that he works on behalf of poor and illiterate peasants seeking loans from the Cooperative Bank, filling out their application forms, advising them on which rules to invoke to garner the largest loan. One day the bank officials throw him out of the bank compound on pain of arrest, and he finds himself out of a job. Down to his last few rupees, a chance encounter with a frustrated author leaves him with a manuscript of a book on sex education. Margayya parleys this into his first million (before discreetly divesting himself of further interest in the book so as not to be tainted by its topic -- he has bigger plans for himself). He has now morphed into a financier, offering returns on investment several times the rates provided by the local bank. Though Narayan does not term it so, any American would see his operation as a Ponzi scheme (On second thoughts, post-Madoff, perhaps not!).

Even as Margayya's stock rises in the world, with all those who insulted him in the past now standing in line to be in his good books, deterioration has set in elsewhere. His son Balu is becoming a wastrel and a vagabond, sustained in the world wholly by his father's wealth and position. Margayya knows that if the boy ever has to pass a school exam, it is essential that he (Margayya) become chairman of the school board (Narayan writes nothing of the World Bank and the IMF), a position he obtains by suitable donations. Margayya dreams that his wealth would provide Balu the opportunities he himself was denied -- a decent opportunity to study engineering and make a good life. However, with his complete preoccupation with making money, he has little time for his son. He bribes the right people, engages the schoolmaster as the boy's tutor, all to insure that the boy passes his grades. It all comes to nought, for the boy is eventually unable to get through the board exam despite several attempts. Partly out of proclivity and partly out of Margayya's pampering (he rents the boy a home in a posh neighborhood, pays for all his expenses and provides him a handsome living allowance to boot), Balu develops into and remains a full-time party animal, even after marriage and the birth of a child.

Although Margayya's rise to financial eminence is sure and swift, the reader is throughout left with a tantalizing dread that there is something unsustainable about the entire edifice -- the only question is how it all will unravel. Narayan is no Freudian in other departments, but for the constant presence of the death wish in many of his heroes. Here it finds its expression in Margayya, at the height of his powers, doing something patently suicidal. The pyramid scheme could not have continued forever in any case, but Margayya hastens its end: provoked by his son's insult, he thrashes Balu's cavorting buddy for having led his boy astray. In retaliation, that man (incidentally the author who gave him the sex therapy manuscript originally) spreads the rumor that Margayya is out of money. Fear catches, and depositors start lining up, at first in small numbers and sheepishly, to request their funds back. An instinctive psychologist, Margayya responds by tossing their money back at them, with interest and with a stiff upper lip. But when the demand for return of money gradually builds up to a crescendo there is a run on the bank, as it were, and soon Margayya is well and truly insolvent.

The beauty of Margayya's character is the utter devotion to moneymaking and its attendant mystique. But a Margayya could thrive only when others were actually producing things, using his services as an enabler from time to time. America's 2008 meltdown arose because everyone wanted to be a Margayya. If Margayya had actually been like George Jefferson and gone in to drycleaning, we (and he) would have been all right. Instead our existence became dominated by too many financial experts, as we made lots of money and quit making very much else. Like Margayya, we turned a blind eye to our own people, to their education, health or other well-being, encouraging them to leave us in peace by providing them cheap funds to... entertain themselves, shall we say. And they, like Balu, got used to living outside their means. All in all an edifice readymade to teeter. And we, in Margayya fashion, indulged our own death wish by responding to an insult by starting a foreign war or two (to his credit, at least Margayya assaulted the right guy).

In the end, all that is left is the old ancestral home, and a few pots and pans. Shortly Balu returns, kicked out of his posh house, accompanied by wife and toddling son. Margayya was paying his rent too, after all. The Financial Expert ends with the touching scene of Margayya, who had spent his life contemplating the wonders of compound interest, turning to his grandson as he finally realizes where his true wealth lay.

It is this wisdom that appears to have eluded us, even after all that has happened. From all appearances, we still remain stuck in the money-making mindset instead of realizing the meaning of real riches. We are living parodies and literal embodiments of what Naipaul wrote of Malgudi -- small men, big talk, small schemes (large scams, though).

And limited means, more limited by the day

Anyone listening?

2009-04-25T11:07:00.003+05:30

Anyone doing anything about it?

India's Press Nixes "R" Word
By P. SAINATH
At least two major newspapers have informed their desks that the word “recession” is not to be used in connection with India. Recession is something that happens in the United States, not here. The word stands exiled from the editorial lexicon. If a rather disastrous situation has somehow to be indicated, the term “downturn” or “slowdown” will suffice — and it is to be used with some discretion. But not recession. That would upset the happy buying mood so vital amongst media audiences for the economy to come out of, er, um, well, recession.
This don’t-worry-be-happy decree throws up both funny and tragic situations. Several times, publications in this denial mode sport headlines telling us “the worst is over and recovery is just around the corner.” The worst of what? Recession? And what are we recovering from anyway? Now many of the publications and channels into this kind of evasion have also been laying off employees in droves, including several journalists.
Those poor souls (many with large home loan EMIs contracted when the economy was in even less of a “downturn” than it is now) are losing their jobs because of — well, whatever. Imagine you were one of them, working at the desk, filtering copy for your readers to reassure them that all is well. In the evening, you’re exorcising the columns of the ghosts of recession. Next afternoon, you find you are a victim of what you’ve purged. The hypocrisy of the media in acting the opposite of what they tell their audiences is the reality — gee, that’s part of business strategy. Scare the public and there will be less spending. Which means less advertising, less revenue, less etc.
The one time a headline in one of these dailies mentioned the ‘R word’, it mocked it as in “What recession?” More cars were being sold in a particular segment; rural India is shining (the word here is “new found prosperity”). We need the sunny side up stories — even as we practice something quite different on the underside. Television channels also trot out the usual (suspect) experts to explain that things are not as bad as they’re made out to be (By whom, we are seldom told). There were happy headlines for a while about declining inflation. (Though a few have lately become cautious about making a production number of this). But there is much less on how serious a problem food prices are. How huge an issue hunger still is. One indication of that does surface in the manifestos of political parties promising rice at Rs. 3 or Rs. 2 or even at Re. 1 a kg. (Oddly, to a population which seems to be set on buying cars, not foodgrain.) But then you know what these manifestos are.
So the media speak to their select bunch of certified experts, spokespersons and analysts and declare: there are no issues in this election. There certainly aren’t many the media are talking about. And yes that comes as a relief to political forces enabled to evade some massive problems now unfolding. Even the chance of highlighting the emerging issues — which would be a big help to many voters — gets spiked. So we were treated to IPL versus elections, Varun Gandhi, Budiya, Gudiya, and heaps of similar blather. It is to the credit of Jarnail Singh the shoe-cide bomber(who gives Barefoot Journalism a whole new meaning) that he got us off the Varun Gandhi trivia and actually scored on an important issue of all elections since 1984,
There is a bizarre disconnect between what we report as developments in the United States and what we insist is the reality here. And, of course, there are significant differences — but we don’t want to explore how those came about. For years, we’ve touted the benefits of one particular form of globalization. In which the more integrated we were with the world economy (read U.S. and European), the better things got to be. But when things get worse there, it doesn’t affect us. Oh no, not at all.
It’s also a measure of the distance, in many ways, between the partygoers and the plebeians. For the latter, there was not much to be gung-ho about, anyway. Many of them would assure you they have issues. But how do we address problems whose existence we barely acknowledged in the first place? So forget about the agrarian crisis, and the 182,000 farm suicides associated with it over the past decade. And when was hunger or joblessness an issue (in the media), anyway? Most publications have given zero space to India’s dismal show in the Global Hunger Index. All these are problems that pre-date the meltdown in Wall Street (itself something that, for the media, happened out of the blue, without warning).
Over the last year and a half, things have not been so great elsewhere either. The crisis of industry, negative growth in manufacturing, the loss of some jobs in these sectors — all these do find some mention. Most often, a passing mention. But things get really bad when the Top Ten per cent get spooked. They need to be reassured and must keep buying cars. At some point “not spooking them” means blurring the lines between illusion, ideology, reality and reporting. It could have very dangerous consequences.
For the vast mass of the population, which does not receive stock market updates on cellphones, things were not so bright anyway. The year 2006 is on record in the media as one of our great boom years. But it is the data from that year that place us at 132 in the United Nations Human Development Index. That’s a fall from the already dismal rank of 128 we held — and places us below Bhutan. In terms of underweight children and malnourishment, India is a disaster zone. Many below us in the index fare a lot better on that front. We have the largest number of such children on the planet. And there are no issues? That the dominant political forces are able to evade the issues does not mean an absence of them. That we are unable to give coherence to the giant processes unfolding around us says more about the media, less about the issues.
As their orders run out, export-oriented sectors are in the doldrums. That’s true of Gujarat, Maharashtra and elsewhere. As that happens, hundreds of thousands of workers — migrants from elsewhere — return to their homes in Orissa, Jharkhand or Bihar. What do they return to? To districts where there is an acute shortage of work — which is why they left in the first place. To a public distribution system in tatters that could not cater for even the earlier reduced population. To an NREGA that was insufficient to begin with — and which certainly, at present levels of funding, cannot cope with the addition of lakhs of people.
There is a time lag between the onset of the latest phase of recession — or call it what you will — and voting in these elections. We go to the polls this month and in May. The job losses amongst migrant workers and others are mounting by the week. You could have a pretty bad situation by the time the monsoon sets in. A few months later, it could be spectacularly bad. But the voting takes place now. Were these polls held some months from today, you would have very decisive results in most States. And the issues would not be Varun, Budiya, Gudiya or Amar Singh’s endless adventures.
Meanwhile, there is little in the media that informs our audiences that we are part of the greatest economic crisis the world has seen in 80 years, the worst since the Great Depression. Nothing that prepares readers, listeners and viewers for what could follow. The only slowdown is in the news (and paralysed editorial intellect). The big downturn is in the media’s performance. For the rest of the world it’s a recession. One from which we could move towards far worse.

Idiot's guide to an MS in the USA

2009-04-14T21:09:00.007+05:30

This post was long pending and i was waiting for my admits to come before i set out to lay the wiki.

My credentials to begin with
GRE: 1560
TOEFL: 115
3 Years at Cisco Bangalore
Three Patents at Cisco and Two papers at College.
Everything else doesn't matter.

Applied for : Networking & Systems

My Admits, in order of importance:
Stanford
CMU
Cornell
Vtech.

Some important steps to confused souls such as me. I never did [1] which is why i wanted an MBA badly and then wanted an MS badly and then wanted an MBA badly....in a loop.

[1] Understand "Why MS for me": If you truly want a good post graduate high tech degree, there is no reason to be averse to taking a shot at GATE. My point being, introspect to begin with. If you were irritated with your reference books at College, there is every reason that you will detest your MS. Its a simple equation. The hunger, penchant and incline begins at College, either you have it or don't. Don't thrust it down your throat because an MS sounds pretty on a CV or the US is a mint [right about now, its the opposite]
In all due honesty, most [90%] of MS graduates end up at high tech companies writing code or testing high products. 2% end up with hot research profiles and they are true blue hot shots.

In all i see that very few MS graduates enjoy the jobs post MS. The ones who do are those who knew "Why MS" in the first place.

What i did: Wasted my Engg degree because i hated all other subjects sans networking.

[2] College is sacrosanct. Use your Engineering degree to the very hilt. Use the expertise of your faculty. Run out for projects. Work on papers.
PS: this will come in automatically if you love your course.

What i did: The only thing i did right was to put together a few papers in networking. Although they were no great shakes, they sharpened my interest and understanding.

[3] Ok, I goofed up college, what do i do to recoup? Get relevant work experience in your area of interest. In my case, it was networking and this is what i probably did right. I ran around until i could land up a Cisco or Lucent job [Dream options for me then]. Lucent didn't bother to call me but Cisco did.
My three years at cisco have been pretty eventful. Be it the achievements, growth or the time put in to understand the technology. These are probably my formative years and probably the key to my MS success.
As much as i don't find my job highly enterprising [coding is not my idea of fun], Cisco is a lovely company to work for. Easily the best work culture across silicon hotties and a good payer.
Fabulous leadership on top and inspite of all the misgivings, i still think that Cisco has been a great playground to tone up.
Why is this important? It made a hude difference in the way i presented myself in my SOP, which is my next point

[4] SOP is your mouth piece. Use it sensibly: How does one write a good SOP, lemme deal with it exhaustively in another post...but for now, take it from a guy who cracked a few good universities, SOP is your leverage.

[5] Research Exposure and Scholastic Achievements: An MS admit is very straight. You have cutting edge research exposure and high distinction in your Engg, you are good to go at the top few universities [for Aid included]. Don't undermine your Engg Aggregate! Your university may be a jhonny but in the US, they take CGPA seriously.
Research Exposure: I don't need to expound here. IEEE Papers, Projects [at IISC perhaps?], Papers at Top National Conferences [NOT THE SAME AS COLLEGE FESTS!] ..and you are good to go.

[6] Check your finances: The planning for an MS is the same as that for a big investment. Plan your finances well in advance. Don't try crossing the bridge when you come to it. Reality is not all about miracles.

[7] Recommandations: Get them from people who know you best. If those best comprises Phds, then nothing like it. If not, no big whoop. Get sensible and well written recommandations [Please write them yourself and get it revised by your professor. Please get your recos toned up by people who have been there and done it before. Well Written Recos are as important as your SOP
Another Advice: Sit with your prof until he submits the online reco. Never, Never leave it to him/her to submit on time. Also a lot of universities have objective question-answer types in the online recommandation to make it quick and easy.

[8] Visit www.edulix.com. I couldn't have been writing this without them. Fabulous forum and has the top few brains sharing their thoughts. Visit the forum and revisit until you have read every thread in there. From cracking GRE to cracking UIUC, its all in there.

My dream destinations:
MIT [Need i say more]
Stanford [90% of all successful CEOs are from Stanford. They rock! but very expensive without aid]
UC Berkeley [Don't apply unless you have a certification of insanity]
UIUC [Right on top but well, near impossible to crack. Dream of a Univ]
Michigan [Fabulous Univ. Expensive. Period. ]
Gatech [Great Place. Expensive!]
Cornell [Meng Only. Expensive. Phd is reserved only for IIT JEE 1-50]
CMU [Tough nut to crack and shit expensive. Go there is you own a bank. But yea...great place]
UT Austin [Ping me if you crack CommNetS. You have my instant admiration. Affordable and one of the top few. Great Place. ]
Princeton and Caltech [Don't bother applying unless you have a genius certification]

What am i doing now: Heading out to IIM Lucknow for my MBA because Lehmann Brothers went kaput.

Must Reads: [PS: You need an edulix user account. Create one for free]
[1] http://www.edulix.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=55129
[2] http://allaboutusadmissions.blogspot.com/
[3] http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~natalia/studyinus/guide/statement/samples.htm
[4] http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~natalia/studyinus/guide.htm
[5] http://www.edulix.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=54918
[6] http://www.edulix.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=44289
[7] http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/grad/eng/search

Reader: Please feel free to ping me at saranathn@gmail.com for any specific queries. A lot of people put up with my million dollar questions and time for me to play santa with the little i have in my bag.

Communistic Democracy

2009-04-13T14:32:00.001+05:30

Democracy Rising

by Nadia Martinez

Grassroots movements change the face of power

As the people of Latin America build democracies from the bottom up, the symbols of power are changing. What used to be emblems of poverty and oppression—indigenous clothing and speech, the labels “campesino” and “landless worker”—are increasingly the symbols of new power. As people-powered movements drive the region toward social justice and equality, these symbols speak, not of elite authority limited to a few, but of power broadly shared.

The symbolism was especially rich last year in Cochabamba, Bolivia, when the new minister of justice made her entrance at an international activists' summit. Casimira Rodríguez, a former domestic worker, wore the thick, black braids and pollera, a long, multilayered skirt, of an Aymara indigenous woman. As she made her way through the throng, Rodríguez further distinguished herself from a typical law-enforcement chief by passing out handfuls of coca leaves.

Throughout the region, marginalized people are rising up, challenging the system that has kept them poor, and pursuing a new course. In country after country, people are selecting leaders who strongly reject the Washington-led “neoliberal” policies of restricted government spending on social programs, privatization of public services such as education and water, and opening up borders to foreign corporations.

Of course, there are exceptions, most notably Mexico, where conservative Felipe Calderón claimed power after a bruising battle over disputed election results. But the growing backlash has driven old-guard presidents out of power in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Bolivia. And, while there are sharp differences among the new leaders, there is no question that what put all of them in power was a growing outcry against economic injustice. Over 40 percent of the region still lives in poverty, and the gap between rich and poor is the widest in the world.

No longer willing to accept perpetual poverty, Latin America's poor are redefining their societies and, in the process, redefining democracy. They are organizing large segments of society into strong, dynamic social movements with enough power to drive national politics. The challenge, of course, is to hold their new leaders accountable, to maintain the strength of the grassroots democratic power, and to go beyond symbolism to make real change.

Bolivia's Indigenous President

In Bolivia, where indigenous people are the majority, there are already some concrete signs of progress. Evo Morales, the country's first indigenous president, took office in 2006 with the strongest mandate of any Bolivian leader. Catapulted onto the national political stage by his struggles as a union leader defending the rights of coca growers, Morales came to power on the heels of massive popular uprisings that ousted three presidents in as many years.

Despite sitting on the region's second largest natural gas reserves, Bolivia is South America's poorest country. In tandem with a wave of privatizations that swept Latin America in the 1990s, the oil and gas industry in Bolivia was opened for business to foreign oil companies, which garnered 82 percent of the profits, while leaving a scant 18 percent for Bolivia's coffers. Shortly after taking office, the Morales government set out to rewrite contracts with private companies. Negotiators increased the country's share of the profits to 50-80 percent by renegotiating contracts with 10 different companies, which will yield billions in additional revenue for the government to sustain its new social agenda.

Spurred by his experience as a coca grower, Morales has introduced new policies that challenge the U.S. approach to the “drug war.” Coca, the base ingredient of cocaine, has special ancestral significance for Bolivia's indigenous people and in its raw form is widely used to treat maladies such as stomach upset, altitude sickness, and stress, in addition to being a part of many Bolivians' daily routine. Under pressure from the U.S. government, previous Bolivian administrations tried coca eradication. Kathryn Ledebur of the Andean Information Network in Bolivia, says that “local farmers who planted coca as a means of subsistence would often face violent confrontations with the military and security forces who were mandated to destroy their crops, which in essence devastated their only means of livelihood.”

The Morales government has developed a farmer-friendly program that allows small farmers to grow small amounts of coca for domestic consumption, while also implementing a zero-cocaine policy that includes interdiction and anti-money laundering efforts to prevent drug trafficking.

In Brazil, a Metalworker is President

The political shift in Brazil is also steeped in powerful symbolism. When Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, a metalworker with an elementary education, rode a wave of popular support to the presidency in 2002, it inspired working-class people around the world. He was re-elected with a comfortable 60 percent of the vote in October 2006. Although his first term was tainted by corruption scandals and accusations from many on Brazil's left that he acquiesced too much to the demands by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for strict fiscal policies, he fulfilled some of his campaign pledges to the poor who form his political base.

According to the Center for Economic Policy Research, some 11 million families have benefited from the “bolsa família”—a monthly cash payment made to poor families in exchange for ensuring that their children stay in school. Signaling more pro-poor policies to come, one of the first acts of Lula's second term was announcing an 8.6 percent rise in the minimum wage.

Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution

President Hugo Chávez is best known in the United States for his overblown rhetoric against President Bush. But in Latin America, the Venezuelan president is fond of conjuring up the symbolism of Simón Bolívar, the “liberator” of South America from Spanish rule, who dreamed of uniting the region in a strong bloc. And while it has garnered little attention here, Chávez has used oil windfalls to advance Bolívar's dream. Venezuela has purchased big chunks of Argentina and Ecuador's debts to the IMF, for example, and sold discounted oil to several of its neighbors and even to poor communities in the United States. And Venezuela has signed trade pacts with several countries that include novel bartering arrangements, such as agricultural products in exchange for doctors and other technical personnel. Chávez has devised a regional trade plan to counter the Bush-favored Free Trade Area of the Americas. The Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America (ALBA, for its Spanish acronym) aims to benefit the poor and the environment, and to advance trade among countries within the region.

In January, Venezuela and Argentina took another step towards breaking the region's dependence on such neoliberal institutions as the World Bank, IMF, and Inter-American Development Bank, which have conditioned lending on “free market” policy reforms and harsh austerity measures. They pledged more than $1 billion to jump-start a new “Bank of the South.” Bolivia and Ecuador have since signed on.

Within Venezuela, Chávez has made impressive progress in boosting literacy levels and providing health and other services to the poor. He has teamed up with Cuba in cosponsoring a program called Operation Miracle to provide free eye surgery to poor residents from Venezuela, Panama, Jamaica, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and a growing list of other countries. The Venezuelan government is also investing heavily in creating a model of local economic development through cooperatives.

On the other hand, Chávez's fossil-fuel-based development plans—including a proposed gas pipeline from Venezuela to Argentina—are hardly visionary. As currently planned, the 5,000-mile pipeline will traverse areas of extreme ecological and cultural sensitivity. Several possible routes are being evaluated, but all run through the Amazon. Environmental and indigenous rights groups throughout Latin America have voiced opposition to the behemoth project, and have asked the Venezuelan government to halt all plans until they can be publicly debated.

Social Movements Redefine Democracy

Some of the most hopeful democratic advances in Latin America are not the result of official policies, but of social movements harnessing their own power. The thousands of poor peasants who make up the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil have claimed the right to settle on and farm close to 7 million hectares, or 43,000 square miles, of unused land—a territory a little larger than the state of Ohio. For millions of people who are largely outside of the mainstream economic system, access to land is of paramount importance, as they depend on it for subsistence.

Miguel Carter, of the Oxford-based Centre for Brazilian Studies, explains that groups like the MST contribute to the democratic process in important ways. “By improving the material conditions and cultural resources of its members” he says, “the landless movement has fortified the social foundations for democracy in Brazil.”

Indigenous movements, too, have gained ground. In the Amazonian region of Ecuador, after witnessing multinational oil companies for decades cut through the jungles of their ancestral lands in search of petroleum, indigenous women put their bodies on the line against the armed soldiers sent to escort oil workers. Known for fierce resistance to oil exploitation on their lands, the remote community of Sarayacu has so far succeeded in keeping the oil companies out.

Throughout Latin America, scores of indigenous peoples have demonstrated that marginalized populations can organize and mobilize effectively enough to topple governments—as they have done in Ecuador and Bolivia—despite their lack of material resources and political power.

A new characteristic of Latin American politics is greater collaboration among countries with the goal of breaking dependence on the North. In the past, countries were largely in competition for U.S. markets and development aid. Now they increasingly focus on complementing the strengths and weaknesses of one another, and seeking common solutions to their shared problems.

One example is the newly formed South American Community of Nations (CSN, in Spanish), an attempt by the 12 countries of South America to create an “area that is integrated politically, socially, economically, environmentally, and in infrastructure.” Because the initiative is new, it is unclear whether it will simply become a trading bloc that improves the region's competitive position in international markets, as is the case with the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). Alternatively, it could establish minimum social and environmental standards and the infrastructure not only to link to international markets but also to trade within Latin America.

Similarly, in a radical departure from a traditional market-based approach, the Morales government has developed a “People's Trade Agreement,” an innovative economic alternative based on principles of fair trade, labor, and environmental protections, and active state intervention in the economy to promote development.

Although still in an embryonic stage, “it is unique,” says Jason Tockman of the Bolivia Solidarity Network. “It has both a strong resonance with the alternative visions for social, economic and political integration proposed by the region's social movements, and the weight of state authority.”

The response to President Bush's visit to five Latin American countries in March is yet another sign that Latin Americans are choosing their own path, independent of the United States and its political and economic interests. Along Bush's route, thousands of people in the streets carrying colorful signs and “Bush Out” banners sent a clear message: people's movements are alive and well in Latin America, and they aren't falling for the White House's attempt to repackage the same unpopular U.S. policies under the guise of poverty alleviation.

At the same time, Chávez was able to gather and rouse into a fervor an estimated 40,000 people at an anti-Bush rally in Argentina, where he announced that Bush was a “political cadaver”—alluding to the president's increased irrelevance in Latin America.

After two centuries of the United States treating Latin America as if it were its backyard, organized popular movements across Latin America are changing the dynamics of the hemisphere. By electing more popular governments in eight countries and by organizing tens of millions of people, they have put up strong resistance to the U.S. agenda of corporate-led globalization, and they have created real alternatives on the ground. These efforts, combined with the Venezuela-led effort for alternative regional integration, not only provide the strongest counter-weight to the U.S. agenda anywhere in the world, but also offer multiple paths towards a better future for millions of people in the Americas

Sixth Sense

2009-03-18T10:08:00.003+05:30

TED - http://www.ted.com/ . Among the many fancies i have harbored, presenting an idea good enough for TED has been fairly persistent [lately if i may add].

I bumped into this talk via a Forward - The Sixth Sense Project [Snip from the web] - " 'SixthSense' is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information."
http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/index.htm

This is a brilliant idea. Connecting the cloud with the the real world. The tons of research time and thought experiments into injecting more hardware and software prowess into the Network is probably incomplete without bringing this power closer to the real world.
Applications such as these will push the demand for higher bandwidth, security, quality of service..what have you....although that is a fairly simplistic thought given my networking exposure.

This is the power of the network...This is the power of thought....

http://i.gizmodo.com/5167790/sixth-sense-technology-may-change-how-we-look-at-the-world-forever

Self Potrait - A.K.Ramanujan

2009-03-04T22:15:00.001+05:30

One of his classics. Borrowed from Collected Poems of A.K.R.

"I resemble everyone
but myself, and sometimes see
in shop-windows,
despite the well-known laws
of optics,
the portrait of a stranger,
date unknown,
often signed in a corner
by my father."

~A.K. Ramanujan

Why can't we simply print more money?

2009-02-17T14:41:00.002+05:30

Here is a little snippet. Yahoo is not so bad after all.....

"This would work if the money was given to just you and me. We'd be rich -everyone else would not. And that would be because the total supply of money wouldn't change that much -you and I would be relatively better off than everyone else.

And, as a matter of fact, this is what counterfeiters do: they just print up some money.

And that brings us to the big Wall Street problem. In effect, when all those bad mortgages were issued, it was a form of counterfeiting. Bear with me here. You have money -meaning the bills in your wallet- and then you have things that are "like money," such as stocks, bonds, and
mortgages. In fact, they are so much like money that people buy and sell them easily. When you need to turn something that is "like" money into actual dollars, you sell it!

Here's where the plot thickens. Those mortgages are "worthless" because the folks who bought the big houses can't afford the payments. Thus, the lender, who used to get $1,000 a month, now gets NOTHING. As long as borrowers are paying, the mortgage itself can be bought and sold. But if I stop paying, my mortgage loan is no good -the current holder can't sell it. They can take my house and try to sell THAT to get their money, but guess what? So MANY houses have been taken (foreclosed) that the sale prices of the houses have dropped. And so, the lender who put up 300,000 for a home loan sells the place for 200,000 -and has a 100,000 LOSS. THAT is what happened on Wall Street.

As you can see, finding out that you hold a worthless (non-paying) mortgage is very much like finding out those 20's in your pocket are counterfeit -they won't buy a thing.

What makes the mortgage valuable is the asset (the house). If the loan isn't being paid off, then the actual value of the mortgage is the value of the house when it is sold.

So, likewise, what makes the paper money worth anything? Time was when gold and silver did the job. But carrying around gold and silver is inconvenient -can you imagine sending a brick of gold to your credit card company every month? So the government and the banks, which stored
the actual gold and silver, printed up certificates -dollars- which for a time were in fact, labeled as gold or silver "certificates." You'll still come across one every now and then (for silver, anyway). The idea was that you could go to any federal reserve bank and trade in your
dollars for actual gold or silver. And in that day, the value of gold and silver was set in stone. Gold, for example, was worth $35 an ounce, period.

The problem here, of course, was that as the population and the economy grew, the government needed to print more and more dollars. But then they had to go dig up more and more gold and silver so that each dollar could be cashed in at the set price. Either that -or simply say that
because of the additional dollars floating around, but no additional gold and silver, then each dollar would be worth LESS.

People began to realize that wealth was found not just in precious metal, but also in practically anything that could be taken from mother nature, and even work itself had value. And so, the whole business of using gold and silver as the ONLY way to figure what a dollar is worth
was abandoned. Now, the value of a dollar is calculated by zillions of transactions which occur on a daily basis. Barrels of oil, pork bellies, eggs, orange juice, acres of land, ownership of companies, houses, cars -you name it! The point being that the exchange of any of
these things for dollars involves the paper money being supported by a physical something. My paper $20 bill is worth 1/150th of a used car, for example. But if I wreck that car, the $20 may be worth 1/10th of the value of the scrap metal.

Now, if someone doubled the amount of dollars "out there," what would happen to the price of my used car? It would go UP to match the bigger supply of money. And this is exactly what has happened over the years -we call it "inflation," meaning that the number of dollars has been
gradually inflated over the years, which is why many things cost more today then they did 20 years ago. There is no problem with this as long as people are also earning more money which is, generally, what has happened; the supply of dollars keeps up with the price of things.

But, when Wall street caves in and all those loans go bad -it is the same thing as having someone steal your wallet, or losing your job. The dollars just disappear! Who pays? The government steps in, which is to say that in the end, your taxes will pay for it."

Truth be told

2009-01-29T08:55:00.002+05:30

A very interesting write up on relationships. A good friend sent this as a forward and i could not resist the temptation of sharing this with my readers. I would have probably found this superfluous or corny even, a couple of years ago... but now for some unknown/known reason, it seems very apt

"DID I MARRY THE RIGHT PERSON?

EVERY relationship has a cycle. In the beginning, you fell in love with your spouse. You anticipated their call, wanted their touch, and liked their idiosyncrasies. Falling in love with your spouse wasn't hard. In fact, it was a completely natural and spontaneous experience. You didn't have to DO anything. That's why it's called "falling" in love... because it's happening TO YOU.People in love sometimes say, "I was swept off my feet." Think about the imagery of that expression. It implies that you were just standing there; doing nothing, and then something came along and happened TO YOU.

Falling is love is easy. It's a passive and spontaneous experience. But after a few years of marriage, the euphoria of love fades. It's the natural cycle of EVERY relationship. Slowly but surely, phone calls become a bother (if they come at all), touch is not always welcome (when it happens), and your spouse's idiosyncrasies, instead of being cute, drive you nuts.The symptoms of this stage vary with every relationship, but if you think about your marriage, you will notice a dramatic difference between the initial stage when you were in love and a much duller or even angry subsequent stage. At this point, you and/or your spouse might start asking,

"Did I marry the right person?" And as you and your spouse reflect on the euphoria of the love you once had, you may begin to desire that experience with someone else. This is when marriages breakdown. People blame their spouse for their unhappiness and look outside their marriage for fulfillment.

Extramarital fulfillment comes in all shapes and sizes. Infidelity is the most obvious. But sometimes people turn to work, church, a hobby, a friendship, excessive TV, or abusive substances. But the answer to this dilemma does NOT lie outside your marriage. It lies within it. I'm not saying that you couldn't fall in love with someone else. You could. And TEMPORARILY you'd feel better. But you'd be in the same situation a few years later.

Because (listen carefully to this): The Key To Succeeding In Marriage Is Not Finding The Right Person; It's Learning To Love The Person You Found! SUSTAINING love is not a passive or spontaneous experience. It'll NEVER just happen to you. You can't "find" LASTING love. You have to "make" it day in and day out. That's why we have the _expression "the labor of love." Because it takes time, effort, and energy. And most importantly, it takes WISDOM. You have to know WHAT TO DO to make your marriage work. Make no mistake about it. Love is NOT a mystery. There are specific things you can do (with or without your spouse) to succeed with your marriage. Just as there are physical laws of the universe (such as gravity), there are also laws for relationships. Just as the right diet and exercise program makes you physically stronger, certain habits in your relationship WILL make your marriage stronger. It's a direct cause and effect. If you know and apply the laws, the results are predictable... you can "make" love. Love in marriage is indeed a "decision"... not just a feeling."

In a nutshell

2009-01-22T18:58:00.006+05:30

Click to Enlarge.

This one's for detroit

2009-01-16T09:13:00.005+05:30

Calvin's of his Lemonade Stand's business perspective and the American Auto Industry. Ring a bell? Click to Enlarge.

Ecshew Obfuscation?

2008-12-25T12:04:00.005+05:30

Intimidate the reader. That's the magic bullet. In High Tech companies, engineers love to wallow in complicated and meaningless jargon, acronyms and sentences.
Pull out a Product Requirements Document or a Software Functional Specification and nine out of ten times, no other engineer sans the one who wrote it will fully comprehend the document. why? The Engineer very crudely camouflages his craving for awe from his peers by complicating simple market needs and research capabilities. A fresher pulls out the document, spend a futile 8 hours demystifying it and eventually gives up and resorts to pinging every honcho in the team to solve a issue. The result is an avoidable waste of time which eventually eats into productivity.

Another disturbing current i see in high tech companies is the lack of synergy between the product managers and the developers.
Product Managers are often viewed as watch dogs of the senior management. In high technology companies, the Development and Product Management teams are loath to collaborate and this lack of synergy is dangerous for the company and the market. Developers are convinced that they do "all the work in the world" while the product management team "punch in dates on excel sheets". Well while this could be true in some companies, it is a mockery of both the roles. Product Management teams are the voice of the customer's/market's problems while the development teams architect a solution for these problems. Pragmatic Marketing has some interesting insights into Product Management at http://pragmaticmarketing.typepad.com/productmarketing/

The snippet below is borrowed from an e-book by Steve Johnson. Sums it all up nicely.

"Product managers bring a powerful combination of skills: product and technology expertise combined with market and domain knowledge as well as business savvy.
Marketing people know how to communicate; product managers know what to communicate.
Sales people know what one customer wants to buy; product managers must determine if the
deal represents a single customer or a market full of customers.
Developers know what can be built; product managers know whether it should be built.
Many people are concerned with this release, this model, this deal, this customer. Who in your
organization is focused on next year and the one after, the next product, the next market?
Product management is a strategic role focused on what products and markets we can serve
in the years to come."

Webjacked?

2008-12-14T18:59:00.003+05:30

What if the www is compromised? Name one major corporation that doesn't directly/indirecly derive at least a third of its revenue from the network. Banking transactions, Emails, E-Checks, Credit Transactions, security files, personal profiles..more than a trillion dollars at stake. What if the internet is brought down? Magically, say, i acquire a key to shut down the internet? That would probably be worse than the current financial avalanche. The article below is a grim reminder of the power of the internet.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-12/ff_kaminsky?currentPage=all#

Spirit of Bakrid

2008-12-09T12:08:00.016+05:30

Islam is certainly intriguing and the more i read about it. The problem as i see it is, this symbolism of sacrifice is subject to radical misinterpretations.

Ramzan is over. Bakrid, which falls into Zil Hajj, the month of sacrifice, has arrived, to commemorate the sacrifice of his dear son Ismail by Prophet Abraham (Ibrahim to Muslims) in execution of the demand made by Allah.

The spirit of this sacrifice lies in that to please Allah the true Muslim would sacrifice even the life of his dear ones, nay, even himself. But God Almighty has not asked us to sacrifice our sons to please Him. That kind of supreme sacrifice He reserved only for his Prophets, even a tithe of which we ordinary mortals can never hope to emulate. The Lord knows we mortals are weak, and so He has only asked us to make a symbolic sacrifice, that of an animal —- a sheep, or a camel, just to remind us of that greatest of all sacrifices in history — the sacrifice of a beloved son by a father, that of Ismail by the Prophet Abraham (Ibrahim).But today, we fail to offer even this symbolic sacrifice or we fail to get into the real spirit of it. We order a sheep or two, ask our servants to tie them up till we are good and ready to offer the sacrifice. It is essential to take some trouble to see that the animal is fit and healthy, just as Ismail was before he was sacrificed. We don't take the trouble to sacrifice the animal ourselves like the Prophet Ibrahim did. Many Muslims hire somebody to do the job. Even the job of giving the animal a bath before sacrifice like the Prophet did with his son is given to some menials. The real spirit behind Qurbani (sacrifice) thus gets eroded. The personal touches like feeding the animal, bathing it etc. are symbolic of the care with which Prophet Ibrahim prepared his son for the sacrifice. Sacrificing the only son, who is hale and hearty, calls for the greatest of devotion to the Almighty. That is why the same care has to be taken of the sacrificial animal. Animal sacrifice is only a symbol.

The deeper and larger significance lies in carrying this spirit into our life and translating it into acts of sacrifice to help our fellowmen. For example, when you have just acquired the necessary cash to secure admission for your son or daughter in an engineering or medical college along comes a poor fellow who must admit his dear one in a nursing home immediately to save her life. You help the poor fellow with the cash reserved for your children, thus sacrificing your ambition. The satisfaction you get out of this act of sacrifice far outweighs the advantage of securing admission for your child. This is the real spirit of Qurbani.

Jewish response? Got this one from wikipedia. Interesting differences in interpretation. i am wondering if these interpretations have effected the evolution of the two communities and their cultures.

-The majority of Jewish Biblical commentators argue that God was testing Abraham to see if he would actually kill his own son, as a test of his loyalty. However, a number of Jewish Biblical commentators from the mediæval era, and many in the modern era, do not agree with this notion. They read the text in another way.The early rabbinic midrash Genesis Rabbah imagines God as saying "I never considered telling Abraham to slaughter Isaac (using the Hebrew root letters for "slaughter", not "sacrifice")". Rabbi Yona Ibn Janach (that God demanded only a symbolic sacrifice. Rabbi Yosef Ibn Caspi (Spain, early 14th century) wrote that Abraham's "imagination" led him astray, making him believe that he had been commanded to sacrifice his son. Ibn Caspi writes "How could God command such a revolting thing?"
But according to Rabbi J. H. Hertz (Chief Rabbi of the British Empire), child sacrifice was actually "rife among the Semitic peoples," and suggests that "in that age, it was astounding that Abraham's God should have interposed to prevent the sacrifice, not that He should have asked for it." Hertz interprets the Akedah as demonstrating to the Jews that human sacrifice is abhorrent. "Unlike the cruel heathen deities, it was the spiritual surrender alone that God required." In Jeremiah 32:35, God states that the later Israelite practice of child sacrifice to the deity Molech "had [never] entered My mind that they should do this abomination."Other rabbinic scholars also note that Abraham was willing to do everything to spare his son, even if it meant going against the divine command: while it was God who ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son, it was an angel, a lesser being in the celestial hierarchy, that commanded him to stop.
However, the actions and words of angels (from the Greek for "messenger") are generally understood to derive directly from God's will, and indeed, the angel in question speaks as if he were God Himself.In some later Jewish writings, most notably those of the Hasidic masters, the theology of a "divine test" is rejected, and the sacrifice of Isaac is interpreted as a "punishment" for Abraham's earlier "mistreatment" of Ishmael, his elder son, whom he expelled from his household at the request of his wife, Sarah. According to this view, Abraham failed to show compassion for his son, so God punished him by ostensibly failing to show compassion for Abraham's son. This is a somewhat flawed theory, however, since the Bible says that God agreed with Sarah, and it was only at His insistence that Abraham actually had Ishmael leave.

In The Last Trial, Shalom Spiegel argues that these commentators were interpreting the Biblical narration as an implicit rebuke against Christianity's claim that God would sacrifice His own son.In The Binding of Isaac, Religious Murders & Kabbalah, Lippman Bodoff argues that Abraham never intended to actually sacrifice his son, and that he had faith that God had no intention that he do so.In The Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides argues that the story of the Binding of Isaac contains two "great notions." First, Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac demonstrates the limit of humanity's capability to both love and fear God. Second, because Abraham acted on a prophetic vision of what God had asked him to do, the story exemplifies how prophetic revelation has the same truth value as philosophical argument and thus carries equal certainty, notwithstanding the fact that it comes in a dream or vision.

New World Order

2008-12-09T11:27:00.004+05:30

LETTER TO A MUSLIM

by Tariq Ali

Remember when you approached me after the big antiwar meeting in November 2001 (I think it was Glasgow) and asked whether I was a believer? I have not forgotten the shock you registered when I replied "no", or the comment of your friend ("our parents warned us against you"), or the angry questions which the pair of you then began to hurl at me like darts. All of that made me think, and this is my reply for you and all the others like you who asked similar questions elsewhere in Europe and North America.

When we spoke, I told you that my criticism of religion and those who use it for political ends was not a case of being diplomatic in public. Exploiters and manipulators have always used religion self-righteously to further their own selfish ends. It's true that this is not the whole story. There are, of course, deeply sincere people of religion in different parts of the world who genuinely fight on the side of the poor, but they are usually in conflict with organized religion themselves.

The Catholic Church victimized worker or peasant priests who organized against oppression. The Iranian ayatollahs dealt severely with Muslims who preached in favor of a social radicalism. If I genuinely believed that this radical Islam was the way forward for humanity, I would not hesitate to say so in public, whatever the consequences. I know that many of your friends love chanting the name "Osama" and I know that they cheered on September 11, 2001. They were not alone. It happened all over the world, but had nothing to do with religion. I know of Argentine students who walked out when a teacher criticized Osama. I know a Russian teenager who e-mailed a one-word message - "Congratulations" - to his Russian friends whose parents had settled outside New York, and they replied: "Thanks. It was great." We talked, I remember, of the Greek crowds at football matches who refused to mourn for the two minutes the government had imposed and instead broke the silence with anti-American chants.

But none of this justifies what took place. What lies behind the vicarious pleasure is not a feeling of strength, but a terrible weakness. The people of Indo-China suffered more than any Muslim country at the hands of the US government. They were bombed for 15 whole years and lost millions of their people. Did they even think of bombing America? Nor did the Cubans or the Chileans or the Brazilians. The last two fought against the US-imposed military regimes at home and finally triumphed.

Today, people feel powerless. And so when America is hit they celebrate. They don't ask what such an act will achieve, what its consequences will be and who will benefit. Their response, like the event itself, is purely symbolic.
I think that Osama and his group have reached a political dead-end. It was a grand spectacle, but nothing more. The US, in responding with a war, has enhanced the importance of the action, but I doubt if even that will rescue it from obscurity in the future. It will be a footnote in the history of this century. In political, economic or military terms it was barely a pinprick.

What do the Islamists offer? A route to a past which, mercifully for the people of the seventh century, never existed. If the "Emirate of Afghanistan" is the model for what they want to impose on the world then the bulk of Muslims would rise up in arms against them. Don't imagine that either Osama or Mullah Omar represent the future of Islam. It would be a major disaster for the culture we both share if that turned out to be the case. Would you want to live under those conditions? Would you tolerate your sister, your mother or the woman you love being hidden from public view and only allowed out shrouded like a corpse?
I want to be honest with you. I opposed this latest Afghan war. I do not accept the right of big powers to change governments as and when it affects their interests. But I did not shed any tears for the Taliban as they shaved their beards and ran back home. This does not mean that those who have been captured should be treated like animals or denied their elementary rights according to the Geneva convention, but as I've argued elsewhere, the fundamentalism of the American Empire has no equal today. They can disregard all conventions and laws at will. The reason they are openly mistreating prisoners they captured after waging an illegal war in Afghanistan is to assert their power before the world - hence they humiliate Cuba by doing their dirty work on its soil - and warn others who attempt to twist the lion's tail that the punishment will be severe.

I remember how, during the cold war, the CIA and its indigenous recruits tortured political prisoners and raped them in many parts of Latin America. During the Vietnam war the US violated most of the Geneva conventions. They tortured and executed prisoners, raped women, threw prisoners out of helicopters to die on the ground or drown in the sea, and all this, of course, in the name of freedom.

Because many people in the west believe the nonsense about "humanitarian interventions", they are shocked by these acts, but this is relatively mild compared with the crimes committed in the last century by the Empire. I've met many of our people in different parts of the world since September 11. One question is always repeated: "Do you think we Muslims are clever enough to have done this?" I always answer "Yes". Then I ask who they think is responsible, and the answer is invariably "Israel". Why? "To discredit us and make the Americans attack our countries." I gently expose their wishful illusions, but the conversation saddens me. Why are so many Muslims sunk in this torpor? Why do they wallow in so much self-pity? Why is their sky always overcast? Why is it always someone else who is to blame?

Sometimes when we talk I get the impression that there is not a single Muslim country of which they can feel really proud. Those who have migrated from South Asia are much better treated in Britain than in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf States. It is here that something has to happen. The Arab world is desperate for a change. Over the years, in every discussion with Iraqis, Syrians, Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians and Palestinians, the same questions are raised, the same problems recur. We are suffocating. Why can't we breathe? Everything seems static: our economy, our politics, our intellectuals and, most of all, our religion.

Palestine suffers every day. The west does nothing. Our governments are dead. Our politicians are corrupt. Our people are ignored. Is it surprising that some are responsive to the Islamists? Who else offers anything these days? The US? It doesn't even want democracy, not even in little Qatar, and for a very simple reason. If we elected our own governments they might demand that the US close down its bases. Would it? They already resent al-Jazeera television because it has different priorities from them. It was fine when al-Jazeera attacked corruption within the Arab elite. Thomas Friedman even devoted a whole column to praise of al-Jazeera in the New York Times. He saw it as a sign of democracy coming to the Arab world. No longer. Because democracy means the right to think differently, and al-Jazeera showed pictures of the Afghan war that were not shown on the US networks, so Bush and Blair put pressure on Qatar to stop unfriendly broadcasts.

For the west, democracy means believing in exactly the same things that they believe. Is that really democracy? If we elected our own government, in one or two countries people might elect Islamists. Would the west leave us alone? Did the French government leave the Algerian military alone? No. They insisted that the elections of 1990 and 1991 be declared null and void. French intellectuals described the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) as "Islamo-fascists", ignoring the fact that they had won an election. Had they been allowed to become the government, divisions already present within them would have come to the surface. The army could have warned that any attempt to tamper with the rights guaranteed to citizens under the constitution would not be tolerated. It was only when the original leaders of the FIS had been eliminated that the more lumpen elements came to the fore and created mayhem. Should we blame them for the civil war, or those in Algiers and Paris who robbed them of their victory? The massacres in Algeria are horrendous. Is it only the Islamists who are responsible? What happened in Bentalha, 10 miles south of Algiers, on the night of September 22, 1997? Who slaughtered the 500 men, women and children of that township? Who? The Frenchman who knows everything, Bernard-Henri Levy, is sure it was the Islamists who perpetrated this dreadful deed. Then why did the army deny the local population arms to defend itself? Why did it tell the local militia to go away that night? Why did the security forces not intervene when they could see what was going on? Why does M Levy believe that the Maghreb has to be subordinated to the needs of the French republic, and why does nobody attack this sort of fundamentalism?

We know what we have to do, say the Arabs, but every time the west intervenes it sets our cause back many years. So if they want to help, they should stay out. That's what my Arab friends say, and I agree with this approach. Look at Iran. The western gaze turned benevolent during the assault on Afghanistan. Iran was needed for the war, but let the west watch from afar. The imperial fundamentalists are talking about the "axis of evil", which includes Iran. An intervention there would be fatal. A new generation has experienced clerical oppression. It has known nothing else. Stories about the shah are part of its prehistory. These young men and women are sure about one thing if nothing else. They don't want the ayatollahs to rule them any more. Even though Iran, in recent years, has not been as bad as Saudi Arabia or the late "Emirate of Afghanistan", it has not been good for the people.

Let me tell you a story. A couple of years ago I met a young Iranian film-maker in Los Angeles. His name was Moslem Mansouri. He had managed to escape with several hours of filmed interviews for a documentary he was making. He had won the confidence of three Tehran prostitutes and filmed them for more than two years. He showed me some of the footage. They talked to him quite openly. They described how the best pick-ups were at religious festivals. I got a flavor of the film from the transcripts he sent me. One of the women tells him: "Today everyone is forced to sell their bodies! Women like us have to tolerate a man for 10,000 toomans. Young people need to be in a bed together, even for 10 minutes . . . It is a primary need . . . it calms them down. "When the government does not allow it, then prostitution grows. We don't even need to talk about prostitution, the government has taken away the right to speak with the opposite sex freely in public . . . In the parks, in the cinemas, or in the streets, you can't talk to the person sitting next to you. On the streets, if you talk to a man, the 'Islamic guard' interrogates you endlessly. Today in our country, nobody is satisfied! Nobody has security. I went to a company to get a job. The manager of the company, a bearded guy, looked at my face and said, 'I will hire you and I'll give you 10,000 toomans more than the pay rate.' I said, 'You can at least test my computer skills to see if I'm proficient or not . . .' He said, 'I hire you for your looks!' I knew that if I had to work there, I had to have sex with him at least once a day.

"Wherever you go it's like this! I went to a special family court - for divorce -- and begged the judge, a clergyman, to give me my child's custody. I told him, 'Please . . . I beg you to give me the custody of my child. I'll be your Kaniz . . . ["Kaniz" means servant. This is a Persian expression which basically means 'I beg you, I am very desperate'.] What do you think the guy said? He said, 'I don't need a servant! I need a woman!' What do you expect of others when the clergyman, the head of the court, says this? I went to the officer to get my divorce signed, instead he said I should not get divorced and instead get married again without divorce, illegally. Because he said without a husband it will be hard to find a job. He was right, but I didn't have money to pay him . . . These things make you age faster . . . you get depressed . . . you have a lot of stress and it damages you. Perhaps there is a means to get out of this . . . "

Moslem was distraught because none of the American networks wanted to buy the film. They didn't want to destabilize Khatami's regime! Moslem himself is a child of the Revolution. Without it he would never have become a film-maker. He comes from a very poor family. His father is a muezzin and his upbringing was ultra-religious. Now he hates religion. He refused to fight in the war against Iraq. He was arrested. This experience transformed him. "The prison was a hard but good experience for me. It was in the prison that I felt I am reaching a stage of intellectual maturity. I was resisting and I enjoyed my sense of strength. I felt that I saved my life from the corrupted world of clergies and this is a price I was paying for it. I was proud of it. After one year in prison, they told me that I would be released on the condition that I sign papers stating that I will participate in Friday sermons and religious activities. I refused to sign. They kept me in the prison for one more year."

Afterwards he took a job on a film magazine as a reporter. "I thought my work in the media would serve as a cover for my own projects, which were to document the hideous crimes of the political regime itself. I knew that I would not be able to make the kind of films I really want to make due to the censorship regulations. Any scenario that I would write would have never got the permission of the Islamic censorship office. I knew that my time and energy would get wasted. So I decided to make eight documentaries secretly. I smuggled the footage out of Iran. Due to financial problems I've only been able to finish editing two of my films. One is Close Up, Long Shot and the other is Shamloo, The Poet Of Liberty.

"The first film is about the life of Hossein Sabzian, who was the main character of Abbas Kiarostami's drama-documentary called Close Up. A few years after Kiarostami's film, I went to visit Sabzian. He loves cinema. His wife and children get frustrated with him and finally leave him. Today, he lives in a village on the outskirts of Tehran and has come to the conclusion that his love for cinema has resulted in nothing but misery. In my film he says, 'People like me get destroyed in societies like the one we live in. We can never present ourselves. There are two types of dead: flat and walking. We are the walking dead!'"

We could find stories like this and worse in every Muslim country. There is a big difference between the Muslims of the diaspora -- those whose parents migrated to the western lands -- and those who still live in the House of Islam. The latter are far more critical because religion is not crucial to their identity. It's taken for granted that they are Muslims. In Europe and North America things are different. Here an official multiculturalism has stressed difference at the expense of all else. Its rise correlates with a decline in radical politics as such.

"Culture" and "religion" are softer, euphemistic substitutes for socioeconomic inequality - as if diversity, rather than hierarchy, were the central issue in North American or European society today. I have spoken to Muslims from the Maghreb (France), from Anatolia (Germany); from Pakistan and Bangladesh (Britain), from everywhere (United States) and a South Asian sprinkling in Scandinavia. Why is it, I often ask myself, that so many are like you? They have become much more orthodox and rigid than the robust and vigorous peasants of Kashmir and the Punjab, whom I used to know so well.

The British prime minister is a great believer in single-faith schools. The American president ends each speech with "God Save America". Osama starts and ends each TV interview by praising Allah. All three have the right to do so, just as I have the right to remain committed to most of the values of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment attacked religion -- Christianity, mainly -- for two reasons: that it was a set of ideological delusions, and that it was a system of institutional oppression, with immense powers of persecution and intolerance. Why should we abandon either of these legacies today?

I don't want you to misunderstand me. My aversion to religion is by no means confined to Islam alone. And nor do I ignore the role which religious ideologies have played in the past in order to move the world forward. It was the ideological clashes between two rival interpretations of Christianity -- the Protestant Reformation versus the Catholic Counter-Reformation -- that led to volcanic explosions in Europe. Here was an example of razor-sharp intellectual debates fuelled by theological passions, leading to a civil war, followed by a revolution.

The 16th-century Dutch revolt against Spanish occupation was triggered off by an assault on sacred images in the name of confessional correctness. The introduction of a new prayer book in Scotland was one of the causes of the 17th-century Puritan Revolution in England, the refusal to tolerate
Catholicism sparked off its successor in 1688. The intellectual ferment did not cease and a century later the ideas of the Enlightenment stoked the furnaces of revolutionary France. The Church of England and the Vatican now combined to contest the new threat, but ideas of popular sovereignty and republics were too strong to be easily obliterated.

I can almost hear your question. What has all this got to do with us? A great deal, my friend. Western Europe had been fired by theological passions, but these were now being transcended. Modernity was on the horizon. This was a dynamic that the culture and economy of the Ottoman Empire could never mimic. The Sunni-Shia divide had come too soon and congealed into rival dogmas. Dissent had, by this time, been virtually wiped out in Islam. The Sultan, flanked by his religious scholars, ruled a state-Empire that was going to wither away and die.

If this was already the case in the 18th century, how much truer it is today. Perhaps the only way in which Muslims will discover this is through their own experiences, as in Iran. The rise of religion is partially explained by the lack of any other alternative to the universal regime of neoliberalism. Here you will discover that as long as Islamist governments open their countries to global penetration, they will be permitted to do what they want in the sociopolitical realm.

The American Empire used Islam before and it can do so again. Here lies the challenge. We are in desperate need of an Islamic Reformation that sweeps away the crazed conservatism and backwardness of the fundamentalists but, more than that, opens up the world of Islam to new ideas which are seen to be more advanced than what is currently on offer from the west.

This would necessitate a rigid separation of state and mosque; the dissolution of the clergy; the assertion by Muslim intellectuals of their right to interpret the texts that are the collective property of Islamic culture as a whole; the freedom to think freely and rationally and the freedom of imagination. Unless we move in this direction we will be doomed to reliving old battles and thinking not of a richer and humane future, but of how we can move from the present to the past. It is an unacceptable vision. I've let my pen run away with me and preached my heresies for too long. I doubt that I will change, but I hope you will.

the human network effect

2008-12-08T20:12:00.003+05:30

Interesting article on
http://www.brandchannel.com/features_profile.asp?pr_id=416

The brand is being positioned very sensibly but Cisco has to put more capital into R&D.
Although we are stepping up efforts to leverage research output from academia, i doubt if it is commensurate with cisco's monolithic presence in the networking market. The economy is nuked and high tech companies will choose to restructure and shape up. Notwithstanding this, i am proud of the leadership council at Cisco - John Chambers and team are living lessons in Management Education.

Power sharing?

2008-12-03T15:28:00.005+05:30

An Article i penned for a Mag some time back. Fished it out to give it some bashing.

“Power no longer flows from the barrel of the gun; it flows from the click of the mouse.”

With routers, switches, server farms and computers coming together to vanquish physical boundaries, the world seems to be getting smaller by the minute.
The network and the internet which are no longer synonymous with the computer are bringing bits and bytes of people closer to each other with scant regard to walls or fences. This is indeed, a milestone in the domain of communication and collaboration. So has the click of the mouse rewritten history? Although this brouhaha about technology is an eternal saga for those who use it and benefit from it, this context of thought throws up, among other obvious questions, one special thought reeking of hope: Has the click of the mouse prevailed over the power of the power of the gun? Where exactly does the click of a mouse take you? Does it give you a handle to transcend boundaries of all kinds? Well yes, it does do that with all but the boundaries in the mind. While the world is tub thumping about the computer and related technologies having dispensed with all physical boundaries, a little known abstraction called the mental boundary doesn’t find many takers. Although this omission does seem innocuous, it can mislead if the larger impact of technology warrants a holistic evaluation. Further, with technology making the impossible seem like child’s play, it does sound like only the high cynics among us would ponder over its suggested prominence.

The power of the computer and related technology can no doubt be leveraged for solving multiple socio-economic problems, but it would be hasty to conclude that technology has already spelt the death knell for most plagues of the present. Man invented the computer, the abacus, the web, the calculator and what have you. These inventions have come together to effect our lives in many different ways. Technology has given us power, no doubt. But how does this power compare with the power of the gun? Has this power which has enabled people to change the face of cultures also rewritten power equations? Has the click of the mouse taken over from the gun? Before this can be answered, it would be germane to understand what constitutes brute force. The history of barbarism on this planet is far too evident for reiteration. What is missing in popular communal awareness is the larger root cause. It’s easy, convenient even, to unequivocally to hold the candle for technology. The world seems to be running on technology, but its plain ignorance to assume that technology actually reaches the entire world or to assume that technology per se is the next messiah.

Let’s take a quick diversion and jump into the world of brute force. Why and how did Brute force work in the first place? The power of the gun has always been the power of the man holding the gun. Since this power was so insurmountable at first, it corrupted. It’s not a bad idea to rid the world of this brute force but it’s impossible to erase memories. The vicious cycle that began with the advent of this force continues to swallow more lives. Brute force has been and will possibly be used as an index of power and hegemony. The hopeful ones will persist and probably ask, has this brute force given way to a preoccupation with technology and its ramifications? Yes and No. The gun, which can take a life with the very same click as that of a mouse, will always be feared for the power it bestows upon the user. Zooming out and contemplating the use of this power for nations, one can see that conflicts are inevitable and the gun will continue to hold sway in every tussle. However, with the entire world converging on technology, it may sound fair to give the computer and the internet a patient hearing. The only flaw in this premise, however, is the smug assumption that the entire world refers to the entire physical world. So we are back to where we started. Does the entire world actually run on technology?

The barrel of the gun is just not a metaphor for war but a representation of a complex tapestry of helplessness, be it terrorism or poverty. The power which the gun totes seems an inevitable de facto option for most, given the current socio-economic world order. With poverty lines being redrawn all the time without any let up on the numbers, one would be jumping the gun by calling technology the messiah. While computers and the internet have made a significant splash in the world order, little has changed for those who were way below the threshold of reach. Given the status quo, brute force seems to take precedence over any super computer or technology. While petite clicks of the mouse may have changed the way we work or live, it is yet to dent the real world. Looking eastward at the conflict ridden Somalia, I am tempted to use the country and its state of affairs as a testimony for my premise. The world that exists today is panting and groaning with more than half of the populace shadowed by abject living conditions. Terrorism is not a fancy word any more and wars are not history yet. This is the real world. The world as it exists now. So while the virtual world seems to be everywhere. The world is still ridden with strife where a country is forced to build nuclear arsenal for its security.
The mouse hasn’t made a dramatic entry into this world yet. It has caught attention, no doubt, but is yet to hold court.

The present is helpless. Technology, however, can make a difference in the future, if not the immediate present. The computer and the internet can be used to raise awareness, to make medical services pervasive, to spread literacy, to inform, to educate, to empower the citizens: The wish list continues ad infinitum, but how does the world translate this wish list to success? Tracing the former line of thought, the only boundaries you and I need to transcend to shape the future are our mental boundaries. Are you willing to take time off your schedule and spend all your weekends teaching kids at an orphanage so that they turn out to be good and responsible citizens (with what ever technology can aid you with, from laptops to Telepresence)? The answer, no doubt will sound benevolent but in very few instances will it transmute to anything promised. This is probably the crux of the problem. With these questions strewn all over, it does seem like there is some way to go before technology of any sort, completely replaces the gun.
There is no magic wand for selfishness, prejudice and hate to do a disappearing act. Mental boundaries will remain independent of technology. While there is enough latitude to shape this future, it would be premature to give the computer world the upper hand now.
Multiple internet kiosk and computer centers have been set up in rural and semi-urban belts to expand the circle of technology. This is a great initiative and deserves kudos but may not be the ultimate solution to do away with brute force. Transcending mental boundaries is an all encompassing convenient answer, but what are the finer details? To quote ramesh ramanathan “A healthy society is not some magic carpet that allows us to fly off in the pursuit of our personal dreams, but rather a complex tapestry where each of us has a strand to weave”. How much we give back to the society probably makes the real difference in the larger power equations and this will come about only if you and I can transcend boundaries of prejudice and selfishness. Technology is but a tool to expedite the process. The future cannot be shaped by technology alone. “Power no longer flows from the barrel of the gun; it flows from the click of the mouse.” Divine rhythm, no doubt, but not the real beat.

Over the Edge?

2008-12-03T09:11:00.006+05:30

Has it boiled down to the majority feeling oppressed? what intrigues me is the color of the majority - Hindu. Have terrorists [predominantly from the muslim community] pinched a very irritable part of the Hindu flesh? Intellects from all over are wont to chide the Hindus for Gujarat, Babri masjid etc..now this is a very very convenient stance. How come terrorism with an islam facet all over the world is an exception?
Looks like the Sangh and related outfits (who were never the rational lot to begin with) are gearing up for a Holy War. Peace doesn't sell with terrorists. Dialogoes don't buy truce with Pakistan. So we take the bull by its horns? I wouldn't have given the slightest of thought to this monstrosity called vengeance before. But i realize no community is free of flaws and its irrational to expect the entire hindu community to forget and move on. Every community has a breaking point and a weak link. As long as you don't breach the weak link , you are good. The moment you pique the sensitive part, things are going to get mucky. Harming/Maiming another human being is not justified, but where does the threshold lie?
Terrorism, be it Hindu or Islam cannot be justified but its important to understand why/how it comes about without blindly deriding the Sangh outfits for their brutal acts. Every community is a like a human being - wise and othervice.

http://francoisgautier.wordpress.com/2008/11/01/the-hindu-rate-of-wrath/
is an interesting read in this context.

Also http://in.rediff.com/cms/print.jsp?docpath=/news/2008/dec/02mumterror-pakistan-will-have-to-pay-a-heavy-price.htm is an interesting read. I wound't go so far as to accept MJ's voice as the vox populi of the entire muslim community though.

Compiling randomness

2008-11-23T15:02:00.002+05:30

I am through twelve pages in the book but i am tempted to jump the canon. I am fascinated to say the least. After a lot of sinusoidal cycles of success and failure past, i realized its easier to live my life if i chartered my journey and sailed along peacefully exploring possibilities rather than charter every cause and event. These cause and events are unpredictable because complexity begets complexity and you and i are complex products of a complex blob.
While we don't have to demystify every conundrum in this complexity, its important to respect randomness. Randomness breaks patterns and paves the way for new thoughts and ideas. This randomness can break a relationship or bridge people in a way that outsmarts the most clairvoyant.
This excites me. Although i have given it a thought before, my ecosystem conditioned my mind to plan every step. This is a mistake. Its important to plan a trip but let each pitstop unravel at its own accord. This not only gives me a kick but i realize that i enjoy my journey all the more by being aware of the existence of a black swan along the way.
That's all.....i can breathe easy now.

Vaaranam Aayiram - Surya for President

2008-11-19T08:39:00.004+05:30

I see a lot of people who couldn't last in the theater for more than an hour through the movie. There are others like me who want to see the movie again..and again..
It's the theme i guess. very deeply reflective and this narration suits people who have been there, done that. Vicarious feelings and thoughts cannot keep you going through the movie.
The last movie i saw was Dasavatharam and i was so disgusted with the shoddy treatment..absurd mockery of intelligence and varanaam aayiram was such a wonderful whiff of scented breeze....
I've always loved gautam menon's connotations, they seem so much closer to reality...his depictions..This is probably where Mani Ratnam fails to spark me...with mani, it is [emotions] [cinema][characters sounding pretense][emotions..back and forth]

Surya is a marvel. His first few movies showed a camera conscious awkwardly built stub unable to pull it off. In his last few movies...well he's been on top depicting multiple characters with facility [also the reason i crack up when i see a vijay depicting two different characters via a change of wardrobes and wrist watches]

I loved this movie and i couldn't help feel disgusted for feeling so mawkish at the theatre. But it releives me to have relived moments and hold on to memories and move on, which is the motif i saw in the movie.
Now the average joe movie, not a forrest gump either [why in the world did this comparison come up in many reviews? its forrest gump...never..compare anyone/anything with this one] but a emotional roller coaster ride for some.

"Outside"

2008-11-15T16:27:00.002+05:30

Something about Indian Poems..may be the color . Even the punctuations seem to beg for intelligence and interpretation.
Translated from Hindi (Unknown) -

"I closed the door
and sat down to write a poem
There was a breeze blowing
and a little light
a bicycle stood in the rain
a child was returning home

I wrote a poem
which had no breeze no light
no bicycle no child
and no
door"

For all us Dummies

2008-10-17T16:39:00.004+05:30

Fantastic Speech on the Indian Economy and the present Crises. The speaker has dissected
the situation so effortlessly as to make it seem simplistic. For all of us Techies who never understood economics.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4343898391323537541&hl=en

...and here we go...

2008-10-12T14:02:00.002+05:30

Fantastic little snippet from a mail. CAPITALISM.....Welcome to the REAL World ...BITCH!!!!!!!!!

"Former prime minister Indira Gandhi was roundly condemned by the US and other Western powers when she nationalised banks in this country in order to ensure that credit reached the poor and powerless. Deemed to be a socialist - or communist-like measure -, it has now been adopted without any qualms by the avowed world leader of free market economies. It seems the US government had little choice, as otherwise widespread mayhem may have resulted for the average citizen both within America and abroad.
In the case of AIG especially, it was recognized that the sudden collapse of the largest insurer in the world would wreak havoc globally. Besides the timing of these events could not have been worse for the Bush administration as the presidential elections are just weeks away. It thus had little option but to carry out damage control as rapidly as possible.
Clearly the rules of the game change for Western economies during crisis. Nationalisation can be resorted to when the American people need to be protected but the same measure can be decried when a developing economy needs to do so to similarly protect its far more impoverished citizenry.
The nationalization of banks in India opened the way for ordinary people to use the financial system for small and tiny deposits. It paved the way for what is known as compulsory priority sector lending. In other words, banks had to provide a certain amount of credit for agriculture and rural areas. In the normal course, commercial banks only lend to sectors providing assured and fairly high returns. But Indian nationalised banks have a social obligation to fulfil and the directive to do so was made possible only by the drastic takeovers effected by Indira Gandhi in 1969.
Apart from banks, many other industries had to be nationalized to prevent millions of workers from becoming jobless. The perennially loss-making National Textile Corp is one such case when the government had to step in as private mill owners were closing shop and leaving their workers in the lurch. Though the corporation and its regional subsidiaries have rarely made profits, the mills under its charge have also performed a social obligation by producing cheap cloth meant for weaker sections of society. No doubt the nationalization process was carried too far, but at the time it seemed the only way out to save jobs in a country without any social safety nets for the jobless."

Wall Street all shook up

2008-09-18T15:39:00.002+05:30

That's Lehman..They paid kids fresh off their MBA a couple of millions.
They went down on Monday, hook line and sinker.
How? Well....may be this is how...and what does this mean for IT companies....? Time to shed fat.

Q: What is a sub-prime loan?
A: In the US, borrowers are rated either as 'prime' - indicating that they have a good credit rating based on their track record - or as 'sub-prime', meaning their track record in repaying loans has been below par. Loans given to sub-prime borrowers, something banks would normally be reluctant to do, are categorized as sub-prime loans. Typically, it is the poor and the young who form the bulk of sub-prime borrowers.
Q: Why loans were given?
A: In roughly five years leading up to 2007, many banks started giving loans to sub-prime borrowers, typically through subsidiaries. They did so because they believed that the real estate boom, which had more than doubled home prices in the US since 1997, would allow even people with dodgy credit backgrounds to repay on the loans they were taking to buy or build homes. Government also encouraged lenders to lend to sub-prime borrowers, arguing that this would help even the poor and young to buy houses.
With stock markets booming and the system flush with liquidity, many big fund investors like hedge funds and mutual funds saw sub-prime loan portfolios as attractive investment opportunities. Hence, they bought such portfolios from the original lenders. This in turn meant the lenders had fresh funds to lend. The subprime loan market thus became a fast growing segment.
Q: What was the interest rate on sub-prime loans?
A: Since the risk of default on such loans was higher, the interest rate charged on sub-prime loans was typically about two percentage points higher than the interest on prime loans. This, of course, only added to the risk of sub-prime borrowers defaulting. The repayment capacity of sub-prime borrowers was in any case doubtful. The higher interest rate additionally meant substantially higher EMIs than for prime borrowers, further raising the risk of default. Further, lenders devised new instruments to reach out to more sub-prime borrowers. Being flush with funds they were willing to compromise on prudential norms. In one of the instruments they devised, they asked the borrowers to pay only the interest portion to begin with. The repayment of the principal portion was to start after two years.
Q: How did this turn into a crisis? A: The housing boom in the US started petering out in 2007. One major reason was that the boom had led to a massive increase in the supply of housing. Thus house prices started falling. This increased the default rate among subprime borrowers, many of whom were no longer able or willing to pay through their nose to buy a house that was declining in value. Since in home loans in the US, the collateral is typically the home being bought, this increased the supply of houses for sale while lowering the demand, thereby lowering prices even further and setting off a vicious cycle. That this coincided with a slowdown in the US economy only made matters worse. Estimates are that US housing prices have dropped by almost 50% from their peak in 2006 in some cases. The declining value of the collateral means that lenders are left with less than the value of their loans and hence have to book losses.
Q: How did this become a systemic crisis?
A: One major reason is that the original lenders had further sold their portfolios to other players in the market. There were also complex derivatives developed based on the loan portfolios, which were also sold to other players, some of whom then sold it on further and so on.
As a result, nobody is absolutely sure what the size of the losses will be when the dust ultimately settles down. Nobody is also very sure exactly who will take how much of a hit. It is also important to realise that the crisis has not affected only reckless lenders. For instance, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which owned or guaranteed more than half of the roughly $12 trillion outstanding in home mortgages in the US, were widely perceived as being more prudent than most in their lending practices. However, the housing bust meant that they too had to suffer losses — $14 billion combined in the last four quarters - because of declining prices for their collateral and increased default rates.
The forced retreat of these two mortgage giants from the market, of course, only adds to every other player's woes.
Q: What has been the impact of the crisis?
A: Global banks and brokerages have had to write off an estimated $512 billion in sub-prime losses so far, with the largest hits taken by Citigroup ($55.1 bn) and Merrill Lynch ($52.2 bn). A little more than half of these losses, or $260 bn, have been suffered by US-based firms, $227 billion by European firms and a relatively modest $24 bn by Asian ones. Despite efforts by the US Federal Reserve to offer some financial assistance to the beleaguered financial sector, it has led to the collapse of Bear Sterns, one of the world's largest investment banks and securities trading firm. Bear Sterns was bought out by JP Morgan Chase with some help from the Fed.
The crisis has also seen Lehman Brothers - the fourth largest investment bank in the US - file for bankruptcy. Merrill Lynch has been bought out by Bank of America. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have effectively been nationalized to prevent them from going under.
Reports suggest that insurance major AIG (American Insurance Group) is also under severe pressure and has asked for a $40 bn bridge loan to tide over the crisis. If AIG also collapses, that would really test the entire financial sector.
Q: How is the rest of the world affected?
A: Apart from the fact that banks based in other parts of the world also suffered losses from the subprime market, there are two major ways in which the effect is felt across the globe. First, the US is the biggest borrower in the world since most countries hold their foreign exchange reserves in dollars and invest them in US securities.
Thus, any crisis in the US has a direct bearing on other countries, particularly those with large reserves like Japan, China and - to a lesser extent - India. Also, since global equity markets are closely interlinked through institutional investors, any crisis affecting these investors sees a contagion effect throughout the world.

There is no escaping reality, no denying reason

2008-09-14T20:10:00.005+05:30

I loved this movie. A lot of people did. However, after in the first version, it grew into an obsession with special effects. I don't know if i pegged this wrong but, it did certainly look and sound that way with the Escape-Velocity fights becoming the cynosure and probably defining the movie itself. The motif however, as it ran in the first version, seemed to be incredibly elastic to interpretations. With multiple allusions to Semitic faiths and illusory perceptions, The matrix seemed to be this elegant giant which reflected every facet of the human existence. A lot of authors have had a uneventful run with their connotations because the theme of the movie was far too liquid to attain a definitive shape.
The fabulous write up below examines one among the many parallels. It's a long article, so if you are the "just poking around", don't even start.

Beyond Left & Right
Escaping the Matrix

By Richard K. Moore

The defining dramatic moment in the film The Matrix occurs just after Morpheus invites Neo to choose between a red pill and a blue pill. The red pill promises “the truth, nothing more.” Neo takes the red pill and awakes to reality – something utterly different from anything Neo, or the audience, could have expected. What Neo had assumed to be reality turned out to be only a collective illusion, fabricated by the Matrix and fed to a population that is asleep, cocooned in grotesque embryonic pods. In Plato’s famous parable about the shadows on the walls of the cave, true reality is at least reflected in perceived reality. In the Matrix world, true reality and perceived reality exist on entirely different planes.

The story is intended as metaphor, and the parallels that drew my attention had to do with political reality. This article offers a particular perspective on what’s going on in the world – and how things got to be that way – in this era of globalisation. From that red-pill perspective, everyday media-consensus reality – like the Matrix in the film – is seen to be a fabricated collective illusion. Like Neo, I didn’t know what I was looking for when my investigation began, but I knew that what I was being told didn’t make sense. I read scores of histories and biographies, observing connections between them, and began to develop my own theories about roots of various historical events. I found myself largely in agreement with writers like Noam Chomsky and Michael Parenti, but I also perceived important patterns that others seem to have missed.

When I started tracing historical forces, and began to interpret present-day events from a historical perspective, I could see the same old dynamics at work and found a meaning in unfolding events far different from what official pronouncements proclaimed. Such pronouncements are, after all, public relations fare, given out by politicians who want to look good to the voters. Most of us expect rhetoric from politicians, and take what they say with a grain of salt. But as my own picture of present reality came into focus, “grain of salt” no longer worked as a metaphor. I began to see that consensus reality – as generated by official rhetoric and amplified by mass media – bears very little relationship to actual reality. “The matrix” was a metaphor I was ready for.

In consensus reality (the blue-pill perspective) “left” and “right” are the two ends of the political spectrum. Politics is a tug-of-war between competing factions, carried out by political parties and elected representatives. Society gets pulled this way and that within the political spectrum, reflecting the interests of whichever party won the last election. The left and right are therefore political enemies. Each side is convinced that it knows how to make society better; each believes the other enjoys undue influence; and each blames the other for the political stalemate that apparently prevents society from dealing effectively with its problems.

This perspective on the political process, and on the roles of left and right, is very far from reality. It is a fabricated collective illusion. Morpheus tells Neo that the Matrix is “the world that was pulled over your eyes to hide you from the truth.... As long as the Matrix exists, humanity cannot be free.” Consensus political reality is precisely such a matrix. Later we will take a fresh look at the role of left and right, and at national politics. But first we must develop our red-pill historical perspective. I’ve had to condense the arguments to bare essentials; please see the annotated sources at the end for more thorough treatments of particular topics.

Imperialism and the Matrix

From the time of Columbus to 1945, world affairs were largely dominated by competition among Western nations seeking to stake out spheres of influence, control sea lanes, and exploit colonial empires. Each Western power became the core of an imperialist economy whose periphery was managed for the benefit of the core nation. Military might determined the scope of an empire; wars were initiated when a core nation felt it had sufficient power to expand its periphery at the expense of a competitor. Economies and societies in the periphery were kept backward – to keep their populations under control, to provide cheap labour, and to guarantee markets for goods manufactured in the core. Imperialism robbed the periphery not only of wealth but also of its ability to develop its own societies, cultures, and economies in a natural way for local benefit.

The driving force behind Western imperialism has always been the pursuit of economic gain, ever since Isabella commissioned Columbus on his first entrepreneurial voyage. The rhetoric of empire concerning wars, however, has typically been about other things – the White Man’s Burden, bringing true religion to the heathens, Manifest Destiny, defeating the Yellow Peril or the Hun, seeking lebensraum, or making the world safe for democracy. Any fabricated motivation for war or empire would do, as long as it appealed to the collective consciousness of the population at the time. The propaganda lies of yesterday were recorded and became consensus history – the fabric of the matrix.

While the costs of territorial empire (fleets, colonial administrations, etc.) were borne by Western taxpayers generally, the profits of imperialism were enjoyed primarily by private corporations and investors. Government and corporate elites were partners in the business of imperialism: empires gave government leaders power and prestige, and gave corporate leaders power and wealth. Corporations ran the real business of empire while government leaders fabricated noble excuses for the wars that were required to keep that business going. Matrix reality was about patriotism, national honour, and heroic causes; true reality was on another plane altogether: that of economics.

Industrialisation, beginning in the late 1700s, created a demand for new markets and increased raw materials; both demands spurred accelerated expansion of empire. Wealthy investors amassed fortunes by setting up large-scale industrial and trading operations, leading to the emergence of an influential capitalist elite. Like any other elite, capitalists used their wealth and influence to further their own interests however they could. And the interests of capitalism always come down to economic growth; investors must reap more than they sow or the whole system comes to a grinding halt.

Thus capitalism, industrialisation, nationalism, warfare, imperialism – and the matrix – coevolved. Industrialised weapon production provided the muscle of modern warfare, and capitalism provided the appetite to use that muscle. Government leaders pursued the policies necessary to expand empire while creating a rhetorical matrix, around nationalism, to justify those policies. Capitalist growth depended on empire, which in turn depended on a strong and stable core nation to defend it. National interests and capitalist interests were inextricably linked – or so it seemed for more than two centuries.

World War II and Pax Americana

1945 will be remembered as the year World War II ended and the bond of the atomic nucleus was broken. But 1945 also marked another momentous fission – breaking of the bond between national and capitalist interests. After every previous war, and in many cases after severe devastation, European nations had always picked themselves back up and resumed their competition over empire. But after World War II, a Pax Americana was established. The US began to manage all the Western peripheries on behalf of capitalism generally, while preventing the communist powers from interfering in the game. Capitalist powers no longer needed to fight over investment realms, and competitive imperialism was replaced by collective imperialism. Opportunities for capital growth were no longer linked to the military power of nations, apart from the power of America. In his Killing Hope, U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (see recommended reading), William Blum chronicles hundreds of significant covert and overt interventions, showing exactly how the US carried out its imperial management role.

In the postwar years matrix reality diverged ever further from actual reality. In the postwar matrix world, imperialism had been abandoned and the world was being “democratised”; in the real world, imperialism had become better organised and more efficient. In the matrix world the US “restored order,” or “came to the assistance” of nations which were being “undermined by Soviet influence”; in the real world, the periphery was being systematically suppressed and exploited. In the matrix world, the benefit was going to the periphery in the form of countless aid programs; in the real world, immense wealth was being extracted from the periphery.

Growing glitches in the matrix weren’t noticed by most people in the West, because the postwar years brought unprecedented levels of Western prosperity and social progress. The rhetoric claimed progress would come to all, and Westerners could see it being realised in their own towns and cities. The West became the collective core of a global empire, and exploitative development led to prosperity for Western populations, while generating immense riches for corporations, banks, and wealthy capital investors.

Glitches in the Matrix, Popular Rebellion, and Neoliberalism

The parallel agenda of Third-World exploitation and Western prosperity worked effectively for the first two postwar decades. But in the 1960s large numbers of Westerners, particularly the young and well educated, began to notice glitches in the matrix. In Vietnam imperialism was too naked to be successfully masked as something else. A major split in American public consciousness occurred, as millions of anti-war protesters and civil-rights activists punctured the fabricated consensus of the 1950s and declared the reality of exploitation and suppression both at home and abroad. The environmental movement arose, challenging even the exploitation of the natural world. In Europe, 1968 joined 1848 as a landmark year of popular protest.

These developments disturbed elite planners. The postwar regime’s stability was being challenged from within the core – and the formula of Western prosperity no longer guaranteed public passivity. A report published in 1975, the Report of the Trilateral Task Force on Governability of Democracies, provides a glimpse into the thinking of elite circles. Alan Wolfe discusses this report in Holly Sklar’s eye-opening Trilateralism (see recommended reading). Wolfe focuses especially on the analysis Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington presented in a section of the report entitled “The Crisis of Democracy.” Huntington is an articulate promoter of elite policy shifts, and contributes pivotal articles to publications such as the Council on Foreign Relations’s Foreign Affairs (see recommended reading).

Huntington tells us that democratic societies “cannot work” unless the citizenry is “passive.” The “democratic surge of the 1960s” represented an “excess of democracy,” which must be reduced if governments are to carry out their traditional domestic and foreign policies. Huntington’s notion of “traditional policies” is expressed in a passage from the report:

To the extent that the United States was governed by anyone during the decades after World War II, it was governed by the President acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private sector’s ‘Establishment’.

In these few words Huntington spells out the reality that electoral democracy has little to do with how America is run, and summarises the kind of people who are included within the elite planning community. Who needs conspiracy theories when elite machinations are clearly described in public documents like these?

Besides failing to deliver popular passivity, the policy of prosperity for Western populations had another downside, having to do with Japan’s economic success. Under the Pax Americana umbrella, Japan had been able to industrialise and become an imperial player – the prohibition on Japanese rearmament had become irrelevant. With Japan’s then-lower living standards, Japanese producers could undercut prevailing prices and steal market share from Western producers. Western capital needed to find a way to become more competitive on world markets, and Western prosperity was standing in the way. Elite strategists, as Huntington showed, were fully capable of understanding these considerations, and the requirements of corporate growth created a strong motivation to make the needed adjustments – in both reality and rhetoric.

If popular prosperity could be sacrificed, there were many obvious ways Western capital could be made more competitive. Production could be moved overseas to low-wage areas, allowing domestic unemployment to rise. Unions could be attacked and wages forced down, and people could be pushed into temporary and part-time jobs without benefits. Regulations governing corporate behaviour could be removed, corporate and capital-gains taxes could be reduced, and the revenue losses could be taken out of public-service budgets. Public infrastructures could be privatised, the services reduced to cut costs, and then they could be milked for easy profits while they deteriorated from neglect.

These are the very policies and programs launched during the Reagan-Thatcher years in the US and Britain. They represent a systematic project of increasing corporate growth at the expense of popular prosperity and welfare. Such a real agenda would have been unpopular, and a corresponding matrix reality was fabricated for public consumption. The matrix reality used real terms like “deregulation,” “reduced taxes,” and “privatisation,” but around them was woven an economic mythology. The old, failed laissez-faire doctrine of the 1800s was reintroduced with the help of Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of economics, and “less government” became the proud “modern” theme in America and Britain. Sensible regulations had restored financial stability after the Great Depression, and had broken up anti-competitive monopolies such as the Rockefeller trust and AT&T. But in the new matrix reality, all regulations were considered bureaucratic interference. Reagan and Thatcher preached the virtues of individualism, and promised to “get government off people’s backs.” The implication was that everyday individuals were to get more money and freedom, but in reality the primary benefits would go to corporations and wealthy investors.

The academic term for laissez-faire economics is “economic liberalism,” and hence the Reagan-Thatcher revolution has come to be known as the “neoliberal revolution.” It brought a radical change in actual reality by returning to the economic philosophy that led to sweatshops, corruption, and robber-baron monopolies in the nineteenth century. It brought an equally radical change in matrix reality – a complete reversal in the attitude that was projected regarding government. Government policies had always been criticised in the media, but the institution of government had always been respected – reflecting the traditional bond between capitalism and nationalism. With Reagan, we had a sitting president telling us that government itself was a bad thing. Many of us may have agreed with him, but such a sentiment had never before found official favour. Soon, British and American populations were beginning to applaud the destruction of the very democratic institutions that provided their only hope of participation in the political process.

Globalisation and World Government

The essential bond between capitalism and nationalism was broken in 1945, but it took some time for elite planners to recognise this new condition and to begin bringing the world system into alignment with it. The strong Western nation state had been the bulwark of capitalism for centuries, and initial postwar policies were based on the assumption that this would continue indefinitely. The Bretton Woods financial system (the IMF, World Bank, and a system of fixed exchange rates among major currencies) was set up to stabilise national economies, and popular prosperity was encouraged to provide political stability. Neoliberalism in the US and Britain represented the first serious break with this policy framework – and brought the first visible signs of the fission of the nation-capital bond.

The neoliberal project was economically profitable in the US and Britain, and the public accepted the matrix economic mythology. Meanwhile, the integrated global economy gave rise to a new generation of transnational corporations, and corporate leaders began to realise that corporate growth was not dependent on strong core nation-states. Indeed, Western nations – with their environmental laws, consumer-protection measures, and other forms of regulatory “interference” – were a burden on corporate growth. Having been successfully field tested in the two oldest “democracies,” the neoliberal project moved onto the global stage. The Bretton Woods system of fixed rates of currency exchange was weakened, and the international financial system became destabilising, instead of stabilising, for national economies. The radical free-trade project was launched, leading eventually to the World Trade Organisation. The fission that had begun in 1945 was finally manifesting as an explosive change in the world system.

The objective of neoliberal free-trade treaties is to remove all political controls over domestic and international trade and commerce. Corporations have free rein to maximise profits, heedless of environmental consequences and safety risks. Instead of governments regulating corporations, the WTO now sets rules for governments, telling them what kind of beef they must import, whether or not they can ban asbestos, and what additives they must permit in petroleum products. So far, in every case where the WTO has been asked to review a health, safety, or environmental regulation, the regulation has been overturned.

Most of the world has been turned into a periphery; the imperial core has been boiled down to the capitalist elite themselves, represented by their bureaucratic, unrepresentative, WTO world government. The burden of accelerated imperialism falls hardest outside the West, where loans are used as a lever by the IMF to compel debtor nations such as Rwanda and South Korea to accept suicidal “reform” packages. In the 1800s, genocide was employed to clear North America and Australia of their native populations, creating room for growth. Today, a similar program of genocide has apparently been unleashed against sub-Saharan Africa. The IMF destroys the economies, the CIA trains militias and stirs up tribal conflicts, and the West sells weapons to all sides. Famine and genocidal civil wars are the predictable and inevitable result. Meanwhile, AIDS runs rampant while the WTO and the US government use trade laws to prevent medicines from reaching the victims.

As in the past, Western military force will be required to control the non-Western periphery and make adjustments to local political arrangements when considered necessary by elite planners. The Pentagon continues to provide the primary policing power, with NATO playing an ever-increasing role. Resentment against the West and against neoliberalism is growing in the Third World, and the frequency of military interventions is bound to increase. All of this needs to be made acceptable to Western minds, adding a new dimension to the matrix.

In the latest matrix reality, the West is called the “international community,” whose goal is to serve “humanitarian” causes. Bill Clinton made it explicit with his “Clinton Doctrine,” in which (as quoted in the Washington Post) he solemnly promised, “If somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background or their religion and it is within our power stop it, we will stop it.” This matrix fabrication is very effective indeed; who opposes prevention of genocide? Only outside the matrix does one see that genocide is caused by the West in the first place, that the worst cases of genocide are continuing, that “assistance” usually makes things worse (as in the Balkans), and that Clinton’s handy doctrine enables him to intervene when and where he chooses. Since dictators and the stirring of ethnic rivalries are standard tools used in managing the periphery, a US president can always find “innocent civilians” wherever elite plans call for an intervention.

In matrix reality, globalisation is not a project but rather the inevitable result of beneficial market forces. Genocide in Africa is no fault of the West, but is due to ancient tribal rivalries. Every measure demanded by globalisation is referred to as “reform,” (the word is never used with irony). “Democracy” and “reform” are frequently used together, always leaving the subtle impression that one has something to do with the other. The illusion is presented that all economic boats are rising, and if yours isn’t, it must be your own fault: you aren’t “competitive” enough. Economic failures are explained away as “temporary adjustments,” or else the victim (as in South Korea or Russia) is blamed for not being sufficiently neoliberal. “Investor confidence” is referred to with the same awe and reverence that earlier societies might have expressed toward the “will of the gods.”

Western quality of life continues to decline, while the WTO establishes legal precedents ensuring that its authority will not be challenged when its decisions become more draconian. Things will get much worse in the West; this was anticipated in elite circles when the neoliberal project was still on the drawing board, as is illustrated in Samuel Huntington’s “The Crisis of Democracy” report discussed earlier.

Management of Discontented Societies

The postwar years, especially in the United States, were characterised by consensus politics. Most people shared a common understanding of how society worked, and generally approved of how things were going. Prosperity was real and the matrix version of reality was reassuring. Most people believed in it. Those beliefs became a shared consensus, and the government could then carry out its plans as it intended, “responding” to the programmed public will.

The “excess democracy” of the 1960s and 1970s attacked this shared consensus from below, and neoliberal planners decided from above that ongoing consensus wasn’t worth paying for. They accepted that segments of society would persist in disbelieving various parts of the matrix. Activism and protest were to be expected. New means of social control would be needed to deal with activist movements and with growing discontent, as neoliberalism gradually tightened the economic screws. Such means of control were identified and have since been largely implemented, particularly in the United States. In many ways America sets the pace of globalisation; innovations can often be observed there before they occur elsewhere. This is particularly true in the case of social-control techniques.

The most obvious means of social control, in a discontented society, is a strong, semi-militarised police force. Most of the periphery has been managed by such means for centuries. This was obvious to elite planners in the West, was adopted as policy, and has now been largely implemented. Urban and suburban ghettos – where the adverse consequences of neoliberalism are currently most concentrated – have literally become occupied territories, where police beatings and unjustified shootings are commonplace.

So that the beefed-up police force could maintain control in conditions of mass unrest, elite planners also realised that much of the US Bill of Rights would need to be neutralised. (This is not surprising, given that the Bill’s authors had just lived through a revolution and were seeking to ensure that future generations would have the means to organise and overthrow any oppressive future government.) The rights-neutralisation project has been largely implemented, as exemplified by armed midnight raids, outrageous search-and-seizure practices, overly broad conspiracy laws, wholesale invasion of privacy, massive incarceration, and the rise of prison slave labour. The Rubicon has been crossed – the techniques of oppression long common in the empire’s periphery are being imported to the core.

In the matrix, the genre of the TV or movie police drama has served to create a reality in which “rights” are a joke, the accused are despicable sociopaths, and no criminal is ever brought to justice until some noble cop or prosecutor bends the rules a bit. Government officials bolster the construct by declaring “wars” on crime and drugs; the noble cops are fighting a war out there in the streets – and you can’t win a war without using your enemy’s dirty tricks. The CIA plays its role by managing the international drug trade and making sure that ghetto drug dealers are well supplied. In this way, the American public has been led to accept the means of its own suppression.

The mechanisms of the police state are in place. They will be used when necessary – as we see in ghettos and skyrocketing prison populations, as we saw on the streets of Seattle and Washington D.C. during recent anti-WTO demonstrations, and as is suggested by executive orders that enable the president to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law whenever he deems it necessary. But raw force is only the last line of defense for the elite regime. Neoliberal planners introduced more subtle defences into the matrix; looking at these will bring us back to our discussion of the left and right.

Divide and rule is one of the oldest means of mass control – standard practice since at least the Roman Empire. This is applied at the level of modern imperialism, where each small nation competes with other for capital investments. Within societies it works this way: If each social group can be convinced that some other group is the source of its discontent, then the population’s energy will be spent on inter-group struggles. The regime can sit on the sidelines, intervening covertly to stir things up or to guide them in desired directions. In this way most discontent can be neutralised, and force can be reserved for exceptional cases. In the prosperous postwar years, consensus politics served to manage the population. Under neoliberalism, programmed factionalism has become the front-line defense – the matrix version of divide and rule.

The covert guiding of various social movements has proven to be one of the most effective means of programming factions and stirring them against one another. Fundamentalist religious movements have been particularly useful. They have been used not only within the US, but also to maximise divisiveness in the Middle East and for other purposes throughout the empire. The collective energy and dedication of “true believers” makes them a potent political weapon that movement leaders can readily aim where needed. In the US that weapon has been used to promote censorship on the Internet, to attack the women’s movement, to support repressive legislation, and generally to bolster the ranks of what is called in the matrix the “right wing.”

In the matrix, the various factions believe that their competition with each other is the process that determines society’s political agenda. Politicians want votes, and hence the biggest and best-organised factions should have the most influence, and their agendas should get the most political attention. In reality there is only one significant political agenda these days: the maximisation of capital growth through the dismantling of society, the continuing implementation of neoliberalism, and the management of empire. Clinton’s liberal rhetoric and his playing around with health care and gay rights are not the result of liberal pressure. They are rather the means by which Clinton is sold to liberal voters, so that he can proceed with real business: getting NAFTA through Congress, promoting the WTO, giving away the public airwaves, justifying military interventions, and so forth. Issues of genuine importance are never raised in campaign politics – this is a major glitch in the matrix for those who have eyes to see it.

Escaping the Matrix

The matrix cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Under the onslaught of globalisation, the glitches are becoming ever more difficult to conceal – as earlier, with the Vietnam War. Last November’s anti-establishment demonstrations in Seattle, the largest in decades, were aimed directly at globalisation and the WTO. Even more important, Seattle saw the coming together of factions that the matrix had programmed to fight one another, such as left-leaning environmentalists and socially conservative union members.

Seattle represented the tip of an iceberg. A mass movement against globalisation and elite rule is ready to ignite, like a brush fire on a dry, scorching day. The establishment has been expecting such a movement and has a variety of defences at its command, including those used effectively against the movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In order to prevail against what seem like overwhelming odds, the movement must escape entirely from the matrix, and it must bring the rest of society with it. As long as the matrix exists, humanity cannot be free. The whole truth must be faced: Globalisation is centralised tyranny; capitalism has outlasted its sell-by date; matrix “democracy” is elite rule; and “market forces” are imperialism. Left and right are enemies only in the matrix. In reality we are all in this together, and each of us has a contribution to make toward a better world.

Marx may have failed as a social visionary, but he had capitalism figured out. It is based not on productivity or social benefit, but on the pursuit of capital growth through exploiting everything in its path. The job of elite planners is to create new spaces for capital to grow in. Competitive imperialism provided growth for centuries; collective imperialism was invented when still more growth was needed; and then neoliberalism took over. Like a cancer, capitalism consumes its host and is never satisfied. The capital pool must always grow, more and more, forever – until the host dies or capitalism is replaced.

The matrix equates capitalism with free enterprise, and defines centralised-state-planning socialism as the only alternative to capitalism. In reality, capitalism didn’t amount to much of a force until the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution of the late 1700s – and we certainly cannot characterise all prior societies as socialist. Free enterprise, private property, commerce, banking, international trade, economic specialisation – all of these had existed for millennia before capitalism. Capitalism claims credit for modern prosperity, but credit would be better given to developments in science and technology.

Before capitalism, Western nations were generally run by aristocratic classes. The aristocratic attitude toward wealth focused on management and maintenance. With capitalism, the focus is always on growth and development; whatever one has is but the seeds to build a still greater fortune. In fact, there are infinite alternatives to capitalism, and different societies can choose different systems, once they are free to do so. As Morpheus put it: “Outside the matrix everything is possible, and there are no limits.”

The matrix defines “democracy” as competitive party politics, because that is a game wealthy elites have long since learned to corrupt and manipulate. Even in the days of the Roman Republic the techniques were well understood. Real-world democracy is possible only if the people themselves participate in setting society’s direction. An elected official can only truly represent a constituency after that constituency has worked out its positions – from the local to the global – on the issues of the day. For that to happen, the interests of different societal factions must be harmonised through interaction and discussion. Collaboration, not competition, is what leads to effective harmonisation.

In order for the movement to end elite rule and establish livable societies to succeed, it will need to evolve a democratic process, and to use that process to develop a program of consensus reform that harmonises the interests of its constituencies. In order to be politically victorious, it will need to reach out to all segments of society and become a majority movement. By such means, the democratic process of the movement can become the democratic process of a newly empowered civil society. There is no adequate theory of democracy at present, although there is much to be learned from history and from theory. The movement will need to develop a democratic process as it goes along, and that objective must be pursued as diligently as victory itself. Otherwise some new tyranny will eventually replace the old.

It ain’t left or right. It’s up and down.
Here we all are down here struggling while
the Corporate Elite are all up there having a nice day!
– Carolyn Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt Maine and anti-corporate activist

"What do you want to do in life" . Ans "get first rank"

2008-08-27T09:20:00.005+05:30

Love this one. Very precise choice of thoughts. It's very difficult to define a "what makes me happy" types question. I guess everyone around the world, is shouting hoarse....saying the very same thing, from Randy Pausch to Manu Joseph. - Don't do what you don't want to do. You can be Gay...so what? I don't give a horse's rear if you think being Gay is being unnatural. Its my freaking life and as long as i don't solicit your company for an intercourse, its not your business.

Now, just a little time-out here. i am just curious. What does one mean when he/she says "this is what i want to do with my life" Is this = "doing stuff that makes me happy". If we converge on this, then "is happiness = nirvana/god". In which case, every action can have a meaning.
"I study for GRE because doing an MS makes me happy, while an MS in literature will not make me happy. It could make you happy, but not me...So don't blame to for my IIT/MS blah blah...i wanted to make my amma happy by being an I Banker...i am happy she is happy..". But the interesting twist to the article below, (as in saw it) is Manu Joseph doesn't focus on "what makes me happy" (this is pretty complex), she looks at "what doesn't make me happy".
Can't believe TOI managed this.

Beautiful World of the Backbenchers
Times of India 13 Apr 2008, Manu Joseph
The most foolish description of youth is that it is rebellious. The young do wear T-shirts that say Rebel or Che or Bitch. But the truth is that the youth, especially in this country, is a fellowship of cowards. It lives in fear. Fear of life, fear of an illusory future. The perpetual trauma of the forward castes is inextricably woven into this fear. And what Arjun Singh's successful reservation campaign has denied them is the right to a secured but ordinary life, a life that comes with scoring 98 percent in the board exams, a life that goes like this: Engineer-MBA-anonymous. You can argue that this route is better than sociology-salesman-anonymous. But that will be to focus unduly on the ordinary among the cowards. The real tragedy concerns the extraordinary cowards. Great writers, painters, musicians and athletes who are lost forever to what are moronically called, 'the professional courses'. Instead of pursuing their talents they are, right now, in
dark gloomy tutorials preparing for entrance exams, fatally infected by objective type questions. The angle between tangents drawn from the point (1,4) to the parabola y^2=4x is?

The angst of the types who score over 95 percent also fills me, and several lakhs like me, with wicked joy. I was the 75 percent type. It was not pleasurable to be so in Madras of the eighties. I grew up in Kodambakkam where Telugu film directors, who wore white shoes, kept their beautiful mistresses; and Anglo Indian girls in skirts, who did not have hair on their legs, and all of whom I now remember only as Maria, walked to Fatima Church. But a large part of my formative years were spent in a Brahmin housing society called Rajaram Colony where fathers were all clerks and mothers were housewives. Rare working women had the same aura as divorcees. I was special because I was a Christian, and the transitory relatives of my neighbours, when they learnt my religion, would speak to me in English.

Many of my friends were periodically thrashed with belts by their fathers when the miasmic green report cards came home. Once, I heard the cries of a boy who had scored just ninety percent in a maths monthly test. Another form of punishment was heating a stainless steel serving spoon and inflicting minor burns. It was called, 'soodu'. My parents never hit me for my marks though my report cards were inspiring. My mother beat me up occasionally for political reasons – every time her mother-in-law came visiting. Apparently, according to a rustic Malayalee way of life, thrashing the kids was a hint to the in-law that it was time to leave.

Those days, the legends of Rajaram Colony were our seniors who had entered the IITs, or as a consequence, had gone to America to study further. Their names were taken with reverence. When they visited home, they left a trail of whispers. And when they deigned to play cricket with us, we observed closely how they bowled and how they batted. Because they knew everything. It was already decided in every household, except mine, that the boys will go to IIT, a certainty just like their sisters will do BSc Nutrition. And so my friends began their furtive preparation when they were not yet thirteen. They began to score higher and higher at school. And they began to look at me as an unfortunate freak, not only because they thought they were brighter but also because I said I wanted to become a journalist. They scored better than me in English too. (Once in an English test, when asked the opposite gender of ram, almost every one in my class, astonishingly, knew
the answer was ewe. I wrote, 'Sita'). I did always claim a higher creative status and often entertained the backbenchers, who were chiefly sons of illiterate parents, by calling my Brahmins friends, "curd-rice muggers".

In the school I had slowly gained a reputation as a poet and some sort of a stand-up comedian. But as I approached the 12th standard, I was not the hero anymore of the juniors. That honour drifted to a brilliant boy, the first ranker who once used to play the tabla and did not touch the instrument anymore because he was preparing for IIT's Joint Entrance Exam. (A few years later, I would meet him on the campus of IIT Chennai. He would tell me that he will not go to America. "Because, you see, with transcendental meditation, you can sit here in Madras and visit any country in the world". He was serious. Now, he is a banker in San Francisco).

Meanwhile, in the Rajaram Colony, I observed that older Brahmin boys who had, somehow, fared poorly in the 12th standard and had to suffer the humiliation of pursuing BSc walked in the perpetual mist of guilt and embarrassment. They took to smoking and drinking, and 'sighting' – the disreputable art of looking at girls. They stared at a future in Eureka Forbes.

I eventually moved out of the Colony to another such fiendish place but kept in touch with my childhood friends. The distance between us, however, grew. They did not really want to see me. I was a distraction in their preparation "for life". There was nothing they could talk to me about, nothing they could share, like their latest JEE sample test scores or the traits of the teachers at Brilliant Tutorials. On my part, I began to find them unhappy and bleak. Once, they were fresh and eager. Like me, they wanted to play cricket forIndia. Some were interested in music, some even attempted novels. Now, they were zombies in the trance of a whole material world that was just one entrance exam away.

Eventually, almost all of them scored in the high nineties in the 12th standard exams. One made it to the IIT. The others prepared to go to second rung engineering colleges in humid melancholic towns. But they still thought they were more victorious than me because I had got 75%, a misfortune that their parents could not believe would visit someone who had two hands and one head. Worse, I told them that I was going to do a BA in English Literature. At that time, people did not think you were gay because you wanted to do literature. But they still did not understand why a male would do such a thing. They asked me if I was alright, if I could reconsider, if some maternal ornaments could be sold for the good cause of capitation fee.

Some days, I think of those boys from another time. They are mostly bankers in America now and, I imagine, partly responsible for the subprime crisis. They are in the glow of the life that they had so dearly sought. But somehow I feel that their sisters, who eventually pursued what they wanted to, have more interesting lives. Also, occasionally I hear that some IITian or the other is returning to the art that he had originally loved. And is making up for the time he has lost because he could crack the toughest questions in the world but could not answer in time the class teacher's annual question, "What do you want to become in life?"

The Human Gravitational Pull?

2008-08-15T19:10:00.013+05:30

I am groping for the right words here...So am just penning down a stream of thoughts here with absolutely no nexus what so ever.

India is so much of fun..Every tom dick and harry in India, by virtue of his citizenship, earns his first fundamental right - To talk politics.

What about the Independence Day?
This intrigues me. Is this about a country or about the people in the country? When you and I, sway the indian national flag, what exactly are we tub thumping about? Our plains and the mountains? Our cricket team (moot point)? Our Rivers? A ramanujam? Culture (How do you define a Culture?) ? Fellow Indians? What runs through your mind, say, when you are at the crest of a patriotic wave ? (Beside a rush of adrenalin)
Is it safe to say, its the people in the country that you and i really care about? That is pretty complex to answer, because I haven't done much for these people, if i really care about them. I am mostly concerned about my vanilla and mundane diurnal duties.

Fundamental Question - What is it about India that appeals to an Indian? Deep within, give our complex mental make up, i don't think any of us really know the answer. We like something, because we like it?

...Freedom and Free Will. Two intricately connected thoughts. If i had spent 20 years of my life in a Nazi Camp, i would celebrate an Independence Day, for the rest of my natural born life.
Its tough to swallow a premise about high patriotism where the patriotism doesn't have a definite root. Why should a kid's father, you and I call a soldier, defend us? Why does he defend this country? What is the country appeals to him? Who is he defending (This would tell me why?)

The first thing about college that appealed to me was, i could go to the Loo without asking the permission. As trivial as it sounds, it made me happy - Freedom.

But why does a Soldier die for a country? What does he die for? Defending whom? Why does he want to defend you and me? What did we do to deserve him? What did he do to deserve us?

I treasure my freedom. If i lived in a Non-Independent Country (make sense?) would i cry if it didn't affect me in any way. I go about my life normally, but i am under a foreign rule. On the other hand, if the british told me, that my life is worth a Hot Dog and killed my free will, then yes, i would care.

So is this all about "I" in Independence? How did MK Gandhi think? It's pretty cruel to say, he thought "I". So let me square the circle and come back to my favorite corner. When you do a "lil something" for someone else, why do you do it? Is it because you want he/she to like you more? (in which case its an "I" again?) If not, why? This may sound like a mouth piece for Ayn Rand, but no. I am being a little simplistic here. Why exactly does a Ramesh Ramanathan do what he does? Is it because he keeps him happy (ultimately?) Why do the amte couple do what they do? (Because......fate/gratification)...Why does a Soldier do what he does?(If he had already known, he would die, would he still do it? Or is he merely taking a shot in the dark, hoping nothing would happen to him)

What ever you do, does it probably come back to "I"? This notion of absolute good is contradictory. It's not a bad thing for life to be about "I". You can either choose to use that "I" for "them" or just for yourself.

So Independence Day...the same string of thoughts hit me. Is it about "I". I could say, well It made Gandhi happy to help his country and it makes me happy to eat Strawberry pudding.
What's the difference? We do what it takes to make ourselves happy/gratified.
You could answer, smugly even that, to some of us, the happiness can come only if it makes someone else happy, to the rest of us..we are just being plain selfish. But this notion of Selfishness is tough to maintain. It's more of an ad hoc thing. You can't escape the human gravity, can you? Did MK Gandhi or Nelson Mandela attain escape velocity? If they did, how?

If you hurt yourself intentionally for someone else, are you doing it because he/she matter to You? If not, are you just doing it for a kick?

This "Why" is getting to be a habit. I was semi sane to begin with and complex thoughts like this( why again?) stress me.

With all the mental brohaha, i almost forgot. You happy, me happy, them happy. What else do you need. Happy Independence Day.

Another Gem from Ramesh Ramanathan

2008-08-14T11:11:00.004+05:30

Pasting from livemint.com. I was a little loath to paste the content for fear of copyright / infringement. But this was far too beautiful to be delegated to a link.

Article by Ramesh Ramanathan-

"I read Niranjan Rajadhyaksha’s column in Wednesday’s Mint about the relationship between the hard-nosed idea called capitalism and more fuzzy notions such as social capital and trust, and thought I would do a follow-on piece.

My wife Swati and I lived overseas for several years, before returning in 1998. The regular non-resident Indian gatherings would have the usual conversations about what ailed India. And we had all the “answers”. “The problem with India is…” was how most sentences would begin. Magic wands being swished around, thousands of miles away, safe. On our visits to India, we would grumble about the airports and the garbage and the traffic.

Pretty soon though, these pontifications started feeling stale. One particular experience was telling. We had just moved home to a new town in Connecticut, sometime in the early 1990s. There was a flyer in the mailbox — “Cleaning the park this Saturday. Beer after.” The mailbox would invariably be stuffed with messages like this, which we would promptly trash. Who had the time, and weren’t these the responsibility of government anyway? But we had just moved in, and wanted to meet the neighbours. So, for purely selfish reasons, we went.

On Monday morning, when I reached the station to take the 6.35 commuter train to Manhattan, I saw — in a suit, reading The Wall Street Journal — the group leader of our park clean-up operation. We talked. Turned out he was a banker like me. Volunteering for the local community was something he took very seriously. There were others — in the school board, on the city budget committee, and so on. These small acts of local engagement were related to larger complicated ideas of democracy and government. I thought about my life in India — I had never lifted my finger to volunteer for anything. Not that I didn’t want to, just that I didn’t think it was expected of me.

Swati and I realized that — like many middle-class Indians—we knew very little about democracy and politics and government, besides the convenient cardboard caricatures we carried around with us. Democracy in India was like cricket — a spectator sport. We began to glimpse the massive shift required in our minds to make democracy truly work in India. We felt the gnawing urge to learn about all this, to return to India and actually make a difference.

Since returning to India, our work has been a turbocharged daily lesson in democracy and public change. While my experiences have increased the respect I have for politicians, they have also reinforced the belief that we cannot solve our country’s challenges without significant citizen participation, in ways that supplement and strengthen the system of government.

There are many educated Indians who wonder why this is necessary. I was once asked by a friend: “Shouldn’t the system work properly on its own, so that I can devote all my energies to myself: being an effective person, running my company efficiently and creatively?” She went on to say, “Each of us could do this, isn’t it? Focus on our own priorities: family, profession, skills, etc.” The question goes to the root of what we mean by democracy and society, and whether the “system” is something independent of citizens. In this increasingly complex world, we believe that we already have enough responsibilities to manage; that our contribution to society happens through the taxes we pay and the “honest citizen” lives we live.

The relationship between individuals in a society and our government is an unwritten social contract — we exchange some of our personal independence for a common good in which each of us benefits. Among the political scientists who have written about this social contract, Jean Jacques Rousseau is arguably the most significant.

In the past decade, the spirit of community has become a hot topic of research, under the label “social capital”. In a famous but contentious book called Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam suggested that these community forces representing social capital were at the root of larger political and economic phenomena: The greater the social capital, the healthier that society is. As Rajadhyaksha observed in his column, social capital is also considered essential for markets to work efficiently.

One aspect of an unwritten social contract is enforceability — a lot of people are “free riders”: not fulfilling their role, but not being noticed. A healthy society is not some magic carpet that allows us to fly off in the pursuit of our personal dreams, but rather a complex tapestry where each of us has a strand to weave. At some tipping point, the weight of the free riders overwhelms the contract and begins to tear the fabric. I believe that urban India faces this risk.

Ramesh Ramanathan is co-founder, Janaagraha. Möbius Strip, much like its mathematical origins, blurs boundaries. It is about the continuum between the state, market and our society. "

Hindu Crossword 9267 - Friday, July 4th 2008

2008-07-04T18:35:00.006+05:30

Pretty sure all are right, except one....that "aftercare" is a shot in the dark...lets see what Saturday tells me....
Let me work the clues out here, some of the solutions may seem a little far out for people
who haven't done this before...because Hindu uses certain keys for words...just need a little practice to uncover them. (church - cd, princess - di (diana), record - ep (epic)....so on)
Also indications of anagrams and putting the punctuation marks in the right place to fish out the clue needs some exposure..

Across:
1) Soldier : GI (GI Joe?), British(b), sacrificial table: altar
5) couple: Pair, go around top of mountain system/first of mountain (m) : pa-m-ir
8) The last (clue), time atul danced - anagram of time atul : ultimate
9) opt for- pick, say (same pronunciation that is)- pic, almost nice - nic ...food for eating out is the clue - picnic
11)not sure...guessed this..daughter is (d)..though
12)aldrin or armstrong - astronauts: direct clue
13) pompous chap (clue) , puts money (tin) before maker (god)
14) direct clue...leap year is intercalary year
16) warning (fore) by chief (head)...frontal feature (clue)
18) things to eat between meals(clue) bit of nuts (n) in bags(sacks)
22) fastener (clue) security (safety)....again..intelligent guess
23) first letter of each
24) started with(clue) : writer (pen), well known dictionary (oed - oxford english dict)
25)another small variant (anagram of another small(s) ->north sea : arm of atlantic
26) mark (clue) , negative (not), church (ch)
27) shot in the dark

Down:
1) partly tells me, the clue is a part of two words..check the picture closely for the circle...
he enjoyed the food (clue)
2) ...making roads (clue) minute black (b) components ->anagram
3) idiom - direct clue
4) one (i) grabbed by a giant (titan) , painter (clue)
5) direct...missive - letter, writer - pen, venom - poison
6) fellow (man) with time (date) , authority (clue)
7) direct clue...
10) favorites( pets...teachers pet?) duck (o), verandah (clue)
15) dwell (harp), unknown(y), ..woman(clue) - harpy
16) chain of flowers(clue) one soft perhaps(anagram indication of one soft)
17) two clues which "reflect" the same word
19) card game(clue), played(anagram , heads up) of as an act
20) wise man(sage) , english(e), record (ep)...leak(clue)
21) direct

Dasavatharam - nebulous at first

2008-06-21T10:45:00.011+05:30

I waited for this movie for two years, thinking about it, visualizing my own Dasavatharam for over a week before i skipped some important appointments at office to watch this movie.

Thinking aloud, when everyone else felt Mahanadhi and Hey Ram were were too blunt, i had seen these two movies over 25 times. What makes him so special. Well i am not a "actor" crazy guy. I am more for performances.

Kamal may not be the most intelligent actor in the world. Brad Pitt with 12 monkeys, babel, fight club is running neck to neck a pro like Al Pacino warrants no comparison.

What exactly did he try with Dasavatharam? why are very apparent flaws unedited and why do some of the avatars look like they just came out of the loo? This is not Kamal. A lot of Kamal fans have extolled the movie for inimitable technical shots and an uncanny expertise to act-naturally. I missed this. What technical expertise. Microsoft screen savers look more life like.

Some others have dragged the movie to the road and lambasted it's crude compilation. Well thats a little too harsh. The movie has some brilliant subtle narratives, not so obvious at first. I saw this movie a second time to get a better idea and it did seem a little more appealing.

I guess this is really the problem. Its impossible to assess this movie in toto, because the story lacks transparency.
When you pen an article on the bay of pigs crisis. As a reader, I am not going to empathize with fancy lingos [although germane] unless you demystify it for me. Until then, with rudimentary understanding, i may call your article profound and deep and some one else who didn't quite follow all of it either, may pick on yours flaws only.

When you really know the nuances of game theory, i am sure you can
explain in no more than 4 sentences the application of this theory to evolutionary biology. On the other hand, when you understand the theory well but have not decoded it completely...well then you are bound to confuse your listener at some point. Typical of Dasavatharam. Butterfly effect and Chaos theory have to be decoded completely before a director chooses to use them. Half cooked fare at Dasavatharam. A lot of people never understood the chaos in the movie itself. Why? Because the film makers never understood the subtleties themselves.

Kamal tries to bring together chaos theory and butterfly effect to bolster ever shot. No harm done but even kuruvi and shivaji can be justified this way.

Just because a movie has 500 hours of make up, three Kamal's fighting each other, impeccable impersonations and the genius of Kamal in the role of the Priest [He defines a whole new facet of the Pious Iyengar without breaking the stereotype. ] and a golti cop doesn't make it a master piece.

I have watched close to 300 hours of Kamal's movies/songs/clips/trailers. Not that i am defining who he is, but his genius doesn't lie in using technology. In fact thats this grey area. [Alavandhan and Virumaadi had some pretty absurd graphics] His genius lies in the life he gives to every line on his body to pull off an idea. One blog had an amusing take on this movie "Kamal always sets a new tempo. He normally doesn't make crap. This time he faltered. The thumb rule in Tamil cinema is - if you are selling crap, have Rajini in it".

Notwithstanding this, Why is Kamal special?It's his rebelliousness that i adore. Rebelliousness is not brow beating, facetious opposition, shallow blockades and undesired guillotines. It's defining a new entity within an old stereotype and letting the popular mindset imbue the new awareness. It needs intelligence and a keen sense of perception. Kamal does this with unprecedented dexterity in his line of work.

A fantastic exchange from this movie. Tamil translation. bear with me.
"Asin: Why do you say that there is no god?
Kamal:[looking at corpses being dragged ashore] I didn't. I am just saying, i would have been happier, if there was one".

Summary: Dasavatharam is a commercial and try-to-appeal-to-all types. Not something hard core Kamal fans would be content with.

...and this is on National Television

2008-06-15T10:14:00.007+05:30

Some fat clown called Sam Anderson [at least thats his google name and it has stuck] is the protagonist in this Tamil movie [the audacity of it all. Its a movie and this song was never intended at humor...]

On a very serious note, why would anyone want to discount the film goers intelligence so much?
"A piece of crap and his mom made love and out came his sorry ass" . I am not sure though, which put down would do the best justice. This clown may have pushed the endurance limits, but Tamil actors are wont to indulge in excessive self glory. The video is hilarious and i am sure most of you watching this will google/youtube for sam anderson [you got to...don't miss this] and take a peek at the rest of his gymnastics.

What hits me, when i see the top ten tamil movies list [saving Kamal, the messiah], 9/10 movies are ridiculous experiments at hamming and blatant, unwarranted insults to our judgment. Don't these guys go back and do like a preview of the crap they spit out on screen? How could any one, even with a minimal amount of discretion, find this passable?

I am pretty sure, we've seen b-grade movies with lot more homework. I mean, freaking, at least get rid of the tummy before you extol yourself as the "true beautiful son of soil". I'll leave any more put downs for the readers to bounce.

As Always, Aces high

2008-06-08T15:58:00.003+05:30

Another day, Another poem. From my little sister's arbit musings. I guess i am a better evaluator than a poet. Like a I.A.Richards i guess [pink elephant flying past..........]
I loved her poem. She has a very diverse vocab and uses poetic license to flout grammar. This poem has a lot of soul and i love fact that, each verse articulates a disparate thought. Very subtle connection.
What disgusts me about "modern collegiate poets", is they write poems which have no depth. Some told me they wrote poems to fill extra-curricular columns in MBA applications. Honest, but disgusting. Well i guess the summer-camps bug spares no one. Others write shallow philosophical shit like i used to earlier.[Circa 2007]

But shalu's poems have a soul. I guess having known her for quite some time, and being privy to her tumbles have increased my empathy for her poems....but i know a lot of my blog readers who felt the same as i did. who felt her poems have a "black and white" feel.

Can poems replace music? Always wondered...

Shalu for thought-

The air heavy with nostalgia,

The light obscured by the clouds,

Now the rain lashes down,

To spread a chill to my soul.

In a stupor, I plod along the path

I made, that comforts in loneliness,

that rejoices in solitude, My heart

has embarked on a journey of its own.

A humming bee in the drumming rain, estranged I believe,

The sound of thunder dampened by the

million innate screams and a thousand heartbreaks,

Afar, the knoll from the church He sends to soothe.

In the warmth of memories whose essence

is now a mere fascination, I walk on,

Of the green grass, the chirping birds,

The time of revels and of laughter, the togetherness.

The myriad thoughts let into the verdurous surrounding,

The same atmosphere drowned in eternal love,

The constant waves of trust lapped the place,

Tides pushing us to the shore, yet we flowed back to where we belonged.

Our souls' desires in dreams,

Running down pathways of reality,

To slake the thrist of those innocent longings,

Yet the hunger remained unsatisfied.

Now, I still walk along one of those lively paths,

Filled by the smell of the sickle holder,

I grip not a drop of water,

From the sheets of pouring rain

Down and deeper into my soul it falls,

Freezing and chilling my every bone,

Now, it's the fallow land I look at,

Wry smiles, insolence and disbelief surrounds it.

My memory has begun to fade,

The clock is ticking away,

I have with me none

to paint, That one last leaf.

Long ago, lost were my most valued lives,

To push me to the shore, to live, to survive,

But every wave of the oceans rolls back,

Alas! As always, I flowed back to where I belonged.
-Shalu

off with your Face

2008-06-08T15:54:00.002+05:30

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we
become disguised to ourselves. -Francois, duc de La Rochefoucauld

TOEFL - Test for english...

2008-05-26T13:22:00.003+05:30

I am guessing all MS/MBA aspirants need to go through TOEFL for admissions in the west. Most of us qualify as non-native speakers of English. Since the TOEFL is a very basic exam to test English- Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing skills, it needs less than two weeks of preparation. A little bit about this, since i had a zillion doubts on this Test, and i had a lot of people clear the air for me. I ended up with a 115 but a not so bad split to have
(Reading 30, Listening 29, Speaking 26, Writing 30). Every Tom cracks the Reading Section, Writing and listening. Speaking is a little dicey at times and Universities are very hard on Speaking Section Cut Offs. This is mostly the differentiator. Either ways, an overall score of 105 is safe for most univs with 23 in reading.

1) Take the TOEFL after the GRE. Plan it that way if you have not already.
Reason: Writing and Reading skills are an imperative for cracking the GRE. So you would
have completed 50% of the TOEFL needs this way. So you can cut the crap for TOEFL and
use your time for the Speaking Section. GRE RCs are a tad tougher. So start from the top,
wrap up a test which needs some prep and which matters more and then trickle down to
the formalities aka TOEFL.

2) Reading: RCs, Same as GRE . A little longer..but absurdly simple. Not ADAPTIVE. Answers
can be reviewed. Time given is sufficient but not luxurious. So don't slack because its simple.

3) Writing: Simple. AWA. So if you have gone through GRE then a simple section again.

4) Listening: Perk up and listen well. Nothing more. Simple and direct questions based
on what you heard.

5) Speaking: Here the microphone can be a little playful. None the less you are given time
to adjust it to suit your audibility. So thats okay. In the speaking section, Speak Clearly and
don't ADD an accent [a lot of indian and chinese students do this?]. As long as you are
intelligible, no one cares if your accent is hispanic or russian.
Content is important. Don't speak crap...that doesn't work even if you speak it clearly.
What i did was, in the speaking section i did not write down stuff after i heard/read the
passages. I mentally rehearsed what i would say. This way my final output was refined.
A lot of people jot down points too and build on that...well given 30 seconds to prepare
writing can eat a lot of time in the process itself...So take your pick

Note: Normally all TOEFL aspirants start at the same time in a Center. When you have
the headphones on you, you will still hear voices and this can get disturbing when you read
your RCs . If you are on the listening section, then its okay coz that noise will filter out the
rest. Since everyone starts at the same time, with an offset, most of them end up in the
speaking section at the same time. So no worry. [Still think there should be separations
or sound proof cubes. This set up with multiple people talking at the same time is
simply annoying even if it works and has worked]

PS: Don't give a shit about who is listening to what you say. Be loud and clear. I was a little
concerned and nagged, i am guessing this cost me 4 in the speaking section. None the less
the speaking section needs some practice. You need to think on your feet so that you don't
mumble or digress. Use your prep time for this. The Longman IBT is
pretty useful beside the free online stuff.

The TOEFL takes about 4 hours of your day. If you are starting early, then don't go in with a glass of milk unless you are a camel. Have something solid before u leave.

To be or Not to be

2008-04-23T15:54:00.019+05:30

Why is homosexuality (one of the many facets of alternate sexuality) not the "right thing", "against nature" or "perverse"? Why is not perfectly natural for a man to love another man or a woman to love another woman? A rather exasperated reply I bumped into "There may not be a law that says you can't marry a dog or corpse either, but marriage by definition is between a MAN and a WOMAN. Whatever relationship you have between yourself, an animal or a refrigerator is not marriage. Now, if that isn't clear to people, we need to get the little old constitutional amendment going that affirms it" The answer is loud and clear. "We don't want freedom to be taken for granted because it will lead to chaos, anarchy and ultimately, degeneration". Whose was freedom to define and mete out?

This is the first basic flaw: Ignorance, ignorant of the fact that, freedom was never bequeathed. It was never yours or mine to pass on and coop at will.

This ignorance guided Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). The British, ironically, abolished any such laws in their country, while this law persists and continues to hurt freedom of expression in ours. According to Section 377 of the IPC, framed in 1860, ‘‘Whosoever has carnal intercourse voluntarily against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or imprisonment for a term which may extend to 10 years, and shall be liable to fine.’’ "Carnal Intercourse against the order of nature"! What is this order of nature? Who defines this order?

This is the second flaw: Arrogance. The assumption that, that there is an "order of nature" and that "we uphold that order because we represent the people and we can take logical decisions on their behalf”.

The statutes are indispensable to lend structure to social processes, but this stature does not justify parochialism. In no simple words, the two blind spots this society faces in accepting alternate sexuality are Ignorance and Arrogance. These two flaws have pandered to each other to compound prejudice. The tragic saving grace is that sexual minorities are not alone. Driven by blissful ignorance and wilful arrogance, the society also oppresses all other minorities.

Blogathon - Let your mind pass on the Baton

2008-04-16T13:49:00.009+05:30

Thats a portmanteau - Blog+Marathon.
www.blogathon.in to get the complete details. An event for bloggers around the world to don their thinking caps/hats and express their views, judgments, opinions on issues of social relevance. April 20th - 26th.
There are multiple topics, you pick one and blog about it. The best blog, comment etc win virtual awards/badges of excellence, so to speak.
"Come again"?: Savvy an "Essay writing contest"? Well, just put the essay on your blog. The essay subjects are announced on the site.
The website gives the details and the modus operandi. Makes no sense for me to go on about the event per se, so penning my 0.02$ here.
The whole idea of Blogs as a new media, a new channel is pretty appealing. if you stripped the frills, a blog is just a lot of space on the web. "Clairvoyant" engineers added all the cosmetics and lo...you have a whole new tool - A Blog.
It's a great platform to hoist your flag and raise an alarm if need be. What bothers me most is, if blogs kill action. Raising awareness? this is an important item in the larger process of making a difference to the community. But that is hardly the end. Post the "i have blogged about it and a lot of people have read about it", there is a phase called "I have to do something about it"
I don't see the point in blogging about the need for better infrastructure in villages, if the thought ends there. Awareness has to transmute into action, for better results. Awareness may be the key. But the screw up is, its easy to get the key. In fact, its an "in thing" to posses the key. No one ever wants to enter the room and clean the dirt though. As if, by raising awareness, you have earned yourself 50 more years of salvation.
Lately i see more of this happening. I realized it was hypocritical of me to blog about poverty in the east. I am doing very very little to change the situation. if not change, at least plant the seeds of change. I switched to articles on "stuff" i have achieved, and how my journey could benefit other people wanting to do the same "stuff".
I am also switching gears to posts which deal with who i am. This way, i have a handle to tweak and change myself before i write about it. Until i get my hands dirty actually changing the poverty abused section of the populace, i am not blogging about it. Period.

The Only Way In

2008-04-10T14:59:00.005+05:30

Problem solving is a very very simple skill. You don't need a Wharton degree. Approaching any problem, giving it a structure
hypothesizing(MECE in Mc K Jargon), backing ideas by facts and delivering a solution. This process is very simple. All it needs it
1) An Open Mind
2) Clarity in thought and communication
3) Love ->Meticulousness->Dedication
4) Minor Point: Intellect.

Problem is, these skills don't come together. Mc K, simply capitalizes this hole in any organization. I liked the book. I've always believed, structured problem solving is the only way to deal with tough choices in life and career.
The part of stellar academic credentials at Mc K...well i don't agree. I know a lot of people at Mc K, who are very sharp, but have average academics. Which is fine. They fit into the larger context at Mc K.
Why then, every book/journal on Mc K stresses academics. If a MIT Phd application said "we want a 10/10 CGPA" i get it. Their course needs that rigor and grading. Why the hell does Mc K need it? Does a perfect score guarantee higher problem solving skills? No...I doubt it. But this book has a lot of gas about high academic standards. This i believe is a past that Mc K is unable to get out of. Lets take Google. They recruited the best engineers in the world, a few years ago ...and then they expanded...and expanded...and now you just have to get the algo courses and DS right, (By right, i mean you have to be an expert, not a god) to clear Google. This is true for any firm..Cisco, Microsoft, TI, Intel. They started off with "Only Berkeley, Stan and MIT" to "I am okay with the IITs, NITs, DCE, RVCE...(Indian engineering colleges). Why? Coz they needed more talent. This is available at multiple places. Again, they were sticklers for "we want the top 3". Now they say
" i know i will get a smart programmer from the bottom 10 too. Let me restructure my entrance test to include math, algorithms etc...instead of blindly interviewing the top three".

But why does Mc Kinsey still insist and turn its nose up? I don't get this...You don't need to have an A+ in VLSI to analyze a problem. Intellect is important. But Problem Solving is a skill. It is honed with practice.
1) What to look for
2) Where to look for it
3) How to use what you get
4) How to present it to, who ever asked for it.

This comes with experience. Any Consult worth his salt will tell you. If a fresh grad from school could solve all the problems given to him, does it perfectly, in record time then he would not come in as an Associate/Senior Associate. He would get in as a Partner. But No....Doesn't happen in the real world. Why? Because he is lacking in experience. Intuition is important. But Facts are a lot better. Memories Help. Learning helps. Experience makes a different. Practice.

Okay..not going to beat this to death. Good Book. This little flaw apart, a dream of a company to work for. They have been on the list of "The most Favored Companies" by B school Grads for years now. A crowning acknowledgment to a firm, which has produced more leaders than some of the best schools in the world.

Perhaps, Mc K, Morgan, Apple, Google... changed academic aspirations"I want to go to a top school so that i can take a shot at these companies" . Thanks to firms like these, FINALLY, students realize education is not the end but the mean to secure an end.
Conclusion: Wow, Mc K is awesome. (PS: So is BCG, Booz allen or any other company which emphasizes open minded, common sense problem solving)

Much ado about GRE

2008-03-31T19:04:00.005+05:30

I took my GRE on the 4th of March and scored a 760(V) +800(Q) +5(AWA). I have penned here lessons from the endeavour. The focus here is on verbal because quant is a walk in the park for most and only needs a memory job of 10th grade mathematics. The article below is for aspirants mid way into their preparation and not for beginners (a lot of terms used here may not make sense to beginners).

Analogies: A strong vocabulary may not really be a panacea and only continual practice makes the real difference. The idea is to form bridges between words (sentence formation as taught in high school) when solving analogies. My thought to you: Just practice from the “Big Book” to build these bridges continually until your master Analogies.

Sentence Completion: Most often, the straight forward SCs require no thought. The subtle ones need some looking into. For subtle differences, look for key words which connote positive or negative contexts. These key words contain clues to cracking a sentence completion problem and use the “Big Book” for these.

Reading Comprehension: The Introduction in the RC is the most critical. Most people ignore the beginning, hoping to catch up towards the mid and the end. This is a universal yet flawed approach.
Some insights:
a) Get a good handle of the introduction (what the author is getting to)
b) Ignore Facts/Names/Dates (Come back to them later)
c) Don't approach the mid of the RC clueless (it means you didn't read the introduction right)
d) Conclusion will reveal the author’s opinion/stance (but never read the conclusion in isolation)

Analytical writing: Stick to the rule book! Any experimentation here (especially if you haven't written dissertations/essays before) can backfire. Stick to the format explained in Baron's or Kaplan.

Is the Baron's Word list enough? No word list is enough. These lists are only indicative. Your Vocabulary is built over a period of time. To sum it up with a didactic thought “Baron’s is necessary but not sufficient”

Time to prepare: I took 2.5 months, from mid December to the first week of March. If you are a CAT or XAT veteran, then 3 months is a walk over. If not, give yourself 6 months of hard and continual practise.

Note: Quant is not tough. Stay calm and answer each question taking the full one minute to get the simple math correct. On the day of the test, start out slow, build your pace and use the momentum for the later questions.

GRE Scores are used as filters in some universities and are used sparingly in most others. Entry into one of the top 10 Universities calls for more than just the GRE Score. There is a whole lot of homework to be done on the SOP, the research discipline & the recommendations for breaking into the portals of the big ones. This and more in the next article on the art of SOP writing and entry into the top 10 US Universities.

Courtesy - Shalu

2008-03-30T22:18:00.005+05:30

Often, "normal" people believe they can be positive aberrations by taking to abstraction. Poetry is an easy succor. What sets the real poet apart is the power of control. Poetry is not about bizarre articulations or zealous poetic justice. This tool of poetic justice is abused by most "normal" people, who misinterpret this for genius. Genius doesn't lie in high abstraction or esoteric idioms.
Say, you want to express your emotion - indignation (say). A genius destructs this complex emotion into simple and easy ingredients for the laity to imbue. A true poet is cognizant of this power.
Okay....that little prelude was much needed for my lil sister's poem. I have been an on/off poet for 5 years now. I realize that i am very much an average poet. I had/have no flow.My sister has the flux that i lack. Probably its all congealed in me, thanks to years of being a competent rat in the mundane race to prove points.
I loved an earlier poem she wrote, so asked her to send me one. I love indian poets because i find it facile to connect with the ethos of the poem. The cover on the left is a lovely anthology. I find it difficult to classify this poem. But i really love the darkness of the milieu she finds herself in. I find this an exquisite work in expressing stark hopelessness. Okay...no more fluff ..read the real thing. Candid and Finely crafted.

"Wallowed in silence during a noisy noon,
One scream of earnest hope I hear,

I scan around to realize not too soon,

That it is my voice I fear.

On a screen of darkness in the light,

Reflections of the past I see,

As I see; within the stillness of my sight,

I am falling into the abyss to be.

Down and deeper as goes the fall,

In helplessness an arm stretches,

I freeze and do nothing at all,

Voila, my history on me, itself etches.

Clear as I fall deeper,

Confused I run away from me,

A dark grotto now is my soul keeper,

As my corpse imagines itself to be free.

Uprooted as I stand now,

I believe I am unbound,

I know it is to a nothingness I bend and bow,

Irony, that in losing my self, me I found.

I found me,

Outside of what I really am made,

As lost and mindless as can be,

Soulless, in prison walls laid.

Among people I move,

I smile, I laugh,

Not knowing what I try to prove,

In a oneness I remain... torn half.
- Shalini "

Vindicated - XLRI admit

2008-03-25T20:34:00.004+05:30

If you guys read my previous post on professional conduct in a GD and wondered, "does this SOB have the f****** birth rite to say this"...well i would never aver in favor of an end justifying a mean, but in this case...for all those cynical cogitators...i cleared the B school .
And that justifies my stand point. This post is not a rant or rave or anthem or pat on the back.

I wanted to spread the good word about a GD and how to tackle it. Most Centers for CAT/XAT prep lack the basic clarity to pass on. Their idea is.... you clear it..you take it...well, doesn't work that way. You have the clarity ...you are through. Your Percentile or your Achievements will cease to matter.
I want to thank my Sis in law for this. She is an alum of this school and its a great big dose of clarity that she gave me, that made a difference.

Sub prime Primer

2008-03-14T15:22:00.001+05:30

If you have no idea why the kid in the bright yellow suit was fired from his automobile company for apparently no reason, then read this.

http://docs.google.com/TeamPresent?docid=ddp4zq7n_0cdjsr4fn&skipauth=true&pli=1

Eat this

2008-03-08T10:22:00.001+05:30

was part of a Group Discussion in the selection process of a B-School. I was expecting a systematic, sensible discussion based on logic and give-and-take. What it turned out to be instead, was crap. Just penning down a couple of my thoughts here just in case someone wants to peep in.

Some Ground rules in a GD in no particular order:

DON'T

1) Speak as often as possible because CL/TIME/Nitwit told you so. Speak only if you have something relevant to say.

2) Jump in the moment some one takes a breather to gain visibility.

3) Begin every sentence with "Good Friend" or "My good friend over there had a good point" . These little grouping of words have no meaning. The idea of a GD is not to simply acknowledge a point because ../../Nitwit asked you to. Its professional to address the person by his name .
Say "Mr. X's argument does have its cogency". If you are not aware of the name, then just say "thats a good point/Address the person and say - that was relevant"....

4) Butt in at every conceivable opportunity with facts and statistics. Don't please bludgeon your way into speaking.

DOs

1) Listen Actively. Listening is as important as speaking. Listening for some reason, is the most undermined. GD calls for active participation of which listening constitutes 50%. The panel observing you may be looking at multiple facets of which "Listening" is crucial. They want you to Listen. No one cares if you butt in with "i listened well , good point my friend". Cut this crap out in a GD. The Listening phase is to get a better handle of the idea. If you are questioned in the interview on the GD, you are much better placed to answer the question if you listen actively.

2) Talk to your fellow aspirants before a GD to know them better and most importantly get their name.

3) Contribute minimally if everyone else is at each other's throat. The last thing you would want to do, is to follow all the sheep heading for mass extinction. When ever you see that a GD is dog eat dog scenario, do your best to structure it. If that doesn't work, don't follow the other morons. Simply stay out and listen well.

4) If you have absolutely nothing to say, use another participant's point and expand on it, in a different context. IT IS NOT A BAD THING TO SAY "I was not so sure about this issue initially, but what mr.x said rings a bell. Extending his idea a bit, i see that from my experience....."
Just because you acknowledge another person or admit you didn't have an idea, you don't lost points. Look at it logically. You are not expected to know everything about everything. As a Manager, its expected that you be honest yet willing to take multiple shots at reaching a solution.
Group Discussions are not for the sake of reaching a conclusion. The modus operandi per se is much more vital than the conclusion itself. Don't pat yourself on the back because you spoke "N" times in a GD. That just means you are a dumb fuck. The idea is to participate actively even if you speak little.
Look at it from a corporate scenario. Does your manager give a rat's ass about how often you spoke? No.....just because you spoke less doesn't mean you knew less. What your manager is more interested in is, are you able to glean the ideas gathered from the GD for your action items. Which is why companies have Brainstorming sessions(called a "war room" at Cisco to signify that a big strategy is being discussed). View the GD as a brain storming session.

No B-School worth its salt, judges you based on your GD alone. They know the typical fish market scenarios most freshers are capable of conjuring. And the participant who is active in the fish market scenario is slated for butcher in the interview.

Who you are matters more, not what you do at a GD.

Spelling Bee: Pronounce F-K-U-C

2007-10-27T09:18:00.000+05:30

Pronounce it. Annoying? Thats why we have F-U-C-K.

I have nothing of value to say, run out of quips and bons mots.
Don't want to give in to hyperboles and Amateurish criticism and shallow philosophy. Its annoying that being a devil's advocate has become a fad. For some weird reason, philosophy seems to have become a literal translation of "esoteric stuff with a punch with a annoying smile of "yes that's how it works, i know it".

Listening to the same shit on television about "how we have brought about progress" and "the Nifty or Sensex drops" some shit about some fucked up number that half of us don't even understand. Concerned and apprehensive looks on stock brokers. What the fuck do they think they are doing? Decoding complexities like John Nash? And that freaking number, that i have no idea of, controls my water supply.

for reasons of intellectual depravity, a Certain "super star" who unarguably does some shit, is revered in comparison to an actor, who is a few million leagues ahead of the entire fucking pack of fags. This guy's atheism is frowned upon and his "values" are peddled to bull shit him, but ask this "Super Star" or "flying comet" or what ever to do a Virumaandi some time , and i will eat off the toilet.

It gets on top of me, when i see the "know it alls " with their head bob talking about "economic progress, golf ", bullshitting the Left(with absolutely no perceptible idea of communistic ideals and values) . This technological progress, is freaking killing me.

It boils me to no end, to hear shit about how a celebrity couple wore matching outfits. That bitch, i am pretty sure slut-ed her way through holly-wood.
There is some other news about how a celebrity Hore, ended up becoming a politician and landed up in a debate on "Ban on Dancing Girls in Bars". Is this shit, ironical or what?

There is so much of shit around, yet i am beeped when i say "shit". And this... this is fucking called Democracy and these neo con ass-holes are a bunch of junk yard feral dogs.

Truth is the *most* important virtue, yet i will get whipped if i told you what i truly feel about Gujarat. The only thing i have freedom to, is to end this sentence with a comma and not a Full - Stop,

We have to find a way out to get out of this complex cock and get some clarity.

Morbid

2007-10-05T18:56:00.001+05:30

The Murder does a Little Gymnastic in my stomach and forces me to throw up.

"There is this beast in you and me. Yours is tamed. Guess i always hated the whip and the circus. That makes my beast free and happy but makes me sordid and inexplicable. but at least some part of me is free".

Inheritance of Loss - Review

2007-09-06T19:41:00.001+05:30

This is more of a review of the author/-ress than of the book. I was content and rather pre disposed to splurge on a large dose of Desai bashing. But that was when i was half way through this piece of literature. The booker is a Dream and its recepient is either very deep or very shallow. No ideal ground here. I concluded, half way through, that she belonged to the latter.
It took only a few more pages to turn the tide of the opinion. i am no IA Richards, but..Desai has managed to dig deep into a pile of thought. An idea that was universal, yet so unimportant.
What is it like to be in a majority, yet be suppressed. How does this come to be? Does the populace with a majority, plunge the wrong holes? Are all the Vantage points shaved off in the name of Civilization? What appealed to me about Kiran Desai is her thought. Its ravishingly simple. Stripped of complexity. Enough to be dismissed as shallow and un endearing. But its this thought that you and I languish in. This thought, be it a crude form of a Civilized Hipocracy or plain selfishness is probably the closest you and i get to the truth.

There is a beautiful petit section in the Book, where a character in the book loses his Dog.
In the very same context is the North East, Red and Fuming. why is the Dog important? Why is the dog not important? Subjective? "My Dog, your Son. Every Dog dies. Every Son dies. Thats the rule."

We are all the same Within. This heterogeniety is a made-up word. made up by the intellegensia to prove points. I do as i do, because i be as i be , because i am what was around me. Genes do condition us. This is made apparent by the environ around us.

Why didn't anybody but Kiran Desai think of it before? That you and I are the same. We are different because we think we are different. we want to be different. I am a tribal at heart.
I am as smart as the briton who used boats to tranport 2 tonnes of Raw material to conjure up this wonder called the "Stone henge". We are really really the same. You and I. We act and react. But Mostly We Just Act.

Sequel

2007-08-15T13:27:00.000+05:30

Learn Butterfly Effect:

Our whole purpose of life is to organize our love others with complete and true love. Before we do that we must love ourselves. So, how is the relationship with you?

Do you have a relationship with you? It is a good idea to ponder into the deep side of you and meditate upon the mysteries of who you are, or better yet of who you can become.

Before we can have significant and lasting relationships with others we need to understand the person we are now and the person we can become.

Break free from you inhibitions and ask yourself who am I, what is my purpose in life. Answer with complete truth and honesty. Then live your life off that foundation. Base your life on who you are. Break free from your doubts and fears and be happy loving who you are. Once you love who you are you will be totally free to love others.

If our purpose on this earth is to love others, we certainly cannot truly achieve that if we are hiding our insecurities and not really loving ourselves. Hiding behind a sea of emotions or a certain weakness will keep us from growing into the person we were meant to be. Being afraid to love others because of being hurt in the past also keeps us from trusting others enough to love.

The first step in growing out from self is to understand that what is our purpose, goals ideas and dreams in life are. Believe it or not, some folks are not sure what their purpose and goals in life are and live in a depressed state of aimless wondering and disillusionment. But it doesn’t have to be like that.

The focus here is to grow out from self by knowing first who we are and the working towards the substance that we are. Who are you? What are you? Where are you going? Why are you going? Find it, seek it, acknowledge it, know it and go after it with gusto.

It is like a caterpillar that are beautiful butterflies. All the excellent creations have the ability to turn into beautiful butterflies. But not all the creations will become beautiful butterflies. What is that? A caterpillar doesn’t allow itself to be free from self. Whether it is through weakness or fear, a caterpillar must break free from what is holding it back by realizing it can become butterfly.

A butterfly is free from restraints of self. A butterfly has grown out from self and now seeks to love others with all the love it has while a caterpillar is still seeing to be loved by others. Unfortunately many caterpillars do not know they have the ability to become butterflies and so remain in their cocoon until they die.

Come out your cocoon and become the butterfly you were always meant to become. Learn to know who you are by having a truly honest relationship with yourself. Grow out of any negativity that may be wedged within your mental, aesthetic sensitive and sensible capacities.

Low self- worth, fear, mistrust insecurities, sin and unbelief will keep you from discovering the natural and true person you really are. But when you have enough belief in your latent potentials then you know it will keep you from those feeling that plague you or that would keep you from growing into the butterfly you were meant to be.

Fear and insecure persons hide behind negative emotions and are enveloped within a particular weakness in their life. Unbelief is weakness. Unbelief in the ground realities is the biggest and most damaging weakness a person can carry upon their shoulders.

For many years I lived on weakness of unbelief which prompted me to drink to fight solitude, group pleasures, late night discussions, and the awe of being held in high esteem my mediocrity by my friends and associates fueled my inebriations. After becoming sober I wallowed in negative emotions those years, I did not know how to have relationship with myself because my relationship was with the ‘spirit’. (Till I was kicked to a nursing home with high lipase and amylase.) . I was rebellious to my work, being and consciousness. . My low self-esteem kept me living in a cocoon bound by a web of deceit that kept me from growing into the beautiful butterfly I was meant to become. I was afraid to grow out from self and get to know truth.

Please learn from my mistakes. Get to know who you are, because that is what society wants from you. Come out of hiding .All you caterpillars and become free butterflies!

END NOTES:

The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing and that therefore changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing targets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating. -Karl Marx.

We admire philosophers. To call someone, from any field a philosopher is almost the ultimate accolade in India. The land of philosophy where religion is described as away of life, where common people philosophize in routine conversation. So why is the philosophy so dear to us. For Pythagoras who originally coined the term philosphia it meant love of wisdom. Later Plato defined philosophy as the love of truth but the also referred to it as the love of wisdom. A wise person, said another philosopher Palma, one would have to love the truth of course but he or she would have too love other things aswell such as human beings. We can easily understand that, For truth is the property of certain propositions while wisdom is the charter of a person .so whatever may be the philosophy a philosopher is definitely a wise person. That is why philosophers are not only engaged in pursuit of certain truth but even more concerned with becoming certain type of person. Many explain the above further. The coincidence of changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as socializing practice, With the wisdom the philosopher said the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it.

Only few people in their pursuit of truth and love for wisdom have been continuously changing their circumstances and themselves engaging in social practice and we call this continuous activity their history. On the other hand many like us who have the potential to participate actively in social practice, interpret, justify, peg our life and philosophy from the point of our weakness, lifestyles, beliefs, and habits.

Let history record we are also prepared for change like colorful butterflies.

Chinu

My reply:

Hello Uncle,

Read your article. A very precise and refreshing write up. I can literally feel the tons of introspection that went into the article. Crisp intelligence on paper, as i would like to call it.

My two cents:

All of us unconcsciously love ourselves. When we love a spouse, a son, a daughter, a mother, a father....we are really loving the truth that they love us. Thats how God works too i think. The only problem with this unconscious love is that it could be terribly lacking in self respect and identity.
Thats where i see your article fill the pigeon hole. Its very important we identify who we are. To perhaps quote a cliche "Its intelligence to know another, its wisdom to know the self"

To take a leaf off your article, its extremely important to be conscious of who we are. All the philosophy and wisdom in the world lies in simple and clear thought. This unconscious love we have for ourself most often transmutes to pity, sympathy, ego and arrogance.

Its extremely important that this Love transforms to greater know how on ourself. Thats where i guess the journey to truth really begins.

The most beautiful and fulfilling concept in the process of evolution is thought. The wonder about the human body is that, it reconciles the intangible thought with the tangible atom.

We love to live and we live to know. But most often we lack the love to know.

Regards

Saranath

Pyramid Club

2007-08-08T20:48:00.000+05:30

A Young man hitchhiking in Canada, ran out of money. He sat on the road waiting for a Lift. A car pulled by and a farmer
offered a ride. When the Young man was about to get off, the farmer handed him 2$. The Young man told him, that it would pretty tough for him to return the Money.
The farmer told him "Return the Kindness by doing the same
onto some other homeless young man".
Thus continued, what later constituted a Pyramid Club.
Let that Club come to life with Sainath at the peak.
Three cheers and a Namaskaram to Sainath and his Credo.
May his kind clone.

A DNA called Democracy

2007-07-25T12:29:00.000+05:30

Read somewhere that, india's history shows a rich legacy of implicit and un-enforced morality.
This made sense and the law was well defined and although the region was ruled by a monarch,
this was hailed a consummate model of democracy...morality from within...
Now, the law enforces ethics. Yet we are democratic.
Freedom is the human mind. Democracy is a DNA. It defines and evolves. All we can do is accept
it. Most endeavors at any genetic modification result in an ugly mutation.
USA and India - GM crops.

Jack and Jill and Global Warming

2007-07-20T18:01:00.000+05:30

Jack and Jill
Went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water
but when they went there,
they found it bare
with no protection
from the sun's radiation
Jack contracted skin cancer
and Jill followed soon after.

(Courtesy : GS Report, AIOBEU)

Lassitude

2007-07-07T15:32:00.000+05:30

Genius is always stomped on by collective stupidity.

Presidential Elect Speech

2007-06-30T22:51:00.000+05:30

Mr.Toastmaster, Fellow Toastmasters and Welcome Guests. The toughest thing in the world, is to find somebody who loves you, who loves you in spite of your mistakes, your flaws, in spite of you ego. Somebody who accepts you whole heartedly as a unique individual. Each day, every morning, you and I wake up with hope. With a hope that, the society around us treats us kindly, treats us with respect, treats us with love and concern. On most days, these hopes are dashed. Why is that? That’s because we live in a culture of numbers, where our Driving License Number, our Social Security Number, our Birth certificate matter much more than who we are. We live in a culture where ambitions, ideas, goals and objectives matter much more than human lives.

In this mode of living, it’s rare to find a group of people who assemble, just to know you better and help you better yourself. You and I are a part of that very special group.

Have you ever wondered that if you to make a something as simple as a milkshake, from scratch, you would first need to create the universe. What that means is, who we are and what we do is a product of millions of years of evolution, millions of years of growth and millions of years of thought, millions of years of love and empathy. I am not here, because I leapt higher, no, I am here, because a lot of much brighter individuals chose not to leap for my sake, choose to give me an opportunity to grow and mature.

Once there was a well known philosopher and scholar who devoted himself to the study of Zen for many years. On the day that he finally attained enlightenment, he took all of his books out into the yard, and burned them all. All that you need to know is within you.

All that you need to become a leader is within you.
Leadership is about knowing your self. Its about knowing who are, what you can do and what you can’t. Each one of us is a leader. Each one of us is a key. The onus is on you to find the right lock and open the door to a different opportunity.

Why is leadership so special? Why is it never cliched? Why can’t you just be an average human being, minding his business, taking care of his family, taking care of his life and move on.

Toastmasters, We live in a very complicated democracy. A country where extremes are a commonality. The need of the hour is not individuals who can change society, but human beings who can change thoughts, individuals who can lead millions of human beings out of darkness into a magical world of rationale and free thought.

We owe it to our country, we owe it to the human beings around us to hone our leadership skills. It would be meek if I said, I am thankful to Daffodils for giving me and this team this opportunity to learn and to lead. Its not a “Thank you” that we owe you, but a wholesome share of our learning and growth.

Music doesn’t come from the guitar, It doesn’t come from the violin, it doesn’t come from the flute. Music comes from within you. I believe that, all that we know and what we are is in the form of a musical note within us.

It is this music which drives us, which gives us purpose and which gives us hope. Let’s use that rhythm to help take our society to a higher plane oh thought.

Let’s not waste even a moment. Let the rhythm flow.

Marx-sism for SOS

2007-05-06T15:05:00.000+05:30

Robert Frost in “Mending wall” speaks about how fences are not needed. I quote
“Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
that sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
and spills the upper boulders in the sun,
and makes gaps even two can pass abreast.”

The motif here gravitates around how nature dislikes walls. How evolution will bring down physical barriers. Frost was clairvoyant. He spoke of not an opinion but a paradigm. Unfortunately, the walls have helped protect the weak against strong currents.
The moment nature brings them down, they are left unprotected. Others of their race seem to show no regard for the weak either. Bomb shelters seem to be saturated with those who can afford the shelter.
Evolution is cruel. It kills the less adaptive and weaker and selects the stronger. The weak fade out and die. If that “weak” were a dinosaur race, I would not give two hoots about it. That “weak” happens to be a human being like you and me, which is why I am piqued. Lack of fences and walls have opened windows of inequalities. Globalization has myriad positives. These pleasantries, albeit, seems to impact only 20% of the populace, “The stronger”. The “weak” will eventually be culled out.
The farmer suicides are a good example of this cruel process of natural selection.
The weak in India are being slowly eliminated by this evolution which shows scant regard for a human life. The “others” of that race, us, seem to offer no semblance of assistance either.
We need to slow down the pace of change. We need to erect fences and empower our domestic economy before letting in any competition to this economy.
Freedom and democracy have been grossly misunderstood by the American administration, so much so, that they are treated in higher regard than the human life itself.
This only reminds me of the dichotomy between Ayn rand and Marx. When I was younger, I urged myself to wrap up 5 Ayn rand books in a year. I appreciated her understanding of democracy and intelligence. I stuck so much to her sense of thought; that I spoke as her alter ego for years. I spoke with fervor about her candid outbursts.
I still enjoy the terrorist (read Ayn Rand), although now, I only relish the impeccable language and nothing more.
After Ayn Rand, I followed an ideal broken middle ground and believed that India could still be redeemed by striking a balance between capitalism and socialism. I believed we could do wonders if we came up with a system that encompassed the best of both. Over time, I have realized that we have reached a dire need for Marxism.
I have never believed in extremism of any sort nor will do so. Any revolution is based on rational thinking and clear and lucid judgments. We need to spark a revolution before more of our country men fade and die and are forgotten. We need to get the government to be proactive about the changes that globalization is bringing in.
I see no other form of thought other than Marxism to help the revolution. The proletariat is moving from the edge of poverty to death. I am ashamed that I belong to the 20% of the populace which benefits from globalization and does nothing to help the other 80%.
The need of the hour is not to bestow blind power in the workers and unions but empower them to understand what power is.
My country men are on the brink of death. Time is running out. Again, violence and bloodshed have no place is a rationale society. The revolution is needed to empower, empower the working class, the class locked out in the MTRs and selling vegetables in push carts.
I am at a loss of words about some of my country men’s stoic and hardened nerves.
I am in no state of mind to elucidate the modus operandi of the revolution either. Somehow I have aged a thousand years since my last article on globalization.
All I can think of now, is Bhagat Singh’s “Inqualab Zindabad”.

evolution - predefined

2007-05-04T21:34:00.000+05:30

MENDING WALL
Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs.
The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me,
and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors?
Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.
' I could say 'Elves' to him, But it's not elves exactly,
and I'd rather He said it for himself.
I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand,
like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

A poem penned during world war1 speaks of the state of human thought a century hence. What was this guy thinking?

The Break-feast of a champion

2007-04-21T19:05:00.000+05:30

Kurt vonnegut. Slaughter house 5 and breakfast of champions. Two masterpieces of war literature. This is not an obitury to this writer, who died a couple of weeks back. This post is more of a "shit man....this is weird shit...but what a book..." . There are two objectives to a book and to its author...Speak itself and stay spoken and speak himself and stay spoken.

What is this war 'thing' really? Its 'bad'? that it? war is like poverty. You grow into it. And you live in this reality, you are forced to admit. You can isolate your thoughts from this reality of gore and death and smell of burning flesh and dream of a pasture. Or you fit into exsistance with resignation. Isolation of thoughts and dreams are a temporary succor, much like an orgasm. Nothing more. Like poverty. Like picking the smelliest piece of left over from a dump.

You pick it up, and dream and you dream. You see cars, flashy gentle men and gentle women and you see your spouse, picking the other left over and you dream of a better time, of a better life, of why and how and why evolution went wrong? Why me? Why not me? War, handicapped and mentally disturbed, a soldier sees a construed reality. A reality he brought about. A sickening reality. "A purple heart - ludicrously negligible wound" as vonnegut puts it.

Vonnegut speaks about the bombing of dresden and the burning corpses with astonishing matter-of-fact ness. But that per se is the reality splashed all over. You either eveolve into it or out of it. To break the mould and take cognizance of blase reality, of a family, of a child, of a life, of growth, of predictability.
Two realities, you put them in a cup and you want to dip into and see how far the rabbit hole goes. how far can you go?

Vonnegut speaks about war and about mental handicaps and sees no co relation between the two. "Years of war didnt render me retarded, I did" . choice.
I would be ridiculously exposing my writing handicaps if i were to even disemble this man or these books. To me, they delve into the psychology and slaughter it and say "that was a waste of time". Vascillations of hate and hate. Of dreams and reality. Of why more than how. Really...the handicap has begun to show up. period.

The butterfly effect

2007-03-31T11:18:00.000+05:30

my 0.02$ on globalization:
"The butterfly effect

To make that easier to emphathize with, the butterfly effect postulates that a butterfly's wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that might ultimately cause a tornado. Sounds insane? Well it’s just an explanation used in thermodynamics, not to be taken literally. To use that as an analogy to explain a phenomenon called “globalization” could be quite apt.
What is globalization really? is there much more to it than breaking fences? Why the broohaha about it? why the butterfly effect to explain it?

Globalization is an offshoot of man’s endeavor to better ‘his’ intelligence and productivity every passing day. (This itself could be a bone of contention for critics, because it is a “his” and not “we/they/all/us”.)
Globalization is an integrtation of socio-enconomic-culturo spehres around the world. A movement caused by increased movment of land,water and air across countries.
A global standandisation of life, Cultures, technology, economics and thinking.

Picture this. Globalization is simply a virtual merging of all conceivable land.The world somehow magically coaelesing all its solid entities. This makes it easier for a man, say a peddlar, to move from one land to another. No water in between. So no impeding him. He moves and struts across the land and sells his wares. This makes it easy for all peddlars across the world to travel across far and near lands and sell their wares. And for us, customers/buyers, we have the luxury of choosing from different peddlars.
He sells, sells,sells his wares and buys,buys,buys what we have to give him. We start enjoying this new founded friendship so much that we exchange our ideas, our thinking for his ideas and his thinking.
And at the end, we depend on him and he depends on us. And we lock each other in a loop of interdependance. Locking our thinking,ideas and possibly our cultures, economics and our destinies.
And that makes globalization like a giant hand, that puts together different marbles in a jar, and says “ you are all together now, stronger, but if I break the jar, you also die together”. What are the frutis of this coming together? Is it greater unity, greater solidartity or more selfishness, more individualistic thinking? “I am a marble and I need to survive till the end. As long I am with the others, I co operate for my gain, when they die out, I co operate with somebody else” . But what is wrong with individualistic thinking? Nothing really, not as long as it doesn’t end up impinging on the line separating human and animal. Not as long as the marble which loses its neighbour says “ aaah…life is like that…next”
Globalization, ever since it has raised its head, has been a pet hate for most anti-empire critics, Citing the death of the economics of thirld world countries and attributing to globalization the death of variety, the death of heterogeniety….But why? Are these critics beings excessively skeptical?
Looking at this phenomenon logically, Globalization has brought with it myriad benefits. You and I can cut across borders. we don’t have to be “far-out/outlandish” to each other, but “closer back home”. The obvious fruits are of course, more and more places to shop, more and more ‘stuff’, more and more ‘fun’, more and more ‘business’ , more and more ‘money’, more and more ‘ideas’, more and more ‘work’, more and more ‘communication’, more and more ‘etc…’ and of course, less and less ‘time’.
That wraps it up, doesn’t it . But why the critic? If things are getting to be more and more ‘fun’, why complain? Man, ever since he was conceived, has always wanted to point fingers. Not at himself, mercifully, But at ‘something/anything’ else. There is nothing wrong with globalization, really…the problem has always been with our twisted minds. To say that “farmers/poor/minorites are being excluded and the chasm between the rich and the poor is getting bigger, thanks to globalization” is inane. That masks the bigger problem. The real problem is with us.
Globalization was bound to happen. Pretty inevitable just like adam and eve. The real problem is Man inherently thinks “me” and then “they”. Globalization has nothing to do with it. In india, we have had the agricultural sector and the farmers being at the wrong end of every stick ever since this country was/is what it was/is. Nothing has been done. Blame the state? Blame liberalization? Blame privatization? Blame nehru/congress? No….we are to blame.

If a poor, bruised girl on the street, bending her lithe little body and jumping through hoops, begging for money doesn’t evoke any emotion in you, and you rather accelerate your bike to get to work on time, then you should get your self admitted to the nearest zoo or the nearest mortuary. You are either a beast or you are dead.
And that emotion should transmute to some tangible action. Not just “ wow….poor girl…I feel bad for her…I want to do something….but no time…shit …..signal”
We need to understand that globalization is not the issue. It is us. We need to want to make a difference. If we can put up and remain stoic to the fact that ‘we are having all the fun’ while ‘they are reeling under poverty’, then we are diseased. If man can do the impossible, break fences, how tough is it for us to make certain that the benefits of globalization extend to all and sundry? We think, so we can.
If the human within us is not dead, we can wake up and realize that a lot of farmers/small scale industries/daily wage workers/retailers are going to be affected/effected because of globalization. Affect or effect is within us. We can consciously evovle a mechanism to make sure, it effects and helps them. We can make sure that the retailers who may reel under ‘no-business’ if a wal-mart comes over, can lead a symbiotic relationship with wal-mart. Is that impossible? No its not.
How is wal-mart able to price its items so low? Because they sell en-masse. Who is to supply? Why not the retailers? The state can define a optimum competitive price that would be impartial to both. The state can insist that wal-mart buy from these retailers. And in turn, we also define the hygienic/quality of any item that the retailer sells. That is anti-democratic? No its not. It’s the opposite. We are making sure, that the chain is not broken and that it is stronger. That any benefit accrues to “for the people, by the people and is the people”. We are making sure the old chain of manufacturer-distributer-retailer is not broken to manufacturer-rock bottom price-wal mart.
“I will protest, I will close down wal-mart…how can they sell …they will kill my retailer” is nonsence and fanatical and sadly, it doesn’t address the issue. The issue is, empower the retailer, make him more competitive, make sure he doesn’t stand out and protest but gets his hands dirty and enjoys the fruits.
We need to consciously make sure that the state functions this way. The same analogy applies to agriculture. “I will ask my sister to buy cotton from USA, coz its cheaper….india…my god…so costly” is a killer attitude, so is “ I will not buy cotton from outside, and if somebody does, I will protest….buy the costlier ones from here and shut up” .
We don’t have to buy cheaper wares and feel good about it. instead work, at empowering the indian farmer who is unable to sell cheaper. Make him competitive. Why is his price higher? Lack of processes, machinzation, vagaries of weather…put a stop to that. We simply empower him. How? Think…how tough is it? we invented a machine that does our work and plays games with us and talks to us….

We need to acknowledge that, it is not globalization but us. That maaza/narial/roohafza is replaced by “coke and choke” is our mistake. We need to have made the difference then. Crying and complaining “hey…these kids…all they drink is coke…why cant they drink coconut water” is ridiculous. If It were up to me, I would have insisted that every MAC/KFC sell coconut water too. Those ‘clowns/old men’ know how to brand anything. but make sure…they buy and sell good/clean coconut water and that in turn comes up our coconut sellers. If you sold good, healthy coconut water and made it accessible ( have coconut water vending machines…who is complaining…what is stopping you?) then people would pay for it.
Empower the coconut seller instead of ignoring him and then fighting for his cause. When coconut water is avalaible only on national highways between channai and bangalore, then who is to blame? And coke and pepsi are ubiquitous, who is to blame again? This business would throw open employment.
“ weavers and small time artists..no way…I am goin to cauvery emporium to buy..please…its class”…is as annoying as “weavers are dying, close down these bigger shops…buggers come here and take our sandlewood…” .where do these “emporiums” get their wares from? God? Heaven? George bush? His wife may be? …..If it is easier for us to order these artistic creations online and that is provided for only by these “emporiums” why don’t we include the small time weavers and artists and potters in this chain? We postulate a rule, that the emporiums buy from them. If the creation is artistic, why would these shops refuse? Price…evovle a ideal pricing scheme. If the emporiums plan to employ these artists/weavers/potters then, nothing like it. Make sure there again., they are not worked like cheap labour, but come under the purview of industrial laws and regulations. These simple rational notions can be further worked upon, no doubt. But the efficacy lies in the implemention.

why the butterfly effect? Well …a small technological change, a minor change in the way we think is causing/has caused a disturbance. We can either ride that storm all by ourselves and say “hurray” or we can stay out and say “no way…that is only for those who can afford it…I protest” or we can get into the storm and extend our hand to those who want to ride it but are unable to. "

Freedom at the grave

2007-03-31T11:15:00.000+05:30

A broken excerpt from the speech i delivered at the District Conference, Toastmasters.

" FREEDOM ONLY AT THE GRAVE.

Never fear! Frown not, I beseech thee,
But smile upon my heroic race!
We have won freedom’s fight,
All one, strong and free
I have been free since the beginning and forever will be so.
For i was born free and shall die so.

Mr. Toastmaster, Fellow Toastmasters and Honored Judges, The six lines of fervor were interleaved from four national anthems.
An idea which inspired 2 billion people to put their lives at stake. An idea which promised man that he was the master of destiny. The sovereign of his fate. An idea which promised me that I would not be punished for who I was.

Why? Why then is racial prejudice and Discrimination a part of the global culture? Why?

If you want to know how to shatter a man’s dignity, I have an answer for you. Hunt him down from his homeland, isolate him from his family, pack him like a commodity, ship him across the ocean and then enslave him. What amendments can you and I make for the civil war? Can we look into the eyes of a fatherless African child and tell him “we are sorry, we killed your father, but he was black”

A pre meditated mass slaughter vanquished 5 million lives. It held no bias; it killed all equally, Woman, men, children. The sky cried, the earth smiled, the death camps swelled.
But there was no reprieve for the Jews.

This belief in a hierarchy of human beings has crippled mankind and punished freedom in the past. But sadly we continue to Discriminate, Oblivious to that inglorious past.

Discrimination against woman, against backward castes, against minorities, against the poor, against the blacks, against Palestinians, against the Jews, Why?

An American soldier was caught on tape, punching an Iraqi woman in the abdomen. Why? is it because she is a woman or is it because she is an Iraqi?
Sixty years after independence, Freedom in India is a mirage. A 22 year old girl was burnt alive. She was deemed untouchable and it was believed she brought ill luck to the village. Her three month young child was hacked to death. Why?
A child three month old is unaware of its mother tongue and we allege that it has a creed, a caste, a religion. Is that tragic or ironical?

What makes an Iraqi any less important than an American? His race? What makes that Dalit child any less important than your own? His creed? Why am I an untouchable? Am I dirtier? Does my heart start pump toxic fluids? Does my pulse throb slower? No. It doesn’t. If you pricked me, I ooze this red liquid. But so do you, what makes me different?
What is the solution Toastmasters? What is the panacea to kill this global plague of intolerance? The answer to that lies here. The Mind is the womb of discrimination. There are no physical fences, except in the mind. There is no segregation expect in your thought. Kill those thoughts; Kill those thoughts that make a fellow human being inferior to you. He is not. Each one of us is equally important to sustain this planet. Be it sewage cleaner or the president.
All I am asking of you is to look beyond the mask of flesh and blood and see the human within the being. The moment you do that, all thoughts of intolerance will disappear.

Assuming that you and I have flushed all the poisonous thoughts, what next? Together, we hold hands and spark a revolution. Raise your Voice; articulate your anger against hate, against jingoism, against bigotry. Fall into groups and leverage the collective voice to help the minorities. The key is to fight the cancer from within.
Instill confidence in the minorities that they can fight back, that their freedom will not be snatched away.
He hates me for what I am. He hates me for who I am. He wants to see my bleed. But what ever the reason, I don’t want to shed a drop of his blood. We don’t have to resort to violence, Toastmasters. Firm and consistent opposition will see us through.

But, if you asked me, why should I revolutionalize? How do I stand to gain? What is the incentive? I have no wealth that I can promise; all I can share with you are these simple thoughts.

Deep within, at the very core, you and I are a nothing more than a product of a love.
Each human life is an eternal dance of memories, of desires, of companionship, of camaraderie, of love, of dreams.
Which is why, at the core, you and I are the same. The difference exists only on the outside. Learn to respect those differences. It is that difference on the outside that makes us special.
Death, Toastmasters, is a choice. Let out a small screech for a fellow human being and you can choose to be immortal. Each one of us can make a choice. We can choose to be a mahatma. That is the incentive.

It is indeed shameful that Freedom and equality have lost their ground to colonialist instincts and jingoistic attitudes. When I die, if I am known as the white man who died, the black man who died, the brown man who died, then equality would be rendered null and void.
The true meaning of freedom and equality will dawn upon our graves, only when each one of us, dies as a human being, and nothing else."

Game Theory For Dummies

2006-12-31T17:15:00.000+05:30

Do you see what you should be seeing? Where did the fracture begin? Can we resize the World Economy? Can we Robin Hood some Wealth from the better half, and redistribute it? The Media, Fourth Estate as a Book popularised it, plays a proactive role in exposing these lacunae- courtesy photo.
One section ridden with a disease and another Section vaccinated with Lucre. Are we taking a Human life for granted? Why so? Too many of it..........? " 6 Billion people....It doesnt make sense for everybody to be equally wealthy. It would defy logic. Economies always have a winner and a loser "..Quoting a Rather infamous CEO.
Competition or Neo classical Enonomics may be guided by Game Theory. But to use the same concept for explaining poverty is frigid.
Anorexic and Aneamic. Somalese Children. Were they on the wrong side of the stadium? Rooting for the wrong team? May be so, but when they do want to get their hands dirty in the game, They are being subdued and dissuaded by Cat calls.
If that analogy escaped logic, take a sneak peek at the Statistics for Aid(below meagre) flowing into these countries, the analogy would plausibly be germane if not sensible. An article in the HINDU, avered that the Muslims in India are being marginalised, and this abject state would aid terrorist camps looking out for recruits. and it went on to suggest that we need to have more inclusion in any activity of national importance. Agreed. Jus one Addition. This ghetoo-ing may have ramifications, not only among the Muslims but also hundreds of thousands of Ethopians and Somalians and Indians in similar conditions. That was not a statement. It was a clarion call. a Caveat.
The Cause is well known. The remedy is well within sight. The implementation is flawed. How do you channelise Aid to Third world countries and make good use of that money, post that?
i dont beleive a picture speaks a thousand words, as a popular adage claims. A picture instead should spawn a thousand thoughts. each oen those thoughts should transmute to a tangible action. Post after Post, i have been raving about the need to bridge the economic gap that exsists in our society. one Q. Am i preaching only? a clerick, playing with words, to fashion a pep talk for the "beleivers"? i dont know, What i know is, I want to. What know is, i can. What i dont know is if i am doing anything at present. If i had to see through the looking glass, like Alice did, i feel no curiosity. Just Shame.

To an Alarm clock

2006-11-09T22:30:00.000+05:30

The clock met time,
said the clock, " am i a worm?"
" a worthless instance created of choice and thought
i hold no value, i am a worm
you are eternity, i am but a chop of a spec"

said the time, "you r a choice,
a choice that works and doesnt work
your handicap lies in your dependance
you are my template and not the other way around"

Gandhi, Chairman emeritus of the freedom struggle communion

2006-10-07T14:41:00.000+05:30

How did gandhi do what he did? how did he negotiate with an empire that was obstinate in its incline to give higher emphasis to commerce rather than human lives?
if this empire had scant regard for the loss of human life, how did satyagraha or courting arrest really help? "jail bharo" ? defies logic....
The empire did not bat an eyelid when thousands of people straved to death in a famine... y did gandhi's penance make a difference then? did things fall in place for him? if it did, y is he so celebrated? every freedom fighter shared the same conscious that gandhi did. Their ultimate objective ran along the same track.
Y did one person enjoy leadership and popularity, when every other peer of his, think the same? we could never argue that bhagat singh was less patriotic. if that is so, y not let him co-father the nation?
Is gandhi simply revered beacuse he was the most successful among the lot? does that make Gandhi a natural leader rather than an ultimate freedom fighter? or was he just lucky?
Did bhagat singh falter in his journey? if he was successful, we would have quoted him for any instance that needed simple brute force with a brute. an eye for an eye , a tooth for a tooth.
Gandhi beleived the opposite. y did this work? what did the british perceive different about this opposition. They had the brute force. why didnt they simply supress?
would gandhi have worked in the nazi regime? would satyagarahas in death camps made a difference to hitler's vision? if america did a gandhi to Al-Queda, would that result in al-queda forsaking their goal?
Gandhi was a concept that clicked, then. we are thankful that a leader emerged in the confusion that betrayed the freedom struggle.
We are thankful that this man gave importance to every human life. To assign him the ultimate, or to critisize him is simple mis understanding.
Gandhi emerged because of our psychology. his stand gave us vicarious courage. we saw in him , what we wanted to see in ourselves.
This post was an attempt to clear my confusion on this concept called Gandhi. i've never beleived in blind reverence or produced critisicm.
Gandhi was transparently sincere. he had the qualities that epitomised leadership, summed up a higher degree of evolution. He is as imporant in the context of freedom struggle as any body else. as important as you and me who don't beleive in fences.
Gandhi was moulded in an era which gave primadonna status to social integration. We have moved past that. we cannot do a gandhi any more. To evolve and think, we need to break fences and simultaneously disintegrate. no pun there. Dis integrate, think for yourself, dont be conditioned and gift wrapped. Think like you were the first man on this planet. evovle , metamorphosize and then integrate......
Choose to think by volition and you can do a gandhi one day and do a Budhha the next.
Gandhi was a celebrity. Much like a popular protaganist. You saw in him what you wanted to see in yourself when you should have seen in you what you should have seen in yourself.

To Camus who thought what he thought and JK who believed what he believed

2006-09-04T17:16:00.000+05:30

This post is dedicated to two very profoundly simple human beings.

For what is what?
for what is How?
would death be bad if it were the ultimate objective?
a nihilist splits atoms,
a rebel is a consistent person
and a maverick is a liar.
death is not the opposite of life
and thought is the opposite of thinking.

The war cry of the Third World Sheep

2006-07-23T12:10:00.000+05:30

The sheep was cooped.
Sheared.
Cooped.
You r Genetically Constrained , said the Man.
Thought The Sheep,"If only i could think",
Thought The Man," If only The sheep could think".
Thought the Other Sheep "If only The Sheep Did not think"
The sheep said to the others" Hey , Hey, We can think!!"
Thought The Other Sheep "Yea, sure. "

The sheep thought " Hey what if i could do a Man"
Then I could make him Play The Sheep
" You are Born to be cooped" said the others

"I want freedom" said the sheep, " He will End up at the butcher" , said the others.
" I will die free", said The Sheep,
?????????? Thought the Others

Many Years Passed,
The Man Died,
The Sheep Died.
And the Others Were Butchered.

Dawn of the same new day

2006-07-23T11:55:00.000+05:30

If the God was Human,
If the God did not Beleive in Himself
Would he be an athiest or Just lacking in Confidence?
Did the puppets get out of hand?
Did they start to Logic for themselves? He thought.
he eavesdropped , said one puppet to the other,
" how do you know some body up there pulls the strings ?"
" I think Its the other way around. "
" The puppeteer was Our Conclusive Answer"
"Oh ho", Thought the God, "if i Had only foreseen this.."

Encore. All for an Encore

2006-06-16T20:30:00.000+05:30

How does the economics of a society work? There is this beautiful masterpiece, magnum opus, if you may, entitled "Toujours Plus! (Always more) by Francois de Closets which deals with the same. Incidentally The HINDU had an article on the same. I am not going to dissect the content of the book. what i plan to do rather is formulate an argument on a similar plane.
(The society, central to my argument mimics the french society in all attributes.)
The economics of the society is astonishingly glaring. The reality is all around you. As its member your ability to control its dynamics commensurates with the power you wield over its subjects.
Consider a prosperous society. Assume equitable( not equal) distribution of power. what is the probability that this society degenerates to poverty? Does the calculation involve complex leibnitz mathematics? i Doubt it. what is important in evaluating a society's dynamics is the culture that spawned the society. what exactly does its member do when he accumulates wealth? what if each member was equally rich?
assume that this society is a circle. the world around it is a bigger circle. These circles being concentric. for years now this circles move in tandem unidirectionally?
what if this equilibrium breaks? does this hitherto prosperous society switch directions to suit the new circumstance? what are the factors that hinder this switch?
The population? The head of the state? The wealth so accumulated? the distribution of wealth?
say, the society swings. how many of its subjects adapt to this change?
Assume that this change doesnt augur well for all the subjects. What happens now? wealth distribution is no longer equal. if the wealth distribution swings in favor of the populace and the heads of the state lose their wealth, what happens to this power centre?
what happens now is not a function of any parameter of mathematics but a function of the cultural background that bore this society. a culture which bequethed democracy will survive and reach stability eventually.
instead what if the society emphasised stability? this is where entropy leaves its first foorprint. this is where the society unfortunately loses the very objective it sought to achieve.
if time permits, consider all permuations of the argument( rich/poor society, equal/unequal distribution of wealth, lack/presence of a pwer centre)
what every argument will finally have as its smallest common factor is the dilemma between stability and democracy.
what the society chooses would be the result of a consummate experiment in heuristics to a historian. it would be a function of antropology to an another study.
what, i beleive is a subtle yet emphatic factor, is the culturul zygote of the society. This is not to say that a society cannot change and must/will conform to its cultural boundry. my point is , the society will find it impossible to do so. what ever be the change.
the power head may be a maverick of sorts but he would still be inhibited and curtailed in the degree of the reforms he introduces by the cultural roots of the society.
This culturul root is nothing but a genetic factor. Its simple observation that any society faced with a drastic cultural change will resist this force or atleast try to.
what is the solution then? the solution lies in resolving the dilemma between stability and democracy in favor of democracy. what ever be the radicle you stem from, your ability to branch out would depend on the freedom of the air your respire.
Don't misunderstand Democracy here.
Democracy is simply not freedom. That is a juvenile description. Democracy is an attitude, It is the importance given to life per se.
How you handle this importance is vital to the society's growth. It is common sense to assume that if the power centre had this attitude, we have a solution in our hands accordingly. That is a little of a polly-anna thought.
if it is not, what do the non-power centres do? do they revolt? They should. if they have to alter status quo, they will. How significant will this uprising be? The sweet answer to this lies again in the people's attitude. if they lack a single thread of the democratic sense i have spoken of their intifaada( as i would love to call it......) would be fruitless.
even if they manage to succeed their success would be short and sweet. Grt for an answer but idiotic for an alternative.
if you have drawn a parallel between what i have spoken of and the french society, you will probably emphathize with my opinion.
The ironic thing though is the above society could prototype every society around the globe. be it american or iranian.
so is the french quagmire a little foreboding of the issues each society faces/ will face.
you decide.

Two dollops of freedom is 5 dollars. Render exact change

2006-05-11T19:19:00.000+05:30

What exactly is freedom? who defines freedom? Freedom is catch-22. think abt it. Freedom is never complete. when you grant somebody consummate freedom you are snatching an equal amount from somebody else.
When you imprison a Killer for his crime, are you not brutally killing his freedom? the obvious retort to that would be, this guy's freedom is pernicious to another. But who am i to judge?
who defines good and bad? Something is good relative to something else. never absolute.
So is freedom, so is Democracy. you need to arbitrate and choose from what you beleive is ethically right and wrong. when you do that, implicitly, you are drawing a line, a boundry.
When you grant freedom in pockets subjective to Ethics and Logics and Rationality, You are creating an Ambit, a little circuit, nothing further would escape this circuit.
I am not playing a Devil's advocate. My point is not to confuse or pun. my point is simple.
when you lack the understanding of freedom is its fundamental state you tend to circumvent it often.
What is happening in Iraq is an example. Bush doesnt know if he has achieved his objective. The iraqis are in a limbo. They beleived they had no freedom during saddam's reign. Now they dont know what to beleive.
Saving the anti-US rhetoric every other opinion is confused and maybe even hopeful.
Life imprisonment is another. why imprison him for life? i dont see the purpose. Capital punishment is less painful.
Freedom in toto is understood only in its absense. Thats when you value the life that grants you latitude for your dynamics.
Banning books and movies is another. What is a regime trying to prove burning Satanic Verses? Who are they to decide what their people read and dont?
The indian system of socialism epitomises my point. here freedom is like the invisible man. you know he's there. but you have no idea where.
every action, be it by the Congress/BJP/something else defies democracy. they do it to appease, to exercise their mandate. their mandate is killing my space, to be what i want to be.
i would find it impossible to define this abstraction in a post. my point is this, think abt the kind of freedom you enjoy. think about the number of times you have impinged on somebody else's space. think abt life imprisonment.
you would then value freedom by the minute. you would possibly contemplate on the dearth of this totally free commodity. Freedom is simply profound. Freedom is like water.
ubiquitous but not a drop to drink.

Yahoooooo

2006-04-19T18:00:00.000+05:30

I, Saranath Narasimhan, have cracked all the clues of the HINDU CROSSWORD 8581, ( 19th April 2006, Wednesday) .
No words to describe the feeling.
tending to become Consummate Cruciverbalist.
If my Uncle is reading this............Unc.............I didnt need your help after all.....nana nanna.....who the man????haaan?

No Maverick This

2006-04-11T22:03:00.000+05:30

I Read this Book a week back. Was a little busy then. This post is more of an opinion than a review. My two cents on boardroom proprieties.
A little overview of the book first. Semlar as a CEO and as a protagonist in this book is like a little bud you expect to unfurl and bloom. That’s the first mistake.

Second his take on a corporation, its intelligence and its dynamics sounds energetic. But highly fanciful.

Third if you think Semlar can do a Jack Welch in the offing you are doing Semlar a big favor.

The problem with Maverick is the contradictory Motif. The book propounds vanguard-ism but advertises itself by quoting IBM, INTEL etc…
Each corporation is a life in itself. Each has its unique system of evolution. A leader does not invent this system; he discovers it and aids it.
Any Corporation progresses on change. To have a boardroom filled with jeans clad directors or executives with trousers will not change the mind set of the corporation.
If a company could make each employee empathize with its cause, vision and objective the work culture would truly be a paragon. But that is high optimism.
If the rank and file is unhappy with the poorer-cousin treatment meted out to them, the corporation at its core needs to change its attitude.
Semlar’s book or his work culture may be an epitome of success. I would never dispute that claim. But Intel or IBM has nothing to learn from Semlar Corp. The only positive in the book is the stress on increasing a corporation’s awareness, which is cardinal to its growth.

If I were heading a team I wouldn't care what my executive wears as long he is comfortable with the team. I would want every meeting to resemble a gene pool with ideas put into the discussion and letting the best idea evolve by simple and logical selection.

Have a lot more to pen on this issue. I guess if I could actually transmute these ideas to reality I would have a much better pier to stand on.

Either ways give the book a try and ping me if you have.

Haiku for thy soul

2006-04-05T18:54:00.000+05:30

a Haiku is a poem of seventeen or less than seventeen syllables in three unrhythmed lines. The general format is three short-long-short lines. 5-7-5 is the convention. I'll let you do your homework on haiku, but do give it a try.

The greatest thing abt these poems is that so much is expressed in three lines. They are great for poets. The reader is given all the freedom to interpret the Haiku. No one interpretation is convention.
I tried my luck at one of these. leave a comment if the Haiku confuses you. would be glad to explain.

a dab of green
the brush and the bush
an easel is a boundry.

Two lives with a pinch of entropy and AI

2006-03-30T18:42:00.000+05:30

No, i am not referring to the book. Vikram seth's TWO LIVES which claimes to be an international bestseller is a bit of dampner. I've always found his writing a wee bit pretentious. Either ways not the post to discuss his writing or his book. ( My opinion: Leila Seth's On Balance, in contrast would be a much better read than any of vikram's seth's.)

i was wondering, what would it be to lead two lives. same person but two lives in his control. He is at two places simultaneously. the physical presence is immaterial. His perceives two totally different environments simultaneously. what if you could do that? imagine, being able to divide your conscious between two contrasting situations. imagine the learning. would it be twice because i have another life to learn and unlearn from?
or would it be half cause the chaos is so doubled.
what would it be like to write this post and have my alternative read it at the same time? would i not be a society of my own?
i know its an absurd thought, but it's hijacked my thinking so much that i needed to put it on paper. if i could actually evaluate myself with the feedback from my alter, how much of a difference would that make?
would it also increase the entropy and chaos that is within me. would it make it tougher for me lead a normal life? or would it increase my awareness?
i dont know.
another little thing thats been bit of a "wasp" in my bonnet is AI. Why exactly is all the research so biased in favor of emulating man. why should a robot emulate man? why should anybody develop a simulacrum? why not the other way round?
i want to do all that a computer can albeit with the conscious and cognition i possess.
its impossible for a computer to do what my brain does. then why research?
why the turing test? why AI? Why robotics?This would make Asimov obsolete.
why can't eugenics expand to include this in its ambit.
I should be able to multiply two twenty digit numbers in a second. are people working towards that? it's the other way around. you have a machine that can achieve this complexity and you want to make it human.
i dont really care if a machine passes the turing test some time in the offing. it can still never be human. in the future i want to eliminate a computer. i want to have enough memory to hold the database that only a mainframe can support. i want to be able to watch movies in my mind.
i want to upload an encarta onto my memory cells.
i want to telecommute, i want to be able to execute several hundred MIPS.
i dont want to be a terminator. i want to be a hybrid of the terminator and an einstein.
that would be an ideal future. but how? cross pollination? make out with a robot maybe?

Architectural Abdabs

2006-03-10T21:52:00.000+05:30

Pink Floyd, i've always wanted to write something about Them. The other day a Junior in my bus said pink floyd was Retro. technically .................Maybe.
But their music has a perennial appeal. To classify them as retro would be the same as saying Houdini was the greatest magician of his time. Pink Floyd blends stage performance, Videos, Lyrics and Music with a high Congruency .
Nothing is out of place . The lyrics and the music is miscible in each and every album. They changed a lead singer, Their founding member left them. It didnt make a difference.
Dave Gilmour's voice accentuates the Mystic appeal their music has. Richard wright is a great player. Nick mason may not be the best drummer( i would still stick to dave lumbardo) though.
Cant compare their playing actually .slayer is different.
They had a concert at Earl's court London in 1994. It was called P.U.L.S.E . One of the greatest stage shows ever. 12 years later, nobody has ever been able to emulate that concert.
To call it a Great gig in the Sky would undermine it.
My frnds told me Pink Floyd really hits you when you are High. me want to try that sometime.
Pink Floyd and Marijuana.
My fav are coming back to life and Any color you like. High Hopes is grt too.
either ways , i realize this post is not in the league of sparking an intellectual discourse.
Just my little humble tribute to this Grt group.
Viva Pink Floyd.

Argumentative indian,Iran and the moderate muslim

2006-02-18T14:21:00.000+05:30

"Our need to be skeptical and to argue is important" amartya sen says. Cn't argue with him on that one.
This book opens a chapter of indian and human history not many people have given importance to. It may not open a whole new vista but it does pique you a bit.
why argue? why not be compliant?is it a sign of being moderate?
is questioning being a rebel?
How would you relate an argument to free speech? free will?
if there is a boundry, who monitors that line? How would you relate the cartoon in a danish newspaper to the outcry of muslims all over the world?
why is iran not allowed to do as it pleases? Why would the security council want to intervene in iran's nuclear policy. more than Why, who has given them the right?

what exactly is moderate here? Is india being moderate on the iran issue? Do millions of muslims who have held protest marches all over the world with no sign of violence represent another facet of islam?
Who is the extremist here? The paper or the islamic faith? why should Prophet Muhammed, worshipped and respected, by the islamic community be depicted in a cartoon? would it be okay if the same was done to Jesus christ? if so, is the retaliation a Quid pro quo argument?
The meat of this book deals with the tradition of argument. But i would differ with someone who says it ends there. Any situation today can be viewed as the need to argue. was the danish paper simply thinking aloud. was it presenting forth the argument of millions of Europians,their islamophobia in print?
These questions are rhetorical. You know the answer. I know the answer. but our answers may differ. why? simply because we think differently . You represent a school of thought that was passed on to you by millions of arguments. ditto with me.
An Argument is a thought experiment. you may or may not choose to verbalise it.

It is the smallest divisible factor in an intelletual discourse. But does it make argument a complex facet of the human psychological make up? why argue then ? would you have freedom then? would i be able to question an edict in china? why not?
Is an argument free world a hassle free world?
The need to attach the complexity of human nature as a rider to any answer has always been a favorite with me. intellectual Contemplation is important. Stifling intellect is tantamount to killing life and its need to question and find a way.
But one little catch. Any situation can be logically explained. any situation has a certain amount of reasoning that solves it . but when you extrapolate backwards and construct the solution from these little atoms of reasoning you dont get your original solution. why not?
You have very smugly overlooked your basic flaw. Every situation is human centric. you can never boil Our complexity in a couldron of reasoning to get your magic portion.

are any dirty commies less dead?

2006-01-29T08:14:00.000+05:30

Why do the yanks hate the “commies”? And if they don’t why not? Sounds a little oxymoronic doesn’t it? I’ve always held this conviction that any school of thought needs to be evaluated in Toto. To understand communism, start from its source. What happened in Russia during the regime of the tsar, the ramifications of bloody Sunday (1905), Marx and his take on this revolt, Engle and his brand of communism, Lenin, the communist party and Russia’s future thereafter.

I’ve believe that any system devoid of HUMANITARIANISM is flawed. Be it capitalism or Communism. Where exactly did communism go wrong? Did it reach a fork in the road and did Stalin lead his country through a rough patch? Or is Marxism flawed at its very source

Marx penned his thoughts in the manifesto and what he said and wrote was apt in that decade. He called for a revolution, a coup, he wanted the peasants to take power, but in all this he was misinterpreted. To take power does not amount to absolute rule. To talk about a peasant dictatorship was tantamount to stifling freedom for a cause.
Marx the humanitarian was misinterpreted to be Marx the utopian.
The difference is a humanitarian fights for a cause but he holds human ideals as priority, the utopian in contrast is blind to the hurdles and sees only his objective. Sounds harmless doesn’t it?
Not so, very pernicious if you are looking at leading 900,000,000 people. To achieve their goal of revolution the commies stifled human intellect. Anything that catered to bourgeoisie was banned. The proletariat was supreme. Again here lies the flaw
The moment any sort of freedom is curbed, be it the right to strike or the right to freedom the system has a loophole.
This is the flaw the commies overlooked. And that is where began Stalin, Khrushchev etc. and eventually Russia’s disintegration. To impede anything that was anti-party, anti-ideal was a mistake. How else would you explain Stalin’s purging of his rivals and thousands of artists, sculptors and musicians. Why did he do it? Simple they did not stick to the path laid forth. A very harmless path though. A path to betterment of the society.

This is where communism has been misinterpreted. It has been perceived as anti-freedom and anti-democratic.
And that is what I want to correct. Communism, I believe at its core believes in a welfare state. And communism with a large dose of humanitarianism is brilliant.
Capitalism is not a bad science either. It’s a different system. Again capitalism if perceived as infallible would be disastrous. Take a little peep at the Vietnam War history and you’ll know why.
No science is infallible. It should be prone to change. It should never stifle democracy or freedom or use force, be it communism or capitalism.
Socialism in that context is bit of a hybrid but eugenically a better variety.

I am not going to conclude without a stand. I am pro-communist. Completely and emphatically. But I believe in a brand of communism not as Lenin or Stalin preached it but a brand that has adapted to status quo. It’s not just about tub thumping or barnstorming, it’s about an equitable distribution of wealth.
I am not suggesting that we force the wealthy to donate something for their poorer cousins. I am suggesting that we make laws based on logic, morals and simple reasoning.

Why should somebody who owns a Ferrari be exempted from tax?
Why should a National health scheme be scrapped?
Why should you allocate more land for the Industry when the urban poor are de-allocated land?
Why should you arrest somebody because she questioned the court?
Why should the administration arrest and torture a minority?

These are simple questions. But who is to answer them? Apply communism but with reasoning. Keep the human factor.
A rich man is as human as a poor man. Don’t kill the rich to help the poor. That’s anti-democratic. At the very source when you make laws, make sure that any exploitation is punished.
Again if the system is to be reformed the people need to change attitudes.
The science does not preach corruption or violence. You do. Your interpretation does.
This is not a document to correct opinions. I am hoping that anti-commies have a whole new vista opened up after this.

Pied pipers of Kashmir

2006-01-27T06:21:00.000+05:30

I’ve wanted to do a little review of this book for some time now. I’ve been terribly confused about two important issues
the Israel-Palestine conflict
The quagmire in Kashmir
I did pen an article on the first issue, but that was to fill a void. And two books I’ve read in this week have given me a simple yet logical solution to my conflict.
1. Exodus
2. Shalimar the clown
I am not going into these books now. You need to read them to swim in their simplicity
It’s like disturbing a hornet’s nest. The pain is too simple for the others but you know every prick of it.
Kashmir I believe has largely been hijacked by a few groups who are offshoots of the pain that continues to grip it. How would it feel to have your brother, with his arms chopped off thrown at your threshold, your father’s digits crushed, your mother violated?
The Indian army did this. But why?
How would it be have your own neighbor tell the women of your house to wear a burkha? To fantasize a faith, to misread the love their prophet preached, to kill in order to spread the message of god? The Taliban did this. But why?

Where is the Kashmiri? Where are the fields that played host to his fantasies? What of the charm that hypnotizes? Where is his daughter? His peer? His son?
Are his fields being trampled only to be trampled again? His voice amplified to the world, but lost in translation.
What happened in Kashmir was a pogrom. Why are we celebrating the deaths?
Kashmir was a dream that ceased to be.

If I could be a Kashmiri for a second what would I say?
Jihad?
Azadi?

……………and thus his conscious awoke
………Deep inside the sea churned
Accepted the filth
Purer than the Ganges
He felt the light put in
…A little boy did a somersault
And thus he prayed in vain for his death.
A life hijacked by love.

Exodus

2006-01-23T05:57:00.000+05:30

This book is brilliant for its diction alone. the amount of research and work that the book entailed is obvious from the issue dealt.
i am not going to do a review here.
just making a request, when you see this book,grab it .
i am guessing that the title says it all about the book. if it doesnt mean anything to you google it.

strategic innovation to solve corruption

2005-12-30T17:12:00.000+05:30

Why innovate? Why not plagiarize? Why take the trouble? Are these tough questions to answer or just rhetorical? Let’s pass them now. The question that would be germane to this issue would be could an individual innovate to change an attitude?
But if I have to draw a bit of a nexus with the question above I need to define Corruption. An attitude or a response? Why should anybody be venal? Why cant’ he be the ideally good.
What do I have in common with Mother Theresa? Saving a million neurons? I have no answers. Where do I start off with? What do I start off with?
Do I need to chart out a course to weed out this supposed epidemic? If I have to home in on a solution by taking a few potshots at the corrupt individuals in my country then I would have to direct my antennae at myself. Can I absolve myself of any corruption/corrupt act? No I could not. If I did that, it would just be an ad hoc maneuver to set the wheels in motion.
If I had to write about strategically innovation to solve corruption I would be taking a well trodden path. It’s not as simple as using a lot of grammar .Before I splurge on a few more words my point is: No innovation is going to change an attitude.
It’s not about trying to cure a little flu that my neighbor girl suffers from. It is about finding the closest cure and administering the antidote slowly and cautiously. If I have to define innovation as anything that involves an idea, a causal connection is evident. But corruption is a state of mind. You and I have been corrupt at myriad instances in our lives, but have we learnt a lesson? Adam was corrupt, can you change that. It’s human. What is the degree of corruption and what is its effect is important. You could advice a little boy not to steal, but does the boogie stop there? Your leader could do it and you would not be able to shake a finger,(your tongue has a lot more freedom though)
I am not going to conclude with a question, my contention is all of us ought to control this urge in ourselves. If each individual could do it, then it would be different globalization... Nor can you ever be holier than thou; you can get close to it though.

In God/good we trust

2005-12-23T08:44:00.000+05:30

I’ve wanted to write this for a long time now. I can see how hopeless the situation is but find myself handicapped. This world is asymmetric, it’s growing but asymmetrically. Globalization has had myriad positives. The BPO industry has spawned a whole new cult of young executives and India is a foremost beneficiary. The middle class is doing ok; the upper middle class and the rich have never had it better, especially if they have a couple working.

But what about the poor? Globalization is a like a river in spate, the above three strata have managed to keep their heads above water. The poor are drowned and the pitiful aspect of it all, nobody cares.
And it’s getting tougher for them.
I am going to place before you a few instances of this asymmetry talking its toll.

A 30 year old man in Belgaum kills his wife and two little kids because he couldn’t repay his debts.

1000 farmers commit suicide in A.P in the year 2004

Thousands of Slums are destroyed by the Govt of Maharashtra to make way for land development schemes (read I.T offices)

A former chief minister of Bihar says he needs a cowshed for his cows beside the house granted to him by the Govt. and the irony; 30% of Bihar is homeless.

What is happening exactly? It spins me out of my stability. The money distribution is so skewed. The norms of the society are skewed. Who is going to reverse them all? Who is to distribute the money equitably? Do we need a Pol pot? A Stalin may be? But we need somebody, don’t get me wrong here, I am not begging for dictatorship. But somebody has to do it and fast.
Why should a multi-millionaire spend millions for his son’s marriage bash when a million people in this country do not get a simple meal everyday?
Why can’t the society be more humane?

Blair wants to tackle terrorism, but poverty is not exactly on his radar. That’s flawed. Reduce the barriers. Make it easier for the developing countries. Don’t hijack the WTO. He’d rather have Bangladesh arms exports (hypothetical nuclear submarines) rather than their textiles. He doesn’t mind the others but has enough trade barriers to deter them.

One supposedly Great president of a big democratic country, himself a nuclear scientist has visions, dreams, fancies but of use only to his books and thoughts.

Another president doesn’t believe in reality. There is no KYOTO for him, war is his watch word and poverty is non-existent in the world, you see the African countries will survive on the rubber plants that he destroyed and the South Americans will survive on the coca that his predecessors destroyed and Hugo Chavez will be made to chew on nothing when he destroys his oil. And this honorable leader heads the best democracy in the world.

Why this? Are we not being cruel? The green peace activists who were hose-piped with jets of water by a Japanese fishing trawler when they prevented this ship from killing a whale is a suitable analogy .
That’s how the world is. And that’s how it is going, in the name of science and development we have cruelly ignored and circumvented a section of the society. But why again? Are we not the same flesh and blood? Why should a frail starved man in north Karnataka count his days when the rich are counting their blessings on their rosaries?
But I am not going to exempt myself from this either. I am equally culpable.
All that concerns me are my academics, my studies, my career, an MBA life, a post MBA life, a married life and then my kids and then some other bull shit. Where am I heading? What am I not doing? What should I be doing?

This post is neither a cry nor a lament. It’s retrospective. I am ashamed to be so self obsessed and I need to change and I am hoping the society reflects on this thought at some point in the future.

Shooting from his heart

2005-12-22T16:20:00.000+05:30

Cliff richard
His voice has a unique cadence

A Bridge Of Sighs

2005-12-18T09:00:00.000+05:30

Time in my palm,
i hold within me eternity,
the macroscopic cosmos within my soul,
we are but a guild of goodness and intelligence.

Ode to THEM

2005-12-17T20:58:00.000+05:30

They who said you could not
They who said you would not
They who said you will never

i who said i can
i who said i will
i who said i always will

They who?

and the cult he spawned...............

2005-12-15T15:09:00.000+05:30

thats dave mustain with metallica for you gentlemen..........................

and a little bit of kirk to his left.

give kamal an oscar before its too late

2005-12-13T20:40:00.000+05:30

My Kingdom for a couple of Oscars

2005-12-10T20:41:00.000+05:30

it's a movie i watched 2 years ago.

Synopsis: Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson (at the time married to each other) play Lily and Ben Reed, a young couple torn apart by a family tragedy. It would take a miracle to rekindle their love and a miracle arrives in the form of a summer guest - Willard Young played by Elijah Wood

a very simple skeleton , but handled with panache .

Director:Mary agnes

ZEe bEst

2005-12-09T21:08:00.000+05:30

Listen to these . no vocals . Dream Theatre sans the vocals ( which my frnds think is a sane thing , but i personally see no difference. )
Petrucci at his best.