What Is The Ultimate Aim In Life?

For long has this thought haunted me - "What do I need from my Life?" "Why am I born? What should I do? Why was I created?". I definitely don't know the answer to these questions. But I want to collect all the thoughts that have been running through my mind and put it here.

Being a software engineer, I sometimes think that - "Is this what I am destined for?". I am sort of ambivalent about it. I don't know whether I like it or not. I just do it. When I entered my company, I was amazed by the culture of the company and the kind of resources I had at my disposal. I enjoyed thoroughly. But now, as time has passed by, I never have the same enthusiasm on things I used to have some months back. I hope that is the same with any profession. Something when better, attracts you for a while, but when you get used to it, the craze on it goes down and you go in search of something else. Attraction can neither be created nor be destroyed. It just gets transformed from one state to another. This cycle continues throughout the life.

But will there even be something which by itself keeps on changing keeping me attracted to it forever?? Or am I too ambitious? Or should I find something in my daily work itself which will keep me involved? I don't know. 

I have always had the feeling that I should not live a so called "normal" life - Eat, Sleep, Earn. Is this why we are born? Even if I don't go too much into philanthropy, I at least want to do something which I will be proud of for being born. Something that the future generations can use. Something that defines and changes the world for goodness forever. I don't know.

Sometimes, when you try to make a fast forward of your life and see where and what you ll be in some years time, you ll find that you end up at the same point where you started. Let me fast forward my life and prove it to you. Now I am an software engineer - age 22. Assuming that I continue this for some amount of time, what would I want to do? - Obviously Earn More Money. Then buy a car?? - age 28. Roam around the world on client sites. Change Company. Do the same thing. Then marriage, kids. I would be what 30-35 years now. Then get a house - age 40. Then what? Higher post. Greater Salary. Management. Same damn thing for up to age 60. Then what? Grand Children. Medical Problems. Death.

How different is this from any "normal" life? At every stage in the above mentioned, I will definitely look back and think, if I had done this, then I would have been like this. What the hell? Never had I appreciated what I am now. We are never living in the present. It is always what we have not done or what are we going to do? I feel it is useless and there is no thrill to lead a life like that. Enmity, Ego, Greed, Hatred - all these are part and parcel of life but they are more for those who don't live in the present. Love is the ultimate thing in life. Live in the present and love everyone. Not to sound like a person who has found every answer in life, I have never believed in the concept of "nirvana" because it means that you are either a coward or you don't appreciated the beauty of His creation. But I at least feel some relief that I have found answers to some real problems which are killing people everyday. The future is uncertain and I don't care about it now. What I am going to do? What will I become? I don't know. But at least I don't care about them now. Screw it!!

I think this is the most random blog I have ever done. But whomsoever reads it, if you have had any of the thoughts in it, I hope you ll understand me or you ll be in the same state of thought as I am in now! For others, Sorry for wasting your time!

"The Theory of Everything"

Of late, I have been watching a lot of documentaries about Albert Einstein - the eternal genius. I have always had a lot of respect for the guy but not until doing some research and the videos about him it struck realize his greatness. In this blog, I would like to just write what ever comes to my mind about Albert Einstein and speak about the genius of His. So excuse me if the passages are not cursory.


            Albert Einstein, if we think about him, we remember the first picture below.

But how many of us do realize that when Einstein presented his masterpiece the general theory of relativity, he was as young as the one in the second picture.


The year 1905 was one of the greatest years of Albert Einstein and for the whole of mankind. He completely changed the way people looked at the world and purged the Newtonian essence in the universe. The genius of Einstein lied in the fact that he was able to think and perceive that "Time could slow down for Light". Speed of light is the only constant in the universe and it was not time.  Time slows down as your speed increases. Wow, What a genius!! I just get goose-flesh when i even think about this fact even. What a remarkable moment it would have been when this fact struck Einstein's mind!


It is only ironical that he was not given Nobel Price for this discovery of His. I think no one even understood what this great mind thought and that's why he was awarded the prize for the discovery of Photoelectric effect in 1921. 


However, In the documentary, The Unfinished Symphonies, of Einstein, it says after this greatest masterpiece by Him, He was again onto some world changing stuff. What was that - "The Theory of Everything". Einstein's  discoveries had led to the birth of Quantum Theory. Quantum Theory summarized in one word means PROBABILITY. It means everything in this universe is a probability. Nothing is certain. Einstein, being a man of clarity, clearly hated his "Grand Child" as the documentary calls it. For Him,everything in this world has a definite and clear reason to happen and there was nothing which was probabilistic. He hated probability. 


Critics say that Einstein wasted, literally wasted the last 30 years of His life to disprove Quantum Mechanics. When the world had moved on and Quantum widely accepted, Einstein was reluctant to accept the fact. He summarized his view points with the killer sentence - "God does not play dice with the universe". The other end was Niels Bohr saying - "Einstein, stop telling God what to do with his dice".


However, Albert Einstein went to this death bed still pursuing His "Theory of Everything". It would have been great if the theory would have been completed. It would have provided answers for most, if not all, of the questions which seem eternal now in metaphysics. "Everything that has a beginning has an end". We would have known the end of the universe by this theory. 


But, given that the theory was not complete, we would never know for sure now about anything. Anything could happen anytime. I am not so much a philosophical but I feel that this should only be the act of God and no one else to take Einstein to Him, before He could find out the end of what He created. 

Service Oriented Architecture

Hi Guys,
It's been a while since I have blogged. Without any shame on my face, I am going to say the same truth, "I was busy". There has been a lot of discussion going on in my team about this buzz word SOA - Service Oriented Architecture and I am here to just share my views on it.


According to me, Service Oriented Architecture is an architectural design pattern which you apply while building your application. There is/has been a lot of commotion around about whether SOA is good or bad but my personal view is that it is really fruitful if used controllably (Yeah, It sounds like One of those primary school debates, I understand - "Science - A boon or a bane to mankind", where the judge gives a diplomatic answer). 


Nevertheless, I ll just divulge my views on why it is both a boon and a bane and we can just draw a line as to how to use it effectively. Bringing SOA in the design of your application mainly means that you are conspicuously going to have multiple clients using your services. Only in those cases will I go for an SOA. So when we have multiple clients, we just provide the clients with a particular end point (URL) to hit, with a WSDL associated that specifies the operations we can perform with the end point. 


Now how do you design a Service? Can we multiple services in our application with only some of them being exposed, others being private? (or) Should we have only Services, with end points, those which we are going to expose to the client? 
My opinion is that since a Service is by definition that which is going to be exposed, to the clients as an end point, there should be no concept called Private Services. It is just an overkill to have services for intra-communication in an application. This is where Services will become a bane if not architected properly. Our application will get bloated up with a lot of end points. Lot of end points means a lot of message exchanges within the system which eventually means a lot of unnecessary network traffic. So we need to draw a line here as to when to create a service and when to just use the interface of one module in another.


One more question about SOA is that should we have centralised or a decentralised data - in the context of a service. For Example, If there is a Customer Service, in the case of centralised data, all data associated with a customer will only be present and accessible by the Customer Service and any other service, if it needs customer data, should contact this service. The problem I perceive here is an one point of failure. If the customer service goes down, the application by itself goes down and is screwed. 


Decentralised data, on the other hand means, since a customer data will be used by most of the other services, the customer data will be present as a local copy with all the other services and they do not contact Customer Service for trivial operations(lookup?, update?). The problem here as I perceive is that, as and when the customer data is updated, a message has to be sent to all the services to update their local copy. At any point of time, it is not certain that all the copies of customer data will be in sync.


Now this presents an interesting debate - whether centralised or decentralised data is better. (Obviously the question is only for data that will be used across the application and frequently and not for all the data. For other data, the centralised scheme is the best, because obviously that is OO way). But in this case, my point of view would be to use a decentralised data as my mind, heart and brain weighs that the application itself going down as the primary concern and anything to prevent that would be the ideal solution. But that's just me!! We can argue either ways!!


As such, there are many interesting design issues with SOA and I seriously find it captivating. If you are really interested in knowing more about what I discussed here, and you want to feel the heat, visit http://bill-poole.blogspot.com/. This is one awesome blog about SOA and for discussions. Most of the things in this post of mine are excerpts from that and from our team discussions. 


OK chalo, till I get another heated discussion in our team on some other interesting topic, Adieu!!

Christmas Eve In A Church

Hey Guys,

First of all Merry Christmas!!

24th of December, 2010 was my first time in a church during Christmas eve and I really wanted to share how awesome an experience this was with you. This is a memorable experience.

The bell that struck in my mind:

I was in the hall in my home browsing randomly through some videos when I heard some people singing and it was so serene to hear that, when I suddenly recognised that it was Christmas eve. I had totally forgotten that there was a church just a block away from my house. Just as it happens for all beautiful moments, decisions are taken in a flash, me and my room mate just decided to run out there to see what it was all about.

Things around us are really beautiful:

In seconds, we were at the back gate of the church. I have walked past these gates hundreds of times but I have never cared to even think to go in and check it out even once. This just showed me that beautiful things are all around and very near to us. It is just our duty to check them out. If we don't, they will reveal themselves in the most beautiful way you can ever imagine. The church was really BEAUTIFUL!!

An Awesome Church:

Not because there were great decorations or costly things around, but only a few lightings, a bell and few flowers hanging here and there around. This originality and simplicity made the church look so wonderful. We were really amazed at the kind of hospitality offered by the people in the church. The prayers were going on in the church and there were songs being sung. The wordings were projected on the dais and we started singing it out loudly. We did not care about the meaning, we just sang.

                                         

Those Evergreen Days:

This just reminded of my school -"St. Joseph's matriculation school" where I studied from class I to class X. Christmas is the THE festival you ought to watch out for in my school. The nativity skit where the birth of Jesus Christ and the events surrounding it would be enacted so beautifully, is one which I am missing the most. 

I wished I went back to school to watch only the Nativity skit once more. 

Not to mention, there would be other great events where Santa Claus coming and dancing with all the teachers, throwing out chocolates and gifts. Also the gorgeously decorated      X-mas tree, out of which we used to pluck the bells and balloons and run away before the PET master sees us. Oh my God! What a time!!

The Pretty Girls:

Getting back to the church, there were some pretty girls around who actually kept me awake lest I would have slept during the prayers. We greeted everyone around us and wished them Merry Christmas. Everyone of them were strangers nearby and I felt so great to see strangers smiling and greeting you. Cool...I only wished I hugged those pretties to wish them Merry Christmas. After some prayers, we went to the altar and we were offered bread and wine from the Lord's supper. It was great.

Chai sir Chai, Chai, Chai:

Penultimately, the other significant part was, we were given COFFEE and CAKE. Needless to mention, the hot coffee was splendid to have when we were walking back home at 14 degrees Celsius at 1'o Clock on a straight road that seemed to never end.  

What a WONDERFUL CHRISTMAS it has been!!

JavaScript - Ram or Raavan?

Hi,

Is JavaScript a boon or a bane? Let's go to the story.

Disclaimer : I have a limited knowledge about JavaScript and so I may not be completely correct in all of my opinions.

The first time I ever heard about JavaScript was in my second year in college where I had to use it for a project I was working on. I just read some random tutorials and learnt only those which are necessary for me. After that I have hardly used JavaScript in my life until I landed in ThoughtWorks in my first project. It seems that not many people have actually read about JavaScript when they are using it. But they are just - using it.

Recently, we had an interesting seminar/discussion on this topic in my office. That was the first time it struck to me as to what is JavaScript - Is it Object Oriented or It is Functional?

Everything is an object in JavaScript. There are no classes at all - which means it is not completely OO. Even a function is an object. You can pass around functions and play football with them - which makes it a bit Functional. Well, may be it is a mixture of both - An unnamed, weird product like some substance I used to get in my chemistry lab back in my school days when I used to mix some chemicals randomly and get a black pungent deposit. It stinks!!

In the seminar, we had some very interesting examples of some of the syntactic sugars in JavaScript. I was completely agape when I saw them. What a bull shit kind of a modern day language?! I was completely pissed off by the incapability of the language to handle simple stuffs like where to put a semicolon. Because of this randomness of JavaScript, there are even no proper editors/ IDEs for it.

For Eg: What is the difference between the following?

1. return {

a = 10;

}

2. return

{

a = 10;

}

It actually turns out that the second set of statements would not give the desired result because JavaScript tries to put a semicolon at the end of a line, if it does not find one and it may end up putting a semicolon after the return statement in the second example and the function ends up returning nothing at all. What the F***??

Nonetheless, there seems to be a history behind JavaScript but the crux of the story is that JavaScript is like a premature baby taken out of a mother's womb and had not grown after that at all.

Nevertheless, JavaScript is the most popular client side scripting language. Even though there has been no improvements in the language as a whole, it is still used in almost all the websites in the world. There are some frameworks on top of JavaScript like JQuery and Prototype which actually make life a bit simpler, though.

However, it seems that there is going to be a new standard announced for JavaScript in 2011/12 which will actually make the language more strong typed and powerful and less random. Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best.

Finally, according to me, JavaScript is as of now a Raavan in the guise of Ram.

The Way My Mind Works

Hi,

Its been quite a while since I blogged, not due to the lack of topics but because mainly because of sluggishness and slightly because I had work. So now this story goes like this.

I was watching a movie now, one of my all time favourites and I think it is precisely the 33rd time I am watching it, when some points just struck to my mind on how my mind actually works!!

First of all, I feel that more that 99% of thoughts that come to my mind fall in one of the following categories.

• not-at-all-useful
• cannot happen
• happened in the past
• will be better if it happens like this
• should have happened like this
• I should have reacted like this**
• this is what I should do**
• completely pessimistic
• WTF??
• Random, as in there are no meaning or structure to them**
• Should I do that now when doing this **
• this is what I want to be ( seeing almost anything), etc etc..

** -> thoughts that more frequently come to my mind.

Robin Sharma in his "The Monk who sold his Ferrari" states blatantly that more than 95% of human thoughts are completely useless. I am starting to wonder is it the same in all the age groups?? Why have I never ever given this a thought?? May be I was not mature enough or my corporate environment is making me think so (:) ThoughtWorks definitely is not a corporate environment. It is like being in a KinderGarten in here. It will take me another post to speak about this.) or is it because I am genuinely getting older?? I don't know.

So, let me take a step back and think aloud for what is the reason for such randomness in life or life without a discipline. Let me elicit some of the reasons.

• Is it because the filter property of the mind is not working fine? Is my mind not able to filter out properly unwanted things from necessary things?
• Is it because I am goalless/ the goal I have set at the back of my mind is not motivating enough/ not clear/ this is not my goal at all?
• Is it because I am not able to achieve my short term targets?
• Is it because I am having too much of a target to achieve more than my capability/ I keep adding more stuff as soon as I see myself approaching my target?
• Is it because I am not celebrating my victories and becoming avaricious of more and more stuff?
• Is it because I am thinking too much not leaving some of my life's moments to nature itself and sitting back and relaxing?
• Is it because I am not taking nutritious food like fresh vegetables that is making me sluggish?
• Is it because I am looking at other successful people in my family, putting pressure on myself to become like/ greater than them in my life?
• Is it because of my mom who always hints that what ThoughtWorks pays you is nothing but literal peanuts?
• Is it because of my ego?
• Is it because I am not taking to many people and the socialising factor has become much low?
• Is it because I am thinking to over achieve than my capability?

Having written so much "Is it because", I almost forgot why did I start writing this even? However I now get a embarrassing feel that what one of my friends told me is actually becoming true - "You are also using your blog as an outlet to vent out your hearts feelings and there is actually nothing useful in it for other readers". Sorry guys, that may be true with this post and some of the previous ones but I promise I ll try my max to inhibit myself from doing it.

However coming back to my analysis, I feel that there are no concrete reasons for this. It just happens/ happened. There are however, ways to overcome it but not to stop it from happening. "The monk who sold his Ferrari" actually tells some very good ideas to actually control one's own mind which when mastered makes you the master of the everything in life. Practising every damn step will actually make me a monk, which I definitely don't want to become now. However I feel that I should start actually practising some of those to control "The Way My Mind Works".

On a finishing note - "Even Elixir in excess becomes a poison - The same applies to Randomness in Life". FYI -This is my own quote.

Social Network

Hi,

Ogay!! Here I am to blog about the Blockbuster "Social Network". It is the most cherished, most watched movie by me only after "Anniyan" and "3 idiots". When I watched the movie for the first time, I knew exactly that I would keep watching this movie for ever.

What makes this movie so special is that I was able to see a reflection of myself in that movie. Not that I am so intelligent as Zuckerberg, but I meant the core intent of the film. I was able to feel what I have missed out in my college not doing some stuff. But again, its the great human (Indian precisely) tendency to blame someone/something for any mishappenings. So I am going to blame my frikking goddamn college for this. "I had no goddamn exposure in my college to become intellectually capable of doing or even thinking of doing such stuff!!".

However, I envy this guy Zuckerberg because according to me, not all ideas become great ones and for that to happen you should have LUCK. Luck and Fortune favors(ed) the brave guy. Relating to the calculations in our mythology - "The amount of good deeds - The amount of sins you do in this Janma(Birth) is directly proportional to the amount of well being and fortune you ll enjoy in your next Janma". Think so this guy was a philanthropist or the like in his last birth. The point is, he is the same now too. He has donated $100 million for improving the US education system!! So he ll continue to be the same in his next birth too.. And we will see Zuckerberg II and I think this will go on and on like some Serial on Sun TV.

But alleviating my envy, I sincerely feel that this guy is doing something really great. Kudos to the facebook team and congrats to Zucky for being the "Time Person of the Year". (However Julian Assange should have got it. You stole it from him Zucky!!). Last but not the least, from my heart.... "Social Network" roCKS!!