Random Events ?

Prediction is nothing but establishing relationship between random events and(with) time.

 - There may be a definite relationship between events however random they may seem. To identify the pattern in occurence with the event in the world or connecting the dots with careful observation reveals the interplay of the very creator.

From my notes

"tasmaat sarveshu kaaleshu mamanusmarah yuddha cha"  
    --'Therefore under all circumstances remember Me and then fight' (Fight means perform your duties) 

 

Impediments to sound mental health:
Greed - for power, position, prestige and money.  
Envy - regarding others' achievements, success, rewards.  
Egotism - about one's own accomplishments.  
Suspicion, anger and frustration.  
Anguish through comparisons. 

 

To cultivate sound philosophy of life:
Identify with inner core of self-sufficiency  
Get out of the habitual mindset towards the pairs of opposites.  
Strive for excellence through work is worship.  
Build up an internal integrated reference point to face contrary impulses, and emotions  
Pursue ethico-moral rectitude. 

 

- Read this in an article longtime back in a magazine and scribbled it in my notes. Don't remember the original author of this.

What do one's Boss mean to his job?

I met my friend after couple of months. He is one of the few people who became instant friends with me even before we met. He and I worked in the same company but in different countries. He was one of the subject matter expert in the field of business i was dealing with, so i spoke to him almost everyday for an hour either officially in the conference call or for individual questions.

 

We sometimes spoke about the cultural similarities and differences between his country and India. Since both of us are not from the US, all our fun ends with poking someone from the US. Anyway he somehow came to the US last year for another position. So i met at last after knowing him for about couple of years. I moved to a different company now but we still meet once in a while off the work to discuss something that is not related to work and of course some office gossips.

 

This time when i met him, we went to a bar near the south sea side in the NYC. It's a fine bar where they serve refreshing home-brewed beer. The names of the beer are really exotic to me but they are nothing but typical native American like 'Cherokee Bash', 'Indian River',' Apache Slide', 'Dakota horse', etc (translated names). The trend in that bar is to order a 'season five' or a 'voyager 7' beer. You can make out from the names they are a set of 5 or 7 beers brewed in-house. They are served in a 1/2 pint glass (approximately 250 ml) in a circular plate with numbers from 1 to 7. They advice you to start from 1 and move up the number. They also give you a description of each beer. Its really fascinating to drink different varieties of beer in a single sitting. You feel like a brew master tasting the beer. We can easily make out the taste of the different ingredients of the beer. The beer made out of barley tastes different from the one that is made from wheat. Some strange ingredients that a beer could be made are from oats, rice and sugarcane. I knew that they made hard-liquor like rum from the sugarcane but never knew that they could make beer out of it. Anyway i liked the light-fine brewed wheat beer than any other beer. The close second is the traditional barley beer. Enough of the digressing from the topic, me and my friend were enjoying the beer and sharing stories from our side. We spoke about food, wine, history of warfare (both of us share this interest) and office politics.

 

My friend was telling me that our CIO left the company after 29 years of service. I knew our CIO really well. I mean my cubicle was next to her room. So its impossible for her to avoid me. Also i have seen her in some presentations and conferences of which i was always a passive listener. I always had a great respect for her as she is extremely brilliant. She had worked on every aspect of the business from procurement to marketing and from inventory management to IT. Although her style of approach is debatable and old-fashioned according to me, she is definitely brilliant. Also her influence on the other senior executives and the board was always very high. So i always thought that she is one of those people who would never retire and never get fired from a company. The news of her resignation sure did catch me by surprise. I asked my friend what's the official reason and what's the actual reason for her resignation.

 

Like any other company, our company always had an official stand on anything and then there is always a rumor mill. Most of the time the rumor mill is intentionally started at the level just below the senior executive to get the truth across the company. I have witnessed this few times myself. In one of the meetings with a senior executive in marketing, he told me over the lunch that the reason for one person leaving the company may be because he stepped into many people's foot, meaning he pissed off his bosses. When i came out and verified with few other people i found it to be true. So in this case my friend is close to people who are in the level to start the rumor about our CIO. So i asked him the truth or the rumor version of the story. He told me that our CIO was asked to report to the new COO who recently joined the company. There seems to be a clash of ego there. I was told that our CIO was eyeing for that job but the board needed a change in the senior management and intentionally rebuffed her and made her report to the new COO. This enraged her and she quit. This incident makes me to conclude one thing.

 

It doesn't matter what position you are in the company. Your immediate boss and (or) one above (may be) is one of the main reason for you to be in the company or leave the company. This is time tested and even across nations, culture holds good. In my limited personal experience and from experienced people whomever i spoke with have all agreed with me on this.

 

 

Arranged Indian Marriage

Some of my friends had written on the same topic before. Some of their ideas are similar to mine but some are very different. I tend to think that many of us blame the society and faith for individual mistakes. Some even go to an extent of commenting on some subjects like experts that they have no expertise on. My friends are no different to this.

Like any other culture in the world, Indian culture is full of contradictions and subtleties. In India the culture varies from region to region and within the same region amongst the castes. Some people call it a curse. I would tell those people are no different from communists or any other fundamentalist because they cannot accept people as they are and want everyone to be the same. Nature hasn't created everything alike that includes humans too. Everyone thinks differently and has an individuality. Equality can be achieved only by accepting the difference and not by disregarding everybody/everything. If we disagree lets not follow. By forcing everybody to agree with our ideas we become no different from other fanatics who follow the very same that we oppose.

My friends had written about arranged Indian marriage. Although some have questioned the very idea of this, one guy in particular had taken social issues into consideration like dowry. The dowry system in India started with a very good intention in the past. The girl child in the family was given the fair share of the property from parents wealth. As the society was mostly agrarian, girls were given land's worth in gold or other forms of wealth and men in the family retained the land. Some of the trading communities gave some initial investment as the dowry so that the in-law can start his own business. All these were voluntary as parents wanted the well being of their kids. Like most of the good concepts things get tarnished over the course of time. When traditions lose values it has to change. I agree with that but who can change is a big question.

Dowry in the modern world is more enforced by woman on another woman. I rarely see man in the household demanding dowry. The solution to the problem lies with the woman. I am not trying to be a chauvinist here blaming the women folk entirely. I am just trying to point out that the solution to a problem can be found only by looking at the right cause of the problem than lashing out at everyone.

I remember a conversation that happened between my friend who worked for the late PM P.V.Narasimha Rao, and the current cabinet minister Mani Shankar Aiyer. My friend (woman) is a great proponent of women's rights and freedom on education. She was lashing out her views on male chauvinism and men suppressing women to Mr.Aiyer. He quietly pointed out to her that she and her brother were born to the same mother. If chavunism exists it arises from one's mother so appeal to your mother if you want to change something and not to your father. My friend understood the gist of what Mr.Aiyer was trying to say and even though she doesn't accept with his logic accepted the truth in his argument.

Coming back to our core topic of arranged marriage one of my friend had also discussed about "jadakam paarkum padalam" in our marriage. For believers it makes more sense for non-believers its just the squares. Just because one doesn't trust, truth doesn't never becomes false. That is the very nature of science. We can either prove it or disprove it but until proven wrong the corollary always holds good. I am not an educated person to understand the nuances in the astrology but at least i am not foolish enough to discard it without giving a careful thought about this subject that has been there for many centuries if not for millennium. There is definitely another school of thought that would argue prove its right then i will follow it. I am OK with their idea. But we always perform our actions on what we perceive as right or wrong and NOT on what astrology says. Even if we follow what jadakam says, it is because we believe that jadakam can be right. That being the case why should we question the validity of this fine subject although some interpretations are questionable.

To believe or not is in the human mind. As marriage is always a congregation of two like minded people and family i don't see anything wrong in accepting/giving dowry, see/not-see jadakam as long as there is mutual consensus. Society has to change from within and not from outside. I strongly believe that a third person has no right to define whats good for the other.

Just to point out that most people who oppose the above and call it a social evil do in fact have an unwanted pressure imposed on themselves to get married before a certain age. What a hypocrisy?

Monday Morning

Yet another Monday morning. Dull and boring as usual. I really don't feel like working and i come with the same thought almost every Monday morning. The question about existence and working to survive predominates any other thought that comes to my mind. I start to wonder why humans choose to be like this when animals don't care and still survive.

Whenever i speak to people who have spent most of their life working always tell me that i need a reason to work if not work will become really monotonous and boring. Even these people were not able to explain me convincingly why we humans have to behave differently from animals. Is that because we are incapable of getting our own food like animals or we simply want to beat the time?

If scholars agree that one cannot totally win over time and only protract the happening at a certain time why are the humans simply fighting to protract the time. Why do we care if it happens at time 't' or 't+1' ?

Why humans have to be humans and not be another animal? The question always lingers my mind and never gets answered.

New York

My friend moved to New York recently. I went to visit him in the west side. His apartment is walkable from the Central Park.

The apartments in NYC are known for their shoebox size rooms and exorbitant rents. My friends apartment is no exception. Its a 14x10 room and the rent is 2800$.

I fell in love with the view from his apartment. One can see the central park from his apartment. For a brief moment i thought of renting an apartment in the city. Although staying in the city doesn't make sense to me as my work is in Stamford. Still the city life was sucking me like a sponge.

I have two options in my plate. One to find a job in the city and then move to the city or find an apartment in the city and find a job later. Both are feasible options but my mind is always wavering. Even though i like the bustling city life i also like the relaxed small town life in Stamford.

Last year my rule was to "act, when in doubt". This year i have decided not to act in doubt. So i convinced myself that crappy apartment space is not helpful and i am staying in Stamford itself.

Islam and Terrorism

First of all let me be honest, I don't know enough about Islam or terrorism to comment about it. Of late i hear a lot about Islamic terrorism and sometime people synonymously use Islam and terrorism. It hurts followers of the religion, makes me to write this blog.

Some facts before we go further into this topic. Its a fact that Islam is one of the most violent religions but people forget the fact so are many other religions like Judaism and our own Hinduism. The religion that are relatively peace loving are Buddhism and to many people's disbelief its Christianity. Buddhism came as an offshoot to Hinduism preaching only the peaceful side of Hinduism and Christianity that of Judaism.

Even though the above said religions may have started for a peaceful cause (debatable) people always wanted to take things that they wanted to take and interpret it in the way that is best suited for them.

Religions and beliefs have always been exploited by the rulers for the economic reasons and to wage war on other nations(which again is just a political boundary). Its simple to gather more people for a common purpose like religion than for any other purposes. Especially when its a congregation religion like Islam, Christianity or Judaism.

The above fact being said, the only thing that is true and has remained true in this world is the humans primitive instinct to fight. To fight for what is a million dollar question. We fight for anything from Women to Money, Land, Gold, Rubber, Rice and now oil. All through out the history people have fought in the guise of religion primarily for the economic prosperity or territorial safety. As they say history is always written by the victors. Things get written and re-written during the course of time.

So having said that humans will fight for one thing or the other, commoners always get affected in the course of this action. Who is to be blamed? I would say "no-one". I strongly believe in the Darwin's theory and i think one should be wise enough to adapt to the surrounding and thrive. Now Islam fighters are blamed as terrorists. So be it. Anyone in the side that prefer war should believe them to be terrorist and pursue a war against them. Anyone that believe they are just jihadists may support them and perish in the war(or win). The third option is to exploit the war mongering people on both sides and reap riches or the last option is to be a careful by-stander and talk only what the society feels right or to have no-opinion on the issues like this.

People who don't fall into any of the above 4 categories are the most confused people who question their faith and go on proselytising the goodness of their religion. I conclude that faith has got nothing to do with any shit that is happening now be it war on terrorism or Islamic terrorism.

Happiness

No matter what work is to be done today
Do it in the best possible way
For today's work is food for tomorrow
and just tomorrow

Decide how you wanna live and do your deeds
Limit your needs
Don't be greedy
And share the excess with needy

Believe in today and tomorrow
Hope is the only key to unlock sorrow
Crave for more money, food or sex ever
For it may give happiness never

Life is for real so why pretend for others
You don't have to invent new things to be happy
Success is what you define and what you want to be
So whats the key to be happy

They say,

Happiness comes with ego satisfaction of showing utmost bravery!!
Bravery comes with confidence, confidence with knowledge, knowledge with continued hard work and discipline teaches hard work.

So, is discipline the first step to happiness?

Potato - The wonder food

Urulai kizhangu as we call it in Tamil is arguably the most liked vegetable in my place.

I was reading about potato and its origin in wikepedia today and i was amazed when i found out that there are at least 3000 varieties world wide. The impact of potatoes on many cultures is very interesting to read.

Urulai kizhangu is very easy to prepare. Some of the easiest food items that can be made are boiled potatoes, fried potatoes, aloo bindi masala(potato with okra, tomatoes and spices), pepper potatoes, french/curly fries, oven roasted potatoes, cream potatoes. Some of the uncommon varieties of making potatoes are milk potato, potato and eggplant, paneer potato, etc.

Some claim potato can heel acne.

Yoga practitioners say potato to be neutral vegetable and its fit to be taken once in a week as a substitute starch.

I think potatoes were as important in the 15Th century as oil in today's world.

Nation and boundaries

Independence Day, Republic Day and India-Pakistan match(es) are the only days when every Indian becomes patriotic.

Last week i was chatting with a friend of mine. She asked me if i spoke Hindi. She could have guessed my answer as she very well know that i am from Madras. So i smiled and said "Hey, remember i am from Madras". Like a typical Indian she asked me as to why i didn't learn Hindi as its our national language. My answer made her really furious. I said we need the country called India only because we need a passport (Well i mean only the passport :-)).

Then, as she was angry like a kali i slowly asked her to define India first. Is India a political boundary? if so is it the one drawn after 1947 or before?

I have come across this same topic many times in the past. I, for some reason could never comprehend the idea of patriotism. Scholars always say "No nation, no home ". I always wondered how the jewish community who never had nation or a home for the past 5000 years preserved their culture pretty much intact. They disprove the very fact that you need international boundary to preserve your culture. So culture cannot be a reason for being a country. We indians, infact boast that we are a land of multiple culture. People who have travelled reasonably well in India would agree that not even the basic religious ritual is done in the same fashion across the country.

Economic interests could be another reason for being a country but who's economy will be a question then. If the business goes down in one place one can always move to another. If you cannot move then you perish (theory of natural selection). Even animals have the instinct to move to a greener pasture. I hope human beings didn't forget some fine lessons learnt as an animal in the course of our evolution. So nation building is for the losers or people who want to exploit the losers and become rich and famous amongst losers. This idea could be extrapolated to anything "Team building", "Company Building", etc. All the above loser talks are management mantra of today's world.

In the Ithihaasam's and puranman's there has been a greater emphasis on personality development. It emphasises people to follow their own path. To follow is a common man's attitude(loser's attitude). If to lead is exploitation, then we have a question of what is the ideal path? The answer is a simple 'En Vazhi Thani Vazhi' mentality. It urges everyone to have a unique path to attain mukti. In layman's term attaining mukti is nothing but to be a human being with acceptance to everything or being dispassionate to everything(0 or infinite). People sometime think what Rajinikath says is a mere punch dialogue. Well its a punch dialogue with more inner meaning.

Ancient wisdom of classifying varnam's is very confusing even to scholars. It has always been debatable in the intelectual community. There has never been a consensus in accepting who's a brahmin. There is some consensus to the idea of who's a kshathriya and a vysya. There is definitely a consensus in accepting who's a sudra as the rule is simple. Anyone who doesn't fall into the other three is sudra. The parameters set for the three varnams are very high and 99% of today's people wouldn't fall into any of the 3 varnams. I am leaving the 1% as an option-unknown. That being the case we are just shades of sudras in today's world.

How appropriate Krishna is in his Gita when he says that more towards the end of this cosmic cycle kali, there would be more dependence on each other even for simple day to day activities making us all sudra(s) in this world. Be it Arjunan or Duroyadhanan or Krishna, urged people to fight like warriors and fight to prove their ego, their valor. No where they urge them to fight for a nation or for a common cause.

If the very foundation of our culture emphasises on attaining brahman why are we still parochial and fight about caste, language and man made national boundaries. I ended my conversation with my friend by saying "To define India i must be able to define who is an Indian first. To define who is an Indian i need to define/understand who am i first? " until then India is only a name in the passport for me. I rest my case.

Searching continues...

Funny Bone

It happened to my friends -

Girl hanging out with her friends in the bar, guy approaches and says, "would you go out with a 35 year old guy if he sleeps with a teddy bear"...as she smiles and says, "I wouldn't"...the persistent guy rephrases the question " would you go out with a 25 year old guy who sleeps with a teddy bear"

Girl waiting in a bar, guy approaches her and says, " how old are you", the girl says 35, looking surprised the guy says "What a coinciendence, i thought so" and leaves.

My friend has been looking for a bride for sometime now. This girl that his parents have fixed him up with calls him up and asks him to go through her blog. No wonder he asked for my help to read the bog. The blog is 300 pages long.

When i became a MAMA

I never understood the word called Mid-Life crisis until i spoke to my friend who is in his mid-forties. What we call as mid-life crisis is honestly 3/4 life crisis. How many people actually live up to 90 years these days. Our life expectancy is going to be around 65-70 depending on the number of beers that you drink before your meal and after. Leave alone the wine that you drink during your meal. This being the case, one is expected to have a mid-life crisis around 35 years. Forgetting the math here i sipped my beer to listen to his droll.

He is not married and he was advising me to get married. When somebody brings the subject of marriage to me, i am always cynical in one way or the other.  I asked him why one needs to get married. He is already 2 glasses down on his black bush scotch by now, went on saying that one needs to have some one near him when he wakes up. I thought well if thats his reason then the solution is simple to his crisis. I concluded immediatly that i want to hook him up with a girl in the bar. 

Normally i would have kept quiet and would have listened to him but this time i am already high and i needed some action. So i urged him to go and talk to a nice looking girl in the bar. She was totally drunk too. Although being a white guy, he's surprisingly shy when it comes to talking to strangers. I always thought americans went and spoke to anyone they wanted when i was in India. This guy is totally opposite to all my imagination of a perfect white guy. I think that really answered why he's not with a girl.

We always wanted to learn more culture and all those crap when we drink. So to keep up the tradition of the drunkards, i asked him what's his criterea for a perfect date. I also brought up the idea of parental-dating (Ponnu parkum padalam) like the one's that happens in India. By now he completed his 4th glass and went for the next round. He started saying good things about the indian culture and the girls which is seen only in bollywood movies. He started kinda feeling hard and was crying by now. 

I normally hate seeing guys cry when they are drinking. Not just because they look like a sissy but they are simple inconsolable. So to cheer him up i volunteered to hook him up with the girl. Eventhough he insisted me not to venture, the beer in me gave me the courage.

I spoke to the girl for about 1/2 hour, i don't know what i spoke but my friend went home with that girl in the bar. I was proud of my achievement that day and had few more beers with my other friends only to wake up in the next morning to realise i was a "MAMA" (pimp) the previous night.

To this day i laugh at my own stupidity. 

IIT and the Indian student psych...

IIT and the Indian student psych..

I have crossed the age of joining an IIT or for that matter i have no passion for college education now. Also, i strongly believe scholastic degree brings just the shit out of everybody and nothing else. So i take the right to comment about the craziness that Indian students have to get into IIT.

To give a brief introduction of how i grew up, I was raised in Madras in the so called middle class family. To this day i don't what middle class meant. Although we never had enough money in our house, our parents always referred ourselves as " the middle class". I guess its because of the brahmin tag attached to our names. My parents had their own line of hypocrisy like others but they were different from my friends parents when it comes to thinking and education. For instance my parents never forced me to study or even go to school. I went to school when i wanted and bunked with my mother's blessings whenever i felt staying at home. This became easy for me as my father was on touring job and was never home for nine months in a year. 

The fact that my father was away also gave me a wide variety of opportunity to explore the world of ideas without getting influenced by a dominant male (I guess that's how the western psychologists term it). 

I have always wanted to join the IIT since i was kid for no real reason. I started preparing for the IIT-JEE when i came to the 11th class like every other guy in my community. First of all, I joined the science group in the 11th class just because i had a better score in the 10th grade. I cannot think of any other reason other than that for taking up that option. In my community any one with better grades joined the science group. I clearly don't understand the reason for it till date.

I sometime think its the mentality of the salaried class people to find a job to get an initial foothold and then move on with their life. I don't have any statistics to support my statement but i can vehemently say that i am yet to come across a person who doesn't obey the above primary middle-class rule. 

Coming back to the subject, well i prepared for my entrance exams for two years and i couldn't make it. Frankly i was not at all frustrated. I think i never had a real intention to go there in the first place. I guess i had been driven just by the peer pressure. I bet it caused me many sleepless nights of preparation for my exams. Going over the same shit everyday and tyring to solve the problems that i will never encounter once i clear my exams and all this i have to do with no interest of my own or my parents interest but because of the crazy peer pressure. 

Well, on the positive side i got to spend many interesting nights in my friends place in the guise of combined study. Many times watching porno movies and ofcourse spent time chatting stupid subjects. 

Every night we would all gather in our friends house, the person who had a house with a separate room preferably a room in a separate floor from his parents. The combined study group varied from 4 to 6 guys and sometimes more during the weekends. Religiously we would all start studying at 9:30 PM after his parents go to bed. We would waste/spend most of our time in the day playing cricket or in some stupid discussions. Most of the time its about the sex or the girls or the guys going with the girls or like the losers do, talking about sexual chastity. Depending on the crowd the topic might digress to politics, religion, caste and caste politics. All the above topics would basically revolve around bitching one particular religion or caste or a party. All those years i always thought it to be the "general knowledge". Goddam it! I still laugh at my stupidity. Eventhough i shouldn't say that all the topics were bad. Some were controversially very interesting. For example cases like Babri Masjid demolition, India going nuclear, Astrology, etc. 

We would waste roughly about three hours talking about these things in the night and would go to bed after that. I don't know how we studied but eventually everybody in my gang got a good percentage in the finals. Of course nobody made it to the coveted IIT but the guise of IIT preparation helped to us to atleast get into one of the colleges without paying money. 

In conclusion, i think the IIT mania (a.k.a) peer pressure should remain in India at all the levels. Be it in school or colleges. Now we don't have a lateral entry system to the IIT's. If we create a possibility of getting into IIT or transferring to an IIT in the middle of our college year, i bet it would prompt many students to chase the myth of the IIT and even if they are not able to make it, atleast it would improve their scores and the quality of the college education or whatever. One way or the other we would get enough reasons to do combined study. This time for a change may be with girls :-). Just Kidding.

About my gang who were watching night-movies with me , we spoke about many things in our life what we wanted to do and how india should and how education should be and after all that shit talking, all of us studied the same shit and became no-one or one in a bunch. Couple of us are software coolies in the US. Couple of them are chip designers. One is in Pharma research. One guy the last time i heard about him was hanging out in the SanDiego beach with a beer in his hand and a girl by his side. Hmm he says its his wife. Never know :-).