Short story - Sky is not the limit

He was frantic. ‘How do I get it shipped ? It is going to be a tall order.’

Outside, there were still cars on the road. Most of them going back home. ‘I have to forget going back home tonight’.

Just as he thought of home, Sita came on the phone. ‘Ram, its already 9’O clock. How long?’ , ‘Sita, don’t wait for me, have your dinner and sleep, I am going to be late. Not sure when’ Ram answered without waiting for her to complete.

‘How late?’

‘Not sure could be past midnight or early morning’

‘Then don’t drive in the middle of the night, stay there and come by morning’.

‘OK’ Ram was already on the messages in his inbox. Sita knows that and she ended her call with a ‘OK bye’.

Ram was in deep shit.

He committed for delivering a piece of software with his small team in Bangalore.

The sponsor of that in the US was travelling to France to demonstrate that software in front of a customer the next day.

Everything was ready and people were at ease till evening. When Ram asked his team lead to demo it to him, he found some fundamental mismatch in the understanding. He had all along talking about it to his sponsor as ‘X’ and it is ‘Y’ as per what his team had done.

Now he had no choice but to get ‘X’. It was not impossible, but there is a lot of housekeeping changes after the main change is done.

He was looking at the messages from his sponsor who was sitting in the airport in Houston.

Let me focus on this. He was now deep into the code. His team mates barring Shyam had left. He just needed Shyam who had done the main piece. Shyam was trying to do a part of it in his cube.

Time went on. Outside the traffic was almost dead. It was a cold Bangalore winter. Christmas was not far off. Ram had planned to do a trip to NewZealand with Sita.

‘Why am I going through all this?’ The saintly corner of Ram was asking this question constantly.

‘What if I dropped this all now and simply walked off?’

These thoughts are not new to Ram. It occurs whenever he finds himself in situations that were forced on him. And it has been that way many a time.

Ram reasoned out that these are just some of the tricks his brain conjures up in defence of his situations. You look at a diametrically opposite possibility than the one you are undergoing. Sometimes it helps you to show the futility of what you are up to and help you drop things that landed on you somehow.

He was finding it hard to focus on the problem at hand. Somewhere the code was going into a spin. The recursion was not ending properly.

Coding should never be done under pressure. It is not anything different from the way you write novels or do a painting. It has to be constructed patiently line by line. Until everything small stacks up in its innumerable ways to show its grandeur.

His sponsor was on chat by now. He was a good man. He was feeling sorry for the pressure and making Ram staying up late. However, he had no choice either. The company they belonged had built a solid line of defence five levels up to keep the pressure distributed.

The sponsor was excited to be meeting the customer on the other hand. ‘All our efforts would be paid this year if we land up with this contract’. He said.

Ram acknowledged sleepily. He was thinking to himself. ‘These words no longer excite me’.

After several iterations of proving murphy’s law, several compilations, stupid coding mistakes and some changes Ram started to see the output he wanted to see.

It was 3:32AM.

He went up to Shyam and asked him to join for a stroll outside. ‘Some tea shops would be open at least. Lets have a lemon tea’.

The city lights had sufficiently polluted the night sky. It was not possible to see any stars. The Moon was visible. ‘What a life, can’t even watch the sky’ Ram told Shyam.

Shyam was feeling better with the chill breeze crossing his face. He said ‘ Yes, I suddenly went back to my engineering college campus, walking around with friends in the night’.

Shyam continued. ‘We used to go out after spending a long time in the computer lab to a shop outside the campus. Hot omelettes and coffee in the middle of the night. And a nice walk talking all sort of crazy things’.

Ram said ‘yes, I did not stay in the hostel. I used to stay with my Grand parents in a village not far from the college. It used to be so quiet after 6 PM and you can get a full view of the night sky , sometimes even the milky way galaxy in its splendour’

‘You seem to be quite interested in the skies, is it?’.

‘Yes, always, ever since we came here. Though it has been a long time and we have figured out how to live here, my mind has not left the time since our ancestors left earth. I have read a lot of the first trip to Mars and the way they established colonies here later’

Shyam said ‘Yeah, its a long time since then. It is so great that we do not miss any of the earth out here and we could create the exact same things with technology'

‘Yes, the space is different, the time is different, but we are ...’ Ram did not complete.

The lemon tea was ordered and the shopkeeper handed them two glasses.

Ram’s phone buzzed. There was a message from his sponsor. ‘Terror alert in Houston airport. All flights cancelled. Will touch base once I reach home’.

Ram sighed and had a good go at the lemon tea while staring at the Martian sky.

Short story - Degauss

'You know where most of our time get wasted?' Ram asked his wife Sita.

She was not immediately answering. She was trying to catch up with him as they were walking around the lake.

‘What?’ she asked

‘I was asking about where we waste most of our time in life?’, Ram is used to repeating things to people around.

Ram knows that every one is lost in their world of thoughts these days. You need to convey something that brings them back from their sleep. So obviously the first thing when they wake up is a ‘What?’.

Sita was not answering immediately. It is one of those ‘too generic’ type of questions that Ram asks.

Ram continued ‘ You know what.. it is the time we spend meeting useless people, talking useless things and thinking useless stuff. In fact all these are inter-related’.

Sita interjected and said ‘How do you say something is useless?’

Ram said ‘Not that you can find it before striking a conversation. While you are going through it, you get that feeling that this does not relate to me at all. It is just noise in my otherwise noisy mind. Then you know you are meeting this useless person and having a useless conversation’.

Sita was at heart more empathetic to people than Ram. She normally views Ram’s statements from this prism. So she did not acknowledge this line of thought.

She said ‘You cannot always see things from a utilitarian or commerce point of view. You need to be mindful that we are humans and not computers or machines. It is fine if you find a useless person. Just move on. Do not be going deep into it and frame everything around you as useless’.

Ram did not leave it. He retorted back ‘Sita, whats wrong with a utilitarian point of view? Isn’t the sweatshirt you are wearing, the phone you hold not come from people who have spent their time usefully? I am just trying to maximise the time we spend usefully doing something. That does not mean I am up against every situation that renders me helpless. Its obvious that life always throws strange things at you and you cannot be productive about all of those. It is a way of gauging something like a meter and trying to have a way of moving out of it’.

There was a bit of silence. It usually happens after a conversation reaches its crescendo. Normally the topic changes at this point.

Ram suddenly shouted in a excited tone. “What if I had a magic wand that can make people’s heads align to me like the iron filings getting aligned to a magnet. You see in the MIB movie where he shows a baton to sort of degauss the folks to forget what they saw about the aliens floating in their midst”.

Sita was smiling. She knew Ram won’t leave it from this point.

True to her belief, Ram built a magic wand.

He was walking on a day when Sita did not accompany him around the lakeside. He was immersed in his thoughts as usual.

He heard a voice behind “Hi Ram, Good morning, long time since we met”. It was Shyam.

Ram had met him during one of the morning walks when they kind of bumped into each other. Initially Ram felt they had lot of common topics like politics, Gods and so on. Soon it dawned on Ram that it comes in the way of his thought stream as he walks and started avoiding Shyam.

Now there is no way. Shyam continued “Time is sucked by Facebook. You do not know when you enter it and when you exit. I love these walks which give me more satisfaction than sitting and posting messages and liking some strange photos shown by your relative’.

Ram did not have much choice. He was not the avid FB user. Still he had to do more than just smile and nod his head.

He said ‘Yeah, these guys when they meet, they rarely talk. But they keep doing these likes for even something stupid. Such is the emptiness in our lives and FB is a perfect sucker of that life’s vacuum’.

The talk went on. Ram suddenly became aware that the conversation is no more connecting with him. Shyam was still ranting something.

Ram stealthily took out the baton. It was a metal rod like thing. Shining, but not so big.

He had tried it in the lab and measured the field with a magnetometer.

He was swift. He waved it along the side of Shyam.

Shyam collapsed.

 
Another funny ending for this story (based on inputs from my friend)

The talk went on. Ram suddenly became aware that the conversation is no more connecting with him. Shyam was still ranting something. 

Ram stealthily took out the baton. It was a metal rod like thing. Shining, but not so big.  He had tried it in the lab and measured the field with a magnetometer.

He was swift. He waved it along the side of Shyam.

Shyam felt something by his side and turned back to look at Ram. He had by now moved a little ahead. He saw this steel like shining baton that Ram was carrying.

‘Hey whats that? Something to scare the dogs away?”,  he was now a bit curious.

Ram still not very clear from his earlier act, tried to get himself back into the conversational mode. He just tried to mumble ‘Oh that's nothing…my son had brought it from somewhere and he had left it in this jacket I guess..I was trying to know from where this came….and by the way, how right your observations are about Facebook. I am absolutely aligned to your thoughts on it’.

‘Wow, this is going places’ Shyam thought to himself, feeling the golden colour shining baton inside his jacket. 'It is getting people aligned to me more than ever’.

Why I cannot let go this life without achieving something?

Many a time I have been questioned as to why I quit my job at HP after spending a substantial amount of time, close to 12 years. Like everything else you get attached to in life, this was not easy. But still I let go.

Though I would not say that I had a very clear cut answer when I did that except that I wanted to make good use of the remaining time of my life doing something I like and earning my living out of that, I can tell with confidence several years after I made that decision and spending all my time in the last 6 months working on the product I wanted to give life to.

It is not about the product. There is nothing about it. Not that I do not like it nor it is not fantastic in my view. It is great and I have never done something like this. It is going to be different and I am sure people will appreciate the value that it brings. There is a even better reason which has cemented in me over years now as to why I want to do all of this.

I desperately want to give some purpose to this existence.

There was a time when I used to constantly question this. Why are we here? What is our purpose? I have spent a lot of time pondering over this, debating with friends, reading a lot of philosophy (which by the way is available in plenty if you are in India). I have even appeared more spiritual or philosophical to many of my friends because of all these. I have even thought that being like this is the end result of some one raising such questions (why are we here? what is our purpose?).

But over time I realized that the question is wrong. You cannot ask this question and find a meaningful answer. You will never find. Instead I realized I should be desperate to make this life purposeful and meaningful for me. This is the only way you can laugh at life rather than life laughing at you when you die.

Make every bit of it meaningful. Never do something that makes no sense to you. Try your best. Try hard at it. Go for it. If you have not thought about this, do this now. There is no better time. Do not settle for anything less. Go for the ultimate you can accomplish. It could be that you had a passion for running. Then go all out on that. Even if you think you are burdened by your finances, burdened by relations or others. Never compromise on what you wanted to do. You may look like you are winning when you compromise and settle for something interim. But in the end you will be a loser. Life would have won over you. You will be one of those speck that visited this planet briefly.

If you feel this is all extreme, then you better change your outlook my friend. You have to be extreme when it comes to living. You cannot be docile and think that you would have solved this problem called life. Be aware, fully live, Do something that will truly excite you, Keep doing and going beyond what you can see today. When you leave this planet, leave it with a sense of achievement.

My Car

I bought this Hyundai Accent GLS in 2001 December. Roughly 13 years now. That is a reasonably long time to keep a car. Yesterday when I took it out in the morning to go to a nearby lakeside for my usual morning walk and parked it outside my house, my wife about to get in screamed.

“What ?” I asked lowering the windows.

“Petrol is leaking SO much" , she hollered.

I just got out thinking that it should be another one of my wife’s proverbial high decibel alarms she gives out when she finds a dead rat, a live cobra, monkeys around the house and so on. Wait, did I say rat? I will get back to this point soon. But the smell of petrol can’t be ignored. It was all around and flowing under the car and coming out from the back on the tar road.

Oops..

I immediately got in and started the car, reversed it and took it back into my parking area inside my compound. I was hearing my wife screaming yet again, this time saying the leak is so much, it is kind of pouring down. I was for a moment thinking “Am I doing the right thing here?”

I had no clue. It is petrol down below the bonnet. What if some spark or something happens? I felt jittery for a moment. But nothing was happening so far. So must be alright I thought.

My father came out of his room. He was visibly worried smelling petrol. I opened the bonnet, peered in. Nothing I could make out. I thought we should collect the petrol in a vessel.

I turned back and asked my wife to get a vessel. She brought some plastic bins after a while. I put them under the car below the bonnet lying low on the ground, wherever I could find the dripping.

Now the petrol smell was all over.

I found that when I turned off the car, the leaking had stopped. “Thank God”.

Reached out to the 24x7 on road assistance, customer service, nearby service centres, hotline help and finally my recent local garage person who services it. He said he will send a mechanic.

The day passed with calm. Towards evening the mechanic came. He saw the tubes and showed the main tube carrying petrol going into the engine had a hole mostly bitten by a rat. He took some photos and sent it over WhatsApp. He said he has to get the part and will fix it the next day. I asked him how dangerous it was to rid a car leaking petrol. He told, if it catches fire by any spark, the roof of my portico would blow up. I was mentally going back to the jitter I felt when I parked the car.

I turned back and told my wife “You know what, if a rat can take my life so easily and cause a 180 degree change in yours as well, just think how vulnerable we are”.

I recollect as I type this Douglas Adams - The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy" where the mice would try to find the answer to the ultimate question using earth as a computer or some such thing. There is nothing that you can hold onto in front of death. Everything is washed away, your morals, your beliefs, your hangovers of any sort.

I was thinking what can be done to stop rats from roaming freely inside my compound. Got those rat killer biscuits and placed them in four corners of the house.

When I woke up in the morning, I went around to see if any of them got eaten up by the rat. One was missing. The one near the car.

When I walked back from the lakeside area after my morning walk, found a dead rat almost half a kilometre away.

I showed my wife. She exclaimed “This must be that thing”.

Somehow, in my head with that thing going off, my thirteen year old car also had finally given way telling me to look for a new one.

This car is not a piece of metal. It is a significant chunk of my life on the road in many places at different times loaded with memories. But so what? Look forward to my new Car :-)

Of climbing mountains, purpose of life and finding me

Actually, there is always this quest for knowing the purpose of this life.

IMO having a purpose gives you that vigour needed to wake up and do things better every day.

Till some point the purpose was not questioned as it is sort of the default mode living in this society that one goes through.

Of making money, building a house, marry, kids , foreign trips etc.

But after a point when these are fulfilled unless you are a Kamal Haasan or a AR Rahman who seem to have got that passion in whatever they do,

for normal middle class fellows who have sailed with the above as purpose in their head suddenly find that they have another 40+ years in existence.

What to do now? So far,  I never had this thought that I would ever be exhausted of the excitement brought in by life.

All of a sudden, I see a vast plain before my eyes , a huge desert with no end after climbing several mountains and hills.

How do I take this up ? Now I realize I am not what I thought I was.  I am not that fellow who was madly going after the above things.

I am not that proud employee of that MNC, I am not that owner of that posh mansion, I am not the lover who showered unconditional love on my wife or my kid and so on...

Well, you may be oblivious to these type of thinking and be blissful in continuing the way you are. No big worries. Life goes.

But what if you are the kind who feels that the mountain you were climbing is now well behind you and you see no mountains?

I believe this is were you have to start seeing some mountains on your own to climb. It can be photography, writing novels, becoming a musician, or building a product

and so on... It can be any type of mountain which earlier you could not climb because there were other mountains placed before you to climb by people near and dear.

So before and now the situation is same. You are climbing mountains. But this time, you decide the mountain to climb rather than others. Since you decide, you may

find a high enough one, a really tough one to climb and one that you climb with passion which you did not experience in all your previous climbs.

Realize one thing. The mountains were always imaginary. They were never there. Earlier you did not know. Now you know. You still do it , but with this knowing.

So you are no longer the person you were before. Qualitatively you are much different.

There will be a time, when climbing mountains or staying in plains will look the same. Then YOU disappear. You are no longer there.

Till that time, happy climbing!

Creativity - what is it?

How to be creative. I have gone through a long phase of doing things now imagining and creating a product that I can lay down some thoughts around this.


Before the 'how', the question of 'what'. What can be termed as creativity?

IMO, it should be something as a way of looking at a question, a problem and coming out with a fresh, new answer or solution to it.

The field of arts - music, painting, story, movie all require creativity , originality and the freshness in the way you express something. It is very easy to identify if a movie is a copycat of something else. Even if it is remade, there can be fine tunings done to a specific region, language or taste which shows creativity.

In technology, the first product that comes out in what can be a trend setter is a result of creative thinking. For example, iPhone even though a cliched example, is a creative vision of how a smart phone should be setting the trend for a generation of smart phones.

A Google glass or a driver-less car, even though the first in a series to come, is more technology centric and the former brings in a more augmented feature to your already existing smart phone of using eye movements to browse or trigger an App. Same with driver-less cars which are the next level or leap of thinking in terms of driving cars.

So, creativity is not just about a technology change that brings in a better comfort to the end user, rather it should bring in a sense of 'beauty' combined with 'utility' than mere 'utility'. Utilitarian enhancements cannot be termed as creative. It is just a enrichment of a existing thing.

Creativity has to be something fresh and new of even existing things, having a tilt towards beauty and what the eyes can see and admire than mere utility. This kind of rules out all things that you just get a utilitarian value. Thus the Google glass and driver-less cars do not fall into the bucket of creativity while a iPhone seem to be fitting the bill.

In software, some fantastic things with the user interface that helps you to use something differently can be termed creative. Though I have probably narrowed the definition of creativity a lot here, which many of you may not agree with, I feel a lot of software  like the OS and compilers that does the 'grunt' behind the scenes may not even appear for evaluation of being creative for a end user.

Creativity is not about the process. It is not about the how. It is always about the outcome. I can be creative in building a mobile app, but it is not about the way I built it, it is about the final outcome and how it has changed the way we look at the problem itself. If the outcome is fresh and new for a end user, then the work is a piece of art.

A very broad and more accepted meaning of creativity is about coming out with something that never existed before. I sort of align to this definition. This is the real creativity. Probably the invention of 'telephone' or 'theory of relativity' are all finest examples of creativity in science and technology.

That was not just utilitarian, it was a new fresh thinking about a problem and creating something out of nothing.

Thus I feel creativity is something that flips the way we are looking at things currently by miles enabling a totally new angle into a problem.

Interstellar - where east meets west

If i carried a watch from earth which you and me were referring to, travel @ speed of light, come back , i see your clock  has run faster (or your calendar has moved faster) and mine has moved slower....??

Does it mean, physically i came back unaltered  (young)...while you aged drastically..

Does it mean something should have happened to me while I was travelling @ speed of light from ageing..what was that? 

Is it like I shrunk into a photon myself (while at c) and when I eased up (slowed down) I kind of 'reverse entropy' into the person whom you saw leaving?

Is it like Black holes are places where our regular notion of time and space ceases to exist and we can see the arrow of time flowing in other direction , making you watch you growing up to get ready to travel to the black hole?

and on and on....

The movie interstellar just kindles all of these and more and you need to seriously go back to physics and Einstein

But if you hear our spiritual gurus, they do tell the same thing as , when you close your eyes and dissolve into a state of samadhi, time and space ceases to exist. If you read siddhars, they have the concept of siddhis (hanuman, krishna, bogar...) all had the ability to become light (in weight, a photon?) and travel at astronomical speeds crossing the universe , sort of be there everywhere....all of these sound like physics as well....

I somehow feel inside you is a singularity (sort of the space-time falls steeply into a infinite abyss) and when you feel it , drawn by it, you start feeling this entire universe within you :-)

Now do not respond to this if you are not serious :-)

Short story - Space and Time does not matter

Oh my God! No….No….watch out…I screamed from where I was standing. By that time it had happened. The fellow was already dead I believe. A pool of blood surrounded his head and started expanding in all directions. This fellow was on a motor bike. It was a bike I always liked and owned as well. An Enfield bullet. 

The bus that came behind him was in such a hurry that it knocked him off while overtaking and he was thrown out landing with his head. I could see lot of people rushing to look at him and many calling police and ambulance. Some lifted him to pull him to the side of the road. His head hung. I was sure he has died already. 

It was a shocker for me. I was speechless and motionless. My mind had slipped completely. I was dazed and stuck inside. Did not expect this when I just came to buy some food items my wife had asked me to buy. I started walking towards the crowd. I could manage to go near him and looked at him. He was probably of my age. His face was still clearly visible. I was thinking to myself. What if it was me? 

****

I don't know when I woke up. Was it all a dream? The sun hit my bed room window not so gently. How do I reconcile what I dreamt of? How do I make sense of that dream with what I am going to do whole day? It was so vivid. The blood looked so real. His face is still crystal clear in my head. Now I need to run for the supposedly real thing. Office, traffic, breakfast, bath, brush in reverse order. But why is this suffering? I could have easily brushed it off as a dream and continued like any other day. But here I was unable to do that. I could not take my mind off it. I was fully consumed by that. 

*****

Hey man, why are you so late today? 

yeah. . .don't know , probably I was driving a bit slow…I mumbled

Driving a bit slow? Today was the best day to come on road with the bandh. How come you drove slow? You OK?

No. Not all that OK. A bit of head ache … so kind of doing things a bit slow…

OK come, let's go for a cup of coffee..

The cafeteria was wide and open. So many options to breakfast and drink about. We chose a corner table.

He was my closest pal for a long time in this office. We have had innumerable breakfasts and lunches together. But today was a bit different. He looked a bit shabby and I was curious. Normally he is impeccable in his dressing. 

I have to tell you some thing … morning when I left my house, I happened to see this nasty accident on the road. Man, it was brutal and shocking. I tried to pull over my bike and help this guy who was on his bike hit by a bus which overtook him from behind. 

Oh no…I was trying to forget it and here he was reminding everything. And man…aren't you telling the exact thing I saw yesterday? What is going on here…I was thinking to myself..

He continued. I was in the middle of this crowd trying to help out…my clothes got soiled a bit. But the traffic police came, pulled him over to the side and eased the traffic. Then I came to office. 

How did he look ? I asked…

Man…. no now I remember it was not just one person. It was two of them…One was sitting behind.. And both were dead on the spot I guess…

Slowly we ended up going into the details of these accidents …and it kind of ended. 

I do not know how long it was when I told him that we need to go back to our cubes to start working for that day. We walked back. 

And then he asked me , how come there are blood stains on my shirt. ..

I was perplexed…You are joking I said…

No man, come to the toilet and see in the mirror….

We walked in to the toilet and we both were looking into the mirror….it was quite blank!

matter, energy, things

Suppose you are left with a 3 year old or even a 5 year old in this world and no one else. Say a nuclear holocaust left the world with you and this 3 year old. Suppose you were a great mad scientist who was on the verge of a path breaking medical research for cancer cure till the day before the holocaust happened.

What will happen to all that knowledge you had gathered and how will you use it? Will it matter anymore? Suddenly will you not find that the only companion you have is the 3 year old and for it, all those stuff you gathered do not matter.

This is definitely a stupid thought, but the point underlying this is that we hang on with our gatherings over time, burdened. We spend enormous time on things in life going into every bit of detail on something until a event which nullifies all of that or some other thing which is important than the one you were up to springs up. Let me call this as 'thing hopping'.

The more you have hopped from one thing to another, the faster it dawns on you that what you are up to is not permanent at any point in time. It changes like the flow of a river or passing of clouds. If you look back in your life, how many things can you point to, that looked like life changing at that point in time and yet you have come all the way here hopping more things?

Life is the flow through time and space. We are swirled around in space by clinging on to this earth and   changes in things around bring the notion of time. The most visible perception of time is when I type on the keyboard while writing this. The energy makes things move. Energy could be a subtle form of matter and vice-versa. So several layers of matter from fine to coarse make up this existence and some layers appear as energy to make things flow.

In all of this I tend to make interpretations, observations, deductions of things around and create a another subtle layer of matter / energy which further puts me into the spin of space and time.

What is all this? 

Flow

I was listening to "Vennilave Velli Velli Nilave" Tamil song from "Vettaiyadu Vilayadu" movie. The song is composed by Harris Jayaraj. The movie itself I like especially the NewYork scenes where Kamal goes to investigate the serial killers and the interesting dialogues with Jothika. The scenes of NewYork triggers another thread in my mind. Sujatha's (Tamil writer) 'Pirivom Sandhipom' novel. Part II of that novel has great narrations of the protagonist's time there , the love, education, twists etc. The description of NewYork is from the angle of a student from tirunelveli background attending a university.

Coming back, Harris in this song and in other songs I liked from "Vaaranam Aayiram" is very structured. I mean the music follows a pattern which I don't see it with the latest Rahman's songs. By this I don't mean I dislike ARR. In fact I mean to say that I like ARR's lack of structure or unpredictability more. Especially the 'Mannipaya' song from 'Vinnai Thaandi Varuvaya' Tamil movie is a good example of the unpredictability of the turn of the tunes and the background score that comes and goes. I don't think it is a tune that can be played easily on your keyboard and it will in the end appear catchy. The song gets its value from the unpredictability and the orchestration itself.  I feel ARR has experimented more in his songs not only with instruments, singers, tunes but also with the way the song flows. It takes unpredictable turns and he seem to some how go anywhere he wants and finally be able to conclude aptly.

This I feel is like the way some one paints a modern art. They may start with a basic idea. But as they progress with the colors and sketches, new thoughts emerge. This is very much after seeing the interim output and based on that the next steps occur. This is like a continuous feedback loop. As a work of art or music progresses, you get new meanings and you change the course which is a more logical step and which would not have occurred to you when you began the work. I am sure most of the creativity hinges on continuous feedback and leaving it to guide the next step. This is not something a person with commercial interests would agree with. I feel humanity always evolves towards elegance, aesthetics in all the fields along with the utilitarian value of something.

I treat software also in this category. Developing software products of your own begins with some initial idea. However, as coding happens new things emerge. You read, hear, try new things. They can be new business models, new requirements, altogether new deviating ideas and so on. This is especially the case if you create software for yourself without time pressures, without some one having a concreteness about the outcome and the goals are absolutely driven by flow guided by usefulness and ease of use. That is where I feel even software turns into a work of art. The more you spend time thinking on what you are doing and refining it, it becomes more beautiful.

Note 1: I realize this article itself highlights the aspect of the 'flow'. It seem to meander from music to art to software one feeding as a input to the next guiding the overall flow.

Why the AAP phenomenon is relevant and needed for us

Post the elections, AAP has churned out lot of negativity in the press. Senior party members resignation, Kejriwal in jail, refusing bail and pursuing the case against Gadkari and all that. There is a lot of flak they have drawn in the media. Comments and feedback on AAP is totally in the negative. On the contrary Modi has started on the right foot with instructions to fellow MPs, clean governance, strengthen the hands of executives, friendly links with foreign states and so on.

Not that BJP or Modi and AAP are enemies. If BJP is doing the right things, it is good for our nation. It is not that AAP is the only force to fight corrupt elements. If BJP is making the right moves it should be welcome. After all, the face does not matter all the time. When it comes to giving good governance, the issues matter more than the face. Modi seem to be making the right noises towards this in my opinion.

However, it may raise the relevance of AAP here. Do we need it if the government is doing its job giving clean governance to the people? I have felt AAP is always needed as the informal Lokpal which was their core demand. AAP may not have done the right things recently. Their strategy to leave governance after the referendum in Delhi has surely back fired. A golden opportunity was lost by taking extreme stand in haste. In politics, abject honesty is not the one which may do maximum good, but a balance of things with an eye on public good without being dishonest. However, AAP being the new kid needs to do a lot of learning in this direction.

So whether we have BJP or Congress or some others ruling this country, once bitten badly with the experience of governance which was indifferent to the very people who elected them (I mean the previous Congress government) and pushing the economy to disaster with series of scam, the need to have a body or political force which can take more aggressive, non compromising stand on the issue of governance, corruption is badly needed for India at this stage. I see AAP filling this position irrespective of the face of it being Kejriwal or some other.

We need guardians who are not leaning towards communal or pseudo secular and just be issue based. So, in a country which has long been divided along communal, linguistic, caste lines and people have largely been aligned along these, it will take time to wake up from the sleep and start looking at the issues that plague our country that are immediate and burning like price rise or the expensive way education is turning to be or the bad roads and polluted cities and so on. We have many concerns right in front of us with the economy expanding in all directions and waiting to explode. In this scenario, we better build bridges than temples or mosques. We focus on things which first make our lives on this planet better not only for us, but for our children. That said, I liked Modi saying build roads not temples or something of that nature. That is the right thinking.

AAP as a movement should be exactly worried about these even if there is in-fighting among the leaders of AAP which I believe should be laid to rest sooner and people should shake hands to build a better India. After all they should never be behaving like the regular political parties we are used to. AAP should move forward to publish their 'Areas of focus' and use the funds and volunteers to help the existing Government to do better in all spheres. That would be a very positive thing and will go down deep in resurrecting their fading image.

Ah another thing I left out of the previous blog

In the same walking incident I described in the previous blog, I saw a person wearing a T shirt with this expression 'I will even kill for Noble peace prize'. It was obviously to display to others that 'I found this funny' and you may too sort of thing. I too felt it funny for a moment. Then I thought what sort of sick fellows are around to wear a T shirt like that. If I wear to choose to wear a T shirt with a statement I wont be selecting this. The oxymoron may be appealing, but I do not like provocative words like 'killing' nor the idea that you would kill to achieve peace. So it is in a way not so funny.

Going further I was thinking over this. People end up killing each other in acts of terrorism or war mainly to find peace. But how sad it is that your peace is decided by the elimination of another person. How sad you came to that conclusion. If some one is attacking another then the person being attacked loses his peace and end up retaliating to get back to his peace. But what if some one attacks another with a larger interest to gain control over land? They invariably destroy the peace of others. In such a case would you mind killing? Peace can be there when there is no killing. But killing has to be there to reach a state of peace.

In the movie Hey Ram by kamal haasan, the protagonist finds his wife raped and murdered in communal violence and ends up killing a few in that rage. A case of retaliation to regain peace which was disturbed because the killer's peace was disturbed and so on. Initially it may start with a wrong and it gets multiplied with every one repeating it. It is a system without balance. The system automatically balances itself by killings. Even if there exist one person who sees something as wrong and even if it is seen as right by all others hatred continues, killing continues.

Its a chain reaction and never stops. Hatred is a chain reaction. Hatred comes out of lack of peace within. We have prejudices built within ourselves over time seeing things, reading thing, hearing things and layers and layers of untold emotions are within us which lets out at a conducive moment. Being able to see through these layers within and be able to un-identify yourself or dissociate the you from these mythical layers is the way to go.

Love helps people remain in peace. But to love one has to be peaceful within himself. 

I saw that same person approaching me as I walked again. This time I noticed the spelling mistake in the 'Nobel' word. I had a urge to point it out to him. By that time he crossed and went behind me. I was thinking 'leave him in peace'. Why create a conflict in him. You never know if he will take it positively or negatively. His jogging is important. Not words. Nor spelling mistakes :-)

The mysterious connections between people when they come close

As usual I was in the park adjacent to a lake which is very much dry and you can see kids playing cricket. There is a walkway around the dry lake. There are trees occasionally along the path.

I went one full round which is little more than a kilometer as I am told. Then I saw some one crossing me. He was a middle aged man wearing white shorts and a T shirt with dull orange color stripes.  After a while of walking, I realized I was just behind him. Our pace were somewhat the same. So I was just behind him. At some point I saw that I was hearing the sound of our walking. The shoe noise. I normally take up a topic and think it over while walking and this noise was interfering. So I tried to speed up a bit and cross him. While I equaled him, I saw he was also increasing his pace to stay ahead of me. Then I increased mine and he did and we were kind of in competition. I was mildly frustrated that both are reacting to each other when I wanted to just walk freely in my pace. So I suddenly ran past him for a distance and then started my normal walk. I felt free. I was back to my pace and my world of thoughts. Then I saw this man crossing me jogging now and continue to jog. I was thinking what sort of people we have around. I was convinced now that he wanted to show he can walk faster or he was reacting to my pace. In any case he disappeared from my eyes soon and I was left with myself.

There is a certain magical force when one person comes in the orbit of another. This is something like the way planets are positioned and follow a orbit and are influenced by other. If you are alone you are fine and left to whatever you are. The moment I add another variable in the system such as a person in the room or space you are in you no longer are the same as what you were when the person was not there. Your thoughts are invariably about the other person as what he thinks about you and your actions are very mindful now. This is mysterious to me. In some way this shows we get connected through some stream of consciousness and are influenced by one another. People tend to avoid this eerie silence by either staring at something else or reading a newspaper or some times strike a conversation. The latter actually eases the friction to some extent. You feel comfortable that there is nothing unusual in the head of the other person about you.

Being withdrawn inwardly and not getting associated with your mind and its tentacles extending into others minds nearby helps to first observe this in you and further choose to focus on what you want devoid of external situations. Do this. Do this. Do this.

Hi Fellow Indians

You cannot ignore this guy. You can love or hate him but not ignore him.

Haters call his actions as theatrical. Lovers hail him as the crusader. But his actions definitely asks for your action. To love or hate him. To take positions. 

The issues are such. Long has India been in slumber and Indians are yet to wake up and question. Subservience runs in the blood. Indians have got freedom from the physically spottable enemies. But they cannot see the latent enemy. British had long left. But the mindset of the politicians are no different. Indian political system has shown us some of the biggest and baddest scams. The scams are what appears on the surface. Deep within is a craving to gather more and more and more and more and more. This could have roots in the way princes ruled this land. If citizens have to go with a begging bowl to their own people whom they voted into power, it cannot get worser. 

The model where Government created jobs miserably failed and it became a obstacle in the path of growth.  Globalisation has opened the door for more goods, more jobs but it has had its dark side with the strong and powerful politicians of India who were the maximum beneficiaries of the produce. 

As a entrepreneur I would have expected how I set up business and the completion of the same in a jiffy if I comply with the rules. Here you see a powerful layer called the politicians and the system they have created called the Government colluding to flout every norm, every rule to reap the benefits in the process driving away genuine businesses. Letting in those who are sort of flexible in dealing with this 'layer'.

And this man supported by a new crop of general public exposing this 'Layer' that has been created over decades, its sinister designs, its collusions and crony capitalism is obviously hated and questioned and derided by the beneficiaries of this 'layer'.  People who are passive observers are obviously confused by the mid night raids in Delhi or the Dharna etc. 

These are not the things they are used to. They are used to being subservient. They are used to being 'give me something to eat and I will mind my own business' and the 'layer' is used to throw some bread crumbs whenever things hotted up a bit and they used to have a seven course maharaja lunch. 

How can the maharaja suddenly disappear? What will happen to our image and the lives we have led all these years? How can there be no palace? How can there be no dictums? When some one is sleeping on the road in bitter cold to protect the women in the city, the image built over decades, the subservience built over time, the crony mindset exhibited by us when extending a bribe to get some personal work done ….oh all of this if it has to disappear, then where the hell is this I? The I, I have carefully nurtured and built in this so called society. 

Some one out there is breaking your mindset. He is calling you a lunatic who has been adjusting to this system for years without raising a voice. Without questioning for fear of getting ridiculed. So, the natural reaction is you turn around and call him a lunatic, a joker and so on. Why disturb when all of us are sucking this nectar? Happily able to write whatever we feel like in the media and sit back to look at the next email from your boss who is directly or indirectly linked to the way we are today.

You often do not get a chance to wake up from your sleep. This is one such opportunity. It is not about Kejriwal. It is not about AAP. It is about a inner awakening to question things which you had conveniently ignored all along. 

Wake up! Question!! Observe!!! Act!!!!