Sleathy Philosophy

It almost 1 in the night and I wonder why am I awake till now. Today was a usually normal day with no such pressure to keep me awake till 1 in night and drive me to blog!
There are three things bugging me right now (in the order of their sequence):
1. I saw a few people (of my age) posting their outing pics with hot friends in hot destinations. For me the missing part was the hot friends. I never had that much time to devote to these hotties. Here comes the question that even those guys have 24 hours in day, so how do they manage. So here I've another line of thought - My technical field doesn't have these hotties and so I don't get that kind of exposure. Hmm, this seems to be more rational. But then, I could also have made it in those companies (read non-tech)? Well, I can work there as well, but I lover my technical core engineering *more* than that. This leads me to another question:
2. Right now, I'm getting paid well and comparable to what a good graduate from top B-skools in India would expect. Rather, I've been making it from the day he would have entered the B'skool. Cool! So where's the tension? The thing is that this scenario is good for today and I'm sure that I can make it stay as it is forever also, but that would require answering the third and the most fundamental question. Right now, to third person my qualifications seem to be little infront of some one who has IIM-A tag with some CFA certifications. Even I' m sometimes attracted by these numbers of Qualifications. On top of that, I've my friends telling me that what are the kind of remunerations one could get by working in Investment Banking/ PE/ Portfolio Management. What I'm being paid right now is the best what I could expect at my level. Although there is lot to learn and I'm doing my best (read the best possible in absolute terms), I don't know how much benefit would it give me in terms of monetary returns. While other s and I, both are adding to their knowledge, the difference is that their number of degrees are also increasing while I'm still a B.E. So I love what I do and I exceed at that, but is the correct thing to do if for-god-sake tomorrow others with more degrees are getting higher salaries than me? So this leads me to the basic and fundamental question on which I began to ponder when I was just 8 years old. At age of 8, money and materialistic values don't have any such importance. But since I'd these questions in my mind really early, I later built a very holistic and intellectual thinking procedure transcending these monetary equations.
3. So the third and the most difficult question is what I think is the real QUEST for life
- What is that I'm supposed to do in a lifetime given to me? Contributing to others is what seems most logical to me, but who can assert it?
- What is the meaning of life to me ? There are somethings I'm good while somethings at which I'm not. So how did I decided which hobbies to adopt?
- Why is it that only certain people interact with me?
- How can I know what is good and what is not? What I perceive to be good may not be good in absolute terms.
- Our actions are important but how? If we work hard, we achieve what we need, but is that thing really we require?
- Do we know what we need?

Just a few of these questions.. The QUEST has many more abstract questions. One thing I've understood in these years is that - to find a solution, you must clearly define the question. So still many more questions need to be framed. And them they need to be answered. Is a lifetime enough for answering these?

-Ashish

Dessign Patterns Revisited

I'm an Elecronics Engineer and my profile requires me to keep myself updated on most o the technologies and keep learning the new ones.

Now when the new technologies are so varied and so different in aspects of their utility, reading the docs is a priority.

When there is so much to study, with different contexts, and within limited time, then just reading the docs for the sake of it is not sufficient.

The way I developed this "Design Pattern 1" is that you first get the idea of the doc at an abstract level. At an abstract level, you only know the very high level working of the things in the docs and you have very slight idea about the different contexts/nodes in the docs. So you know the graph and connections between these nodes at an abstract level, but you dont know contents of the nodes at this level.

At this time, and at this abstraction, you can relate it to your graphs already stored in your mind/database. The similarities can help you, to a great extent, to get familiar thoroughly with new concepts.

So in this way you keep using your previous knowledge, and at the same time, with very good understanding of the context, you keep updating your database as well. This updated database increases your diversities of the graphs known to you, ans this further helps you in commanding new documents/techniques.

Blogging again

The last blog was almost an year ago on 25 june...

Before that I used to login to put some of my thoughts into the blog as a snapshot of my feeling at that moment.

So a whole year passed and I didn't even thought of blogging.. WHY?
What happened today that I thought and even executed it?

I think an year ago, I got into the company I always dreamed of. I was learning what I wanted to learn. I was doing what I wanted to do. I was in my hometown living with my parents as I always wanted to. I was with my friends meeting with them occasionally and had a good time.

All this made me feel so "complete" that I even thought of settling and getting married!

Well, so this could be a reason why I never thought of blogging again as the feelings were so good and I was always so enlightened that I never felt to record those feelings in the blog...

If plaintive feelings made me to blog, so am I lugubrious today as well?

Well maybe or maybe not - I maybe in pensive mood because I'd shifted to Noida last month and somehow the vacuocity of the room reminds me of the "completeness" I used to feel at home.

The flavours of these kind of "only me" feelings aren't new to me. Lets get into out time-machine and getting going backwards...

When I was at Kota, monthly or bi-weekly, I used to taste these, no matter how bitter they maybe.

During my stay at Kota, this bitterness became far stretched in search of anecdote, sometimes I used to just get out, catch an auto and leave for home catching a train. That was in itself a different story. Now I don't want to travel even in busses as they are overcrowded. At that time, I used to go to ticket counter, take a General ticket, then got in sleeper on any empty RAC and used to pay the TC the remaining amount. I don't think I can do that as of now.
If anything substantially affected me, it was my 6 months stay at Kota. I can never forget those days. It was not as if the stay there was torturous, but I had never been exposed to that kind of a reality. I had to complete most of the task myself. I'd never understood before that what responsibilities were .

Just like today, at Kota I used to have a lot of free time and when there is so much of time for yourself, you introspect and retrospect. At that time, I didn't had a laptop with me and so I didn't blogged. But still, when there is no-one to share the "so-personal" feelings, you have to find a way to vent them out. And so I used to find a piece of paper and start writing them down.
By the end of my stay, I had compiled a good collection of 10 or 15 notes.

Recently, I discovered that I could make/ compose short poems/shayari very quickly. I guess this was one of the many "by-products" that the 6-month stay provided me.

Now that we have started a journey in reverse gears, lets move a few more years back. As a student, I was never very good. Above averge maybe, but not the toppers that everyone wanted to be. At that time, the study for me meant a laborious task and I was only a labor who had to toil in atleast 2 hours daily to earn his daily hour of computer games.

It was back in 1996 when I got a PC for myself. At that time, I didn't knew what I had in my hands was something that was going to be my destiny. Within no time, I was an expert at DOS programming and could actually write and make sense of FoxPro Codes written by my father. Now for a child of age 10 years, this was prodigial and precocious.

So the wage I used to get for studing was that I could play PC games and go outdoor with my childhood friends to play games like "ooch-meech ak papra" and all. I remember that in those there used to be two attractions in the video games segment. First was the Sega gaming consoles, the one that I never had and the other used to be the PCs. So I had the then popular DOS games like Dangerous Dave, pacman, prince of persia... I still remember that it took me almost a month to get par Level 5 in Dave. All those jetpacks (Alt) and Guns (Ctrl) defined my sources of fun. At that time, when other children used to be mischievous, I was quiet as a stone and so self-composed that my mother was always worried about my mental health! The time progressed and changes started to affect me as well. Slowly the pressure to perform and excel in studies forced me to be more concentrated on the books. It's sometimes painful to see that the only criteria for the parents and teachers to decide the astuteness and mental abilities of a child are through the percentage he gets. Its been my attribute that I cant get along well with the things that don't entice me, but then I'm a master in the things that I find attracting. The syllabus in the preliminaries was never "logical" and was mostly something I call as a reference. So to mug up these references and spit them out in answer-sheet never made sense to me. Yes, even today I don't want to be caught in a situation where I am no more that a "mnemonic" machine.BREAK!

So in the 4th std itself, my overly concerned parents found a tutor for me. And I used to take daily tutoring classes at 4-5pm after school. The trend continued for many years. I was good in Maths and Science even then, but the percentage depended on Literature subjects like hindi and English as well. There was nothing in those syllable that intellectually challenged me. Albeit, today it's a necessity to be good in English :(.

Rules and regulations made me to go in a defensive mode where a cryst surrounded the cognitive engine in my brain. I never wanted to think beyond what's already there till advent of 7 th std. It all started with the breaking of Science into physics, chemistry and biology at that time. The physics caught my attention. The flow of heat, bending and refracting of light, creation of rainbow and other principles of mother nature had my attention. In chemistry the effect of temperature and pressure on states of materials and how did it affected them made an affinity bond with me as well. I was slowly breaking the crust and letting the thinking and cognitive engine start again. The fuel for this engine was the study material and content that I used to get. Instantly I could predict what could be the next excerpts from the book. Slowly the tutor was amazed to see the clarity of my thinking process and assured the parents that I had a sound knowledge of the basics and was good at logic reasoning. And then in consecutive three years, I'd baggd top 3 postions in the class! From being to nowhere in top 20s till 6th std, I was amongst the toppers. Alas! my parents took a long time to find the peculiar qualities the nature instilled in me.

Prior to class 7th and after 3rd class, somehow I had started to hate field activities and never went out to play. Somehow after 7th, my interest in playing started to re-develop and I started going out again. I made good friends along and by the 9th class, I was usually made the cricket captian of our Apt. So 7th to 9th was a renaissance for me and the revival was all good. So far there were no obligation on me to perform well. But then I entered the 10th std, the over-hyped boards exams, 10-12 hrs of study, 95% of marks to get good stream and all the associated rubbish started to haunt me. I lost a track of the things once again and just felt the pressure. Somehow after these experiences, I can positively state that the human mind has some kind of defensive method where it blocks the thinking and cognitive engine. All I felt was the pressure to perform and succeed, I again had lost the interest I had developed in those past 3 years and affinity was almost dissolved by the caustic pressure of expectation.

The same trend continued in the 11th and 12th and I failed with equal consistency.
The C++ programming language seemed so frightening to me in those days when I had mastered Foxpro and Qbasic in 3rd. IT certainly seems odd. The more wayward thing is that in 11th-12th days, I didn't even remember that I'd mastered QBasic or Foxpro. The Thinking and logic reasoning engine in my brain was simply broken down! Programming requires good amount of application, but at that time it was simply not there! I'd once again lost it! The so involving Physics seemed to be daunting to me that I had constantly failed in the subject. Even today, I can't figure out that how could I not catch up with the so logically structured physics?

Even the derivatives and integrals were so difficult for me to follow. I remember that I'd tried my best to get hold on these subjects, but mymind was simply not performing to the expectations. Again there was this haunted JEE pressure. And so I failed to click either of these in the exam and had no "good" choice left.

So I went to Kota (a true Mecca for me), it shaped me once again in every respect. I think it was in my best interest that I had dropped and more importantly went to Kota. It was a landmark in my life and value the learnings deeply.

The amazing thing that happened to me at Kota was that my cognitive engine in brain was working and was more powerful than ever before. Immediately after the exams were over, I turned on the PC and just returned to programming for FUN. Yes, somehow I found programming to be fun now. Given that I'd not touched any programming related questions/text at Kota, I couldn't have Built a parser to draw graphs on any trignometric or exponential function, or calculate the integral of a function between 2 points or find a tangent to any arbitrary function at any point. Yes, I make sense in the programming and make the complex Data Structures work for me immediately. This isn't something that I'd expected to occur. It was something that helped me understand myself thoroughly.
I like to work and do the most challenging work that involves logic and application of mind, but I can't work if something that is to be done "by norms of a being" nad just for the sake of it.

The four golden years spent at college made me learn, that the knowledge is the true friend and to gain knowledge you have to be humble, behave foolish and be greedy for it. Just doing that and loving it!

This has also helped me in deciding to let-go off MBA, when every one around is/or will be an MBA. The tremendous pressure from parents/relatives/friends to go for MBA vacillated my mind but as with the circuits, after some attenuation, I attained that quiescent point that I am a person driven by excitement and curiosity rather than the social norms and standards. I believe in setting your own standards and expectations rather than following what others had set for themselves.

Good to be back again! Just love this blogging phenomenon, my haven to vent out he feelings..