Anonymous notes to nobody

Blog Moved

2004-10-17T00:21:27Z

Sorry for the inconvenience. But since I needed the convenience of posting everything on a single site and wanted multiple blogs and photo album and other Stuff I moved my blog to my own website.

http://www.deepjoy.name

Time money and futile efforts of happiness.

2004-07-12T17:16:43Z

Who is truly Happy...

My Dad once told me that the happiest man in the world most probably was a daily wage worker who had just earned enough to get thru the day and was about to go to sleep at night.

Being happy requires 'roti' (bread), kapda (clothing) and makan (a roof), but is that all, Well most people I see around me do have those commodities but I wouldn't call them happy people. At the end of the day when they go to sleep they do not have a feeling of completion.

This is an unfinished journal entry that I hope to complete some day. The thoughts are there but the words I fail to say...

Transition! The word doesn't begin to describe it

2004-06-30T20:03:28Z

Moving on in Life has probably been the oldest human/Animal instinct that has filtered down the ages. People learn to do it in the face of all kinds of obscure situations. But in the end of it all these phases of transition are what makes us alive. It makes us able define a purpose in life. It is to these moments of transition which we look back and are proud of.

I feel i'm in one of those phases now. I'm sure I will be able to look back to this part of my life and say 'I did good!'.

Just about now it feels like I'm about to give up but I know I will wake up tommorow with a new vigour (and more assignments to do). :-)

New Job. New man. New Thoughts?

2004-06-27T16:54:20Z

Some time back I joined my first Job. All I can say is it has been a hectic new week filled with promise and sleepless nights(due to more reasons than one).

I'v shifted base to Bangalore for now. and hope to make it to at least one of the LJ meets being held here.

On the other side I do feel like there has been a drastic change in my life in the last couple of months. College student to my first job has been a smooth transition mostly. A new perspective on life is what I look forward to from here.

My One big contribution to the world

2004-05-05T20:08:47Z

I'm sure most of us remember the time when we were kids and imagined ourselves to be superhero's with super powers to do stuff nobody else could. Was it just me or did everybody just wished they could make a difference in the world around. I remember I imagined myself as several bollywood hero's from their leading roles in movies.

Well just sit back and hear me out here.
Later in life as we grew older our singular achievements in life gave us solice in knowing that we had done what few others had acheived. I'm sure everybody has a moment from 5th or 6th grade they remember. A part in a school play, an atheletic acheivement or something to do with acheiving good grades. Well did society bundle us up to think that all those things were unique. Well sure I played a really great part in a school play but I'm not an actor today. I won the 100mts dash but I'm not a sportsperson or I got good grades in school whatever happened. Those singular achievements that we are so proud of, Are they really making that difference. Are we in pursuit of what society makes us think we want. Just so that it can then just pop the bubble. It's like, "Sorry kid you just don't cut it as an athelete or a actor or a playwrite or whatever".

A few years further away is your angry young martyr thing. This is when they make you beleive you really can make a difference right now. You start to discover real world problems and solutions and you start looking for/beleiving in this one thing you think can really make a difference. I mean social and animal rights activists. Those nerds who figure out that cold fision may not be a myth after all. It's like a whole set of passionate paths are handed down to us. But again we bide our time awaiting to be taken seriously.

Even later and you find yourself in college doing stuff you never knew existed as a kid. and you go through more drills like a semester project or a survey or a garage project which you could sell to like billions of people.

Ok not everybody reaches there but the rest of us are still biding our time. And all this time we are supposed to fiegn interest and motivation for the benefit of those evaluating us. I mean, project evaluations are a joke. You take a seniors report and reprint it and you get the same grades as the guy who came up with this brilliant new idea and spent 4 months of flesh and blood implementing it. You get the same reactions as him too. Your 50 page report is checked for content(read contents page) and presentation and so is his. I saw this senior of mine submit a project which was an example from a software which was being taught to the class for 6 months. The teacher didn't know and the fellow got top notch grades. Let me put this in light I personally know that senior and he was positively brilliant the kinda guy with those new ideas I was talking about. But as usual we are all biding our time and he saw no point in sweating unnecesarily for something which was not gonna matter to anybody anyways.

It seems like all this time we bide is just an excercise. Is it not to say that we are just killing away genius waiting to make that "one big contribution to the world".

The smaller things in life keep getting bigger

2004-03-31T19:04:03Z

It's amazing how life has changes. Though it's the smaller things in life which tell us how much it has really changed.

Innocent Birthday parties have changed into splurging outings.
sugar coated toffees from the grocer have been replaced by stuff from the local cakes and pastries shop
sessions of hide and seek in the neighbourhood have been replaced by kids playing badminton instead

It's all been uphill but have we learnt to expect more from life or are we living in a larger than life world where we just expect more every time. The definite changes can be seen all around it's just that you have to identify them to feel the actual impact.

Have the smaller joys of life become bigger or have they dissapeared all together.......

Hard Days Night

2004-03-19T02:54:39Z

It's been a long long time. lets say it was a phase.

I have just had news that I will be moving to Bangalore in June. The last month has been topsy turvy. I don't know why but I didn't feel like writing in here. Most of the time I was either too happy or too sad to write. So now that things have stabilised I'm Back.

Will write in soon.

I backlash too

2004-02-10T15:46:47Z

President Bush of the US of A has sealed his fate with the 2nd gulf war(I really don't want to say which way). Now as a crunching finale to their poll campaigns US legislators have been pushing bans on outsourcing. This when they are still extending agricultural subsidies to their own farmers, which implies that they are killing the local agricultural market in third world countries.
Outsourcing of US white-collar jobs has got everybody in the US shouting. Wired magazine even did a feature on this in it's Feb issue.

From our(Indian) perspective
We have spent years upon years importing goods and services from the US. For crying out loud they almost exclusively controlled who had and who did not have computers about a generation ago. All medical services and drugs were bought from the west. The shifting of manufacturing services to other destinations was when the US was hit first. Cheap labour in South Asia and other 3rd world countries, who in the eyes of the American's are 'poor' countries, have been categorically proving financially more viable alternatives to domestic production. The disparity that the Americans are proud of is the sole reason for their goods and services being imported. What we see here is world economics trying to correct a lop-sided balance. The corrective lop-side, as I would like to call it, was first seen when manufacturing of motor cars and other mass produced items became dirt cheap in Japan and other countries. In this second wave it is intellectual property which is moving out of the US. Don't get me wrong each country is doing it's best to gain the maximum from these winds of change.

America is trying to hold on to it's position and jobs by banning outsourcing

China is continuing devaluing it's currency to keep outsourcing profitable.

Indian politicians are trying to extract feel-good points for the outsourcing jobs it has got over the past 2 decades. and of course the RBI is checking the rising rupee

Even companies are thinking up new methodologies to circumvent existing laws to cut costs.

But I feel that legislations to ban outsourcing will not be well taken by the US economy. Although analysts may claim that it will be better in the long term. who are they kidding. Did the drive to buy American goods only work in the 70's and 80's? manufacturing has by and large shifted outside the US. US Companies like Trilogy, Sapient and Tavant have gone further and founded their branches on Indian shore. So even if a job is given to an American firm and third party sub-contracting is banned. The company itself will be using workers in India. This is one of the more direct ways of circumventing the proposed legislations. I'm sure there are subtler ways which are virtually untraceable.

So wake up I say. the outsourcing wave may do for us what the micro-devices manufacturing did for the south east Asian countries.
:-)

Whackiness though Name is me

2004-02-01T06:45:01Z

Wow! reading that last post scares me now. Wonder where such wierd thoughts creep into my mind from.

Anyways they do and I use this journal to document them coz i'v had them bottled up for more time than I can remember. I have seen many a factual journals. That is not what you are looking at here. This journal is for those parts of myself which otherwise go unsaid. I'm sure other people also have random thoughts which really move them for an instant. But they never take the time to go back and figure out what the thought was all about. Then again maybe some people do and I just havn't met them yet.

Bye for now

The Human race

2004-01-30T21:40:57Z

A good long break (all of 2 days) from the PC did me a lot of good. I had been almost glued to monitors for the last coupla months. too much work load or whatever.

Anyways, it's amazing how out of sight need not always mean out of mind. Everything pushed out of immediate attention still governs our actions in our subconscience. to begin with people have a tendency to have a subconscience in the first place. I have noticed that however stony and distant someone might seem. They always harbour a streak of righteousness. How his/her actions manifest to support, ignore or defy this subconscience is what gives different appearances to different people. For example: A beggar comes up to your car window begging for alms. The different possible reactions are

pretend not to see or ignore and justify your action by telling yourself or your companions that the beggar would do a decent days work if he/she did not receive alms from people

give something to the beggar

Irritate the beggar (by taking his/her begging bowl or picking a fight: beleive me I have seen this happen)

Now beleive it or not all these actions show similar traits in human beings. I am usually a member of the first group but I know in the back of my mind there is the thought that maye I should have given something to the beggar. (all the so called lectures on those less fortunate may have rubbed off). Their righteousess stems from having done the expected (right) thing. They do not want to be morally held responsible for not having done the right thing.
The person who gave something to the beggar is in a group which clearly reflect their thoughts by their actions. Their righteousness stems from acceptance of their role in society and teh upliftment of the masses.
The third groups is the most complex of the lot. Their actions stem from their irritation from the presence of the beggar in the first place. Their Idea of righteousness is directed in a more general fashion. They beleive in righteousness for all humankind and do not see the beggar as having earned his/her position.

now such underlying thoughts may seem varied and distinct but really each is stemmed from righteousnes. similarly other distinct emotions expressed to situations are usually motivated by similar driving factors underlying in our psyche.

That is the reason that the overal ideas of the human race has not changed a lot over time. Honour, Sincerity, Love for mankind, etc. are ingrained into our society. And in the end these are the threads which seem to be holding this so called civilisation together.

Piracy the simple Math.

2004-01-22T19:27:08Z

We have all seen marked amounts of growth in proliferation of MP3's and DivX's. But have we ever stopped to think that their growth is an indicator of thriving violations of copyright agreements. A parallel increase in shared software (through p2p) also suggests the same for Intellectual Property rights agreements and licenses.

In the western world the figures are , shall we say, less staggaring. According to RIAA and MPAA roughly around 25% of the copeis of music and movies going around in the US on optical medium were pirated. Similar stats for '3rd world' countries can hardly be fathomed. As an example, take note that the largest recordable optical medium manufactureres have changed in the past 10 years from all over the world to south east asia. This implies a more or less direct increase in pirated copies of copyrighted material.

All that was factual information. The pertinent question here is. Why? I beleive it's a statement being made by file sharer's is. Is it really justified that talented (or sometimes just overhyped) artists be payed huge amounts of royalty. Just so that their fans can hear their music. Here I consider the cost of the proeprietary product as against the cost of the medium of distribution.

An average CD when cast from a die (as mass produced CD's are) costs around Rs 3-4 (6-8 cents) to produce.

Include into that the cost of packaging and printing lets say totalling around Rs 3-4 more. coming to a total of 6-8 Rs (13-18 cents)

Now assume that the wastage factor (peices sold /peices produced) is 0.5 i.e. if 200 CD's are produced only a 100 are sold

The total cost now comes to 12-16 Rs (27-36 cents)

Also adding transportation and middle man margins of 100% (crazy but lets allow as much margins as possible)

Now the Cost to put this CD on the shelf comes out to 24-32 Rs (53-71 cents).

So you mean to tell me there is a profit above this to the tune of 200 % more. Audio CD's are Rs 100 (2.2 $) per peice the last time i checked
The shelf cost of a movie on Video CD's in India stands at a minimum of Rs 200-300 if bought from a legitimate source.

Consider the alternatives.
The local grey market CD dealer provides movies at Rs 100 (2.2$) and Audio CD's for as little as Rs 30 (66 cents)
The Internet provides active P2P communities from where you can get a much wider variety of music and movie's than ny stockist or Music store in India can provide. The only cost here is to remain connected.

So for me the end user the difference is only the difference which seems to have crept is is the difference in the cost of putting the finished item on the shelf and the cost at which it is marketted. The assumptions made about the wastage and transport and middle man are clearly prepoterous. Hence an actual record company can sell CD's at the same price as the pirate and still make a profit.
This would help in many ways
consumer : curb the grey market products which have no quality control
Artist : would sell just as many or maybe more records than they are doing currently ( more of them through the proper channel)
Record company: would sell more peices (larger production should mean lower production cost)
MPAA RIAA : could drop the facade that they actually want to stop piracy. all they want is that more people listen to the music and the more profit they can make out of it.

:-) What do you think?

Pop quiz here I come...

2004-01-19T18:13:04Z

Why do people at LJ have this tendancy to take net based quizzes. The whole idea behind doing this is beyond me. I know people will turn up saying not everything done by human beings is done for a reason. Sure i agree.

For instance why do I keep this journal. Is there any real answer to that. Coz I haven't really posted any day to day happenings of mine. I feel all that to be too drab and uninteresting to describe. Although a good freind of mine from 221 B Bakers street would disagree and say
"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes"

So maybe I save those for my personal diary. So that nobody with an astute eye for the extraordinary can spot me out. What I put up in my journal is my thoughts and feelings about things in general. I post on topics i feel strongly about or maybe am associated with. A quiz on the other hand fails this logic completely. sitting on the Internet it takes a few clicks to get to and through a quiz which claims to unravel the kind of person you are. What amazes me even more is the strongly reassuring results supplied with taking the quizzes. In short I feel the quizzes tell you what you want to hear.

This person I know from LJ and elsewhere on the Internet is apparently into goth and is deeply satanic in their cravings and by all standards should by now have been a lesbian hippie serial killer if their quizzes are to be trusted. Based out of his parent's place in mumbai. I'm sure all of those things can't be true.

So are we seeking reassurance of our self image or are we trying to show the world who we wanna be. Coz these quizzes surely don't reflect who we really are.

Delhi the city of joy hope and aspirations

2004-01-17T10:53:04Z

Just joined the delhi LJ community. I'v lived most of my life in Delhi. Granted that I still haven't seen the world. But I've done a fair bit of travelling inside the country. Been to all the major metro's. Kashmir while it was still relatively safe, The North-East houses my hometown. And hence Calcutta (kolkata) is inevitable. Chennai I didn't particularly like. Mumbai was kewl. Rajasthan was grand and historic. But Delhi at the end of the day is what I call home.

Here I see an amalgam of sorts of all kinds of people. gone are the olden days of the Raj and the babudom for which Delhi was known. It's image as the centre for political power in the country somewhat spoils it but then again thats a part of what Delhi is today. Being a radially built city it maybe gets people from all parts much closer than any other metro in the country. :-)

Anyways if you come to India or are in India i implore you to drop by and sample what this city has in store for you...

Some Moderation Needed

2004-01-15T19:55:47Z

Human nature by default is to curb the degree of freedom enjoyed by any intellectual entity. This is reflected on most actions taken thereof by most institutions set up by mankind. Marriage, Censorship, various treaties, etc. are basically all control mechanisms of varied kinds serving the same common purpose. The apparent reason for such control are doomsday prophesies illustrated with easy in varoius fictional representations of our times and of times past.

To draw an analogy Howard Roarke the character from an infamous book may seem the perfect underdog with a perfectly heroic end. But he illustrates an even more deep rooted fear than obvious examples as our depiction of alien worlds in various sci-fi extracts has been in the past decades. To quote a few, check out the Hutt's(Star wars), Klingons and Ferengi(Star trek), or any UFO reports in the past all point to no good coming out of excesses and thus justify the need for moderation.

In Rand's work the ultimate fear that of complete conviction in whatever is done at an individual level leaves no scope for moderation. The fear stems and branches into varied flavours. In the absence of moderation what is seen is a lack of control which is the point brought out by her.

But then again lets turn away from fiction and move to reality for a change. For fiction might be interesting but will never replace the latter. In the charted course of history which has predominantly been through moderation and control. It can be seen that periods that lacked these qualities were the one's which brought about changes in society. Beggining from all the wars/revolutions, to all scientific discoveries, to all innovations were all times of excesses in some sense or the other. Moderation it seems may bring control but lacks change and dynamism. So os it always a simple choice of whence to moderate and what to moderate.

No. The point now is to moderate as little as possible. For we may have another hitler but we may have another Einstien. We are always told to look at the bright side of things and I trust my glass is still half full.

Deadliine :

2004-01-14T21:52:00Z

So much for the morning bit. Seems i'm just not the morning type. Jump starts are my way to greet the morning but that is so that I do get to know that a sun definitely exists upon our skies.

A lot of deadlines approaching. working on too many projects I think. which one do I drop. hmmm.
Inky Pinky Ponky
Stupid verses for Donkeys.
The Reader dies
The writer Dies
Inky pinky ponky.

Hmm I really do need sleep. Now I'm babbling. Anyways been working on quite a few projects.
Some for my Masters (at college)
Some for being lame
and some for the little boy who's babbling again
Whatever my system could use some sleep.

Work work go away
little slumber wants to play
come again later today
work work go away

Rise and shine

2004-01-13T03:54:41Z

The sun'll come out
Tomorrow
So ya gotta hang on
'Til tomorrow
Come what may
Tomorrow!
Tomorrow!
I love ya
Tomorrow!
You're always a day away
Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I love ya, tomorrow
You're always a day away!

Walt Disney - Annie

My first post in the morning. A lot of work to be done today, so I think I'll just get down to the nitty gritty. It's funny how the lines above apply to almost everybody. The only flip side being
That was me yesterday and now it is tommorow
and it's no longer a day away...

Search for a holiday

2004-01-11T22:33:01Z

The omnipresent notion of a holiday never ceases to amaze me. I mean look at it this way.

The dictionary describes a holiday as

A day free from work that one may spend at leisure, especially a day on which custom or the law dictates a halting of general business activity to commemorate or celebrate a particular event.

I mean in todays world is that really possible.
The human mind which we sing praises of is also to be the ultimate undoing of mankind. Sitting here at my desk today on a sunday all I can think of is the deadlines to be met next week. I went out in the evening but all I could talk about is my professional life. why professional alone I say even our private lives and times bind us to a state which can never really be a holiday. The incessant nagging of the future never leaves our side. I'm sure a wealthy businessman on a cruise would be thinking of all his bussiness issues that need to be dealt with in his absence. A common labourer on his day off has to worry about tommorows rations or concerns about how much he will be able to send back to his village.

Hmmm... that last paragraph scares me. sounds too much like a socialite talking about 'social service'.
No my take in this entry is that the search for freedom and moksha and spiritual enlightenment is but an extension of the human thought of a holiday. Now is that true or just too prosaic.

Anyways I notice that my posts consistently show me as tired (as will todays). Maybe I should start posting in the day time once ina while.

All in a days work

2004-01-10T19:41:17Z

No this is not a take on Readers Digest or an attempt at any kind of humorous ordeal through which you will be subjected.

There are good days and there are bad days. And then there are the one's you don't really wanna talk about or remember. The fine line differentiating the latter from the last is the inablility to find self-pity/conversational value in the fabric of those daily events. Bad days are the one's which you can reminisce about and someday (if you live that long) tell your great grand children about ( also in the mean time your children and theirs are not spared of hearing your stories).
Again this is not to be takenas generation gap story or a sad story of a teenager who has had one too many lectures' and inspirational talks flavoured with a healthy dose of the fore-described bad- days.

The gist of it is that the really bad days are the ones that you don't really talk about and that is because they tell the story where the protagonist (you) has no importance.

Coffee and a few online friends

2004-01-09T17:12:00Z

Coffee for me is a daily ritual it has to be done not too often but not in moderation either. The gentle caress of hot steaming liquid on a cold winter day. A few friends online and not much more can be expected out of life. Then again maybe it can!

whatever slow day today so remember the stupid sign which I read a lot of times.

Work: The the thing you do between coffee breaks....

Borrowed Pearls of wisdow

2004-01-08T15:33:10Z

Why is it so easy to just go on the internet and borrow someone else's work and claim it as your own

Borrowed knowledge includes compilations created, recorded, and discovered by others. These include such sources as: books, magazines, newspapers, journals, research reports, microforms, dissertations, diaries, pamphlets, films, audio recordings, videotapes and computer data base output. Any information, inference, experience, observation, or experiment made by another and reported or recorded by another falls into this category and must ethically be documented when used. Others' work must be credited by future users. You cannot claim another's work as your own whether in part or in whole. Putting others' work into your own words or quoting it directly without telling others where it came from is plagiarism, an offense likely to get you into serious trouble and likely to make others distrust you in the future.

Now that was borrowed from http://www.umpi.maine.edu/~petress/essay21.pdf

we often don't think before doing it and very often it's even a commendable job done on our part to conceal it. But sometimes (when I like to think that I have a conscience) it just doesn’t feel right. Currently I’m coding a software project which requires some piece of “Borrowed wisdom”. Now, that I have gotten over my initial dilemma of whether or not to use it. I am faced with an even greater one turns out that the piece that I did copy was in its own turn copied from another one by someone else.

Are we in our search for knowledge landing up in a cesspool of common human know-how?
Are we in the end only adding just one more piece to the same and claiming glory for all the “Borrowed Pearls” that we did not invent?

Some would claim why re-invent the wheel but then again do we really know who invented the wheel and do we make the effort to acknowledge that in fact the invention of the wheel was a major contribution in what we have done now.

Again some would say that is not possible.

Me well I say who care’s as long the so called façade of human industry in adding pieces to an ever increasing jig-saw puzzle continues…..

Anonymous notes to nobody

2004-01-08T13:22:01Z

Crazy as it might seem but viewing other peoples LJ's I see that there are a lot of views by total strangers and people from all over the world. What I make of it is this is a personal space to make your statement to the world.

I begin my LJ today with this thought and I sure as hell don't know what kinda crap i'm gonna end up writing here.

But Ho humm here goes.