tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-209811932024-03-08T02:56:47.629+05:30Neuron FrenzyCOMPLEX ADAPTIVE NEURONSoraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.comBlogger123125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-71096377319546969182013-07-24T23:21:00.003+05:302013-07-24T23:21:54.957+05:30Why is design everything?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I have always been a keen admirer of good design. The idea of making something good just for the sake of making it was never so appealing to me until I stumbled upon the concept of good design. It is right there in plain sight - the way we hold the spoon, the way we use our vessels in the kitchen, the way we hold our pens, the way we sit on our chairs, the way we walk on the street, practically everything we do everyday is heavily influenced by design. All the mundane items I mentioned just now were designed (or in some cases hopelessly copied) by some designer at some point in time. They went through the pain of sketching up a prototype & then tried to imagine how it would be used in different situations.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">With such a dense influence of design on us, do we actually notice it? The point of good design according to me is that the product must completely disappear from its physical form & become an extension of the body. So we stop noticing how the object is designed & we focus more on how we are using it. A staggering number of daily objects successfully do that. No matter if they were natively designed or copied from some original, they still serve the same purpose as the designer intended.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">BBC had a 5 part documentary series called <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sdb8x/episodes/guide" target="_blank">The Genius of Design</a>. It was by far the best tribute to an art form which has always stayed hidden & unglamorous. But the role it plays in our lives cannot be underestimated. This led me to another question, why has good design stayed on for such a long time? What drives it to survive apart from the will of a few motivated individuals who struggle to solve day to day problems through products & processes?
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The answer leaped almost instantly within a few minutes of watching the first episode of the BBC series.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>'Design is a slave to capitalism'</i>.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Without the financial incentive to create a better product, no person will keep on designing good products. Capitalism, the idea that someone is willing to pay for a product & appreciate its value for the job that it does is perhaps the chief intention of design. The profit may not be directly achieved, but it does drive the design process.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>'Design is never a pure activity. It is always connected to how things are bought, sold, recycled. It is the entire </i><i>product life cycle.</i>'
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Design for the sake of design doesn't even sound right. It is based on a series of observations on how the product will become a solution to some daily problem. I am tempted to think of the first stone tool & what a product of genius it must have been! Although the sophisticated nature that design has achieved at the moment, being based on a financial incentive, must also create efficiency in making the product. This makes it mandatory for a designer to think of the entire life cycle of the product rather than just making the object only once in a studio.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The documentary series, goes from the industrial revolution, to the early, mid & late 20th century design ideologies to create this chronology of thought processes driving a designer's mindset. Schools of design unlike schools of art became problem solvers rather than just being temples of creativity. Manifesting a need through an object is no less than art, but creating a need just to manifest it through some object seems a bit vain. Good Design lives way above this vain creationism of objects.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">What kicked designers in the nuts to actually solve so many of our daily problems? To imagine a problem which some designer solved - remember the time when you wore a poorly designed pair of shoes which made your feet itch & made you want to remove them every chance you got. That's how annoying bad design is. It is rather astounding at what scale design has invaded our daily lives. There has to be something more to it than just solving problems.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This is where design met its long distant cousins - manufacturing & marketing. Mass production was not an old idea during the industrial revolution. In fact it was born out of the ability of the machines to churn much more items than manual labour could. The idea behind mass production according to the documentary was -
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">'<i>mass production = universal availability + universal affordability</i>'.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Americans perfected this idea with their corollary = <i>Standardized parts made with special tools assembled by semi or unskilled workers to an uniform design. </i>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Imagine a revolution in the way manufacturers started to think where one faction of society has been completely absorbed in making more items with less cost which led them to design newer versions of manufacturing machines capable of more efficient production. The only problem they faced was their ability to make the customer appreciate the value of reduced manufacturing cost & improved quality. Customers were still paying the same amount or even less in some cases for the same product. But capitalism being extremely efficient, the race to cover a bigger portion of the market makes it difficult to keep selling at the same price. Prices constantly drop as some efficient manufacturers keep selling at a lower price thus passing on the benefits of efficiency to their customers.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">So now we know how improving manufacturing helps design turn into reality but sometimes totally fails to create an appreciation of it. That's when the other distant cousin, marketing steps in. The better the product is marketed the more chance the manufacturer has in really reaping the benefits of efficiency. Imagine Apple selling stunningly designed consumer products. Why doesn't Apple sell its products at a discount or at the same price as other manufacturers? Why do more & more Apple customers in effect pay for the design excellence where some other companies have blatantly copied some of their designs & continue to charge a lot less? Apple projects themselves & their ability to design beautiful & most importantly functional products in a way which makes people appreciate it. Sometimes even for the sake of appreciation. If Apple's products were not functional & merely aesthetic, then they would most certainly have been stuck in the same rut as the rest of the competition.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">By marrying function & design at the same time making sure that the cost of production & distribution stays low, Apple qualifies its most basic responsibility to its shareholders - increasing profitability. Thus design comes full circle when people understand their need of a product & equate it with an available product.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">That's why I admire good design. Something so hidden from our day to day point of view can have a profound impact on the way we live. </span></div>
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A few tributes to good design:</div>
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<li>Gary Hustwit <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Trilogy" target="_blank">Design Trilogy</a></li>
<li>Dieter Rams' <a href="http://www.archdaily.com/198583/dieter-rams-10-principles-of-%E2%80%9Cgood-design%E2%80%9D/" target="_blank">Ten Principles of Good Design</a></li>
<li>Architect Norman Foster's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1620785/" target="_blank">Biopic</a></li>
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oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-37511434295675333922013-01-26T22:39:00.001+05:302013-01-26T22:39:28.941+05:30F i n - a very short story about 'a story '<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In the beginning, there was only the end. He coveted closure. Just the thought of the ending sent goose bumps up his hands. He imagined himself typing, every word with an effortless stroke like a synchronized swimmer zipping through the water. His fingers danced upon the keyboard like a ballerina tip toeing across a polished wooden floor. The silent screeches when he brushed his fingers on the keys just before scooting off to the next key were like the sound of the fingers shifting a chord on an acoustic guitar. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">His motor neurons never felt so calm. All he could visualize was ending it. The last words, the last phrase, the last meaning, the End. He hadn't written it yet, nor had he seen what it would look like. All he could think of was writing it. His momentum </span><u style="font-family: inherit;">would</u><span style="font-family: inherit;"> guide him like a distant lighthouse on an unknown shore. The boat would bob in the water watching the light turning ON & OFF & ON again. The pulse of the shore almost reverberated through the hull. With each key stroke his breath grew heavier yet in perfect </span>rhythm<span style="font-family: inherit;">. Just as the hull of the boat creaks in the water his lungs hissed with exhaustion & excitement. With the shore approaching, the fingers clicked on the keyboard resembling waves silently moving up & down & up again, leading the boat with them. It was a silent peristalsis of thoughts being sent in wave after wave to his fingers. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Why was the end so important? Why does the boat have to reach the shore? To end with a question would be sinister. To solve the mystery of the beginning would be moral. Nobody appreciates the creation of a problem, but they always reward the solution. Shouldn't the problem be rewarded too? The problem carries in it the seeds of its own solution, the beginning is loaded with the end. Without the problem there would be no solution & without a beginning there is no chance of an end. It's a revolver, cocked and ready to be fired. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">He is tempted to go on & waste a perfect stride. He does it. He misses the crescendo & the symphony collapses on itself. He is only left with a coagulated End in his heart, which somehow won't circulate to his finger tips. A feeling of terror slowly creeps up to him as he watches the cursor blink on the screen, asking, "Now What!". . . </span></div>
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oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-60869910767372165602013-01-10T21:35:00.000+05:302013-01-10T22:23:02.626+05:30Read More, Become More<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Fiction is a very powerful idea. I can't say that any other life form on our planet has ever graduated to using the full power of fiction like we have. The most they <u>can</u> rely on is the immediate knowledge from their genes and what they learn vicariously. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.00390625);"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But we have an unique advantage. We can put all our working knowledge of our culture, our traditions, things of practical importance into a tidy little capsule called a story. Once all this knowledge is filled in that capsule it is only a matter of time someone will come along and swallow it. It may not profoundly affect that person's world view but it will surely make a dent. How big a dent it can make depends on how potent the capsule is & how often he swallows it. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Fiction in the form of books has changed the way people perceive the world. It has made our existence a lot more colourful and has added flavour to our experience which, at that moment, we couldn't have added on our own. A lot of times writers dissect their character's thought processes. This helps the readers clearly understand a character's actions. If a reader looks up to that character then the thought process seems like an incentive to improve ourselves to that standard. Even if we read of some character behaving disagreeably, we can always feel it and it reflects our own cultural & social upbringing. It brings out our ideas about good & evil & allows us to express them in our thoughts.
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.00390625);"><span style="font-family: inherit;">These thoughts wouldn't have come out on their own unless we were subjected to that experience directly. Fiction speeds up this process minus the pain of living through it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.00390625);"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The structure of fiction is also unique. There's no contents page, no acknowledgments, no introductions. We plunge directly into the narrative right from page one. This puts us front and centre of the events that unfold. No other form of correspondence or form of knowledge transmission works that effectively. Every other form needs some sort of qualifying introduction to set the tone for what's to come. Even a brilliant piece of music needs a right setting.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.00390625);"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Since we humans are a bag full of feelings and emotions, whether we like to admit or not, fiction brings out the best and the worst of our feelings. We feel for the characters, we feel for their outcomes. Perhaps we feel for them more strongly than we feel for our own outcomes. That's because in fiction the characters' actions are always motivated by some thought. There's no room for purposeless actions. This is contrary to the way we humans go through life. We usually do a lot of things that are motivated by some thought but largely there are a lot of other things we do automatically. We have a subconscious drive that pushes us to do things we wouldn't do if we carefully consider them. Sometimes we are not even conscious of the purpose of our actions and are made aware only after someone or some event brings it to our attention. This possibility opens up a whole new world of exploration for us. Fiction can help us see the motivations behind the characters' actions & can make us question ours as well. Without fiction for our aid we would pay an hour's fee to a therapist to help us understand & untangle the subconscious intentions behind what we do. But the joy to figure it out on our own is totally different and it's much more vivid. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.00390625);"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We generally have these self biographies running in our head. They tell us who we are, what we must do, what we are like. These biographies change with our experience & knowledge of ourselves & the world around us. These biographies seem remarkably similar to reading character profiles in fiction. They are highly imaginative & very colourful. They make us look either good or bad in our own eyes which in turn determine the kind of mood they put us in. We have this remarkable tendency to observe our behaviour & deduce what kind of a person we are. Fiction is a similar process where the character is written & presented in front of us to figure out the labyrinthine thought behind each action. Fiction can helps us question what our biographies should be like. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Aristotle said that "<i>We acquire virtues by first having put them into action ... we become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage.</i>" What better way to get acquainted with our actions than to see us emotionally respond to what the characters do? </span>Better yet, they can also change us into who we wish to become. <span style="font-family: inherit;">A good story invokes all these thoughts & puts us in an inevitable position to answer these questions about ourselves. That's why reading novels involving existential themes are very difficult to accept. They force us to ask what is our purpose & may force us to consider that there may not be any.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Read More, Become More.</span></div>
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oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-53051637182558535192012-12-22T16:38:00.002+05:302012-12-22T16:38:25.481+05:30So long & thanks for all the Fish!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
On the day after the supposed destruction of our world I wish to ask - Has anything changed?<br />
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Firstly I don't believe anybody really believed that the world was going to end. Catastrophe or not I don't think any one takes it seriously until the News Channels flash it with a Breaking News tag on it.<br />
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Here's one for the networks - Breaking News: We're still alive. Now the world thinks how to get back to work on Monday.<br />
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Just in case the Mayan's got the date wrong & the world does end today, I can only think of one thing to say - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_Long,_and_Thanks_for_All_the_Fish" target="_blank">So Long & Thanks for all the Fish.</a></div>
oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-60013660872721339952012-12-22T14:23:00.000+05:302012-12-24T08:59:54.674+05:30New Project Announcement<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b><u><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Why:</span></u></b><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">From the past few months I have been putting together a new project. The content of this project is very dear to me. It has made a tremendous difference to the way I have started to look at things. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The past few years have made me realize that my ability to learn new things & use them in my day to day life has started to peak. Normally I would enjoy myself at this peak & look back at my achievements. But this time I was not so satisfied at what I had achieved. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The speed at which I have been consuming knowledge (content) has steadily risen over the past decade but the speed at which I process this knowledge hasn't changed at all. I thought that in order to maximize what I learn from what I am absorbing I need to change the way I work. I cannot use the same techniques which have proved to be ineffective in the past & expect different results.</span><br />
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<b><u><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The What:</span></u></b><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">So I started on this idea of learning how to be more productive & effective in learning what I want to learn & finding ways to make it easy to apply in my day to day life. This is way more difficult to implement than to put in a sentence. I have barely scratched the surface of any potential gains I can reap from this idea.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">So my desire to learn ways to be more effective in learning & applying my knowledge has led me to a point where I wish to share the philosophy & involve a more engaging discussion about the ideas around <u><i>Productivity</i></u> & how to really use it as per our individual needs.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">There are productivity Apps, Productivity Techniques & Systems, but no process to connect these ideas to our specific needs. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">After all a tool used for the wrong purpose can't really be effective.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Hope <a href="http://nondump.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">this</a> project gets good feedback & encourages us to think together about Productivity from a different perspective.</span><br />
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<b><u><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Where:</span></u></b><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">You can access this project on my new blog <a href="http://nondump.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">here</a>.</span><br />
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It is called NonDump.<br />
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The origin of the title is as ambiguous & as mysterious to me as it is to you. But the moment I used it for the blog, it seemed catchy & short enough to remember. So it stuck.<br />
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<b><u><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Now What:</span></u></b><br />
If you wish to leave any feedback or suggestions do contact me through the new blog or just share your comments here.<br />
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Or you can reach me at nondump.feedback@gmail.com.</div>
oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-46911418838322054232012-12-17T23:15:00.000+05:302012-12-17T23:15:47.099+05:30A Human's Rant<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We humans have evolved into self aware, intelligent beings. This allows us to understand our surroundings. It allows us to question the way the world works & figure out how. This is unlike any other animal which doesn't indulge beyond its base instincts of food & mating. Lets call it an inner biological need. A few reasons that we know which made us what we are, </span><br />
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<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">An efficient way to store energy </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">Evolution of a complex language to generate, process & transmit thoughts. </span></li>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Once this structure was in place we could practically cruise around seamlessly with knowledge learned & retained from previous generations.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But the flip side of it was we started to develop elaborate formal systems around us. Formal systems where the rules of behaviour are standardized. These are our social, political, religious, economic, legal systems. This was perhaps the single handed exercise which has resulted in keeping the majority of us aligned & focused on a shared social goal - multiply our own kind. In all this we very occasionally become aware of the nature around us. We are so engrossed in our formal systems & rules of engagement that we often forget what we actually are at a biological level. We are only reminded of our true origins & our vulnerability when things start going wrong.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We take a lot of pride in thinking that it is always better to get along very well with our current systems & excel within them. We have pulled a world over our own eyes full of structured, controlled & (perceived) certain outcomes. We indulge in them so heavily that we eventually take our biological footprint for granted. We tend to forget that under our skin of iphones, blackberry's & technology we are the same as other mammals that have been roaming around this planet for eons.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We are so convinced of our survival instincts & ingenuity in creating such systems that we have perhaps started to believe that this is <u>the only</u> right way to live. Whereas there is no such prescribed way of life in nature. There are several models of co-operation & survival in the jungle & all of them have their unique advantages. We perhaps indulge in our own political models of co-operation to suggest that we too have the same system, but it is just a little bit more structured & at a higher level of intelligence. We refuse to live on nature's autopilot & we choose to create our own autopilot systems. This ironically is something that comes very naturally to us. Find a working pattern & repeat. We have been accustomed to this way of living as a standard model of human life for who knows how long.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We have become dependant on it to the point of believing that everything that doesn't evolve into our system is potentially wrong. As some systems become more & more advanced they create aspirations for other primitive systems to imitate them. A successful system is valued more & believed to add more to the average daily life of humans. We go to any developed nation in the world & watch their use of this idea as a standard evolutionary fact. But we never seem to question if this assumption of evolution can ever be incorrect.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">With this assumption we start looking more & more inward to seek what we need & try to recreate that need in real life with the use of technology or policy. For instance at some point we decided that we need to carry our music with us - all of it. So we found peace in a little tile shaped box with a round dial on it & a pair of white cables extending from our ears. We walked around with it for about a decade & evolved that idea into a way of life. We create latent needs into actual needs & transmit them as a new & more efficient way to live in the systems that we ourselves have created. It seems almost automatic. This is pervasive at all scales from personal to global.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We have basically outsourced the whole process of outward thought (thought about the world around us & our impact on it) to a small group of people. We call them our scientists. I use scientists as a general term which includes all those people doing any research in trying to understand things beyond the inner needs of humans. They study the space & the universe, they study our biological systems to find better ways of surviving, they study the planet, they study the elements of nature & human nature. They look beyond these systems & hope that the average person gets to acquaint with their world view through their research. All this also for the conformity of creating better systems than what we have at present.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The average person, instead of acknowledging that we are a part of the universe & that too a rather insignificant one, is incredibly busy in trying to cope with the systems that other humans have created. There is perhaps this creationist bias, where only ideas that are created by others are worth believing in. We start getting bigger & bigger in our own systems thru more wealth of knowledge, money, power, anything. We eventually reach a stage of believing that there is nothing greater beyond this. Perhaps religion & theistic beliefs have stemmed from such a latent human need to systematize the uncertainty around us. They have given us a reason to create our systems. Religion did try to bring in the respect for outer systems, but it has failed miserably & ended up creating atheists like me who wish to detach the propaganda from the true message. I see a pious man praying to a river & then throwing a plastic bag full of decaying flowers right in the middle of it. This is not religion.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">One thought I can't shake off is what would happen if we started to channelize our latent inner curiosity - outwards? First of all is it biologically possible?
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">What would happen when we individually start to acknowledge our role (position/state to be precise) in the universe (which is pretty benign considering we are just perishable animals)? Will it change the way we treat our surroundings?
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">How will it affect our current social structures & would it make us better in relating to the needs of other species which inhabit the same space as us?
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">These questions push us into a thought which doesn't fit within our system, it seems like a plugin which needs to be installed from the outside. But before all this, we need to ask why should we do all this!</span></div>
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oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-44986657138323421872012-09-27T01:58:00.000+05:302012-09-28T06:54:30.602+05:30The Untouchable City<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I cannot remember the last time I touched any wall in my city. It's not as if I am obsessive compulsive about not touching anything outdoors, but one glimpse at the walls of this fateful town & it is apparent why you can't even dream of touching them. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The average height of an adult Indian male is around 5 Feet 5 Inches. That means, the mouth of this average Indian male is at around 4 Feet 11 inches from the ground. The tobacco munching mouth can project a jet of murderous red spit on any wall at an average angle of 45 degrees at varying velocities. This is obviously assuming that the person spitting on the wall is at a reasonable distance from the wall to avoid any splatter on him. This archetypical male has been bestowed with god given powers to consume infinite amount of chewing tobacco. That translates directly into the city's latest murals. We are blessed with this art form which is the biggest ever crowd sourced art project ever imagined. It also works on a subliminal level to make the artist unaware of his contribution. With gravity doing most of the strokes, all the artist has to bring is fresh set of saliva & a large puddle of chewed tobacco. With the cutting edge pneumatic forces which took nature itself several million years to perfect, this unassuming street artist does this city a favour by contributing his talent for free.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">No amount of dripping sarcasm is enough to speak of these dripping red walls. We are tactile animals. One of the largest & the most important sensory organs on our body is the skin. We count touch as one of the five basic senses which allow us to perceive our world. Although we are not limited to touch anything else, we are definitely limited in our ability to caress our own city walls. It can be a building of historic importance or some high rise commercial premises. These murals paint the city with a joyous abandon only found elsewhere in nature. As a matter of excretion, these artists were never taught any discretion. In a way they can't be blamed, no one ever taught them not to paint these walls. Another feature of this city, where if it isn't explicitly mentioned, anything is allowed. For instance, if there is no 'no parking' sign, even an entrance to a building is a place to park. If by some miracle there is an instruction like 'no parking', some of the courageous folks from the city do take pride in disobeying them, especially "Do Not Spit Here" signs.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">So who's fault is it anyway? BMC (the local municipality) has tried half successfully to enforce an 'on the spot' fine a few years back. But with the city bubbling with new art work, it seems not to be working so well. What would it take for an average artist to avoid painting the wall? What incentive can we offer to that artist whose mouth does his work for free?
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Education is another futile concept for these artists who will gladly spit on it & move on. The very posters that tell not to spit in public would become open dart boards to test their projectile accuracy. The spittoons will be inundated with a smouldering red goo at the end of the day which is below any human being's dignity to clean. The beetle juice in these chewing products is itself corrosive by nature & takes more than just water to clean once it has dried. So something which is beyond anyone's dignity to clean, becomes even harder to clean after it dries.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I remember having taught in my school that littering, spitting & defecating in the open is bad. I don't know why I remember this, but somehow it must have made some impact subconsciously. I don't do any of these things in the open out of choice & which has now become a reflex. Any habit to form requires torturous repetition of some task to make it mundane & ordinary so that our body can carry it out automatically. How can we internalize the importance of hygiene in public places in these lost souls?
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Is decency a matter here? Are people just not decent enough to acknowledge the fact that they are soiling something? I have had some rare glimpses of decency which I wouldn't have attributed to the city of Mumbai if I hadn't witnessed them myself. A white collar gets off the bus at CST bus depot & innocuously throws the ticket stub near the bus door. Now ideally this would be a normal sight in Mumbai, where people thoughtlessly litter. But he wasn't so lucky & had to spend some time thinking over what he did later. The Clean-Up Crew recruited by the BMC had apparently cleaned the area a few minutes ago & were resting on the foot path adjoining the bus stop. All of them watched the guy throw the stub & they suddenly sprang into action. They all rushed at once to have that person surrounded. The white collar obviously demanded to know in a rather animated way why he was being held up. When they told him that he had littered, I was half expecting an apology or at least some sign of shame. Perhaps that's what the clean up crew expected too but instead they heard him barking expletives. Now a cloud of anger shrouded the bus stop & shoving ensued. Clearly a crowd gathered demanding to know why an educated (looking) person was being held up & barking in an uneducated way at a bus stop full of uniformed clean guys. After a full 4 minutes, which seemed like half an hour of proving how he never even got off the bus, he relented & walked back to the bus door. There wasn't more drama in any soaps on the tele than what I saw next. A clean - up member had recovered the ticket stub & was holding it in his finger tips. He handed the stub to the white collar & made him dispose it in a nearby dust bin. No claps, no appreciative words from anyone, no thanks to the clean-up guys, the crowd dispersed as if nothing had happened & the white collar, mumbling expletives under his breath rushed off to catch his train.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Another slightly more graphic incident gripped me the other day waiting in a traffic jam trapped inside an auto rickshaw. There was no view staring at the back of the driver so I peeked outside & looked in the general direction. I noticed two beggars (perhaps husband & wife) along with a small kid. Perhaps 3 years old or may be less. The couple was begging at a street corner where a lot of pedestrians walked by. The small kid, was looking for a spot to take a dump around the same corner. I knew even before it actually happened what I was about to see, but I couldn't have been more wrong. I looked away from it, but could't seem to shake my mind from the idea that a piece of fresh turd was going to lie at the corner of the road for eternity. I turned around hoping that the horrible scene would have passed & saw something so unbelievably surprising that I couldn't believe my eyes. My hand reached to cover my mouth in total disbelief. The 3 year old kid was instructed by his mother to pick up the turd with a small plastic bag. She then took him to a dustbin nearby & they both threw the bag in. The mother & the kid got back to the corner & she started to beg again as if nothing had happened. The whole world went their way after the traffic cleared, completely missing the point of this miracle of decency which I am sure not many must have seen till the very end.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I am cherry picking examples due to sheer lack of them which display basic decency in the urban population of Mumbai. But I can never forget the torment of the cleaning crew or even the basic hygiene of a beggar. What are these if not examples of decency & an unsaid love towards our own city? Even if it was just part of the job description or a habit to clean it up.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">One question I beg to ask these people, whoever they are & who are never going to read this. Is their artwork motivated by a systemic hatred towards the city? Do they hate the diversity, the financial inequity, the general throbbing pulse of the city so much that they choose to malign it with their sole contribution. I am yet to see a person spit inside his own home & then welcome any guest. Athithi devo bhava my ass. We can't even keep the financial capital of our nation clean, let alone invite anyone to walk through this god forsaken pile of filth.
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">After all this probing & venting out my frustration towards this art epidemic, I don't feel any better. I still can't touch my city & must forgo the biggest sensory attachment I have to the place I call home. </span></div>
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oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-80485892524979676902012-09-20T22:24:00.000+05:302012-09-20T22:24:02.232+05:30Taxmen (a much awaited Accounting Drama)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">There's no legal show out there that hasn't gone through real life cases & dramatized them for television. Also there are crime scene investigation drama shows which have so far shown, in vivid detail, how to kill a human being. Sometimes I wonder how many more ways a person can die & how many unique murder weapons would be used? I have also watched an amazing medical drama & throughout its 8 season run time, all I could care to understand about medicine is that Lupus is a very common diagnosis, Auto-immune diseases are like the wild cards of medical cases & projectile vomit is simply awesome, without knowing absolutely anything about what Lupus & auto-immune diseases are. But one thing I am yet to watch, solved in meticulous detail with all the grit, drama & excitement of reaching to the conclusion is doing a tax audit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I have searched the length and breadth of the internet & I must have definitely left a few spots, since I still haven't found a dramatization of accountants in a multi season TV show. They do get side jobs in legal dramas but there isn't one show which shows the glitz and glamour of going through some person's or a corporation's books. Especially when they are wonderfully cooked. OK, I can take back the glamour, but there is definitely some glitz-ish stuff. It is so surprising to find a lack of media interest in the profession of accounting especially when some of the most important plots in films have hinged upon accountants.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">A few that I care to remember, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Ben Kingsley in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Schindlers-List-Widescreen-Edition-Neeson/dp/B00012QM8G" target="_blank">Schindler's List</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Will Ferrel's exceptional performance as an IRS auditor in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Than-Fiction/dp/B000NTHT6G/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1348159524&sr=1-1&keywords=stranger+than+fiction" target="_blank">Stranger than fiction</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The accountant in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Untouchables/dp/B000I3UI7E/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1348159894&sr=1-1&keywords=untouchables" target="_blank">Untouchables</a>, he has all the evidence (no accountant, no Capone)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The chubby guy from the film <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hitch/dp/B000I8G5C6/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1348159923&sr=1-1&keywords=hitch" target="_blank">Hitch</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Ok, I thought I had an exhaustive memory of accountants in the media, but it seems it has exhausted.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">So all these films gave accountants their share of screen time, but what I really really long for is to watch the clacking of calculators & digging out evidence, missing expense receipts, backtracking tax frauds, some exciting time in tax havens, back room dealings with bankers & tracing secret accounts of the super rich. I may have gotten a bit carried away there, but somehow the excitement of solving the number puzzle would make an excellent series on accountants.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I do have some baseless assumptions on why there may not have been any attempt at making a series / film on accountants:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">- <b>It is too complicated to show on primetime TV</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">(duh! so is law, medicine & crime investigation)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">- <b>Accountants are dull people </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">(well I have a few accountant friends & they know their way out of their numbers. Certainly not dull)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">- <b>There can't be much drama in an accounting firm </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">(wherever the average age of the staff in a firm is less than 40 you can be assured to have a lot of competition, rivalry, sexual tension, forced hierarchy & finally cut throat colleagues - I thought this is what the legal shows were based on. Also I have nothing against people over 40 doing all those things, but my experience is pretty slim in being over 40 to realize what they would do)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">- <b>It is difficult to show people endlessly working on their calculators & make it look exciting </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">(well if a show like Numbers can crunch advanced math on TV, accounting is just plain adding & subtracting)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">- <b>Finally, accounting shows will give people ideas on how to evade tax & commit financial fraud </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">(this is the closest, I think, I have come to making a legitimate case for not having an accounting TV show. But then I remembered watching all those meticulously executed murders in CSI or Dexter & that made me feel better since I haven't had even the faintest urge to plan such an execution. So far ;) )</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">- <b>There can't be a protagonist</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">(that may be true, since everyone I know hates the taxman & auditors sometimes have the nasty habit of uncovering a number trail which was cautiously buried causing a lot of inconvenience to a lot of seriously rich people. The taxman always seems to be a metaphorical antichrist)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">So this sure does call for a really gritty accounting drama, I don't mind writing the pilot episode for this one at all. :)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But like all great Eureka moments, as soon as I started to bask in the glory of my powers of observation I came across these three unsuspecting links (<a href="http://www.accountingweb.com/blogs/briggsie/barefoot-accountant/why-not-tv-show-about-cpas"><span class="s1">this</span></a>, <a href="http://capitalaccounting.wordpress.com/2008/06/03/accountants-in-film/"><span class="s1">this</span></a> & <a href="http://jonlip.wordpress.com/2008/06/09/accountants-should-have-a-tv-series/"><span class="s1">this</span></a>). These are 3 blog posts that basically say the exact same thing that I have been yapping about here, but in a much better way than I have. One of them also happens to be written by an accountant who has figured out the first scene for the pilot episode. There goes my pilot dream. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">So much for drama. CLICK</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">(In case you are wondering what the click was at the end of that sentence, it was the melancholy sound of pressing the OFF button on my calculator. If you listen very closely, you might actually hear it.)</span></div>
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oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-34684528516450597202012-07-28T00:14:00.000+05:302012-07-28T00:14:20.338+05:30Bookworm in a Kindle [A Short Story]<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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He messily clicked through the pages of the book. He was desperately trying to find the passage he had highlighted. He didn't wish to use the Clippings to find all his notes. All he wanted was to reach to that one marked passage, to invoke that one idea which he wanted to think on. "Damn this button, why can't you go any faster?" he clicked the button harder in anger hoping it could miraculously skip several pages just to satisfy his urgency, but the device was only capable of going at a page per second.</div>
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He realized with any more force, the button might come off & he won't be able to read on the device again. He took a giant gulp of breath, pursed his lips and exhaled emphatically through his nostrils. He tried to calm himself down. Instead he began to think about that passage, to recollect the exact words while still clicking slowly & laboriously through the pages. He couldn't focus, his mind started to wander into an ancient memory. He remembered how easy it would have been to just flip the pages of a paperback & reach the page in less than half the time. No clicking, no tapping, just a flurr of paper. He completely lost track of the thought & limply slumped in his arm chair unable to console his urge. </div>
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He was tired of searching & his mind started to drift. He closed his eyes, rested his temple against the back of the chair & forgot that he even held the device. He imagined his old shelf, the neat row of books, arranged by height. The books had an inviting gaze. They pulled him across the room to pick up a book he had long wanted to read. He remembered the coffee stains on the cover of his favourite novel when he had accidentally kept his mug on it. He smiled through the corner of his eyes when he remembered that dank smell which came from the shelf in the rains. He remembered the rummaging of a pile of books at the public library to find an article mentioned in an old book. That moment seemed like the fate of the world depended on it. He could have just googled it, but it would lack the anticipation, the sense of urgency, the kinaesthetic pleasure of using his hands to find something. It would just be functional, unemotional & useful to use a computer.</div>
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As his eyes slowly shut, his imagination flew him to the scrolls from the library of Alexandria. He imagined how they would have been inked. They wouldn't last the test of time & termites, but they would enrich the life of some thinker who looked through them to process his thoughts a little better. He would know something more about the world which he didn't know before. He would hold the delicate parchment in between his fingertips as if lifting a feather without ruffling it. Although the rest of the world would be oblivious to the importance of those scrolls, they would be made aware of its significance centuries later. That's when books went public.</div>
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The moveable type would bring the magic of the library of Alexandria into a common man's shelf. The printing press would become the bastion of information, spreading ideas with every rhythmic clank of its gears. Behind his closed eyes he could now see how a lonely child would sneak under his bed in the middle of the night with the cover pulled over his head & a torch light glaring on the pages of his favourite comic book. He could see a young woman with only a single book keeping her company in her moment of solitude giving her hope & strength. She has no need to carry a hundred books along with her, in a device just to not know which one she could lean on to provide her the most support. The confusion, the intermittence of reading too many books together & not ruminating on any of them, is the bane of this technological evolution. Have we evolved so quickly to accept the need for a faster processing ability? Has the human mind evolved to such a degree to understand how to weigh the ideas strung together by a chain of several hundred books at once?</div>
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He watched his thought process spring from user interface to form & functionality & ultimately hatred of the new book reading technology. He wanted to read not only to fulfill his over powering sense of curiosity but also to test the limits of his own ideas. He would be amazed to find an idea in some obscure book about something he knew, but had never felt the desire to think in those terms before. He would get totally lost into an idea from a single book & weeks later emerge from it like a miner emerges out of a coal mine at the end of his shift. He would be smeared all over with a thought which was not his own but he nevertheless had excavated through it. The pleasure of burrowing deeper & deeper into <span class="s1">an</span> idea was extremely compelling to him. </div>
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The fall of the singular idea, into a pool of unconnected phrases made him feel trapped, yet very powerful. It gave an illusion of knowing more but in reality understanding very little. With the ability to carry so many books with him at once, he at first let the technology goad him into believing that not one, but many ideas could travel with him & he would be free from the tyranny of the shelf. The shelf would lose its monopoly & become an ancient artifact in his home. It would only exist for the pleasure of an occasional visitor to figure out the past indulgences of the owner of those books. With his new device he believed he had the ultimate power to unleash his mental capability to think on several ideas at once & not limit his mind to the ideas of a single book.</div>
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It worked beautifully until one fine day he couldn't find that one idea he wanted so desperately to think about. Now the idea seemed distant & had vaporized. He felt lost in a room full of mirrors with all those surplus ideas staring at him from different angles. He couldn't locate them in reality. They were merely reflections of the ideas he had crammed into his skull by abusing his faculty to concentrate on too many at a time. They lacked form, they lacked the meat.</div>
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He opened his eyes to find the device still resting in the grip of his right hand. His finger tips were sweaty & it left a small moist patch where it came in contact with the plastic. He changed the grip to his left hand & saw something wiggle across the screen. It wiggled & moved briskly to another corner of the device & seemed to have hidden at the back. He gave a full smile when he realized what he had witnessed just now. A bookworm somehow found its way to the device & was trapped under his grip while he was day dreaming. It was released when the device changed hands & wiggled across the screen to hide under the grip of his other hand.</div>
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He felt a warm satisfaction, like a gulp of warm milk rushing down his throat, from the thought that not everything had changed. No matter how much the technology of reading evolved, an occasional bookworm will still find its way to a digital shelf to chew on a few bytes.</div>
</div>oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-25349149886649931612012-05-02T22:30:00.000+05:302012-08-19T22:17:58.163+05:30We Want Everything, Period. [A short story]<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“Who gives a damn about saving a bunch of cats out in some jungle?” Varun poured angrily at Rishabh. “They aren’t just any cats man, they are tigers. They are majestic. You know that! And since when does it matter what cats they are. They are animals, they have the right to live on that land just as any of us.” Rishabh said trying to sound polite but totally missing it. “We can be callous about such a thing sitting here in our comfortable conditioned air, but there are people out there who cannot be fed, because they can’t buy their own food. You know why, because they don’t have jobs. They haven’t had any idea what livelihood means.” Varun saw it very clearly & tried to shine a torch down Rishabh’s brain. But he sensed no activity through his eyes. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“I understand that the people are poor & they need to be fed. That’s honorable, but do you really think that a national park, a beautiful forest needs to be destroyed for such industry?” Rishabh thought he was good at asking rhetorical questions, but Varun was too thick to understand the rhetoric. Varun looked at him furiously. He had taken it way too personally than the situation demanded. He was justified in taking it personally, because on this one his neck was way out there. His firm wouldn’t win that contract for constructing those factories if Rishabh didn’t sign in on the agreement, the agreement to use the forestland to build a swanky new Special Economic Zone. Rishabh’s influence in the upper house of the parliament was exactly what was needed to spearhead such a project on this scale. This was never heard of, not even in the most advanced & fastest growing nations in the world. This was a project that would create jobs for a million people & could sustain a metropolis with their livelihood. It was an ultimate experiment in economics by trying to inject supply into a system that was ready to begin consumption. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Varun said, frustrated, folding the sleeves of his fifteen thousand rupee shirt, sorry, his $300 custom made shirt. He sat on Rishabh’s table to add emphasis by towering over him. Rishabh calmly, yet firmly sat in his chair holding his point in between them like an unlit cigarette. Varun tried to explain, “look, we can really help these people. We are going on all fours with this one. The mere amount of working capital that we need to raise, you could build 10 expressways with that. We are very committed to make this nation the best capitalist system anyone has ever seen. This is it for us Rishi.” Rishabh looked at the window, he saw dew gathered at the corners of the glass. He said, slowly, while exhaling the fictitious smoke, “That piece of forestland is the only one we have in this region to protect the tigers. Besides there are several dozen rare species of frogs & other animals, some of which haven’t even been cataloged yet. How do you wish to destroy such a pool of natural diversity with the aim that these people will eat better? I have nothing against those people, in fact I will be more than happy to find a man earn a decent living & live a dignified life, but what you are asking to do here, is to destroy a piece of nature. It is like asking your mother to cut some part of her heart just so she can feed you. There is no going back after this.” Rishabh was concerned not just about the impact of deforestation, but also about the fact that there is no way to re-create it anywhere else. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“But what about civilization?” Varun asked in a very dejected tone of a child who was just denied the toy it craved for, for a thousandth time. “We really do care about the forest, but this location is pivotal. It is extremely close to the water source, where we plan to construct a massive dam, so that we can harness electricity, pollution free. We don’t contaminate anything, just delay the flow of the stream that’s all.” Varun said with a chuckle. “Once the power issue is solved we have hired the best architects from all over the world to build this nice green city for us, which will host it’s own conservation system to preserve water & electricity. There would be no waste.”</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“Are your genius planners going to give an advance evacuation notice to the animals living there too?” Rishabh said mockingly. “I’d love to see a draft of that one.” Rishabh’s idea of a joke was not just to insult the hollow sense of respect that Varun showed, but the sheer pretentiousness of the way people looked at nature & it’s importance to us. People believe that the nature, this planet is separate from them, form their fate. People tend to believe that whatever is happening to this planet is not going to affect them, because living in a city forever has blocked their senses. There is no connection towards the world around them. It is like losing a sense, of touch, of smell, of sound, of taste. It is like forgetting what a breeze of fresh air feels like. People might as well be zombies, if they felt that the nature was not something worth protecting. And the dams & their pollution free power, what good is that, if there is no one left to breathe the fresh air?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Rishabh’s whole idea about the planet & what one species’ capacity to influence its fate was hinged upon a fact that unchecked deforestation has been responsible for the loss of a lot of species of animals & plants. All these extinct species were part of the same ecosystem that man is. They must have served some purpose in their chain of events. They must have been someone’s food & they must be eating something else. They were maintaining that unsaid balance. But now they are no more, for industry encroached & tore down their habitat. Any attempt to re-create that artificially for those species was merely keeping them alive for our scientific amusement. When it’s gone, it’s gone. The connection is severed, the link is lost, the umbilical cord is cut, and that event collapses on itself. That system will now have to find different ways to keep on doing what it used to do before. New food chains had to be forged, new habitats, new balance within this chaos.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">While Varun pretended to be a capitalist, his idea was to destroy a resource to create another one for the betterment of only one species. The man, the homo economicus, the rational ape. Varun dreamed far ahead into the consequences of such an enterprise & how many people will get their livelihoods from this location. The want of man, that’s what he thought of. His principle philosophy was that of consumption feeding the need for creating supply. He only saw a few cogs in the bigger picture of man’s universe & mistook it for the whole thing. Pretending to be a capitalist in a socialist’s coat, he never really knew what he really was. He felt that capitalism was to allow better transfer of money from one place to the other, from one hand to the next. His idea of capitalism was to facilitate trade & grow industry for the betterment of civilization. But the nature of a true capitalist doesn’t merely end here. The capitalist, the captain of industry always considers the cost. There is a cost, not just of capital but the cost of economy, the cost of ecology & finally a cost on humanity. A self-sustainable industry; is a capitalist dream. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“There is nothing wrong about man wanting more.” Rishabh said in a small voice. “You remember both of us growing up, don’t you? We had so little to begin with & we built it inch by inch, in our own separate ways. We never really looked back, have we?” Rishabh was almost apologetic. Varun lost the track of Rishabh’s line of thought, “How do you believe that was possible, our current state of being? We have been taking advantage of the same system of wants that I am trying to build here. We wanted & we could achieve it. The man has tremendous ingenuity & you know it. We can re-create a thousand such eco-systems if we wanted to. This is ‘the man’ we are talking about. The animal that eventually taught itself to speak, to grow food, to change its habitat. The only intelligent life on this planet that can even think about it’s repair. Do you think a tiger or a bunch of frogs would be able to think of such a thing?” Varun continued with a tone of indifference, “Some species are always lost in the race of time. They don’t survive because perhaps they don’t mean to survive. Their extinction might be nature’s process of weeding them out. The humans removed them because nature is acting through us. Nature is directing us to remove unsustainable species & replace them with a much more sustainable one. I mean, we are part of that same nature, we are not different, are we?”</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Rishabh couldn’t believe Varun’s logic, but chinks began to appear in his armor. Rishabh was on the verge of breaking down, but he held on. “These million jobs you are about to create, how do you think these million people feel about the nature that we are speaking of destroying?” “They don’t need to know” Varun replied quickly. “They don’t need to know in the same way you don’t need to know how the computer was made just because you choose to use it. They don’t need to know, because they can’t do anything about it even if they want to. They want everything. Period. Don’t you get this? They want to consume, they want to spend, for that they need money, they can earn it or they can rape, pillage or murder for it. Isn’t this industry a cleaner way to achieve that outcome?”</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Rishabh drew a large breath as if he was about to inhale the entire room. “You make a lot of logical short cuts Varun, you always have. That’s why you can live with the consequences of your actions so easily. You don’t seem to understand that for every connection lost in nature, there may not be a new connection to replace it with. Where now you see deserts, there were forests with abundant diversity of life. What do you think made them into a desert? Even re-wiring a river to flow in another direction can change the future of an entire topography. Can destroy entire civilizations. Wars are fought for that sort of thing. Do you honestly believe that our planet needs to suffer for the consumption needs of a few million? Why not make a better plan to work around this problem, to make it more sustainable, spend a little more to make sure that you don’t disturb the natural order of things? We want everything too Varun, we want to survive with what we have & not regret later when it’s gone & we were too late to acknowledge its importance.”</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Varun gasped as if it was his last breath, “You can’t fathom the kind of capital we are sinking into this. You bureaucrats have never understood how much it costs to create the development that we see. You never seem to notice the price we pay so that you can go abroad to give lectures about our country’s growth story. It is we on the frontlines, battling the fibrillations of the economy. We shape the future as you sell it to your voters. We have already paid the price you are asking us to pay.”</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Rishabh said furiously, “Let me ask this one last time Varun, do these people whose consumption stories you are parading really understand what they are building their lofty towers on? Do they really understand what is the price we, as animals sharing this planet, have paid just so they could buy a better soap? Don’t you think they should know?”</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Varun disregarded the whole line of thought, “Even if they knew they can’t stand across a fucking bulldozer when we would have pummeled the mountain. They can’t do anything, they haven’t done anything about it so far, and they just want everything. All we are doing is satisfy that want. For every demand, there has to be supply.”</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Rishabh chuckled this time, “They can do much more than what you believe. They can vote. Why do you think you are talking to me right now? I represent their voice & I represent their choices. They might regret not having the television they wanted, but they won’t regret it if they still have the fresh air they are breathing, the clean water they are drinking & the food they are eating.”</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Rishabh added emphatically, “We Want Everything. Period.”</span></div>
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oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-61780588309117844632012-03-21T22:43:00.000+05:302012-08-19T22:18:42.785+05:30The iPad<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The iPad (image from: Apple.com)</span></td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I don't own an iPad, but that doesn't mean they didn't get it right when they made it. I loved one of the comments in this <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-16/in-praise-of-apples-ipad-the-first-one"><span class="s1">article</span></a> on BusinessWeek. It says 'Beware of The iPads of March'. Now it is a reference to the Ides of March, that is 15th of March, the day supposedly Julius Caesar was assassinated & so on. It has nothing to do with the iPad. But it has everything to do with what the iPad symbolizes. It symbolizes a revolution in the way people have begun to interact with data. Just 4 years ago, there was no iPad & that is so hard to believe. We had gotten by our lives so peacefully & there comes this sleek slate of pure desire. It was made to fall in love with. Even a reasonably rational adult who doesn't believe in jumping out and buying the latest gadget out there, cannot resist the pull of an iPad lying idly on a wooden table. It is welcoming & that is what Apple has pulled. It has done it so incredibly well that even if we just wander by their store with one of these staring right at us through the glass pane, it does entice the fingers a little. We just want to grab it, feel the brushed aluminum against the palm & touch the clean glass with our index finger, even if it is just to scroll some random list of things on it. And the best part is we don't even have to own it to feel that way. The reason is that most people can still live pretty efficiently & normally without owning an iPad. Technology is generally adopted to enable us to do something better than before. There is no before for the iPad. We have never scrolled stuff on a glass surface & enjoyed it, ever. We have never enjoyed full HD videos right on our laps. We have never spoken to someone across continents in full screen shiny glory & also wanted to kiss the screen at the same time. We have no memory or kinetic function whatsoever associated with using the iPad. Yet is sells, by the tonnes. We perhaps adopt it not because of any real function like a very few people really do, but we adopt it simply to be a part of this phenomenon where our own data is no longer separated from us. The distance between us & our data has never been so close as to almost having worn it. We touch it, we play with it (scrolling aimlessly just to watch it go 'zoooooo'), we engage in a way we have never done before. The weirdest part is, data was never meant to be so personal at all. It was just meant to be electronic signals which represent what we store, want to retrieve & delete. But now we feel like licking it, right through the screen.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">This begs to question, was technology ever meant to be so personal? Are we becoming machines or are our machines crossing over to show us that they live through us? </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">- Why not?</span></div>
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oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-29270315126287841622011-12-31T23:35:00.001+05:302012-08-19T22:19:01.232+05:30The Chequered Game of Writing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-zdoTy4lz3h1s4nLsmtcL-FDzLCzk6KrOsm0TfmA4hvP3_GXwKv9aaDNiLsHquj9QwIhaftTCze7wgXnBSf_XWnE01Itf5cl75er9TcVZpiSJ52z9YPsjxiT6qn8PIeki8RwQqw/s1600/Chess%252BBooks.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-zdoTy4lz3h1s4nLsmtcL-FDzLCzk6KrOsm0TfmA4hvP3_GXwKv9aaDNiLsHquj9QwIhaftTCze7wgXnBSf_XWnE01Itf5cl75er9TcVZpiSJ52z9YPsjxiT6qn8PIeki8RwQqw/s400/Chess%252BBooks.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I think I have finally come across a nice analogy for why people write novels/stories (fiction, to be vague). This is mainly because, when I started reading fiction for the first time, it made me wonder why did someone take up so much time in their life to sit down & write this book, this story, this whatever?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">When I wrote my first short story & posted it on my blog, I realized it instantly, but only subconsciously. It took me about 3 years to finally come to terms to understand consciously what it was I had learned while writing the story.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">It is just like a game. To make the analogy better, let's assume a Game of Chess. What is a game of chess, really? A board with black & white pieces &, black & white squares with some rules. Same applies to writing fiction, there are some basic rules - there ought to be characters in the story, they have to do something, that should bring out something much bigger than the face value of the characters' actions. To simplify, the actions mentioned in the story (includes dialog, physical acts, emotions, etc) must represent some broader or a smaller, or any concept which is outside the story. A sort of underlying message or philosophy. The writer should make that connection instantly instead of lingering on & almost trying to reach it. But the best part about this process is evident from millions & millions of writers writing more or less similar plots in so many different ways. Just like a game of chess, despite being centuries old, still has the ability to come up with new moves as new players improvise their games independently.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">So the game of chess begins when both players sit across facing each other's arsenal. One player has white which begins the game, the other has black. I think these colours also symbolize a lot more than their intended use of mere distinction. It is a difference in ideology of the writer & the reader. They don't come from the same background & same beliefs. So the writers' words are in fact bearing a different meaning for each of the readers. The white always begins, because the intention is clear, to start off with the game in a peaceful manner, no matter how it ends. The black represents the critical aspect of the game, which has to enter into the game with a defensive manoeuvre. Then the game can progress with one player being offensive & the other defensive irrespective of the colour of the pieces. The reader must be able to critically assess the work in his own head to better understand it within their own context. In short, it has to be understood in some relevant way.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">So in the fiction business the game begins with actually writing and publishing the material. That's the first move. The reader being the other player enters into the game by deciding to read. This I presume is a defensive move because we have to react to an impulse which actually made us want to read that work of fiction. We don't know how the game is going to turn out just in the same way we don't know how a chess game is going to end because there is clever tradition of not including a contents page.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">So after entering into the game, each player gets settled by aligning their pieces. The writer starts to transmit ideas in a variety of forms, through characters, through narratives, through examples, through analogies & so on. The reader reads these ideas & interprets what the writer is trying to say, literally trying to get into the writer's head. The writer through his words tries to elicit some emotional response to either uplift the reader or to break him down. This is exactly what chess players do. They try to get into each other's heads while the game goes on revealing layers after layers of intentions. These intentions best decide how the game turns out to be. Some players are more perceptive than others so they can guess the opponent's moves & plan better whereas some not so good players end up spending huge amounts of time deciding their next move by brute force. So in the same way good readers, will guess what the author is trying to say judging through the author's words & explanations, whereas bad readers end up hacking their way through the writer's work trying to make sense of the words. Most often without any success.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Similarly good writers understand their own ideas better & can project them in a much better way than bad writers. So the bad writers end up wasting a lot of time reaching any relevant point because they don't know exactly what they are getting at. I think this is also a serious reason for writer's block, not knowing exactly what we are trying to convey. In the game of chess, good players know their moves, styles & their ability to play so well that they don't over reach & set up game plans accordingly. A bad player sets up unrealistic goals & fails to plan or even change plans mid-game & doesn't think through moves because he doesn't really know how to steer the game. The bad player is always at the mercy of a good player's sword (I couldn't resist the pun, in case you missed the pun - you should know who the bad writer is by now).</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">A good chess player always knows if he is about to lose. That player will know when to forfeit a game, if the odds aren't in his favour. That's also a remarkable trait of a good writer. Sometimes it matters a lot what you don't send for publishing. If everything that the writer thinks is published then it may or may not be up to the same standards that he has set up for his work. This requires remarkable work ethic. It requires huge amounts of ego to suck it up & sit on it. The other end of the spectrum is again trying hard to change the outcome of an out-of-favour game. This usually fails since probability isn't biased. Also good readers tend to move around a book very easily & know when to throw a book away. Bad readers tend to keep reading crap even when they know it's crap, but hope that it might get better. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I think the whole book publishing industry is based around catering to the really good readers & writers out there & making the bonus on being able to sell the stuff to mediocre readers who cannot differentiate good material from bad. Incidentally there are also good publishers that are different from bad ones who don't know when crap is crap. I think the new self-publishing platforms are pretty cool since it creates a good & fair market for good reading material & bad reading material. The crowd decides what is good or bad. I love free markets for this precise reason. The idea is of deserving the fate for a piece of work. Also in the game of chess, if you are pitted against a good player & you are a bad player, then you will consistently lose until you get the message & rework your game.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In the end, like I said earlier, it is a clash of ideas & opinions. The writer reveals himself as much as the reader reveals himself while reading. The only difference is that the writer reveals to himself & to the world but the reader reveals only to himself. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">But what is true for this game, is also valid for most of the things worth doing in life. All these things can be improved through focused practice & by slowly but painfully learning what not to do.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">That's why good writing is as much fun as reading a really well written book, really well. Just like in the game of chess, there can be moments of great excitement when good players battle it out till one of them bows out.</span></div>
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oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-90865617953101766652011-11-19T09:00:00.001+05:302011-11-19T11:10:34.807+05:30Opening the gate to Normal Land<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Lately I have been soaked in this thought about what does it really mean when we say that something is 'normal'. Are people really trying to imply this is how it should be? Why is it so rewarding to be normal for some people? Is this like an ultimate ride into conformity land!<br />
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I grew up with this idea that if I think someone is weird then there must be some other person who definitely finds me weird. There is still no doubt in my mind about it. It sounds so obvious to me that well, here is this person I really don't enjoy being with because I find that person weird so how weird would I be to someone else? There is no context in my head to this thought because I cannot possibly predict what feature or bug in me is going to make me feel weird to someone, so I just never think about it. But in the same way that I feel liberated by this idea, I have seen that some people find it extraordinarily difficult to deal with the fact that anyone can find them weird. Then begins an exercise into finding reflections off other people & trying to look good in their mirrors of opinion. This sucks. I find this sort of an exercise extremely distracting & can't possibly imagine doing it myself.<br />
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But some people do. I don't necessarily think that they are abnormal or weird, but they have a different point of view which I don't or I won't share. They believe in fitting in entirely. But for anyone who has exercised even a bit in their life can tell us that there is a limit to which we can stretch our bodies, but there is no such tangible limit to stretching our minds. This puts us at a complete loss, because once we are convinced by some idea we just kind of get sucked into it. We start slipping into that thought pool & can only get out of it if we have the adequate will power to face the limits of that thought.<br />
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So being normal, or watching people scorn other people for being abnormal or weird is perfectly acceptable for most of us, because we have already been sucked into this quicksand of normality addiction. There is different normal for different people, so how could we possibly imagine what a general idea of normality is? For a serial killer who has no moral burden over his actions against his victims, killing can be a perfectly normal state of mind. Maybe that's why TV series like Dexter are so successful, because it puts us into a totally different realm of a concept we (non-serial killers) can so easily believe to be absurd.<br />
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So this whole normal business leads to a big bunch of dissatisfaction amongst the lots of us. I have seen so many people get consumed by being accepted that they totally forget about who they really are. I was like that once, trying to live up to the expectations of other people around me, but somehow the tide reversed in my favor. I could easily detach & forgot all about it as I grew up. Good for me.<br />
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Take a hippo for example, because it is a really huge example & it is easy to pay attention to big bulky things than a small pin lying on the floor. If some person tells us that when it rains & there is mud all around, he likes to roll in it & enjoy the feeling. This may not be a perfectly normal activity to expect from a sane person, but from a hippo's point of view - well it will definitely find it cool. It will join that person in rolling in the mud & maybe both of them would have a really great time. Just rolling & getting dirty in the mud slush.<br />
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So this whole business of preferential normality, or in english, my normal is different from your normal, leads us to this really boring conclusion about how cults or groups are formed. People who think something is normal for them & find other people who do it too, will find each other & will come together to share their normality. For them perhaps, if they aren't so open minded, will find other people's normal to be really obnoxious & something to stay away from. The tragedy here is that a lot of people wish to impose their view of normal on a lot of other people. Would a mother obsessed with cleanliness & perhaps having OCD for keeping things clean, force a hippo out of the mud? It will sit on her to begin with, just to protest.<br />
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History is filled with such examples of people imposing normality on others, colonisation perhaps, religion definitely, philosophy for sure, political ideology & all those pretentious things people tend to believe when they think they know it all, or worse - they know better.<br />
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That just shows perhaps how difficult a political idea like democracy can get, which can become an ultimate exercise in conformity. What most people believe is good for all, is the law & the rest who don't believe it to be good are, well just the abnormal minority. That's why it must always be fun for politicians who get to steer the majority opinion in their favour by not usually putting up great solutions for society's problems in front of the people, but just a thought which most of the electorate will believe to be in their favour. That's it, & the rest is taken care of on the election day.<br />
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So how do we deal with this normal bug? How we as a species deal with something so basic & fundamental to our thought process, & change it into an unpleasant experience of being open? I know it is possible & it makes finalizing judgments rather difficult. It takes a whole lot of time to take a stand for or against something when we are being too open about it. Open may not always translate to making the right / contextually appropriate choices. Only in hindsight can we say if being open was really the right way of doing it & there couldn't have been another equally efficient alternative solution. Being open is like being in a constant state of motion & some people tend to get motion sick.<br />
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Because, being open may not be everybody's normal.</div>oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-71546977684946405862011-11-07T12:38:00.000+05:302011-11-07T12:57:11.608+05:30The Stuff of Inspiration<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I have a theory. Like many of my other theories this one is also based on an entirely unoriginal & mundane idea. I have often wondered how different people have managed to inspire themselves to do a lot of things that they have done. Often while reading interviews of great writers, inventors, et al, it is usually a very common question which pops up on an average 15 minutes into the interview - what has inspired your work? Most people give generic answers & list other people's works or ideas. They speak about their influence on the way they think & approach their process. But all this is merely deflection. What is the true source of inspiration which makes use of that influence, what springs us into action to do some of our greatest works?</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bored.</td></tr>
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To take a shot, without any fear of missing the point, I think the biggest personal motivator for people to move on & do their best work might be - <i>dramatic pause</i> - 'Boredom'.</div>
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I read Joseph's Brodsky's <a href="http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/paleopsych/2005-May/003252.html" style="background-color: transparent;" target="_blank">interview</a> <span style="background-color: transparent;">where he analyzes the idea of boredom. Another </span><a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/the-importance-of-mind-wandering/" style="background-color: transparent;" target="_blank">article</a><span style="background-color: transparent;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent;">on Boredom. Brodsky terms boredom as a 'psychological sahara' - that starts right into our boredom & spurns the horizon. The most important part about boredom that he mentions is about humility.</span></div>
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Boredom is a minion of time. It is a realization of the existence of time behind everything that we do. It allows time to invade into our minds, to hack into our regular thoughts & slow it down to a grind. It makes us believe in our finite existence. Since time has plenty of time to just go & on, we as humans who benchmark our lives to time, follow it helplessly & also hopelessly. There is always this ticking clock inside us, the number of breaths we take in our entire life time, the number of heartbeats, the number of hours of sleep we allow ourselves to get, the number of minutes of workout, the amount of time we spend at work, the amount of time we devote to our leisure. It is more ruthless than money & the advantages of economizing on time far out-weigh those of economical use of money.</div>
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This finite life form versus an infinite force, forces us to realize our insignificance in the entire scale of time. If we try to visualize one human being's existence on the so far known scale of time, we would be measured in million nano meter units. But thats not the point. The point of boredom is not it's existence, but the thoughts that it brings to our minds about ourself & about our abilities. What we can & cannot do with that time!</div>
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To quote Brodsky, "<i>If it takes will-paralyzing boredom to bring your insignificance home, then hail the boredom. You are insignificant because you are finite. Yet infinity is not terribly lively, not terribly emotional. Your boredom , at least, tells you that much. And the more finite a thing is, the more it is charged with life, emotions, joy, fears, compassion.</i>"</div>
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I'd like to imagine, though inaccurately, how the typical life of an average prehistoric human would have been 500,000 years ago. Hunting & foraging for food & spending large pockets of time during the day doing, well, absolutely nothing. There would be a spurt in activity for specific times during the day for hunting & collecting, but beyond that, due of lack of any civilized construct to follow, there would be nothing left to do. True idleness in the wilderness. Now the idea of Psychological Sahara becomes a wonderful metaphor to show the limits of activity in an ocean of nothing. What would this prehistoric human, with an outsized brain & the ability to walk upright do in times of complete nothingness? I just have to look at this computer screen right now to imagine what that human must have done. Because that human was bored with a unique circumstance to actually feel the boredom, he might have spawned an entire process of innovation by mere observation & re-invention. I have heard that necessity is the mother of invention, but who is the father? Among many candidates & due of lack of DNA profiling, I assume it is boredom. An entire thought process developed due the insecurity that boredom creates. We have leaped from a stone tool to an iPad. The sophistication of such a thought only seems to have emerged from something very primal to us.</div>
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Why is it that such a vital part of our thought process remains so under appreciated? Well it is in fact not under appreciated, it is acknowledged every single time we check our email, check our BBM's, check our apps on a smartphone, watch a film, use drugs, do mind blowing work, basically get busy. It is everywhere. It is the exact opposite state of focused activity.</div>
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I'd read somewhere that, 'Adversity introduces a man to himself only if he allows it to'. What better adversity than being bored to death, unable to lift even a toe in any direction. Well the most important thing about boredom is that it doesn't kill - at least physiologically & whatever doesn't kill us, makes us stronger. But the main question is how should we objectively look at boredom when we are actually bored? This is a more daunting task than actually suffering it. This somehow feels like a massive exercise into our own masochistic ego.</div>
</div>oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-23694173888782786762011-11-06T19:16:00.000+05:302012-08-19T22:19:31.834+05:30The Island of Incomplete Illusions<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">It is always easy to get lost in an illusion which we end up believing. We think it is so true that there is no escape from it. We enter it with an anticipation of honesty, fun, thrill & recognition. Sometimes we get what we are looking for, but in small portions & there are those other times when we get so much more that we forget the need for illusion altogether. It becomes us.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9VWyQBE2GUScQlZYypjJz3MF2m8478I8svjNv6j5t0zFg0nZ2M8etLbJDz-2G1CK6WC-iVRUZNEUncJhAM2qK1AL4u-cAOMQZ6nMGnDGwiPve4cItev5VYakfWGHRguWhbJ8T2A/s1600/midnight-in-paris1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9VWyQBE2GUScQlZYypjJz3MF2m8478I8svjNv6j5t0zFg0nZ2M8etLbJDz-2G1CK6WC-iVRUZNEUncJhAM2qK1AL4u-cAOMQZ6nMGnDGwiPve4cItev5VYakfWGHRguWhbJ8T2A/s320/midnight-in-paris1.jpg" width="225" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">(Poster from imdb)</span></td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent;">Such was an illusory experience watching </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_Allen" style="background-color: transparent;" target="_blank">Woody Allen</a><span style="background-color: transparent;">'s latest, </span><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1605783/" style="background-color: transparent;" target="_blank">A Midnight in Paris</a><span style="background-color: transparent;">. He is so unassuming about the audience's taste, perhaps that comes with his age, that he clearly forgets that someone else is really going to watch his film. He characterizes himself into a much younger man, with a similar large nose & goes about trotting along the streets of Paris into the night.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">He harbours illusions, so strong that even the most objective thoughts about the film & plot quickly dissolve into his imagination. Perhaps thats what really great story telling is all about. The audience must get so absorbed about asking "why" about the right elements of the story, which lie at its heart rather than asking why about the plot. Immersive. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">But is it really necessary to have any illusions, can we help it? Can we avoid it? I think illusions are like milestones, they show us that there is still distance to cover till you truly reach your destination where ignorance doesn't matter. It perhaps is a product of not knowing what we exactly want from ourself. If we knew completely, in very simple terms what is it that we really want from every single action that we take, it would be pretty close to predicting our own future, minute by minute. I believe the fun in the future is to live it gradually & reach there to find that there is still more of future to cover, like a never ending <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._C._Escher" target="_blank">Escher</a> drawing, but unlike it until the point where we reach the end of our personal road & face a bottomless pit. This edge is our launching pad into the next phase of life, that is in plain english - no life. We leap off that edge without knowing if we will float upwards or sink like a brick. But the best thing is the final glance that we must take at the road walked so far. I would prefer jumping off the cliff with my back towards it, so that I can watch all the things that I have done behind me, good or bad, staring back at me for that one final moment as if to say 'goodbye' or in most cases, ' good riddance'.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Watching Woody Allen's film shifted me into an alternate tab of mine. Into the tab where another fresh webpage was just loading. This is a tab which lists zero personal accomplishments, pretty similar to the other tabs, but with a slightly different template. It put me in state to reassess all my illusions, haven't been successful at all in doing so. I only realized that what I really passionately believed in, was true & not really an illusion. It was real to the point where I could hack through other emotions & watch these glow. But the illusions were more deceptive that reality. The moment I tried to look for them, they disappeared. This is where life imitates quantum physics. That constant state of shifting focus from one illusion to the next, not knowing where to land as if floating in a hot air brain full of helium like ideas zipping across various lands where sometimes thoughts grew like weeds & sometimes like oak trees. I could at least begin to see where I might want to land. The places where I had landed in the past & took off from were great launchpads & new areas await.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://battleshippretension.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/woody-allen-on-the-set-of-001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF0tR5Hl_0LeGjOr4dhW7If_rJ9qt8TbtZsD1952sNa5qD6B894I2sC1Oz1VfLwyEBlfGCbkx82A2VgOp8OIHCsCYmMz0ESoZYdSvd9vBa1x1KnQopmrTWMRoFu4nPBH8YRp3GVA/s320/woody-allen-on-the-set-of-001.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">(Photo From: http://battleshippretension.com/)</span></td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I was hardly ever inspired so much by a single piece of work, but perhaps it's the Woody Allen effect, whose films I grew up watching. I realized that during my most formative years where I started to realize who I was & what I would like to do, I had laced my thoughts with a lot of ideas, including Woody Allen's works. I might have been looking at his latest work not from the point of view with which he presented it, but the point of view with which I had perceived it. But that I think works most of the time, because other people's thoughts sometimes seem like worse illusions than our own.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">But nothing is complete without a satisfactory ending. I think this is where the greatest stories differ from the rest. What thought does the piece of work leave in our minds at the moment it ends. This post is perhaps the thought that I was left thinking about in between shifting the tabs from illusions to reality & back, I feel quite contented about it.</span></div>
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oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-33321079895700856972011-09-12T00:52:00.001+05:302011-11-20T13:38:44.727+05:30A Reluctant Historicist<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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"<i>Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.</i>" </div>
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I have grown up reading that quote. But what should we learn from history? Should we just learn about what happened in the past or should we learn from the actions that were provoked because of what happened in the past? Everything there is to learn from history gives us a chronological story of when & how the events took place. This can breed in us a misplaced arrogance of probably identifying a pattern or a trend in which history proceeds to become the present. We might get tempted to say, "of course, that was going to happen anyway, what else could happen?" These patterns might very well exist, but each of these patterns is tainted by our own way of looking at it. </div>
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<span class="s1"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper">Karl Popper</a></span>, in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Society_and_Its_Enemies"><span class="s1">Open Society & its Enemies</span></a> calls this imagination of a historical trend as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicism"><span class="s1">Historicism</span></a>. Although this term predates Popper it's a good place to start thinking about history. A historicist looks at the past & starts drawing conclusions based on facts & interpretations to come up with a theory of historical development/evolution. It is akin to irresponsibly use a spreadsheet to drag a trend to eternity. This so called knowledge of the evolution of history seems mystical but at the same time is an important part of the fabric of assumptions of how any society grows. </div>
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For a long time I assumed that the system that we are living in is a good one. I mean, the democratic system, where anyone can do what we want to do under the common context of the law. I still think it's a great system. But perhaps due to lack of any major turbulence in my life or perhaps sheer ignorance about what's happening around 'my' world, I began to believe in its obvious permanence. It seems obvious, only due to a lack of understanding of how it feels to be in any system other than my own experience. Now I begin to question, if this experience was worth anything at all! The ignorance, the assumption of permanence & taking the system's function for granted. One of the major traits of an historicist is to passively assume that the system will remain the way it is & it will have a DNA of its own. All the good & bad things about it will continue to be so (within an assumed historical trend) but with minor modifications as the social context changes with time. So my assumptions about political, social, educational, economical & the capitalist system that it is the way it is & will remain the way it was, were based on nothing but a Thanksgiving turkey like assumption. I believed that I am safe because I was fed & taken care of all year long. Well what will happen when my Thanksgiving day arrives & my theory of this world is roasted in a big fat oven? </div>
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My assumptions about the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system"><span class="s1">complex adaptive nature</span></a> of the universe are also based on a similar mix of arrogance of knowing too much but not knowing the full importance of what I already know. I tend to assume that when things are in a flux, they very well might remain in flux until a trigger brings them back to their so called, Mean Value. But this is one man's stupidity speaking. Imagine a world of people where we each have our own opinions of our systems around us & we each approach them in our own way. Some of us will be allowed & applauded to think on our terms where as the less dominant (popular) ideas will be suppressed. Democracy.</div>
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If we see a nation coming together to protest against something as hard to prove & easy to prosecute as corruption, we can observe the anti-historistic attitude in the minds of these people. They seem to assume that they can control their system's fate (which ideally they should be able to, in a democracy) & steer it into a direction of corruption free growth & prosperity. How many of us have honestly visualized the after effects of this, in a country like ours? There are various models to refer in other countries, but what about a model state of affairs for our nation? What will it finally mean to take charge of the course of this nation's future history? Do all the people standing with a candle in their hand & cap on their heads actually understand the economic, political, social impact of their actions when they face the same incentives & threats as the people they wish to prosecute? I don't know the answer.</div>
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I have begun to believe that there are two types of historicists. One who truly believes in his version of historical evolution & hopes that the cycle will repeat the way it has in the past. The other type of historicist is a reluctant one, who has to accept that without a movement as viral as the current protest against corruption & without serious resources to protect against personal vendetta from the affected parties - it is nearly impossible to get the system to move one way or another. In short, become a fish big enough so that other fish can't hurt me & my cause. I guess I have become a reluctant historicist, which deeply bothers me since I believe in taking charge of my own life & not succumb to any patterns or trends that I am 'supposed' to follow. That's a weird contradiction to live with, but this time I can't seem to figure which of my assumptions is wrong?</div>
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</div>oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-70378111209517828222011-07-24T22:48:00.000+05:302011-11-20T13:40:01.866+05:30The Sport of Investing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Cross posted from our company blog - <a href="https://www.ppfas.net/blog/2011/07/24/the-sport-of-investing/"><span class="s1">The Sport of Investing</span></a></div>
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I have always wondered if investing is a sport or a profession. What I mean to say is that should investing be about competition or should investing be about generating good returns on investment. Although a lot that an investor does, especially a very public one, can be qualified as a sport when we use league tables to judge fund managers, private equity investors, etc. But is investing really a sport or just another professional activity?</div>
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Well professional sportsmen will surely differ here, saying, ‘hey, even we are professionals.’ Sure they are, but the context is different when emotions are involved. It is weird since both investing & sporting involve the same level of emotional demands from the player. (S)He has to make decisions in a cold and calculated way which can make the difference between glory & defeat. An investor faces the same emotional dilemma, but not with glory or defeat (entirely), but with money & worse – other people’s money. So the emotional motivation to get glory at all costs is the fundamental difference between sporting & investing, because an investor can’t bet the ranch when the odds are not in favour (at least that’s what should happen in a rational universe).</div>
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The reason I compare these two activities is because I watched a documentary about the legendary (late) Formula One driver, Aryton Senna. Its called “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1424432/"><span class="s2">Senna</span></a>“. A wonderfully made, heart wrenching film about the driver’s meteoric rise, the sport of formula one & his untimely death in an accident. The end reminded me much about how investors & traders can also feel the colossal effect of a fatality (not with life but with money) of a decision gone wrong. But you still live another day for the next round, unlike in Senna’s case. In his interviews which have been restored from archived footage, he talks about what he feels of the sport & his skill as a racing driver.</div>
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To give some background, Senna had been penalized for an accident while he nicked his car against team-mate & arch rival Alain Prost (of McLaren) which meant the end of the race for Prost & Senna continued with relatively less damage to win the race & the championship title. The race victory was stripped away from him as a penalty. In an interview later, the former Formula One driver Jackie Stewart asked Senna how was it that he was the most accident prone driver in any given stretch of 36 month period in the history of the sport? (which in fact is not a relevant comparison since nobody really drives in a race for causing accidents). To which Senna replied very emotionally that, “When we call ourselves racing drivers we see a gap, we take it. If we fail to do that, we can no longer call ourselves racing drivers”.</div>
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Isn’t this what investing is all about? We try to find gaps in the value of an asset, a security & we try to take advantage by acting on the gap. The gaps in the race are chances to move & exist only for a limited time frame of a second or two. But in investing the gaps have been known to exist for a lot longer than that & also some exist for a very short time. But this gives us even more reasons to rejoice so that we can keep on taking advantage of the gap as long as it exists.</div>
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Investing is not a sport, although its risks are real just like any sport. It isn’t necessary to compare one investor with the rest because all we are dealing with is past performance based on situations which had existed at those times. Its really the process that comes to work in the end. A racing driver can have a few fluke victories, but a sustainable, long term great performance is only possible when the driver has developed a process with which he uses his ability to race.</div>
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Buffett used to say in his partnership letters that our only benchmark is the S&P 500 index & Dow Jones Index, & that he would be glad if he could consistently beat it with a few percentage points difference over the long term. Well, he has done a lot more than that, but the point is taken. How any investor will perform in the future depends on a lot of factors and skill & luck are a very large part of them.</div>
</div>oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-34883990233180608732011-07-07T01:31:00.002+05:302012-08-19T22:20:34.315+05:30Unthinkable<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">There is a quote in a Saul Bellow book, </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">We're funny creatures, We don't see stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects, but endless fire.</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">This is precisely what it makes us think when we face a moral dilemma. We want to see the correctness of our actions as a vindication of our conscience. We want to look moral & fair in our own eyes. We want to live with no guilt for our decisions, but only glow in the relief of a favourable outcome. But what if the outcomes are not in our favour? Most of us don't have the strength to gut it that it's not us who failed entirely, but also the odds were against us. We miscalculated & erred & that's that. We can come up with thousands of post hoc explanations, but that isn't going to resolve the failure of that one action.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Basically, we have to live with it.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">I think a lot of religious texts create this disconnect between the process & the outcome. If we are at least following a process which we think is correct at the time, we can detach ourselves from the outcome. We can say, we tried our best - & that would be true in that situation. Perhaps thats why there is a constant focus on rituals, to engrave the importance of the process.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjijazV8EcCYsMDJAchDFZqsixIgYQ9in2mh4JHAEMrvv_-9kvSFkTovgWGTMuIZ6mvybj12NHldu-GMWTekd_WWE2Ki96Gphkgpsr943nEfw1jvAXWKIUvCyxT6kq9estSlBfotQ/s1600/unthinkable.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjijazV8EcCYsMDJAchDFZqsixIgYQ9in2mh4JHAEMrvv_-9kvSFkTovgWGTMuIZ6mvybj12NHldu-GMWTekd_WWE2Ki96Gphkgpsr943nEfw1jvAXWKIUvCyxT6kq9estSlBfotQ/s1600/unthinkable.jpg" /></span></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I watched a film recently (spoiler alert), called "</span><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0914863/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Unthinkable</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">". I picked it up with no expectations, being a direct to dvd film. It turned out to be a crazy ride down morality lane & a very well acted one too. I don't think any amount of ethics lectures are capable of preparing us with how to deal with the threat presented in the film. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">An American citizen releases a video tape of planting three nuclear bombs across the country. Then ensues an enquiry, everybody till the very top is rattled by the threat & especially since there are no demands made, yet. Then a secret military operation, involving the FBI for the bomb hunt & the military, who have already captured the terrorist. Till this point we are led into the trap of assuming how straight this film is going to be. It's a typical terrorist situation, "We don't negotiate with terrorists" blah blah & then the investigation to find & disarm the 3 bombs. But the situation is far too complicated under the surface. We come face to face with a series of moral dilemma's. This is, as it's obvious by now, the interrogation of the terrorist & the methods used thereof. We are aware of the various ways torture is used to extract information, by using intimidation, scare tactics, physical abuse & finally, leverage. What we don't naturally think of is the limit for all these actions. How far can we go with this one person, who clearly intends to harm other people, to save millions? We also fail to look through the eyes of the torturer. We look at him as a heartless human being, perhaps as bad as the terrorist itself. But we never really try to figure out the nature of his actions. The nature of belief that he creates in the mind of the terrorist - that all this will stop if he reveals the locations of the bombs. That's where we fail. That's where we do not understand the limits of both the terrorist's ingenuity, his tolerance & the torturers ability to withstand the personal, moral guilt of inflicting the pain.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">We must stop to question, then are the terrorist & the torturer made out of the same fabric of thought? Do they share the same mental makeup to inflict pain & suffering upon their own kind? How do they individually assess the morality of their actions? In short, what is right & what is wrong for each of them?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Sadly the answers we get are not black & white. Throughout the film we watch the brutality of the torturer in detail & his cold & calculated ability to deliver pain. We also face the cold & calculated suffering of the terrorist, who is one of the military's very own & his ability to withstand intimidation. These scenes feel like a slab of ice against the cheek, after a point we give in to the pain of watching it. The terrorist puts across a lot of moral points, chief of which is the ability of humans to torture or hurt one of their own, under some pretext. In his case, a terror suspect. The point is, should the terrorist as a human being have any rights & the dignity of a fair trial? Surprisingly, this question is not as easy to answer as it seems, when we have to work within the terrorist's rules of sharing the information. Then should we applaud our Indian judicial system to win a trial against a terrorist or should we applaud the tortures being conducted all around the world under some or the other pretext of counter-terrorism? Both can act as a deterrent to terror, but which one is more effective?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">The torturer, it seems is not part of the moral quagmire that regular people face. He is like the prosecutor who has to prove the guilt of the suspect & extract vital information to proceed with the investigation. Both work within their systems, one, within the system of man's fear & pain, the other within the system of law. The torturer knows that he has to deliver, he must have the strength to make those tough choices about the limits of pain & rely on nobody's judgement. He can't give in to the weakness of human dignity & suffering. He has to push through & in many cases make enemies for life, of all the torture survivors.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">The film is a lot more than what I am trying to convey. For obvious reasons I won't discuss the ending. On watching the reactions of all the other characters facing certain death if the bomb explodes along with a few million more deaths & the torturer's fight with himself & the terrorist, brings this film to a hair raising conclusion. The torturer is focused more on the process of getting the information out whereas all of us want to get the information (outcome) & move on with our lives. It makes sense when we read Saul Bellow's quote now, that we try to look at things for what we think they are rather than what they actually are. We choose to be blinded from the obvious & are happy to live within a perception, of course until the bomb blows up in our face.</span></div>
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oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-52559151297604426702011-04-24T09:13:00.001+05:302012-08-20T01:40:42.870+05:30Why is Literature Important?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">"<i>If they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.</i>" </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">This is a line from Thomas Pynchon's famous novel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gravitys-Rainbow-Classic-20th-Century-Penguin/dp/0140188592">Gravity's Rainbow</a>. A similar situation arose from asking questions to businessmen while researching their companies. If the questions that I ask them are not relevant according to them, then they don't need to worry about answering them accurately. Any answer would suffice as long as my sense of curiosity is satisfied. It takes to be a really good financial analyst, to figure out the relevant questions & to be a very good conversationalist in order to put these questions in the right context. Unless these questions are asked properly, the relevant & really important information that we seek, lies hidden. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I think this is also the nature of literature (or fiction, in general). There are questions & there are answers - they are not always pleasing to everyone. But they need to be put into the right context so that their answers will have some relevance to our life. We humans lead contemplative lives throughout which we ask these questions, about ourself, about the state of the world, about nature of things around us. And mostly we fail. Most of us don't get to see the answers the way they should be because we have our own lens to look at the world. The questions are tainted by our own observation & interpretation of things. Things are unresolved in our minds which is usually mistaken as a clear viewpoint whenever it becomes part of a chain of thought. The belief that if its a thought in our minds then it must be a tangible understanding of some concept seems wrong. This misleading judgement pushes us in two directions. The first one is the passive, complacent acceptance of our own ideas as the right version of everything. The other is an unsettling need to find several other versions of the same truth. In our confusion we try to compare our life with how others are living theirs & come up with these hopeless benchmarks of right / wrong ways to live. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Truth is not some abstract understanding of the world, but perhaps a way to frame the question properly so the answer emerges out of it.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Why are these questions important & what is the use of those answers?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The questions are an inevitable part of being human. In our truly idle moments we spend painfully long hours in connecting the dots. Dots that would be any parts of our life. Life is an abstract concept which is only finalized by the reality of death. Such a binary outcome of our existence seems too daunting to go through without some clarity about who we are & what are we doing here. The questions seem to form a part of this process to connect the dots between our existence & its significance. Its significance to us & relative to the world around us.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> The job of a writer is not just to create a fantastic world view & an entertaining plot. Its job is to create a world which we can relate to. Once we can relate to this world thats been verbally pulled over our eyes, we start imagining ourselves as a part of this world. We truly connect to the symbolism, to the characters & their relationships amongst themselves. We start seeing things from their perspective, just in case, to understand what we would do in the same situation. This adjustment of worlds leaves us totally vulnerable to these questions & thus we become more receptive to our own thoughts. We start treading cautiously into the unknown territory, we are wary of the imagery & begin to anticipate what might happen on the turn of the page. And when we least expect any looming thought around the curb of the next page, the writer introduces these questions. The very same questions that we ask ourselves, to get to know who, why, how, what we are. Of course they are not so obvious, but they start to emerge from the text. They build anxiety, they build doubt & they build confidence at the same time - that we can at least take a shot at answering these questions. In our fear of finding the ugly truth about ourselves, deeply hidden within a labyrinth of our thoughts, we finally start seeing light. It seems less embarrassing to ask ourselves those pointed questions & make meaning of our lives. It brings us the courage to come face to face with the fact that we have been what we have been so far, does it make sense? Is this the best I can get or do? Whats more? Am I pretending to be someone else?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Countless amount of wealth is spilt on psychotherapy, by millions of people to find the same answers. Or even to be able to face the same questions. Fear of the unknown is a natural part of our thought process & its evolution's ironic gift. It teaches us our limitations & at the same time keeps us from crossing them. But most of the fears that we have can be resolved mechanically, if not logically. But the fear of truly knowing who we are & to be afraid to find out that the answer might be unpleasant - is present in all of us.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The writer & his literature then becomes a tunnel for us to guide these thoughts to the light at the end. The light does not symbolize any clarity or the tunnel doesn't lead to any field of answers to our questions, but it leads us into a light of our own thoughts & our own ability to ask ourselves - 'Who am I'?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">But one question remains, which only the reader can solve for itself - If we truly find out what we really are & it's unpleasant according to us, can't we do something about it & change it into something relatively better or do we seek comfort in not finding the tumour & let the cancer spread till it eats us alive?</span></div>
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oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-67950642961867678912011-03-26T15:57:00.005+05:302012-08-20T01:42:01.875+05:30Protecting Values<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Why should rich world powers involve themselves in the internal conflicts of the countries with oppressive regimes? Like in Libya.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Two options lie ahead of us (whether of rich or poor-oppressed nations):</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">We can tolerate that other people are being oppressed & they should rise up against their own evils.</span></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Another approach is that we should intervene and get rid of the oppression & help those people stand up on their own feet, sooner.</span></li>
</ol>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">What are the pros & cons of such an approach? </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">To intervene or not intervene?</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The foremost reason is "trade" or "economic relations" between different regions of the world. When it was easy to get away with not moving around & live within self sustainable means, there was no incentive to reach out to see what the world had to offer. Even if there was an incentive as we can see in hindsight, it wasn't always economically viable. Instead local economics dominated over the minds of the locals. Since there was no conception of what goods/resources the world can offer, there wasn't any desire to explore the possibility. Fortunately not all people thought this way & some of them explored (mostly for the search of treasure to loot or countries to colonize) but nevertheless ventured out on funded expeditions. Once the goods from the new lands were brought back, there was an immediate comparison between its value with locally available goods. This might have created a dichotomy of value, what can we make better than them & what can they make better than us? </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Stealing ideas & designs was probably as old as then. But it doesn't change the economic basis of trade. We buy what we think is more valuable than the money we spend on it. If we believe that someone in a far away land can make something better than us & it can be economically transported with the least possible risk - we can hope to buy it at a reasonable price. This is the basis of international trade or at least the version that the WTO wants to believe.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">With massive explosion in distribution networks, it is far more prudent to find such economic value in a lot more nations than our own / our neighbors. So if a supply chain is disrupted on account of internal conflict in some part of the world, it automatically affects the lifestyle & economics of the nations that depend on the output of these strife led countries.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">But are there rules of protecting such economic interests of the world? </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Are there rules of engagement meant for the rich countries, which can be relied upon to engage in such situations?</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">What should be the priorities of the intervening nations - to protect their own interests or the interests of those oppressed?</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Can being selfish truly absolve the world's conflicts & create a better environment for trade?</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">So intervention even if it sounds ridiculous in the newspapers & borderline meddlesome - does it not ensure that markets remain free & their access remains equitable? </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I think international diplomatic relations are much more necessary to protect the smooth functioning of the markets as much as they are important for usurping oppressive regimes. But it will be exceptionally naive to assume that all the intervening parties will have the best intentions in mind. All of them, under the guise of freeing markets can have ulterior motives to control or dominate the region for themselves. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Will this lead to controlled colonization of the nations under strife? </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Should a super power be trusted with the authority to benevolently return the state to the rightful rulers after the conflict is over? </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">This was exactly the reason why most nations came under the oppressive regimes in the first place. Laying tremendous trust into the hands of someone powerful, in order to run the state as they please, until the state stabilizes. Besides, the rulers never left. Remember Caesar?</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The power, it seems, to turn the wheels of global trade & commerce will always lie in the hands of the powerful. As Muammar Gaddafi quoted in one of his speeches, 'The Strong will always rule". </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Is power of the people stronger than one regime? </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Is the wit of the people greater than one regime? </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Is camaraderie a reliable force to sustain trade? </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Finally, why does it always end up being a question about sustainable trade? Don't we have anything better to do?</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">There are examples of good governance leading to tremendous improvement in the standards of living of people. Singapore is an example that comes to mind. There are contradictions in the way the world works & they more or less evolve from they way people think about their values. The most ancient dichotomy lies between the values of the West vs the East. Western nations believe that free trade is the way ahead & they have evolved their political systems surrounding the assumptions arising out of it. Since they have been more prosperous with their approach, despite the price paid in history - this model of global capitalism seemed very juicy not to adopt. If these values spread, it will not only benefit the West, but also benefit the nations who adopt them. This has also been demonstrated by India, China, Brazil, & so on. So there lies an economic incentive in spreading your values & protecting your economic interests.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The East on the other hand has perhaps evolved its idea of capitalism from a more socialistic or a communist point of view.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">But, as your interests more & more depend on how other people lead their lives, it becomes necessary to set the path straight once in a while by intervening & suppressing the volatility in policy, The Economist has a <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/18395991">brilliant argument</a>, which seems logically correct so far - that in order to be able to promote its model of economic well being, it has to intervene & the moment it sacrifices its values by not intervening, the economic model will blow up in its face.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">As for why don't we have anything better to do than just trade?</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Well, we weren't always like this. In Matt Ridley's book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-How-Prosperity-Evolves/dp/006145205X">The Rational Optimist</a> - he cites that 'Transacting is not a natural phenomenon'. Humans developed the idea of trading/exchanging at least 100,000 years ago. They seemed to have figured out the logic, that the more you trade the more you prosper. Animals, although show examples of transactions in isolation it is nothing compared to the way we humans have evolved. If trading was such a dominant revelation in human thought, then it is necessary to ask, why did the industrial revolution not happen sooner?</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Now comes the biological kicker - human tendency, like other animals is to isolate & create special factions which share amongst themselves but not with outsiders. This has hugely restricted new ideas & inculcated group think amongst cultures. Well the obvious advantage of trade, specialization, production & consumption is apparent from our current urban lifestyles. But is it worth protecting? Are these values really so important that we have to try & show others the right path towards them?</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">What if, there is some hidden, unknown sense of life underlying the values of oppressed state - that the intervening world fails to see?</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">To answer that I'd like to cite what Ridley cites which more or less sums it up for why protecting markets is sometimes more important that protecting political ideologies - </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'<i>Political decisions are by definition monopolistic, disenfranchising and despotically majoritarian; markets are good at supplying minority needs.</i>' </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">- simply put - if we don't like an outcome of an election, we have to live with it. But if we don't like a hair dresser, we can always look for another one.</span></div>
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oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-80167454639866580662011-02-26T19:30:00.002+05:302012-08-20T01:41:21.379+05:30Sucker for Critical Inquiry<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I read an <a href="http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/india/article.cfm?articleid=4567">interview</a> of Gurcharan Das, about his latest book "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Difficulty-being-Good-Subtle-Dharma/dp/0670083496">The Difficulty of Being Good</a>". Here he casually mentions that in order to research <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata">The Mahabharat</a> he went to University of Chicago & sat among grad students to learn along with them. What's surprising is that a person can learn such a text with little cultural relevance to western philosophy, in a western university. I am pretty sure I have never come across any formal university course teaching The Mahabharat in India, where it was scripted.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">When asked why he chose to learn at the University of Chicago rather than in India, he said he didn't want to escape into Indian past & wanted to do a critical inquiry. I am not surprised by the answer, since this statement immediately took me back 10-12 years when I was in school & had started developing a decent amount of curiosity about history. It still remains my favorite subject to date. History was among the thinnest text books we had ever used. Second only to the Civics text books. Most of the assessment was done on the basis of how much we remembered from the text books (the dates, the figures, the people & their references, wars & other such details). I still don't remember learning history as a way to understand a way of living at that time, or even its contribution to how we live now. I would have loved to understand the importance of the freedom struggle of India in the context of why 'freedom' was a goal & what were the alternatives? Instead the focus was on atrocities of the British & how several movements fought against them with detailed facts & figures. Well, great lessons in anarchy, but what about infrastructure, governing & stability? Our civic & legal structures still mimic the british system which was instituted by them when they ruled. What has changed? Why should it change? Why was it considered bad? - these things were never discussed (emphasized).</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">When some non-Indian authors write about Indian historical figures, they run a risk of getting themselves & their books banned in the country - which becomes a major disincentive to promote critical study of history within India. Churchill reminded us that "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_history">History is written by the victors</a>", demands that future readers of that history use a lens of doubt to study those events & their interpretations. A political cult of a common version of history destroys the sanctity of facts & doesn't allow anyone to ask questions which might challenge that version of the <i>truth</i>. Instead it breeds complacency among the students to ignore history & treat it as a topic which gives them some extra credits in their final exams. It also breeds a sense of belief that it has nothing to do with their lives. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Well to be precise, if there is no history, there can't be any future ahead. No matter what the history text books, political opinion or even expert opinions believe - what has happened in the past, has happened for a reason & that reason is what must be emphasized. This precise lack of respect of what caused the events to take place makes people insolent towards the outcomes. No wonder people still litter at historical places in India. Nobody cares why that historical monument exists, but well its a great spot for a picnic, isn't it?</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Is this a job for education, politics or parents? Who decides what we must learn from history? I don't know what the right answer is, but its worth figuring out. Who can control our understanding of our culture & make people realize why it is not a good idea to write "I love you" on the walls of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajanta_Caves">Ajantha Caves</a>? </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">A <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/18180446">recent article</a> from The Economist casually mentions a very important point at its conclusion. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">"<i>21st Century skills may help our pupils become better workers; learning history makes them better citizens.</i>"</span></div>
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oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-43583779975759533032011-02-13T19:34:00.000+05:302012-08-20T01:41:02.665+05:30Loss? of a vision...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMxGmv9evocH5vSW2wqPqJS46hVvNn2IHMSFQc1vG4h4gsPb4s3cxupYPFjxX8e9Nicr9WKsF6rEurvhFCxEq7B2lYUMIvHqHMhhdXzrskDTNfhmgH_wGoNeowlZbv8c21WxX8Sg/s1600/DSC_0004.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMxGmv9evocH5vSW2wqPqJS46hVvNn2IHMSFQc1vG4h4gsPb4s3cxupYPFjxX8e9Nicr9WKsF6rEurvhFCxEq7B2lYUMIvHqHMhhdXzrskDTNfhmgH_wGoNeowlZbv8c21WxX8Sg/s320/DSC_0004.jpg" width="213" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Modi Road at 8:30 AM</span></td></tr>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I love walking down the streets of Mumbai. DN road, which on any average day is full of the sound of a cash register ringing in some shop or the other, or the sound of a card being swiped so that somebody could buy what they want to. But on a perfectly sunny morning - at around 8:30 AM - it is something else altogether. I don't know what it would look like if there was no british construction there. But the way the sunlit street shines up, waiting for opportunity to pass by every day. The sun light hits the architecture creating shadows of the past, giving those structures a purpose of being there. No matter what atrocities transpired within those bricks, it still was our moment back then. Its magnificent. I regret every single time I walk past this vision, without my camera. I don't know what I am supposed to be capturing here, but that moment is raw, thawing out there to be felt before it melts away.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The moment I cross the street to reach my workplace, the vision is gone, the sun has moved up a few degrees & the moment is no longer raw. It dissolves in the light - maybe someone has seized it & maybe it will be available for me to seize it on some other sunny day. But no one knows when that will be. The sun will have moved a few degrees away & the rays will not fall in the same way. If that moment was captured by someone, it could have lived an eternity.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I watched a film called <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0964517/">The Fighter</a> & the same thoughts rushed back. The boxer (Micky) who could have been a great fighter, was living under the shadow of his brother who was his hero & trainer. A former boxer, his brother Dicky was looking for his brother to be a great boxer but was pulled down by his drug habit. Eventually Dicky sobers up, Micky moves ahead without his brother's help but only because of Dicky's training. They get back together again, train harder & Micky wins the welterweight title at the fag end of his career as a professional boxer. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3D1i6SqTuOdlT0fN7Zm_wZ7MeLSsqs6FcD6B3fz7Dv1jQJSTYf071UvJAO0-TVVfNSeBsElbWKs-WycojbQVh5-vc9L8hON91SXYQOGbgJlN_2lJ8yzq_jOnbyn-hH9QgdpxmNA/s1600/The+Fighter_movie_stills_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3D1i6SqTuOdlT0fN7Zm_wZ7MeLSsqs6FcD6B3fz7Dv1jQJSTYf071UvJAO0-TVVfNSeBsElbWKs-WycojbQVh5-vc9L8hON91SXYQOGbgJlN_2lJ8yzq_jOnbyn-hH9QgdpxmNA/s400/The+Fighter_movie_stills_1.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Mark Wahlberg (Micky) during a 'fight'</span></td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The movie also speaks a lot about how opportunities come & go in our lives & we know when they are staring right at us. The look is penetrating, it makes us feel inspired & ready to go get it, but circumstances or our weakness holds us back. It is never clear what happens to the opportunity once it moves away. Maybe somebody else grabs it & makes good for themselves. But what happens to us, we end up staring at the empty road trying, yet again to put out our best effort to win another such opportunity back. Very few, I have observed are lucky to get such a chance again (like Micky was). But even then, it is up to us to realize that chance. The odds of winning will never be the same again. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">There are so many such instances in life I am sure I am missing to see, although they are staring at me intently. I know some of them, others I wouldn't even know about. What happens to those I know about & don't act on? </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Just like a photographer who has lost his vision, who has lost the opportunity to capture the light bouncing off those structures & the opportunity to immortalize that vision. Light had reflected upon the culture & had shown him a piece of history which was itself built on other such pieces of opportunity. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">That vision is lost & the lens has to move on to the next one. </span></div>
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oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-1511481282290195442011-01-12T19:43:00.000+05:302011-10-17T22:24:17.657+05:30Life to be...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I remember starting this blog for stroking my vanity, but it turns out people have been reaching out to me to tell me that they read it too. Well, it is in the public domain so I can't blame them. I am surprised, shocked and even humbled that how life for most of the people who commented and talked back at me about the blog can be remarkably similar and different from mine at the same time. The social context changes but the plot remains the same. The hunt for stability, the hunt for the right person to spend our lives with, the hunt for security & finally the hunt for purpose. I contradict with myself in most of those hunts but sometimes I also rhyme with them.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I have been writing at the end of every year since the past two years, about what I did in the year that will end and what I plan to do in the year to come. This time I deliberately broke the spell. There have been some fundamental changes in the way I perceive my life now and most of the previous view points will need a few alterations.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">2011, is a year of decisive change, just like 1985, when I was born. I got married in 2011, on the very first day, to a very sweet woman. Although what she means to me & what I feel about her strictly stays with me, locked in the secret chamber of my metaphorical heart. But all I can say is, she is awesome to be with.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The most common question I got asked was - "So, how does it feel after getting married?" - & I must say incidentally it always came from unmarried friends. I imagine that married friends don't wonder about it now :). The answers that raced through my mind were not exactly what I told them. I was thinking - wow, yippee, yeah, way to go - what I said was - it feels warm, it feels nice, it feels real now. Well all that and more, I finally got to ask myself. How does it <i>really</i> feel to be married? Is it any different from before when we used to spend enormous amounts of time speaking about anything with each other?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I think it is different, because now it has materialized. The day I so eagerly imagined & awaited just came and went but left with it a lot of incredibly beautiful memories. Now with things slowed down, I can finally reflect upon how the whole event was. Now its just me & her and our life together with our family. I can't imagine how big an adjustment it must be for her. She will be staying with us in our home and leaving her maternal home for good. The daily life, the daily chores, the daily noises around the house, the dog that used to occasionally wander into their compound, the garden in her backyard, will all be replaced with a different landscape. The landscape now would be our home, a new life and a whole lot of dreams to make real. For me, possibly the adjustment was easier than hers. She was there on the phone a few moments ago, & now she is here for good, a few moments later. Yes, the loud music, the action films, the inordinate amounts of time spent reading will all have to make its room around my new life now. But that is nothing as compared to what she has to go through.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Does it say that a relationship means sacrificing one's lifestyle for fitting into a new one? I don't know what others feel, but I believe it is more of an adaptation than a sacrifice. The semantic difference may not be much, but there is a big difference in its interpretation. We as humans, I believe, have evolved to face social changes. Changes which involve things to do with other people, and the situations surrounding people. We are incredibly adept at getting used to social scenarios and not so much to physical scenarios. Thats why emotionally we are more malleable. Whenever a physical change faces us, we change the environment or our physical appearance (wearing a sweater during cold & so on). But I am no expert on relationships, not even on my own relationship. But I can be sure of one thing that, it definitely feels awesome to have someone sneak into my life and change its perspective from within.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Another thing that surprised me the most was how an atheist like me, took part in a religious wedding ceremony. Well to be honest with myself, I couldn't resist seeing everybody enjoying the wedding. My whole family is religious (meaning, has faith in a higher authority). But I turned around from this faith a long time ago. But even with our differences we had lived & shared all moments of joy & sorrow. I think there is no logical barrier required to enjoy any celebration. The fun in such an event is the usual chaos & the precision of all events. The rituals & their significance was interesting to know, but it has honestly lost its relevance in the modern times. The duties of a married couple which are eventually explained through all these rituals, are socially bred into us right since our childhood. Possibly several thousand years ago, the wedding ceremony might have been the only place to impart such an education to the couple. Most people believe that the whole Indian wedding is sexist and biased towards treating woman with less importance. This I take objection to, because no where in the entire ritual it is mentioned that woman is secondary in marriage. In fact to be honest, there is no room for even the ritual to take place if there is no woman involved. A woman is an integral part of a family and thats what the ritual indicates. Despite having known the symbolism people still prefer to carry out their celebrations with rituals. This indeed is very surprising to me as a skeptic. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Well I think I stumbled upon a reasonable explanation in E. O. Wilson's book, Consilience. He infers that, "<i>Ceremonies stripped of sacred mystery lose their emotional force, because the celebrants <u>need</u> to defer to a higher power in order to consummate their instinct for tribal loyalty.</i>" This can be an empirical truth, since I have seen people bonding together very well during ritualistic celebrations. The organized preparations, the delegation of different work to everyone, the sheer excitement behind the ceremony is very obvious from the energy with which everybody prepares. After all, for me religion has always been close to emotion. In my case my emotion is derived from logic, but my family doesn't necessarily share that point of view. They still derive a lot of emotional pleasure from rituals, ceremonies & togetherness. Perhaps this is the tribal loyalty E. O. Wilson was talking about. I must agree, it was a whole lot of fun to enjoy this way with everyone, despite my lack of faith. Since, faith doesn't play much of a role here after a point, once the symbolism is understood.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This wedding has brought me closer to my family. I didn't know that I had drifted away so far with my thoughts. But now I have come to infer that differences of ideas, logic or opinion don't really matter when you still have the capacity to empathize, understand & love.</span></div>
</div>oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-51120877681540623442010-10-24T11:37:00.002+05:302011-10-17T22:25:50.180+05:30Ineffectively Effective<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Its a crazy notion to have after a decade's worth of usability experience. After I have graduated to using good technology in the form of my new mac, it suddenly dawned on me that whatever I know about computers & IT systems (those necessary and unnecessary details), I owe it to the pain and suffering of my Windows-PC days.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I think <u>this</u> human brain is not equipped to enjoy life's simplest pleasures but to constantly mull over details. But I like this idea. I don't know a lot, but I know more than average about computers than there is to know. Apart from my graduation in the field of IT, I wouldn't have had the claim to knowing anything I know about computers. But this education begun a lot earlier in my childhood.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">There was a dutiful windows PC at my uncle's place, which me and my cousin used to tinker with. Then there came a PC at my home, which I used to tinker with. The tinkering was less due to curiosity and more due to some abnormal machine behavior. To come to terms with it now, it was more about curiosity than about abnormal machine behavior. I distinctly remember dis-assembling my computer for the first time, each part lying on the floor as a spare part in a broken machine. I also remember what happened after that, I forgot how it looked before and how to put it back together again (big oops there). Then came a horrible 5 hour zig-saw workout, trying to put humpty dumpty together again. I put it back together and there it was, working like a charm. After that I knew a lot more about the relationships of various parts in the computer than I knew before. No college degree in IT can teach you that so effectively. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I had developed a new found respect for closed systems because of this experience. The kind of software environment that windows has, also makes it easier to get various software applications to use for any of your needs. This is thanks to a very strong developer community which fed the outsized market share of Windows. Understanding how the hardware works, understanding the software environment have surely helped me appreciate the system more when I started programming. I think I owe my "big picture" viewing skill to my early days of suffering with my PC. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">To make the picture even bigger, I think suffering and pain have a lot more to offer than pleasure and satisfaction. Suffering creates a desperate need to get out of that feeling, and it probably is the source of the urge to act, to move, to aspire and to achieve. Suffering is also an extremely good educator. It holds us up by our heel, upside down, shows us how bad it can get, effectively pointing us to hell. Then it drops us and hopes that we land on our feet. If we fail to land on our feet, we succumb to the suffering and if we do land on our feet, we learn about our ability to stand amidst any great fall.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">My PC days were filled with remarkable ineffectiveness and lots of lost productivity. I almost always ran out of Memory (applications became more powerful than my ability to upgrade my computer's memory). I always had the processor 5 times less effective than the one needed to run what I wanted to run. I was always ran out of hard disk space (data grows on you, mysteriously, until there is no space left on the disk). So all these things, could have held me down and I would have constantly demanded a better computer, almost every 6 months, which I did. But my father knew something I didn't, perhaps. He never gave in. So now I had to be satisfied with what hardware I had. It taught me amazing lessons about living within my means. Even now, I tend not to exceed my means (in money, time, computer memory) even when I have enough of it. I use it conservatively remembering the times when all these things got used up a lot faster when I didn't keep a check. What a way to learn to be frugal, I think!</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So I owe most of my simple ways of life, to my small tete-a-tete with technology (or the lack of it). I am sure living in a urban setting has the same effects on the human mind. There is usually no adversity of opportunity, which teaches us to take it for granted. But I appreciate the people who come from the country side or from under privileged part of the society, where the opportunities for growth (personal and social) are so scarce that they grasp to any opportunity, big or small, with the same fervor. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I think there are more lessons in adversity worth learning than we normally want to get away from.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I think I am beginning to agree to what Marcel Proust said, "We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full".</span></div>
</div>oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20981193.post-77484891735680173022010-10-03T13:19:00.000+05:302011-10-17T22:24:29.293+05:30Balls<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">A while ago I read a <a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/establishments/68513/">typical Wall Street Billionaire's</a> profile. The article like any other biographical work, misses the finer details and focuses merely on the material achievements of the person. But that wasn't what intrigued me. It wasn't the first billionaire bio I was reading. All the billionaires who I had read about have been babies of opportunity, as I would like to call them. They saw the same world that we all see, but observed opportunities. Now out of all those who observed the opportunities, only a few billionaires had the "balls" to do something about it.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It got me to think, where do I get these pair of balls to act on an opportunity when everyone around me is telling me that 'I'm being an idiot'?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But like all things worth acquiring, there is an equal amount of luck and skill involved in getting them. One widespread idea which can be seen floating around almost everywhere like oxygen, is lifestyle. In better words, 'looking like your bank statement'. I have seen so many people, including me, fall prey to this idea. Its a networth obsession. Nothing seems to be enough if measured strictly by the size of our current bank statement. The author Joseph Heller made a remarkable statement when compared to his billionaire friend. He said, that 'I have something which he can never have, the knowledge that I have enough'.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Back to balls, I think the idea of having the balls and audacity to do something about an opportunity comes not just from the detachment from the networth effect, but also from the idea that its irrelevant in the long run. Why so? Its probably because of greed and fear again. Greed to have more and fear of losing it all. That greed works miraculously in our favor when we are pursuing that opportunity. The Hunger to do it better than the rest, hunger to learn, hunger to test our limits, hunger to test the boundaries of everything. This <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094291/quotes">greed</a> pushes us far ahead than the rest. This is not just about the money, by the way. I have seen so many folks working in NGO's driven to such an extent to their cause, that they would actually get deluded from the reality of the world around them and indulge in idealism. Idealism is good, only if you can live to talk about it. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">How long does this hunger last? Is it part of our character to be hungry for something all the time? I think every person is hungry for something - love, attention, respect, power, money, envy of others, knowledge, social welfare, fairness, equity, and all the other things that drive people. This can very easily transform into greed if it is made an important benchmark for wellbeing - darn <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine#Dopamine.2C_learning.2C_and_reward-seeking_behavior">dopamine</a>. This hunger might be sufficient to identify opportunities, identify ways to get ahead of others. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So what stops most people to go after what they are hungry for? - Well one hypothesis can be that we don't necessarily know what we are really, consciously hungry for. Or the other side of the assumption is - Balls. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I think fear sets in a lot sooner than hunger, probably even before hunger/greed. Since there is a fear of not doing well for ourselves, not being able to achieve what we wish to achieve, it might also drive the greed to achieve it. From the profile I mentioned in the beginning and all the other biopics of these billionaires (by wealth only), all of them show remarkable similarity in one form of behavior. They aren't afraid of going to zero. The person in the interview, David Tepper (hedge fund billionaire) says when asked about his abnormal confidence to achieve what he does, "I was never afraid to go back and work in the steel mills." Not being afraid of losing a lifestyle. I always wonder what would make a normal person take that kind of a risk? I still don't know, maybe hunger for more is the answer, but only maybe.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Probably this is what is known as balls, the ability to detach from a social benchmark of well being and being focused on what you can and want to do. Disagreeing with the rest of the world and defining my own boundaries, probably is a better way to look at the idea of having balls to do something. Otherwise why would there be any progress? No food will be made without being hungry enough to eat it. This biological response to hunger for food is so easy to understand, then why is it usually difficult to understand the psychological hunger for something/anything? </span></div>
</div>oraunakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03786684995493382739noreply@blogger.com0