eXHAUST mYSELF

Deccan Chronicle (and other news papers): Cleavage for young minds

2009-07-27T16:48:09Z

At around 1439, Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type and changed the world. Print media was born. Newspapers came into being. They motivated people. They exposed secrets and cover-ups. They overthrew governments. They united people. They gained independence for countries. They kept people informed. Educated them. Motivated them. They told awesome stories and events from around the world. They sold because of quality content. All were happy. Then more newspapers came. Then competition began. Then money became the goal. Newspapers became business. Profit making business. Newspapers had to sell. Not quality. Quality got replaced by cleavage. Cleavage sold. Sold to the young minds. The future of this country is run by the young minds inspired by the cleavage of women glorified by Deccan Chronicle. People no longer buy pornographic magazines. They buy the likes of Deccan Chronicle and the daily supplement in the Times of India. Hustler and Debonair are no longer profitable. They now have to compete with the Times of India and Deccan chronicle priced much lower and serving millions of people more than Hustler and Debonair can possibly reach.

Which porn newspaper do you subscribe to?

The miserable state of Indian movie posters

2009-07-27T15:25:56Z

It is quite a well established fact that a lot of Indian movies are cheesy. However, off late, there has been an increasing trend of good realistic movies being thrown out by new directors and actors (Anurag Kashyap comes to mind). This is good news for a lot of movie fanatics like me.

However, on the other hand, one simply has to look at the fact that Akshay Kumar is the highest tax-paying actor in the country. This clearly establishes that cheesy movies have a big market.

I was at the cinemas the other day and came across this Kannada movie film poster. The name of the movie is Junglee and in a certain way the characters tend to be true to the name of the film. As long as movies like these are made and people are there to watch it, the chances for quality movies to make money are far off (except for the occasional hits). And there is only so much filmmakers can make films without the reward of money.

Note in this poster, shades on the eyes of the fake Shahrukh Khan and another pair hanging on the T-Shirt. Why are Indian film makers obsessed with making dumb-ass cheesy movies with standard formula of romance and dance around trees and costumes no one wears in reality? To top it off, the poster says all about the quality of the movie.

And then I found another movie poster.

This is as slutty (Is that the right word? I am out of words) as movie posters get. An item of clothing 3 mm thick separates romance from cunnilingus in this poster. Why don't they just bare it all and avoid the hypocrisy?

Now check this other poster.

A movie starring an Indian Pirate and a bald vulture as a side-kick. Once upon a time, Indian rippers had some dignity. The rip off was very subtle. One would be hard pressed to identify copied content. But not anymore. With Indian film makers losing skin and trying to capitalize on the popularity of Hollywood flicks, super-obvious Indian rip-offs are all the rage now. I don't know Telugu (or is it Kannada?), but I suspect this movie is called Pirate of the Andra Pradesh (or is it Karnataka?)

And finally here is a poster that is the product of the average of all the other non-plagiarized Indian movie posters.

When nothing is left to be copied or when enough copying has been done, this is the standard template for most Indian films - Hero, Heroine, Eye blinding clothing and a white jacket in hot weather. Where are all the creative people in this country?

If any movie poster designer is reading this page, do take a look at the 100 best movie posters of all time

P.S: My phone camera has become slutty having taken these pictures!

Practical questions that need answers to become a vigilante

2009-01-09T13:48:42Z

Image source: http://www.blogcadre.com/files/images/superheroes.jpg

Bruce Wayne is rich and has an R&D lab for himself besides the geeky Morgan Freeman for support. Superman was born super and Spiderman has Kirsten Dunst. Ironman has everything! I have none of these, but we all have one thing in common: The desire to remove the wrong-doers from the society.

So I was thinking, seriously, if I wanted to be a vigilante fighting evil, how would I go about it? This would be an herculean effort for someone like me who spends 18 of 24 hours a day in front of the computer. At 5'9" and 70 kgs with a pot belly, there are a lot of questions that need to be answered when attempting to indulge in such radical behavior. Off the hat, I need to figure:

1) Do I model myself after known super-heroes or do I create a new avatar?

Since I am making all this effort in real life, I might as well take some credit for it by creating a new brand of Vigilantism. This could help me financially in terms of merchandise, comic books, movie rights and such (too much to ask?).

2) What costume will I wear - underwear over pants or pants over underwear?

Tight fighting spandex that will make my belly and genitals stand out is not an option. However, I do need something that will help create an identity besides being comfortable for all the action. A logo that stands out is an absolute must (or is it?).

3) Where can I get the costume made?

This will be a good opportunity to learn fashion designing. Practically speaking, walking around in plain clothes would be easy to morph in and out of my vigilante personality but this would kill my disguise if spotted and also remove the opportunity to spread message by nature of my visual identity.

4) How will I get my message across to the public?

Graffiti is not practical, nor are focused beams with bat (replace with any other logo I come up with) cut-out masks. Cannot make direct contact with media, I fear cops being able to track me down. Anonymous emails also seem to be traceable (Help me out geeks!) these days. Publishing pamphlets is also not practical, I could be turned in for a reward by the publisher. Home printed messages randomly thrown around in the city might not be effective in communicating the message besides adding to the existing garbage and cows on the roads.

5) How can I evade the cops?

This is a tough one. The Indian law enforcement is very vulnerable to bribery and I will need to build good contacts to weasel my way out of the situation if I am caught. This is not practical. Besides, most of the thugs have good rapport with the cops. I don't think I can financially disturb the relationship between cops and the thugs. Needs more thinking.

6) What weapons can I gain access to and how I will I beat up professional thugs?

I have no illusions about my physical skills. With no formal training with weapons and a body that can at best push a heavy table, this is going to be one of the toughest challenges in becoming a vigilante. Either I go get myself trained physically and with weapons or I rely on brains and chemicals to put down the enemy (Perhaps the writers of Christopher Crocodile could help me with this). At present I own some steel-handle kitchen knives in 3 sizes and a 100$ Japanese sword made in San Francisco that looks real but is functionally untested.

7) What will be my mode of transport?

This will be essential for fast getaways. I don't have the expertise to custom design street-illegal vehicles. I would love to hack and use one of those tanks the Indian army has put for display in various road junctions in Bangalore. But that is just a fantasy. I could use my 2 wheeler, but then I will have to remove the number plates. However, my bike is just not cut out for fast escapes on bad roads besides being not armored to withstand bullets.

8) How do I select my targets?

All said and done, whom am I fighting against? At the frontlines of the Indian society are the auto-drivers (3 wheeled cabs in India) who make life miserable by refusing to use government specificied fares for travel, demanding double-fare or simply refusing to come to destination of the passenger's choice. Then there are corrupt cops and other government officials. Politicians mostly being disguised thugs are important targets but they might be hard to gain access to (what with me reading the news item that the government spends Rs. 250 crores every year in VIP security. Most politicians turn out to be VIPs in front of the mirror). This question will need serious thinking and good strategies. Choosing targets needs careful planning and escape strategies.

9) What are the ethical boundaries in becoming a vigilante?

While wanting to bring about change via violence, I would like to think of myself as a peaceful man. I don't want to kill or injure anyone permanently but no guarantees can be made when deciding to indulge in such dangerous methods as vigilantism. Pepper spray with a message would be ideal but I doubt if it can motivate people to change.

10) What is my motivation?

A) Watchmen. B) All the corruption and bureaucracy, greed for power and money and the feeling of even a common man is this country about being able to get away with wrong doing (I feel this too, else why would I decide to become a vigilante?) needs cleansing. The question is: Can I clean this society? Vigilantism is an option I am looking into.

This is just the beginning. So many more details to be thought about and plans put into place before the belly gets any bigger. Suggestions and questions are welcome.

Microsoft/FaceBook/Google from India? Can Indian Society produce Gates/Larry/Zuckerburg?

2008-08-09T17:19:11Z

http://www.pluggd.in/2008/07/microsoft-facebook-google-from-india-can-indian-society-produce-gates-larry-zuckerburg

To quote from the article:

#2 Our Aversion toward extremism

We, as a society enshrine moderation. No one likes to take a firm stand and people feel offended when you advocate your belief passionately. I feel this uneasiness every time I advocate the merit of Wikipedia and ask people to contribute to it. Folks around us expect us to dilute every assertion with “It depends” and avoid confrontation. But confrontation and friction is required for excellence.
We need to teach ourself that confrontation is not insubordination. Single minded obsessive focus on one thing is a must for creating something which is out of the world. But sadly no one I know wants to work with a leader who is extremely obsessed about his work .

Brilliant read.

Enchantress of Florence

2008-06-11T13:01:30Z

I have refrained from reading Indian authors because a few attempts at reading them gave me a feeling that the books are based on emotions of people and not on research which is the case with most american and british fiction writers.

And then, I picked up The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie.

I was running out of money to by a hard bound copy of the book. But the book looked so beautiful that I wanted it real bad. But imagine my excitement when it turned out that there was no unbounded version of the book.

And then, after reading a few pages, I figured, the inside of the book is as beautiful as the outside. Words so beautifully express content and make one fall in love with the language of Rushdie. I have not finished the book yet. But from what I have read, I have figured that the research and the story don't matter in this book. The language itself is so beautiful that it deserves a read. Beautiful usage of words.

A special mention would be the paragraph where Rushdie explains why Akbar is the Great King of Kings. In less than a page, with beautiful words, Rushdie convinces you that Akbar was indeed a great King. Would I have ever cared otherwise?

I am impressed.

Religion: It exists because it is the easy way out

2008-05-31T12:29:35Z

Believing in something that is as unfounded as religion and god is so rampant because people are way too lazy to put in the effort to find out the reason why the world exists as it does. On the other hand, religion just gives an explanation to everything in a plate for people to digest. And since many seem to be digesting it easily, a lot more are motivated to do the same. On the other hand, doing science to figure out why things behave the way they do is a more complex task which not all can do and consequently science takes a second place to religion in society in terms of followers. But little do people realize that the conveniences in their lives are not served by religion but by science. The utter lack of respect for that source of comfort and knowledge and the profound respect for something as irrational as religion and god is highly disturbing and contrary to the human ability to accept reason. Perhaps, accepting reason is like common sense, not so common. But one can take relief in knowing that as generations pass, people see the truth and a day will come when rational thinking and science drive man's growth exponentially uninhibited by the dogmas of religion and god.

Theory of everything

2008-05-25T08:52:51Z

Everything is a thought.

Why women should not appear on TV in Islam

2008-05-20T14:15:40Z

Something about this looks familiar

2008-05-06T08:14:03Z

Quotes

2008-05-04T13:08:15Z

"There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence—or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly's wings. The insect would fly just as well without them."
—The Lost Worlds of 2001, 1972 - Arthur C. Clarke

"The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion."
—"Credo," Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! Collected Essays, 1934-1998, 1999 - Arthur C. Clarke

"Once you start doubting, just like you are supposed to doubt, you ask me if the science is true. You say no, we don't know what is true, we are trying to find out, and everything is possibly wrong.

Start out understanding religion by saying everything is possibly wrong. Let us see. As soon as you do that, you start sliding down an edge, which is hard to recover from and so on. With the scientific view, or my father's view, that we should look to see what is true, and what maybe and what may not be true, once you start doubting, which I think to me is a very fundamental part of my soul, to doubt and to ask, and when you doubt and ask it gets a little harder to believe.

You see, one thing is, I can live without knowing and uncertainity and not knowing. I think its much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainity about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we are here, and what that question might mean. I might think about it a little bit and if I can't figure it out, then I go onto something else, but I don't have to know an answer, I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysteriour universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me." - Richard Feynman

The possibly impact of the Rs. 60,000 crore farmer loan waivers

2008-03-22T13:17:36Z

I am no economic expert and my thoughts on this matter may not be well founded. But I can't help but feel that I might be right about the negative consequence of these loan waivers on the Indian economy.

The Indian finance minister announced farmer loan waivers worth Rs. 60,000 crores at this year's budget a few weeks back. This amounts to approximately $15 Billion if my math is right. Also announced was the minimum taxable salary raise from Rs. 1,00,000 p.a to Rs. 1,50,000 p.a for men. The latter announcement made me feel good about the fact that I would now take home more money than earlier. This latter announcement however clouded my judgement of the former.

A cursory glance made me feel that the loan waiver could help the agricultural sector and add to the already booming economy. But deeper analysis complemented by few incidents that I encountered recently make me believe that this might have been a big mistake on the part of the government. There was an uproar by the opposition that the budget rewards were a political tactic to secure votes for the next election. Most of India still being an agrarian society contributes a huge percentage to the vote bank. If the opposition claims are true and if the decisions are not backed by sound economic priniciples, India might be in for trouble.

Social and economic progress in any society is a direct result of the effort of the people to produce and add value to the system. Hard work implies more production implies more money with value implies increased purchasing power implies comforts implies increased standard of living.
This is the only way economic development happens provided there are no artificial obstacles and the people work honestly.

Without the artificial economic boosters that the governement puts in place, society would progress at a slower pace, but progress it will. When there is increased production, the impact is visible in all classes of the society. The labor class moves up to become small and medium land owners. The medium land owners become large land owners and the previously large land owners become super large land owners or move out of the agricultural business into an industry that can make better use of the money he/she has. This brings up the question - who fills the role of the labor class if they move up the social scale? Machines are the answer. Advancement is science as contributed to by those who can afford good education in middle and upper classes results in automation of the role previously filled by the labor class. This is a natural process and as time progresses more work is done by machines than humans. But effectively, we have achieved economic development.

People work to earn a living. If they have a tough start then they possibly take loans for an initial setup. This is followed up with additional hardwork to pay off the loans and lead to an individual's economic stability. All this work contributes to greater production which leads to social and economic progress.

At the lowest level of the agriculture society in india are laborers who toil with tools in the lands of the land owners who pay them daily wages. Besides the labor job, some of these people also own small plots of land which feeds them enough for their survival. The day job is a means to provide basic amenities like clothing and shelter.

By announcing the huge loan waiver for farmers, the government has artificially raised the standard of living of the agricultural class. This is especially applicable to the poorer of the agricultural class as the loan waiver is only entitled to people with limited land and income. By artificially raising the living standards of the labor class, the government induced an aritifial labor shortage there by affecting the medium and large land owners. There are no machinery to replace the gap left by the missing labor class. Even if there is machinery, it is not affordable to the land owners.

As ridiculous as true is the notion that a lot of people in the labor class are more than happy having three meals a day, a roof over the head, a television for entertainment and clothing for comfort. Most people do not feel the need to work more and struggle to increase their own standard of living. People are complacent by nature in the convenience of the known where risks are limited. By raising the standard of living of these people artificially, the government has effectively created an environment which invalidates the labor class' need to work.

As an interesting example, a friend of mine narrated an incident in her home town where her she owns coffee estates. Daily wages for coffee picking were Rs. 65 and the laborers worked 6 days a week. When the daily wages were increased to Rs. 75, people started turning up for work only for 5 days because now they made approximately the same money as earlier working for a lesser amount of time. The laborers conveniently chose to stay put at home rather than work for an extra day. This resulted in unplucked coffee and destroyed crops. Prices of coffee fell. This is the general scenario in the home state of my parents where there is a severe shortage of laborers because of loan waivers and other benefits government provides to the low income class of people. The labor shortage exists inspite of the land owners willing to pay more wages.

Add to the above scenario the loan waivers and we can see that agricultural production will slowly come to a halt. When that happens, prices for commodities will soar and inflation will rise. In the end this inflation will affect the very same labor class who will now struggle to meet their basic maxims of life working for 5 days. Now they will have to start working much more than earlier to earn as much as earlier which isn't enough anymore (because of inflation). This not only affects the labor class but everyone who needs for for survival.

I hope I am wrong for the sake of seeing progress in society. But I fear otherwise. This money would have been better used building better roads all around the country. Setup a committee that oversees corruption free implementation of good roads. This would have a greater impact on the economy overall including the agricultural sector by helping save transportation time of goods produced and commutation time of people who can spend more time working.

fzkl @ 2008-03-21T20:58:00

2008-03-21T15:31:07Z

One of the best

The Atheist Apocalypse

2008-03-21T06:37:48Z

http://www.viruscomix.com/page433.html

Ambition

2008-03-18T19:20:19Z

A friend today asked me if I thought being ambitious was wrong and if it isn't, is being ambitious above everything else wrong? While my initial instincts jumped to vote for being ambitious, I decided to think over and analyze before I give my final word.

To find the answer to this question, it is necessary to dig deeper and find the origin of ambition and evaluate its role in life. It is also necessarity to evaluate the conflict of interests that can arise between ambitions and a social life (which I suspect is what my friend meant referred to as "above all else".

Without dwelling really deep into the purpose of life, and for the sake of a realistic answer to that question, and most importantly to settle for a definite answer, I would say happiness is the purpose of life. Everything people do in life is meant to make them happy. Being happy for as many instances in a life time as possible is the ultimate purpose of life. Whether people realize it consciously or not, everything they do is to try and keep themselves happy. I have even caught myself feeling happy about being in an orgy of depression and sadness.

If happiness is the purpose of existence, then to achieve happiness one must accomplish feats that require an effort as input. The gratification of effort is the source of happiness in a man. To constantly put in effort to accomplish that which was set as a goal is the key to deriving happiness. The more the goals, the more the efforts, the more the sense of accomplishment, the more the gratification of efforts and hence - more the happiness.

Ambitions are not necessarily a long term goal. One could be ambitious about cooking great food, another for being productive at work, another for having good relationships with other people. People tend to associate career goals with ambitions. While that is not incorrect, a career goal is simply a layer of abstraction over smaller ambitions. Ambition to work hard plus ambition to think and come up with great ideas plus ambition to learn programming plus ambition to code a great idea plus ambition to learn marketing plus ambition to manage a project, all these ambitions put together and when accomplished would satisfy the ambition to make a lot of money which would could be a career goal or a greater ambition for a software programmer. This career goal is eventually realized when these induvidual ambitions are realized. Each step is rewarding in itself, contributing to smaller sources of happiness and in the end when the pieces fit together, there is a greater sense of accomplishment and happiness.

A person could have a set of unconnected ambitions that lead to happiness. For instance, finding a life partner might be an ambition that has nothing to do with a career goal (though a good partner might be instrumental in motivating a person to achieve a career goal). Having said that, it is hard to distinguish ambitions with targets in social life. The latter is a subset of the former. In effect, the answer to my friend's question probably is: consider all as ambitions, identify that which would give the most happiness, work towards that ambition which is more likely to be more rewarding. A key factor to consider is time. People tend to pay a lot of attention to career because working towards to a long term goal constitutes the greatest effort (though this happens in smaller steps) over a longer period of time. It might be wise to prioritize that ambition which one knows he/she would put in the maximum time of their life into to see the results of.

To summarize, everything in life is an ambition. The key is to prioritize each of these ambitions in the order of magnitude of happiness that comes as a reward for the efforts that go into fulfilling these ambitions. And of course, all this is based on the assumption that happiness is the purpose of life.

Ted talks - Vilaynur Ramachandran on the brain

2008-02-10T14:47:03Z

New Idea N+3: Polar powered data centers

2008-02-02T11:22:31Z

Data centers are huge buildings where massive chunks of computers sit together and process data. They are also where massive amounts of data are stored on hard drives. Think of companies like yahoo and google having huge amounts of user and general data. Where are all these stored? These are stored in data centers owned by these companies where there are hundreds of thousands of computers and hard drives processing information flying across the internet. Such a dense concentration of computers and hard drives in a building can result in extremely hot environments where temperatures are easily around 45 degree celsius (with all the cooling).

Companies like yahoo and google make significant investment in providing cooling solution for these computers. They are easily more than 10% of the cost of the entire hardware that run to billions of dollars in total value. A brilliant idea to cool these data centers would be to build data centers in ships and park them in antartic or arctic waters where they are weather cooled. Underwater submarine cables can connect to these ships and power rest of the world with information. In any case, very few people live in data centers and most of it is controlled over the internet from other places. So antartica would be quite feasible. This would be like an offshore oil-well, only this time its an information well. Nuclear reactors in ships could power these data centers and the crew to run the ship can be changed once in a while.

Hmm... I need to think of a way to monetize this idea....

New Idea N+ 1 : My theory of everything

2008-02-02T09:56:13Z

In my latest attempts to reason out everything around me, I now have a new theory for everything that exists. The grand unified theory of everything that Einstein and everyone after him have been trying to figure out. They have been looking in the wrong place!!! This explains all the unsolved mysteries of the world. It is the perfect solution. It brings everything under one fundamental idea. A single idea to reason out all other ideas without a contradiction. Here goes:

Everything begins with a single thought. A thought calling itself in recursion leading to more thoughts. It is thought reproduction. A thought leading to more thoughts further club together amongst themselves to form more thoughts and so on in an infinite chain. A massive permutation and combination of thoughts leading to more thoughts that never end. It is in the outer periphery of these thought combinations that totally new unheard of ideas are formed. New thoughts. These again get reused by merging with other thoughts to form still newer thoughts. It goes on and on and on.....

There are no physical forms, no atoms, no god, no tables and no keyboards. But the idea of such things simply existing as thoughts that form from other smaller thoughts. The idea of me, a human, is merely a collaboration of smaller thoughts. Fzkl is a thought formed from smaller thoughts that describe a physical form whose countours are shaped a certain way that other thoughts can identify. These countours are actually smaller ideas. The human body is a complex thought consisting of smaller thoughts that define internal organs and their functional mechanism. The many humans we see are merely thought's replicated with minor changes. Since there are an infinite permutations of thoughts, it is inevitable that there will be shit load of humans who have the same basic form but can still be distinct. 7 Billion distinct thoughts. All formed from previous thoughts. And this is just for humans. Extend this idea to everything around and this explains how everything exists.

We are all just thoughts floating, just existing, nothing is real but for the thoughts. And whats even more interesting is: a thought is created by another thought. So, in reality, a thought is just an imagination of another thought and thus does not exist. The implication of this is that there is only one thought which thinks other thoughts that think other thoughts and so on. And combinational thoughts sustain the first thought like as I am doing now by documenting the existence of the very first thought. A self sustaining recursive thought mechanism is the cause for the existence of everything that has ever been thought of. Contradictions can exist because two separate thoughts can be totally opposite but still exist because their combination came from different kinds of parental thoughts.

Its easy to draw an analogy to sexual reproduction. The young one has the traits of the parents. Child thoughts derive their characteristics from parent thoughts. And parents can differ and give rise to possibly opposite thoughts. Families of thoughts, their ancestors, forefathers.

My brain is currently overloaded and I can't keep going on. I may have to come back to this if there is a need. On a casual first read this theory of everything might come across as being flawed, but nothing that cannot be reasoned out because my idea permits existence of flaws. Flaws are merely thoughts of opposing nature to existing thoughts. So in effect, my idea is flawless and I do not have to reason out anything. Everything is understood implicitly - as thoughts.

The Jump

2007-09-17T18:29:56Z

How PCI Express defeated religion!

2007-07-09T09:42:20Z

I call myself a late luncher. The lunch time at work is 1PM to 2PM and I go for food only at 2PM. I do this to avoid sitting with colleagues and indulge in pointless gossip. This way, I typically spend only about 10-15 minutes for lunch instead of an hour. There are times when a few colleagues end up at the cafeteria when I am having lunch and the expected pointless conversations ensue.

One such meeting involved a discussion with a muslim colleague of mine on the leave policy at work. He wanted to know how I was able to convince my manager to take two weeks off from work as he was in need of a long vacation. He wanted to take off for 42 days starting august. That was a really long duration for a leave. I couldn't help but ask the reason for such a long leave and I was stumped by his reply which was: I want to go to this religious course in the mosque where I reach a higher level of religious acheivement, closer to god. I was too shocked to not ask any further questions except one.

I have been doing training sessions at work on an architecture called PCI Express for my colleagues. Its a 24 week session (1 session a week) that dissects the PCI Express architecture to the BIT level. The lunch encounter with my muslim colleague happened before the first class of the the training. Knowing what was in the pipleline, I asked my colleague if he was going to miss the training sessions and he said he didn't have a choice. He had made his priority the fullfilling of his religious interest.

Three weeks have passed by since this incident and I have completed three sessions in PCI Express. My muslim colleague who is to go only in august attended the three sessions that I have completed so far. Today at lunch I happened to be at the table along with him yet again. I asked him if he had spoken to my manager about the leaves and got them approved and he replied that he had decided to push his religious interest to later. When asked for the reason, his genuine response was: "I do not want to miss out on the architecture training sessions you are doing". This was inspite of him knowing that my sessions were being recorded.

I didn't say anything yet again. But I was filled with a certain sense of happiness. For me, science had won over religion. I have contributed in my own small way to peace in this world.

Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine by W. Daniel Hillis for Physics Today

2007-07-01T06:17:02Z

One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. His reaction was unequivocal, "That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard." For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right. Either way, he was interested. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company.

Richard's interest in computing went back to his days at Los Alamos, where he supervised the "computers," that is, the people who operated the mechanical calculators. There he was instrumental in setting up some of the first plug-programmable tabulating machines for physical simulation. His interest in the field was heightened in the late 1970's when his son, Carl, began studying computers at MIT.

I got to know Richard through his son. I was a graduate student at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and Carl was one of the undergraduates helping me with my thesis project. I was trying to design a computer fast enough to solve common sense reasoning problems. The machine, as we envisioned it, would contain a million tiny computers, all connected by a communications network. We called it a "Connection Machine." Richard, always interested in his son's activities, followed the project closely. He was skeptical about the idea, but whenever we met at a conference or I visited CalTech, we would stay up until the early hours of the morning discussing details of the planned machine. The first time he ever seemed to believe that we were really going to try to build it was the lunchtime meeting.

Richard arrived in Boston the day after the company was incorporated. We had been busy raising the money, finding a place to rent, issuing stock, etc. We set up in an old mansion just outside of the city, and when Richard showed up we were still recovering from the shock of having the first few million dollars in the bank. No one had thought about anything technical for several months. We were arguing about what the name of the company should be when Richard walked in, saluted, and said, "Richard Feynman reporting for duty. OK, boss, what's my assignment?" The assembled group of not-quite-graduated MIT students was astounded.

After a hurried private discussion ("I don't know, you hired him..."), we informed Richard that his assignment would be to advise on the application of parallel processing to scientific problems.

"That sounds like a bunch of baloney," he said. "Give me something real to do."

So we sent him out to buy some office supplies. While he was gone, we decided that the part of the machine that we were most worried about was the router that delivered messages from one processor to another. We were not sure that our design was going to work. When Richard returned from buying pencils, we gave him the assignment of analyzing the router.

The Machine

The router of the Connection Machine was the part of the hardware that allowed the processors to communicate. It was a complicated device; by comparison, the processors themselves were simple. Connecting a separate communication wire between each pair of processors was impractical since a million processors would require $10^{12]$ wires. Instead, we planned to connect the processors in a 20-dimensional hypercube so that each processor would only need to talk to 20 others directly. Because many processors had to communicate simultaneously, many messages would contend for the same wires. The router's job was to find a free path through this 20-dimensional traffic jam or, if it couldn't, to hold onto the message in a buffer until a path became free. Our question to Richard Feynman was whether we had allowed enough buffers for the router to operate efficiently.

During those first few months, Richard began studying the router circuit diagrams as if they were objects of nature. He was willing to listen to explanations of how and why things worked, but fundamentally he preferred to figure out everything himself by simulating the action of each of the circuits with pencil and paper.

In the meantime, the rest of us, happy to have found something to keep Richard occupied, went about the business of ordering the furniture and computers, hiring the first engineers, and arranging for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to pay for the development of the first prototype. Richard did a remarkable job of focusing on his "assignment," stopping only occasionally to help wire the computer room, set up the machine shop, shake hands with the investors, install the telephones, and cheerfully remind us of how crazy we all were. When we finally picked the name of the company, Thinking Machines Corporation, Richard was delighted. "That's good. Now I don't have to explain to people that I work with a bunch of loonies. I can just tell them the name of the company."

The technical side of the project was definitely stretching our capacities. We had decided to simplify things by starting with only 64,000 processors, but even then the amount of work to do was overwhelming. We had to design our own silicon integrated circuits, with processors and a router. We also had to invent packaging and cooling mechanisms, write compilers and assemblers, devise ways of testing processors simultaneously, and so on. Even simple problems like wiring the boards together took on a whole new meaning when working with tens of thousands of processors. In retrospect, if we had had any understanding of how complicated the project was going to be, we never would have started.

'Get These Guys Organized'

I had never managed a large group before and I was clearly in over my head. Richard volunteered to help out. "We've got to get these guys organized," he told me. "Let me tell you how we did it at Los Alamos."

Every great man that I have known has had a certain time and place in their life that they use as a reference point; a time when things worked as they were supposed to and great things were accomplished. For Richard, that time was at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Whenever things got "cockeyed," Richard would look back and try to understand how now was different than then. Using this approach, Richard decided we should pick an expert in each area of importance in the machine, such as software or packaging or electronics, to become the "group leader" in this area, analogous to the group leaders at Los Alamos.

Part Two of Feynman's "Let's Get Organized" campaign was that we should begin a regular seminar series of invited speakers who might have interesting things to do with our machine. Richard's idea was that we should concentrate on people with new applications, because they would be less conservative about what kind of computer they would use. For our first seminar he invited John Hopfield, a friend of his from CalTech, to give us a talk on his scheme for building neural networks. In 1983, studying neural networks was about as fashionable as studying ESP, so some people considered John Hopfield a little bit crazy. Richard was certain he would fit right in at Thinking Machines Corporation.

What Hopfield had invented was a way of constructing an [associative memory], a device for remembering patterns. To use an associative memory, one trains it on a series of patterns, such as pictures of the letters of the alphabet. Later, when the memory is shown a new pattern it is able to recall a similar pattern that it has seen in the past. A new picture of the letter "A" will "remind" the memory of another "A" that it has seen previously. Hopfield had figured out how such a memory could be built from devices that were similar to biological neurons.

Not only did Hopfield's method seem to work, but it seemed to work well on the Connection Machine. Feynman figured out the details of how to use one processor to simulate each of Hopfield's neurons, with the strength of the connections represented as numbers in the processors' memory. Because of the parallel nature of Hopfield's algorithm, all of the processors could be used concurrently with 100\% efficiency, so the Connection Machine would be hundreds of times faster than any conventional computer.

An Algorithm For Logarithms

Feynman worked out the program for computing Hopfield's network on the Connection Machine in some detail. The part that he was proudest of was the subroutine for computing logarithms. I mention it here not only because it is a clever algorithm, but also because it is a specific contribution Richard made to the mainstream of computer science. He invented it at Los Alamos.

Consider the problem of finding the logarithm of a fractional number between 1.0 and 2.0 (the algorithm can be generalized without too much difficulty). Feynman observed that any such number can be uniquely represented as a product of numbers of the form $1 + 2^{-k]$, where $k$ is an integer. Testing each of these factors in a binary number representation is simply a matter of a shift and a subtraction. Once the factors are determined, the logarithm can be computed by adding together the precomputed logarithms of the factors. The algorithm fit especially well on the Connection Machine, since the small table of the logarithms of $1 + 2^{-k]$ could be shared by all the processors. The entire computation took less time than division.

Concentrating on the algorithm for a basic arithmetic operation was typical of Richard's approach. He loved the details. In studying the router, he paid attention to the action of each individual gate and in writing a program he insisted on understanding the implementation of every instruction. He distrusted abstractions that could not be directly related to the facts. When several years later I wrote a general interest article on the Connection Machine for [Scientific American], he was disappointed that it left out too many details. He asked, "How is anyone supposed to know that this isn't just a bunch of crap?"

Feynman's insistence on looking at the details helped us discover the potential of the machine for numerical computing and physical simulation. We had convinced ourselves at the time that the Connection Machine would not be efficient at "number-crunching," because the first prototype had no special hardware for vectors or floating point arithmetic. Both of these were "known" to be requirements for number-crunching. Feynman decided to test this assumption on a problem that he was familiar with in detail: quantum chromodynamics.

Quantum chromodynamics is a theory of the internal workings of atomic particles such as protons. Using this theory it is possible, in principle, to compute the values of measurable physical quantities, such as a proton's mass. In practice, such a computation requires so much arithmetic that it could keep the fastest computers in the world busy for years. One way to do this calculation is to use a discrete four-dimensional lattice to model a section of space-time. Finding the solution involves adding up the contributions of all of the possible configurations of certain matrices on the links of the lattice, or at least some large representative sample. (This is essentially a Feynman path integral.) The thing that makes this so difficult is that calculating the contribution of even a single configuration involves multiplying the matrices around every little loop in the lattice, and the number of loops grows as the fourth power of the lattice size. Since all of these multiplications can take place concurrently, there is plenty of opportunity to keep all 64,000 processors busy.

To find out how well this would work in practice, Feynman had to write a computer program for QCD. Since the only computer language Richard was really familiar with was Basic, he made up a parallel version of Basic in which he wrote the program and then simulated it by hand to estimate how fast it would run on the Connection Machine.

He was excited by the results. "Hey Danny, you're not going to believe this, but that machine of yours can actually do something [useful]!" According to Feynman's calculations, the Connection Machine, even without any special hardware for floating point arithmetic, would outperform a machine that CalTech was building for doing QCD calculations. From that point on, Richard pushed us more and more toward looking at numerical applications of the machine.

By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he presented his answer in the form of a set of partial differential equations. To a physicist this may seem natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is a bit strange. Feynman's router equations were in terms of variables representing continuous quantities such as "the average number of 1 bits in a message address." I was much more accustomed to seeing analysis in terms of inductive proof and case analysis than taking the derivative of "the number of 1's" with respect to time. Our discrete analysis said we needed seven buffers per chip; Feynman's equations suggested that we only needed five. We decided to play it safe and ignore Feynman.

The decision to ignore Feynman's analysis was made in September, but by next spring we were up against a wall. The chips that we had designed were slightly too big to manufacture and the only way to solve the problem was to cut the number of buffers per chip back to five. Since Feynman's equations claimed we could do this safely, his unconventional methods of analysis started looking better and better to us. We decided to go ahead and make the chips with the smaller number of buffers.

Fortunately, he was right. When we put together the chips the machine worked. The first program run on the machine in April of 1985 was Conway's game of Life.

Cellular Automata

The game of Life is an example of a class of computations that interested Feynman called [cellular automata]. Like many physicists who had spent their lives going to successively lower and lower levels of atomic detail, Feynman often wondered what was at the bottom. One possible answer was a cellular automaton. The notion is that the "continuum" might, at its lowest levels, be discrete in both space and time, and that the laws of physics might simply be a macro-consequence of the average behavior of tiny cells. Each cell could be a simple automaton that obeys a small set of rules and communicates only with its nearest neighbors, like the lattice calculation for QCD. If the universe in fact worked this way, then it presumably would have testable consequences, such as an upper limit on the density of information per cubic meter of space.

The notion of cellular automata goes back to von Neumann and Ulam, whom Feynman had known at Los Alamos. Richard's recent interest in the subject was motivated by his friends Ed Fredkin and Stephen Wolfram, both of whom were fascinated by cellular automata models of physics. Feynman was always quick to point out to them that he considered their specific models "kooky," but like the Connection Machine, he considered the subject sufficiently crazy to put some energy into.

There are many potential problems with cellular automata as a model of physical space and time; for example, finding a set of rules that obeys special relativity. One of the simplest problems is just making the physics so that things look the same in every direction. The most obvious pattern of cellular automata, such as a fixed three-dimensional grid, have preferred directions along the axes of the grid. Is it possible to implement even Newtonian physics on a fixed lattice of automata?

Feynman had a proposed solution to the anisotropy problem which he attempted (without success) to work out in detail. His notion was that the underlying automata, rather than being connected in a regular lattice like a grid or a pattern of hexagons, might be randomly connected. Waves propagating through this medium would, on the average, propagate at the same rate in every direction.

Cellular automata started getting attention at Thinking Machines when Stephen Wolfram, who was also spending time at the company, suggested that we should use such automata not as a model of physics, but as a practical method of simulating physical systems. Specifically, we could use one processor to simulate each cell and rules that were chosen to model something useful, like fluid dynamics. For two-dimensional problems there was a neat solution to the anisotropy problem since [Frisch, Hasslacher, Pomeau] had shown that a hexagonal lattice with a simple set of rules produced isotropic behavior at the macro scale. Wolfram used this method on the Connection Machine to produce a beautiful movie of a turbulent fluid flow in two dimensions. Watching the movie got all of us, especially Feynman, excited about physical simulation. We all started planning additions to the hardware, such as support of floating point arithmetic that would make it possible for us to perform and display a variety of simulations in real time.

Feynman the Explainer

In the meantime, we were having a lot of trouble explaining to people what we were doing with cellular automata. Eyes tended to glaze over when we started talking about state transition diagrams and finite state machines. Finally Feynman told us to explain it like this,

"We have noticed in nature that the behavior of a fluid depends very little on the nature of the individual particles in that fluid. For example, the flow of sand is very similar to the flow of water or the flow of a pile of ball bearings. We have therefore taken advantage of this fact to invent a type of imaginary particle that is especially simple for us to simulate. This particle is a perfect ball bearing that can move at a single speed in one of six directions. The flow of these particles on a large enough scale is very similar to the flow of natural fluids."

This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. On the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality.

We tried to take advantage of Richard's talent for clarity by getting him to critique the technical presentations that we made in our product introductions. Before the commercial announcement of the Connection Machine CM-1 and all of our future products, Richard would give a sentence-by-sentence critique of the planned presentation. "Don't say `reflected acoustic wave.' Say [echo]." Or, "Forget all that `local minima' stuff. Just say there's a bubble caught in the crystal and you have to shake it out." Nothing made him angrier than making something simple sound complicated.

Getting Richard to give advice like that was sometimes tricky. He pretended not to like working on any problem that was outside his claimed area of expertise. Often, at Thinking Machines when he was asked for advice he would gruffly refuse with "That's not my department." I could never figure out just what his department was, but it did not matter anyway, since he spent most of his time working on those "not-my-department" problems. Sometimes he really would give up, but more often than not he would come back a few days after his refusal and remark, "I've been thinking about what you asked the other day and it seems to me..." This worked best if you were careful not to expect it.

I do not mean to imply that Richard was hesitant to do the "dirty work." In fact, he was always volunteering for it. Many a visitor at Thinking Machines was shocked to see that we had a Nobel Laureate soldering circuit boards or painting walls. But what Richard hated, or at least pretended to hate, was being asked to give advice. So why were people always asking him for it? Because even when Richard didn't understand, he always seemed to understand better than the rest of us. And whatever he understood, he could make others understand as well. Richard made people feel like a child does, when a grown-up first treats him as an adult. He was never afraid of telling the truth, and however foolish your question was, he never made you feel like a fool.

The charming side of Richard helped people forgive him for his uncharming characteristics. For example, in many ways Richard was a sexist. Whenever it came time for his daily bowl of soup he would look around for the nearest "girl" and ask if she would fetch it to him. It did not matter if she was the cook, an engineer, or the president of the company. I once asked a female engineer who had just been a victim of this if it bothered her. "Yes, it really annoys me," she said. "On the other hand, he is the only one who ever explained quantum mechanics to me as if I could understand it." That was the essence of Richard's charm.

A Kind Of Game

Richard worked at the company on and off for the next five years. Floating point hardware was eventually added to the machine, and as the machine and its successors went into commercial production, they were being used more and more for the kind of numerical simulation problems that Richard had pioneered with his QCD program. Richard's interest shifted from the construction of the machine to its applications. As it turned out, building a big computer is a good excuse to talk to people who are working on some of the most exciting problems in science. We started working with physicists, astronomers, geologists, biologists, chemists --- everyone of them trying to solve some problem that it had never been possible to solve before. Figuring out how to do these calculations on a parallel machine requires understanding of the details of the application, which was exactly the kind of thing that Richard loved to do.

For Richard, figuring out these problems was a kind of a game. He always started by asking very basic questions like, "What is the simplest example?" or "How can you tell if the answer is right?" He asked questions until he reduced the problem to some essential puzzle that he thought he would be able to solve. Then he would set to work, scribbling on a pad of paper and staring at the results. While he was in the middle of this kind of puzzle solving he was impossible to interrupt. "Don't bug me. I'm busy," he would say without even looking up. Eventually he would either decide the problem was too hard (in which case he lost interest), or he would find a solution (in which case he spent the next day or two explaining it to anyone who listened). In this way he worked on problems in database searches, geophysical modeling, protein folding, analyzing images, and reading insurance forms.

The last project that I worked on with Richard was in simulated evolution. I had written a program that simulated the evolution of populations of sexually reproducing creatures over hundreds of thousands of generations. The results were surprising in that the fitness of the population made progress in sudden leaps rather than by the expected steady improvement. The fossil record shows some evidence that real biological evolution might also exhibit such "punctuated equilibrium," so Richard and I decided to look more closely at why it happened. He was feeling ill by that time, so I went out and spent the week with him in Pasadena, and we worked out a model of evolution of finite populations based on the Fokker Planck equations. When I got back to Boston I went to the library and discovered a book by Kimura on the subject, and much to my disappointment, all of our "discoveries" were covered in the first few pages. When I called back and told Richard what I had found, he was elated. "Hey, we got it right!" he said. "Not bad for amateurs."

In retrospect I realize that in almost everything that we worked on together, we were both amateurs. In digital physics, neural networks, even parallel computing, we never really knew what we were doing. But the things that we studied were so new that no one else knew exactly what they were doing either. It was amateurs who made the progress.

Telling The Good Stuff You Know

Actually, I doubt that it was "progress" that most interested Richard. He was always searching for patterns, for connections, for a new way of looking at something, but I suspect his motivation was not so much to understand the world as it was to find new ideas to explain. The act of discovery was not complete for him until he had taught it to someone else.

I remember a conversation we had a year or so before his death, walking in the hills above Pasadena. We were exploring an unfamiliar trail and Richard, recovering from a major operation for the cancer, was walking more slowly than usual. He was telling a long and funny story about how he had been reading up on his disease and surprising his doctors by predicting their diagnosis and his chances of survival. I was hearing for the first time how far his cancer had progressed, so the jokes did not seem so funny. He must have noticed my mood, because he suddenly stopped the story and asked, "Hey, what's the matter?"

I hesitated. "I'm sad because you're going to die."

"Yeah," he sighed, "that bugs me sometimes too. But not so much as you think." And after a few more steps, "When you get as old as I am, you start to realize that you've told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway."

We walked along in silence for a few minutes. Then we came to a place where another trail crossed and Richard stopped to look around at the surroundings. Suddenly a grin lit up his face. "Hey," he said, all trace of sadness forgotten, "I bet I can show you a better way home."

And so he did.

The Boss

2007-06-17T06:38:37Z

It was a fine evening in Ooty with nothing to do but wait for the evening to die and friday to come. I went to the theater with a certain sense of apprehension about getting tickets for Rajinikanth's Sivaji. Getting tickets for the first day was going to be an impossible task but I was not going to give up. I was greeted with a board that said that there would be a special screening at 9.30 friday morning. And with luck in my hands tickets were available and I was all excited.

Somehow, in spite of hating movies that have the cliched can-do-all heroes, Rajinikanth was an exception. There is something about the chap that makes me want to go and watch his flicks. Though the last two Rajinikanth movies have been a disaster, I had some hope for this one, Shankar being involved. The problem with the last two Rajinikanth flicks were: The movie had to outdo his last movie in terms of style and stunts. Now, out of lack of creativity on the part of the makers of the movie or because of all possible styles and stunts having been explored, there is only so much a director can do until he unleashes gravity defying stunts to the audience. And there is only so much deviation from gravity that the audience can digest. The last two movies were of this type and would have put newton to shame for having come up with the concept of gravity.

I woke up on friday in the hotel room and switched on to find myself disappointed that I wouldn't be watching the movie first day first show. Apparently Albert Theater in Chennai had a screening at 5 in the morning. I was beaten by 4.5 hours. Which is crazy, my disappointment of not having watched first day first show or people crowding at the theater at 5 in the morning?

So I reached the theater only to find it empty. There were about 15 people in a balcony that could have seated 300 people easily. I was greeted by the trailer of Rajinikanth's next movie: Sultan the warrior. Rajinikanth looked young, what with all the computer graphics transporting him back by 30 years. The movie started and only then did the usher come in and verify the tickets at my seat.

Movie = Disaster.

a) Someone should tell shankar that 5 out of his 7 movies have abused the social development theme. He has run out of ideas for further exploitation of the theme
b) Too much time is spent on Rajnikanth's style and the songs which further weakened an already weak plot
c) Most gravity defying stunts were parts of a song and I was almost excited about a relatively normal Rajinikanth movie until the car stunt scene which must have made Mahindra a proud company for manufacturing the scorpio. The stunt started out with Rajinikanth in a Mitsubishi Pajero that sometime in between the fight sequence turned into a Scorpio. NASA should check with the movie makers on the propulsion system they used in the Scorpio.
d) I am not sure if A.R. Rahman gave a bad background score or if it was the fluttering speaker, but I was very disappointed with the sound, not to say the movie.
e) I will beat up the costume designer if I ever see him. Whats with the whacko colors for Rajinikanth's outfit? Even the famed Ramaraj must have been put to shame by this display or the lack there of a sense of color matching.
f) There is nothing Shankar about the movie but for the theme. The movie was badly executed. I heard they had spent 60 crores on the movie. I am not sure where all this money went.
g) Rajinikanth should retire before he disgraces himself any further.

Update:
A lot of them tell me that the movie was good. I am not sure if its because of the sad theater I watched the movie in or if I have really grown out of Rajinikanth flicks.

Illusions of grandeur

2007-05-30T09:36:46Z

I returned from my trip to the outside of India a couple of days back. In the last two weeks I have been to the US, Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong. While I have not exactly spent a lot of time at these places, I have seen enough to be able to clearly distinguish India from these countries.

The one thing that blew me off while in the US was the road system and the organization of the place. I have seen good looking roads in american movies and was always a sceptic of what roads were really like in the US. I now know that the roads are better than in the movies. The lane system, the speed limits, the city planning, the foresight of the people who built the place, unbelievable. While it might be a common place thing in the US and probably most of the rest of the developed world, I am still quite excited by the ability of civilized man to build such wonderful systems. The place was a stand out example of man's capacity to think and build great things.

Then there are the buildings. Huge sky scrapers that I drooled over. I have always been a sucker for tall buildings by virtue of which Mumbai happens to be my favorite city in India. However, what stood out in my eyes was the lack of compound walls around houses and buildings in the US. There was not a single building I saw in the US in my entire two weeks there which had a wall around it. It came across as a reflection of the attitude of people to let others to their privacy and not intefere.
Add to that the cleanliness of the place. It was hard to say which was cleaner, the outside of the buildings or the inside.

And then there were the people. Every store I walked into, I was welcomed with a lot of interest and there was a genuine desire amongst the sales people to help me with my purchases. Even those whom I told that I was just looking around with no intention to buy were glad to show me around the place. There were stores that would price match with any competitors. There were stores that would take back a product upto one month after purchase if the buyer isn't satisfied with the product. Then the people at work. They came, did their work and left. They did not ask personal questions. They do not waste my time. They offered for help if I needed any. And the offer seemed genuine. No false pretensions.
The roads, the people, the cleanliness and the buildings left a big imperssion on me. I am quite aware that there will be a lot of exceptions to these things. However, the exceptions in this case are a minority.

Upon landing at the Bangalore airport, I called my friend asking him to stay awake to help me with the luggage. He warned me of the fact that there had been a power outage for the last 4 hours. At that moment, a depression truck ran over me. The reality of the place that I had to come back to hit me real hard. I looked at my colleague who was standing next to me and said to him "There has been a power outage for 4 hours. Welcome to India". That sentence is probably the most satisfying sarcastic statement I have ever made. However, to my dismay, my colleague went on to tell me not to let down the nation that has been my home since I was born. He questioned my pride about another nation at the cost of ridiculing what he thought was my beloved country. It is then that I asked myself, what are people so proud about in this country? What makes people patriotic? What is so great about this country that others question my allegiance to it?

I have heard people mention that inspite of the development in the west, the one thing the west cannot compete with in India is the culture. What is this culture that the people speak off? The society is a reflection of the culture of the average of the people who live in the society. The country, its amenities, its standard of living, its roads and every single thing is a reflection of the quality of the people here. If I find faults with all these things, then isn't it a problem with the people who live here? A problem with the quality of the average person living in this country? Citizens of this country have illusions/deslusions of grandeur about it. There is nothing about it, atleast nothing that I can throw right out of mind, that anyone needs to be proud of. Everyone here should be ashamed of has been made of this place. If I tried hard enough and found something that is good about this place, rest assured, I might be able to reason out this aspect dwindling amongst this culture or the lack of it.

I suspect the fundamental flaw of this society is the lack of respect people have for the work they do. The dignity of labor here is almost non-existant. There are very few people who take pride in what they do. Most feel that they deserve better, most feel what they do is below what they are capable of. They feel this way at the cost of not doing properly what they are paid to do. This seems like the reason why the system doesn't work as it does in other places and everything seems broken here. This is the reason why everything is so chaotic and unorganized. For a system to be strong the underlying foundation should be strong. The foundation of the system are the most simplest of the jobs that require as much dedication as the the most complex of the jobs that hold the system. A brick layer is as important as the cheif election commisioner. The garbage collector is as important as the Cheif justice of the country. However, this concept is not ingrained into the people here.

People need a conscience that holds them guilty if they don't sincerely do their work, whatever it might be, however trivial it might be. They should do it well because they are paid for it. One should not expect to grow and do acheive their goals without at first doing the basic simple things in life. Most people seem to want to start on top and remain there without having to travel all the way up. People are looking to take a short cut to the top. The sad part is, these people are able to get to the top because most other people are the same way. There is a greater respect in this society for people on the basis of their socializing skills than on their professional skills. Professional skills seem to take second place to social skills. An average working man spends atleast 37.5% of his working life doing actual work (9 hours a day, 5 days a week), 33% of his working life sleeping (8 hours a day, 5 days a week) and the rest of the time doing other things. With most of the time spent working, why doesn't this work get as much respect as it deserves? It just doesn't and that is where the problem lies. Poor work due to lack of respect for it translates into the poor infrastructure and the quality of life at this place.

People talk about the situation in this country and some try to fix the situation. But they are treating the symptoms, not the disease. And the disease here as stated earlier is the lack of dignity of labor. Its just simply not there in most cases and that is because of the type of culture we live in. As a society, we are in between a rock and a hard place.

Hope

2007-04-30T07:37:56Z

Allie keys (Taken): People talk a lot as if the most important thing in life is to always see things for what they really are. But everything we do, every plan we make, is kind of a lie. We're closing our eyes and pretending that the day won't ever come when we won't need to make any more plans. Hope is the biggest lie there is, and it is the best. We have to keep going as if it all mattered, or else we wouldn't keep going at all.

Post Mortem

2007-04-11T15:27:24Z

I got to work today and opened my mail box to find more than the usual number of junk forwards. One of the mails had the subject "Armstrong" and without paying much attention to the name of the video file I played the video. I was expecting some video of Lance Armstrong or Neil Armstrong but to my horror I realized it was the video of the execution of Eugene Armstrong, one of the engineers beheaded in iraq. It pissed me off real bad and put me in contemplation of how someone had the balls and brains to do this. The only thing that kept coming to mind over and over again is the religious fanatism. Its fucking disgusting. If there is a religion, there will be fanatics. Its tragic that people have given up reason over faith and are indulging in violence in the name of faith. To quote Richard Dawkins - When one person suffers from delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from delusion it is called religion. Fucking religious insanity.

So in the course of the day I began to converse with a friend, someone with whom I tend to have philosophical discussions with. There are not too many people who are intellectualy capable of giving me the pleasure of indulgence into a philosophical argument. This lady happened to be one of them. But she was a believer. And this is how it went:

Me: If I prove to you that there is no god, will you renounce your faith in god and religion and become an atheist?
Lady: u and ur crazy ideas are not enough to shake me out of my faith
Me: what if the person providing the logical proof for the absense of god was not me but someone else?
Lady: and if u are in anyway attempting to turn me into an atheist, u shouldnt waste ur time. period
Me: u should answer my question. can we conclude that come what may, you are a person who believes in faith more than you believe in concrete evidence?
Lady: i am not talking about religion, atheism , faith to u and i do not agree with your stupid ways of inferences
Me: i am asking you a simple question. y cant u answer that?
Lady: u are now irritating me bigtime
Me: Just tell me if you choose faith over concrete evidence and i will not discuss this any further
Lady: if u are defining faith as belief in God and a religion-then ur "concrete evidence" will not be chosen.
Me: I have nothing more to tell you.
Lady: about atheism or about anything!?
Me: about anything
Lady: fine. is it possible to say why is tht so?
Me: I expect a certain standard from the people i keep in my company. You have just failed to meet that standard.
Lady: or u are gonna wash me out like PERSON-B
Me: wash you out like PERSON-B
Lady: u sound like a very low religious fanatic to me, "u are not a christain/muslim so, i dont want to be frnds with you anymore"
shame on u!
u are not atheist so i dont want to be in ur company,huh!
Me: You should stop reasoning out why I am what I am because reasoning is not something you should be doing. remember, you just chose faith over reason a few minutes back.
Lady: suit urself dude!
Me: And u being a non-atheist has nothing to do with my choice in keeping you in my company. I have non-atheist friends. but no one really has chosen reason over faith.
Lady: i will do wt suits me, reason out wt i feel like!
Me: and this conversation had no intent of me proving to u that god doesnt exist. i didnt even have a proof. i just wanted to know if you are dumb to reason . turns out you are.
Lady: FUCK u and ur reasoning, and ur twisting certain statement does not make me dumb
Me: my place or yours?

LATER....

Lady: i completely regret not having taken those movies from u already, im not gonna get the airtel connection for long
Lady: bye, u are sure u are not kiddin right,
Lady: i need not waste my time "trying to talk to ya??"...can u atleast say tht
or am i supposed to gather that from "the Vibes"?
Lady: im gonna "try talking" to ya again tomo..
Bye

Hmph...
Moderate believers of religion think that they have no role in the violence of the world. But figure out what is common to those fanatics and the moderate believers. Clearly, those people who beheaded Armstrong are no different from this lady. Both chose faith over reason. The root of all is the lack of reason. Religion exists because moderates believe in religion and god on faith. Not only do they believe, they also teach. It spreads to their children if they ever have one. And the life of religion goes on and on and on and by probability some of them turn out to be fanatics. Moderates are the underlying foundation on which the religious system that yield fanatics lie. The moderate following is an act of support to the teachings of a religion which can then be rephrased to the convenience of fanatics who can go on a killing rampage. Someone said religion is the opiate of the masses. The world is perishing from an orgy of religious believers. How ironical it is when some muslim fanatic kills someone and a christian moderate watching the video says "oh god jesus" or a hindu says "hey ram".

Every scientific invention that provides all the comfort today is strongly founded on the principles of logic and reason. And the moderate lunatics and the fucking fanatics have the audacity to enjoy the pleasures of these scientific acheivements while at the same time killing the very logic and reason. Bloody hypocrites.

And looking back into the conversation, I was called a religious fanatic. LOL. Really. Can loss of reason and logic get any worse?! Come to think of it, I have not asked people in my close company whether they will choose reason over faith. This lady was the first one. It just didn't occur to me that there could be people in my company who are well educated and civilized (atleast seem civilized) who would choose faith over logic. And I quite truly was taken by surprise. I was expecting a resistance of some sort, a reply like "You give me the proof that god does not exist and if it sounds right I will consider giving up god and religion". What I wanted was a slight respect towards this concept of logic and reason, a benefit of doubt. What I got was a fucking faith and outright rejection of what keeps this world alive and all the good things in it.

It is inevitable that the world will self-destruct, all these moderates and fantics fighting with each other. It is in evolution that the stupid organisms perish. So will all the stupid people. Death count in iraq is proof enough. Those moderate christian soldiers dying. And those suicide bombers! They are the ultimte proof of evolution! Cause and effect. Stupid people/organisms die.

Since most religious people fight with people of other religion, one solution for all these problems would be to unite all the people who feel the need to have faith under a new common faith. Since its clear that it is not the religion but the maintaining the faith that is essential, this would be a nice thing to do. Call the religion DODOISM and all believers can worship the Dodo bird that became extinct because of it stupidity. Alternatively, they could also worship the suicide bombers. Imagine man with intelligence volunteering to kill himself. Even the dodo bird didn't consciously try to kill itself. The dodo was stupid, but the suicide bombers are demented fucks with no value for life

Service

2007-03-31T16:26:21Z

Service of any sort in this country is most often a joke. From 6 months to repair an electric hotplate having 1 year warranty having become non-functional in 5 days of purchase to pleading with a plumber for 2 months to come home and have the wash basin fixed, my life has been sabotaged waiting for proper service.

I wanted to switch my ISP for technical reasons and decided to move to airtel. I called up airtel yesterday and informed them that I wanted an internet connection and gave them the address. At 11.15 this morning, an airtel agent called me up and agreed to come over and see my place at 11.30. He was here right on time and agreed to have the installation done. The place was within the range of their service and there was an airtel junction box to pull a wire from quite nearby. So I gave him the required documents and the 500 bucks installation charges and he left saying that he would try to have the installation engineers come in today and do the setup. I laughed at his words and went back to my reading. At about 5, 2 guys from airtel came in, inspected the facility. In half hour they pulled a cable and did the necessary drilling and installed the phone and left saying that an engineer would come with the ADSL modem and setup the internet. In another 15 minutes the next person turned up with modem, setup the internet and left. He didn't even linger with the look expecting any additional money for the QoS. Had he asked me, I would have gladly paid. But that he did not ask and just did his job and left, reflected a certain dedication to the job. Unbelievable service. From paying the cash to installation in 6 hours. I have a card that came with the documentation for the connection that states that if any issues are not attended to 4 hours of reporting, I would be given a discount of 100 bucks on the next month bill. Talk about the company's faith in their on service standards.

On a parallel note reflecting another quality of service, I called up hathway yesterday right after I called airtel, asking them to disconnect the connection. I was asked to send an email to a particular id stating that I wanted a disconnection. I sent the mail and my connectivity was stopped at 3 this afternoon. Not a soul called me. No one came to collect any hardware or settle the account.

No wonder Bharti telecom is doing so well. Probably the first indian company whose shares I might be interested in buying.