Sab Maya Hai

My dad just told me that my school 'Chinmaya Vidyalaya' was in a controversy after someone threatened to publicize their barbaric punishment of making students stand in the hot sun for an hour or so. It was not the worst punishment because you could also get caned by Her Majesty, Maya maam, the principal, if you screwed up a little more badly.

I think "standing in the sun" punishment was conceived by Kamakshi, the mother of Maya, and also the mother of most diabolical punishments in the school. It was usually awarded if the whole class was responsible for something. Like, if the students of a class were late to "form" the assembly line, or were late by a few mins to the class.

As kids nobody felt bad about the punishment. At least I thought it was better than sitting in the class at that time. When sympathetic teachers would stand with us, we would tell them, "We are getting Vitamin D".

But later on you realize how sadistic that punishment was.

As principals, they tried to get respect through fear. Which I think was the worst example to set for the students, something which could have scarred them more than any punishments.

We had to chant the entire "Sahasranamam" on Thursday mornings, new practice that was introduced after Swami Chinmayananda, passed away. I used to volunteer for "minding" the lower classes because it was better than sitting crosslegged and chanting things that didn't make any sense.

One day, I saw my classmate, Harikrishna who was in the adjacent room, send Maya's daughter out of the class. "She was not behaving herself" he told me. Unfortunately for him, Maya was doing rounds in that corridor at that time and when she saw that her daughter was standing outside the class, she got really pissed off, asked her daughter to go into the class and summoned Harikrishna to her room where he was caned.

Another punishment was to 'run 5 times around the school ground' if you were late. This was not so bad because it was at least healthy but I would tell the P.T master that I had asthma and excuse myself from it.

We had a school diary which had just 2 places for recording late arrivals to schools. Obviously, the school underestimated the traffic situation and a slew of things that can delay things in India. The wily principal thought of this as a business opportunity and said that if you don't have a place to record the late arrival, you must buy a new diary.

When we were at 11th std, she came to know that everyone was attending tuitions and classes for Engineering/Medical entrance exams. But this was at odds with her focus on getting higher marks in the Board exams which determined the reputation of the school. So one day in the assembly, she announced a ban on attending any outside tuition. Of course the ban didn't work.

Then, she had an idea: If the students want to attend tuition, why can't the school give the tuitions after class? But the clever part was that it was not going to be free and there would be a fee of Rs.1000 for the tuitions.

Nobody joined the internal tuitions and then, she held a parent meeting which failed miserably because after that meeting, she never mentioned about it.

I know that there are worse schools but what is sad was that Maya was awarded "the best principal" award some years back. Its all an illusion.

Big Bang!

This is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Starting in late 2003, astronomers pointed Hubble at a tiny, relatively empty part of our sky (only a few stars from the Milky Way visible), and created an exposure nearly 12 days long over a four-month period. The result is this amazing image, looking back through time at thousands of galaxies that range from 1 to 13 billion light-years away from Earth. Some 10,000 galaxies were observed in this tiny patch of sky (a tenth the size of the full moon) - each galaxy a home to billions of stars. -- Source

Looking at that picture brings in a perspective on how little we really are.

So, why not swing for the fences in the little time that we are here, because in a few years, nobody is going to care, whether we failed or not.

“Almost everything you do will seem insignificant, but it is important that you do it” -- Gandhi

The Wonder Years

This Calvin toon brought back some memories from school and college.

A running joke goes like this:

"Suppose you have only 1 hr to live. What would you do?" A prof. asks a student.

"I would go to college and sit in you class. It always feels like an eternity.".

I joined Chinmaya Vidyalaya in 3rd standard.

We were taken to school by Velayudhan, who would cram 11-13 kids in his auto-rickshaw. He was a nice guy because when he dropped us late and the principal shouted at the kids in English for being late, he would shout back in Malayalam, leaving the principal with no option.

In the first week at my new school, as we were standing in the assembly for a school prayer, a butterfly flew close by. Dileep, my new friend in the new school and I tried to catch it. Sadly, the vice principal saw it and summoned us to her room.

"I will bang your heads against each other if you repeat it" she shouted and told us to go back to classes.

A few years later, our school relocated further off and we had to take a couple of buses to reach the school.

Kacheripady was one stop before the final destination and a lot of school kids would be standing there waiting for the bus. The school principal used to see us as she traveled in her "Tempo Traveller" and she was angry one day that nobody standing there, acknowledged her.

"You must greet when our vehicle passes!" she ordered in the assembly session one day.

The next day, when the van passed, every school kid in the bus stop promptly shouted, "Haaaaaaaarriiiiii Om, Maam", in a tune, which was perhaps more embarrassing for her because she told us to stop it the next day.

High school was fun. Oh, I remember the buses "Maryland" and "Jithin", the last hope for those who want to reach school in time, which all of us late goers would wait for. It seemed the bus drivers somehow wanted to get us to school in time because they always drove like mad men and we, in the last seat in the bus had to hold on so as not to fall off. The bus would usually reach the place just 5 mins before the school call for assembly and then we would have a run to cover the kilometer long stretch from the bus stop to the school.

College was better. You only had to aim for 75% attendance which was still tough sometimes if some lectures always happened in the 8/9 AM time frame. 8 AM was hard to make if you wanted to eat breakfast too. But I had a trick up my sleeve, called the "last minute dash".

If I was late to the class, I would make a dash for the class in the last few meters up to the class and give an impression that I was literally "running" late. The professor would think that this guy ran to attend my class and feel good about and allow you to enter. Bonus Tip: If you come late, always pick the front seats.

There was one professor with initials "SP", who was a little strange. After entering the class, he would take attendance and then spend 10 mins cleaning the blackboard. It appeared he wanted the board to be as clean before he wrote anything. This often presented a good opportunity because when he was looking away, you could slip out of the class, something which we did often in his class. Sometimes, the room would be half empty once he finished cleaning the board but he usually didn't care.

My reading habits improved when I was in college because, it was more fun to read novels in class than hear lecturers read from text books.

Then, there was this guy called Prakash who was a repeater. Prakash was 2 years our senior. But he was the kind of guy who made it look "cool" to be a repeater. I liked Prakash. He used to be my companion in the back benches.

One day, someone dared him during a class. The dare was this: Walk up to the podium of the class, pat the lecturer on the back and then walk off the class.

Prakash's reputation was at stake. He thought about it for 5 mins. He got up, walked up to the podium where the lecturer was writing on the black board. And then, he patted on the back. The lecturer, taken unawares, was shocked. "What are you doing here?" he shouted.

But then Prakash whispered something to his ear and walked out. Later on he told us what he said: "I am not feeling well. Can I leave the class now?"

Obama is hope

Intrigued by Obama's idealistic vision that he often paints in his speeches, his unflappable demeanor and charisma, I wanted to learn more about him.

"Is Obama just another politician who is really good at politics or does he mean what he is says?"

I read "Dreams from my father", the autobiography that he wrote after a publisher approached him after he became the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, which explains a lot into why he thinks the way he does and I am happy that the book very much reaffirms my faith in Obama.

"Dreams from my father" is a book on his search for identity. Born to a Kenyan father and a white American woman from Kansas, Obama's is an extra ordinary journey. Through his travels to Indonesia as a young boy and Kenya before he joined Harvard, Obama understands that the dreams of someone in the third world is no different from someone in America, a dream for a better life. This is the foundation for his respect for other cultures and countries and people of other faiths.

Trying to come to terms with his race, he does community service for 3 years, trying to help a black neighborhood in Chicago stand up on its feet.

In the last part of the book, he tries to understand his father, who after his studies in America, returns to Kenya to contribute to his country with great ambitions but gets disillusioned with the bureaucracy and the politics, and loses after trying to fight the system.

My favorite passage is this extract:

“I dropped to the ground and swept my hands across the smooth yellow tile. Oh, Father, I cried. There was no shame in your confusion. Just as there had been no shame in your father’s before you. No shame in the fear, or in the fear of his father before him. There was only shame in the silence fear had produced. It was the silence that betrayed us. If it weren’t for that silence, your grandfather might have told your father that he could never escape himself, or re-create himself alone. Your father might have taught those same lessons to you. And you, the son, might have taught your father that this new world that was beckoning all of you involved more than just railroads and indoor toilets and irrigation ditches and gramophones, lifeless instruments that could be absorbed into the old ways. You might have told him that these instruments carried with them a dangerous power, that they demanded a different way of seeing the world. That this power could be absorbed only alongside a faith born out of hardship, a faith that wasn’t new, that wasn’t black or white or Christian or Muslim but that pulsed at the heart of the first African village and the first Kansas homestead– a faith in other people.

“The silence killed your faith. And for lack of faith you clung to both too much and too little of your past. Too much of its rigidness, its suspicions, its male cruelties. Too little of the laughter in Granny’s voice, the pleasures of company while herding the goats, the murmur of the markets, the stories around the fire. The loyalty that could make up for a lack of airplanes or rifles. Words of encouragement. An embrace. A strong, true love. For all your gifts– the quick mind, the powers of concentration, the charm– could never forge yourself into a whole man by leaving these things behind…

"A faith in other people". Being part of the system to change the system. That is perhaps a lesson that Indian US returnees who give up quickly when they go back to contribute, can learn: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/28/business/global/28return.html

ITs not glamorous anymore

Its interesting to see IT companies in the bottom shelf of the "Top Tech Companies to work for" list. Infy is at number 7 in the Worst companies to work for category.

Lowest-Rated Tech Companies

Rank	Company	Company Rating	CEO	CEO Approval Rating
1	Xilinx	2.3	Moshe Gavrielov	12%
2	Affiliated Computer Services	2.4	Lynn R. Blodgett	21%
3	Hewlett-Packard	2.4	Mark V. Hurd	22%
4	Avaya	2.5	Kevin Kennedy	24%
5	Real	2.5	Rob Glaser	12%
6	NVIDIA	2.5	Jen-Hsun Huang	52%
7	Infosys	2.6	Kris Gopalakrishnan	35%
8	Nortel Networks	2.7	Mike S. Zafirovski	2%
9	Perot Systems	2.7	Peter A. Altabef	35%
10	Dell	2.8	Michael S. Dell	28%

Source: http://gigaom.com/2009/12/15/which-top-tech-company-to-work-for-not-google/

The problem is not with the IT companies but rather with the people who join them with the wrong expectations. The fact is that IT work is getting commoditized and no longer needs the brain horsepower for which it was once respected.

IT companies these days prefer low risk, low margin maintenance projects to high risk high margin application development which tend to be interesting to engineers who always want to work on cutting edge tech. This automatically makes the manager or management more important the engineering.

As one manager put it "Coding is not the big deal. It is all about managing profitability. Getting work done at the lowest cost.", trying to make it sound interesting to be a 'manager'.

So, IT companies are no longer "engineering" companies but more like body shopping, staff augmentation/hiring companies. The engineers are no longer assets "who walk into the office each morning and walk out in the evening" as it used to be once.

The managers as used as they are to their high paying boring jobs of making excel sheets and reports cannot understand why someone doesn't like their work.

"Not doing something because it is not interesting is not an excuse. We are serving the client and we must ensure customer satisfaction in whatever they ask us to do" as some 'senior' manager said in his town hall meeting to which a friend whispered "Just because I know how to sweep the floor doesn't mean that I am going to sweep the office floors".

As one would expect, employee morale would be low. Its not the companies fault because once you are a public company, you need to chase the money. The problem is with the disgruntled employees themselves who continue to work without trying to find other suitable jobs.

As some great chef said "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen (and the gene pool)" :D

One step at a time

The cartoon below illustrates humorously how abstractions (or building blocks on top of the other to make something more powerful) can lead to very powerful things.

Source

If you think about it, nobody could have envisioned and built the modern computer (or any great human artifact) in a single go without going through the iterations. It was always small steps rather than large leaps. Many times, there would be multiple approaches in the marketplace which leads to competition and ultimately a winner based on merits.

This process is very much akin to evolution in nature. When you read about nature's creations, you wonder how such complex beings could have been designed by evolution. For e.g. see the digestive system of a cow http://www2.kenyon.edu/projects/farmschool/food/milkbio.htm.

But if you think about them as abstractions built on top of each other over millions of years, its a little easier to imagine.

Ignorance is Bliss?

At some point in our evolutionary road, when humans developed a moral function, there was a need to justify morality. Morality has a hand in evolution because "groups" have a better chance to survive than individuals and therefore the need to cooperate within groups, which cannot function effectively without some core rules.

Thus, "God" which started out as a fear of the unknown also became a symbol of morality.

All religions profess the need to be good. And each incentivizes that behavior in the form of some reward: most common one being the heaven.

But there are problems with that.

1. What if you are just ignorant? For e.g. the six brothers in 'Satte Pe Satta' who lived like animals.

2. What if you lack the brain function to judge right from wrong (Yes. There is a brain component for this). Or what if you are mentally retarded?

3. Your circumstances were so bad that you cannot afford to be good. Morality is often a luxury that the poorest of the poor cannot afford.

Also, how can you explain "why bad things happen to good people" if the world was purely based on Karma.

Each religion is just a different version of Occam's Razor (the simplest explanation), trying to find the best answers to those questions.

Hinduism believes in an infinite cycle of rebirth until you graduate into something better. Hinduism doesn't enforce a belief in one God. There can be multiple ways to reach God. And yes, you don't have to acknowledge God to get your salvation. You are judged based on your actions and not your beliefs.

Buddhism is more of a stretch of the above belief and claims that "Life as we know it ultimately is or leads to suffering/uneasiness".

Christianity believes in Heaven and Hell and there is no second chance :( It also requires a belief in God, Jesus. Hence their followers have a moral obligation to propagate the religion to infidels.

Islam also believes in Heaven and Hell without a second chance after death. It also believes in one Supreme God. Therefore, it too prescribes a need to propagate itself to the infidels.

(We can see which religions tend to be tolerant just looking at their beliefs but thats for another post)

I like the Hindu explanation not only for its tolerance but also that it addresses the above 3 problems very well by giving people another chance by rebirth.

At the same time, it addresses the "Ignorance is bliss" problem. i.e. Ignorance of the moral system is not an excuse to be immoral.

You cannot get away with not being good, just because you are incompetent to decide the right path. In other words, it doesn't help to be 'Strategically Incompetent' when it comes to being good.

100 Not Out*

I initially started this blog as a place for curating my thoughts. More like a private diary to see how my thoughts evolve over time. A place to vent anger. A place where I can contemplate unimportant things like the meaning of life :)

Generally, a thought comes to my mind during on a conversation or while watching something and I start writing and I try to validate my ideas with things that I have read. Sometimes the process of writing (or typing to be precise) itself contributes to ideas for the post.

I have found empirically that I get more thoughts when I am busy or when I shouldn't be thinking about such things :) I don't know if its typical or not but perhaps the brain is built that way. For e.g. before college exams when they give you time to study, I used to feel an urge to read IEEE magazines or business mags or think about how to write a particular computer game like Tetris or do something in the coming holidays. But that is for another post.

Sometimes I do wonder if I should continue to write this blog. There are a lot of risks to writing down your thoughts. For instance, it might appear arrogant to think that your thoughts are valuable enough to be written somewhere. Or I might write something stupid and may come across as an idiot (Silence at least gives you the benefit of the doubt). Or people who read this blog will judge me solely based on the things that I write here. Or I might lose my job if my manager finds it :) (which is the reason I have not shared the blog with a lot of people)

But if not anything else, I find it amusing to read my old posts and laugh on something that I wrote which I now think is stupid. For e.g. I was clearly wrong on this one: http://somethingvishy.blogspot.com/2009/01/on-nris.html

And then, when you are staying far away from your family, writing a blog may be the only way to communicate your ideas to them.

Blogging would be worth it just for the above reasons but it turns out there is more value in it than just that:

Excerpts from Open as in water, the fluid necessary for life

Most of our happiness and productivity comes from the everyday details of our lives: the people we live and work with, the books we read, the hikes we take, the parties we attend, etc. But how do we choose these things? How do we know what to do, and how do know if we'll like it? The obvious answer is that we do and like whatever the TV tells us to do and like. I'm not certain that's the best answer though...

By sharing more of our own thoughts and lives with the world, we contribute to the global pool of "how to live", and over time we also get contributions back from the world.....

Sharing your boring thoughts and activities may seem narcissistic and self-absorbed at first (I'm still kind of embarrassed about having a blog), but there is virtue and benefit in it. Naturally there will be challenges and fear along the way, but in the long term we're contributing to a more open, fluid society, where people are more able to find happy, productive lives. It also encourages us to be more accepting of others. Everyone is flawed, and the more we see that we aren't alone, the less we need to fear that truth.....

People can not truly live and thrive in a prison -- we require freedom and mobility. This may explain my incomprehensible analogy, "Open as in water, the fluid necessary for life".....

* The title of this blog indicates the count of my posts so far.

Fwd:Patriotism is stupid

This blog post, Patriotism is stupid, totally captures my thoughts on patriotism. Working for an Indian subsidiary of a multi national company which in turn gets its contracts from countries across the globe, I have always thought that it doesn't make much sense to be a nationalist anymore.

Ofcourse, you have an obligation to contribute to the society that groomed you. But crazy nationalist pride is for idiots like the Shiv Sainiks.

After all, how do you know if the history you learnt in school is not propaganda? Pakistani's for instance, read a different version of history.

Marx was right

A friend of mine at work, a middle aged guy, has a lot of bitterness at the Britishers. Born in Coorg, he inherited a 3500 acre coffee estate from his father which he says would have been 20 times the size if India's colonialists had not snatched it away and then paved the way for Indira Gandhi in post independent India to implement land ceiling acts which brought down his inheritance to 'middle class', in his words.

Ofcourse, the bastard still lives an affluent life. A palatial house in the estate and coffee exports to foreign countries guaranteeing that he never has to work again. But the peer pressure to be "one step better than the rest of you" amidst the thousands of other similar estate owners, led him to pursue a career in the US, so that when he goes back to India, he can boast to his peers "I design software that manages millions of US dollars. And what are you guys doing here looking after your parent's estates?".

To justify himself, he also believes that workers who now enjoy a collective ownership of the land that was distributed at that time were better off without it.

"How much land does a man need?" I ask him, quoting Tolstoy's short story and he says "But there are other people who didn't get affected because of their influence in the government and they are much better off than me now."

Clearly, he doesn't get it. An otherwise intelligent and well read man, he seems to be off by a big margin on this one.

Does just being born into a family entitle you to their fortune?

In a perfect world, everyone would have equal fortunes and motivations for working and excellence would be altruistic and for one's own satisfaction in contributing something to the society.

And usually, they are. The best discoveries and inventions by man were motivated by the 'cause' and not by the fortune that awaited it. See for e.g. this TED talk on 'The science of motivation'.

Which all leads me to conclude that Socialism is the ideal solution and the only reason it doesn't work is because we are not ideal humans yet, which is a perfectly valid reason not to adopt it.

Atleast I have my priorities right

I am not very passionate about making money. I mean, I am very happy if I am doing things that I like to do. I am the kind who would rather pay the taxes than do the boring paperwork for evading it. So, I get concerned about myself when friends talk about investing in stocks or keep looking for a scheme to avoid paying taxes.

"Am I getting left out? Of course I want to be wealthy but if I am not passionate about it, will I ever be?"

Therefore, I get consoled when I read articles like these which I get from the people I follow on Twitter.

“There are two goddesses in your heart: the Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks that they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, give her all your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you." -- source

Its not what you believe. Its what you do that matters.

Working out of perhaps, the most conservative state in US, the Mormon state of Utah, you get a feeling that while America is a developed country, a lot of their people are not very developed in their thinking.

First, they are a very closed society in Utah, especially the Mormons. The city shuts down at night like in India, and unlike other places in the US. Their Sundays are dedicated for religious practice.

All that is OK but what gets you is their stubbornness that theirs is the oldest religion and everything else is a loose and derivative of their Church. In fact all of them think that if you don't follow their religion, you are going to hell, which shows their intolerance towards other faiths.

You don't find many Blacks here. Many hate Obama. They are also Republicans and think that George Bush was a good president.

Ofcourse, their thinking is because of propaganda. What they hear in the Church and the Fox News channel (which is blatantly biased towards Repubs) . And most news channels are inward looking. They don't have a world news segment.

Many of them, like Sarah Palin, think that Africa is a country and not a continent and, they cannot point out India on the world map. Also see this: http://images.google.com/images?q=the+world+according+to+america

I think a lot of their bigotry comes from their own insecurities. The Mormons, after all settled in in the mid western, unpopulated state of Utah only because they were persecuted in the other states.

How else can you instill pride in the faith if it is unpopular? By making such claims and thinking that those who are not Mormons are morons. :)

Middle Men

As readers of this blog would know, I am pretty disillusioned with middle management. Part of the reason is because I worked with a manager who was so good at leading that whoever else came along looked terrible.

He involved people in the vision, understood people's aspirations, gave people freedom when he knew it was the right time and there was no politics. He gave importance to getting things done more than anything else. He was a good programmer himself some decades back and even if he didn't know the details, he could call out bad ideas. He knew that part of his job was to clear the bottlenecks so that people who did the work could be efficient and so on. More importantly, everyone who worked for him were happy to work with him.

He had a very different style, some would say chaotic and disorganized but there was a method to the madness. He disliked documentation and creating beautiful reports which a lot of managers seem to do. But in client meetings, his personality was such that it didn't matter. They had a lot of respect for his ideas.

Since he left, its been terrible and so articles like these which, while they might appear overblown, actually reflects the reality in most companies.

While casually surfing, I came across this blog post which has some good ideas to 'fix' middle management:

A manager's performance should be judged on the following dimensions:

- A key component of a manager's performance should be the sum of the performance scores of the individuals who work for him. This is good in many ways, starting with the fact that this incentivizes the manager to ensure that his team gets the credit vs. taking credit himself. It also ensures that the manager is more upfront about delivering hard feedback and helping improve employees who are lagging behind. Finally, when recruiting new employees, the manager will try and find good people vs. just adding more bodies to build his empire

- Get feedback from the manager's employees and her peers about how effective she is in empowering her employees. Often times employees get bogged down by all the processes that large companies are bound to have. A manager's job should be defined by how well she can empower her employees, cut through the processes, and get stuff done.

Finally and most importantly corporations ought to be EXTREMELY transparent about the evaluation/performance scores of not just managers but all employees. Employees, should be able to easily look up other employees' evaluations.

Ofcourse, these ideas have shortcomings. For e.g. the boss and the team can game the system so that everyone gets a good ranking, but the work they do could be mediocre. A manager can also reciprocate with low rating to an employee who gives him a low rating. But the ideas seem to be in the right direction.