From Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to Dumbasses Endangering Innocents

This title has been rattling around in my head for a while now, with no adequate outlet in the shadow of the 2nd Trump administration's push to seemingly throw out without an ironclad claim to stay in USA. To add context for those who may read this in the distant future, a major point of the administration is/was that DEI (the former in my title) is bad. And a stated mission to remove "bad" immigrants illegal or otherwise, but settling for anyone they can get their hands on. I don't think it's possible to adequately convey what that does to a brown immigrant, except to say it sucks out your... joy. And that's when I'm a very overqualified person capable of doing what only a handful of people can, I shudder to think how someone "average" feels. All of this leads to my other definition of DEI in the title. 

So why this post, well a few reasons. First and foremost, I'm a father of two now, and I hope some day reading this will give my kids a sense of who their dad is/was and what made him like that. Secondly, I'm a few days away from turning 40 and have been distilling who I want to be, having achieved most of what I truly wanted from my life, and enjoying just living that dream, and at some point in the midlife crisis, you have to just say f*** it and do what the heart feels is right. Thirdly, I was missing a true distillation of what I wanted to say, and as always, a song brought it to me -- Ed Sheeran's currently new single, Sapphire (go listen to it), a collab with Arijit Singh with Punjabi lyrics in the middle, and an unmistakable mix of Indian/Punjabi music ethos into a definitely english song. To sum it up, it's... joy. 

As an immigrant, I truly am a citizen of nowhere, not quite fitting in in either country I can call home. And being outside of that mix gives you a perspective that I feel someone who hasn't lived this experience either can't have, or would find it really hard to appreciate -- that cultures are meant to mix, they're not meant to be insular. Growing up, I loved Indian culture, but also felt I disliked parts of it. Being in the USA I see patches for that, but I see other things I dislike. So a fusion, makes sense. Btw, don't get me wrong, I appreciate my luck to be able to do this, and I know how many people cannot have this choice. I hope you'll remember my luck in this case stems from a genetic lottery coupled with parents who essentially toiled their whole life to give me the opportunity, but it would have meant nothing without the insane amount of hard work that made the most of that luck. So, privileged yes, but not only that. 

History (and I can't imagine anyone who's read any of the other posts on this blog would be surprised by me giving a history lesson) is full of successful civilizations that blended cultures and were the better for it, as well as disastrous results of trying to not do so. The Romans are a good example of both, yes they were racist to an extent, but they also tried to include every peoples they conquered, and their biggest failure was Britain and Hadrian's wall. The Mongols, and their descendants the Mughals that ran India are a newer example of doing the inclusion part well. The Chinese have a good example of what goes wrong when you insulate cause you're too awesome, and destroy your naval armada to look inward and sell your tech to outsiders, only to have them come back in a few decades and conquer you with your own tech (that was the English and the opium wars btw). Where even the great empires failed is when the inclusion, the blend, the melting pot, started to take over the original peoples that started it. 

The United States seems to be at that precipice. 

We can argue for ages about "what this country is" and that a eurocentric view is what made this country, and what it is now. There's no convergence on that argument. I agree that's how it started, I'd argue that's probably not why it's the world leader. The USA had luck in the bets it made in WW2, and the country's inherent character to fight a bully presented itself well. But, if you think that's what wins wars, boy do you have some surprises in store for you. The USA won the war on the backs of a few advantages, geographically of course, but an assembly line of tanks, machinery, and most importantly, science. Science, done by the very folks the current administration would very much like to send "somewhere". And not to forget finance, money does run the world. If you think what makes this country is blonde, white people, I think you'd find more in common with some other folks in WW2. 

The crux of my point is this, that white folks have enjoyed a long reign at the top of the pyramid in this country, and in most countries for the past few centuries. And in the USA, so have the devout. But maybe that's not all this country has to be, in order to be great. If you want a place to be great, it has to truly be a beacon to all to give it their huddled masses yearning to be free. That ideal is what everything is based on, not the money, not the science, not the weaponry, and not a statue. Cause you can force people for a few years or decades, but the moment you lose that ideal, the next generation of smart people -- dare I say folks like me, and folks very much not like me -- will go somewhere else. And where those people go, so does the greatness, cause it follows great minds, whatever bodies they might happen to reside in. If you're hoping to sit on top of a pyramid of skeletons, then that's what you will have, but such pyramids crumble. 

In the meantime, you'll have dumbasses endangering innocents, in the name of righteousness and protecting the country. So, we the people, this is your choice, would you like to build walls around your tiny kingdoms of uniformity, or do you truly want a melting pot. Cause you really can't have both, and you have to understand melting pots have upsides and downsides. The downside? lots of people whose views and thinking are diametrically opposed to yours that will frequently make you uncomfortable. The upside? well joy for one if you include Punjabis, but more seriously, it'll open your eyes to an experience and a world you didn't know existed. Cause life is not meant to be lived in comfort, it's meant to make you question things, and find there's joy and enlightenment in unexpected things.  

So why should you believe me, cause after all I'm one of the outsiders myself. Well, here's my shot at tears in the rain. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe, wholly disparate couples who represent this melting pot in a very personal (and successful way). Friends from all over the middle east who truly taught me the meaning of friendship, loyalty, and kindness, and yet more friends born and raised right here who shared a completely different yet so similar picture of the same. Smart people from all over the globe and right here, who taught me the many things that brought me here. And the food, so much amazing food, from dal makhani and gulab jamuns, to tiramisu, escargot, pulled pork and a true southern banana pudding, turkish kebabs, belgian ales, weissbiers, satays, (the many many different) curries, sushi, tacos, burritos and so many things I can't remember right now. Well that didn't hold a candle to Rutger Hauer, but maybe that's best left for the 50th birthday. 

To close, I hope you choose joy and find a balance in the melting pot, one that hopefully includes folks like me. Cause though we may not live to see it, history teaches us that a choice in the other direction won't end well for our kids, cause those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. 

Look...

Look left, look right

Come what might

Be it day or night

Commit no slight

Be strong, yet nice

And nurture no vice

Find a cause, devote his life

Find a good woman, make her his wife

These are but a few tenets of being a man

To be good not cause you must, 

But because you can

But what to do when these rules took hold

And he learnt the story untold

He learned of people who don't

They can, they must, but simply won't 

And he realized, 

All he knew to do, was give them a look

There is no mention of any more, in this book

Black and white, he had learned to see

But this was the middle, as grey as can be

Dive in you must, to set them free

But they whispered back, so did we

And he began to see up and down

And up sprouted a whole new town

Where he thought he was the knight

But turned out to be the clown

The rules had changed, the book was old

That way of life was pawned and sold

Yes, things were simpler up on that moral perch

But this world warranted a whole new search

There were good things in this world

That the book never saw

They brought to life such beauty, that filled him with awe

The world wasn't just black, white, or grey

Nor were there devils, looking for his soul to prey

They just wanted to be left alone

To love and live

They never wanted that present

The knight sought to give

He searched far and wide, hoping for succor

To find even one

Of all the answers he sought, yet found none 

And so he trudged on, hoping for once to write

Of his search, of his plight

The book of colors, of this world so new

With questions so many, but answers so few

But as the seasons changed, from spring to fall

He yet searched for the meaning of it all

But it did not yet rule his life

And without so looking, even found a wife

As he looked back an old man

At how far he traveled, how fast he ran

He remembered the old home he once came from

It brought back a few smiles and even a frown

He would forever be that man from out of town

It wasn't the end he once wished

He touched some lives, yet some he missed

But to an extent, followed the book he had

                                                                     --- Me

Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai

I've been pretty pissed off about the political climate in India of late, and the kinds of things going on, especially on Facebook. My apologies for the misuse of the title.

If you're not aware of what's going on in India these days, it's the circus that comes along every few years. The Lok Sabha elections, which eventually elects the Prime Minister of India. The two, or should I say three leading candidates are all deeply flawed. There's yet a group which is angry about this very fact, that we're looking directly at PM candidates, cause India isn't a presidential democracy. I'll get to why I'm pissed with that group a little later.

First, the candidates, the Congress finally has it's scion Rahul Gandhi up and running, the BJP has Narendra Modi of Gujarat fame, and somehow, almost in a delusional fashion, we have Arvind Kejriwal. Lets look at them in order, Mr. Gandhi, who's now better known as a meme after his all too infamous interview, cannot honestly hope to win. After answering questions from probably a parallel universe, no sane or well educated person would want to vote for him. This is fairly shameful, as he comes from a long line of very successful politicians, all of whom were intelligent enough to hold their own in the political arena. Intelligence seems to have its roots in genes, and Sonia Gandhi has proven her intelligence time and again, let alone the rest of the Gandhi clan. So how he was so much at loss in a scheduled interview is beyond me. After that, how can anyone want to hand over the reins of a country to him.

Mr. Modi owes his fortunes and misfortunes to Gujarat. To some it seems like I support him, but quite frankly that isn't the case. My knowledge of economics isn't that deep that I can comment on the development that has happened in Gujarat and how much that's his doing. But, having been to parts of it, I can say that the people of the state have a bigger claim to that than any leader. It may be a stereotype, but they really do have business sense. I've never seen a state in India that is cleaner, more organized, and safe for women. Now since I haven't seen Gujarat pre-Modi, I don't know how much of that is thanks to his leadership, but I doubt anyone can attribute human nature to a leader. As for the infamous riots, the plot is a little more complicated. The courts exonerated him, but the specter of those riots have never left him. I can't comment on his guilt, that's for courts and people wiser than me to decide. What I can say though, is that they happened on his watch, and I've seen people resign for less. If he is guilty, then sure I can go along with the moral argument of why he should not be PM. More so however, people in politics are built on perception, and I do buy that argument that whenever he does go abroad to represent India, the defining factor won't be his successes in development, it'll always be those riots.

This may be abrupt, but let me turn to Mr. Kejriwal, cause he's the one who annoys me the most. Why, you may ask. Well, quite simply, all he's doing is throwing a spanner in the works. He, and his party for most part, seem to love a revolution, they're just not sure what they're going to do if they succeed. Yes, that line is supposed to remind you of the Joker's line from the Dark Knight, where he says "I'm like a dog chasing card, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qE6v0khR9U). Because some of you are probably foaming at the mouth by now, let me explain why. The two main points that AAP wants to bring about that I've understood are, rooting out corruption and decentralizing the power of the government. Honorable intentions at heart, but very half baked executions. Their model of corruption removal seems to think that corrupt people are somehow separated from regular people. That the aam aadmi is somehow not corrupt. No offense, I've met very few such aam aadmis in a country of more than a billion people. Extrapolating statistically, I don't think we can find enough such people to run the country. And furthermore, simply being honest doesn't make you qualified to run anything. Stupidly, let me borrow a line from the West Wing, where a Nobel prize winning president says that fixing any problem requires a combination of efforts, not going all out in a particular direction. Anyone who has any experience with natural systems will be able to tell you that the way mother nature does it is pretty much the same. Redundancy is the name of the game. If you want to remove corruption, remove the things that lead to corruption. But first, rid yourself of the naive notion that any system can be completely corruption free. Corruption is a natural implication of a system with insufficient resources for the number of people -- everyone will want to steal cause there isn't enough for everyone. It's a part of human nature, all that we can do, is make it an option with a high opportunity cost. Not just by prosecuting corruption, but also weeding it out from our day-to-day behavior. Don't slip a 50 to the cop who stopped you, go pay that ticket. Don't misuse that company car for personal things. Don't cut the line or jostle, follow order. Because those more visible forms of corruption arise from them. Reducing power tariffs and giving people freebies is just populist politics, something that other parties have been doing for ages.

I think I lost track there, went on a bit of a rant, so let me come back to the second point, decentralization. The core tenet of the idea of swaraj is very appealing, to return the power to the disenfranchised masses and let them decide how to spend that money. Let me ask you this simple question, in such a model, how can you get the IITs which educated Mr. Kejriwal, how can you get the Bhakra Nangal Dam, the Indian space program, the amazing railway network and roads that India has? Distributed decision making makes sense for certain projects, but not as a general rule. Economies of scale are important for growth. As for decentralization, there have been projects for a long time in that direction, which have slowly divested some power to local councils and gram sabhas. Being impatient with that just because the current system doesn't correspond to an ideal is again naive. No system is perfect, so when you advocate revolutionary transition from a model that somewhat works, you better be sure that your alternative will work better. Cause anything else leads to anarchy, and ironically, more corruption. As I've said numerous times before, this is governance, not kindergarten, learning on the job isn't an option at this scale.

So there you have it, three candidates, all of whom are deeply flawed in their own different ways. I wouldn't want to vote for either of them. If you twisted my arm, and flew me back to India to vote, I'd probably be in favor of Modi, cause at least he has an established track record for governing.

As for the people who're unhappy that we're getting closer to an American model where leading candidates are making themselves known, and crying themselves hoarse about how India's democracy was designed differently and a Presidential model has serious pitfalls, take a moment. No one is transitioning India to a Presidential model just yet. Moreover, just because we understand two models of democracy doesn't mean a new better model can't evolve. Because the people who designed these two models did it to the best of their knowledge at that time. People seem to forget that times change, and given different conditions, those very same smart people might have made different decisions -- that's what made them intelligent to begin with. So using the argument that someone decades or centuries ago did something and following that by rote is something I don't understand. Instead I advocate trying to understand why they made the decisions they made and how those were driven by the prevailing conditions, so that we can understand if any of those have changed, and if we may need to rethink their ideas. Cause it's not like we don't make intelligent people anymore, we probably just don't elect them to office as much, and don't give them the freedom to make lasting change. 

Divergent

I've been reading the Divergent series of books these past few days. Yes they're  probably written for teenage girls, and probably have major elements lifted from others, but it's a nice story, and I'd recommend reading it. There are a few things in there I'll probably write about in a while. But, In the meantime I found a nice excerpt from the end of the third book Allegiant, that I felt was worth sharing:

“There are so many ways to be brave in this world. Sometimes bravery involves laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, or for someone else. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved, for the sake of something greater.

But sometimes it doesn't.

Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through pain, and the work of every day, the slow walk toward a better life.

That is the sort of bravery I must have now.”

A skeptical aam aadmi

I am what most people might call a skeptic (with the grand exception of technology, where I seem to be an early adopter of most things), but I like to keep an open mind for new things, provided they give a good argument in their favor. Quite simply because doing anything new is hard, so some leeway should be granted. It's illustrative to think of this as the hump:

Yep this one, no pun intended

I was lucky enough to find a pic that illustrates the phases too! I maintain the most interesting things happen in phase 2, cause honeymoons are fun and easy (or so I've heard...). Humps are hard, because going up slopes is hard. That may sound like an obvious fact, but that's the reason trails take a long route up, mountain roads have bends, and you have to take a few degrees to get to active research. And quite simply, there is no easy way across the hump and anyone who promises you such a way is most likely a liar (think diet pills and their no-exercise-weight-loss promises). This is an accepted fact in sciences, barring quantum tunneling. Lets leave that out for the time being, cause I won't be talking about quantum things here. The jump I'm claiming here is that most real world challenges also fall somewhere along this curve. People spend years making slow, creeping progress towards a solution, building momentum. And when you hit the peak, you know that the trend has reversed and you'll see a sudden flood of progress. I'd postulate that gay rights in USA are approaching that peak. Why? Cause simply put, it's a battle for minds, as soon as you have a critical mass of people believing in your solution, you have the majority and the majority can convert others much more quickly.

This is where I'll pivot to the point I want to discuss. The AAP (Aam Aadmi Party for the uninitiated), is offering a panacea to the problem of corrupt governance. Their manifesto has a definite socialist tilt, but they claim to have solution that works. So yay, we're at the peak of the hump. A lot of their supporters say this is why they must be given more leeway than other parties. I'm willing to accept that to a limit, but there seems to be a general misunderstanding of what it means to be near a peak. To get near this peak, a large number of people have devoted their lives and effort. In this case, quite literally lives have been lost to highlight corruption and try to steer the country away from it. So when someone claims to be capable of crossing the hump, they carry the wishes and dreams of a lot of people past and present. Secondly - and this is the part I see gross ignorance of - they're near the peak, not past it. A mistake here has the potential to start an avalanche of momentum away from the desired outcome. Why, you might ask, cause future governments can point to their failure to shoot down progress. If you want examples, just look at the current problems the Obama administration is facing from mistakes in the healthcare rollout.

The two arguments that might detract from me having any say in this are that I'm technically not an aam aadmi, and that I'm not even in Delhi right now. Yes, I've used a good combination of luck and hard work to get where I am, so I might not be like most of the middle class AAP represents, but I'm still there, and I've lived through the spectrum, through my experiences and my family's. As to the fact I'm not in Delhi right now, well, that gives me some objectivity simply from being outside the problem I'm supposed to be looking at (I spent a whole post discussing that, so look it up :) )

So finally, here is the primary thing I'm skeptical about: Why dole out the results you expect to come down the line? I'm inclined to believe there is corruption in power and water distribution, but why not let those inquiries complete with actual facts. I don't care where you studied, IIT included, because most IITians themselves will say it's dangerous to assume that your predictions will always be correct. Even experts fail periodically, and you're still new to this game. This is where that danger of rolling backwards comes into play. A mistake here will reverse the momentum in the blink of an eye. The same parties AAP accuses of favoritism and corruption will come back and point fingers, destroying their hard-earned credibility. Because, unlike some who feel this is a victory, I think this is just the beginning of the test, one in which they have to ace every question to be successful. Doing that requires slow prudence and maturity, not rushed populism.

Even now, negative articles are propping up about Kejriwal and his perceived heavy-handedness in matters. How raising questions and pointing out possible flaws seems to be anathema. There's only so long (that honeymoon period), that AAP can hide behind the label of being new. After a point they'll have to start answering questions, biggest of which is how they intend to pay for what they've already given away. Because no matter how corrupt the previous government was, in the decade or so Sheila Dikshit was CM, I saw the power situation improve, pollution go down, and transportation improve by leaps and bounds. When I was a kid, the word "blueline" warranted terror similar to Gabbar Singh. People knew what "folding cots" were, cause we slept on them a lot of times thanks to there being no power. Pollution was so bad that smog was a daily occurrence. Thanks to, in spite of, or independent of, the Congress government, power cuts went down, buses became better and safer, a metro was finally built, and pollution is going down thanks to CNG. Those are achievements, big ones at that. Delhi still has problems, and almost all of them can be traced back to the massive influx of people it sees everyday. I once sat through a lecture (by an expert on the topic, mind you) on how you can't possibly plan for such an influx because there aren't enough resources. And now AAP, which doesn't have so many experts, is claiming it can. I'm not inclined to believe them unless they offer hard proof. And they seem to be on their way to delivering that, with audits of power companies etc. Instead of fast-tracking these audits, they went on a promise making spree. Temporary as these promises might be, taking something away is always exponentially harder. Remember when reservations were only meant to last for a few years?

If it was unclear from the last para, what I'm trying to say is that governance is built on hard-won victories, not shoot-from-the-hip promises which play to the masses. AAP had the potential to do the former, and still does, but they seem to be going for the latter, which is what disturbs me. Because while you're focused on this particular hump, don't forget the other hump, the one of dictatorship. If you're confused, read about Herr Hitler's rise to power.

ps: I know some of you are going to lose it about the last line, so let me clarify that I don't think AAP is going to become the next National Socialist German Workers Party, only that small missteps have the potential to have big repercussions. Because the steps from National Socialist to Nazi aren't that many if we follow anything like mindless drones without asking questions to the contrary. 

Democracy 2.0

"No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Winston Churchill was the luminary that said those lines. It's often used in most, if not all arguments for starting a discussion on why it should be the way this world is governed. The point at which I disagree with those discussions is that there isn't a better alternative, and I'll try here to propose a better option, Democracy 2.0 so to say. I'll also offer the disclaimer that I have no professional knowledge or training about government, so this could in all likelihood be the delusional rantings of a person who thinks he knows the answer. So, there, that was your pinch of salt.

I am the citizen of the world's largest democracy, and currently live in the world's most watched democracy. The denizens of both countries are almost always up for spirited debates about it, because these countries have had it for long enough to have a few generations who have seen no other form of government. But, the unfortunate fact is that major change in its formulation seem to be almost absent. To put it in perspective, if Apple were to not release a new iOS for 300 years, how would that feel like? Cause the last two were pretty good in my opinion (Yes, android was pretty good too, this not *that* discussion).

I always maintain that computer science has a lot to offer the world in a purely theoretical sense. The basic principles from the world and CS always have a reasonable mapping. So, lets begin. The biggest problem that's faced in democratic governments these days seem to be the representatives themselves. Voting is a pretty good way of electing representatives, but the people who formulated the idea never considered that elections could be such an industry. Don't believe me? look up the spending numbers for the last US presidential elections, and you'll see what I mean. Money is a great motivator, and money usually seems to grease the huge moving parts of the two democracies I mentioned. USA has lobbyists, who spend billions to get their pet projects approved, laws passed, and by implication, get supportive representatives elected. In a computational paradigm, this translates representatives into programs whose veracity can't be trusted, cause there are external elements which can affect their responses. There are some excellent solutions in CS for resolving these, but the problem here can be that large masses of programs can be compromised. So, a challenge based method seems to be a pretty good approach. Each program justifies its response, and that justification is noted along with the response.

Before closing that discussion, let me open a slightly different, but related chapter, making laws. It's become a massive undertaking to make even one law, or pass any other bill. In the CS paradigm, whenever you try to add a feature, a discussion about its impact etc. is a pivotal part of the design process. Then a description doc is written which describes not only the choices made for the features, by also why those choices were made. The careful reader will note that this reduces the chances of arguments like "This is clearly what the authors (founders) of so-and-so intended", because they write down what they intended to begin with. In addition, write down the assumptions behind the reasons as well. What all this implies is that you make a coherent argument about why you're doing what you're doing, and this argument must be complete. So, in the future someone can't come along and say that so-and-so were against A because they never mentioned it. Well, maybe A wasn't considered a possibility then. An example, maybe the founders of the constitution never thought about gay marriage because it wasn't a well known possibility back then, and that they knew if they even discussed it, the people who this constitution was intended to be for, would never accept it no matter what that the end result of that discussion was. This argument extends to a lot more contentious issues too. But carrying on, the other part of the design process is the bug-fixing stage, when the end users who are actually going to use your feature note the issues and problems with the feature. Then, a small group of core decision makers try to develop fixes for it, and implement those to the satisfaction of the end users. The fixes don't go back to a huge committee, just the small group whose business it is to get the product working - the authors of the law in this case. Changing the API isn't an option here, only fixing and clearing what the API is supposed to be doing, and make minor corrections if there were issues. If there are major issues, this team is usually fired, because they didn't do a good job of designing the API to begin with. Ok, if not fired immediately, then at least placed on probation.

Interestingly enough, periodically, the upper leadership in a software company changes, and major re-organizations aka re-orgs happen. Groups are fractured and shunted around, priorities are reassessed, and things are modified appropriately. Sounds a lot like elections doesn't it? More interestingly, debates in companies - software or otherwise - are usually resolved in a very dictator-like fashion. Steve Jobs was famous for this, and look what that brought this world. But this is dictatorship with a difference, the person at the top can't make arbitrary decisions, there's a board that controls his/her fate and can throw him/her out if bad decisions are made. More importantly, it usually helps if neither choice came from the person at the top to begin with, but that probably never happens.

One more increasingly important issue in software design is security. There're entire armies of people devoted to making sure your code is secure, and doesn't allow random hackers to put up pictures of genitalia on your front page. Which means that every bit of code is stress tested, and automated and manual processes check the code for loopholes. If any are found, they're sealed and fixed by that bug fixing process I described earlier. I don't see why this can't be done for laws too, laws these days are almost designed to have loopholes. Worse yet, lawyers are paid millions to find them. When smart people on wall street found loopholes in laws and made profits at the cost of others, we vilified them and wanted to persecute them. Yet, lawyers who do the same with actual laws usually escape such scrutiny, the same for the people who formulated the laws themselves. Now consider this, if a law was written with the intentions of the makers, plugging these holes would be a lot easier, because anyone could tell where the theory and implementation of that intention diverged giving rise to the bug.

Another interesting aspect is modularity. This has gained popularity recently. What it means that each component of a program works in relative isolation so breaking one module doesn't break the rest of the program. Most of your operating systems follow this philosophy, which has made computing much more secure in general. A democratic government was initially designed with this principle, but it's become polluted in practice. Just because one branch of the govt. cant make a decision doesn't mean every other branch should grind to a halt, that makes for poor design, and any software architect will tell you that. Interestingly, there's even work on how to make a decision when a module can't rely on others to be secure. But it's far too complicated for me to understand and explain here, so read it up if you want to. I promise that it's bloody cool work. The one thing I pride above all else about India is its judicial system. Judges aren't elected by everyone, and the judiciary, though slow, works in relative isolation. To this day, the Supreme Court's decisions are respected by most. They're respected in USA too, in spite of the oddity that each judge seems to be qualified with a political leaning. But the one singular fact is that these people have devoted their lives to understanding the law and what should denote fair judgement. They've proven their credentials to be at par with the very people who formulated the first laws, and so they should be allowed to operate outside the boundaries set forth in those first laws, *if and only if* the underlying assumptions on which that law was based on have changed. And trust me, even 50 years is a long time for those assumptions to hold.

What I'm trying to say here most of all is that one proven aspect from history is that when a government fails to keep up with the changes in society, the repercussions are severe. The simple solution CS can offer is that government keep changing slowly, improving all the time, so such upheavals are unnecessary. If for no other reason, it should be done because sudden changes are horrible for the people who live through it. At the end of it all, it comes down to trust, because the people who usually revolt have lost faith in the people who govern them. Finding a solution that fits so many diverse people is hard, so it's about time we use the mathematics and logic we're taught to use some rigor in the way we're governed as well. So that we can slowly progress to a government that remains by the people, of the people, and for the people - all of them, however they might be. 

It's my birthday and I'll rhyme if I want to!

Another year of my life is gone
And I might be forgiven for being forlorn
I'm not the spring chicken I used to be
There are even some new leaves in my family tree

Though I'm not really tied down
I still yearn to be free
To spend my days doing stupid things that make me smile, not frown
Alas, there's still some fight left in me

And though I might now be twenty eight
So lighting those many candles might be tempting fate
And sure, any beatings or bumps I'll happily take
But know this, I remember those who plaster me with cake

I should probably end this on a cheery note
And maybe drop some interesting quote
But nothing comes to mind, it's a blank
So lets just be frank

I'm probably old enough where it's just another day
But it's still a lot of fun to cut a cake, and say yay!
So thanks everyone for wishing me and being so nice
I feel so elated, I just might have another slice

-- Me

Why

Sometime between 6th and 9th grade, we were taught how to write notes in English class. The main questions you were supposed to answer were, Who, What, When, Where, Why. My most hated was always the 'why'. It could never really be answered in the word limit that was allowed. As the years have progressed, it's held its place as the most annoying question in my mind.

Over the years however, the complexity of this annoyance has gone up significantly, thanks in no small part to the many scenarios where this question raises its ugly head. Things like, why did that happen, why didn't that happen, why does my code not work, you get the picture. However, I'm starting to see that the worst of it all is the question, why am I doing this?

Let me give a little more perspective. Over the years, I've experienced frustration in the work setting, and seen others go through so much more, all for doing something we love. But work is like any other mistress, if it doesn't love you back, the affection starts to fade and you're left wondering why you're going through that frustration to begin with. The other, worse part has to do with the fact that I'm surrounded by very intelligent people who hold the skills and temperament to succeed at pretty much any endeavor. I like to believe I'm one of them, and it probably is true. The next part might sound patronizing or self-aggrandizing, but it really isn't, so my apologies if you're offended. The key problem when you're so intelligent that you can do anything, is the question why should you devote your efforts to that particular something. Yes, it can be seen as overconfidence, but the fact is that most people are driven by a reason. There's a reason people are willing to put in their nights and days, their sweat blood and tears for a cause. Because the simple fact is that it needs to be a cause. And the importance of the cause is proportional to the effort required. A lot of my friends, they've spent a good part of their lives studying and working pretty damn hard. Which means that the 'why' at this point needs to be pretty darn strong. This is the point where companies and business execs lose the plot. At this point, money can only do so much, family considerations and pressures a lot more. But what they (and me), truly desire, is a sense of satisfaction, or achievement, of having made a difference to this world. They want a fulfillment of that dream that was shown to them when they started college and were told they could change the world.

Much as this might seem annoying to you, people who aren't happy with how much they've achieved, the desire to achieve something in life is universal. It's the scale of desire that differs. I'm sure when Alexander would have told people he wanted to conquer the world, people would have wondered, why the hell isn't he happy with having a kingdom. Yes, I will agree that he died young, and that might suck, but the world knows who he was. There was a line in the movie Troy, when Achilles' mother tells him, that if he stays, he shall have many sons and daughters who will love him and pass on his story, but slowly his name would die out. But if he went to Troy, he would not return, but his name would live through history. He chose the latter.

I don't think all of us want that strong a cause, but scientists try to map it to the autism spectrum. How focused you are on one particular thing tends to decide how much you want from your work. That's a gross oversimplification I agree, but there is a correlation. In fact, autistic tendencies are positively correlated to success in STEM fields, simply because hard work and perseverance pays off in these fields more than others.

So in the end, the irony is that I at least know the answer to one of the why's, which is that why I must know why I do something, and that's a good beginning. Hopefully, some time before I hit 50 I'll also understand why I ended up taking the path I took.

Ideal and Practical Solutions

I've been busy with a deadline the past few weeks, and the hellish amount of effort, and the stuff happening in that time gave me this idea. Let me start by saying that in the world of Computer Science, there are all kinds of solutions to problems, but they usually end up being classified - rather informally - into ideal and practical solutions. For example, you can propose complicated algorithms for problems which are amazingly fast, but no one will ever implement them because they're so complicated. On the other hand, people will be more amenable to using quick and dirty solutions simply because they're easy to use. And this is something I see happening in the real world too.

The key lies in understanding that ideal solutions may not be practical, in the real world too. They make assumptions and simplifications that just don't hold up in the real world. So, we end up creating practical solutions that are close to the ideal solution, but not quite there. This is especially true of problems which are very complex, where an ideal solution requires just too much. Take equality for example. The ideal solution is to ensure there is no discrimination in any sphere of life, based on any factor. But, we all know some of these are buried very deep, either because of the way we are, or because of the environment we grew up in. Now, I've yet to see an example where training can overcome such deeply buried views. Which means that equality isn't a problem which can be practically solved within a generation, no matter what the change proposed. In fact, since how we're raised contributes significantly to this, I'll be a little stingier and claim that a few generations are needed before any proposed changes creep into the nurture process. Which means the war for equality is something that's going to yield changes over a century span, rather than, lets say, a 5 year span. Which makes it fairly disheartening for anyone fighting for it. But, it's important to understand that the temporary 'equilibrium' that we achieve during that century depends a lot on how much we strive for the ideal solution.

Let me go on a tangent for a bit and explain the law of thermodynamic equilibrium. Don't get scared of it, all I care about it in this context is that if you have two sources of temperature, the equilibrium temperature depends on both the sources. This might seem like a fairly simple thing, but it has massive implications, particularly when you're trying to do things like insulate your house for the winter, or cool it in the summer. I'll leave the technical details aside, just point out that this is why air conditioners are rated for a particular range of temperatures, if it gets too hot, they just can't work if they haven't been designed for it.

Getting back, how this tangent applies to the "real" world is that how hard activists fight for equality right now, has a direct consequence on what the temporary fix we get for it. Which is why there are so many lobbying firms that get so much money. If not for any reason, but simply to affect a temporary solution, because most people can see how things will go in the long term. The particular example I'll use here is fairly contentious, so I'll try to stick to logic and avoid getting into opinions, particularly my own.

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about gay marriage, the equality of marriage and the whole concept of marriage as a whole. Both sides argue over the fairness of their side and how not following their view would be detrimental to the world as a whole. But, arguing over what the government considers as marriage should only begin after one looks at the history of why the government got into the business of noting who married whom. This goes back to medieval times, when there weren't really governments but lots of lords and kinds who ruled their fiefdoms. The big problem was who gets the property or any belongings of a person when they died, and how to avoid quarrels of any such sort. Ideally this was also meant to resolve matters of succession, but history is littered with examples where the powerful simply chose to overlook the laws. But, in most cases, this helped. The person who was legally married to the deceased got dibs, i.e. their offspring were legal heirs, and the others, bastards. Legal marriage was attested to by the lord or king, whoever ruled the land. Such attestation was important to prevent impostors, not just in matters of property, but also the profession. This is exactly how surnames associated with jobs arose, and sadly enough, the caste system. But clearly the original reason for a ruling body or government recognizing marriage was to ensure that the rights of the loved ones of the deceased (or living) was maintained and free from challenge by the rest of society. This idea stood the test of time, which should give it some measure of sanity, in as much it must have been developed by some leading minds of the time. Since in USA (where this discussion is taking place), the founding fathers are considered paragons of reason and virtue, it is logical to consider the people who came up with the idea of registering marriages, as smart enough. Going along the same argument, this would imply that the definition of marriage as understood by a government should be based purely on how it might help matters of protecting the rights of a person and their loved ones, particularly taxes, inheritance etc. That should imply that the government should not really care if this union is with a man, woman, or any other being or thing. As long as the person or persons referred can be transferred ownership of property without any ambiguity, the government should be perfectly fine with it.

Yes, I realize my argument implies that gay marriage should be allowed. And I do concede that it assumes the separation of church and state. But that's where my logic led me, I'd be happy to change it if someone shows me the flaw there. And if you're wondering where did the ideal v.s. practical theme go, here it is. The solution I've presented is ideal, because it's based on a dispassionate logical understanding. We as humans are not so, we have deeply ingrained prejudices which affect our decision making. Thus I don't expect gay marriage protagonists to win soon. As in I do expect they will get some legal victories soon, but a true adoption won't happen until people's prejudices are wiped out, and that's something that can't happen until the next generation. Even worse, it'll take ever longer for this idea to precipitate to other countries, cause they're a little further back on this change totem pole.

To conclude this rather long and rambling post, let me just say that the extreme protagonists on either side need to keep up their battle cries, no matter what their cause is. Cause how hard you push makes a dent, on both the short-term and long-term scales. And even if you don't see the change you want quite yet, take heart in the fact that your next generation will, thanks to your efforts. 

The 3am desparation

Ah sleep, why hast thou deserted me
An early-to-bed-early-to-rise types, I have the potential to be
It's all part of my grand plan, come here and see
But you're stubborn, it's 3am and I need to pee

A long time ago my parents scolded me for staying up too late
Now they're ecstatic, if I'm up at eight
Morning walks might still be pipe dreams,
But it's been a while since it wasn't lunch, but breakfast I first ate

What could I possibly have done...
...to deserve such a fate, I just had some fun
To all who ask me to sleep early, what am I, a nun?!
And I don't sleep all day, my day just begins with the setting sun

And beneath the moon I've seen some amazing sights
Taken some great pictures, and seen twinkling lights
But now people insist on calling me,
The thing that goes bump in the night

Until "Twilight" I had no problem in being called a vampire
Some vamplings, I once hoped to sire
But one more mention of glittering in sunlight,
And I'll walk out into the sun, to set myself on fire

But before I set myself ablaze,
I must rid myself of this daze
Upon the rising sun I must gaze
And see if waking up early is really as magical, as everyone says

And I must hurry, the damned idiot might tell the kids
How he found their mother, quite soon,
And I'd like to finish this PhD
So my life is no longer a sad toon
And so people stop calling me that loon
Who decided instead of taking a paying job, to work nights and stare mournfully at the moon

Imagine the limits of my desparation, that I'm using pop-culture references
I tried counting sheep, but they refused to jump the damn fences
I agree, I must be out of my senses,
But I've seen too many of my friends' thesis defenses

And now since my mental capacity is all too low
So much so, that I didn't use "pun" in the 13th, no 11th row
I must try to watch some boring TV show
To bed, I must go!

-- me

Untitled...

I've been in this world, for many long years
Put in my blood, sweat, and tears
Even had a couple of beers
I've taken leaps, and faced many fears
Have loved and lost, and suffered a few jeers
I've certainly lived, for many long years

'Tis true my friends, I've come a long way
Heard a few interesting things, and found a lot more to say
I may stop and rest some time, alas, 'tis not today
That day will come, when beneath the heavens I lay
Yet one, a few, the world, may remember me, for that I pray
I ask not for the sun, just a ray

But new little faces look back at me
In their eyes, their gap toothed smiles, I see
That innocence, that wide eyed boy I used to be
But I'm yet that boy, playing on the shores of a deep blue sea
Scared of the waves, but not enough to flee
There's more to suffer and learn, so to life I exclaim, Mais Oui!

-- Me


(Needs a little polish, and a title, but that never stopped me before :) )

Postponement (aka I'll do it tomorrow)

I am a kind of person that people might call lazy. What they seldom see, is that there is a complex mechanism of prioritizing underneath. That mostly serves to convince me that I'm not lazy. So I've decided to diagnose myself as suffering from what I've coined as "Postponement Disorder".

So lets get to the symptoms. The primary symptom obviously is the tendency to postpone current tasks into the future, for various reasons which may vary. But they can usually be categorized under the umbrella reason of "I didn't feel like doing it". But the underlying causes usually reflect your current level of frustration with life, work etc. What most people don't realize is that hard working people who are lazy otherwise are so because their work-life balance is off. Well sure, you might also hate your work, your life, or even your wife, but then you'll have a clearer idea about it. So, back to that elusive work-life balance. We all know about the hallowed thing, how we're supposed to maintain it, and how companies spend millions on trying to motivate their workers to do so as well. But we all know times come when we have to screw that balance for a certain duration cause of the work load. In fact, for real success, you have to screw it most of the time. This is especially pertinent in a grad school situation, cause work load is pretty intense, in addition to the fact that you really never leave work. That's the other problem. Jobs are nice in the sense that there is a demarcation between work and home. Grad school, is mostly treated as school, and not the work it actually is. Which means we work odd hours and all hours of the day and night. Especially close to deadlines and when our advisors lean on us, we keep everything else on the back burner and just work. And this everything else isn't just having fun, it's family, relationships, and even our health. I'm probably guilty of doing all three. But by the end of it, I've realized the folly of that approach. Sure, a lot of people know that secret beforehand, to them I say, lucky bastards, you've probably worked a few years. The ones that don't, I really can't say anything to convince them. This is a fact you either take or leave, it's hard to explain or justify, cause understanding it requires a having gone through the amount of pain and trauma you experience from the above. Which means it's a matter of faith, and that's where it gets hairy. Cause there is a certain threshold of that very pain beyond which you really can't work, something like a breakdown stage. If you're good, you can still maintain a work throughput which a lot of people can't achieve at full trot, so most people won't even notice it. If you're not, it'll be pretty evident to everyone, and they'll tell you, or fire you if they're your boss. And funnily enough, to most people it'll simply look like you're lazy and aren't putting in enough effort. A lot of said people will also tell you to suck it up and just work.

Which brings to the next part, except there really isn't one. If I had a quick fix to this problem, I'd use it and not write this whiny post :) If you do, tell me, I can use it!. Though I must say I'm starting to learn this balance a little better everyday, which gives me hope that I can recover from it minus expensive therapy :P All I will say to those who might also be going through the same is this. Live your life too, PhD's and other things take about the same time whether you kill yourself or not. Well, maybe not, but the rule applies for most things. More importantly, don't keep postponing everything else in your life, cause like willpower, you'll realize you have a limited postponement power, ergo use it wisely, or at least avoid using it as much as possible.

I see now that this post has absolutely zero structure and it didn't end anything like the beginning might have implied. So I'll end by saying this. I think this work life balance thingy sounds important. So I'll get right to it after my PhD defense!

Assumptions

If you've seen The Hurt Locker, you might remember a scene where the protagonist is talking to his baby. The dialogue goes something like this:

"You love playing with that. You love playing with all your stuffed animals. You love your Mommy, your Daddy. You love your pajamas. You love everything, don't ya? Yea. But you know what, buddy? As you get older... some of the things you love might not seem so special anymore. Like your Jack-in-a-Box. Maybe you'll realize it's just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal. And the older you get, the fewer things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe it's only one or two things. With me, I think it's one."

It's a wonderful piece of dialogue, something that stuck with me after the movie. My thought for this post goes along similar lines. When we're young we assume a lot of things. We live in a sheltered world, and a number of simple assumptions maintain that shelter. Things like how our parents and family love us, how they are probably the smartest people around and how they'll always protect us. Then follow the other ones like your friends being awesome etc. etc. Over time though, most of these assumptions get broken. But the ones that don't, form the backbone of our existence, our foundations so to say. Which is why it's so overwhelming and upsetting when one of our long held assumptions, or beliefs, get shattered. I guess the most important of these assumptions are the most primal, ones pertaining to our immediate family. Maybe it's different for other people, but that's the case for me. It seems like a reasonable assumption (no pun intended), since not having a stable home is known to cause behavioral issues among people. I'll even go far enough to postulate that love is somewhat of a fast track criterion for assumptions to be assimilated into the core backbone, cause that aligns it better with how bad breakups hurt.

And that's how faith works too, right? Cause at the heart of faith is a set of assumptions. That's the beauty of it, that assumptions do not have to answer to any form of logic. Which is also why people get defensive when their faith is questioned by logic or science, since it isn't based in logic. But it also emphasizes the importance of not shattering anyone's assumptions in faith for no better reason than someone's need for logical consistency. But most of all, what's important to remember is how deceptively well hidden these buggers are. We're so used to their existence that we don't notice them even when they're staring us right in the face.

When you think a bit more about it, you start to realize that our mind relies on a lot of assumptions in life. Most problems in CS dealing with human abilities, like sight, hearing, intelligence and comprehension are so insanely hard to solve because developing these assumptions using algorithms. We don't recognize everyone equally easily, only those we expect to see. That analogy carries to other senses too, like we understand languages using context. If someone uses words out of context, even the best language experts have to take an extra second to understand it. All this seems to highlight the importance of assumptions, they help us survive and exist. In fact, it's widely believed (or is proven, I'm not sure), that your mind can hold exactly 8 pieces of information at a time. Anything more and one of these things have to be switched out. I'm guessing that makes multi-tasking hard, and that people who can truly multi-task must have some interesting differences in this architecture.

But all in all, this seems to point to a nice avenue to help our species evolve, cause the newer generations seem to have better assumptions in place for technology and the ilk. So imagine if we can understand how assumptions are formed and assimilated, and are able to speed up the process, we'd pretty much be able to instantly teach people things. Or, on the evil spectrum of things, brainwash and control people. But it would definitely be a cool line of research. Maybe then the assumptions we develop ourselves will have that extra value, or rather I hope our mind would evolve to differentiate between the two. Till then, we'll just have to assume other people know what they're talking about and have some common sense :P

Remember remember...

...the 5th of November, that's how V for Vendetta starts off. It's one of my favorites, mostly for philosophy above anything else. The movie makes one very interesting point though, that an idea is bulletproof. After looking at the state of politics these days, I'm starting to believe that even an idea isn't immune to rusting.

Let me start by talking about another movie that I saw very recently, Lincoln. It's a Spielberg movie based on his biography (which now goes on to my ever increasing to-read list). It's after watching it that I remembered V for Vendetta once again. For those of you who might not know, Lincoln is one of the more revered American presidents, for a number of things, biggest of which was abolishing slavery. That's one hell of an accomplishment, but the story of how it was managed and what it took from the man makes it even more poignant. Passion like that made me wonder why politics seems so different these days. Except that I realized politics hasn't changed, Lincoln faced serious opposition to pass his law. The law that seems so self-evident was abhorred by much of the Parliament then, much like some of the recent laws. Which makes it seem like there aren't any big problems these days, or maybe it's hindsight that makes a problem seem great. The bigger problem is the apparent lack of faith in democracy overall. Every little thing is so heavily contested, opinions are so fractured that it makes democracy seem like an exercise in pain that'd make a colonoscopy seem pleasant.

Which brings us to the main point, why the hell is that the case? History seems to make the case that people haven't changed much, something else should be the problem. A more likely cause are the circumstances. In Lincoln's time, democracy was a gift, independence had just been won, and the generation that fought for it was still fresh in everyone's memory. So the people knew what was at stake, they knew what democracy was better than. On the contrary, the current generation has grown up in an era where democracy is assumed. In most of the western world, freedoms are assumed, and the concept of a time and place where autocratic rulers made arbitrary rules is very foreign. Don't get me wrong, but to people whom freedom is given without any costs, it seems vanilla. To others who haven't grown up with it, it isn't. Just to be clear, I'm not in the latter category either, the world I grew up in had all kinds of freedoms, which is why I react strongly to any loss of freedoms. But I come from a country which obtained its freedom much more recently than the USA, and as a consequence, holds its democracy a little dearer. Not that that means things aren't messed up with it, but that a whole other story. There's a saying that complacency breeds contempt, and it seems particularly appropriate in this situation. Because democracy has been around for so long people treat it with a certain level of contempt, and expect it to do things for them, rather than the other way around.

Winston Churchill famously said "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time". For all the chest beating we might do about it, we tend to forget that it requires a lot of compromise. The problem is that unless you know what the alternative is, it's hard to get the adequate motivation to compromise. Which makes me think that democracy as a form of government is reaching a stable state, i.e. the changes in it's existence, shape and form are done. The problem with forms of government is that people get bored with them once they reach stability. Cause all the rhetoric about how they can be glorious stops and people have to see the flawed reality. And the problem about seeing flawed realities is that then people start to look for the next glorious form of government that can work, and revolution starts. The one thing democracy has going for it is that there isn't a viable alternative yet, but the descent to anarchy seems quite close, especially if you see some of the stuff on news networks in USA. Whether that happens remains to be seen, but I jolly well hope not. Till then I suggest you learn more about Lincoln, and even Kennedy and ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

Holiday!

I awoke one day with a start
Maybe something was wrong with my heart?
But what is this I see
Fighting hard to overcome my urge to pee..

My mind told me it is a thing called the sun
People talked about it, I figured it was a pun!
They had urged me to try and have this thing called "fun"
Now that my deadline was done

I noticed something on my phone
When I clicked it, a voice started to drone
You have a flight in 3 hours, it said
You'd better be there, or you'll be dead

For it's time to meet people you once knew,
Before for this deadline, before you bid the world adeiu,
In a land far away your family awaits,
Far, yet in these united states :P

So get used to that spherical shape in the sky, that odd shade of red,
And on that note, get out of bed!
Of night-time knowledge you may be a fount,
And even look like Dracula, but you're not yet a count

Go on, go to York born anew,
Holidays like these, you get only a few
Another time, you may belong to the night
But thankfully, those days are not yet in sight

So I shut the phone and stare,
And wonder what to wear,
Surprisingly the laundry is done,
Past me, thanks a ton!

It's time to get ready and look smart,
For the ones close to my heart
There's a new one I get to meet
And she looks oh so sweet!

But since gifts I have none,
I must get there early, I must run!
Beg forgiveness from the queen all of four,
For she shall surely throw me out the door

So I'm leaving on a jet plane,
Sadly I know exactly when I'll be back again
I just hope it doesn't start to rain,
Cause getting home dry will be a pain,

Now I'll end cause this poem's becoming a drag,
And I have yet to pack my bag,
So to all, a good day, I'll see you soon,
Seems like I can write a funny poem, I might even try a toon!

-- Me

In the good old days...

I recently had a few chats with a certain math hating economist who believes sociologists are the root cause of all evil. As someone heavily relying on math, this made me start thinking. Then the further knowledge that she had not heard what UNIX was got me thinking if I'm starting to become a relic of the "good old days" (not before I screamed blasphemy a number of times, and tried to find the computer equivalents of holy water and a cross. Albeit, I couldn't, but I could use suggestions!). Further along this line of thinking, I remembered a discussion I had with one of my closest and oldest friends on his birthday. That the last time I saw his entire face was more than a decade ago. Since then, a rain-forest of hair has ravaged what remains of his face, it is rumored that parts of it haven't seen sunlight in years.

The key point of all this is the sensation of getting old. Some of you may have been a part of my discussions on turning 25 and being on the wrong part of the 20s. As my sister tells me, the 30s are worse, I worry about friends getting married, she worries about them having kids. But as she just got on the "right" side of that fence, she can taunt the others peacefully for some time. But, that inescapable feeling is starting to take hold that I'm going the way of mainframe programmers. Those of you who haven't heard of mainframes, read that line about UNIX again, and remember that as soon as I find that holy water and cross, I'm coming for you.

I grew up a part of a glorious generation that saw computers, phone and mobility take hold. When we were kids, TVs were bulky and bulgy, phone calls meant you sat in one place tethered to a wall, and no one got tense if you didn't call to update about your plans every instant, or post an update anywhere. The beauty of this time was that we go to choose whether we want to go outside and play, or stay in and explore this new virtual world. Like many, I chose parts of both. The generation before mine mostly chose the former, while the ones after me choose the latter. Unfortunately, I believe that a generation that sees both as equal options may not come again. It is not for me to judge whether either is better, but I'm a big believer that "both" is always better. Later generations may see different options, but I don't think they will see such a life-changing one till we invent interstellar or time travel.

It's my time to head into the world of adults, and try to earn a living. But the adolescence I'm leaving behind fondly is crystallizing into my "good old days", and that rocking chair on a front porch is getting closer. Now I'm off to fight my next battle against the evil rocking chair, so get off my lawn you pesky kids!

Mehkhaana

waise hi itne ghum diye zamaane ne ae ghalib
zara si hansi bhi kyun cheente ho
dilon ke jaam ko chhod kar, zahar ke kalash kyun peete ho
itne lamhe zaayar kiye to sahi, kuch lamhe khushi mein jeete kyun nahin

वैसे ही इतने गम दिए ज़माने ने ऐ ग़ालिब

ज़रा सी हंसी भी क्यूँ छीनते क्यूँ हो

दिल के जाम छोड़ कर ज़हर के कलश क्यूँ पीते हो

इतने लम्हे ज़ायर किये तो सही, कुछ लम्हे ख़ुशी में जीते क्यूँ नहीं 

Balance

I'm a big fan of the now cancelled series Scrubs. I'm a bit like the main character, so I'll start with a line he said at the end of an episode. It's meant to make a point, so don't take any literal meanings out of it :)
JD says, no one understands the importance of sex better than someone who isn't having any. Similarly, I feel that no one understands the importance of balance better than someone who doesn't have one.

Now since I'm done with the titillating opening, lets get down to business. Every natural system in this world has opposing forces, and it may seem like it strives to achieve a balance. I'm not an expert, and there are 2 opposing lines of thought on that, but you may consider this balance a choice of a higher power, or a freak of coincidence that's one of the infinitely many possibilities that have an interesting residual in our universe, and on this planet. The overall fact remains that this leads to an important observation, that balance is essential for something bigger to emerge out of simpler forces.

Some people confuse this balance to be stable. In reality, no interesting system we know about has a stable balance, or in more technical terms, a stable equilibrium. They manifest as unstable equilibria, with small ranges of stability that our world seems to reside in. In fact, as someone who writes simulations, that's the region we strive to achieve, and trust me, it's pretty hard to achieve.

This analogy carries over to our lives and our minds too. A balance is important, not just for ephemeral things like happiness, but even for basic sanity and survival. Your body and mind do not take kindly to extreme conditions. But again, it'd be naive to assume there isn't wiggle room. In that vein, I've spent long parts of my life oscillating between excesses of work and fun. A side note, oscillations are interesting manifestations of turbulence in physical systems, but differentiating actual ones from spurious implementation induced strokes is very hard work.

Honestly, I'm in a field that spends a lot of time and money teaching their members about work-life balance, and then go right off expecting you to ignore it. After looking at the recent incidents in the world, I'm starting to believe this problem isn't just localized to computer science. Over the past month, I read multiple headlines along the lines of disgruntled person goes to a public place and shoots a bunch of people. In one notable exception, the person responsible even survived, and is enjoying media coverage of his now red hair. Maybe it's just me or the effect of media focus, but I feel that the incidence of such events is on the rise. Again, I'm not an expert, but some reasoning suggests that there's a reason for these extreme actions. Every assailant in these cases had extreme cases of stress, having either lost jobs, or  hope in their PhDs. So you can see why it hits a little close to home, I'm in the 5th year of the latter myself.

People are likely to suggest that these are outliers, resultants of some other extreme actions along with an inordinate response. Coincidentally  simulation folk are very familiar with these too, these are indicative of a case where that unstable equilibrium suddenly loses the second word, and becomes just unstable. That happens because some of the underlying forces and assumptions that made things balance, are violated, resulting in an increasing oscillation leading to blowup. In laymen terms, that means that what was keeping you sane, just stops, because your brain just can't balance the forces exerted on you anymore.

Like any decent scientist, I'm inclined to offer an explanation, so let me start with something that I heard a while before I came to USA. I was always told that Indian people here are lonely. After coming here, I realized that's not the case, it's just that the primary model of society is nuclear families and individuals, the latter slowly becoming the dominant set. In my opinion that is the primary cause of this increasingly extreme outbursts of stress.

So, in the early 20th century, right up till the 70s, the primary model of existence was families. People lived in big families, and had a large set of cousins they knew about. Well, ok, maybe not in the cities, but at least in towns. And this model still exists largely in most Asian countries, where these sort of outbursts are not as common. But the fact remains families were, and still are, major balancing forces in our lives. Then somewhere down the line, the baby boomer generation came. They moved out, did great things. Slowly and steadily, that model became the norm, and we started to ignore families, to express individualism. Before you get the idea that I'm trying to prophesize the importance of families, I'm not. I'm simply offering a line of reasoning, and I don't intend the choice of one over the other. So, getting back, individualism prompted people to do great things, since removing family commitments from our lives opens up a lot of extra time and motivation, since the primary focus of our life is work. But, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Earlier generations still had the support of the family they left behind, that foundation. Increasingly however, that foundation is getting eroded, because extended families and people you cared about are becoming an ever smaller set of people. These people help you snap out of depressing thoughts festering in your brain, lines of thought that are better left alone. Social isolation makes you delve exactly into these lines of thought, except, a lot of people don't have any tether at all, meaning they can drown in them. The result is what you see in the headlines, because depression/stress and anger never make for a good combination. I've seen people shoot others over trivial car accidents, so don't underestimate the power of that deadly cocktail.

Granted I took some liberties with rigor, that line of reasoning should hold, so I'll move on to the other part of my discussion. Unstable equilibria, turbulence, they're very interesting phenomena. They may oscillate wildly, and seemingly randomly, but there's always a pattern. The economic issues straining society are becoming ever more prominent. With general public unrest in a lot of places, the chances of a spark igniting this tinderbox are huge. And if you think the natural state of society is stability, well, you didn't really get the point. It's well established that physical systems prefer higher entropy, or more simply put, more variations and chaos. Add weapons to that equation, and the results aren't going to be pretty.

Before you start thinking I'm going to recommend buying gold and making basements to stock supplies and weapons to defend against the coming apocalypse, let me point out that I'm not Glenn Beck. All I'm saying is that increasing volatility is making our society unstable, and the only reliable force we know of is family. So it only makes sense to try and return to that model, at least until we can come up with a better one. What's obvious, is that the current path is becoming untenable, and something needs to be done. The world is heading towards a realignment, and such transitions are never peaceful or painless, lets hope me and you come out of it in one piece. 

Art, music and games

It's been a long time since I wrote my last entry, suffice it to say it's been a helluva ride. And since in the next year I'm going to be trying to graduate with a PhD, I'm not sure what my frequency of posting will be, so lets give this a shot.

In all honesty, I've always been a mediocre gamer, delving into different games sometimes, but never so good as to hold delusions of earning my livelihood through them, or boast about my skills. In the past month, finally being relatively free motivated me to try once again. Oh that relatively is so loaded a word. I played the usuals, Crysis, Modern Warfare, even the new Max Payne. Ignoring the fact that I ran through these games like a 100m dash (that's the way I do things, the black plague way), I didn't quite like them as much as their predecessors, with the possible exception of Crysis. Don't get me wrong, games have become quite breathtaking, especially if you have the right hardware. But they've lost some of their soul, so to speak. Visual brilliance has taken precedence over other aspects. But I know there'll be some who'll point out that my sample set's quite skewed to make that call. And I agree. The next game I played, was the one that made Bioware famous, Mass Effect. And damn was I surprised. I'm a guy who started playing games when they were designed for things with much less compute power than your not-smart phone. I've played SpaceWar, when it was still new, and that's been a badge of honor of sorts. They made me take up computers as a serious hobby, but that's a whole other story. Speaking of stories though, games have always been very linear, checkpoint oriented cause any other kind of story or choice would be prohibitive to code up. Plus, they were never very complex, only basic shells to assist the protagonist in blowing things up. Mass Effect seems to be the other kind. Yes, there's still a lot of blowing things up, but there are actual choices, ones that make a difference in how your game progresses. Story controls the game, rather than the other way around. Lovers of RPGs, don't take offense, but anything that just helps your character gain points doesn't really count. I expect the hordes of WOW (that's World of Warcraft to you non-gamers) followers to take immense offense to that line, but I'm saying it as I see it. Heck by the end of the game, it had handled complex issues like homosexual relationships, relationships in general, life, death, and a bunch of other things with great sensitivity and panache. That's something you don't usually expect from a bunch of geeky coders looking for aliasing lines at 1080p.

All of which seems to suggest that games are maturing, dare I say, as an art form. Mass Effect is a statement if there ever was one, and the tree or graph like elements in its story where what you choose to do actually makes a difference, is very new, at least to me. I'm sure there are other games which are doing a similar job, maybe even better. The icing on the cake was a background track at the end by Clint Mansell (http://youtu.be/WE8Rhmy8v0E). I'm a big fan of the guy, very few people have the talent to make such haunting music with very little. If you listen to this one, it only has a piano and a string quartet playing. If you don't know who he is, try seeing the movie Requiem for a Dream. I still haven't, but that track speaks louder than most pieces of art I've seen (http://youtu.be/hKLpJtvzlEI). Honestly, as a grad student of limited means, this game offered more value for money than any movie or book I've seen in the recent past.

People talk a lot about art evolving and experiments being done with new visual media. I've been to very weird installations which I couldn't make any sense of, but which a lot of people praised immensely. It might be time to consider games as an art form, but only if it's taken out of control of resolution jocks who only care about getting 60fps at highest quality settings. That's an insult to what a game's supposed to be. The resolution, visual quality serves to immerse you in a virtual world, much like CGI is supposed to do for movies. When it's used as a crutch and made a major selling point, it's stupid. Yes I know you're thinking Michael Bay and Transformers and laughing, but there are other offenders too, even Apple sometimes (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/15/5-reasons-i-hate-my-new-macbook-pro-a-geek-s-critique.html) (yeah I'm a little prone to Apple bashing). Graphics is and always has been an enabler, not an end, and unfortunately that's what some people would like it to be. But overall, games are getting better and more interesting, at least the non-iPhone kind. And that's where I have a bigger problem with Apple and iPhone gaming. It encourages those same toy like games where you grind your finger against the screen. No depth, just mindless droning. Sure, instead of carpal tunnel, you'll get something else. But if iPhone gaming becomes the norm, it'll kill this rising art form, and that's something I have a problem with, cause it'll kill something that's been more than 2 decades in the making. 

An ode to rebuttals, writing in general, and to things unsaid

There are some things that need to be said,
But the words escape me,
The thoughts are there in my head
But the verses escape me

... to be continued