Om. I am neither the mind,
Intelligence, ego nor chitta.
Neither the ears, the tongue,
Nor the senses of smell and sight.
Neither ether nor air.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!
I am neither the prana,
Nor the five vital breaths.
Neither the seven elements of the body,
Nor its five sheaths,
Nor hands, nor feet, nor tongue,
Nor other organ of action.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!
Neither fear, greed, delusion,
Loathing, nor liking have I.
Nothing of pride, or ego,
Or dharma or liberation.
Neither desire of the mind,
Nor object of its desiring.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!
Nothing of pleasure or pain,
Or virtue or vice, do I know.
Of manta, of sacred place,
Of Vedas or sacrifice.
Neither I am the eater,
The food or the act of eating.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!
Fear or death, I have none,
Nor any distincton of caste.
Neither father nor mother,
Not even a birth, have I.
Neither friend, nor comrade.
Neither disciple, nor Guru.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!
I have no form or fancy.
The All-pervading am I.
Everywhere I exist,
Yet I am beyond the senses.
Neither salvation am I,
Nor anything to be known.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!
Thursday, September 20, 2007
I am Shiva
By the Adi Shankaracharya
Waah!!Waah!!
I just came across this couplet by the urdu shayar Zauk and cant help writing it. This is as relevant as they come.
Hamne maana dakkan mein hain , bahut se kadr-e-sukhan,
par kaun jaye ae zauk, ye dilli ki galiyan chhodkar
On the Tao Of Physics#6
And Mr. Sankara replies:
Hi kislay
Have read ur entire mail. Ur arguments about UNIX processes is quite interesting to read. Nice one, I must say.
As far as bomb case is concerned, u have got me wrong, I was quoting it to substantiate my arguments regarding not being receptive about a particular thing and not as an example for instinct.
Yes, we are talking about a hard gained skill. What Capra is trying to say probably is that the efforts needed for getting that "hard gained skill" is very similar to what an eastern mystic goes through. That's why he made a comparison.
Also I talked to Gaurav Singh ( COE guy, jo bahut lamba hai and b-ball team captain)about ur post. He also said something very similar about instinct being the result of subconscious mind. In fact that's what they are trying to model in their idea for a paper on automatic essay evaluation. So I think we do have a convergence of views there.
I am not arguing about that UNIX process thing as I don know anything about neural networks or that feyman's theories. So I reserve my comments. If at all I do get something to read on that and if I don agree with u, I shall raise those points.
Also, I think I am understanding objectivism now. For more I read about hindu philosophy ( once again the vedantic philosophy which considers vedas as the defining text on hinduism), I feel there is some sort of convergence between the vedic philosophy and objectivism. I plan to read some books on hindu philosophy, notably works of vivekananda and some commentaries of adi shankara on various upanishads etc.
Once I read that, I think I wud have a decent understanding of hinduism and will be able to better comment on the following question.
"Has Ayn Rand, been inspired by certain ideas of our philosophy?"
Also, I suggest u try reading few of those and more importantly try to get the true meaning of it by transcending the obvious ones.
How is the work pressure there? Did u finally understood your role in the organization?
Now that CAT notification is out, I am back to square one as far as clarity of my career path is concerned.
Regards
shankar
On the Tao Of Physics#5
This is the mail I wote after having gone through Sankara's replies. It is mostly concerned with instinct and the origins of Epiphany.
Hi,
How you doing man. Project fine?STM still not bankrupt eh???
>>>>
I feel everybody is born with it. Everybody can perceive things which cannot be justified by reasons of logic, but just we feel it.
If u remember Alchemist, we have something similar saying that nature always gives us signals. We need to listen to them. If we regularly overlook it, we feel the signals have stopped comin...... Along these lines.
What I feel is we stop being receptive about it.
>>>>
Really can't say anything about what Paulio Coelho has written. I think it is a critical case of words and phrases being inappropriate/insufficient to convey what he meant when he wrote "Maqtub" in that book.
What I understand is this-Instinct is the knowledge which comes before conceptualization of the problem. Imagine someone punches you and you see the punch coming fro the corner of your eyes. You duck (hopefully) and what makes you do it is instinct.
>>>>
Why lay man does not get that instinct.
1. lay man does not even know the objective of the experiments. Even if he gets a result he cant make sense of itfor the raeson that he is not aware
that such a problem exists.
Say if i pull out the wire and give u a bomb, u wud realize what it is and run away. But if u never knew that such a thing like bomb existed, how wud u identify it. For u it is nothing more than a round ball.
2.he does not actually set out to look for it. Its like it, u know a signal is coming on a particular channel. All these years u were not tuned to it. So u never realize the transmission. The research, training etc that is being talked about is for the correct tuning.
>>>>
Understanding the objective of the problemis outside the domain of instinct. I think the problem here is that we are confusing extremely hard gained skill with instinct.
Consider a golie in football.In penalties, he can be said to be jum,ping left or right on 'instinct' but is it really so? Would you then say that the players at the highest level of the game have greater instinct or greater skill. You or I would have absolutely no clue of what to do.
As for the bomb-you said it yourself. My 'throwing it away' does not constitute instinct at all.It is a conscious decision taken so fast that even I cant consciously follow the chain of decisions.
So in my opinion, A layman having not getting those epiphanies but a scientist getting them has nothing to do with instinct.
Another point that I would like to raise in this regard is that of the subconscious mind. It is well known fact that even when we have banished some thought from our mind it persists in the subconscious.e.g. we are trying to remember a name but cannot recall it.Then several hours later we suddenly remember it.
I like to think of our mind as one huge UNIX machine which is extremely likely to create orphan processes. Even when you have killed the active process, the neural circuits still bear the computation as it is not possible to them all due to the highly decentralized structure of a neural network.This 'orphan' process may ,later on, come up with a solution, which the mystics/philosophers/godmen claim to have as a godsend or instinct.
Your point about no reaction without knowledge is exactly the one I am trying to make. The 'instinct'of the scientist is his subconscious mind come up with a solution.
>>>>
And for the last question,capra has himself given a very good account of it. They were not able to get that brainwave earlier because they were looking
in other direction. The moment physicists started looking for it( as an eastern mystic does)they were able to get it.
>>>>
By all accounts, the eastern mystic does not look in any direction at all. He is sitting there trying to calm down all his 'orphan' processes to extract 'maximum' performance from them.
Just consider this:
Consider some huge problem like 'who made this universe?' or some such. If you know of swarm intelligence, you will know that in them we consider ALL POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS (kinda like FEYNMAN'S SUM OVER HISTORIES) and gradually converge to the best solution. But the problem with our mind is that in our mind we are carrying so many deeply ingrained filters regarding what is possible and what is not. So the result thrown by the orphan processes I just mentioned are being actively filtered out when we try to intellectualize the problem. And that cant lead us to a solution as the solution demands that all possible alternatives be considered.
Here states like meditating or sleeping come to limelight. From a technical/scientific point of view, these states are a SUSPENSION OF DIBELIEF-a state where our filters are suspnded so that our neural circuit can realize the full potential of that swarm intelligence process running in the background.
Hence Kekule's six snakes dream. I belive it was not a dream about snakes at all. It was one of the possible solutions given by his mind. He subsequently described it as snakes as a sort of verbal approximation. Or his mind, represented its result in the form the imagery it found to be closest to what the result actually was.
>>>>
Just to give an example, do u remember how Kekule came up with the structure of benzene. For us, it wud have been a bad dream about snakes but for him that was an insight, a hint by nature, which his instinct interpreted correctly. It came just by chance, he did not try to get that dream
>>>>
They say you can not find it if you look for it. I think the hypothesis of the 'orphan process' and the mental filters explains this koan beautifully.
On the Tao Of Physics#4
Hi
Now the third question.
I am not fully convinced by the arguments of Capra. To tell the truth, I don have an opinion on this. However, the fact that a physicist says so makes
them somewhat credible.Had this been said by a mystic, I wud have outrightly rejected it as case of my area being superior.
Regarding instinct,
I feel everybody is born with it. Everybody can perceive things which can not be justified by reasons of logic, but just we feel it.
If u remember Alchemist, we have something similar saying that nature always gives us signals. We need to listen to them. If we regularly overlook it, we
feel the signals have stopped comin...... Along these lines. What I feel is we stop being receptive about it.
And for the last question,capra has himself given a very good account of it. They were not able to get that brainwave earlier because they were looking
in other direction. The moment physicists started looking for it( as an eastern mystic does)they were able to get it.
Why lay man does not get that instinct:
1. lay man does not even know the objective of the experiments. Even if he gets a result he cant make sense of it for the raeson that he is not aware
that such a problem exists. Say if i pull out the wire and give u a bomb, u wud realize what it is and run away. But if u never knew that such a thing like bomb existed, how wud u identify it. For u it is nothing more than a round ball.
2.he does not actually set out to look for it. Its like it, u know a signal is coming on a particular channel. All these years u were not tuned to it. So u never realize the transmission. The research, training etc that is being talked about is for the correct tuning.
Just to give an example, do u remember how Kekule came up with the structure of benzene. For us, it wud have been a bad dream about snakes but for him that was an insight, a hint by nature, which his instinct interpreted correctly. It came just by chance, he did not try to get that dream
I hope it clears a bit.
Regards
shankar
On the Tao Of Physics#3
Hi
This is my reply to Q2.
Mysticism (from the Greek ??st???? (mystikos) "an initiate" (of the
Eleusinian Mysteries, ??st???a (mysteria) meaning "initiation"[1])) is the
pursuit of achieving communion or identity with, or conscious awareness of,
ultimate reality, the divine, spiritual truth, or God through direct
experience, intuition, or insight; and the belief that such experience is
one's destiny, purpose, or an important source of knowledge, understanding,
and wisdom. Traditions may include a belief in the literal existence of
dimensional realities beyond empirical perception, or a belief that a true
human perception of the world transcends logical reasoning or intellectual
comprehension. A person delving in these areas may be called a Mystic.
This is from wikipedia.
But what I believe is as follows.
Western philosophies do not have a very close relationship btween religion
and philosophy. They are quite distinct identities. While one encourages
reason and logic while the considers them as satanic. However eastern
philosphies, in particular hindu philosophy( the philosophy propounded by
Adi Shankara, for there are many differences btween the philosophies)
considers philosophy and religion as two sides of the same coin.
We make extensive use of religion to convey the philosophical thoughts.
So mysticism, I feel is a term coined by westerners so as to handle this
unique amalgamation of religion and philosophy.
On the Tao Of Physics#2
This and the next 2 posts are Shankar's replies to my e-mail.
Hi,
I did not read the entire book. However, I will try answering the questions
according to my chota dimag.
1.Religion is a kind of user interface to the philosophical thoughts. See,
many of the philosophical thoughts are quite abstract and people use
religion as an approximation to comprehend the abstract teachings.
The aim of philosophy, I feel, is self realization i.e a better a
understanding of your life and the surroundings which affect directly or
indirectly ur life. Only by self realization, ie by knowing who am i? whats
my role in the world, can we try to attempt the more difficult question of
why I am here, and what next.
The path of self realization is very tough and I feel religion is a
companion/ friend/ guide/ vehicle that eases our journey. Lets take a simple
example of meditation. U try medidating with blank thoughts ie the state of
void, No thoughts entering ur mind and its perfectly peaceful. This is the
ideal state, that we shud strive.
But meditation by no thoughts is very difficult. So what they suggest is to
medidate ny focussing on one thought, ie thoughts about God, which is
definiltely easier than the previous one.
Thus we see religion has made our journey somewhat less tedious.
That's what I feel is the role of religion.
To further substantiate, I have read translations of 3 different shlokas in
one of the orkut communities. One on shiva, one on krishna(gita) and one on
shakti (lalita sahasranama). All three are exactly similar extolling the
opulence of respective deities.so what does it signify?
The simplified view is that there are inherent contradictions in the
scriptures themselves. But is it so? How I understand it is not one of
contradiction but one of convergence.
There is something called the Supreme Being ( what Adishankara called
brahman)and the religion has given us different instances of the same thing.
For some, he is krishna, for others rudra and for some she is shakti. That's
the role religion set out to fulfill but now people are missing the woods
for the trees.
I will mail u those three translations when I reach home.
I hope, I am coherent. If not tell me I will mail u in the weekends.
Other questions I will answer later
Regards
shankar
On the Tao OF Physics#1
What follows is a series of e-mail conversations between myself and Mr.R.Sankara Narayanan (copyright protected etc. etc.) sparked off by the book "The Tao of Physics" by Fritzof Kapra. They include the tossing back and forth of our own meager ideas about what constitutes the difference between skill and knowledge and the playoff(???) between mysticism and the world-view modern physics is beginning to uncover. That, of course, is also the principal theme of the book.
This post contains the text of my first mail in this regard and the subsequent posts contain the replies and counter-replies.
A footnote to this series of posts-if you are interested in science and/or philosophy, don't miss this book.
This post contains the text of my first mail in this regard and the subsequent posts contain the replies and counter-replies.
Hi,
I was busy with a training program for the past 2 days so not much time for the TAO.But the internal conflict has started from Chapter-2 itself.It'll be great if you can answer these questions for me,considering that you have already read the book:
1. What is the difference between religion and philosophy?
2. What is mysticism, as distinct from religioug and philosophical movements?
3. Do you agree that mathematical symbols are not talking about reality just because we can not perceive the reality they describe as such?
4. What is instinct?
5. If instinct is something fundamental to all humans, then why can a layman not find the answers to quantum physics problems instinctively?If this insight/intuition is enabled in a scientist due to the years he has spent in research and study, can this form of epiphany/brainwave/sudden insight be called intuituion at all?
I am going to have a good time reading this one I'm sure.
More question when I have read more chapters.
Take care,
Kislay Verma
A footnote to this series of posts-if you are interested in science and/or philosophy, don't miss this book.
Shibboleth+lisp
Sitting here in the training room Nalanda at my ofiice, with the steady hum of the trainers voices lulling my mind and making my thoughts drift arbit-ward, I just had this amazing thought. The thought came thus: I lisp( or maybe I should say lifp). And I suddenly realized that this trainer babbling about something or the other, is a shibboleth( speaks 's' in place of 'sh').
Now anyone can tell you that 's' is not a lispist's favourite consonant. So I thought, what would it be like for a guy(or girl,whatever) to be both a shibboleth and lisp at the same time. How terrible mangled the English language sound, when left in the care of such an individual. And how terrible( or funny, depending on your taste) would it be for the listener.
Consider the following sentence:Shashank should have shown him the chateau....It is hard to figure out exactly how this would sound in the tongue of the aforementioned fated person, but after repeated trials i have come to the conclusion that it would be something like: Fafank fud have fon him the fatoo.
Not pleasant, considering that I myself am halfway there.
Apart from thinking up stuff like this occasionally, I remain firmly on sanity's terra firma, enjoying a hyderabadi sun come out after almost 1 week.The company gave me 2 days off to "recover from the strenous training before you are assigned to your respective teams and real projects".
Couldn't have been better for me. After sleeping my a** for almost 1 month in training sessions on arcane topics, I get 2 days off to "recover' from it
Might get a lil boring though.
Now anyone can tell you that 's' is not a lispist's favourite consonant. So I thought, what would it be like for a guy(or girl,whatever) to be both a shibboleth and lisp at the same time. How terrible mangled the English language sound, when left in the care of such an individual. And how terrible( or funny, depending on your taste) would it be for the listener.
Consider the following sentence:Shashank should have shown him the chateau....It is hard to figure out exactly how this would sound in the tongue of the aforementioned fated person, but after repeated trials i have come to the conclusion that it would be something like: Fafank fud have fon him the fatoo.
Not pleasant, considering that I myself am halfway there.
Apart from thinking up stuff like this occasionally, I remain firmly on sanity's terra firma, enjoying a hyderabadi sun come out after almost 1 week.The company gave me 2 days off to "recover from the strenous training before you are assigned to your respective teams and real projects".
Couldn't have been better for me. After sleeping my a** for almost 1 month in training sessions on arcane topics, I get 2 days off to "recover' from it
Might get a lil boring though.
Oxymoron Profile
This is from the orkut profile of one of my school friends. I always figured him as quite a bit of a retard and this has finally confirmed my suspicions.
This is the dude's about me:
Note the down to earth in beween all the other self-endowed accomplishments...nothing could be further away from earth.
Now this is one of his testmonials. Can't blame him totally forhaving that in his profile as someone else must have written it but you always have the option of deleting one of your testimonials.That this person hasn't exercised this option speaks volumes.It goes:
We will pretend not to notice the rigour with which grammar rules have been followed. Notice I have never met with gagan and then in the same sentence notice Ihave ever met in my life.
Ek hi profile mein do aise kamaal ke paap heere...kya baat hai!
This is the dude's about me:
smart sexy hot down to earth n simply coooooooolllllllllllll.
Now this is one of his testmonials. Can't blame him totally forhaving that in his profile as someone else must have written it but you always have the option of deleting one of your testimonials.That this person hasn't exercised this option speaks volumes.It goes:
VEL I HAV NEVR MET VITH GAGAN BUT STILL I VOULD LIKE 2 WRITE SUMTHING DAT HE IS SUCH A CHARMING PERSON I HAV EVER MET IN MY LIFE.HE IS A VERI JOLLY NATURE N FUN LUVING GUY.HE LIVES 4 OTHERS.HIS MAIN MOTTO IN LIFE HOW 2 MAKE OTHERS HAPI.I M GLAD DAT I GOT A SWEET PERSON LIKE HIM IN MY LIFE .THANX ALOT
We will pretend not to notice the rigour with which grammar rules have been followed. Notice I have never met with gagan and then in the same sentence notice Ihave ever met in my life.
Ek hi profile mein do aise kamaal ke paap heere...kya baat hai!
Neural Networks Revisited
QUOTE(dude @ Feb 5 2007, 08:36 PM)In essence, the type of generalization you are referring to, is the basic building block of what we call science. Observe phenomena, formulate a theory that explains in general the behaviours that you have observed (and test it too!). But IMHO sometimes we need contrasts to move further in our quest for knowledge and I think this is very important.
Think of it this way, we were used to burning coal and oil to generate heat for our power plants. They worked on the principle of combustion... But when we discovered nuclear power, we had to change our viewpoint that apart from fossil fuels, nuclear energy can also be used to generate electricity. We could have formed a general opinion that combustion is the only feasible way to generate large amount of power in a viable manner. By thinking different, creativity is encouraged and people tend to think out of the box. Finding general patterns seems great (as it seems that we would have to work lesser for future discoveries, I suppose) but might lead to stagnation of knowledge.
Hey!
I think I have misconveyed myself, so I will try to make things a little more clear.
I'm not saying that all scientific work should be aimed at generalizing (although I do believe that that is what brings the quantum leaps). As you have said, work at lower levels is important too, more so because how things work at a lower level can often give invaluable hints to the overall larger order of their working.
What I was trying to say is made more clear through an example. Consider any novel groundbreaking system which makes some sort of decision based on a distance parameter between two vectors.
The system qualifies as genuine research and ought to be hailed as such. Once, the system has been specified however, then the choice of the distance parameter becomes trivial. Any half educated technical student knows that there are several measures (Hamming Distance, Euclidean distance, Mahalanobis Distance,Correlation...) and others can be invented as you go along.So that if you have spent 15 years just trying variations of all these distance on the same system, I say something is wrong. And for these things to be published in IEEE journals as articles of cutting edge research is greater folly still.
Pick up any volume of Technical transactions and you will find discussion on things analogous to the example I have given above(e.g. "Modification of the Karhunen-Loeve Transform using matrices of all image classes rather their correlation matrix") as if the aim of their research was the distance measure rather than the system (which in the previous case was Facial Recognition). I can't help but feel that these guys keep forgetting what they started out to do.
A final word on this-I am also not against working these 'distance parameters' if it can be shown that one of them is more fundamentally related to the system than another.e.g. In the case of Self-Organising Neural Networks, A feature based approach can aid in preliminary input differentiation but if we want to draw conclusions from input data, then an Information Theory based approach is required. In this case, the determining principle for self-organisation needs to be changed and I am all for it.
I hope I have made myself clearer.
The Diaries#3
They come less frequently now, these fits. I remember listening to endless hours of ENIGMA under their spell when in school, but these days work usually keeps them away. There is this ever present feeling of breathlessness, anxiety, ticking of the clock, dripping of the sand in the hour glass, that there isn’t enough time to do all that must be done. What is to be done, though, I haven’t the slightest clue. Mine is already a life driven not by goals or even desires but by what others are doing. I don’t not know what I want to do, and therefore must do everything that everyone else is doing to stay in the race to dozen unseen finish lines.
The fear of being left behind is too much to bear, even when I realize that the race is one in which ai don’t care to run. The prospect of losing, hidden behind the excuse of keeping my options open, is too grim to contemplate. All of them are my compatriots aren’t they? Then why should I not do all that they are doing? If they are reading 3 books at the same time, I can do it. If they are getting papers published and going abroad for higher studies, I can too. If they have IIM calls, I must obtain those. And beneath all this, an ever-present tiredness, a panting whisper which acknowledges the impossibility but still wants more time.
I wonder if I will still feel these things in the future. Will I have the occasion to remember these remembrances when the bustle of a mundane life has overtaken me? If I don’t, then will some part of me have died, for if there are only two halves of my personality, then what is it that stands apart and observes both of them in my moments of sanity?
The fear of being left behind is too much to bear, even when I realize that the race is one in which ai don’t care to run. The prospect of losing, hidden behind the excuse of keeping my options open, is too grim to contemplate. All of them are my compatriots aren’t they? Then why should I not do all that they are doing? If they are reading 3 books at the same time, I can do it. If they are getting papers published and going abroad for higher studies, I can too. If they have IIM calls, I must obtain those. And beneath all this, an ever-present tiredness, a panting whisper which acknowledges the impossibility but still wants more time.
I wonder if I will still feel these things in the future. Will I have the occasion to remember these remembrances when the bustle of a mundane life has overtaken me? If I don’t, then will some part of me have died, for if there are only two halves of my personality, then what is it that stands apart and observes both of them in my moments of sanity?
The Diaries#2
I’ve always been suspicious of generalizations and those who make them. Whenever I read through the stuff I’ve written over the past 5-6 years, I can’t but escape the conclusion that I ought to be terribly suspicious of myself. As a lot of people have told me-“No one thinks of the survival of the species when lying…”. Very correct, but not correct enough if I am correct.
I think it’s a social problem; a personality disorder I have about which I have managed to convince myself that it is a good thing through verbal grandstanding in front of an audience comprising myself. I certainly do talk enough to myself to have done that in a careless moment. I’m a misfit-always have been-and I have convinced myself that this is because my perspicuity allows myself to see so much more in the course of life which others do not and therefore do not understand. I’m a self-proclaimed crusader for removing hypocrisy fro our lives-and have built this almost alternate personality which doesn’t ordinarily allow me to see that I may not be fully equipped to handling real problems in a real life-hypocrisy of the first order.
It is only these formerly explained periods of dazedness that I see both the I’s separately, objectively and know both of them to be conceited, real me. Maybe its wrong to call these spells dazes. Maybe they are the only lucid intervals in an otherwise hallucinatory existence.
I can see the two selves clearly as I write this. One, totally tongue-tied I front of any audience larger than one, and that one himself. The other, full of himself and his ideas, loving the sound of his own voice too much. One, wanting nothing better than to crawl away somewhere and hide. The other claiming that this is an intellectual inclination and not a reluctance to face the world. One which must make jokes incessantly to hide that he doesn’t have anything to say. The other claiming that this isn’t insularity but rather ‘ the pleasure of being alive’. One which barely feels any emotion. The other hiding thefrigidity under the cloak of stoicism.
I think that’s why people find it difficult with me. They don’t know about the two me’s and can’t understand the mixture they see. They’d rather be friendly with me rather than be a friend, because they don’t know what they might end up befriending. That’s probably why so many artists have espoused drugs. It’s a wonderful thing-this state of oblivion. Though grass has never left a pleasant experience with me, fortunately I am able to get to this state without any external aid. Even now I can hear a small voice at the back of my head saying-“See,See! I know! I know my problem and am not ashamed to talk about it!”. Too proud, too proud. Is this self-glorification? I do not know.
I think it’s a social problem; a personality disorder I have about which I have managed to convince myself that it is a good thing through verbal grandstanding in front of an audience comprising myself. I certainly do talk enough to myself to have done that in a careless moment. I’m a misfit-always have been-and I have convinced myself that this is because my perspicuity allows myself to see so much more in the course of life which others do not and therefore do not understand. I’m a self-proclaimed crusader for removing hypocrisy fro our lives-and have built this almost alternate personality which doesn’t ordinarily allow me to see that I may not be fully equipped to handling real problems in a real life-hypocrisy of the first order.
It is only these formerly explained periods of dazedness that I see both the I’s separately, objectively and know both of them to be conceited, real me. Maybe its wrong to call these spells dazes. Maybe they are the only lucid intervals in an otherwise hallucinatory existence.
I can see the two selves clearly as I write this. One, totally tongue-tied I front of any audience larger than one, and that one himself. The other, full of himself and his ideas, loving the sound of his own voice too much. One, wanting nothing better than to crawl away somewhere and hide. The other claiming that this is an intellectual inclination and not a reluctance to face the world. One which must make jokes incessantly to hide that he doesn’t have anything to say. The other claiming that this isn’t insularity but rather ‘ the pleasure of being alive’. One which barely feels any emotion. The other hiding thefrigidity under the cloak of stoicism.
I think that’s why people find it difficult with me. They don’t know about the two me’s and can’t understand the mixture they see. They’d rather be friendly with me rather than be a friend, because they don’t know what they might end up befriending. That’s probably why so many artists have espoused drugs. It’s a wonderful thing-this state of oblivion. Though grass has never left a pleasant experience with me, fortunately I am able to get to this state without any external aid. Even now I can hear a small voice at the back of my head saying-“See,See! I know! I know my problem and am not ashamed to talk about it!”. Too proud, too proud. Is this self-glorification? I do not know.
The Diaries#1
Today I found the old diaries that I used to maintain when at school and in the first year at college. It has been a long time, almost 4 years since I saw them last. Even I had forgotten a lot of what was in there, but as I read through them, I remember-old memories and impressions, vague now with time and other cares of the intervening period.
Also, I think, what do they read like? 4 years doesn’t give much of an age perspective but I have to wonder whether these are my original thoughts or just recycled crap-garbage imbibed in the meandering course of my education and random images that our lives throw at us everyday.
A lot of it was written merely as an ‘attitude’ thing, and the rest sounds too grandiose for a 19-20 year old person. It also makes me wonder as to how I could think up that kind of stuff. A lot of it very well written, hinting at the kind of clear, coherent thought of which I seem to have lost the capacity of late. Unless of course it is sermonizing about how to live our lives most of which is as obscure to me as it must sound to others.
It’s a rather garbled mess-my brain, like an overcrowded attic with an extremely random collection of thoughts and ideas thrown together pell-mell. And most of the thing I there can’t stand the company of most of the other things in there. It’s an effort to keep them all together-but it must be done to maintain the conceit of open-mindedness I pride myself upon.
It used to be a lot less cluttered back then. I was much less profligate with what I read, much less judicious-reading mostly the kind of stuff that you read once and forget quickly- Sidney Sheldons etc. No ideas to store, no thoughts to carry in my head. A lot of the entries are straight from the covers on ENIGMA cassettes.
But most of all I remember the condition all of the entries in those diaries these were written in. It’s a kind of daze, a numbness that I sometimes find myself afflicted with, as I find my afflicted with right now. It’s a little like being stoned, nothing is quite as sharp as it usually would be, the feelings are not quite as animated, the usual whirring inside my head is dulled to a steady throbbing-like all those disparate things in my head had decided to stop fighting each other and set me a joint petition to be let out immediately.
At times like these, it’s like I’m not in my body anymore-like one of those near death experiences we hear about. It’s like standing someplace else and looking down (well maybe not down exactly) on someone who thinks and looks the way I do. Vague impressions pass by, maybe phantasms of my own sub-conscious, or probably chips and fragments of all the conflicts I have chosen to stuff my head with. Not really my own, but not really not my own either.
And to think that after all the guff I have spouted about reason, consciousness etc. etc. blahblah on this blog, these diary entries comprise most of my creative work and they are done in one of these mystic dazes that I’m so totally going to trash in the next entry. It’s a contradiction-and there are no contradictions. Maybe I’m just expressing hidden feelings. Maybe I’m just some guy who doesn’t who doesn’t what the f*** he is talking about.
Also, I think, what do they read like? 4 years doesn’t give much of an age perspective but I have to wonder whether these are my original thoughts or just recycled crap-garbage imbibed in the meandering course of my education and random images that our lives throw at us everyday.
A lot of it was written merely as an ‘attitude’ thing, and the rest sounds too grandiose for a 19-20 year old person. It also makes me wonder as to how I could think up that kind of stuff. A lot of it very well written, hinting at the kind of clear, coherent thought of which I seem to have lost the capacity of late. Unless of course it is sermonizing about how to live our lives most of which is as obscure to me as it must sound to others.
It’s a rather garbled mess-my brain, like an overcrowded attic with an extremely random collection of thoughts and ideas thrown together pell-mell. And most of the thing I there can’t stand the company of most of the other things in there. It’s an effort to keep them all together-but it must be done to maintain the conceit of open-mindedness I pride myself upon.
It used to be a lot less cluttered back then. I was much less profligate with what I read, much less judicious-reading mostly the kind of stuff that you read once and forget quickly- Sidney Sheldons etc. No ideas to store, no thoughts to carry in my head. A lot of the entries are straight from the covers on ENIGMA cassettes.
But most of all I remember the condition all of the entries in those diaries these were written in. It’s a kind of daze, a numbness that I sometimes find myself afflicted with, as I find my afflicted with right now. It’s a little like being stoned, nothing is quite as sharp as it usually would be, the feelings are not quite as animated, the usual whirring inside my head is dulled to a steady throbbing-like all those disparate things in my head had decided to stop fighting each other and set me a joint petition to be let out immediately.
At times like these, it’s like I’m not in my body anymore-like one of those near death experiences we hear about. It’s like standing someplace else and looking down (well maybe not down exactly) on someone who thinks and looks the way I do. Vague impressions pass by, maybe phantasms of my own sub-conscious, or probably chips and fragments of all the conflicts I have chosen to stuff my head with. Not really my own, but not really not my own either.
And to think that after all the guff I have spouted about reason, consciousness etc. etc. blahblah on this blog, these diary entries comprise most of my creative work and they are done in one of these mystic dazes that I’m so totally going to trash in the next entry. It’s a contradiction-and there are no contradictions. Maybe I’m just expressing hidden feelings. Maybe I’m just some guy who doesn’t who doesn’t what the f*** he is talking about.
Silence must be heard
Silence must be heard.
In silence there is vibrance of life.
In silence there is stillness of death.
In silence there is gaiety and mirth.
In silence there is despair and frustration.
In silence there is warmth of sentiments.
In silence there is chaos of emotions.
Listen to the silence.
Wails of defeat dwell in it,
As do roars of triumph.
It is the home darkest fears,
and the abode of glorious hopes.
It is gentle as the rustling of leaves
and horrendous as a tempest.
It is the determination to win,
and the surrender to defeat.
Listen to the sound of silence.
It is the sound of sad partings and happy meetings.
It is the sound of cherished memories.
It is the sound of unbroken vows and forgotten promises.
The voice of silence is your voice.
The voice of silence is my voice.
It is the beginning of all ends,
and the end of all beginnings.
It is soothing and yet it is terrifying.
It is lonely and yet encompasses the universe.
It never was, and never will be,
and yet is-infinite, eternal, timeless.
And that is why,
Silence must be heard.
Look into the others’ eyes, many frustrations.
Read between the lines, not words just vibrations.
Don’t ignore hidden desires-pay attention,
you’re playing with fire.
Silence must be heard.
Noise should be observed.
Or diamonds will burn,
Friendly cards will turn.
Because silence has a right to be heard.
People talk too much for what they have to say.
Words without a meaning, just fading away.
The time has come to learn,
That silence must be heard,
noise should be observed.
In silence there is vibrance of life.
In silence there is stillness of death.
In silence there is gaiety and mirth.
In silence there is despair and frustration.
In silence there is warmth of sentiments.
In silence there is chaos of emotions.
Listen to the silence.
Wails of defeat dwell in it,
As do roars of triumph.
It is the home darkest fears,
and the abode of glorious hopes.
It is gentle as the rustling of leaves
and horrendous as a tempest.
It is the determination to win,
and the surrender to defeat.
Listen to the sound of silence.
It is the sound of sad partings and happy meetings.
It is the sound of cherished memories.
It is the sound of unbroken vows and forgotten promises.
The voice of silence is your voice.
The voice of silence is my voice.
It is the beginning of all ends,
and the end of all beginnings.
It is soothing and yet it is terrifying.
It is lonely and yet encompasses the universe.
It never was, and never will be,
and yet is-infinite, eternal, timeless.
And that is why,
Silence must be heard.
Look into the others’ eyes, many frustrations.
Read between the lines, not words just vibrations.
Don’t ignore hidden desires-pay attention,
you’re playing with fire.
Silence must be heard.
Noise should be observed.
Or diamonds will burn,
Friendly cards will turn.
Because silence has a right to be heard.
People talk too much for what they have to say.
Words without a meaning, just fading away.
The time has come to learn,
That silence must be heard,
noise should be observed.
Saki's Verses
A mouse that cried for allah’s aid, blasphemed when no such aid befell.
The call which devoured that mouse, thought allah managed rather well.
A poet praised the evening star, another praised the parrot’s hue.
A merchant praised his merchandise, and he, at least, praised what he knew.
“You are not on the road to hell”, you tell me with fanatic glee.
Vain boaster, what shall that avail, when hell is the road to meet thee!
There is a sadness in each dawn.
A sadness that you cannot see.
The joyous day brings in its train,
The feast, the beloved, and the steed.
There shall come a dawn at last,
That brings no life-stir to your ken.
A long cold dawn, without a day,
And you shall see its sadness then.
The Best of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner
These are some of my choicest verses from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
One after one, by the star-dogged Moon
Too quick for groan or sigh,
Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,
And cursed me with his eye.
Four times fifty living men,
(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)
With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,
They dropped down one by one.
The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I
I looked upon the rotting sea,
And drew my eyes away;
I looked upon the rotting deck,
And there the dead men lay.
I looked to Heaven, and tried to pray:
But or ever a prayer had gusht,
A wicked whisper came, and made
my heart as dry as dust.
I closed my lids, and kept them close,
And the balls like pulses beat;
For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky
Lay like a load on my weary eye,
And the dead were at my feet.
An orphan's curse would drag to Hell
A spirit from on high;
But oh! more horrible than that
Is a curse in a dead man's eye!
Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,
And yet I could not die.
The loud wind never reached the ship,
Yet now the ship moved on!
Beneath the lightning and the Moon
The dead men gave a groan.
They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,
Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;
It had been strange, even in a dream,
To have seen those dead men rise.
The helmsman steered, the ship moved on;
Yet never a breeze up blew;
The mariners all 'gan work the ropes,
Were they were wont to do:
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools--
We were a ghastly crew.
Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship,
Yet she sailed softly too:
Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze--
On me alone it blew.
Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed
The light-house top I see?
Is this the hill? is this the kirk?
Is this mine own country!
We drifted o'er the harbour-bar,
And I with sobs did pray--
O let me be awake, my God!
Or let me sleep alway.
O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely 'twas, that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be.
Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us
He made and loveth all.
Random Rants
…A trifle, a little, the likeness of a dream,
And death comes as the end.
When there’s nowhere left to go, the only way left to go is forward.
Wandering stray thoughts,
Grim battles fought,
Hard time borne,
Scars on the heart wrought.
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.
I’ve been thinking on my thinking, and I think its improving!
This is the story of the loves and hates of men and women that have long been dust; the story of a day when the red earth was young, and the gods sat steadfast in their places; the story of a time and times; and behold! It has never been told to human ear till now…
Everyone loves god. I have sympathy for the Devil.
If you understand, or if you don’t.
If you believe, or if you don’t.
The universe of justice, and the eyes of truth
Are always watching you.
There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, when taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and misery.
On such a sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.
And death comes as the end.
When there’s nowhere left to go, the only way left to go is forward.
Wandering stray thoughts,
Grim battles fought,
Hard time borne,
Scars on the heart wrought.
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.
I’ve been thinking on my thinking, and I think its improving!
This is the story of the loves and hates of men and women that have long been dust; the story of a day when the red earth was young, and the gods sat steadfast in their places; the story of a time and times; and behold! It has never been told to human ear till now…
Everyone loves god. I have sympathy for the Devil.
If you understand, or if you don’t.
If you believe, or if you don’t.
The universe of justice, and the eyes of truth
Are always watching you.
There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, when taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and misery.
On such a sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.
Arbit Verses
Take a leap into the unknown,
Ask for a life that I’ve never known,
Stand with my hands outstretched,
Still can’t fly…
Grab at the chances fate has blown,
Past me, moments long gone,
Hold on to myself ad watch them
Pass me by…
In the tide of time, tossed and thrown,
The tumult of destiny waits for none,
Dare to face the inevitable,
Head held high…
(First verse courtesy Mr. Meekal Bajaj)
Ask for a life that I’ve never known,
Stand with my hands outstretched,
Still can’t fly…
Grab at the chances fate has blown,
Past me, moments long gone,
Hold on to myself ad watch them
Pass me by…
In the tide of time, tossed and thrown,
The tumult of destiny waits for none,
Dare to face the inevitable,
Head held high…
(First verse courtesy Mr. Meekal Bajaj)
Kidhar Hai Satya
It’s the old debate. Did the river carve the land to make way for itself, or did the river bend to offer the river a course? Would the course of time allow itself to be marked by something as tiny as one man? Are his shoulders strong enough to bear the weight of the responsibility of the endless millennia?
Do great men match their wills against the wheel of time, marking it indelibly, thus shaping the lives of men and women for years to come? Or does the host of history, marching its predetermined course, produce such men as it needs to do its bidding? And when these are no more, goes on to find others?
“Kidhar hai satya?
Nadi ne khud banaya tha apna raasta,
Ya parivesh ne jhuk kar nadi ko raah di thi?
Kidhar hai Satya?”
Do great men match their wills against the wheel of time, marking it indelibly, thus shaping the lives of men and women for years to come? Or does the host of history, marching its predetermined course, produce such men as it needs to do its bidding? And when these are no more, goes on to find others?
“Kidhar hai satya?
Nadi ne khud banaya tha apna raasta,
Ya parivesh ne jhuk kar nadi ko raah di thi?
Kidhar hai Satya?”
Monday, July 23, 2007
Embers
The daggers of chilling wind have blown away the ashes. And now, the embers are stirred…
It’s a dark night. The wind howls mournfully in every corner and screams at every window. The deadly pall of gloom surrounds every life and the shadow of despair lies black upon every heart. Everywhere men are cowed by the wails of terror.
But behold!
The daggers of chilling wind have blown away the ashes. And now, the embers are stirred.
Yes, the embers are stirred. The slumbering giant rises from his sleep. Strength is I his great arms, and the fires of revolution burn bright in his eyes. Vengeance its touch, it raises its claw and shreds the blanket of despair from the minds of men. Terror flies before the terror of him, the screams of the wind of doom turns to moans begging mercy. The darkness consumed by the waves of fire heralding the leviathan, it goes back to its sleep. All that remains now is the twisted, smoldering corpse of the night-and a new beginning.
All this and more will now come to pass. Because you see…
The daggers of the chilling wind have blown away the ashes. And now, the embers are stirred.
It’s a dark night. The wind howls mournfully in every corner and screams at every window. The deadly pall of gloom surrounds every life and the shadow of despair lies black upon every heart. Everywhere men are cowed by the wails of terror.
But behold!
The daggers of chilling wind have blown away the ashes. And now, the embers are stirred.
Yes, the embers are stirred. The slumbering giant rises from his sleep. Strength is I his great arms, and the fires of revolution burn bright in his eyes. Vengeance its touch, it raises its claw and shreds the blanket of despair from the minds of men. Terror flies before the terror of him, the screams of the wind of doom turns to moans begging mercy. The darkness consumed by the waves of fire heralding the leviathan, it goes back to its sleep. All that remains now is the twisted, smoldering corpse of the night-and a new beginning.
All this and more will now come to pass. Because you see…
The daggers of the chilling wind have blown away the ashes. And now, the embers are stirred.
Neural Networks
I don’t know if it’s just me, but all things I study start converging into a single monolith. If I have studied 10 different ideas then you can be absolutely that I would have found some sort of skeleton architecture into which all of them would fit more or less seamlessly. It is an obsession with me to build these structures of unified thought.
Given this, you will understand why going through IEEE transactions on Neural Networks absolutely disgusts me. Make no mistake; I think IEEE is a great organization which has done a lot to further the interests of science and technology. But what passes as research in these transactions is so inherently inimical to all that I seek and desire from study that it becomes difficult to digest.
The problem, as far as I am concerned, is that all these brilliant people from all over the world keep confusing theory with reality. Mathematical modeling of all phenomena is fine thing and it helps us gain a better understanding of systems, but only as long as you don’t start taking the m0odel for the real thing. Going through any of the IEEE documents on the subject I find a plethora of such arcane variations on such obscure schemes that I have to stop and ask myself after every 2 pages-“Ok, so what are we trying to do here?”
The avowed aim of the study of neural networks is to understand and implement systems which emulate the working of the human brain. The first few generations seem to have worked with this definition in mind. Concepts like Perceptron, Hebbian Learning, Adalines are a product of this line of thought. They correspond to an actual mapping between the real brain processes and the mathematical models being developed. With the advent of recurrent networks, however, the field has been abandoned to mathematical chaos.
When half of today’s journals are filled with description of n different kinds of Neural Network schemes, each more convoluted than the previous one and the other half with schemes to get these schemes to work in a better way, we have to enquire about the vision guiding these efforts. Have these guys ever talked to a biology student to know about the processes that they are trying to model. How is the ‘Radial basis function NN’ or the ‘Epoch based real time recurrent NN’ suppose to carry out the tasks of the brain if its makers have no idea of how things happen in the brain. What they is a lot of complicated equations which have only an incidental relation with the real entity they are trying to model.
The human is a generic machine. Although the tasks are divided among the different parts of the brain in a general sort of way (e.g. listening recall etc.), these individual parts are themselves generically structured to carry out the tasks pertaining to their domain. In the hearing part of the brain, the whole part is responsible for all the tasks given to it. This must be so because of the way we evolve. Evolution is not in parts but as a whole. Our bodies did not evolve different parts in an independent fashion to satisfy each of our requirements. Had this been so, the distinct division of brain into domains of expertise would not have occurred. What I believe happens is that first a primitive neural structure evolves, which takes on more and more complexity as more and more diverse tasks are given to it.
So in the part of our brain which handles visual acuity, there aren’t 10 different architectures to identify 10 different poses or directions of illumination. The process, I believe is more cogent and cohesive than that.
So the aim of our research should be to find generic models or principles which have their corresponding counterparts in human brain and on a firmer classification and understanding of the tasks that the brain must handle. Once this classification is done, we can undertake the modeling of the various processes.
Any mathematical models without clear biological grounding can not come under the purview of neural networks because although they use a weighted added (the neuron), the paradigm they are employing has no well defined relation with the brain. Such systems are not concepts-they are heuristics. This is not to say that they are not useful for certain tasks, but through a blind pursuit of them, we lose direction in the quest to find true AI.
Given this, you will understand why going through IEEE transactions on Neural Networks absolutely disgusts me. Make no mistake; I think IEEE is a great organization which has done a lot to further the interests of science and technology. But what passes as research in these transactions is so inherently inimical to all that I seek and desire from study that it becomes difficult to digest.
The problem, as far as I am concerned, is that all these brilliant people from all over the world keep confusing theory with reality. Mathematical modeling of all phenomena is fine thing and it helps us gain a better understanding of systems, but only as long as you don’t start taking the m0odel for the real thing. Going through any of the IEEE documents on the subject I find a plethora of such arcane variations on such obscure schemes that I have to stop and ask myself after every 2 pages-“Ok, so what are we trying to do here?”
The avowed aim of the study of neural networks is to understand and implement systems which emulate the working of the human brain. The first few generations seem to have worked with this definition in mind. Concepts like Perceptron, Hebbian Learning, Adalines are a product of this line of thought. They correspond to an actual mapping between the real brain processes and the mathematical models being developed. With the advent of recurrent networks, however, the field has been abandoned to mathematical chaos.
When half of today’s journals are filled with description of n different kinds of Neural Network schemes, each more convoluted than the previous one and the other half with schemes to get these schemes to work in a better way, we have to enquire about the vision guiding these efforts. Have these guys ever talked to a biology student to know about the processes that they are trying to model. How is the ‘Radial basis function NN’ or the ‘Epoch based real time recurrent NN’ suppose to carry out the tasks of the brain if its makers have no idea of how things happen in the brain. What they is a lot of complicated equations which have only an incidental relation with the real entity they are trying to model.
The human is a generic machine. Although the tasks are divided among the different parts of the brain in a general sort of way (e.g. listening recall etc.), these individual parts are themselves generically structured to carry out the tasks pertaining to their domain. In the hearing part of the brain, the whole part is responsible for all the tasks given to it. This must be so because of the way we evolve. Evolution is not in parts but as a whole. Our bodies did not evolve different parts in an independent fashion to satisfy each of our requirements. Had this been so, the distinct division of brain into domains of expertise would not have occurred. What I believe happens is that first a primitive neural structure evolves, which takes on more and more complexity as more and more diverse tasks are given to it.
So in the part of our brain which handles visual acuity, there aren’t 10 different architectures to identify 10 different poses or directions of illumination. The process, I believe is more cogent and cohesive than that.
So the aim of our research should be to find generic models or principles which have their corresponding counterparts in human brain and on a firmer classification and understanding of the tasks that the brain must handle. Once this classification is done, we can undertake the modeling of the various processes.
Any mathematical models without clear biological grounding can not come under the purview of neural networks because although they use a weighted added (the neuron), the paradigm they are employing has no well defined relation with the brain. Such systems are not concepts-they are heuristics. This is not to say that they are not useful for certain tasks, but through a blind pursuit of them, we lose direction in the quest to find true AI.
Where to beegin
Every end is a beginning,every beginning is an end
One follows the other,or does it lead
One within the other,or is it without
Or all of these at once manifest
A timeless dance, eternal quest
Different in name,akin they portend
Death seeking life,start seeking end
Can we really know, at what threshold we stand
At that of a first,or that of a last?
And in this unending circle, if you would like to know me;
My friend,where will you begin?
One follows the other,or does it lead
One within the other,or is it without
Or all of these at once manifest
A timeless dance, eternal quest
Different in name,akin they portend
Death seeking life,start seeking end
Can we really know, at what threshold we stand
At that of a first,or that of a last?
And in this unending circle, if you would like to know me;
My friend,where will you begin?
Aditya's 9 Lives:Ques#7
Ques#7-Where and when then does a man truly affect or is affected by an atom beyond his body?
The answer can be had from the number of times in your life you are actively, physically conscious of your body. Barring those moments, all other that you are active, you affect and are affected by ‘atoms’ beyond your body.
Considering the issue in a rather more detached manner, we can conjure a semi-dichotomous situation between the ‘man’ and the ‘body’ (the classic Bhagwadgita trip – vasansi jeerdani yatha vihay…sanyati navaani dehi). The dichotomy is only partial because the ‘man’ or the consciousness inhabits the body and is dependent on it for existence-they are different and yet the same .The sameness is what gives the perception of ownership of the ‘body’-a concept which in the long run makes no difference.
I am not seeking a mystic discourse .We must realize that the consciousness is not the body-that the ‘man’ is not the ‘body’ .Once this is established ,the question can be approached in a much more direct manner.
The answer lies in clearly stating what is the meaning of affected? If we mean ‘atoms’ in the ordinary sense of the word , then the answer is obvious-our life processes causing our body to interact with the environment blahblahblah…
If the ‘atom’ is something more, the evolution of the physical world, the course of fate, everything else (You’ll have to be a little more specific here!), then the answer would be-at every instant .All the things that we decide to do and not to do are decisions of a conscious mind which shape the world. Speaking in a technical manner-If all men be the state variables of this vast, unbelievably complex system (Yes I am studying a lot of mathematics these daysJ), then the state (a word which, interestingly in this context, means ‘condition’) of the world is determined by our outputs (i.e. decisions and actions).
What happens in this world is not determined by the sum-total of individual actions of the ‘man’. It is determined by the decision of the mind, the conscious. One mind may decide to carry out the task of building a beautiful building. Other minds may independently, or under the influence of the first mind, decide to build more such buildings. Eventually their country could become the country with the most beautiful buildings in the world. All these people could also drive a construction boom which leads their country’s economy northwards.
For more crap along these lines, read One by Richard Bach.
I think by now it is obvious by now that each of our decisions affect the ‘atoms’ in the world around us.
The body is also very important in the sense that it is ultimate tool for carrying out the instructions of the mind AND it is the conduit for all information which allows us to make any rational decision. A mind which does not receive any information to process is no mind at all. This brings us to a very important and fundamental aspect of the question under consideration. We have already seen all kinds of influences a person can have on his/her environment. The reverse is not less emphatically true.
Imagine a person who has never had any sensory perception at all-absolutely none. In that case, can there be a conception of self for that person? With no data to feed on, the mind is dead. When I see a tree, the important thing is not that I see a natural resource or beauty or anything else of that sort. The most important part of the sighting is-I see ME! I am aware of myself as a sentient being and then I am aware of things that are distinct from me and I am capable of making the distinction.
So man, too, is influenced by his environment. He owes his consciousness to it.
The answer can be had from the number of times in your life you are actively, physically conscious of your body. Barring those moments, all other that you are active, you affect and are affected by ‘atoms’ beyond your body.
Considering the issue in a rather more detached manner, we can conjure a semi-dichotomous situation between the ‘man’ and the ‘body’ (the classic Bhagwadgita trip – vasansi jeerdani yatha vihay…sanyati navaani dehi). The dichotomy is only partial because the ‘man’ or the consciousness inhabits the body and is dependent on it for existence-they are different and yet the same .The sameness is what gives the perception of ownership of the ‘body’-a concept which in the long run makes no difference.
I am not seeking a mystic discourse .We must realize that the consciousness is not the body-that the ‘man’ is not the ‘body’ .Once this is established ,the question can be approached in a much more direct manner.
The answer lies in clearly stating what is the meaning of affected? If we mean ‘atoms’ in the ordinary sense of the word , then the answer is obvious-our life processes causing our body to interact with the environment blahblahblah…
If the ‘atom’ is something more, the evolution of the physical world, the course of fate, everything else (You’ll have to be a little more specific here!), then the answer would be-at every instant .All the things that we decide to do and not to do are decisions of a conscious mind which shape the world. Speaking in a technical manner-If all men be the state variables of this vast, unbelievably complex system (Yes I am studying a lot of mathematics these daysJ), then the state (a word which, interestingly in this context, means ‘condition’) of the world is determined by our outputs (i.e. decisions and actions).
What happens in this world is not determined by the sum-total of individual actions of the ‘man’. It is determined by the decision of the mind, the conscious. One mind may decide to carry out the task of building a beautiful building. Other minds may independently, or under the influence of the first mind, decide to build more such buildings. Eventually their country could become the country with the most beautiful buildings in the world. All these people could also drive a construction boom which leads their country’s economy northwards.
For more crap along these lines, read One by Richard Bach.
I think by now it is obvious by now that each of our decisions affect the ‘atoms’ in the world around us.
The body is also very important in the sense that it is ultimate tool for carrying out the instructions of the mind AND it is the conduit for all information which allows us to make any rational decision. A mind which does not receive any information to process is no mind at all. This brings us to a very important and fundamental aspect of the question under consideration. We have already seen all kinds of influences a person can have on his/her environment. The reverse is not less emphatically true.
Imagine a person who has never had any sensory perception at all-absolutely none. In that case, can there be a conception of self for that person? With no data to feed on, the mind is dead. When I see a tree, the important thing is not that I see a natural resource or beauty or anything else of that sort. The most important part of the sighting is-I see ME! I am aware of myself as a sentient being and then I am aware of things that are distinct from me and I am capable of making the distinction.
So man, too, is influenced by his environment. He owes his consciousness to it.
Boredom:(
The last 15 days must surely constitute the most boring fortnight of my life. I thought that things would be so cool after placements. They are after a fashion, but the tremendous vacuity that I feel is nauseating. There is a lack of purpose, with nothing on the horizon, and nothing expected to appear there either, just a big empty void in which you can sit and brood (or sleep!) but not achieve or feel much of anything.
I have always thought of myself as a slightly irregular but a disciplined person. I might not wake up on time due to laziness, but if I had to wake up before everyone for something, then I would do it, I could do it. Even that faculty seems to be gone. After repeating trying the same for the last 5-6 days, I have failed miserably and I feel tired-tired all the damn time! And for a person who likes to feel fit, all this is extremely depressing.
The boredom stems also from the fact that almost everybody else is preparing for CAT while I am not. Although I and Adi have talked each other into believing that MBA at this stage is all ‘moh maya’ and that we want to become engineers, I sometimes wonder if I got convinced of this so easily because my preparation was sucky anyway. Were I as good as tiddi or gupta, would I give up the CAT avenue as I easily as I have done now? Would Adi?
The high points have been the documentaries that I have seen over these days. The one on Hitler was absolutely amazing. Though it gave only a somewhat superficial sketch of the man, the footage in it was awesome. So many dead, so much suffering-all for one man’s fanaticism. It reminds me of King Laman in the Wheel of Time series. In it too, were all the lands from Cairhien to Tar Valon razed due to that man’s folly and pride.
The other one was on String Theory. As an engineer I was expecting that things would get slightly more technical so that I could actually understand what they mean when they say that efforts to unite Gravitation and Electro magnetism have repeatedly failed. Some equations would have been welcome, but I guess BBC wallahs make their documentaries for absolute laymen (that I suppose is as should be). As I was watching the documentary, I found myself putting forward hypotheses like every armchair scientist does, and amazingly, every single thing I had thought turned ot to be correct. Well, as correct as things expressed without mathematics can be in the world of Physics.
Of string theory and parallel universes I have much to say, some very interesting discussions which I will put here as soon as I have t
I have always thought of myself as a slightly irregular but a disciplined person. I might not wake up on time due to laziness, but if I had to wake up before everyone for something, then I would do it, I could do it. Even that faculty seems to be gone. After repeating trying the same for the last 5-6 days, I have failed miserably and I feel tired-tired all the damn time! And for a person who likes to feel fit, all this is extremely depressing.
The boredom stems also from the fact that almost everybody else is preparing for CAT while I am not. Although I and Adi have talked each other into believing that MBA at this stage is all ‘moh maya’ and that we want to become engineers, I sometimes wonder if I got convinced of this so easily because my preparation was sucky anyway. Were I as good as tiddi or gupta, would I give up the CAT avenue as I easily as I have done now? Would Adi?
The high points have been the documentaries that I have seen over these days. The one on Hitler was absolutely amazing. Though it gave only a somewhat superficial sketch of the man, the footage in it was awesome. So many dead, so much suffering-all for one man’s fanaticism. It reminds me of King Laman in the Wheel of Time series. In it too, were all the lands from Cairhien to Tar Valon razed due to that man’s folly and pride.
The other one was on String Theory. As an engineer I was expecting that things would get slightly more technical so that I could actually understand what they mean when they say that efforts to unite Gravitation and Electro magnetism have repeatedly failed. Some equations would have been welcome, but I guess BBC wallahs make their documentaries for absolute laymen (that I suppose is as should be). As I was watching the documentary, I found myself putting forward hypotheses like every armchair scientist does, and amazingly, every single thing I had thought turned ot to be correct. Well, as correct as things expressed without mathematics can be in the world of Physics.
Of string theory and parallel universes I have much to say, some very interesting discussions which I will put here as soon as I have t
Finally,My school alumni meet works out:)
Hi All ,
How long it's been you have met Your school Buddies? How long its been u have met ur seniors/juniors of school? How long its been u have spend some quality time with ur old pals?
If the answer to the above questions is "NO", then its the time to get into action and meet
pals n buddies of yester-years to revive old memories.
We, the Students of Mother Teresa Public School,have taken an initiative of forming a registered Alumni Association of MTPS. In regard to this, We have been in touch with the Mrs Neeta jetty,Principal MTPS and she has been extremely supportive of this move. We are in process of officially registering the Alumni association and launching a website for the same.
But it will be of no fruitful use without the support of all of You,hence we have decided to formally conduct an Alumni meeting to work out all the details and receiving your feedback and valuable suggestions . Following are the details for the meeting:
Date : 28 October,2006
Time : 4 P.M.
Venue : Mother Teresa Public School,C-Block,Preet Vihar
Agenda : Registration of members for MTPS Alumni
The meet will be followed by snacks and tea party.
Since it would be practically impossible to reach out to All people,I would request each of you to send this mail to as many people as possible. There are many means available nowerdays, namely, messengers,orkut.Hi5,yahoogroups etc. The maximum participation will be of utmost Importance.
Lets get ready and bring all the alumni of MTPS under one roof. Please note that this Alumni is not for any particular batch and applies to anyone who has Studied in MTPS.
Well it did take my school ke fuckers hell of a lot of time to get here but they did reach finally,and that is what matters!
Awesome!
Taken from the novel Magister Ludi by Herman Hesse:-
We consider classical music to be the epitome and quintessence of our culture, because it is that culture’s clearest, most significant gesture and expression. In this music we possess the heritage of cultural antiquity and Christianity, a spirit of serenely cheerful and brave piety, a superbly chivalric morality. For in the final analysis, every important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for human behaviour concentrated into a gesture. As we know, between 1500 and 1800 a wide variety of music was made; styles and means of expression were extremely variegated; but the spirit, or rather the morality, was everywhere the same. The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind chance. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity. The grace of a minuet by Handel or Chopin, the sensuality sublimated into delicate gesture to be found I any Italian composers or in Mozart, the tranquil, compose readiness for death in Bach- always there may be heard in these works a defiance, a death-defying intrepidity, a gallantry, and a note of superhuman laughter, of immortal gay serenity. Let the same note sound also in the whole of our lives acts and sufferings.
Rock in Delhi
By all accounts, Delhi has the hottest campus rock circuit in the whole country. I have been witness to some Fantastic performances over the last 4 years since I attended my first rock show, which was ‘Avanlanche’ in my first year (and which, by the way, counts as one of the best ever). The luster seems how seems to have vanished from the thumping, rockin’ rollin’ stadia over the last year.
Going to a rock these days means more of Punk music than ever before. Gone are all the heavyweights of heavy and extreme metal (Sledge, Myndsnare, Evergreen, Demonic Resurection…) to whom you could head bang till your head broke off, there never was never much of classic rock in the city (Delhi swears by metal-Metallica, Iron Maiden, Ozzy, Megadeth…, every Tom, **** and Harry knows and loves them!) and now those messiahs of nu-metal-Joint Family are gone too.
And with these bands has gone the spark from the rock scene. Going to a rock show these days means listening to the same bands with amateur voices trying desperately to sound like big tough men and trying to make music that sounds all the same. There are a few exceptions (Superfuzz is a FUCKIN’ good band with brilliant vocals. If the 3 of the band died today, they’d still be remembered for the vocalist’s primal screams in ‘She ate my heart out’ and ‘I’m back in school again’).
And why is it that any band, claiming to be of any genre, when makes an OC, then that song is always, ALWAYS punk??
For god’s sake can somebody make a straight heavy metal song!!!
All said and done, all this applies mostly to the ‘free’ rock shows (hehe…See I’m an Indian-soooo cheap!). In pubs and clubs where it costs RS.250 to enter and which I have never done till date, the master still reign. The pioneers and flag bearers of Indian rock-like Parikrama, Hundred Octane, Vishnu et all still rock the city with their grrreat music.
In light of all this I am eternally indebted to Yamaha for sponsoring the rock show at Pragati Maidan last Saturday which brought together Superfuzz, Them Clones, Half Step Down, Zero and PDV for a wild night of groove music. If Delhi applied, it would probably win the guiness for the single largest Mosh pit in the world (All thanks to Pin Drop Violence and their growling vocals-The performance wasn’t very good, but when Delhi realizes that extreme metal is on, no matter what the quality-it goes insane.)
So I sit and wait, wait for my first salary, when I would be able to go to see one of these guys perform. Maybe I’ll head bang my brains out.
Going to a rock these days means more of Punk music than ever before. Gone are all the heavyweights of heavy and extreme metal (Sledge, Myndsnare, Evergreen, Demonic Resurection…) to whom you could head bang till your head broke off, there never was never much of classic rock in the city (Delhi swears by metal-Metallica, Iron Maiden, Ozzy, Megadeth…, every Tom, **** and Harry knows and loves them!) and now those messiahs of nu-metal-Joint Family are gone too.
And with these bands has gone the spark from the rock scene. Going to a rock show these days means listening to the same bands with amateur voices trying desperately to sound like big tough men and trying to make music that sounds all the same. There are a few exceptions (Superfuzz is a FUCKIN’ good band with brilliant vocals. If the 3 of the band died today, they’d still be remembered for the vocalist’s primal screams in ‘She ate my heart out’ and ‘I’m back in school again’).
And why is it that any band, claiming to be of any genre, when makes an OC, then that song is always, ALWAYS punk??
For god’s sake can somebody make a straight heavy metal song!!!All said and done, all this applies mostly to the ‘free’ rock shows (hehe…See I’m an Indian-soooo cheap!). In pubs and clubs where it costs RS.250 to enter and which I have never done till date, the master still reign. The pioneers and flag bearers of Indian rock-like Parikrama, Hundred Octane, Vishnu et all still rock the city with their grrreat music.
In light of all this I am eternally indebted to Yamaha for sponsoring the rock show at Pragati Maidan last Saturday which brought together Superfuzz, Them Clones, Half Step Down, Zero and PDV for a wild night of groove music. If Delhi applied, it would probably win the guiness for the single largest Mosh pit in the world (All thanks to Pin Drop Violence and their growling vocals-The performance wasn’t very good, but when Delhi realizes that extreme metal is on, no matter what the quality-it goes insane.)
So I sit and wait, wait for my first salary, when I would be able to go to see one of these guys perform. Maybe I’ll head bang my brains out.
Morality,Ethics and God part-2
I derive great pleasure in throwing spanners in my friends’ faiths. I myself am a confirmed atheist (an agnostic at best-I can’t seem to decide between the two, but I definitely do not have much truck with god.) and always it is my fervent desire to see if any of my friends can give me reason enough to pause and reconsider my beliefs. I enjoy discussions with Shankar on this topic coz he truly tries to find logical arguments rather than continue saying-“Try to feel it” as many of the other fools do.
So here I will try to give another of the arguments that occurred to me for refuting the existence of god and putting morality in his place.
I regard moral principles to be absolutes. They are not constructs of somebody’s fancy but rather the requirements of man’s existence as man and not some primitive beast. They should be followed not because we belong to some religion, or follow a certain spiritual leader, but because following them allows us to avail the full scope of our faculties in the most productive manner. In part-1 of this, I have shown how this applies to honesty. Similar arguments can be found for other moral precepts.
Now we come to the crux of the matter. If we believe that moral principles are, in fact, an end in themselves, that they must be adhered to for purely pragmatic and not mystical reasons, then does that not eliminate the role of God from our whole moral edifice? If we must be honest for honesty’s own sake rather than to escape the retribution of the almighty, then what exactly do we need the almighty for? And looking at the whole issue in this light, does it not seem more likely that god is just a concept dreamt up to keep men from deviating from what is moral and just, like demons devised by parents to get children to eat their food or to go to bed.
As far as I understand, god has the following 3 roles:-
1. Origin of life.
2. Maintenance of life.
3. Book-keeping of sins and appropriation of punishment for the same.
Most of us, I hope, agree that origin of life is a matter of science and not religion. The reasons for origin of life on earth may be obscure, but they are definitely not supernatural.
The last two I now club into one and hold morality responsible for both. If moral laws are broken, it is a sin and the retribution is immediate in terms of reduction in chances of survival. Inner peace and conscientiousness all stem from this basic belief in some essential moral laws and not a god.
Hence, we see that we can easily remove god from the whole picture and put science and morality in his place. Doing so also removes some other ‘irrational’ beliefs like rebirth, heaven and hell. If we violate our moral code, then what the world becomes is hell. There is no punishment in an after-life. The retribution is then and there in that same life and that is the extent of Karma (which incidentally is more consistent with the original meaning of the word-‘karm’ from Sanskrit meaning action).
One thing that becomes essential in such a scenario is to correctly distinguish between moral principles and religious dictats. e.g Honesty is a moral principle, while not eating beef is merely a religious injunction ( I can see no reason why one animal should be more holy than the others). Thus while we decide on the moral code that we must follow, it is essential that we carefully sift the dogmatic from the rational and discard the former.
So here I will try to give another of the arguments that occurred to me for refuting the existence of god and putting morality in his place.
I regard moral principles to be absolutes. They are not constructs of somebody’s fancy but rather the requirements of man’s existence as man and not some primitive beast. They should be followed not because we belong to some religion, or follow a certain spiritual leader, but because following them allows us to avail the full scope of our faculties in the most productive manner. In part-1 of this, I have shown how this applies to honesty. Similar arguments can be found for other moral precepts.
Now we come to the crux of the matter. If we believe that moral principles are, in fact, an end in themselves, that they must be adhered to for purely pragmatic and not mystical reasons, then does that not eliminate the role of God from our whole moral edifice? If we must be honest for honesty’s own sake rather than to escape the retribution of the almighty, then what exactly do we need the almighty for? And looking at the whole issue in this light, does it not seem more likely that god is just a concept dreamt up to keep men from deviating from what is moral and just, like demons devised by parents to get children to eat their food or to go to bed.
As far as I understand, god has the following 3 roles:-
1. Origin of life.
2. Maintenance of life.
3. Book-keeping of sins and appropriation of punishment for the same.
Most of us, I hope, agree that origin of life is a matter of science and not religion. The reasons for origin of life on earth may be obscure, but they are definitely not supernatural.
The last two I now club into one and hold morality responsible for both. If moral laws are broken, it is a sin and the retribution is immediate in terms of reduction in chances of survival. Inner peace and conscientiousness all stem from this basic belief in some essential moral laws and not a god.
Hence, we see that we can easily remove god from the whole picture and put science and morality in his place. Doing so also removes some other ‘irrational’ beliefs like rebirth, heaven and hell. If we violate our moral code, then what the world becomes is hell. There is no punishment in an after-life. The retribution is then and there in that same life and that is the extent of Karma (which incidentally is more consistent with the original meaning of the word-‘karm’ from Sanskrit meaning action).
One thing that becomes essential in such a scenario is to correctly distinguish between moral principles and religious dictats. e.g Honesty is a moral principle, while not eating beef is merely a religious injunction ( I can see no reason why one animal should be more holy than the others). Thus while we decide on the moral code that we must follow, it is essential that we carefully sift the dogmatic from the rational and discard the former.
Morality,Ethics and God part-1
I have been planning to write this piece for a long time now but it needed some thought and I haven’t had either time or conducive company in the whole summer break and merely no time in the month of August. Both seem to be in ample supply now and so, here goes.
This concerns that famous question- ‘Is there a god’. This also concerns the nature of our moral precepts and our own attitude towards morality in general. And if you are still reading on then I will assume that you have time and patience enough and will allow me to build my case. All arguments are, of course, welcome in the comments section of the blog.
Sometime ago I was reading ‘Sophie’s World’ by Jostein Gaarder. The book gives a basic introduction to all the famous and some not so famous schools of philosophy. I, being an almost complete Objectivist, was trying to measure how each of these schools matched against my beliefs. It was then that I got this idea of conducting a survey. So I shot off messages to a lot of my friends, asking a rather simple question-‘Why is it bad to lie?’. The responses were, to say the least, interesting.
First I had to assure each of them that I had not gone crazy and seriously wanted an answer. All the answers I received can be grouped into 3 broad groups:-
1. We must not lie to our friends, it doesn’t matter what we say to strangers.
2. Any lie is permissible, as long as the aims are ‘selfless’.
3. One lie causes us to lie more and more to cover it up. So we shouldn’t lie.
These answers are all very curious because none of them recognizes truthfulness, honesty etc. as a moral absolute, an end in themselves. They all imply that we must not lie because people can find out, and leave enough loopholes to wriggle around the guilt of lying easily enough. I want to examine all these answers individually.
To all those who gave the first answer, I asked- why? Most replied- “Because your friend might be hurt if he/she found out”. Again I asked- “What if it could somehow be ensured that he would never find out”. Most amusingly none answered this query. Note that the answer is not an answer. It never answers why lying is bad. It merely tries to divide the world into two groups of people- those you can lie to and those you can’t. How this division comes about is not explained. If you had a fight with one of your current friends, then it would magically become okay to lie to him/her.
It sounds like some weird kind of loyalty but it isn’t. It’s a façade built to convince yourself that you are a moral person while you are not. It is this answer which is coming back to us whenever a shopkeeper lies to us and cheats us, whenever an acquaintance doesn’t keep a promise (he thinks you are not ‘friend enough’ and who are you to argue with that). This ‘Moral Nepotism’ will be defended by its proponents as pragmatic behavior (“I am no saint-everyone does it! Why take a burden of guilt for people you do not even know?”), but I beg to differ.
The second reply is the vilest contortion of morality garbed as a moral statement. Why should the aims be selfless? Who decides this selflessness? It allows us to lie and then to hide it behind some or the other veneer of selflessness. I could go on and on but I will stop because just thinking about this makes me want to throw up, and then slap the person who gave this answer. Unfortunately, the person is one of my closest and oldest friends.
The third POV, which I call ‘Lazy Morality’ can be held to be the closest to my own beliefs. Whenever we lie, we are deviating from fact, from reality and the more we lie the further we must lie to cover the previous lies. Thus we deviate further and further from reality. But here we come up against a blank wall. Further from reality…so what? Why is deviation from reality bad? And that, of course, is the original question. So we don’t really have an answer. But in my opinion, we are tantalizingly close, whether or not my friends who gave this answer realized it.
Which brings me, at last, to my own opinion on this subject. Why should we not lie? It certainly is expedient, and in our daily lives, often necessary.
In my opinion, honesty is an Objective requirement of human survival. In as much as man is a social being, and must live in a society in order to survive in the kind of living conditions that we are living in today. This kind of life would not be possible if every man was a free operator and functioned according to his whim or fancy.
Lying is bad because our every action aimed at survival in today’s society is depended on an unspoken understanding that certain other individuals will do certain other tasks and deliver on certain promises. Job agreements, business contracts etc. are all forms of these promises. Were lying as acceptable as honesty, then it would be quite acceptable to not pay an employee after a month of work, to renege on a deadline for a projects, an infinite such instances where either a man’s word or his signature on a piece of paper count for millions of rupees or years of trust. If all this were acceptable then the only way to survive would be to do everything by your own hands and all semblance of society would vanish like a fart in the wind.
Now I hope the patient reader can see why the third answer was so close to my reasons for honesty. The further from reality, the further from survival, and if that is not reason enough to stop lying, nothing is.
This concerns that famous question- ‘Is there a god’. This also concerns the nature of our moral precepts and our own attitude towards morality in general. And if you are still reading on then I will assume that you have time and patience enough and will allow me to build my case. All arguments are, of course, welcome in the comments section of the blog.
Sometime ago I was reading ‘Sophie’s World’ by Jostein Gaarder. The book gives a basic introduction to all the famous and some not so famous schools of philosophy. I, being an almost complete Objectivist, was trying to measure how each of these schools matched against my beliefs. It was then that I got this idea of conducting a survey. So I shot off messages to a lot of my friends, asking a rather simple question-‘Why is it bad to lie?’. The responses were, to say the least, interesting.
First I had to assure each of them that I had not gone crazy and seriously wanted an answer. All the answers I received can be grouped into 3 broad groups:-
1. We must not lie to our friends, it doesn’t matter what we say to strangers.
2. Any lie is permissible, as long as the aims are ‘selfless’.
3. One lie causes us to lie more and more to cover it up. So we shouldn’t lie.
These answers are all very curious because none of them recognizes truthfulness, honesty etc. as a moral absolute, an end in themselves. They all imply that we must not lie because people can find out, and leave enough loopholes to wriggle around the guilt of lying easily enough. I want to examine all these answers individually.
To all those who gave the first answer, I asked- why? Most replied- “Because your friend might be hurt if he/she found out”. Again I asked- “What if it could somehow be ensured that he would never find out”. Most amusingly none answered this query. Note that the answer is not an answer. It never answers why lying is bad. It merely tries to divide the world into two groups of people- those you can lie to and those you can’t. How this division comes about is not explained. If you had a fight with one of your current friends, then it would magically become okay to lie to him/her.
It sounds like some weird kind of loyalty but it isn’t. It’s a façade built to convince yourself that you are a moral person while you are not. It is this answer which is coming back to us whenever a shopkeeper lies to us and cheats us, whenever an acquaintance doesn’t keep a promise (he thinks you are not ‘friend enough’ and who are you to argue with that). This ‘Moral Nepotism’ will be defended by its proponents as pragmatic behavior (“I am no saint-everyone does it! Why take a burden of guilt for people you do not even know?”), but I beg to differ.
The second reply is the vilest contortion of morality garbed as a moral statement. Why should the aims be selfless? Who decides this selflessness? It allows us to lie and then to hide it behind some or the other veneer of selflessness. I could go on and on but I will stop because just thinking about this makes me want to throw up, and then slap the person who gave this answer. Unfortunately, the person is one of my closest and oldest friends.
The third POV, which I call ‘Lazy Morality’ can be held to be the closest to my own beliefs. Whenever we lie, we are deviating from fact, from reality and the more we lie the further we must lie to cover the previous lies. Thus we deviate further and further from reality. But here we come up against a blank wall. Further from reality…so what? Why is deviation from reality bad? And that, of course, is the original question. So we don’t really have an answer. But in my opinion, we are tantalizingly close, whether or not my friends who gave this answer realized it.
Which brings me, at last, to my own opinion on this subject. Why should we not lie? It certainly is expedient, and in our daily lives, often necessary.
In my opinion, honesty is an Objective requirement of human survival. In as much as man is a social being, and must live in a society in order to survive in the kind of living conditions that we are living in today. This kind of life would not be possible if every man was a free operator and functioned according to his whim or fancy.
Lying is bad because our every action aimed at survival in today’s society is depended on an unspoken understanding that certain other individuals will do certain other tasks and deliver on certain promises. Job agreements, business contracts etc. are all forms of these promises. Were lying as acceptable as honesty, then it would be quite acceptable to not pay an employee after a month of work, to renege on a deadline for a projects, an infinite such instances where either a man’s word or his signature on a piece of paper count for millions of rupees or years of trust. If all this were acceptable then the only way to survive would be to do everything by your own hands and all semblance of society would vanish like a fart in the wind.
Now I hope the patient reader can see why the third answer was so close to my reasons for honesty. The further from reality, the further from survival, and if that is not reason enough to stop lying, nothing is.
D.E.Shaw nailed!
I love this blog .I think it is lucky for me-cruel but lucky. It makes me look stupid but gets me what I want. Whatever I moan about not having in this blog, I usually get it soon after making the entry and have to come back and make an entry about eating my words. It happened with ‘Internship and Internet’ entry, and now it happened with ‘The Future’. I was just moaning about not having a high paying job, and considering possible courses of action for the future, when BAM! A huge job just jumped down my throat.
On Sept.5 ’06, I was recruited by DE Shaw and Co. for a ridiculous sum of around 9 lpa, thereby becoming one of the most highly paid guys I my class at roughly the end of our main placement season.
The run-up didn’t look very promising. Almost everyone was looking forward to this company very eagerly (for the salary alone, I think. Nobody had much idea the profile-not that it would have mattered anyway. For 9 lpa, I’d have cleaned toilets!) and I do not count myself anywhere even close to the college’s smarter people. IBM-ISL junta was still going to be allowed to sit and when that gang includes the likes of Bharat Garg, Shruti Tewari and Sandeep Singh and with the company self confessedly out to take only the ‘extraordinary geniuses’(I’ve been called that, but each time the speaker has been excessively drunk), I wouldn’t have bet on myself. The only reason I had a semblance of hope was because I had been told that the company laid a lot of stress on a strong CV, and on that count I am confident to beat most guys of our college. And because for some weird reason, I’d been consistently clearing writtens which had a strong Aptitude component (CAT quant style questions), when some of the worthier CAT aspirants of my class had failed (e.g. The Inductis Test. Rishabh Gupta flunked it and I got through.).
The written comprised of three sections:
1. Aptitude section (20 questions in 30 minutes)
2. Tech Section (30 questions in 25 minutes)
3. Programming section (1 algorithm in 15 minutes).
I wasn’t happy with my performance in the aptitude part, so for the first time in the placement season- I craned my neck and copied 2 questions off Sandy’s answer sheet and then 2 more off my neighbour’s , fervently hoping them to be correct. The Tech section too had me stumped until I decided to attempt questions in the reverse order, which turned out to be a good decision and I was able to do 36 questions out of 50 in the objective part of the paper.
The Algorithm part was easy and I think everybody was able to do that program. Then it was off to the canteen for lunch and waiting for the result.
When I received the sms telling me that I had an Interview call, I can say that I was surprised. Jasleen , Bhuvnesh and Khurana also had been selected.
I was the first person to be interviewed (This seems to be a lucky charm- for Flex too I was the first person in the Interviews.). A panel of 2 awaited me in the Green Room. They began by asking me to introduce myself which I did. After that the grilling began:
Interviewer-1:Tell me about this Online Counseling Software of yours.
Me: *Ramble On*
Interviewer-2:This Workflow Automation Project that you have done, how many levels does it have and what is the backend?
Me:* Ramble On*
I-2: Do you know DB?
Me: Sir 3 points on a scale of 5 for me.
I-1: So tell me what is Normalization?
Me: *I hadn’t studied DB at all so start telling him what I remember from doing my projects*
I-2: No. Take an example and then explain.
Me: I took a bad example without realizing it and soon they had my normalization procedure tied I knots and looking more useless than Maru’s running shoes.
I-2: Ok. What are your fav subjects?
Me: Sir C, DS, OS...
I-1: What is a b+ tree?
Me: Told him.
I-1: Why do we use it?
Me: Sir so that if we want elements sequentially we can get them straightaway without having tom traverse the tree.
I-1: Why would we want to do that?
Me: *Scratch my head and look stupid*
I-2: Where does memory for a linked list come from?
Me: Heap.
I-2: Why?
Me: *I dunno why man-ask Ritchie!!!* Sir ‘coz heap has these automatic garbage collection mechanisms so that we can’t over-allocate memory at runtime.
I-2: And stack doesn’t have these mechanisms?
Me: no sir*Or does It???*
I-2: Local variables are on the stack right?
Me:*I you say so*Yes Sir.
I-2: Then if I have to access an element at the bottom of the stack, then areall the elements above it popped and pushed everytime?
Me: no sir.
I-2: Then why is called a stack?
Me:$#%^@%^@%
I-2: Tell me about storage classes?
Me: Sir I haven’t a clue about what you are talking.
I-2: WHAAAAT? You’ve never heard about extern, static…
Me: Ohh yessir yessir.Then I told him whatever I knew.
I-2: If I have a static global variable in one file, ca I use it as extern in another file?
Me: Yes. (It turns out you can’t)
I-2: Are you sure?
Me: yessir.
I-1: Ok. Do initialized and un-initialized variables lie in the same segment in C?
Me: yes sir (No they don’t)
I-1: Where do you see yourself 5 years down the line?
Me: don’t know sir.
I-1: Whaat?
Me: Sir right now all I want is a good techie job. 5 years later who knows if I might get interested in management, or interested in some specific and end up doing MS in that field, or remain interested in earning piles of money and stay in the Industry.
I-1: Ok what about 1-2 years down the line?
Me: I see myself in a technical job where I have a responsible position and I have a bigger picture view of the aims and objectives of my team’s and my own efforts.
I-1: What kind of work at DE Shaw would interest you?
Me: sir work on the vast distributed system you mentioned in your PPT or work which allowed me to play with information.
I-1: Elaborate please.
Me: For example you have people in all corners of the world who want stock market data from all over the world in real time. So I’d be interested in designing systems which collect this info process the gathered info into a form which is more intuitively useful for every specific request and to render the processed info compatible to platforms ranging from desktops to mobile phones.
I-1: Ohkay…Write me program to reverses a string.
Me: I do it using two pointers.
I-1: *pokes enough holes hole in the program so that it sinks to the bottom without a fight* Ok thank you, we will get back to you by about 9 in the evening.
Me:*Bhago!!!!*Thank you sir.
After I came out and discussed the questions, I realized I had screwed up every question that could possibly have been screwed. With not much hope remaining, I went to DC with Adi to have a fruit beer at Bercos and a couple of burgers at McDonald’s.Back at the flat, I started watching ‘Swades’ for the second time (A really good film, dunno why I had ignored it till now). Around 9:30 I got a call from Budhrani telling me that I had been selected. I don’t remember my heart beating so loudly without physical effort ever before. I ran over to the Audi but the post-selection photo session and all the congratulatory speeches etc. were already and I caught The Shaw team coming down the stairs. I met them and they were all smiles and congratulations. I told I-1 and I-2 that I thought they had killed me in the interview and that I had left for a movie. I-1 told he had done the exact same thing after his own Shaw interview!
There were hugs and high fives and demands and promises of treats all around. I called up my home and as expected, everyone was totally ecstatic (I later learnt that my mother didn’t sleep that night!)Then I had a call from my teacher (it being teacher’s day) and she too was extremely happy at the coincidence. The flatties were all intending to go to my home and demand a huge sum of money from my parents for a party.
Now I can’t walk 100 meters without someone asking for a treat!!! Relatives I didn’t know I had have been calling to say proud I’ve made them. The best part is that now I can shove my half hearted CAT preps up IMS’ ass. No need for solving FLTs, Quant section tests….AAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!! Relief. But I can’t help but feel this strange kind of vacuum within me, a lack of purpose. There is nothing to do now but wait for the mid-sems to come and devastate me, coz no-one has any clue of the syllabus, and half the teachers have already decided to fail most of us. And I do not feel like preparing anyway. Most of the junta has taken up the CAT challenge in all earnestness again. That too is gone for me.
So what else is there for a man to do? Sit around, watch highly rated movies (Akiro Kurosawa’s ‘Seven Samurai’ sucks, by the way!) and write too long blog entries like this one here.
And btw, since I mentioned at the beginning of this entry that I got whatever I moaned about not having at this blog, let’s try that one more time:
BOOHOOHOO! I don’t have a girlfriend!
On Sept.5 ’06, I was recruited by DE Shaw and Co. for a ridiculous sum of around 9 lpa, thereby becoming one of the most highly paid guys I my class at roughly the end of our main placement season.
The run-up didn’t look very promising. Almost everyone was looking forward to this company very eagerly (for the salary alone, I think. Nobody had much idea the profile-not that it would have mattered anyway. For 9 lpa, I’d have cleaned toilets!) and I do not count myself anywhere even close to the college’s smarter people. IBM-ISL junta was still going to be allowed to sit and when that gang includes the likes of Bharat Garg, Shruti Tewari and Sandeep Singh and with the company self confessedly out to take only the ‘extraordinary geniuses’(I’ve been called that, but each time the speaker has been excessively drunk), I wouldn’t have bet on myself. The only reason I had a semblance of hope was because I had been told that the company laid a lot of stress on a strong CV, and on that count I am confident to beat most guys of our college. And because for some weird reason, I’d been consistently clearing writtens which had a strong Aptitude component (CAT quant style questions), when some of the worthier CAT aspirants of my class had failed (e.g. The Inductis Test. Rishabh Gupta flunked it and I got through.).
The written comprised of three sections:
1. Aptitude section (20 questions in 30 minutes)
2. Tech Section (30 questions in 25 minutes)
3. Programming section (1 algorithm in 15 minutes).
I wasn’t happy with my performance in the aptitude part, so for the first time in the placement season- I craned my neck and copied 2 questions off Sandy’s answer sheet and then 2 more off my neighbour’s , fervently hoping them to be correct. The Tech section too had me stumped until I decided to attempt questions in the reverse order, which turned out to be a good decision and I was able to do 36 questions out of 50 in the objective part of the paper.
The Algorithm part was easy and I think everybody was able to do that program. Then it was off to the canteen for lunch and waiting for the result.
When I received the sms telling me that I had an Interview call, I can say that I was surprised. Jasleen , Bhuvnesh and Khurana also had been selected.
I was the first person to be interviewed (This seems to be a lucky charm- for Flex too I was the first person in the Interviews.). A panel of 2 awaited me in the Green Room. They began by asking me to introduce myself which I did. After that the grilling began:
Interviewer-1:Tell me about this Online Counseling Software of yours.
Me: *Ramble On*
Interviewer-2:This Workflow Automation Project that you have done, how many levels does it have and what is the backend?
Me:* Ramble On*
I-2: Do you know DB?
Me: Sir 3 points on a scale of 5 for me.
I-1: So tell me what is Normalization?
Me: *I hadn’t studied DB at all so start telling him what I remember from doing my projects*
I-2: No. Take an example and then explain.
Me: I took a bad example without realizing it and soon they had my normalization procedure tied I knots and looking more useless than Maru’s running shoes.
I-2: Ok. What are your fav subjects?
Me: Sir C, DS, OS...
I-1: What is a b+ tree?
Me: Told him.
I-1: Why do we use it?
Me: Sir so that if we want elements sequentially we can get them straightaway without having tom traverse the tree.
I-1: Why would we want to do that?
Me: *Scratch my head and look stupid*
I-2: Where does memory for a linked list come from?
Me: Heap.
I-2: Why?
Me: *I dunno why man-ask Ritchie!!!* Sir ‘coz heap has these automatic garbage collection mechanisms so that we can’t over-allocate memory at runtime.
I-2: And stack doesn’t have these mechanisms?
Me: no sir*Or does It???*
I-2: Local variables are on the stack right?
Me:*I you say so*Yes Sir.
I-2: Then if I have to access an element at the bottom of the stack, then areall the elements above it popped and pushed everytime?
Me: no sir.
I-2: Then why is called a stack?
Me:$#%^@%^@%
I-2: Tell me about storage classes?
Me: Sir I haven’t a clue about what you are talking.
I-2: WHAAAAT? You’ve never heard about extern, static…
Me: Ohh yessir yessir.Then I told him whatever I knew.
I-2: If I have a static global variable in one file, ca I use it as extern in another file?
Me: Yes. (It turns out you can’t)
I-2: Are you sure?
Me: yessir.
I-1: Ok. Do initialized and un-initialized variables lie in the same segment in C?
Me: yes sir (No they don’t)
I-1: Where do you see yourself 5 years down the line?
Me: don’t know sir.
I-1: Whaat?
Me: Sir right now all I want is a good techie job. 5 years later who knows if I might get interested in management, or interested in some specific and end up doing MS in that field, or remain interested in earning piles of money and stay in the Industry.
I-1: Ok what about 1-2 years down the line?
Me: I see myself in a technical job where I have a responsible position and I have a bigger picture view of the aims and objectives of my team’s and my own efforts.
I-1: What kind of work at DE Shaw would interest you?
Me: sir work on the vast distributed system you mentioned in your PPT or work which allowed me to play with information.
I-1: Elaborate please.
Me: For example you have people in all corners of the world who want stock market data from all over the world in real time. So I’d be interested in designing systems which collect this info process the gathered info into a form which is more intuitively useful for every specific request and to render the processed info compatible to platforms ranging from desktops to mobile phones.
I-1: Ohkay…Write me program to reverses a string.
Me: I do it using two pointers.
I-1: *pokes enough holes hole in the program so that it sinks to the bottom without a fight* Ok thank you, we will get back to you by about 9 in the evening.
Me:*Bhago!!!!*Thank you sir.
After I came out and discussed the questions, I realized I had screwed up every question that could possibly have been screwed. With not much hope remaining, I went to DC with Adi to have a fruit beer at Bercos and a couple of burgers at McDonald’s.Back at the flat, I started watching ‘Swades’ for the second time (A really good film, dunno why I had ignored it till now). Around 9:30 I got a call from Budhrani telling me that I had been selected. I don’t remember my heart beating so loudly without physical effort ever before. I ran over to the Audi but the post-selection photo session and all the congratulatory speeches etc. were already and I caught The Shaw team coming down the stairs. I met them and they were all smiles and congratulations. I told I-1 and I-2 that I thought they had killed me in the interview and that I had left for a movie. I-1 told he had done the exact same thing after his own Shaw interview!
There were hugs and high fives and demands and promises of treats all around. I called up my home and as expected, everyone was totally ecstatic (I later learnt that my mother didn’t sleep that night!)Then I had a call from my teacher (it being teacher’s day) and she too was extremely happy at the coincidence. The flatties were all intending to go to my home and demand a huge sum of money from my parents for a party.
Now I can’t walk 100 meters without someone asking for a treat!!! Relatives I didn’t know I had have been calling to say proud I’ve made them. The best part is that now I can shove my half hearted CAT preps up IMS’ ass. No need for solving FLTs, Quant section tests….AAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!! Relief. But I can’t help but feel this strange kind of vacuum within me, a lack of purpose. There is nothing to do now but wait for the mid-sems to come and devastate me, coz no-one has any clue of the syllabus, and half the teachers have already decided to fail most of us. And I do not feel like preparing anyway. Most of the junta has taken up the CAT challenge in all earnestness again. That too is gone for me.
So what else is there for a man to do? Sit around, watch highly rated movies (Akiro Kurosawa’s ‘Seven Samurai’ sucks, by the way!) and write too long blog entries like this one here.
And btw, since I mentioned at the beginning of this entry that I got whatever I moaned about not having at this blog, let’s try that one more time:
BOOHOOHOO! I don’t have a girlfriend!
The Future
With the placement season almost out of the way(and before you start asking for a treat, no,I havent got a bumper paycheck ), its time to ponder about the future.
Pondering is something al NSITians seem to be brilliant at!I saw it when some C grade companies refused to allow MPA to sit for their tests. You'd think that the kind of haalat the MPA guys were in w.r.t. jobs, there would be a bout of intense slogging from them for the remaining jobs-but no.What followd was a bout of Pondering.MPA pondering as to what to do now, how to 'make their voice heard' *ROTFL*, 'Who th f*** adviced me to do MPA' and 'ab hamaara kya hoga'; All the other branches pondering what MPA should do now, how MPA should make its voice heard(again *ROTFL*), 'who the hell advice them to do MPA', and 'ab inka kya hoga'!!!!!Really NSIT needs no reason to indulge in pondering and nonstp BCD.
But comng bak to the point,these are my options:
1.Landing DE Shaw(humph...fat chance-considering that IBM-ISL is still B-cat and tiddi is still elegible(for those who don't know-tiddi is bharat garg.he is also the guy cursed to clear all writtens and gloriously fail in almost every interview.Also, he is in IBM-ISL).With the rest of my class high IQ waali junta making noises about giving the written at all costs,his option is pretty much outta the window.But still...writing options like this makes it appear that i have a lot of options.
2.Crack CAT.*HAHAHAHAHAHA* Wit scores so low you cant see them from ground level, this seems a tall order, esp. with guys cracking 70 in mocks in which I yield 36 .If I am not among the top 7-8 CAT aspirants in my class, then it is very difficult to beat guys from all over the country.AndDI section ne to solve hone ki rakhi hi nahin hai! Besides I find I have no motivation for it. Every day I find myself more amenable to coding than to solvingquant questions. Tech is exciting,challenging and a damn sight moer interesting than interpreting huge masses of no.s.Beside not every highly paid person in this world is an MBA.
However, there is always this feeling of havibg made a commitment to at least the written part of the MBA admission procedure, and if it can be managed with a reasonable amount of hard work,I intend to do it.This way, I dont feel all disapointed that I auseless,cant compete with any no. of people,AND it prevents my parents from killing me(anybody can fail in the interviews right???)
3.Join Flex.This seems to be the most likely. A pity they aren't paying nearly enough.But I suppose that will come with time.
So, fingers crossed...lets see what happens.DE Shaw on the campus on Sept 5.
), its time to ponder about the future.Pondering is something al NSITians seem to be brilliant at!I saw it when some C grade companies refused to allow MPA to sit for their tests. You'd think that the kind of haalat the MPA guys were in w.r.t. jobs, there would be a bout of intense slogging from them for the remaining jobs-but no.What followd was a bout of Pondering.MPA pondering as to what to do now, how to 'make their voice heard' *ROTFL*, 'Who th f*** adviced me to do MPA' and 'ab hamaara kya hoga'; All the other branches pondering what MPA should do now, how MPA should make its voice heard(again *ROTFL*), 'who the hell advice them to do MPA', and 'ab inka kya hoga'!!!!!Really NSIT needs no reason to indulge in pondering and nonstp BCD.
But comng bak to the point,these are my options:
1.Landing DE Shaw(humph...fat chance-considering that IBM-ISL is still B-cat and tiddi is still elegible(for those who don't know-tiddi is bharat garg.he is also the guy cursed to clear all writtens and gloriously fail in almost every interview.Also, he is in IBM-ISL).With the rest of my class high IQ waali junta making noises about giving the written at all costs,his option is pretty much outta the window.But still...writing options like this makes it appear that i have a lot of options.
2.Crack CAT.*HAHAHAHAHAHA* Wit scores so low you cant see them from ground level, this seems a tall order, esp. with guys cracking 70 in mocks in which I yield 36
.If I am not among the top 7-8 CAT aspirants in my class, then it is very difficult to beat guys from all over the country.AndDI section ne to solve hone ki rakhi hi nahin hai! Besides I find I have no motivation for it. Every day I find myself more amenable to coding than to solvingquant questions. Tech is exciting,challenging and a damn sight moer interesting than interpreting huge masses of no.s.Beside not every highly paid person in this world is an MBA.However, there is always this feeling of havibg made a commitment to at least the written part of the MBA admission procedure, and if it can be managed with a reasonable amount of hard work,I intend to do it.This way, I dont feel all disapointed that I auseless,cant compete with any no. of people,AND it prevents my parents from killing me(anybody can fail in the interviews right???)
3.Join Flex.This seems to be the most likely. A pity they aren't paying nearly enough.But I suppose that will come with time.
So, fingers crossed...lets see what happens.DE Shaw on the campus on Sept 5.
Flextronics!
On the 4th of August,I have ,for the first time in my life, become empployed and am now an official Flextronics guy.YAhoooo!!!(or rather FLEXTRONICS!!!, yahoo is coming to the campus tomorrow).
The process of joining the hallowed ranks of India's ubiquitous IT force came about as a 3 step thing:
Step-1: A written test.
Step-2: Tech Interview.
Step-3: HR Interview.
The written test was seni retarded(Even those who could not clear it agreed to that).With 7 sections comprising of English, Quant, Attention to detail(the stupidest of them all), C, section on Data Structures OS and Algo, A section on retention, E-mail writing(yes,amazing what companies can test you on!),It was a mad scramble to the finish line.
I had fine tuning several strategies for cheating in the paper but all of the plaaning came to naught.The evil invigilators removed evryone around me beyond whispering range and I ws left to fend for myself in the big game of employment seeeking.
Yours truly wrapped up the English paper in less than 4 min, got slightly harassed by the quant paper, and generally tumbled through the rest of the section. There was barely a time to pause as the papers of the previous sectoin were taken away as soon as the next section was given.The only real pause I took was while deciding on how to masquerade as a cable operator writing an email to an irate customer.
This whole examination procedure was followed by several hours of waiting(I didn't really think about the result, some of my friends were on the brink of breakdown).The result was finally declared around midnight and 2/3rd of my flat ended up qualifying for thhe interview but the other 1/3rd was heartbroken.
Interviews began at 9:00 a.m. the next morning.I was among the first batch of 5 interviewees.The panel consisted of A mousy looking female and a guy who seemed to be amused at nothing at all.
Amused guy:Hi kislay,please tell us about yourself?
Me: *I ain't expecting this in the tech interviews idiots* Eh..I'm a student of NSIT-IT..eh...I am a hardworking guy and generally like to get on with problems and solve them...eh...But I tend to get a little unrealistic at times and put too much pressure on myself...eh....I've done a lot of web dev work and am fascinated by technology in all its forms.
Mousy woman:Ok thats a good intro(REALLYYYY!!!!)Wjat are your main subjects?
Me: MA'am DS OS and Algo.
What followed was a 10-15 min long series of questions that I answered and bluffed my way through.Then I found myself waiting for(eternally it seemed) for my HR interview.Got quite irritating, especially with Aditya muttering feverishly about how much we could have been studying for the Microsoft test.The only respiite came from Mr. Anil Dhawan,Product Manager,Microsoft.An excellent speaker, he provided a most interesting take on all iissues from his own life to piracy and software industry.
Finally my name was called for the HR interview.I was escorted to the interview table bya reasonably pretty HR female and I was beginning to think-"huh not bad at all!"
Female in red tee: So kislay-where did you do your internship?
Me: m'am I did it at iMediablitz Solutions,an internet marketing company.
F.I.R.D: Do you think working in teams is better or working alone?
Me: Ma'am I think working in small teams is the best as they have the most cohesion and are, inn my opinion the most productive.
F.I.R.D.: Have you ever worked in a team?
Me: Yes,as a part of the NSITLOUNGE web team(followed by a tirade about lounge)
F.I.R.D.: Ok you have mentioned here that like reading philosophy and economics.What did you read most recently?
Me: ma'am I just finished Sophie's world and have started ' The age of reason'.
F.I.R.D.: Why Flex?
Me: I want to work in a company which is doing new and exciting work.I believe Flex is doing that .So..(this is just the gist of it.I rambled on for 5 min)
FIRD: any problems with working outside delhi?
Me: none.
FIRD: Ok kislay.Thanks for your time.
I knew I would get the job then.And that is exactly what happened about6 hours later when the final results were announced.
You'd think it'd have meant a great deal---you now--a first job.But it didn't.Both I and Mangla took one look at the results mailed to us, confirmed our names ,and went right on studying for microsoft and a fatter paycheck.
Human beings are greedy creatures.
The process of joining the hallowed ranks of India's ubiquitous IT force came about as a 3 step thing:
Step-1: A written test.
Step-2: Tech Interview.
Step-3: HR Interview.
The written test was seni retarded(Even those who could not clear it agreed to that).With 7 sections comprising of English, Quant, Attention to detail(the stupidest of them all), C, section on Data Structures OS and Algo, A section on retention, E-mail writing(yes,amazing what companies can test you on!),It was a mad scramble to the finish line.
I had fine tuning several strategies for cheating in the paper but all of the plaaning came to naught.The evil invigilators removed evryone around me beyond whispering range and I ws left to fend for myself in the big game of employment seeeking.
Yours truly wrapped up the English paper in less than 4 min, got slightly harassed by the quant paper, and generally tumbled through the rest of the section. There was barely a time to pause as the papers of the previous sectoin were taken away as soon as the next section was given.The only real pause I took was while deciding on how to masquerade as a cable operator writing an email to an irate customer.
This whole examination procedure was followed by several hours of waiting(I didn't really think about the result, some of my friends were on the brink of breakdown).The result was finally declared around midnight and 2/3rd of my flat ended up qualifying for thhe interview but the other 1/3rd was heartbroken.
Interviews began at 9:00 a.m. the next morning.I was among the first batch of 5 interviewees.The panel consisted of A mousy looking female and a guy who seemed to be amused at nothing at all.
Amused guy:Hi kislay,please tell us about yourself?
Me: *I ain't expecting this in the tech interviews idiots* Eh..I'm a student of NSIT-IT..eh...I am a hardworking guy and generally like to get on with problems and solve them...eh...But I tend to get a little unrealistic at times and put too much pressure on myself...eh....I've done a lot of web dev work and am fascinated by technology in all its forms.
Mousy woman:Ok thats a good intro(REALLYYYY!!!!)Wjat are your main subjects?
Me: MA'am DS OS and Algo.
What followed was a 10-15 min long series of questions that I answered and bluffed my way through.Then I found myself waiting for(eternally it seemed) for my HR interview.Got quite irritating, especially with Aditya muttering feverishly about how much we could have been studying for the Microsoft test.The only respiite came from Mr. Anil Dhawan,Product Manager,Microsoft.An excellent speaker, he provided a most interesting take on all iissues from his own life to piracy and software industry.
Finally my name was called for the HR interview.I was escorted to the interview table bya reasonably pretty HR female and I was beginning to think-"huh not bad at all!"
Female in red tee: So kislay-where did you do your internship?
Me: m'am I did it at iMediablitz Solutions,an internet marketing company.
F.I.R.D: Do you think working in teams is better or working alone?
Me: Ma'am I think working in small teams is the best as they have the most cohesion and are, inn my opinion the most productive.
F.I.R.D.: Have you ever worked in a team?
Me: Yes,as a part of the NSITLOUNGE web team(followed by a tirade about lounge)
F.I.R.D.: Ok you have mentioned here that like reading philosophy and economics.What did you read most recently?
Me: ma'am I just finished Sophie's world and have started ' The age of reason'.
F.I.R.D.: Why Flex?
Me: I want to work in a company which is doing new and exciting work.I believe Flex is doing that .So..(this is just the gist of it.I rambled on for 5 min)
FIRD: any problems with working outside delhi?
Me: none.
FIRD: Ok kislay.Thanks for your time.
I knew I would get the job then.And that is exactly what happened about6 hours later when the final results were announced.
You'd think it'd have meant a great deal---you now--a first job.But it didn't.Both I and Mangla took one look at the results mailed to us, confirmed our names ,and went right on studying for microsoft and a fatter paycheck.
Human beings are greedy creatures.
Life in the placement season
As I sit here in my flat,trying to ignore the beautiful weather outside and trying to get weary and bored mind to focus on the endless trivialities of what pointers can empowers us mere humans to do, I can't but ponder over the two much puzzled over conundrums:
1) Pointers are a contraption allowing us to program very fast computers to do impossible tasks even faster
However, that is immaterial to me if all this haste to perform some task doesnt give me the time to wander outside in the pleasant breeze.Agar free time hi na mile to kaam jaldi karne se kya faayda?But no.I must sit here and go through 6 books (all as heavy as I am ),and to top it all,dream up ways to do things faster than the ways given in the books.Maybe the matrix wasn't so imaginary,maybe it wasn't just a good movie.This mad search for algorithms is my own matrix--and I am hopelessly trapped of my own volition.
2) Just why on earth is the weather so nice just when I have to study my ass off and cant go running over to Priya and watch Pirates of the Carribean:Dead Man's Chest when every other human being alive has seen it.It never fails.You plan an outing and the sun starts blazing like it will never set.
THese musing aren't totaly arbitrary.They are the most well exhibited symptoms of is known as placement fever.Every year the phenomenon repeats itself in most engg. colleges all across India.It is almost amusing.People you never heard with anything but gaalis on their tongue suddenly start talking in english, people who never used the computer except for playing games and watching porn can be seen discussing time complexities of algorithms, for once CAT is a bad word all over the campus, people who aren't half qualified to become engineer's peons are suddenly discusssing the jobs they will and will not accept!!!
Speculation is rife about companies,offers and packages, Bhatia sir is the most sought after man on the campus( he is that always vaise to),rawat struts about like a peacock in his harem, squeaking commands to anyone who'll listen-and people do listen!!
Rumours and misinformation are common currency.The funniest episodes are when people start discussing how to tackle interviews.The greetings between friends suddenly changes from 'hi' to 'decribe yourself in one word' or 'tell me about yourself'.More than half the advice thrown about is garbage,and the other half is worse.One of my seniors told me that some of his friends called him up and asked:"Yaar,koi weakness bataa de" lol.
And always, behind the curtains, is the incesstant ghisai. The toppers have already gone through their books so many times that the books are about half their original weight(it isnt called ghisai for nothing you see!)And where there is ghisai, there is, of course, the pleasant weather, which brings us back to my original conundrum.
Let no one doubt the cyclicity of life.
I like this
This is taken from the orkut profile of Mr. Aakanksh Vashishth,who was 3 years my senior in school and has been a profound influece in my life-one of the first men to introduce me to the art of asking questions.
न पुण्यं न पापं न सौख्यं न दुःखं न मन्त्रो न तीर्थो न वेदा न यग्य ।
अहं भोजनं नैव बोज्यं न भोक्ता चिदानन्दरूपः शिवोऽहम् शिवोऽहम् ॥
Sin or merit can never touch me, Joy and sorrow can't contaminate me;
I know no mantra, I have no sacred pilgrimage to make,
I know no scripture, nor have I anything to gain through rituals;
I am neither the experiencer (subject), nor the experienced (object), nor the experiencing;
I am Shiva the all pervading happiness, Yes, I am indeed, I am definitely Shiva.
न मे द्वेषरागौ न मे लोभमोहौ मदो नैव मे नैव मात्सर्यभावः ।
न धर्मो न चार्थो न कामो न मोक्षः चिदानन्दरूपः शिवोऽहम् शिवोऽहम् ॥
I've no likes or dislikes, Nor I've covetousness or greed,
Nor I've arrogance nor any competition with anyone;
I don't even need the four 'Purposes of Life' (Dharm, Arth, Kaam, Moksh);
I am Shiva the all pervading happiness, Yes, I am indeed, I am definitely Shiva.
न मे मृत्युशंका न मे जातिभेदः पिता नैव माता नैव न जन्मः ।
न बन्धुर्न मित्रं गुरुर्नैव शिष्यः चिदानन्दरूपः शिवोऽहम् शिवोऽहम् ॥
I've no death, no caste or creed distiction;
I've neither father nor mother; infact I am never even born!
I've no kith or kin, I've no teacher, nor am I a disciple;
I am Shiva the all pervading happiness, Yes, I am indeed, I am definitely Shiva.
Dunno whether I agree fully or not,but sounds good.
Aakanksh is,btw, into Computer Graphicss.Find some of his work here.
न पुण्यं न पापं न सौख्यं न दुःखं न मन्त्रो न तीर्थो न वेदा न यग्य ।
अहं भोजनं नैव बोज्यं न भोक्ता चिदानन्दरूपः शिवोऽहम् शिवोऽहम् ॥
Sin or merit can never touch me, Joy and sorrow can't contaminate me;
I know no mantra, I have no sacred pilgrimage to make,
I know no scripture, nor have I anything to gain through rituals;
I am neither the experiencer (subject), nor the experienced (object), nor the experiencing;
I am Shiva the all pervading happiness, Yes, I am indeed, I am definitely Shiva.
न मे द्वेषरागौ न मे लोभमोहौ मदो नैव मे नैव मात्सर्यभावः ।
न धर्मो न चार्थो न कामो न मोक्षः चिदानन्दरूपः शिवोऽहम् शिवोऽहम् ॥
I've no likes or dislikes, Nor I've covetousness or greed,
Nor I've arrogance nor any competition with anyone;
I don't even need the four 'Purposes of Life' (Dharm, Arth, Kaam, Moksh);
I am Shiva the all pervading happiness, Yes, I am indeed, I am definitely Shiva.
न मे मृत्युशंका न मे जातिभेदः पिता नैव माता नैव न जन्मः ।
न बन्धुर्न मित्रं गुरुर्नैव शिष्यः चिदानन्दरूपः शिवोऽहम् शिवोऽहम् ॥
I've no death, no caste or creed distiction;
I've neither father nor mother; infact I am never even born!
I've no kith or kin, I've no teacher, nor am I a disciple;
I am Shiva the all pervading happiness, Yes, I am indeed, I am definitely Shiva.
Dunno whether I agree fully or not,but sounds good.
Aakanksh is,btw, into Computer Graphicss.Find some of his work here.
Technologically Aware or Technically Competent
I've been pondering this issue for well about an year or two now.Not actively of course,but every once in a while someone says something that gets me on the topic again.What is better-To be technologically aware or to be Technically competent.
The dichotomy of course does not work all the time and in quite a few people we see the coming together of both these things.But more often,we find that a person who is more competent technically(e.g great in academics...) is technologically unaware or worse still, indifferent.I know plenty of good C programmers who know next to nothing about what is going on in the world of technology,what the new avenues are and so on.On the other hand,my circle of acquaintances also abounds with those cant tell their structs from their classes but know the computer inside out and are generally very well informed about technical stuff.Don't need to look very far,the BH abounds with them.
And I just cant stop wondering which is better:To know how to code at the expense of awareness(In which case you don't know what to do with your expertise) or to be aware(in which there isn't much you can with that info).
Another thing I find interesting is that those who are aware come across as more cocky and confident as against the competent ones,who seem to be much more cautious about what they know and are forever willing to acknowledge the awrae one as their better.
The thing is-Coding skils can be acquired later on when you are actually into the worksphere whereas awareness cant.But at this stage of our careers,it seems obvious to me that competence is more relevant.
The dilemma remains...
The dichotomy of course does not work all the time and in quite a few people we see the coming together of both these things.But more often,we find that a person who is more competent technically(e.g great in academics...) is technologically unaware or worse still, indifferent.I know plenty of good C programmers who know next to nothing about what is going on in the world of technology,what the new avenues are and so on.On the other hand,my circle of acquaintances also abounds with those cant tell their structs from their classes but know the computer inside out and are generally very well informed about technical stuff.Don't need to look very far,the BH abounds with them.
And I just cant stop wondering which is better:To know how to code at the expense of awareness(In which case you don't know what to do with your expertise) or to be aware(in which there isn't much you can with that info).
Another thing I find interesting is that those who are aware come across as more cocky and confident as against the competent ones,who seem to be much more cautious about what they know and are forever willing to acknowledge the awrae one as their better.
The thing is-Coding skils can be acquired later on when you are actually into the worksphere whereas awareness cant.But at this stage of our careers,it seems obvious to me that competence is more relevant.
The dilemma remains...
Upto my eyeball...and sinking fast
Well,its eating my words time. I have this opinion of myself as person as not very lucky and a person channel to god is scrambled with static.
Had barely written the last entry in the blog when was given a solid project-developing an extension for firefox that would pack quite a lot of punch.I reckoned it'd be exciting to get to learn some new stuff..but this shit is just a little too much for me.
It so happens that quite a lot of the functionality that I am required to implement in this toolbar of mine has not been implemented by ANYONE in the world(or so it would seem when google threw up no relevant results).I approached the official development forums of both Firefox/Mozilla and the Developer's group dor the overlib library in Javascript but neither has any clue on what to do about my little problem.
So now I am stuck with a toolbar,A full fledged XML parser in javascript, an AJAX module and an RSS ticker with no clue of how to put toigether the damn things
The deadline is on Friday...I've been working fever pitch but to no avail.The ignominy of failure seems inevitable
I have this opinion of myself as person as not very lucky and a person channel to god is scrambled with static.Had barely written the last entry in the blog when was given a solid project-developing an extension for firefox that would pack quite a lot of punch.I reckoned it'd be exciting to get to learn some new stuff..but this shit is just a little too much for me.
It so happens that quite a lot of the functionality that I am required to implement in this toolbar of mine has not been implemented by ANYONE in the world(or so it would seem when google threw up no relevant results).I approached the official development forums of both Firefox/Mozilla and the Developer's group dor the overlib library in Javascript but neither has any clue on what to do about my little problem.
So now I am stuck with a toolbar,A full fledged XML parser in javascript, an AJAX module and an RSS ticker with no clue of how to put toigether the damn things
The deadline is on Friday...I've been working fever pitch but to no avail.The ignominy of failure seems inevitable
On Intership and Internet
Vacations have started and I find myself sitting in a royal throne(devoid of backrest) in the offices of iMediaBlitz Solutions in Gurgaon.This honour is given to me in the capacity as an intern in the 40 head strong IITian initiated startup. As I recall the numerous days and nights spend worrying about how to land an internship which would give me a chance to actually learn something over these 2 months,I can almost laugh,and not pleasantly.
Its been 7 days here and I have learnt how to surf the net to keep yourself busy while actually accomplishing anything.Given the task of finding a script that would allow my employers to put up a classifieds site, I spent the first 2 days assiduously scouring the lanes and bylanes of the internet for such a tool. At the end of those two days, however my task was done and I reportted my recommendations to the owners.
Since then they seem to have forgotten that I exist.As I sit here in my cubicle listening to everyone else go about the business of S/W development,I cant help but feel a bitter taste in my mouth.There's people in the world who are going around doing the process of thinking, learning,growing and here I am stuck in this land where I am the intern who knows the most about Web Development and I am the one who has had no real work to for the last week.
Absolutely Disgusting.
And commuting to this place takes bloody ages,as a consequence of which any sort of studying has been put on an indefinite hold.
On the bright side, having the internet all to myself has good effect.I have some ideas which I have been considering for some time but couldn't pursue for one reason or the other.Now I have unlimited access to the biggest repository of information on the earth and today onwards I hope to put it to good use.
Its a pity they wouldn't let me download movies here
Its been 7 days here and I have learnt how to surf the net to keep yourself busy while actually accomplishing anything.Given the task of finding a script that would allow my employers to put up a classifieds site, I spent the first 2 days assiduously scouring the lanes and bylanes of the internet for such a tool. At the end of those two days, however my task was done and I reportted my recommendations to the owners.
Since then they seem to have forgotten that I exist.As I sit here in my cubicle listening to everyone else go about the business of S/W development,I cant help but feel a bitter taste in my mouth.There's people in the world who are going around doing the process of thinking, learning,growing and here I am stuck in this land where I am the intern who knows the most about Web Development and I am the one who has had no real work to for the last week.
Absolutely Disgusting.
And commuting to this place takes bloody ages,as a consequence of which any sort of studying has been put on an indefinite hold.
On the bright side, having the internet all to myself has good effect.I have some ideas which I have been considering for some time but couldn't pursue for one reason or the other.Now I have unlimited access to the biggest repository of information on the earth and today onwards I hope to put it to good use.
Its a pity they wouldn't let me download movies here
Kamaal ka Week
The lord our father in his heavenly seat must have decided that it had now been enough time since I saw the break of dawn,that time which is not of the day nor is it of the night,when the first rays of warm sunlight suffuses the night's chill. So strongly perhaps that it was time he himself did something about it.
Ergo the whole damn week has been one of negligible sleep and sunrise darshan-not something I am overly fond of!
The sms started it all.The harbinger of the news that google was on the campus looking for worthy young men and women to train.Considering myself to be fulfilling all criteria of 'worthiness',I decided to go and see what the whole brouhaha was all about.The catch-the show was 8 a.m. in the morn.So I forced myself to wake up at 4:30 in the morning (I live at the other end of the civilized world you see.).My thrice cursed informer failed to inform me that Google was to take only 3 from all over India,knowing which I'd have paid more attention to my slumbers.Hona kya tha-Kat gaya!No rest,no sleep And no goddamn internship either.
And after that-CV making running,around for internship info-WHAT THIS??!!!
Terribly tired,man.And thoroughly confused as to why evrything that happens at NSIT has to be so chaotic and haphazard.
Ergo the whole damn week has been one of negligible sleep and sunrise darshan-not something I am overly fond of!
The sms started it all.The harbinger of the news that google was on the campus looking for worthy young men and women to train.Considering myself to be fulfilling all criteria of 'worthiness',I decided to go and see what the whole brouhaha was all about.The catch-the show was 8 a.m. in the morn.So I forced myself to wake up at 4:30 in the morning
(I live at the other end of the civilized world you see.).My thrice cursed informer failed to inform me that Google was to take only 3 from all over India,knowing which I'd have paid more attention to my slumbers.Hona kya tha-Kat gaya!No rest,no sleep And no goddamn internship either.And after that-CV making running,around for internship info-WHAT THIS??!!!
Terribly tired,man.And thoroughly confused as to why evrything that happens at NSIT has to be so chaotic and haphazard.
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