BJP after all is a mortal party and behaves exactly like us mortals. The nearness to god one feels during the  tougher times in  life.  (A related lemma:  when you are flying high in the aeroplane and the plan  starts wobbling violently, you feel very near to god, both literary and meta phorically)  Few thousand years back, kabir had said.

</Hindi  “Dhukh mai sumiran sab kaare, sukh mai kare na koi’
“Jo sukh mai sumiran kaare do dookh kaahe ko hai”" /Hindi>

Kabir, would be proud to know, thousands years later he has my  complete endorsement.  Narrating from my own experience with god, from my school/college days:  I would swing widely from being atheist to “sharnagath” (absolute unconditional surrender) as the semester would proceed. Bhakti would  make intermediate appearance during the unit-tests and would slowly build up  as the schedules are announced.  Bhakthi would peak as I would walk towards the result board.  After viewing the results  would experience “post traumatic stress”   and would find solace in the  the oft quoted philosophical quote

</sanskrit  ” Karmanye vadhi karasthe maa phaleshu kadachan” /sanskrit>

Do your duty without worrying about the results. Do your duty with detachment.

In my case the detachment comes after seeing the result.  The question of “who am I”  would be clearly answered  by this end of  semester spiritual experience.  “You are one among those who would just scrape all exams, and get job in some s/w industry.  Just bear with this torcher. Thier is light at the other end of the tunnel”. My  end semester spirituality  experience being what it is, let me draw focus to our politcians.

It is time for the five yearly exam for political parties. Exam time and God always go together as above illustrated.  Tirupathi is the hot spot (literary i tis very hot too), where in all the VIPs, fall on the feet of the supreme.  In the north,   Our friends from BJP go back  and fall at the feet of ram, and pledge again  this time it “ram mandir” for sure.

This agenda of the congress for 40 years ” garibi hatao “  ( “jo hatai nahi hathi”. ). So I cannot blame BJP if they are using mandir only for the past 15 years. It has a life time for 25  more years.  Even radio active material are useful till thier half  lifes,  this election material  is just completing 1/3 of its life”. I presume it has a huge potent of causing considerable confusion.

Further elaborating, for minimum of FIve elections from now (it ofcourse assumes stable goverment lasting for five years)  we would still be hearing  this.  If your question is  “kya 20 saal baad  BJP  mandir kabhi banegi” and the answer lies in  learning from the past  ” kya  Congress nai aaj tak garibi kabhi hata pai”.

Ladybird ladybird fly away home,
Your house in on fire and your children are gone,
All except one and that’s little Ann,
For she crept under the frying pan.

Wow, i guess all children are gone, implies gone for the good. Else it could have been worded as

all your children have flown.

And the only one that is remaining,  has been defaced with third degree severe burn as she crept under the frying pan. Tough luck lady bird, you are life is going to be hell from now on.

The message for an kid seems to be    “accident and even fatal ones are  around the corner”  and better get used to it. You may have been born just few years back, but that does count much.

I am however very impressed by Marathi songs for kids . ( no , no I dont belong to MNS). Songs like “sang sang bolanath”  invoke fond memories of school, when I would get stomach ache before maths exam. Infact I still want to ask bola nath, if  my office  would be shut, as some  employees were fired (in my or near my office)  and would political parties be  protesting against them.

A bunch of good old marathi songs in  you tube can be found at http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=U4NWJtEL_jg&feature=related.  Very entertaining  and well picturized, sweet . Thanks fountain, your CDs rock.

These view is purely based on my industrial experience and its practical implementation. I have seen how in the last few days all the forms and the links are updated to present a perfect picture of process adherence.   In all their interviews  all managers would speak very high o fhow things have changed after application of the processes, but out in the bar, all would agree, this stinks, it is all a sham/drama.  Why this kind of double speak ?  I have never heard of any great success stories where with increasing attainment of higher levels things have drastically changed for the company,. Though I have heard of zillions of meetings to ensure that the external auditor is easily guided to issue certificate of the required level. (It is like fielding best academic students during surprise inspection in school).   I have also heard of  infinite meetings to fine tune the requirement document template and the rewards to the team that achieved that zeroed in the template (to be changed by the new incomming manager)

IMO, it  is the people who are more precious than processes. It is the people  and their intellect who going through their code/design document and laborious white board discussions assure that things would work as per requirements.  The oft quoted  necessity for documentation is,”what happens when some one leaves”.  Well loss of a person/persons cannot be compensated  via few  diagrams and words in the document. I have never worked on any proejct, where just going through a design document, I would  become master of the subject.  Five hours of white board sessions is equivalent to reading about 1000 pages of design documents. White board sessions, involve people/questions/arguements and is more alive and than simple reading.

A high level design of the system is a good entry point.  Knowledge gets incremented with white  board  sessions. My vote would be to record these  white board sessions and store them as repository rather than design documents.

Thier is a hope at the end of tunnel  and it is called Agile. But  knowing what the software industry is, I think it is too revolutionary for the industry to follow. It requires manager to give up micro managing  and concentrate on higher value things (well, like what . One wonders ?) Tt requires team to be co-located (though the die hard AGILE  fans would quote other wise), which is impossible in this industry, where architects would be in US, developers in Bangalore and tester in Hyderabad.  (and each of them will have an opinion that others are shit).  Some Orgs have test/dev/arch reporting to three different managers, and of course no one wants to give up control.It requires for each engineer to up his responsibility and ownership. This is tough shit, as we are humans and dont work at the same pace each day. External factors influence our daily output, and  daily stating what you did yesterday, is definitely daunting. I have had days, when I have done nothing, and have days, where the output has been amazing. ALso engineers work best when the deadlines are near.

However, I am a dreamer and

I have a dream,
that one day the architects, developers and testers will work together as  a team

that a meeting will lead to action. closure and results
and not remain as action items in some excel sheet
and the only result is to meet again on an another date

that in the team bulding exercise we are not compared wtih australian tigers
for we dont make that much  money and our work is not that interesting either
and  girls dont  swoon bcos we made the release 1 month eariler

that my baap management residing in the other side of ocean
does not pass on the crap  he developed for maintainance
but rather considers the two sites as his two hands
need to work together and not by chance

My own theory is that the traffic condition can be directly attributed to change in our priority and values in life. With growing inflow of money, not only have we become more materialistic but also indifferent to others. This indifference detoriates exponentially as the target moves from concrete entities such as neighboring driver to abstract entities like Nature/Environment.

It is definitely comfortable in car, with A/C insulating u from the outside world, with the choice of your song being played, and windows rolled down to avoid the pollution of outer world. For people who own car, even if the price of petrol doubles, it would hardly matter. They are already talking about thier second car. The comfort is just too much to loose. We have reached a point of time where the “next car” is the topic of discussion in coffee table discussions.

There is a theory floating around, that says that if we improve the pubic transport, people would move away from their own cars. However, going from my own experience in the past companies, the theory is good for coffee table discussion. We had company transport that would pick up drop employees at points few 100 meters from their residence. But it did not fly high, as many folks (mostly high paid engineers/managers) found too hard to walk such a distance. Their legs were more used to control the clutch,break and accelerator. An another crib was that it did not suit thier needs for flexi working hours. I compared this to about 12 years back, when we used to walk about 1 KM to get to our company bus and managed our time to suit the company bus timing. We had lots of fun these busses, some couples were formed and some hearts were broken, as the bus offered time to do think and do such things. But then over the the past 12 years we have had this IT boom and so has our idea about comfort/joy have changed.

There is another reason, why I am skeptical about the theory of public transport. In my own neighbor hood we started this anti plastic campaign, where in we urged people to reduce their usage of plastic, by carrying thier own bags. We even kept cloth bags at few of the shops for 5/10 Rs, so that people can buy it instead of using the plastic bags. We conducted door to door campaign about the hazarutds of plastic. But in the end, the feedback was that all things were not as comfortable/economical as a plastic bags. Environment is just too far of a concern to any one and we are ready to live with choked overflowing drains. So if we are not ready to make such a small sacrifice, doing away with private transport stands no chance at al.

Now you would see why I say my buttons have been pressed. So how do we go ahead

1. Tax the usage of cars heavily along with better transport facility. Impose huge tax on second/third car.
2. The modern day spiritual gurus take upon them selves to make people more caring about others and the environment.
3. Corporates encourage employees to use the company transport, may be some extra incentive. Currently it is the other way around, with tax concessions for buying new car.
4. Car Pool. Car pool lane (That was a joke, we need first lanes and then we can talk about car pool lane)

I have spoken about “others” in general, what about self.

1. I hate to drive my car in bangalore, and take all the opportunity to pile on with my friends.
2. Till about 4 years back, I Have cycled/walked my way to office. But then Bangalore became too cycle unfriendly.
3. I have always used company transport when it was available.
4. HOWEVER, my trips to chennai have been more on car. I love to drive on the fours lane super ways at 100 KMPH. It is just a thrilling feeling. Would I give up this for environment. Nope, this where my line is drawn

 2. If you are in rome it is better to forget you are a  greek and be a roman, and if you are in Australia it is better to forget traditional cricket and play it our way.

3.  I may not be their tomorrow but this spirit of Australian cricket mustcarry on, the sledging must carry on, and reach heights that it has not ever seen.

. 4. What does integrity mean to me. Several people have asked this question. Itdoes feel great when the umpire asks me before getting myself out. Infact,one of them refused to judge me and went back to pavilion, giving me a free hand to judge the proceedings while I was on the crease batting. I ofcourse umpired to the true spirit of “australian cricket”. In certain matches the 3rd umpire have switched of the camera and would redirect allthe calls that came  upto him.  Let me be clear, “integerity” means to do things what one believes is correctand do it consistently. I have never walked out till the umpire has given meout. Infact in a crucial match I was taken out by sheer force by somehuman bouncers, and was tied to the nearest pole, till my batting side becameout. That is my commitment to stay in the crease. It is wheremy house is, it is where my heart is. No force can take away me from it.Ask a Palestinian what a “home” means, and I would know what it means when somebody snatches it from you.  I also understand that umpires are fallible and after the decision are takenthey may regret or have second thoughts about it. Many a times, I have given this time to the umpire and ensured that he  believes I am out, right from thebottom of  his heart, and is not merely carried away, by the outdated rules written in ICC books.  This is what integrity means to me. It makes us to take position where no ordinaryman would ever think of , and makes you to things that don’t seem to be correct or

ethical to normal humans.  But that is the price of my integrity.

 I am not to be judged by the eyes of the world, I am to be judged by the A;s of Australia

HALLOWED BLUE EYED BOY, WHO SEE THING
 FROM “DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE”
(  ) :-0[]–    

 ”Too Good be true” Good looking female of the office
  &  &
  *  *
  \ /           .
  / \
  I I
Highly paid and and gab gifted leader of the org
  $$$$$$$$$$
  ————
     @  L  @ 
        000      
  ————

I guess if one has learned  strongly typed langauge (like C/C++)  PHP and JAVA-script is a cake walk.  Took me back to the days of my college, where I got my ” first segmentation fault, core dumped error”. The answer I got from one of my collegue was to check if the “variable to be read in scanf has a &” along with it.  Adding the “&” did  solve the problem, and I was wondering “why is the error misleading and why could not the error indicate the missing “&”".   However the problem was temporarily solved when the same error propped again. I verfied each scanf and they looked perfect.  No google those days, and had to learn through the hard way that this error is going to haunt me throughout my life as a code-developer.

Being interpreted language their is no core dump error, but I managed to screw up the IE browser through my sample scripts. Suddenly the navigation bar would dis-appear , or at times the browser would not pop up.

Guess the engineer cannot stop  screwing up . Watch out web world, I am going to rock soon

1. State Formation Day
2. Deepawali
3. New year day 

Driving on the first two occasions is not free of hazard. Driving on SFD  you can attract attention of  ”work-free” groups of people, who would stone your vehicle, for they can stone your vehicle. On the second occasion their is a definite fire hazard, with streets hosting bombs and rockets. You have a potential of becoming a news item, and being quoted for freak accident involving a rocket and combustible engine. Fresh in my memory is today’s drive, where for considerable time I was driving at 5th gear. Of course one has to always take care of random motion of auto rick shaws.  But definitely a very satisfying drive for myself and my over stressed engine. New Year has definitely had a good start in a high gear.

1. My 6th std teacher would say that “He was shy but very smart. He was once asked the question, If all the great prophets preached love, brother-hood and all the good things, why each of them established different religion” ? So deep were his questions.

2. My xth std would quote me for my famous paradox. Consider the following quadratic equation

                2                   1
(a + ib) x   +  (c+ id)x  +   (e+if) = 0

Seperate the above to real and imaginary part
    2       1                2       1
ax + cx +e  + i( bx + dx + f) = 0 + 0i

We will get two roots from

   2       1               
ax + cx +e  = 0

and two from

        2       1
( bx + dx + f) = 0

Thus the quadratic equation will have four roots ? How is that .

3.  My 9th teacher would quote the following

He once got the answer as 2 the answer should  have been -2.  So here is what  he did

2 = 2/1 = -2/-1 = -(2/1)   = -2.

he he.

4.  Collegues from school days would state the following ( BTW, this is a stolen explaination)

 He explained n_choose_r=n_choose_n-r as follows
consider a basket with 10 balls. Choose 4 out of it.  For every choice of 4 you have made, their is choice of  6 present in the  basket.  This implies that 10_choose_4 = 10_choose_6 

5. The famous  5 quotes are attributed to him

1.Never complete your managers sentence, for it would mean that he/she is stating the obvious.
2. Most of the townships in banglaore are called so, for they float in water during rainy season.
3. Genius is 99% inspiraiton , 1% prespiration , where inspiration is the politically correct term of super human intelligence, and 1% prespiration is the hope that ordinary can also reach such levels.
4. Banglaore does not need road dividers as of now, for it would cause divide by zero exception.
5. Bangalore does not need road dividers, it requires roads first, followed by road multipliers.
6. Now is the moment you had been waiting for , unfortunately it has already passed, and the waiting continues.

1. Monthly credit card bill (+ junk advt of freebees that I am eligible and I am missing )  electricity, telephone  bills. Well no water bill, in the place that I live “water supply” is another election promise.
2. Cable bill (This guy does print bill, but not sure of its validity).
3. Quarterly thick reports of companies that is pushing up the Indian sensex. Well even if you own one share, you are still an owner.   Even if you write a mills and boon story inside these reports, I guess it would mean the same to me
4. .  Pamphlet advertising,  near by dhaba, beauty parlor, home made delicious food, bachelors accommodation, PG accommodation.  Proof that Entrepreneurship is in the booming in India.
5.  Corporate training material (inclusive of leadership) and the notebook supplied along with it. Since leadership covers a vast area inclusive of
       1. Creativity.
       2. Team building
       3. Dealing with ambiguity
       4. Financial acumen
        5. Motivation
        6. People management
       …………….
       Each would have definitely a training module for it.  Training is the number one tree  
      killer. Remove it and you would spare half the worlds tree.
6. Print out of manuals/white-paper/conference-paper/design documents that you had planned to read to upgrade yourself. I am now a realist and hardly take any printouts home to read.
7. Conference/Seminar proceedings. Come on, only a fraction of us would ever understand a conference paper, and see its relevance to our work and actually have it followed up to get it implemented in the projects.  May be a pure R&D center/edu institutes would be serious about following the papers. For rest of the virtual R&D centers  “it is the spirit of attending the conference that matters not getting anything out of it”.  One cannot destroy such proceedings for it is a memorabia .

Looks like when in grihasta ashram such wastage has to accepted. For who can change the direction of big corporate,  who can ever quench the thirst of raising consumerism and who can deal with the force of  capitalism. One and Only one “Global warming” and super-star  -:)