Happy Deepawali / Diwali

No matter which way you spell / pronounce it.... its Diwali and its my favourite festival!!!

Hope it brings light, joy and cheer to you and to all your loved ones!!!

Happy Deepawali !!! Happy Diwali!!

Mystery.....Suspense......Fame........Intrigue......Love.....Deception.....Passion...

Sounds likea general list of emotions that would make up a potboiler hindi movie..isnt it?

OR ...could it could be a book ...a work of fiction, perhaps?

But, in all events, they are hardly the kind of adjectives that you would expect to be used to describe a non – fiction book....

Strangely still....a non fiction book whose premise is probably the most un-emotional topic of all - Mathematics :) :) :)

Before you think that i have gone stark raving mad..the book I am talking about is called “Fermat’s Last Theorem ” by Simon Singh.

The premise of the book is the quest to solve a mathematical mystery that was put forth by an eccentric mathematician a few centuries ago..and what probably resulted in one of the longest lasting unsolved mysteries . The book deals with the topic right from its origins and tries to give a picture of all the people who impacted and influenced it over the annals of time.

To someone like me, who loves a good mystery, the charm of a genuine mystery that endured for centuries in itself was a delight to read and understand about...

But, in this case, from a purely emotional perspective, I couldnt help but get attached to and really feel....through the personalities of people who were involved in this quest ....their circumstances and even their emotions around this so called holy grail of mathematics...

The way that so-called different fields of mathematical thought were combined together by different people and how it all came together beautifully in the end ..was a sheer thrill to behold. It gave the feeling of having combined different pieces of music composed by different composers into one beautiful harmonious symphony.

Cheers,

Me

Stating the Obvious:- A subject is never emotional. Only humans are. And hence ANY subject associated with a human has the potential to be.

Some random musings...

Been a while.....

I usually pick up books that I have never heard about mostly based on their name and then i go through the back cover / preface to see if there is something there that would interest me to spend some time with it..One such book that has intrigued me since i heard of it and that was way back in 2001/2002 was "One Hundred years of Solitude". To me, it was a very interesting name and something that warranted further investigation even though i knew nothing at all as to its contents..

Finally got around to reading it sometime this year...I started off gung -ho and I must say that as i moved through the initial chapters ..."Confused" would be the only adjective that applied. I am never good when it comes to remembering character's names and the fact that here was a book about a LARGE family having spanish and deceptively similar names meant that i was having a tough time groping around just trying to figure who the hell was doing what...the fact that they gave a family tree at the beginning of the book was really no help...coz a lazy bum like me really doesnt flip back pages to refer to the family tree...even if i am not quite sure who is killing whom...

I persevered through this initial tough period with the book...with serious reservations as to whether i could get through it...and things started to improve. As the book unfolded, i realised that there was a poignancy which held me spellbound especially at some specific junctures in the book. Its a book mainly about a place but also about a lot of people who are or become related to that place and the smaller stories of people like the piano player who came to Macondo(i forget his name :)) within the larger story of Macondo....intrigued as well as entertained.

I must admit that the Geography of the place- Macondo - did also confuse me as to where the author really intended it to be. Even if it is a fictional place,there are references to real places which did end up confusing me to some extent. At one point, i stopped trying to figure out where Macondo really was supposed to be and just took the authors word for anything geographical. It would have been much more enriching to me had i been able to pinpoint the general Geographical location of Macondo - maybe i guess it can be done from the book but it needs more concentration than what i put into while reading the book..

Just my opinion....but its no where close to my favourite list of books...but its definitely a book worth a read once...

Cheers,

Me

P.S : Happy Independance Day !!

Ref: One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

These are a few of my favourite............reads...

I recently replied to one of my friends (that’s you, Shilpa) who asked…”where are your emails? “ , that very few things come to my mind..so I really have nothing much to write about…

But one of my friends (that’s you, Lord J) sent me a list of his favourite books and asked me for mine and that eventually prompted me to get off my lazy arse and made me write this out…

This is the list that I could come up with unaided, just relying on memory. I am sure that there are books that I love that are missed out in this list..

The ones that I can remember off-hand even with my sieve like mind, in no particular order are:-

1. Joseph Heller - Catch 22

2. Robert Pirsig - Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance

3. Mark Twain - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

4. Mark Twain - Adventures of Tom Sawyer

5. Charles Dickens - Pickwick Papers

6. Mitch Albom - Tuesdays with Morrie

7. Antoine De Saint Exupery - The little prince

8. JRR Tolkein - The lord of the rings

9. Antony Jay, Jonathan Lynn - Yes, Minister

10. Antony Jay, Jonathan Lynn - Yes, Prime Minister

11. Charles Dickens - A tale of 2 cities

12. Henry Cecil – Brothers in law, Sisters in law, Alibi for a judge, The Painswick line and a host of others that I cannot recollect, but I have rarely read a Henry Cecil that I didn't love (and I have read about 15-20)

13. PGW - Everything (and I mean it)

14. Bill Bryson – A short history of nearly everything

15. Paramhansa Yogananda – Autobiography of a yogi

16. Ernest Hemingway – The old man and the sea

17. Arthur Conan Doyle – Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

18. A.C. Grayling - What is good?

19. Life of Pi – Yann Martel

20. R.K.Narayan – Life of Malguldi, Magic of Malgudi and others

21. Ayn Rand – Fountainhead

22. C. Jung – The Undiscovered Self

23. Richard Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

24. Douglas Adams – The Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy (All the 5 parts of the trilogy )

25. Bill Waterson – Calvin and Hobbes – ALL

Zen is one of my favourite books…I have read it twice over and the first time was a few years ago..when I didn’t exactly get it..but it interested me enough to read it again last year..and I just found myself more and more fascinated by the book..

What is good? Is one book I really liked…I found it very interesting..i read it a few years ago actually…I think I even sent across 1-2 quotes from it in my then regular emails

Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy or H2G2 as it is commonly known as ….i just find to be brilliantly imaginative and funny

Of all these books though, the one I fell in love with…years and years ago is catch-22..i remember reading catch from my dads collection when I was in school and finding it too obtruse..but I read it years later..and have never tired of it since..Its a book that can be read as a novel or short stories..and its sad and its funny….i just find it brilliant..

If you like a book on science and to read of an highly individual character along with….i highly recommend Feynman’s Surely you must be joking….Recommended to me by a friend(Kaus, where art thou?), i really enjoyed reading it…

Cecil was part of my dad’s collections of books….and till recently, out of publication in India When, a few years ago, I saw them in re-print..believe me, i rejoiced. His knowledge of the law along with the inimitable characters that he portrays are something that unerringly fails to tickle me pink..

I love Shantaram..but there is a double reason for it…its not just for the book but also for the setting..it is set in the city that I love in the time when I was growing up in it..and a lot of the situations and characters are something that I actually can relate to..so it made it a very unputdownable book for me..i think I read the last few hundred pages just sitting through one night…

Argumentative Indian…is very lucid and insightful…..i think it’s one of the best non-fiction books I have read.. a collection of related essays by Sen in which I find his insights very interesting and thought provoking as well.

I have read 2 of Rushdie’s…the one I listed and Shalimar the clown and honestly…Shalimar was a disappointment..i have yet to read his supposed greatest work yet “Midnights Children” and I will reserve my judgment till I read that but so far….1 for and 1 against..

Cheers,

P.S. I stay away from the abridged versions..i made up my mind years ago that if I wanted to read something, I should read it whole or not read it at all. It can be classified as a silly obstinacy of mine but it’s nice to have a few idiosyncracies to call my own..

P.P.S “Complete and Unabridged” is my motto J

Angry, Happy, Jovial, Dumb, Morose...and the list is endless

Its typical of the way we classify people....we bracket them into boxes as boring, sad, jovial, adventurous....and on and on and on....

But the reality really lies in the fact that each person encompasses ALL of these qualities or behaviors and more.......and our perception of people is just a very narrow view of them depending on the circumstance that we encounter them in...

I guess when you read this..it seems as obvious as the fact that night follows day..but the next time you try and make a comment about someone "that chap is a bore", if you can still have this in mind, it might just make you think twice...!!!! Atleast it made me...and that made me wonder........Actually practicing keeping an open mind is WAY tougher than thinking or talking about it...

Passion for technology ...contd

Before you start reading, let me warn you that this definitely qualifies as a *RANT*

Software Architects and “Passion” for technology.

A lot of the time when talking to people who are in the field of software technology itself, I get the distinct feeling that people feel that “passion” for technology is the same as having a “knowledge” of technology. I tend to disagree. And Strongly.

In no way, is KNOWLEDGE (either in breadth or in depth) of technology the same as a “Passion” for technology. There is a HUGE difference between the two. Knowledge of technology is what provides the technical know-how to create a solution. BUT, “Passion” is what ensures that this know-how is used in the best and most suitable manner.

Let me cite a simplistic example:

Common SQL best practice: Dont use Select * in your Select statements. But, i have come across a specific scenario in my projects where i thought it made SENSE to use Select * because the usual drawbacks associated didnt apply in this case and the benefit was flexibility, which we wanted.

So, if i go just by the standards, i would end up writing a lot of different SQL statements for something that got very cleanly handled with just one statement.

What i am trying to highlight here is that there are always standards and references but not always is the decision to choose which is applicable and which is not, IN A PARTICULAR CIRCUMSTANCE, always a straight forward or a obvious one. And in such situations, I think it is the “Passion” that I refer to, the “FEELING” to do the “correct thing” which makes a difference as to whether the selected choice is the best choice.

I thought about it honestly and wondered if I could just call this feeling “Common Sense” but I decided against calling it that because I have myself been in a lot of situations where my “Common sense”, if I use it, points me to the right solution, but I have honestly not “CARED” enough about technology and have had no qualms about choosing the worse of 2 available options just because the worse one was more convenient or faster or easier or something i already knew and did not have to spend time learning about.

Think about it: You must have worked with people, maybe even yourself, who made mistakes inspite of knowing that what they were doing were a mistake. I definitely have detected loads of code review defects, which i thought should never have been there, especially coz the developer agreed point-blank that there was no justification for them not implementing it. This is a direct result of the lack of the very “passion” that I am referring to.

There is another commonly used argument against “Passion” which is that people with “passion” for technology are so absorbed in it that they will ignore the customer needs / project constraints. I again disagree.

a. I think it is more of a assumption that people have that a person with a “Passion” for technology is oblivious to customer needs / constraints. I think any reasonably intelligent person understands that there are ALWAYS constraints in doing anything and that applies to software as well, just like to any aspect of life, for that matter. So, the assumption that someone who is passionate about technology will forgo all his customers needs or benefits or all the constraints that apply to his work, outside of his control, seems to be more of a knee-jerk reaction to the “geek” cliché rather than anything else.

b. I dont see any reason why a person who is passionate about technology will be any more oblivious to his overall environment than a person who is not passionate about technology. Does being passionate about technology make a person unreasonable or vice versa? I think neither.

c. A Passion for technology is not something as narrow or restrictive as “I like .NET” or “SAP is the best”. A passion for technology is the belief that SCIENCE (which gives rise to technology) can and is being used to provide and create SOLUTIONs to PROBLEMS that exist. And anyone who thinks with that defintion of technology would probably not be easily swayed from his customers requirements or constraints that exist.

So, at this point, to rephrase a question once put to me,

Would you rather have a architect who is passionate about technology and who can understand and work with it within his client’s needs and constraints

OR

Would you prefer to have an architect who understand the clients needs and constraints and knows technology (but doesnt really care much for it)

Independence Day.....

Independence Day TV…

It was inevitable, with all our television channels and all our scores of news channels, that something like Independence Day would fall prey to the same commercialisation that everything else has fallen to in recent times..

There are all sorts of channels and programs having NOTHING relevant to Independance day being advertised all over TV and Radio, all just trying to cash in on the “holiday” and use it to their advantage to get the maximum number of eyeballs and eardrums for that day.

There are movie channels trying to exploit the afternoon of Independance Day to get us to increase their TRP’s by watching “KRRISH”

There are news channels trying to exploit it by conducting some INANE first ever Indo – Pak opinion polls...

There are positives to everything and probably the saddest but greatest positive here is that were it not for the ads promoting KRRISH, a LOT of people may not even remember that it is in fact India’s Independance day today.

Sad but true.

National Anthem at the movies…

I was one of those people who treated the idea that some Maharastra government came up with to play the national anthem before every screening in theatres in bombay with scorn and contempt. To me, it was just another inane, nonsensical political gimmick....

But, everytime since, whenever i have stood before the 70MM screen and watched the National Anthem being played, I have, in all honesty, really relished it because ever since leaving my school, where the national anthem was played everyday in assembly, i had NEVER ever got a chance to sing / hear the national anthem and forgotten what a great feeling it really is....especially when you sing along to it.

Its sad that other than people who represent the country officially, the common man, whom that very flag represents, rarely gets a chance to even hear it, leave alone sing it in any aspect of his normal life.

So, in a warped up way, i am thankful to whatever politician came up with that idea, for whatever his reasons may have been, because it gives me a rare joy everytime i go to watch a movie. It takes me back to school in a very nostalgic way.

One last word…

Wordweb seems to think that Independence = “Freedom from control or influence of another or others”

If that is a correct definition of Independance, then honestly, from 1997 to 2007, havent we been going in the OPPOSITE direction?

After all, our markets are dependant on others now. When NASDAQ falls, so does the BSE. Our economy is more prone to get affected by external factors. Even our Nuclear program now has external influence on it. We are dependant on others more and more now than we were before 1992. Am i just being simplistic or maybe i should just take WordWeb with a pinch of salt?

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY.