Connecting the dots..

I love the commencement address of Steve Jobs at Stanford University. In my view, it was a re-affirmation of the "Hind sight is 20-20 rule" that most of us know. In retrospect, everything makes sense but as you are rambling through life and inevitably having a mixed set of experiences , it is hard to "connect the dots".

That is why I have always maintained that successful people are successful in retrospect. Everything that they have blundered through appears carefully planned in hindsight. So one of the keys to having a satisfying journey is to accept the fact that we cannot connect the dots as we wade through them.

Which harks back to " ignorance is bliss" kind of an attitude. I don't want to make sense out of things that are destined to never make any sense. The only problem with this kind of philosophy is that it tends to become fatalistic. Since I can't make sense out of anything - why aspire for anything? But if you don't aspire for anything where are you headed? Quite clearly, we do want to have aspirations. But it is important that we also know to accept the short term setbacks without allowing them to bog us down from achieving our long term goals.

Admittedly, many (or pesimistically speaking most of us) may not achieve those long term goals but at least we are trying and enjoying the ride. And that I think is the most important. Enjoy the ride and the destination becomes incidental. I think that would be my takeaway from Steve Jobs's speech which he himself summarized laconically as "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish" - An Amen to that..

Keeping up with the Online Joneses

Ok.. I have acquired my Facebook account, wrote a few reviews in Amazon, set up another one at Twitter, started answering questions on Linkedin, am maintaining my blogs and posting my pictures. But will all this industry on my part ensure that my name would be googled by "all and sundry" and their siblings?

I was reading some articles recently that mention that I need to post to my blog at least once a week and ensure that my twits happen on a more frequent basis. And pray tell me why? Because my prospective employer is looking for me in twitter. My family is checking me out. My work force is looking for that constant stream of pearls of wisdom emanating from my keyboard. They all are probing deep into cyber space to see what I am upto every minute of the day.

This to me sounds like too much pressure - in fact bordering on paranoia. Looks like we cannot ruminate about anything without feeling the need to analyze whether it can fetch me a couple of more morsels of online fame. And in the process add to the surfeit of junk that has already made it into cyberspace. As I key these words in, I am aware of their poignant irony. I am criticising the need for constant expression online while expressing these very thoughts online! Such is life I guess. Sigh! At least this completes this week's article. I will think of some more trash to dispense next week...

Song Meanings

Of late I have been going to a website called songmeanings.net to check out what people think about some of the songs we keep listening. Many of us who have heard Hotel California or Stairway to Heaven might have wondered about the hidden metaphors that are contained in the songs.

This site seeks to explain them albeit through the comments.

For instance, check out this song. I have always been captivated by the music in this song but this is the first time I heard someone trying to make sense of its lyrics. Check it out and more importantly listen to the song itself. It is really nice!

On Asymmetry and Morality

Having been brought up in a conservative society,I have never suffered from a dearth of restrictions. I resisted many of them as usual-swore that I would never abide by them - and now having reached man's estate so to speak, I eke out my livelihood exacting vengeance by imposing the very same restrictions on the younger generation!

What I am trying to say is that we all recognize the value of various injunctions that our parents have imposed on us as we grow up. Most of them have to do with the upholding of morality. Stealing is bad so "thou shalt not steal". Taking a step back, we recognize that this morality is needed for preserving order in society. Without morality, the society would deteriorate to some version of chaos da da da bla bla bla.. So morality tells me what is good and what is bad. But who gets to decide on what is right and wrong? It is a good coincidence that for the most part, the world seems to be in concurrence with their views about what constitutes morality - notwithstanding the fact that morality is still geographical and governed by various demographic factors which accounts for most of the conflicts in the world.

But the interesting thing for me here is to observe the polarizing effect morality has on the world. It divides the whole world into the protagonists and the dissidents. Into the right and the wrong. Into good and bad people. Hence morality seems to become the bedrock on which all our notion of asymmetry of human beings rests. And if we go back to the fact that morality is very much based on perception, it is a relief that we all think alike for the most part! So agreement about what constitutes morality seems to be one place where commonality is good and uniqueness bad. Interesting huh?

Knowledge Explosion & Internet fatigue

It is nice that the internet and the search technology is bringing us access to a fantastic amount of information. I was just pondering over the effects this seeming explosion of knowledge had - on me and a few people around me. Here are a few random observations in no specific order:

The internet puts us in touch with the cognoscenti in extremely narrow fields of specialization. As Anderson argues in his book "The Long Tail", there is tons of stuff in the fringes of knowledge and human understanding, that has suddenly become part of mainstream culture. We are no longer pursuing popular fads but are instead trying to identify the specific categories/sub-categories that align with our personality.

Our tastes and inclinations seem to have become very specific. At one time for instance, I just wanted a bike. Now I know that I need an all terrain bike which has full suspension, bike shoe friendly pedals and shimono speed shifters. This ability to sift through information and identify what exactly we need, gives us an amazing amount of empowerment. It also helps us identify what we want with increased precision. My son would (and should) no longer be content being a "run of the mill" engineer or a doctor. He should identify the exact thing that is interesting him. I see this happening increasingly around me when i talk to the kids around me.

People suddenly find themselves increasingly in touch with the rich and the famous. After all, anyone must be "google"able to even be reckoned as important. No more celebrities in their ivory towers now! Be it Obama, Osama or the Big B - they all beckon to us from across the wires using their blogs, forums, facebook, twitter and the like.

People seem to consider their ability to google (or bing) for information to be directly proportional to their mental faculties. There is no need anymore to analyze the information obtained and dissect the knowledge. Instead, the need of the hour seems to be to just quote it. In fact, if you want to say anything important at all you better put it down on the internet or else you run the risk of being out-googled and out-quoted. In short people have become search engines :P

This is all truly democratic. But sometimes I get tired of all this stuff. I don't want to know anything more. I just want to chill and relax! Maybe fix myself a drink or read a PG Wodehouse. I get tired of being constantly challenged by some pseudo novice who has the insouciance to suppose that he can sabotage my bright idea by being the mouth piece of someone else who might have at some time in the past, refuted, a possibly similar idea somewhere in the dark recesses of the internet! Is this a sign of internet fatigue? Speaking of which let me just try googling for internet fatigue and see what I can come up with.. sigh!

The plate theory of forgetting..

Forgetfulness has become an obsession with me of late. I probably have like two things that I can remember and the rest of them just seem to vaporize away! And this seems to get worse with time. Not that I am anywhere near the nadir of my life and ready to kick the bucket anytime soon. But still this forgetfulness seems to become more chronic of late.

This got me thinking about it a little bit. And as always I sought out an expert for enlightenment. Big Bro Google should surely lead me to the expert. So I typed "Forgetfulness" at the Search field. Promptly, with the speed that we have come to expect from Google, I get an ad on the right hand side asking me "Is it Alzheimer's Disease?". O Boy I thought, I really needed this one now! I am sure there are a ton of search results that would serve to illumine me in this matter but I was not in the exact mood for being scared. So, being the inveterate escapist that I was, I went back to the arm chair and started ruminating over recent events in a quest for the solution. The following is the outcome of this.

Computer savvy folks can relate to this analogy that I came up with. The mind is like a stack of plates. Each thought in it is like a plate. You keep piling one plate on top of the other and very soon you start building a huge stack. But since there is only so much space available, the ones at the bottom just "go away" (don't ask me how and where). The ones on top stay in the stack till they also get pushed down to no man's land. So this is all fine. But that still does not explain why I am getting more forgetful now than before. To answer that, the only thing I could think of is that my stack has got smaller for some reason thereby accommodating fewer plates! Or maybe I am having too many items on my plate of late.. or continuing the analogy further.. too many plates in my stack! I suddenly realized that it is neither of these two reasons. It is just that of late I have been bombarded with unrelated things which by their very nature are hard to keep track of.

So for me to remember all the tasks that I have to accomplish, there should be a certain amount of cogency in the tasks that I have at hand. This realization lead me to look up at the root cause of the problem. In this digital age, we are bombarded with all kinds of information - each quite disjoint from the other. In the absence of prioritization, we would be desultorily trying to process myriads of information and as promptly forgetting each of them! Hence selectiveness is a necessary criterion for picking what we want to process. We should apply the correct filters to appropriately filter out the "noise" and process the information that needs to be processed. Else, we will end up gobbling too much of useless information and forgetting the one that is important.

A part of this endeavor is to keep your "stack of plates" as little as possible by applying the correct filters as to what qualifies to enter the stack. Hence in pursuant to this thought process, I started disciplining my life a little bit. The following are some of the things I did:

Keep your email "inbox" minimal. Let it not be overwhelmed with historical information. Keep historical information pigeon holed into appropriate email folders that you can always go back to without cluttering your senses.

Speaking of clutter, keep the office and home more organized by reducing clutter.

Cutting the noise out by reducing useless interactions with people, reading unnecessary books etc.

I would say it did help me out. So the plate theory has gone beyond the realm of tectonics and is actually applicable elsewhere too. That is definitely changing the plate quite a bit !

En vazhi thaneee vazhi...(My way is unique)

Rajnikanth would have had a great future as a comedian even if he had not become a super star in tamil cinema.

His so called stunts are totally humorous.
Check this really hilarious ad out.