Ideas are Immortal

In my current role as a ‘teacher’ – a tag I incessantly greet with skepticism, there are multiple misconceptions I encounter amidst the learning community I interact with. A cluttered perception of education, career, future – all seem quite natural – given the constrained learning environment they are exposed to.

Using some of my personal experience both as a student and teacher, I jot down here just few observations of mine. I am not projecting this to be advice or any such futile things. (Advices never work)

Knowing and knowing the name
I steal this line from Richard P Feynman, who in his brilliant career was more than what any science pursuing person has been. A rarity, of course. We might not be able to emulate the ingeniousness he exhibited all through his life, but, there are numerous traits from his life as people we must try to inculcate.
Superficial learning seems to be the un-proclaimed rule of learning in the whole structure – from the teachers through to the students.No inquisition to probe concepts to their roots; assuming gaps and continuing the ‘learning’ process without questioning is the game of knowing concepts today. I can for some gift in me see through the hypocrisy of the highfalutin crowd who claim to know something they wouldn’t know.
Not knowing is never a problem – we can learn; Not wanting to know is a regression, and pretending to know the unknown is criminal.

Learning and studying
Two terms we use interchangeably, almost with no distinction. Studying, to me is the process of wanting to grasp a concept for an incentive other than the incentive of knowing the idea, like for marks, or a less gratifying sensation. The brand ‘students’ too has been reduced to a herd trying to know ‘things’ , prescribed in a prescription (read syllabus) without any thought, and hence not questioning.
Learning, on the other hand I see it as a process of comprehending ideas and concepts for the incentive of catering to one’s inquisition, enhancing a skill or to apply the same to a different motivated purpose.

What you want, and what others want for you
Another aspect to one’s life that is lost by the time we realise, is to do what we want to do. By the time we are enrolled in undergraduate education or anywhere in that proximity, most of the important decisions in our life have been made by everyone else, than us. While this might not be a valid generalisation, the tendency of people to work in order to please someone else and not themselves is the biggest discontent causing glitch in the system. When people do what they don’t want to do, of course it shows!
Stay connected to yourself, a friend says and I think that is a profound statement. It takes lot of courage to cling on, pursue and accomplish what YOU want for yourself.
Oscar Wilde, in his witty best says “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken”, and how true.

Wanting to do, and to see its done (most applicable to me)
Procrastination is an attribute that is common where people are expected to work – in academia it is more so, for the incentive not being profit the cadre is not driven to the edge. It is not about being driven to the edge – but the self urge to want to finish the work one claims to want to do. Passion towards one’s work or tasks would flow in, voluntarily only when the person does what he/she WANTS to do. Mere verbiage of goals to be accomplished although might give instant gratification, the permanent one is always worth the work (Derek Sivers has a brilliant talk about this).

Conclusively,one notion that always is running at the back of my mind while I revel at the works in Science especially is – when a mind can originally come up with ground breaking works like what we are expected to ‘study’, how difficult can it be for us to simply understand the same? Are our minds so worthless that they can’t even understand an existing idea? How can we talk of innovating anything new at all?
Happy Learning 🙂

Television advertisements are the best indicators of which direction the brainless society is heading towards. Like these days, of course it is well known and widely accepted that commodities come first, and people next in the globalised economy we live in today.

What brand one wears would be more important than what the person is. Worthless people trying to find worth in supposedly worthy commodities.
At this junction, a related anecdote as related to Tamil poet Bharathi comes to my mind.

Bharathi is to attend a wedding, and he is in his dhoti and a towel – untidy, unshaven (reckless man he was) tries to enter the marriage hall, and the guards do not allow him, thinking him to be a tramp. Then, he heads back home gets dressed in his best attire and is allowed in with the highest salutations. He is then served food, and the maverick takes the food and starts feeding it to his clothes! When asked he says, “It was not I who earned this food, my clothes, so I can’t eat it”, or something on these lines.

Even now we are all this stupid, and I can’t only blame the economy and the ruthless marketing campaigns.

Coming back to the time today – the most ridiculous of the adverts are the jewellery ads plaguing television off late.

I am well acquainted with television ads on south Indian TV channels, and I can conveniently extrapolate these claims all across the country, for , we are the same.

Gold jewellery for long, as long as I remember have been associated with the emotion of love. That by itself was stupid, for, the only symbolic gesture of gold and love was preciousness. Now, if the partner is precious, why adorn her with less precious jewels, making the net preciousness lesser, or some sort of animosity I already have.

The recent months, as I have observed, the value of gold is being associated to every kind of human value! A school master and his student (trust they claim here). “Daughters are worth it ” says another caption, where jewels for teenage girls are being showcased, and the most atrocious is even the bond between mother and son is being portrayed of value on the lines of gold.

The gold standard for emotions is one of the most flawed identifications of human bonds. A blunt statement equalising these beautiful emotions to an over priced metal chunk – This is the most gullible thing that we have allowed to happen to us.

Beauty, love, success, affection, trust, music and the whole treasure of human values are being undermined by equating them to products of the silliest nature. I am not worried about the ads at all! The unfortunate impact it is having in the social fabric is what I am concerned about.
These ads work!

The distorted sense of values that runs through our consciousness like the plague that haunted the old times back then cannot even be eradicated by a vaccination.

I begin to write this post without any agenda to discuss- maybe that is the agenda, to not have one.

As I write now, on this lazy afternoon with mountainous tasks ahead for rest of the day, I am only looking forward to the intensity of work that is going to drive me to the verge of exhaustion. That exhaustion is not something I am complaining about, it is a feeling of optimum utilisation of myself. Exhaustion in pursuit of gratification is a feeling rarely one gets to experience. It implies the work I am to do, and have been doing utilise my skills and me as a resource to the fullest.

Being busy, or rather ‘happily busy’ as one like minded friend calls it is a gift seldom people bestow upon themselves. The problem,  if one wants to pick out of being happily busy is that some people, from our personal space get eclipsed for sometime, and if these people don’t understand it- we are out for a bitter ride. It becomes a trouble that can disturb the delicate balance of being happily busy, and can lead one into a traumatic phase (oh yes, been through and recovering).

In times such as these is where the momentum of one’s work eclipsing the personal space happens so often, to a lost mind like me. And here is where the aspect of balancing one’s priorities surface up. And I learn slow!

Started aimlessly, now have brought this writing into the context of a public apology-
If I haven’t been avaialble to the many of you, as you would expect me to, it is because I was and still am hopelessly lost in work that keeps me happy and nothing else. So, forgive my absence 🙂

1984, and now Blindness – two books that are menacingly disturbing, yet hard to deny for they speak of a reality which is not far from being plausible.

Blindness by Jose Saramago is one of the most powerful books I have read, and yes,it changes you. The fragility associated with the human bonds, the relationship of demand and supply in a society and simply the deep abysses of the human mentality are all unthreaded into thin layers of realities, so scary that I runs shivers down your spine.

In a unique narrative, where sentences go on for two pages, and paragraphs go on for multiple pages Saramago is unforgiving in his details of the incidents which even to read might cause one to shrug, but at the same time delicately balancing the fact that it could very well be true!

A city that turns blind, with blindness spreading as an epidemic and the whole social structure collapsing, with people heading towards animal-like behaviour is chronicled brilliantly in this book. While I write it, I also realise that the derogatory ‘animal behavior’ we tend to think of, is not all that bad when one can see what we as people are capable of. In Blindness, these contradictions are brought out lucidly.

I will not delve into reviewing the book – he’s simply brilliant. And it is worth reading simply to allow our imagination take a ride and realise the fragile framework we all end up forming.

The last lines of an essay or an article or even a book are the most important aspects of leaving an impact. In this book, he leaves a thought that lingers long after you’ve dropped the book, done reading.

I think we are blind, blind but seeing, blind people who can see, but do not see.

If you thought that the grand questions of life “Who am I”, “What am I doing here”, etc haunt us when at the verge of growing senile or crazy, not quite – I have encountered these many a times and not recently, but before a few years. You can take it from me that I am not senile, but crazy I might not deny – will leave it to the rest of you to decide relative to your own ability to think 😛

Now, I did convince myself with answers that I use on a daily basis to keep myself motivated, and when I do get low down these ideas immediately help me out!

So, who am I? Or, can I generalise on behalf of all of us – Who are we?

The most rational, yet humbling answer is that we are all star dust! We are chunks of Hydrogen cloud who have been lucky enough to undergo nuclear fusion, in a labyrinth of processes and assimilate the whole lot from periodic table into ourselves, and have an obscure synchronisation (many invent God in this junction) to be able to sit down and ponder about these questions!

This idea that all of us are hydrogen clouds, just lucky enough to be in this form before we again end up being the unconscious matter in the Universe is a journey called life! When I did realise this and started imbibing it into my thought process, every moment I waste without being positive simply adds to the guilt of all the time I have wasted in my life already. It does not only help me not waste time (at least most of the times), but also keeps me positive in being me.

And by not being positive or being happy I find it to be sedition on our part to the Universe! For, if you work out the probability of the number of atoms in your body (having a conscious ride) to the rest of the unconscious matter in the Universe, it is literally zero!
Aren’t we lucky then?

Like many philosophical characters in films and books have already said – Life is too short to get sad!

It is not just for the heck of writing a post that I am portraying this profound idea that drives me; I strongly endorse this point of view and I don’t see any other way of defining and justifying the life that we live.And I thought some of you were looking for an answer of this kind!

Happy living 🙂

There can be no obedience between like minds, only compliance.
Likewise, to want to be obedient reflects a tendency of the mind to stray towards dependence – an unwillingness to get independent – stand by itself. Before I lead you further into this tumultous terrain,  I simply am arguing that the shackles of dependency must be thrown away and, one must let the mind oscillate, learn and come to its own unique equilibrium without seeking dependence, only guidance. .

No independent mind can want to remain obedient – trying to convince and getting convinced are rational metamorphosis. But, to want to obey is to give in to irrational thought.

When thinking ends, subservience begins.

It is not anything but ignorance that is the misery of mankind. An interesting caption in a social media post read “Employers understand capitalism, employees don’t” and how true! Likewise at every step in our lives, whenever we fail to give heed to independent thought, and are ready to obey we are soaking ourselves in ignorance.

To budge down to authority in terms of age, status,wealth or any other metric is the standard recipe to embrace the hideous tendency of being servile. It takes questioning, comprehension and convincing to comply, but only mounting pressure to get subdued.

Now, subservience I speak of here is not the one which exists outside family, or friends, or the circle of interaction. Defiance of subservience must begin at home. It is unfortunate that our culture has given room to interpret subservience as respect, and quite ironically the ones who demand such respect deserve no respect at all! Bargaining into one’s mind, by arguing and convincing are the only means of gaining respect – No short cuts, or bureaucratic privilege to respect.

Experience, and not age deserves respect in people.

Intimidating another person with power, status or age is extortion of the pretension of respect and never genuine respect at all. Admiration is the simplest manifestation of respect, as I see and experience it. I fail to understand how people could miss this and demand something so obscure and feudal as obedience!

If we analyse further, this notion of respect gauged as obedience has a grand history of feudalism. Landlords expecting their laborers to be servile to them, and this contorted notion is carried on as respect! Like all superstitions, this is another stagnating belief which our system expects and if you are not servile you are arrogant is the brand given!

So, think before you seek and grant respect!

It has been over an year that I got back to the academic arena. Personally it has been gratification to the fullest, but on the other hand have got acquainted with the many grave flaws/

The acceptance of ‘imparting education’ as the primary goal of academia is the fundamental problem, and I shall not delve into that notion as yet. This crude effort paper of mine and a fellow collaborator would convey it better Evolving Pedagogies beyond production line models of education .

In this post I want to express the deep anxiety that has come as a natural consequence of witnessing another inseparable facet of academia – Research.

I know my strengths and weaknesses, and I very much am aware that I am not an abstract research person – I am simply a problem solver, who can see problems when others cannot. That being my strength I already know what would be the nature of my research in academics. And it did not take me long to realise that ‘arriving at the problem’ is the fundamental requirement for performing research, and not necessarily the solution. It is quite the opposite with the persons I have observed for the last few months.

Now, with the shifting environment from industry to academia, not as a student but as a teaching faculty I have been overwhelmingly disappointed with the majority of research instances I have encountered. As students are taking up engineering education without any aim, but of getting a job, the incentive for performing research is all contorted. Research for the sake of climbing up the hierarchy in an institution seems to be the most common incentive, which has an associated perk of better pay.

Research when motivated by anything other than passion to solve a problem is futile, and the many instances of research I have seen are in essence futile. A thesis which sits in a booklet impacting neither science, nor society but only adds a prefix to the title of an individual is in all senses derogating all the progress we have made in science and society.

Researchers lacking clarity of the problem they are trying to solve, in a domain unrelated to them is a commonality today in India. With the easy access to content on the Internet, most work is outsourced to search engines and effort is minimised on the individual’s part.
And hence, the lack of research in India.

Not to end this post on a low, there are a handful of minds I am lucky to know, who are immersed in the subjects they are working in. They are researching problems which they are obsessed with, and these are the specks of hope for a better intelligentsia to usher India into a future that is bright in all senses.

Sympathy and charity have their own pitfalls.

When I am sympathetic towards a person, who is in dire need of one of the fundamentals for a decent living, the ability to act a good Samaritan by performing an act of charity, while might seem natural and humane, also in the same instant and space of action, eclipses another facet of action, which might be more necessary than giving away few alms: The anger at an injustice that prevails in the society which has brought another equal human being to such a state is overshadowed by a soft and lachrymal experience of charity.

Charity gives instant gratification – a momentary respite to the needy, and a heart full of goodness in the Samaritan, but the scope for change remains stagnant.

Acts of charity, although are magnanimous and in many cases genuine, there is a sense of complacence associated with them. The mind does not identify the disparities as problems, but as a condition that already exists, and only tries to heal it superficially with mini to micro acts of giving away of alms. Not to brand the whole act with a tinge of my cynicism, but it is futile in the bigger picture.

Just a utopian hypothesis : If all the people who are engaged in charity, would end up being enraged by the injustice in society there would be no more need for such people to go on with their acts of charity.

Ayn Rand, the staunch advocate of individualism, strikes one point right with the hammer. Altruism exists because altruists thrive on being altruistic on the miseries of others. If there were no misery in others, where will the altruistic flaunt his/her altruism.

Now, as always this analysis by Ayn Rand might seem to be on the extreme; nonetheless, the point I am trying to drive is that sympathy in most cases when converted into acts of charity has limited and short term impact. The injustice which is so vibrantly prevailing in the world we live in cannot be eradicated by humble acts of charity, but only by revolutionary acts of voicing opinions and fighting injustice in one or the other forms of struggle.

Now the uneasy term ‘revolutionary’ has been used in the post and allow me to clarify – By revolutionary, a term that has acquired connotations of being either a romantic feeling of sacrifice, or a convenient sense of token protests is not what I mean!

George Orwell in his disturbing, dystopian book 1984 says “Speaking the truth in times of universal deceit is revolutionary”, and I can only see that we are now living in times of universal deceit! Voicing one’s opinion against wrong, consistently as a way of life could be revolutionary.

Further, to a great extent legal compulsion can be pursued for many small problems which persist in the society, and for all the major problems, where the system itself presents as the problem a gradual and slow participation in a cumulative change can heal the world. Change does begin from within, but only when many have changed from within, and gotten together in pursuit of a gradual process of changing the society can we hope for the disparities to balance out!

Let not your anger be quenched by waters of charity,
May only it kindle your rage to light up fires of change in society.

The whole blissful aspect of we humans is that we are adaptive – more adaptive than the most sophisticated of computers. If one stagnates on this distinction for sometime, the consequences are waiting to get dire.

The analogy of convection heat current, which I use it for more than explaining heat flow in many occasions also seems befitting to tackle priorities. When a priority reaches the top of our list and we are incessantly putting in effort to keep it on the top, the ones we have pushed to the bottom cannot remain there forever, unless we want the system to go abnormal. The heat, or the efforts must flow into all the priorities in the container of our life, in a cycle. Without this cyclic nature of catering to priorities, the dormancy and stagnancy that ends up building in us is perilous to say the least. The impact is worse than what one would have faced if not changed priorities in the first place.

The only defining principle for long, for me to be doing things I have been doing has been to do what I simply want to do. Now, how does one tackle a situation when there are more than one affiliations to cater to? How do you balance?

And now, after dodging for the last few lines I arrive at the problem I am trying to put forth – balancing.

I have let things go haphazard for more than the contingency time I had for myself, and am in a fix without having a ready fix to get this fixed.

All I need to do is peddle the cycle of priorities, push things which are light for now and cater to the heavier ones.

PS: I have more than anything promised myself that I shall be posting on my blog lot more regularly! I am missing me 😛

Working in a team is not something that I naturally am good at – and there are multiple reasons for it. I am a megalomaniac and I believe (yes, even now) that a task that I can do cannot be delivered by another person to the extent that I can do,and without a decent track record to substantiate it I might not trust someone with any work 😛

This puts me in a fix, where I cannot of course do all the tasks myself and while I have unwillingly assigned tasks to others am hoping that they don’t make it seem less effective than what I would have wanted it to be. This paranoia is what is also holds me back many a times, for I think I am a conservative on these lines.

But there are instances and few teams which are impeccable : rare confluences of talents and skills which I can blindly rely upon (for either I have already scrutinised them before hand, or are unbelievable bunch of talents together) and can perform as a unit without giving me the shocks of paranoia, to be apprehending a goof up at any scale.

The latest event that we set rolling at BMSIT was a perfect experience of one such amazing experience. The team we arrived at, has been one of the most versatile, capable and efficient. That “aaah, no need to worry” feeling was prevalent in me all through the event. The problem of assigning tasks to people, and then being worried if it is being implemented at all, and if it is in what quality is more arduous than taking up and doing the task itself. But, the exceptional cadres of the team working at BMSIT, now I realise, never gave me a chance to worry on these lines at all! And what we ended up doing was an unprecedented show of technical and organisational acumen.

Trust me when I say how difficult it is to find a team as dedicated and motivated, with all the combination of skills and efficiency as the one which worked at BMSIT! Only if this were true with every team, and utopias don’t exist 😛

So, to the entire team at BMSIT for doing something different and awesome on technical lines, but more than anything to have made a whole bunch of memorable experiences and enriching the treasure of memories – CHEERS!