Tere Bin Laden....

Disclaimer: People incapable of impartially reading something without getting their opinions in the way are encouraged to NOT READ the following. Any angered/impassioned lambasting of my existence shall be met with the rudest retorts that my meandering mind can generate. Whether or not it coincides with yours, you can NOT boo me for having an opinion!

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For the last few days since Osama Bin Laden was killed, I have been debating with myself whether I really want to write and publish this blogpost. I was not sure if my own thoughts were clear enough and whether such blatant opinions need to be made public at all. Today, I read something that convinced me I should. So here goes..

THE CONFESSION

I have never really hated Osama Bin Laden. Since I saw the live footage of the WTC twin towers and Pentagon burning, to this very moment, I have never felt that surge of anger that a lot of people feel or have felt against him at some point of time. I could never see 'evil' on his face. I could never bring myself to blindly believe all the labels and adjectives that were attributed to him. If anything, I almost admired Osama Bin Laden. I always thought that born under better circumstances, he would have made such a great scientist, sociologist or philosopher. There's good reason why I say so. While my opinion about his motives and the means of accomplishing them has wavered over time, there was and is no denying the tremendous genius of the man who stood right in the face of 'the greatest nation on earth'. The ten years gone by during which the US relentlessly pursued him and yet ended up with just dead ends have only served to prove this. I have often wondered how he managed to walk with titanium balls that big.

The above sentiments apart, unlike so many people in so many parts of the world, I am still in no mood to celebrate Osama Bin Laden's death, for multiple reasons:

THE ARGUMENT

1) What's glorious about the willful killing of a fellow human being, no matter who they are and what they did?

2) Its all a big game of perception management. In the media, we are mostly fed only one side of the story, which follows the golden rule: 'He who has the gold makes the rules!'. But sitting in the cozy safety of our homes, its genuinely difficult to appreciate what the people in some other part of the world are really facing on a daily basis. Try listening to this:

Makes 'One man's terrorist is another man's martyr' make some sense, doesn't it?

3) As the real happenings of 'Operation Geronimo' emerge as the White House 'revises' several key details, it is becoming increasingly clear that this was a planned political assassination. No attempt was made to capture the target alive. Keep in mind that there was no 'firefight', as Osama Bin Laden was unarmed, and also that he did not use any woman as a human shield. Obama's speech was just perception management eyewash.

4) The entire operation also stands in multiple breach of elementary norms of international law. Whats there to celebrate about the blatant breach of the sovereignty of any country by another? And who's to say that this will not happen to mine in the future? The US will undoubtedly get away with it too, simply because there IS no one to stand up to them. The disbalance of power only makes me worried, not gleeful.

The following assume the Osama was 'evil':

5) The vengeful repercussions of Osama's killing are bound to show up sooner or later, and your guess is just as good as mine as to what form they will show up in. Given the brilliant mind that he was, I'm willing to bet that he'd already chalked out a plan of action to be followed post his death.

6) Osama managed to pull the US into a dead-end ground war on multiple fronts, which cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. The hits taken by the US economy ever since George W. Bush declared a 'war on terrorism' show that it is a pyrrhic victory for the US, if at all a victory. Now with the death of Osama, the americans feel a sense of closure, and the war between the most powerful country in the world and a handful of terrorists, after ten years, can only truthfully be said to have ended on a draw. Really seems like a victory for Osama, if you ask me.

7) For a while now, Osama was being seen as more and more of a symbolic figurehead representing the multi-pronged extremism across the globe, with minimal direct operational command of Al Qaida. The world's most wanted and most dangerous terrorist, captured alive and kept rotting in a jail would have been symbolic victory to the US. The US could not have gifted a more 'glorious' and 'inspirational' end to Osama by killing him and making him a martyr dying for his cause.

And in closing, a quote from Noam Chomsky: "If this world believes in the Nuremberg Principles on which the Nazis were taken to trial for its crime against humanity through their tyranny post-world war II, all American presidents should be taken to trial  following the same principles."

Tell me what you think.

Luv-n-luck,

Av

POPS !

Learn to live in the moment, they say. Without being weighed down by your past, or being pulled too fast by your future. Every once in a while, I have a moment in my life, which seems to have more life in the moment than usual. While the feelings possibly experienced in such moments encompass the full spectrum of human emotions, I believe what is common is that they irreversibly change the way you look at something. Such moments tend to stick out in your memory like bookmarks in your life. I call such moments Points Of Paradigm Shift, or POPS. Quite the appropriate onomatopoeia, eh?

So this is a song about a moment in time, when on a relatively secluded beach in Konkan, albeit in unthoughtful jest, I was down on one knee, holding a fused light-bulb and looking into eyes that were suddenly filled with a haunting blend of unexpected emotions.

LIGHT OF MY LIFE

I've never been the kind
Who go around searching for love
I've never believed love's blind
Or that happiness comes from above..

I've never believed in fate
Or that destiny is real
And all this talk of a soul-mate
Has always felt so surreal..

All my life, I've lived an illusion
And never dared to face my fears..
But I've broken free of this delusion
In this moment with you, right here...

Now I'm on my knees
And I can suddenly see things right
I'm begging baby, please
Say, you'll be the light... of my life...

Much as I would love to, I can't really elucidate upon 'see things right'. Not as a matter of intent, but as a matter of ability. Someday, I hope to be able to write in words expressive enough to really encompass the beauty of the moment and the depth of the realizations within it. Maybe then, I could call it an apology. From naiveté to hurt feelings.

Luv-n-Luck,
Av

Laziness is in our genes! Or is it??

My primary motivation to go out and meet interesting people and talk to them is not limited to just what they have to offer to me as fully formed opinions in terms of intellectual exchange. While that is surely unique, a few days back I re-discovered, to my pleasant surprise, that the real dark horse of the interaction is the tangential thought process which the other person's thoughts trigger off in your own head. Now this particular conversation was about Global Warming, and here is the outcome, about Evolutionary Bio-psychology! Yes, I just made that word up.. :P

Anyway, here goes:

Where does Laziness come from?

They say a new-born baby is like a clean slate, and the first few hours and years of experience will mould the human being that they will be for their whole life ahead. Some people say the experience starts with conception, or as I like to call it, biological birth. Do we really learn EVERYTHING after we are born? Or is it possible that we hold something within us that comes from even BEFORE biological birth?? For example, its anybody's guess who/what teaches the baby to swim around or kick while in the mother's womb, or breathe after physiological birth.

Emotions are one thing precariously perched on the fence between numerous fields of research. So is instinct. A sceptic's view (read, MINE) begs the question: where do we pick up laziness??

For a moment, turn the clocks in your head backwards to a prehistoric point in time, long before human had trifle chores (such as blogging). The priority of the day was evolving into complete humans in the first place! One can easily see that there were two basic things that a prehistoric average guy on the (yet-to-be-invented) street would be concerned about, just like every other organism around him:

a. To survive

b. To replicate

Makes for a pretty short to-do list, doesn't it? What wouldn't I give for a situation like that. But I digress..

No matter what lofty goals humankind was chasing, surviving was and is obviously step numero uno. I'm pretty sure that just like modern society, endeavours directed in the direction of accomplishing 'task b' often caused the candidate to fail in accomplishing 'task a' !  Now consider the woolly mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger competing with the girlfriend's father for shelf-space on the Rack of Mortal Dangers, and its obvious that EVERYTHING our protagonist would do would be basically directed towards survival at some level.

The point I am trying to make, in my admittedly laborious and tangential fashion, is that over a period of time, humans isolated and inculcated a set of behaviours and abilities which helped them accomplish these tasks. Complicated processes such as formation of society and hierarchy of social structure, development of languages, arts and indeed all science and technology have their roots back in this simple necessity. To survive.

Next, look at the basest necessity to survive. Energy. HUMAN Energy. Energy derived from the food we eat, but more importantly, energy saved by NOT exerting oneself. These are both two sides of the same coin, and are ingrained into the basest instinct. A lion knows that it must not over-exert itself in a chase when it looks like the deer's got a new pair of Reebok runners, simply because it will be too tired for the next chase, which it must anyway run if it wants to feed. Ergo, it should come as no surprise that man, with his developed (developing?) brain not only understood this at a gut level, but also found ways and means to proactively implement energy-saving strategies. Social hierarchy, barter trade, the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel etc., are all means to this end. Some of these means are a way of utilizing another human's energy, while others are means of compensating human energy with another form of energy. This is a crucial difference, as expending someone else's energy to get your job done has the additional benefit of increasing your chances of survival against theirs.

Watch natural selection and human development stroll hand in hand on the beach of time for just a few thousand years, and the tendency to conserve human energy has already been hardwired into the human DNA irreversibly. This has simply occurred because the folks that managed to conserve their energy are the only ones that survived and replicated! Zoom in on the process and you see the drivers of technological advancement gradually metamorphose from the necessity of saving energy to the luxury of saving energy.  Technology has bestowed man with powers far beyond the ones that could have evolved through a natural process. While flying in the sky or crawling on the ocean floor, the impetus is still on minimizing the human exertion. Minimizing the energy loss during a task that is anyway beyond natural human physical capabilities!

Wind the clocks back to the present day, and we have a natural tendency to not exert ourselves, and use sources of energy other than humans, without realizing that we are, at an instinct level, only saving our energies to run away from this sabre-toothed grin, which by the way hasn't been seen for a while now!

Anybody who doubts what I call 'DNA-hardwiring', or the ability of evolution to influence the actions of a  species should do good to think why a domesticated dog sleeping on a rug will turn round a few times before settling in, just like its brethren in the wild. :)

What do you think? Tell me!

Luv-n-Luck,
Av

Don't give up on me, I won't give up on you...

Michael Franti - Hey World (Don't give up)

tell me why the grass was greener
years ago
I swear it used to grow here
but no more here

tell me why
on this hill
all the birds they used to come to fly here
come to die here

and tell my why i need to know
sometimes i wish i didn't have to know
all you show me

hey world
what you say
should i stick around for another day or two
don't give up on me
i won't give up on you
just believe in me like i believe in

tell me why on the corner
all the kids that used to come to run here
load the guns here

and tell me why
it's okay
to kill in the name of the gods we pray
tell me who said it's okay
to die in the name of the lies we say

tell me why there's child soldiers
tell me why they closed the borders
tell me how to fight disease
and tell me now won't you please

the only thing i want to do
is to be in the arms of someone who believes in me
like i believe in you
i try try try try
i try try try try for you
don't give up on me
and i cry cry cry cry
i cry cry cry cry for you
just believe in me
like i believe in you

Of Chapters and Discontinuities...

Hi All,

It has been 558 days since I last posted something here, and after gargantuan measures of procrastination spread throughout those 558 days, as I finally sit here to write a fresh blogpost, I am fixated upon the concept of continuity.

In the chapters of a book, the author strives to maintain a delicate thread of continuity (or atleast context) to string together the whole piece of writing. As I think about what to write, I realize that although this is like the 2nd chapter of my blogging endeavours, there can be no continuity.

There can be no continuity, simply because the person who wrote the last blogpost and the person writing this blogpost are separated by a discontinuity in time, wide enough to ensure that there is but very little common ground between the two. The schizm between me and me is emotional, intellectual, experiential, and attitudinal. However, like an Alistair MacLean novel, I hope that the successive but apparently unrelated chapters shall converge to a singularity as the novel of my blogging adventure progresses.

So what do I write about? See the next blogpost for that!!

Love-n-Luck,

Av

Its not perfect.. but its mine..

Wandering around in cyber-space, I just stumbled on something so poignantly simple in its beauty that I can't even wait to come up with some nice words to describe it, before I share it here. This just cant wait. The song is by a stand-up comedian called Tim Minchin. This song is like the 'doosra' in his repertoire. Listen to it. Till the end.

Luv-n-Luck,

Av

P.S. - You can find the lyrics here.

Coders Only!

Warning: Very long geeky post!

/* This post is written to share a few laughs */

In the light of my recently celebrated non-anniversary of my mindless IT coder job, I wanted to share a few coder's jokes, compiled from various sources. People who do not plead guilty to the tags of coder or geek are encouraged to NOT read the following in interest of their continued sanity.

The rest of my brethen, join in for a few smiles, giggles and laughs!

Here goes..

1) Q: Whats the object-oriented way to become wealthy?

A: Inheritance

2) Q: how many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None, that's a hardware problem!

3) Q: How many hardware engineers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None, it'll be fixed in the drivers!

4) Q: Why do programmers always mix up Halloween and Christmas?

A: Because Oct 31 == Dec 25!

5) If you hold a Unix shell up to your ear you can hear the C!

6) C++ is a modern language: your parents can't touch your privates, but your friends can!

7) Ascii a stupid question, get a stupid ansi!

8) if(!this.Kill(me))

me.Strength++;

9) There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who get laid.

A) Q: How do you keep a programmer in the shower all day?

A: Give him a bottle of shampoo which says "lather, rinse, repeat."

B) "Knock Knock!"

"Who is it?"

Very long pause...

"Java"

C) Programming is like sex. ONE mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life!

D) The Programmers' Cheer:

Shift to the left, shift to the right!

Pop up, push down, byte, byte, byte!

E) Eight bytes walk into a bar. The bartender asks, “Can I get you anything?”

“Yeah,” reply the bytes. “Make us a double.”

/* Rajnikant Fact Collection (RFC) */

1. When Rajnikant throws exceptions, it’s across the room.

2. All arrays Rajnikant declares are of infinite size, because Rajnikant knows no bounds.

3. Rajnikant doesn’t have disk latency because the hard drive knows to hurry the hell up.

4. Rajnikant writes code that optimizes itself.

5. Rajnikant can’t test for equality because he has no equal.

6. Rajnikant’s first program was kill -9.

7. Rajnikant burst the dot com bubble.

8. Rajnikant can write infinite recursion functions…and have them return.

9. Rajnikant can solve the Towers of Hanoi in one move.

10.Rajnikant doesn’t bug hunt as that signifies a probability of failure, he goes bug killing.

11.Rajnikant’s keyboard doesn’t have a Ctrl key because nothing controls Rajnikant.

/* End of RFC */

/*~~~~~~~~ Start of Jokes Section ~~~~~~~~~*/

A guy is standing on the corner of the street smoking one cigarette after another. A lady walking by notices him and says "Hey, don't you know that those things can kill you? I mean, didn't you see the giant warning on the box?!"

"That's OK" says the guy, puffing casually "I'm a computer programmer"

"So? What's that got to do with anything?"

"We don't care about warnings. We only care about errors."

/*~~~~~~~~~ Joke Seperator~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~*/

A Cobol programmer made so much money doing Y2K remediation that he was able to have himself cryogenically frozen when he died. One day in the future, he was unexpectedly resurrected. When he asked why he was unfrozen, he was told:

"It's the year 9999 - and you know Cobol"

/*~~~~~~~~~ Joke Seperator~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~*/

Jesus and Satan have an argument as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they come to an agreement to hold a contest with God as the judge. They set themselves before their computers and begin. They type furiously, lines of code streaming up the screen, for several hours straight. Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightning strikes, taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over. He asks Satan to show his work. Visibly upset, Satan cries and says, “I have nothing. I lost it all when the power went out.” God says, “Very well, let us see if Jesus has fared any better.” Jesus presses a key, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers. Satan is astonished. He stutters, “B-b-but how?! I lost everything, yet Jesus’ program is intact! How did he do it?”

God chuckles, “Everybody knows… Jesus saves!”

/*~~~~~~~~~~ End of Jokes Section~~~~~~~~~~~~*/

/* And to wrap it up, a beautiful poem, a-la Dr. Seuss: */

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,

And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,

And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,

Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report!

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash,

And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash,

And your data is corrupted 'cause the index doesn't hash,

Then your situation's hopeless, and your system's gonna crash!

You can't say this? What a shame sir!

We'll find you another game sir.

If the label on the cable on the table at your house,

Says the network is connected to the button on your mouse,

But your packets want to tunnel on another protocol,

That's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall,

And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss

So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse,

Then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang,

'Cause as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang!

When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy on the disk,

And the microcode instructions cause unnecessary RISC,

Then you have to flash your memory and you'll want to RAM your ROM.

Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom!

/* End of post. Hope you enjoyed it! */

/* Users are encouraged to leave comments on my comments! */

/* Luv-n-Luck, */

/* Av */