Have people forgotten Shiva?

July 19th, 2009 admin

Hinduism has a notion of trinity - three forces that drive the universe. The trinity consists of the creator, the sustainer and the destroyer (personified respectively by Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva). I do not claim to know the spiritual aspect of this concept. However, the applicability of this concept to the physical things in our lives is almost obvious. Everything physical comes into being, serves its purpose during its lifetime and is (or rather, should be) eventually destroyed. These three forces must guide each other in an eternal cycle, rather than in a linear progression. That which is destroyed, must contribute to the creation, and that which is created must be destroyable. This is not philosophy; this is just the principle of equilibrium and balance.

The spark of a creator’s idea, must be weighed and studied for the sustainability and fesibility of that which the idea generates. Once the creative force is assured of the sustainability and usefulness of its creation, it must also analyze the destructibility of the creation. Only when the idea passes both these tests - useful when in existence and destroyable when not useful - is the creation sustainable. To be destroyed does not mean to make it go away or vanish. Being destroyed here means to change form. The death of one is the birth of another. The death of a wine glass when it slips from your hand and shatters is the birth of a hundred pieces of glass. The death of those hundred pieces in a kiln if the birth of liquid silica, which dies to takes up another form when shaped into a glass window.

Sunstainable creation is dependent on reliable destruction, which in turn is dependent on future creation. In our lives nowadays, I wonder if the creator’s dependence on the destroyer is being slowly forgotten. Things are getting created with no concern for its destructibility (and often with no concern even for sustainability). Creation is driven by sustainability and usefulness, which is fine. However, the second part of the pre-creation analysis, destruction, is becoming only a secondary concern.

A case in point is plastics. Plastics are almost irreplaceable in certain situations. However, its usage cycle has overflowed its equilibrium bounds. The ease of creating plastics and the convenience of sustaining plastics have together overpowered the responsibility of destroying them. The durability of plastics, which is often a big positive, makes it equally hard to destroy. And when used in scenarios where such durability becomes a liability, the benefits of plastics are questionable. Wikipedia’s article on Plastics has this, somewhat scary, line. “Due to their relatively low cost, ease of manufacture, versatility, and imperviousness to water, plastics are used in an enormous and expanding range of products, from paper clips to spaceships. They have already displaced many traditional materials, such as wood; stone; horn and bone; leather; paper; metal; glass; and ceramic, in most of their former uses.” Notice that all the things that plastics have replaced are either natural or biodegradable, or both. I agree that there are some organic palstics in nature, and there are some man-made biodegradable plastics; however, the point I am trying to make is not hijacked by either of these. From wall-to-wall carpets to the teacups used by chai-wallahs in roadside dhabas, from ziploc bags to microwaveable idli-plates, plastics have slowly but surely taken over our lives. In this takeover, not only has the senseless overuse of plastics created a dangerous imbalance in the natural world, it has paralyzed us into a state of helplessness compliance. Plastics have destroyed the destroyer.

In many uses of plastics, they are certainly replaceable by other, more responsibly created, products. We, the users and sustainers of plastics, should vote down the creators’ decision to create them by reducing the use of plastics where possible (take your cloth grocery bags with you when you go shopping, use glass or steel dinner ware at home and paper or corn-based plates at picnics). When usage is not avoidable, we can restore the balance somewhat by paying due homage to the destroyer (use plastic that is recyclable and recycle the plastic that you use). A moments thought before consumption can not only help restore some balance in the cycle of creations and destruction, it can also help restore a sense of control over our destiny.

On my part, I make it a point to visit the Shiva temple of Cary once a month. It is a large, airy temple, with the added convenience of a drive-through pradakshina (the act of revenential, clockwise, walking around a Hindu temple’s central structure). Each time I go, the priest walks up to my car, greets me, and asks, “What do you have?”. Upon telling him about my problems, he points me to the correct deity to go pay my respects to. His utterance may seem strange for temple-talk, “Go to number 4″, but what he really means is, “Deity no. 4 will rid you of all your troubles and send you home free and uplifted”. The temple, for some strange secular reasons, likes to identify itself with a small, unadorned, non-ostentatious, green sign with white lettering that reads, “Cary Recycling Center”.

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A Fleeting Experience

December 26th, 2008 admin

We are driving towards Orlando in our overloaded Pontiac Vibe. Anant is in the driver’s seat; Kavita is sitting behind him, with a mountain of boxes and bags filled with camping stuff, food, clothes, maps, cameras and stuff for our week-long road trip almost leaning onto her to her right and from behind her. We are listening to Ira Glass’s “This American Life” CD. Up until a few minutes ago, I was reading the New Yorker magazine that Anant had brought with him from California. But as the light outside faded, I could not read any more and my mind wandered.

I was looking out of my passenger-side window when I noticed a tall tower with two red lights, horizontally arranged atop the tower, a thin cloud of mist in front of it and a dark night behind. To be more accurate, I only saw the lights, and I imagined the tower’s existence. As those lights were flying past me, I craned my neck for a few seconds trying to keep my sights on those two red lights. In those seconds I realized something. The fleeting vision of those lights behind a cloud of dark, foggy mist and my fruitless attempt at trying to hold on to that view made me realize how I (we all, perhaps) crave focus. We want to be able to hold on to experiences. One after the other after the other. I realized, also, how fleeting the nature of all experiences is. What you experience, what you take in, is different from what you set out to experience, what you probably wanted to take in. The moment that you want to experience, is past by the time you actually are able to take it in. In this constant rush of fleeting images, fleeting thoughts, fleeting sensory experiences, we keep chasing that impossible goal. We crave an experience we can truly and completely call our own - an experience we can hold by the scruff of its neck and do with what we choose to. But alas, it unfailingly slips out of our grasp, always leaving us with a few tattered thoughts and shadowy images - and even these leftovers belong to a different moment altogether, not the one we were trying to go after. And what you take in is really what you want to take in. Can you ever truly experience a moment, when time keeps the scenery ever-changing? What you can hold on to is that which is not changing with time - that which is independent of time. And maybe the only such thing, which is within you control, is that which is within you. That which you can truly experience, necessarily, has to be an idea that is of your own creation - an idea that which you can readily recreate, that which is truly obedient. Does that mean that, that which is outside, that which is real, is really not? And that which is hypothetical, imaginary, and, obedient, is the reality we can experience?

These rhetorical questions apart, one other thing these fleeting lights maybe helped me see is one reason why I like photography. For once, I can hold time nearly still. A shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second is pretty close to being momentary for me - short enough to not allow multiple thoughts to cross my mind. And when I look at that picture later, I can study every detail at my leisure, without the nagging fear of something discreetly changing in the bottom left corner of my view while I was busy breathing in the top right.

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The 3 Ds

September 17th, 2008 admin

My father’s maternal uncle, Dr. K. Ramamurthy, whom I call uncle also, responded to my email about “Games Indians Don’t Win” with some of his own words of wisdom, which I believe will be useful to many people; I reproduce them here with his permission. Read and think about it.

“During my management consultancy days, I’d start my classes with “Three Ds”: Discipline, Dedication, and Devotion.

We have to start anything in life, commencing with our earliest education, with the rigor of Discipline: regulated studies in terms of time allocation, understanding of what we study, practicing to become perfect, and humility not to be carried away by early successes (or depressed with early failures). You keep at it in spite of obstacles to reach the goal you set for yourself.

When you’re sufficiently integrated in a disciplined web of working (doing things), you get to the stage of Dedication - a stage where you totally, intrinsically, get merged in what you do and what you want to achieve. You breathe, live, and think all the while of your chosen field and its nuances to be able to excel. That’s how great writers, poets, scientists, musicians, innovators, nation builders, and freedom fighters like Gandhi dedicated their whole life to a chosen cause.

From this stage comes Devotion, where your “life and work” become a Religion unto itself. That’s how Thyagaraja, Purandara, Meerabai, Aurobindo, CV Raman in our life time and people like Einstein worshiped what they chose to do. All the greatest achievers have gone through these stages, knowingly or unknowingly.

Consider the training of today’s top notch players who reach the very top, their journey begins at very early age and goes on unhindered and unfettered for several years to reach the top. Certain failures are inevitable during this long journey but they’ve to trod on incessantly to reach the peak.

Of all who tried, the number who did or did not make the final assault is immaterial. The very process and trial is ennobling - in fact, religious. It’s like seeking the elusive God, but there is bliss!!

In such pursuit, the teacher becomes the most important being in our life. It’s said in our scriptures that one cannot attain the highest pinnacle without a “Teacher.” In our daily prayers, we do give homage to our teacher: Guru Brahma, Gurur Vishnuhu, Gurudevo Maheswaraha, Guru Sakshsat Parabrahma, Tasmai Sri Gurave Namaha! Discipline starts with respect to the teacher - starting from our parents who are our first teachers, to others who have taught us, guided us, helped us, sustained us, given solace in our trials and difficult patches, and remained our “guiding lights” throughout our life.

Unfortunately, the teacher-taught, trainer-trainee, professor-student, employer-employee relationship has become now too commercialized to nurture a meaningful, respectful, disciplined way in life. Without this kind of moral and ethical approach, the society declines. It’s only the few chosen (by whom, I can’t say!), who are able to fuse the 3-Ds to be the Great in their individual life!!

By our performance, we’re not ONE of those.”

His observations on how to simultaneously achieve happiness (selfish motive) while at the same time being productive to the society (altruistic outcome) by following the course of discipline, dedication and devotion speaks to me and I hope to many of us. He elaborated in a later email thus.

“To further elaborate, the first D is the base or foundation on which the second D, dedication, is superimposed. The third D, Devotion, is necessary, along with the other two, for the final outcome, or assault, as it were. That is reaching out to the pinnacle. While the first and second Ds have a continuous nature, the third D could be even ‘momentary or fleeting’ but it’s that fleeting moment - like in deep, prayerful, thought that gives the final ‘push’ and the ‘answer.’

This is referred to in our books of lore about ‘Rishis’ in deep meditation; we see this in our scientists and researchers in their hour of ‘discovery.’ Philosophers of lore were of that genre.

Recently I read of an interview of Dr. Ramachandran, the Neurosurgeon-researcher and author of books on brain structure and functioning. He was alluding to his conversation with Chembe Vaidyanatha Iyer, doyen of Carnatic Music and said that while the music maestro was rendering a raaga and aalaapana, he was ethereal, as if he was in ‘devotional ecstasy.’ At that moment the maestro was not aware of his surroundings, the visitor, or anything else but his music rendition. That is the moment of the third D.“

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On Choice

September 11th, 2008 admin

My friend, Sandeep, sent me a link to a very interesting talk given by Dr. Barry Shwartz, a sociologist, who observes and persuasively argues that excessive choice is bad.

I agree with this observation. More generally, this observation applies to any kind of decision making. We make many decisions in life - in everyday life and in the grander scale of life. In everyday life, we decide on things like which vacuum cleaner to buy, or, which hair conditioner to buy, both of which were decisions I had to make last week. In the grander scale of life we need to make decisions such as who to marry, or, which profession to work towards.

To make a decision we weigh pros and cons across several dimensions and finally settle on a decision. If we do a good job at making the decision, we have considered all the dimensions and all the pros and cons along those dimensions. We are happy that we have come to a global optimum across the search space of the solution, and we can pat ourselves on the back for it. As the number of dimensions grow, however, the search space explodes in size. The resources and time to do this optimization become overwhelming. We are forced to work with a smaller search space that we can handle within the time we give ourselves to make the decision. Say we have an hour to kill and feel like watching come TV. We sit in front of the box, pick up the remote and flip through channels. We want to decide which channel to watch. We do not want to spend that hour trying to optimize that choice. To make a decision in some reasonable time, we need to make more decisions first. We need to decide which dimensions of choice we want to ignore. This is choice-pruning. For example, we might not care for a show if it is not in Hi-Def. Then the choice-space shrinks by an order of magnitude. However, once we do shrink the choice-space, we have to settle for something that may be a sub-optimal solution compared to the global optimum. And that can take away from the satisfaction you draw from your, potentially sub-optimal, choice.

For some of these decisions there is no way to know the optimality of the solution. For example, once you marry a person, you better make appropriate adjustments and make happiness out of it. There is no point comparing the decision to anything - what if I had married someone else, what if I had taken up that other job offer 10 years ago? In some ways not knowing the optimal solution is a boon. You can rest assured that there is no such thing as an optimal solution in that case. The decision you make is the only decision that matters. No one can prove to you that a different choice would have definitely been better. It is calming to know that your decision is beyond judgment. Still, too much choice can be paralyzing in this case also. The only saving grace is that almost any decision is really a pretty good decision.

For some other decisions however, there is a direct measurable impact. These are the decision that can haunt. The stock you choose to invest your money in may tank, while that other option you were considering just as fervently, does really well. The vacuum cleaner you chose sucks, while the one that your friend bought for just a little bit more money, sucks better. And it is for these decisions that too much choice can not only be paralyzing, but also be humiliating. You blame yourself for the sub-optimality of your choice; after all, you have proof to justify that blame.

I routinely find myself presented with this overdosage of choice. And being mathematically and engineeringly inclined, I tend to at least give choice-pruning and optimization a fair shot. As I wrote to Sandeep in my response email:

“Being an engineer I tend to compare the available choices across many dimensions, and the search space grows multiplicatively. I was looking for a hair conditioner yesterday, the dimensions were - ingredients (should not have any obvious bad stuff), the company (should be something I have heard of), the quantity (should not be measured in gallons), the price (should be reasonable), delivery mechanism (spray vs cream), application time (dry hair or wet hair - further subdivided into needs rinsing after application or not) etc. Comparing all this across the 30 brands in the store left me tired.”

In fact, excessive choice wastes time and energy, and therefore, wastes money. Just by spending 20 minutes to decide on a hair conditioner, I am sure I bumped up the price of the produce by a few dollars. Time is money, and this was time I could have better spent elsewhere.

And the solution to this problem of excessive choice is not communism, or even reducing choice, necessarily. Availability of choice is not the root problem. The problem is the excessive demand excessive choice places on the decision-maker. The decision-making has to continue to be streamlined. The choice has to be presented to the chooser in a structured, standardized, unbiased way. This is really a service, which I like to call “choice pruning”. It can be an industry in its own right. An example of this is epinions.com, where people’s past experiences with their decision-making about buying a product are collected, analyzed and presented to the customer to help speed up his or her decision making process. The opinions are not strictly standardized, and I can spend days reading through the reviews there, as I recently did when trying to decide on a vacuum cleaner; but still, it does help. At least you know that with hundreds of respondents, there is a chance that any biased views and any person-to-person variation in the interpretation of the measurement scale are evened out.

By spending time on what we are choosing, we affect what we are choosing. If I spend 5 years to decide which stock to invest money in, I have already lost more money than a sub-optimal decision could have cost me. In other words, as the time to make a choice increases, by the time you finally choose, the choices available to you might end up being different than the choices you optimized for! Thus anything to speed up the selection, anything to assist with the optimization, anything to reduce future repenting, is a much-needed solution. For me, rigorous, instinctive, choice-pruning, indifference to the actual choice made, and a poor memory, help make this process faster, reasonably optimal, and guilt free.

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The purpose of life …

August 31st, 2008 admin

Kavita is driving her Pontiac Vibe south towards Charlotte, North Carolina, and eventually Atlanta, Georgia; it is still the beginning of this Labor Day weekend. I am settled is the passenger seat with the laptop in my lap and Louis Armstrong’s Greatest Hits enveloping us.  The sun is setting to my left, lining the edges of the blue-gray clouds in brilliant yellow-orange.My thoughts drift in and out of a notion I stumbled upon a couple of weeks ago. It came unannounced and in a spark of realization. However, it has stayed with me for quite some time. And I now think that it deserves some more inspection and hence this write-up. The notion, the thought, was with respect to a question all of us ask ourselves, and wonder about, at some point in our life. Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? Are we simply on nature’s rollercoaster, evolving forever to be able to survive, as the conditions allow it? Is life just purposeless meandering of helpless beings? Is purpose something we concoct and associate with life to try to give it some shape and meaning? Are we just telling ourselves stories to make passing our time here a little easier? Are these stories about the purpose of life, and we know there are many versions, with many names, just the grandest of the entertaining illusions created for us and by us, entertainment-seekers?

Mankind is different from all other living creatures, mankind claims. Why? That is the question. And in that “Why?” lies the answer - reason - the ability to reason and the thirst for reason. The ability to reflect, to introspect and to innovate is a manifestation of the same distinction. The introspection that helped us identify this distinction, and the introspection that is the distinction, are one and the same. The question is the answer. And though this kind of an answer seems vaguely incomplete, almost too obvious to be significant and only escapist wordplay, this general principle of self referencing is central to intelligence.  Humans are considered different from other living creatures because they are intelligent – capable of participating in a closed loop of self-evaluation and adjusting behavior to the findings of such an evaluation.

Before trying to experiment with the notion of self-referential answers and self-fulfilling prophesies about the purpose of life, let me go back and try to work on one of the questions that I raised about the need for a purpose of life. We could say that our existence is just a chance happening that rolled out of millions of years of chemical reactions that happened simply because the chemicals were in the right place at the right time. These chemicals were helpless and had no say in the reactions at least until a point when the chemicals became sophisticated enough to preferentially seek out the right place and the right time. Prior to such time, the direction such reactions took were driven by the state of affairs in the rest of the universe, or, in other words, chance. Gradually, the chemicals involved in the chemical reaction became more sophisticated and were able to extricate themselves somewhat from the mercy of chance. The beings, like humans, had the power to identify and appreciate to some degree, their position in the scheme of things, their significance and insignificance with respect to the rest of the universe. Even if they did not have the answers all worked out, this chance chemical reaction had reached a stage where it was curious enough to question the need for that very reaction. The reaction itself started off as a mathematical probability. The direction the reaction took, the continual readjustments to keep the reaction alive, though also not immune to chance, does seem to point towards something more than just survival. The evolution of species, most recently humans, sometimes seems wholly unnecessary. Other animals alive today are perfectly suited for today’s environment. Yet there was something guiding the chemicals to continually keep reacting in a way so as to develop newer species, not necessarily any better suited to the environment, but definitely better suited to think about this question - What is the purpose of this reaction – the reaction which has reached a scale where it can finally identify its existence and think about itself? And when we pose the question thus, the answer seems to scream out at us. The reaction has reached the point where it can identify itself, and is trying to figure out where it is headed. Maybe that is the goal of the reaction, at least for the time being – figure out where it is headed. Put another way, and this is the claim I was driving towards, maybe the purpose of life is to figure out the purpose of life!

I have not established a reason for why there needs to be a purpose to life. I have just tried to argue that there must be some other reason to life than perpetually trying to be best suited to the environment we find ourselves in. But maybe that argument is unsatisfactory. Even so, coupled with the reasoning mind, that argument, at least, nudges us towards a related, yet different, purpose - trying to figure out if there is purpose to life and if so, why. Not what, but why?

Either way, that is whether we say, “The purpose of life is to figure out the purpose of life”, or, “The purpose of life is to figure out if there is a purpose of life”, the open-endedness of this simple closed-loop recursion is similar to the answer to why is man different from other beings.  Stepping out of the mind-warp that this self-referential statement can lead to for the time being, I would now like to think about the similarities that this notion has to the many other answers to the same conundrum. This quest has the quality of being never-ending - an infinite, perpetually uplifting, notion, which is a quality found in any religion and any other answer to this question. The notion of self-referencing has a powerful individual appeal. Each thinking mind can seek to define its own purpose of life based on introspection. This is like each person defining and following his or her own religion, and more importantly recognizing that everyone else has a different, unnamed, religion.  Whether one chooses to figure out the purpose of life or to figure out if there is a purpose to life, they have a purpose in life. This seems better than any rigid doctrine that disallows continual refinements, and is certainly better than the aimlessness of a skeptic who either says, “I will never know the purpose of life”, or “I don’t care what the purpose of life is”. In fact, this self-referential notion allows the skeptic to hold his view as long as it seems reasonable.

I found this relevant quote today (09/24/2008):

“The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one.” - Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents.

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On the nature of religion

October 27th, 2007 admin

Recently, we had a long discussion on our IIT Guwahati, Class of 99, Google groups. It was related to a petition filed with the Indian Supreme Court regarding a song in a Bollywood movie, the lyrics, costumes and imagery in which were deemed derogatory to religious people in India. The discussion meandered its way through several interesting topics and opinions. Here I present a glimpse of my views on the topic of religion and why it is futile to judge what is religiously right or wrong. My friend, Samya, encouraged me to put these views up on the website. I present my thoughts verbatim from my email and therefore any contextual references that seem out of place or emotional here should, kindly, be excused.

I find the notion of religion an interesting subject to think about. Even in this short discussion we have found many points of view, many frames of reference, many notions hidden behind the word “religion”. Thinking of religion reminds me of the story of the 5 blind men trying to understand what an elephant is. I do not see those men, as the story seems to imply, as lacking any specific faculty. I see them as normal humans. I do not see the elephant as an understandable subject that is only difficult to understand. Finally, I do not see the blind men as failures because their “limited” point of view. If those were blind men and that elephant was their large unassailable subject, what makes us, the reader of that fable, special in that we are able to see the big picture? In the real world, we are one among those men, and, therefore, we will not be able to see the entire elephant. Even more importantly, what *is* the “entire elephant” in such a real world? Just because the blind men are feeling around does not mean there is an elephant to be discovered. If there was no one to tell those blind men that they were touching an elephant, how would they *ever* know that it was an elephant they were touching? To me the “elephant” is the ability to be able to simultaneously acknowledge that each of the billions of blind men do have a piece of the view that the others will never have. Further, to me the elephant is the ability to distill those billions of view points into some common, uplifting, purposeful goal. This live interaction between the minds and view points of these billions of people is not just impossibly difficult, thankfully, it is unnecessary. Why should there be one common elephant that all have to agree to have understood?

Search for a common religion is like this search for the one elephant. It is impossible. Again, careful when I say impossible, it is nothing to be dejected about. It is an elevating feeling. It is like the blind men saying, “Hold it off for a minute…why do we *have* to *all* see the same thing?” It is an elevating feeling because you can, finally, let your conscience guide you without the haunting feeling that you are missing something. We have a faculty for thinking. The blind men still had the sense of touch. Let us use what we have and figure out what purposeful goal we see from our vantage. Let there be a billion religions for a billion people. Anytime we *name* a religion we are in trouble. There are not enough names to make it worthwhile. And anytime two people who name their religion the same but are at different ends of the elephant, there is bound to be frustration. Anytime two groups of people name their religion differently, they try to evaluate the better point of view, the “true” religion. They try to *help* the other group out by bringing them to their end of the elephant, while not acknowledging that there is no *reason* why their end is really better, except that *they* feel so. This brings in ego. The problem with ego is that it is the tendency to prioritize your thoughts over another person’s thoughts *without* reasoning through them, that is, without using your faculty of thinking honestly.

Therefore, I am cautious anytime I am asked, “What is your religion?”. If I thought about it long enough, I might be able to convey some ideas about what my “religion” is, but it will not make complete sense to anyone else in the world, because no one else shares my exact same position next to this impossible elephant. Why? Because no one else is me.

Here is the conclusion from a John Saxe poem

So, oft in theologic wars
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean;
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

The complete poem is here

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On the need for religion

October 27th, 2007 admin

After thinking a bit about the nature of religion, I started thinking about the need for it. Why are the blind men so intent on discovering an elephant? Here are some thoughts related to that topic. Again, Samya was the motivation behind putting these up on this website, and once again, a fable helped me explain the thoughts.

Another fable that I think applies to real life is the “grapes are sour” story . That one, as I recollect, portrays a fox that gives up on reaching a grape vine, consoling itself by saying that the fruit is not worth the effort. The way the story was presented to me seemed to imply that such an attitude is laughable and that one should be honest with oneself.

However, I believe that there is much to look up to in the fox’s attitude. The fox was able to weigh the cost and the benefit given the situation it found itself in, and decide the cost is more than the benefit. Such analysis is very important in real life too. It keeps us from getting stuck. Further, the fable seemed to imply that the fox wrongfully chose to “believe” in falsehood. It knew that the grapes would be sweet, but it still walked away thinking and saying they are sour! But think about it. Lots of people are able to live their life without going insane because of such an attitude. If a poor person suffers from a dreaded illness that has a cure but is expensive (or if a poor person, for no fault of his, gets run over by Salman Khan’s SUV), often they or their relatives resign to their fate saying that such is their karma, or saying that they must have done something wrong in their past lives, or that such was God’s plan, or even more tragically, that God loves that person more than others.

Those we call religious and those we call superstitious might actually be very reasoning oriented. They are so starved for a reason for why bad things happen to them that they create, or succumb to, this pacifying fantasy of their being a superhuman controlling their destiny; that there is someone who sees and cares. If you read the book “The Life of Pi”, this is the underlying theme in the book. There is a plain, calculated, probabilistic world where you do have a certain vaguely measuarable probability of dying in a freak road accident. And then there is the world where the accident had a reason behind it. Someone had a plan for why it had to happen. You did not die a meaningless death. No wonder we choose the latter view of the world under extreme helplessness.

The fox could have walked away acknowledging that it was completely helpless and that it would never, in its lifetime, be able to taste grapes, or, the fox could have walked away genuinely believing that grapes are sour. Guess which way the fox would be able to continue living with some sense of equanimity? Afterall, sometimes, we do take life too seriously, And sometimes, these grapes *are* overrated.

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In Phase Interview

September 30th, 2007 admin

A little over a month ago, Sourabh Sriom, a current student at Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, contacted me for an interview. IITG is where I earned my Bachelors degree. Our class, the class of 99, was the first to pass out of the new institution. The ECE Department at IITG has an ECE society called Cepstrum. On september 20th, 2007, Cepstrum released the first issue of the monthly magazine called In Phase. The purpose of In Phase is to both help the students be in touch with the happenings in their field, Electonics and Communications Engineering, and to help restore the social networks between alumni, faculty and students. I was honored to be asked for an interview. It helped me give the current students a view of how my career progressed, after graduating from IITG, and also helped me a chance to reflect on a few things. I would like to thank IITG and Cepstrum for giving me this opportunity. I also was pleased to see the continued support of the faculty at IITG, many of whom I studied under, in this endeavour. It was great to read Dr. P. K. Bora’s communication to the In Phase team, which appears in the magazine too. Here is the original link to the magazine, which appears in the Cepstrum webpage here. I also made a local copy of the magazine on my webpage here. Note that this is a 5.8MB pdf file. It might take some time to open up, and your browser needs to be able to open pdf files. A few questions and answers form my original response had to be removed due to space constraints in the magazine. If you just wish to read the interview questions and answers, the full interview follows.
1. Being a student of the 1st batch of our IIT, tell us about your apprehensions and pre-conceived notions, if any, about IITG.

From what I recollect about my state of mind then, I believe I was more excited than apprehensive. The opportunity to study at an institution where the quality of education, faculty, students and facilities was reputed to be at par with the best in the country excited me. My inclination was towards ECE as a subject area and I was only grateful that I could pursue that subject at IITG when I probably could not elsewhere, given my rank in the JEE. My only preconceived notions about IITG were that it would be a young institute looking to build itself, both in literal terms and in its beliefs and character. I knew it would be an institute that would not have much to show for itself in the first few years in brick and mortar terms. I also knew that when you put smart, motivated and courageous people - people who were smart enough to get into IITG, motivated enough to prioritize their area of academic interest over the place of study, and courageous enough to choose an hitherto unexplored destination – the chances are good that you will end up with an institution you can be proud of.

2. Did these feelings live up when you finally entered IITG? That is, how were your first few days at IITG?

The disappointment of seeing the small, unassuming, pale, four-storied building tucked in the cramped, commercial heart of the city, further isolated by the agonizing groans and rumbles of slow-moving trains on railway lines on one side, and the noisy arch of the Pan Bazaar flyover too close for comfort on another, could have been overwhelming; for me, however, there as no disappointment. The lack of a tangible, photographable campus with large buildings and facilities was probably compensated for, subconsciously, by trying harder to do the best we could with what we had. And what we had were a batch of 64 motivated students, great faculty and the hope that everything else an institution needs would come in due time. I think the one thing that IITG had from day one was fantastic people. And that takes care of the two main aspects of undergraduate education – developing academic skills and developing social skills.

3. Did you feel let down at any point during your stay here? (If, yes what or who boosted your confidence?)

No. I do not recollect feeling let down at any point. The reason might have, partly, been that I had nothing to compare our experiences to. But even in absolute terms, I think the IITG Administration was sensitive to our needs and were always receptive to our suggestions. Even when there were the occasional drooping shoulders, the administration, faculty members and other students would boost the morale by providing honest perspective.

4. Talk us through the experiences of the rest of your B. Tech, the faculty, other students, and, the placements.

We were lucky to have some highly motivated faculty members whose knowledge of their subject was thorough, and, enthusiasm for their craft, contagious. It was a pleasure to actively learn from them in the classroom and beyond. With 63 other students to begin with and with more joining in the future years, it was a non-stop learning experience in social behavior. The emotional support, comic relief, opinionated exchanges and lifelong friendships are experiences we students shared with each other and the faculty. The combination of our being in our late teens, the 4 years we were together for and the shared adventure that was IITG, might be the reason why the friendships made in those days are still so strong. The placements and higher studies are but a blur in my mind. I remember that even then we were able to attract some of the best companies and were offered good jobs with competitive pay.

5. What prompted you to go for higher studies abroad?

My main motivation for higher studies was that I felt I had only begun to skim the surface of my field and there was a lot more for me to learn. The other school of thought was that what you really need to learn you can learn while doing a job. Though that was true to the extent of doing your job well, I wanted to learn more for its own end. That is, I wanted to learn what great minds of the past had thought up or discovered, for no other reason than that I wanted to know. I had no plans for how I was going to use that knowledge. Why abroad? I wanted to explore the kind of academics and research that is practiced in other reputed institutions of the world. It was, in some sense, IITG all over again - the yearning to put yourself in a new situation, to, hopefully, gain a new perspective.

6. Did the department guide you in this goal of yours? If yes, then in what way?

Yes. Because we did not have any student history to go by, being the first batch, we had to research the process of applying for a PhD or a Master’s ourselves, to a large extent. We had faculty members who were extremely helpful in educating us on how to go about applying, how to attempt standardized tests for graduate school entrance, and which schools to choose, based on their experience and contacts. Lastly, they wrote us honest recommendation letters.

7. What were the major differences you felt graduating from a premier institute in India to doing your PG from a reputed university in the US?

I went to Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, USA for my Master’s in Electrical and Computer Engineering. It was a gigantic University compared to IITG and certainly a bit overwhelming. The size, the history and the bureaucracy were the first things I noticed. It worked like a giant machine with things happening like clockwork running on old but well-oiled and well-cared-for parts. However, I was able to find myself an apartment, make new friends, get a decent understanding of the geography of the large campus, get my head around the official rules and requirements, participate in a different culture, continue good performance in academics, and participate in sports and other extra-curricular activities. So all in all, I think IITG prepared me well to take up the new challenges in the new environment.

8. How did you land up in IBM? Tell us something about your stint there.

Similar to placement interviews at the end of a B.Tech at IITG, there was a job fest organized at Purdue University’s ECE Department. I interviewed with several companies and decided to get some exposure to the industry. I joined IBM, primarily, because of the company’s reputation, the breadth of knowledge the company seemed to possess and because the team that interviewed me seemed to be doing very interesting work. The main difference between academia and industry is that industry tries to channel research into an end product that is tangible, useful and therefore, sellable. IBM has a Research division too; however, the team I joined is part of Development. I work as a Future System Performance Engineer. My work deals with helping hardware designers and system architects optimize the design of a future computer system such that it performs the best it can, given various requirements, such as expected workloads, throughput and latency requirements, and constraints, such as the area and power budget, architectural or microarchitectural extensions allowed etc. I learn a lot of new things on the job and work with some very sharp people.

9. At what point during your job did you make up your mind to go for a PhD?

I noticed that high importance is given to innovative thinking at IBM. I realized that with better knowledge of the Computer Architecture field, I could not just solve the current design problems better, but more importantly, I could foresee future problems and try to incorporate that vision into the current solutions. I also noticed that in the region where I live and work, there were several good Universities and IBM management was always supportive and encouraging in allowing me to go back to school for either an MBA or a PhD. So after working for about 4 years at IBM, I applied to and joined North Carolina State University in Raleigh as a part-time PhD student. By then I had gotten a reasonable understanding of the types of design and technology constraints computer architects and hardware designers face in their work and the kind of solutions that make a product competitive in the market. I thought the time was right to look at the directions academia was taking in this field. Academia and Research are typically a few years ahead of the Industry and Development. Therefore, being in touch with academia allows you to see patterns that would be harder to see from within the industry.

10. How was research in ECE different from a job in the area?

Though I have not yet started serious research as part of my PhD, and am currently taking classes and only recently formed my Advisory Committee, I can give you my current view on this topic. Since I joined my PhD after some exposure to the industry, I can research a topic that is a new and interesting problem both in academia and industry. Such overlap is usually not perfect, but if research in an academic setting is guided to some extent by real problems faced by engineers, it leads to research that is more purposeful.

11. How would you compare India and the US in terms of opportunities in the ECE field?

Having limited exposure to the industry in India, I have to go by my understanding of what I have heard or read. I believe that India has a foot in the door to becoming a knowledge superpower. India is already a major player in the software and services industry. From being a middle-man providing support to the producers and the consumers, India is itself moving towards being a big producer and a big consumer. That is a significant shift, because as a producer you create value where it did not exist before, and as a consumer, you provide a reason for the producers to produce. India seems to be on the threshold of a gear change in this engine of value-creation and value-aware-demand. In ECE and related fields the differences in opportunities between the US and India will continue to shrink as long as India continues to take the opportunities that come her way and discover or create new opportunities on her own.

12. Would you like to share a piece of advice with our readers about how they should plan their career moves.

Based on my limited experiences, based on what has served me well, assuming a vast majority of the readers are students at IITG, and assuming a general guideline rather than a strict example is useful, my advice is, be honest and positive. By honest, I mean several things. Be forthright in your assessment of where you are, where you want to be, how to get there. Be a humble follower when you should be, and likewise, a confident leader when you should be. Be connected to reality by being aware of your thoughts, your motivations, your limitations, your duties and your actions. By positive I mean, most importantly, try to keep improving yourself. Try to do the best job in everything you do. How you define “improvement” or “best” depends on how honestly you can judge where you are and where you want to be. Try to improve that ability to judge as well. By positive I also mean be creative. Get into the habit of practicing your innate creativity. We have the brains and the training to actively create value, rather than passively consume it. Even when being a consumer be an active one. Be a good follower (active consumer) and be a good leader (active producer). Let the opportunity to partake in creativity guide your career moves.

13. Finally, a word for the very first people at IITG, the director, the faculty of the department, the HOD. I’m sure they all would be proud of you.

I am and have always been impressed by the positive energy of the IITG Administration and Faculty. In twelve short years the progress made by IITG has been remarkable and most of the credit should go to these nurturing souls. I am grateful and proud to have been, and still be, a part of IITG. I am positive it will continue to grow in stature and fulfill its role in shaping the world.

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Bringing beauty back to the eyes of the beholder

April 16th, 2007 admin

Anant sent me a wonderful article from the Washington Post newspaper today. The article, titled “Pearls Before Breakfast”, by Gene Weingarten, appeared on Sunday, April 8th 2007. Here is the link to the article, hoping the link continues to work for a long time.
Pearls Before Breakfast by Gene Weingarten
Reading the article evoked many thoughts which I sent back to Anant in an email, and also present here, hoping that my thoughts might futher thinking on this issue.

Anil: Anant, this is a brilliant cultural and psycological experiment that results in what the author might have found a little baffling, but fails to surprise me as much. That said, I was very happy to have read it, since it confirms my suspicions. My elation in having correctly identified human nature is matched by my disappointment at its meaning. The article distills the theory of three philosophers, regarding beauty, thus - “What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?”. Yet another viewpoint, we have all heard of, is “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” But I wonder if it really is. Why do people pay hunderds of dollars to go listen to Joshua Bell at a concert? Why do people pay millions for a Van Gogh painting? Are they all acting out of the pure lure of beauty? I sincerely doubt it. Are many a people in the concert audience there because they want to please someone - maybe spouses, maybe bosses, maybe for their own future cocktail discussions? Are many collecters buying paintings to be able to sell it in the future for a higher price, or maybe to appear appropriately dignified and aware in their social circle? Who is judging or defining beauty here? Is it the observer or has the quatification of beauty already been done by a select few; a panel of “experts” who have been given the job of branding, evaluating and weighing beauty of an art-piece? Does their word then percolate down to the ticket costs and price tags? Is this branded beauty making people more aware or less aware of what beauty truly is? Is it training people to not heed to their own sensibilities and evaluations, but rather to always be skeptical of their own belief and to habitually fall in line behind the sensibilities of the masses? This ties in with, and runs against the grain of the overrunning theme in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. “What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good…need we ask anyone to tell us these things?” But is that what is happening? Are we handing over the responsibility, and therefore the return, the true joy, of appreciating what is beautiful, to others? And this ties in with the overriding theme of Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”. The book talks about a world full of second-handers who depend on and imitate, yet resent and try to extinguish the prime movers, the first-handers, the visionaries of this world. This article highlights a subtler expresion of the same distinction; one within a single human being. It points to how, within a single human being, the second-handedness matures and stifles out the primal motivation to be honest, capable judges of beauty that every child is. Thanks for the forward. I hope we can continue to be aware and honest.

The following are a few more thoughts on this issue based on my reply to Anant’s email response, presented as a dialogue (though it was not, Anant’s response came together all at once, not in response to my statements presented below).

Anant: Anil, your analysis was very thought-provoking. I definitely do not think beauty is measurable and even if it is the majority of the people would not have the inclination or time to make that measurement.

Anil: I think beauty is measurable. It is not standardizable. The measure is individual and subjective. The International Standards Organization cannot come up with a “unit” for beauty. However, each one of us, has the capability to distinguish between greater beauty and lesser beauty. Indeed, is that not the resource we tap into when we say “I loved this movie” vs. “It is an Oscar winner, but I did not think it was that great”. What makes me sad is that even though we all have this skill and the sensitivity to appreciate beauty, it is the opposing quality of insensitive honesty that is found lacking. The courage to honestly and individually appraise beauty, rather than meekly submit to others’ appraisals, is what we allow to slip away over time.

Anant: If it is subjective, is there a basic sense of what is beautiful in every person that is built in, like an instinct? Like you said, it is this instinct that is being stifled due to a number of factors: the need to conform, lack of time, wrongly ordered priorities etc.
Another thing that came to my mind was that they really didn’t need Joshua Bell to prove this. For an untrained ear like mine or the majority of people who walked past him, there is no difference between how a world-famous violinist plays and how a merely good violonist would play. But I guess the stamp of “genius” that the experts have put on Bell does make the story more dramatic.

Anil: The whole point of beauty is that even to untrained ears like ours it should still qualify as beautiful! The ear of a child is probably untrained, at least in the sense you probably meant it, yet, if the music conformed to his or her sense of beauty, the child would be attracted to it. It is important to recognize that I am not saying the passers-by were stupid. Maybe the music itself was overrated! Afterall, the music that some Victorian-era musician composed with great elation and suffering, does not automatically qualify to become beautiful. As a slight diversion, my take on the issue of effort is that honest, sincere creative effort more often results in beauty than secondhanded imitation. So, for all the effort the composer and the violinist put in to the performance, the result likely will be quite beautiful. But it does not necessarily have to be. My take on the experiment itself, however, is that things of great beauty might still need time to familiarize themselves to the observer; they might not be beautiful at first sight and might need the “state of mind” that Kant talks about. The results of the experiment were partly sullied by the requirement that music, more than visual art depends on the “state of mind” and time to prove its worth. In any case, my thoughts in the previous mail were more or less independent of this particular experiment, although the article certainly evoked those thoughts.

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Faith with no doubt vs failth only in doubt

April 23rd, 2006 admin

“If a man will begin in certainties he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties.”
- Philosopher Francis Bacon, quoted in the Associated Press

The notion of faith evokes an immediate association with religion. Faith is considered integral to truly experiencing the joys of religion. Faith is the ability to overcome doubt. It is fueled by humility, obedience and trust. All these are virtues. I would like to argue in this article that every thing I said about faith applies to science, and arguably, more to science than religion!

Faith is integral to science. The big difference in science is that the faith is not placed in the end result. The faith is placed in the means to the end, the process of getting there, the method. Faith is placed only in the validity of doubt and methods to counter it. Doubt is the origin of science. This doubt, fueled by curiosity and bolstered by unyielding faith in the validity of doubting, eggs on the scientist to the end result. Which, of course, is open to doubt.

Faith in religion does not stem from doubt. It stems from individual or collective notions. It often stems from an individual’s notion that is guided by what will appeal to collective notion, the masses. Religious faith asks one to give up ones prejudices. Coincidentally, science asks the exact same from its followers. Religion, though, makes up for your loss in giving up your own prejudices, by replacing it with communcal prejudices. Science leaves you high and dry. You have no easy replacement. That is the most crucial difference between the two approaches to knowledge. In one, you are handed a solution on a platter. In the other you are often handed an idea, a theory or a hypothesis, that is itself open to your scrutiy and validation and occasionally, you are handed nothing.

Why would one choose the scientific way, when it is ridden with potentially wrong solutions, laced with heavy doses of doubt, and provides no guarantees for any success? Would it not be easier to accept solutions which can be sufficient to lead a happy lifetime, with no double-guessing, no opportunity for pattern-less chaos, with no doubts? Unfortunately, though many solutions have been proposed often in the form of religions, the solutions have not been able to present a uniform set of answers that could completely anhilate doubt from all minds. And the problem is not with the solution provided by any religion. The problem is the attempt to provide such a solution. The very nature of how relegious ideas develop, make it hard to be communicated across all geographies and cultures. But even if there were only one religion, one set of solutions, that everyone in the world had attempted to put their faith in, it would still not work. And that is because, the attempt is to place faith in the solution. There is no way to verify or recreate the solution to satisfy one’s own curiosity. And that brings us to the heart of the matter. One’s own curiosity implies the notion of individuality. Every individual is different and capable of thinking for herself or himself. When a solution reached by one or, hypothetically, even a majority of the people is presented to “everyone”, there certainly will be someone whose individuality will not be truly satisfied with the solution. Uniform religion that provides ready solutions, therefore, will continue to be inadequate.

The alternative is to nurture this individuality - the inherent ability and, indeed, the urge, to doubt. There is no solution that is beyond any individual’s grasp. There is no requirement for collective faith to be placed in the solution. The faith is placed is the means, where the means only refer to doubt. The means do not refer to a particular approach to finding the answer. The faith is not placed in anything beyond the individually verifiable. And that often stops at the realization that the answer is either not available or not sufficient. With such a weak framework of guide rails, it could be argued that we will never get anywhere. But that is the kind of freedom that an individual craves for. The lack of guide rails is an opportunity, rather than a restriction. The downside is that it takes a lot more courage to truly follow the scientific method. There are no guarantees that you will ever get anywhere. The temptation to build rigid guide rails, to take you somewhere, is often overpowering. The temptation to get to an answer, before the battery runs out, that is, within a lifetime, is also another pitfall. Truth does not have such stipulations, and to dive into the vast expanse of science with all its half-baked solutions, caveats and sparse guide-rails takes tremendous courage and tremendous faith - faith, in your right to doubt - faith in fact, in nothing, except doubt itself.

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