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.