Reductio ad absurdum

Today I had a most interesting conversation about religion with my friend Tarun Runwal. He is a confessed agnostic, I am a militant atheist. When the two meet, you know who was defending god. Both of us were slightly drunk on Urban Asia’s excellent LIITs too.

A point that Tarun repeatedly made that I found both effective and exasperating was that of the first cause. It is not a novel argument in favour of deism, but I have never personally seen it used so doggedly. For the uninitiated, it goes like this – scientifically speaking, there was a beginning. Who/What caused it? If it is explained in the first degree, then the argument can be repeated to the n-th degree without losing any validity (at least superficially). If the n-th degree situation can’t be explained be explained rationally, then what right do we have to completely dismiss god from the equation? He/She/It could have caused it.

I would like to approach this by considering the nature of questions in general. A question is valid if it is answerable, at least to some extent. A chicken-egg question is not a valid question, IMO. If every possible answer of a question can be the subject of the original question, then the question is invalid. Some readers might liken this to a situation where some senior manager asks a junior guy something. The junior guy starts from an answer that is relevant in detail to his level of expertise. The senior fellow keeps on repeating the question, the junior keeps moving to a lesser and lesser detail in his answer. This happens till both are satisfied. This is a fairly familiar scenario (at least where I come from). If no answer of the junior would ever be high-level enough, then this exercise would never end and we are forced to conclude that the line of questioning is wrong in some way.

This is the nature of a scientific inquiry. We are trying to explain phenomenon at a suitably high level. We start with an empirical hypothesis and push it outwards based on observed or proven facts, and generalize it to the level our information allows us (no more – A junior who reported imaginary things to his manager would no doubt be fired soon). If, however, we see that no amount of data or analysis is going to explain a phenomenon, we should perceive that there is a problem with the statement of the phenomenon itself.

Religion these days finds its last stand in such reductio ad absurdum kind of questions. The theologians realize that there is no logical way to solve these, and house there gods in their shelter. My argument against these is that the universe is what it is. You cannot gainsay the nature of nature. The aim of science and reason is not to indulge in endless logical frivolities, but to reveal to us the underlying laws that govern nature. As Richard Feynman famously put it, it is like watching a game of chess, of which we can only see some parts at some times. Our understanding needs to be reverse engineered from these glimpses. That being said, there is only a certain level to which this understanding can be reduced or generalised (Just like there are only so many ways to explain the move of a pawn in chess). Beyond this, causality becomes meaningless. “Why moves the knight thus?” would have no meaning in chess. The same is true in physics.

Reductio ad absurdum is a useful technique, but it should be applied in context. This is why the anthropic principle is such a powerful and effective technique in physics – it allows us to separate the crap question from the relevant ones.

Infinite regression is the refuge of the morally and intellectually bankrupt. Anybody who wants to have meaningful philosophical discussion about anything should avoid it.

Michelangelo Antonioni's "The Passenger"

I watched Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger recently. The movie features Jack Nicholson who is by any account a living legend of cinema. Both Hollywood and Bollywood are full of stars but deplorably lacking in actors. Even in that league of extraordinary gentlemen, Nicholson is a force to be reckoned with. Neither Michelangelo Antnioni’s genius nor his fame need an introduction. So far so good.

With this movie came the crushing realization that I don’t have the ability to critically watch cinema (the critics’ choice works, so to say). I have watched a lot of movies (like A LOT of movies – thank you Aditya Mangla, thank you TPB) and fancied myself knowledgeable in such matters, but now the bubble has been burst.

While watching the movie, I was too involved with what was happening to understand what the producer meant by all that. Kind of goes back to when I was a rookie developer at Shaw and some soft-skills training tried to teach the difference between listening and active listening (listening between the lines).My impressions was the cinematography was AWESOME and the way the environment dominated an actor as dominating as Jack Nicholson was impressive (SRK would no doubt have a sad song with lots of close-up shots in the damn desert). Apart from that, I saw only the slow-ass chase, the strange female character, and the predictable ending.

True, I sort of realized what the essence was, sort of got the feeling about the movie was all about, but I had no words to put to it then. I realized I liked the movie (in a way), but I wasn’t sure why. Not until I read this excellent review that I realized what I was missing. The words ennui, escapism, identity, destiny, coincidence, existential malaise, did not occur to me as I saw the movie. All I had was the feeling that there was something behind the curtain of a rather tame mystery. I guess that is what critics are paid for – articulating concisely what others feel vaguely. I just expected better of myself.

I guess I’ll get better with practice, so am planning to watch a lot more non-mainstream movies now.

I strongly recommend The Passenger movie to everyone, but if you are a normal mortal like me, just read the review I linked above before you watch it. There can’t be spoilers for this movie; the things that get spoilt already suck here. It is the other bit which is superb.

The Great Indian Political Circus

I usually don’t think about politics, but a recent re-reading of Freedom at Midnight and The Great Indian Novel gave some interesting insights into the current Indian political circus. As is usual with my insights, it isn’t really an insight. It’s just a general mess of thoughts, cleared up and come together in one statement – Our politics is messed up because we know how to protest, but not how to govern.

I believe this is due to our political legacy.

Freedom at Midnight relates how immediately after independence, our revered leader proved absolutely incapable of administering their new found nation. They knew how to protest, how to hold rallies against government laws, but they had no experience in making and enforcing laws themselves. So when the communal backlash of the partition refused to abate, they were forced to call in Lord Mountbatten to contain the violence. Only with his behind-the-curtains intervention did normalcy return. Jawaharlal Nehru deserves every bit of credit he is given today as a leader of Independence struggle, but he is not quite the role model of leadership and governance. He, however, is the paragon of politics whom our leaders choose to emulate today.

The second part of my thought process came from The Great Indian Novel and the Anna Hazaare movement. Both refer to periods where people took to the streets in direct opposition to policies of the government (Anna ji’s case being that of protests against an absolute lack of policies from the government). Both battles were fought on the streets, and both were wildly successful in mobilizing the public against the government (actual results notwithstanding). On neither occasion did the protesting party offer a viable administrative alternative (The Janata Party government formed of Shri Jaiprakash Narain’s movement died without a whimper).

This is not to suggest that protesting is wrong or that someone who can’t be a great prime minister should just shut up. Citizen activism has its part to play in the balance of power. The strange problem is in when concept of activism and its success are hijacked. It gives the impression that whoever can muster the most people on the street can govern regardless of who holds the majority in the parliament. It is a parallel democracy where “for the people” is taken literally to be the headcount of a rally. I am not well versed with the politics of many countries but I believe that this may be unique to the largest democracy in the world.

The problem is in the complete abandonment of governance in favour of protests. Neither the ruling nor the opposition parties today choose to use the parliament as the forum for decision making, nor are election the favoured means to oust a party that has lost the popular mandate. The chosen means of everything is a “popular” circus. But as a correspondent wrote about Baba Ramdev’s dharna, when you organize a circus, sooner or later the clowns will arrive.

The business of politicians is to make policies. This is best done by sitting down and deliberating, not by shouting on the streets. Our politics is messed up because we know how to protest but not how to govern. Our political role models did not know how to govern either, and their legendary status has left an incorrect but lasting impression that their way is the way. It isn’t. 

Worth of an MBA

courtesy http://www.mbaonline.com


Created by: MBAOnline.com

Random Ranch - That. Not this.

I would like to thank my unofficial partners and traffic sponsors "Random Ranch" - The largest country bar in Barrie's, Ontario.

For the record, I have no affiliation with this place, nor am I trying to 'hijack' any web-traffic intended for them. I have had this blog for about 5 years now, and till very recently (okay not THAT recently - about 2 years ago) I had no idea of the existence of such a place in remote Ontario. I only discovered it when the blog promotion/traffic monitoring bug bit me and I noticed the entries sitting above mine in Google searches. I also found an inordinate number of visitors visiting this blog from Ontario.

The place seems to have shut down of late, but hey, considering the significant amount that has come my way courtesy this bar, I feel that a formal mention is the honourable thing to do (besides, I love bars).

So here's to Random Ranch. That. Not this. Or Why not? This too!

Respect the infrastructure teams

For some background on what is coming up, I work on project which involves various (often unrelated) teams plugging their components (pun unintended) into a central framework thereby resulting in one of the largest data access portals in my company. For over 4 years I have hammered away, doing my own stuff, worrying only about my own code and pretty much expecting the "framework" to do everything else seamlessly.

In such a scheme of things, the team tasked with maintaining and enhancing the framework are the bad guys - applying controls, managing approvals, adding/removing jars, and generally messing around with honest middle-class developers like me. Any issue outside of my code is always their problem - missing functionality, poor performance, lack of flexibility and what have you. Their design choices are poor, they use reflection with impunity, and are generally an ugly lot.

So for a little hobby project of mine, I decided to set-up something from scratch. A Java web-based web project, with the fairly standard jsp-Struts-Spring-Ibatis stack. As I mentioned before, I had never done this before but figured it must be easy enough.After all, the great and wise Mr. Hannibal has said - "What one man can do, another man can do." (-from "The Edge")

Bad call!  As you would have guessed by now, it wasn't long before I was drowning in jars and configs and a confetti of components that refused to get glued together. Let's start with the project structure. I had a general idea of my class hierarchies, but how to layout the structure, where goes the source and where the
binaries. Well, simplistic problem that got solved by copy pasting a sample Struts project.

And the jars!! Ah the jars! Sometimes they are missing, sometimes there are too many of them, sometimes they work only with certain version of other jars (which in turn are incompatible with other jars still), sometime they work only if you colour them red in Ecplise...But as before, my perseverance and awesomeness prevailed and everything (a dummy action class and jsp) started compiling.

I swear I am wiling to work for free for any company whose aim it is to rid the internet of outdated technology tutorials. There should be law against them. You read an authoritative sounding "how to..." article ,try to do it, fail, try again since you are convinced that you are the idiot, and then in some obscure comment on the tenth Google page or in some deeply buried change log (I had never read a single change log till about 2 months ago) find that it has been deprecated or drastically modified.

And I hadn't even written any REAL code yet !

Lesson learnt - When it comes to code, never believe you can do something till you have done it at least twice before. And respect the people who are doing it today.

All infrastructure teams I work with - I still hate a lot about what and how you do many thing, but accept this post as a token of my gratitude for doing the dirty work for a lot of us :)

EDIT: I just came across this excellent article by Ryan Tomayko which neatly sums up my frustrations with setting up a Java web stack.

Taking a break

Somehow I have never quite understood this concept of coming back to work rejuvenated from a holiday. I have always heard and read of people who took a break and are now "raring to go". This doesn't seem to work for me.

Not that I don't like my work. I really really enjoy what I do, and I tend to think of my work as "problem solving" than (merely?) programming (I wish they had designations like that - Senior problem solver etc.). I never have Monday morning blues (unless I am hungover) and a challenging day at work is actually more enjoyable than a duh day.

But every time I take a long(-ish) holiday, I find myself totally detached from what I was doing before I left. I find that I have no memory of what was happening and have to go back almost to the beginning, familiarize myself my own work (re-reading your ownn code sucks BTW) and re-motivate myself to get into the problem solving groove. I want to kick-start from day one, I'm not tired, but there is always this massive inertia.

Likely it is due to my working style. I tend to over-focus and binge-code rather than pace out my work. I'm fairly obsessive about whatever I am doing and some of that intensity takes time to return after a break. But I guess no programmer has ever been guilty of working without a looming deadline so I don't know how valid this argument is.

Just one of those thing I am feeling strongly after a week long break.

A very happy new year to everyone!

Role of a trader

Full Disclosure - I am a programmer for a hedge fund.

In all societies in the past, a person's income was directly linked to his/her role in society. Agricultural societies rewarded farmers, warlike societies rewarded soldiers and democratic societies rewarded statesmen. This is not to say that the system was fair or that everyone got what they deserved, but there was a general connection between the craft that was the primary source of a society's prosperity and the status of the practitioners of that craft.

Traders and investment bankers are among the highly paid professionals of our times.And yet somehow I am unable to understand the role they play in our world. As in I understand the role, but not its significance to our lives. What would happen in no trading was done for a week?

The role of a professional trader emerged as a side effect of development of excellent means of transportation. With farmers and craftsmen able to ship their goods far and wide, it became impossible for them to personally be present at the site where theie wares were being traded. Thus emerged the trader-someone who would charge some money in exchange for buying/selling on your behalf. And it is in strictly this role that the function of the trader is critical. Such trading has to be done in order for assets to circulate in society. Here actual assets get introduced into the economy  via the trading function. The trader is essentially as assistant for those creating real assets and value.

Now consider the role of the stock market trader as we see it today. This trader does not generate any assets in the system. By merely playing off one asset against another (No one really knows the reason for volatility, but the likeliest reason is trading itself. Imaging that!!! The phenomenon that the trader claims skill in riding is in fact 'created' by his riding!), he generates a notional wealth which in no way reflects the real world's prosperity. If the stock market climbs a thousand point in a day, it does not mean thhat an equivalent amount of assets have somehow been injected into the economy on that day, or that people are living proportionately better lives. Nor do the actual asset creators benefit from this movement, apart from claims of massive market capitalization, which is merely a poor metric of a company's performance. No one benefits, apart from the trader, who without having given anything to the society, has now cornered a good bit of its money.

Trading-for-the-sake-trading is institutionalized gambling. It is cartel which allows power to shift from those who produce to those who merely piggyback. The trader in an assistant's role can never be too big to fail. The role is very important, but one that doesn't necessarily drives our lives.

This brings me to the concept of bank. But that is a discussion for some other day.

Kislay Verma goes live!!!

Balls to perfection. And Screw the previous post.

The music is here!!! It can be accessed at Reverbnation, Facebook and Myspace. You can also check it out in the whats-its-name on the top-right of this screen.

After many, many hours of tinkering with different softwares, recording and re-recording vocals, being betrayed by sound gurus, and in general trying to perfect the sound as I detailed in the previous post, I finally lost patience and decided to go to the world with home demo recordings. Not that I dont care about the quality any longer but all those hours didn't seem to be improving the mix and I was beginning to get more and more confused about the right tone. So I figured the best way to do this would be to go to the audience and use the feedback. Crowdsource the critical listening, so to speak.

The first 2 songs out are Drift Away and An ode to good times. Drift Away especially has been received very well by the few people who have heard it till now. Rank 20 among Indian singer-songwriters on Reverbnation's charts is not bad for starters (Though admittedly  the category is sparsely  populated).

I must thank Sidhharth, Kalpana and Tarun for listening to some very bad preliminary versions of recordings and giving invaluable feedback.

Next stop is finding some gigs in Hyderabad. If you have any ideas/contacts, please let me know. The beer will  be on me if I land the act.

So if you haven't heard the music yet (What are you waiting for??? The whats-its-name is right there on the right!!), get to it!!! Every bit of feedback is highly appreciated. If you like it, don't forget to share it with a friend. Or ten friends.

Kislay Express is rolling out. Welcome aboard :)

Listen. Share. Support.

Cometh the music

Throughout 2009 and 2010, I was a part of a band called The Turning Brain. We jammed intermittently and though we did manage to end runner-ups in a Battle of Bands competition sponsored by Extreme Sports bar(Hyderabad), the show never really went anywhere and as mentioned in an earlier post, we have now officially disbanded. Playing with Mohtashim Khan, Nishanth Pais, Aabhaas Khanna, Jonas David, Anirudh Voleti and Mohit Lalwani has been my great pleasure and much of what I now know about playing music I learnt with them. Best of luck boys!!! Fates willing, it is not over yet :)

I have been turning my thoughts into lyrics and sharing them on this blog for almost two year now. Almost always, the lyrics have been backed by some melody (however rudimentary). A few of these melodies, were attempted as full-fledged songs by the Turning Brain, but like I said, nothing solid came out of it. Now with the band gone, I finally decided to bite the bullet and record a few of these songs myself. The arrangements would have to be simpler (I can only play the guitar) and the vocals would be ordinary at best, but as Khan bhai would say, my solo career would have taken off!

I have tried my hand at home demo kind of recordings before, but doing the entire shebang alone turned to be a brutal and humbling experience. I have already spent at least 5 days and all I have are just about passable recordings of four songs. The recording, processing, arranging and mixing is tedious business. Also it is beginning to look like I am frequency deaf (technical term-totally different from tone deaf) since some audiophile gurus have told me that I am catching a very narrow band of frequencies and I can’t help but make my blank face at them (“Sounds good only!!”).

So I decided to check out what other people recording solo are doing and was amazed not merely by the numbers but also by the quality of some of the stuff out there (like this, this, and this). I am now convinced that even with the extremely limited gear that I am using, much better sound can be produced than I have currently.

There is nothing more precious in this world to me than my music and I want it to be perfect so that everyone can listen to it just as it sounds in my head. So it is back to the drawing board for me as I try to reach a semblance of quality with the recorded stuff before I can share with others.

It is coming. Await the onset of Awesomeness :)