Jas Personal Blog
Posts tagged Philosophy
Peekabo in life
Oct 13th
As I start the ‘bike’ of my thoughts lets talk away our time, you see the people say that sometimes it happens in life that you have to take a path that you never ever imagined walking, well I register a denial (don’t really like the orthodox way of saying I beg to differ!). It has been 26yrs for this dinky soul of mine loitering around over here, and I have found myself time and again to be in the same situation. So lets strike off the sometimes, that will make us all feel justified.
Kick! *gurhrhrhrhr..* Ah finally the bike starts! Before talking to you out over here I have been trying since last week. Anyway where was I? You mean where? Two months in Chennai, and well, here I come to Hyderabad now. It has exactly been 1.3 months over here and I really can’t tell where the time has went. In case you have a girl friend and friend like a girl friend who won’t accept that, then you surely know where the time is going, not for me. It has been a same routine for me to wake up lousily, get ready by 9am, stuff myself with Andhra breakfast that is provided and then walk to the office. Yes you read it right, I walk to my office.
My office – its just about 3 kms from my home, the road starts from the garden of guest houses, slowly touching the ‘secret lake’ – Durgam Cheruvu, taking turns as the waist of a plump 50 yr old; finally leading to an uphill trail turning like an old spring. Even though the trail is uphill, you won’t sweat easily as the breeze swiftly takes it off you with its comforting fresh and cold grazing touches. 30-35 minutes and I reach my destined ergonomic chair.
Gear 1, I apologize for another sharp turn in topic, first gear is usually rough; lets talk about the festive season. Ganesh Chaturthi, then Ramzaan, now Id-al-Fitr, Navratras have started, Dusshera is in pipeline and who can forget the grand Diwali which ofcourse will be followed by birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev. Lets admit, we Indians have come in festive mood now, work hurts. What the heck, we will even celebrate Christmas and New Year! Its nice to be in Hyderabad at this time, Ganesh Chaturthi was celebrated in huge manner with Indian Twenty20 riot fueling the celebrations, and then Haleem of Hyderabad brought every newspaper to talk about it. I have had it here, but had it at a wrong place and hence got beaten at taste. Let’s see what is special here for Id.
Gear 2, Wow its quite smooth, more like self switching to 2nd! So talking about all these festivities make me miss my nears and dears ones, those who care for my existence and I guess by this definition I bring my foes in too and yes, I will miss them, the challenge has gone outta life without them, there is no fun if you don’t get competition, no? But its a long long time since I go back to home, its even after Diwali so that makes me to spend the Diwali and New Year over here, its nostalgic. The smell of crackers in air itself is quite strong enough for me to go nostalgic. And with Id here on corner, I will surely miss the Meethi id of north. Here it’s more of non veg treat but above there for us it meant seviyyan and given the foodie I am, it means a lot! 
Gear 4, bloody damn! Skipped the 3rd gear! Now you know the kind of jerk you get when it does this! And why not, alongside the festive celebrations, the idiot box has suddenly been showing the news about Indian government saving themselves from early election and putting N Deal in cold storage. That surely is a mood killer. Like the ones outside these Haleem shops, all politicians are like fanatic dogs, running here and there having no idea about the deal. See this -
Most of left still living in socialist world of USSR era, I am already hating to hear their laughs! What have they done to their own states, ruin them? No corporate is coming to these states as there is a strike every now or then, the comrades have always been notorious for accumulating wealth for self, Hazaron Khwaishein Aisi depicted that nicely. If they have an idea of what they are opposing it makes sense, but as truly nominated as headless chicken, left surely is a party living in 1950s. TO argue the deal they question why the PM didn’t visit Middle East and why India didn’t shout at Saddam’s death?! What a ludicrous train of argument! Most of these politicians are plain bastards! Am sorry for the strong words but they are just that! India, a democratic country ! Who will produce the electricity in coming years from cow dung maybe!!
My bike has stopped, the left tyre has burst, maybe that’s why we never got in 3rd gear! A gear too fast! Left cerebrum is for logic they say, but the bike of thoughts is anyway not working, so … what the hell!
We, God and the Chaos
Sep 6th
“Tell me how microprocessors and micro controllers work“, thats how the discussion got started by Rahul at 10:17pm in our room; the discussion that would obey the chaos theory in the topics being discussed and keep us awake till 4:50am.
The talk started with the controller architecture, the paradox of data bus and memory addresses and graduated to the processing power. When Pankaj got up to fetch a bottle of water from kitchen it was already 1:40am, and meanwhile I arrogantly pronounced that the weather data crunching supercomputers deals with terabytes of data and actually measure fluctuations at every point in a about 1 sq km of area. Suddenly the team was energized to argue that it was just not possible and voila! thanks to Chaitanya we landed up in Chaos theory and butterfly effect, the brilliant yet mind boggling theory.
Butterfly effect phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly’s wings in Brazil might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that ultimately cause a tornado to appear (or prevent a tornado from appearing) in Texas. The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale phenomena.
The Chaos theory on other hand describes the behavior of certain nonlinear dynamical systems that under specific conditions exhibit dynamics that are sensitive to initial conditions (butterfly effect). As a result of this sensitivity, the behavior of chaotic systems appears to be random, because of an exponential growth of errors in the initial conditions.
No I am not going to discuss about how the movie by same name described the effect and repercussions of changing something in past, what I want to discuss is that even after a system being totally chaotic, it still may be deterministic. In the essence that even though the essence of God is still a mystery, it may not be some day when we get enough variable to discuss the origin and expanse of the universe.
Let us have a look at the long term behavior of a chaotic motion. The Lorentz Attractor would show a graphical representation of the time variation of three variables X(t),Y(t) and Z(t), coupled by non-linear evolution equations. For single solution evolving from an initial condition (X0,Y0,Z0) will be very different from another solution running simultaneously from initial conditions separated by (dX0,dY0,dZ0) by setting any of dX0, dY0, dZ0 to nonzero values (e.g. 0.01). This tiny difference in the initial conditions becomes amplified by the evolution, until the two trajectories evolve quite separately. The amplification is exponential, the difference grows very rapidly and after a surprisingly short time the two solutions behave quite differently, even though they may be having a similar trajectory. This is an illustration of the butterfly effect – the idea in meteorology that the long term behavior becomes impossible to forecast. Hence Rahul said we can’t predict the weather to escape the price of acquiring the knowledge!
But this raises the question about our existence. How many times have you got boggled down thinking if all started from big bang, what was around that big concentrated ball of mass, how did it come there, whats the end of the universe? I personally believe that like the discovery of earth being round body answered infinite questions, there is yet some truth to be found which will suddenly make many disconnected theories and questions fall in place. The motion of almost every natural thing is chaotic, but then given a long duration it can be expressed in significantly complex mathematically equation. The challenge is the expression and not the chaos!
Pyaas – Philosphy of Jugad !
Aug 22nd
I am reminded from time to time about a joke that my dad used to love cracking whenever he would get a mature government service audience. It was his pet joke. The joke goes like this -
Once some foreign delegation is coming to India to discuss some avenues of collaboration and growth, with state governors. While coming, their car breaks down on the way. There is a roadside mechanic there, so they approach him and ask if he can fix it up. The guy has a good look at the car and says that the tire has lost a nut and bolt and that although he doesn’t have the same but he still can do a ‘jugad’. Perplexed the foreigners asked what a jugad was! He tells them not to bother and does it, telling that they can now drive farther till the next 15kms where they will find a bigger shop.
Once some foreign delegation is coming to India to discuss some avenues of collaboration and growth, with state governors. While coming, their car breaks down on the way. There is a roadside mechanic there, so they approach him and ask if he can fix it up. The guy has a good look at the car and says that the tire has lost a nut and bolt and that although he doesn’t have the same but he still can do a ‘jugad’. Perplexed the foreigners asked what a jugad was! He tells them not to bother and does it, telling that they can now drive farther till the next 15kms where they will find a bigger shop.
Wondering the crew leaves and reaches the shop. The shop owner says that he needs a nut fastener and that is not available with him, but there is a tools shop after 25kms and he can arrange for a ‘jugad’ so that they reach there. Foreigners are amazed and want to understand what the hell ‘jugad’ is, but the shop owner smiles back silently and does the work.
After finding the tools shop the foreigners ask him for the fastener, but he says he is out of it. He suggests that they go to a nearby welding shop for a ‘pakka jugad’. One of the foreigners by now akin to such talk asks if he can do a jugad so that they can reach this new guy, to which the shop owner agrees leaving the full delegation in awe!
As they reach the welding guy, they pester him to tell about the ‘jugad’, but to no avail. he just fixes the car and tells he has done a ‘pakka jugad’
When the delegation reaches to governors meet, they give just one proposal – Give us the ‘jugad’ that you use to make everything work so miraculously in return for 3 trillion USD. To this a governor replies, “How can we give that to you? This whole country is running on jugad itself only sir!!!”But so so true it is, we Asians infact have mastered this art of jugad and we tend to find ways out from any situation, we are street smart as they say. If a scooter wont start, bend at 30degree and start; don’t have buckets large enough and state is giving condoms for free? use condoms to fetch water or use to fine select silk while making sarees; the motherboard is off the case? use chewing gum to stick it at place till repair (was done in IBM); want to get better price for your old cow? dye them black using hair dye (UP gave Godrej a shock by this resulting in abnormal sales)… the list is infinitely long. Whole point is whatever is wrong; it can be most probably fixed, though temporarily.
But lets look at the problem in this, take a normal algebraic equation y=f(x). y here is an output or symptom or effect and x is an input or cause of the problem. Jugad is an excellent way of changing your output value to adjust it to desired state. Hence effectively the function f is redefined. But the problem was in or as x, which leave alone touching, is not even realized. So what do we get? a system which is other than desired, but still serving the same desired result, although unpredictably. Any time the system may crash.
Look at our efforts, in ITES also we are so good at maintenance and rebuilding; but where are all the Asian nations when it comes to developing? We don’t have that troubleshooting approach, how many times do we sit and think what the problem is instead of just giving the solutions.
After talking with many of my MBA friends, I have realized that most of them started giving solutions in first week itself. Where was the patience or mindset to spend a month understanding problem? If you haven’t defined the problem, how can you give a solution?! (Think about the DMAIC – Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control)
The reason that I can find is that all these Asian geographies were highly fertile and hence had higher densities of population, leading to resource crunch. This has led to very different philosophy and lifestyle. Capital with a person is low and fight is higher in life, no doubt ‘jugads’ rule the life!
Note (edited) : There has been an article on Jugad-ism in HT too few days back, although this article was written entirely in absence of knowledge of this HT article, still the link has been added here to allay any Plagiarism attempt fears! A look a the article though will tell you how much different the articles are but then some people had the doubts…
Darwin Rectified
Jul 14th
How many times have we read the Darwin’s principle of survival of fittest and how many times have we seen it being proved right in front of our eyes? The change of homo sapiens, flying of Acheopteryx, humans losing the tail, bending of beaks for vultures and eagles… all justified fully by the revolutionary theory. So does it mean that it is THE theory? and no matter what, it and only it will guide the races?
Not if you take a closer look at human intervention. Last month i had a chance to talk to a person who worked at a ‘chicken farm’. With such a huge demand for chicken meat, the process has been automated like many other things in European countries. With shortage of labor and high demand, it was only matter of time that humans would start farming of each and everything that they need. And meat was no different.
A normal chicken processing machine would need just 2-4 ppl to operate, one to catch the unsuspecting chicken and hang it upside down using clamps and rest of labor is required to just take out the frozen food and get it ready for logistics purpose. But no, this pun isn’t that am talking about in this post. Its the challenge to the Darwin’s theory that we are making.
Does it really matter that the species of these creatures which can fight the nature and hunter best should advance? Or that the most intelligent ones and most healthy ones go on to procreate? Think a bit! The production of majority of such ‘edible’ creatures is controlled by humans, so its not nature; its men who decide which one lives and which one doesn’t. Which one is fitter and which one is not.
Effectively the definition of fittest will now be human prerogative. Large pig farms, cow farms, chicken farms etc for meat; then a list for medicines, for milk, for leather, for wool…. list is on. Just think, wont you want to eat a chicken which has more muscles, fuller in size, thick legs and breasts, and tender to eat? Ideally a broiler and not chicken? and how do u think such a thing would be fighting in nature?
So lets rectify the Darwin’s theory!
Sources: Image source http://www.northernsun.com
