answers in questions.

It’s been long since my last post. Inspite of the "topics to write posts" post on my blog, there wasn't any activity :(
May be this shows that posts should come naturally and cannot be made up. No proposing theories here.
But after a long break without a proper topic to write about, I am back with a topic related to the title of my blog.

The first thing that comes to the mind when you see the words "questions" and "answers" together is "Examination" and having written enough of them all through my life so far, I propose to write about them. Every examination was special; some along the path to the most awaited holidays, some, the most important career-deciding ones, each having a list of questions to be answered.

Well, this was tough; you never know what questions you may have to answer. But with all my experience, I can say they were not that hard if you apply your mind properly, at least in the kind of exams that I have written. And applying the mind properly here doesn't mean you have to toil hard and all that, it just means “apply properly”.

The examiners were good people who did not give you much work.
All you have to do is find clues in the question paper and use them to write your answers. This part was the most interesting one for me. There was always a clue, obvious or not, in the paper itself and this was no DaVinci Code, I assure you.

Like in the Chemistry paper, "Give three examples of Exo-thermic chemical reactions" and all you had to do is find an earlier question, in which were given three equations to be balanced, and use the same ones to answer this question. Well, if you are lucky, you could get all the three correct and in the worst case, half the marks were guaranteed.

Physics - no, it did not require the Newtons and the Einsteins to answer questions. There was always a number like "49" written all over it that its square root is part of the answer. All you had to do was make "7" part of the answer and half the marks are yours.

Mathematics, the easiest one of all. “Prove = ”. And if you don't forget to write the lines "Therefore, LHS = RHS. Hence Proved" at the end of your answer, you have already scored more than you had expected.

Social Studies, the verbose of examinations. Now this had a strategy associated with it. Extracted from the Indian History chapters of the subject, the strategy is called "Divide and Rule (Write)". For a question like "Describe the 1857 revolt or the Sepoy Mutiny", if your answer explained each of the words 1857, revolt, sepoy, mutiny individually and add more words like 1947,1947-1857=90 and add stories from the recent movies you have seen, you may be a social studies topper.

Nonetheless, there were always questions which included the alien language like the "adiabatic expansion of ...", "The Heisenberg's uncertainty principle .." , "..the special theory of relativity" etc., which I guess was part of the DaVinci code meant for the future-Einsteins.

more ideas, more posts.

Stuck up about the topic to write?
Want to make your blog more interesting?

No, no. These lines are not from some comment based marketing, nor did the blog-marketing people mistakenly post their ad on my blog
( They do that in the comments section though ).
They are valid lines of this post.

Now, this post of mine sounds more like a marketing ad than like a post.
However, the content I have is more related to the word 'marketing'.
If you want to market your blog, make it interesting, get more people to read and comment on it, here's a link about the top 10 ideas to post.
All the best bloggers.

No prizes for guessing. My next post will be based on one of the ideas mentioned there, most probably the first one - "How to . . ." ;)

an irreversible process

It was long back when we had Chemistry laboratory and we would experiment with all the salts and chemicals.
It was great fun. Some of them tasted sour, some of them more sour.
So, for a second, I thought it would be good to conduct a simple experiment, to revive all those memories of lab reports, practical etc.
Thus started my experiment.

I set out with a slightly bigger aim - I should successfully complete the experiment and the experiment should be useful to someone in one or the other way.
So here was my aim - "to increase the entropy of the universe". Now that the aim is defined, I set out to gather the apparatus needed for the experiment.
I really missed the burettes, the conical flask, the catalyst solutions and most importantly the pipette, which helped me taste the sweet chemicals, for these were not useful in the experiment I wanted to conduct.
Procedure was quite simple. Thermodynamics says that the entropy of the universe can be increased by an irreversible process. So to carry out my experiment, I had to find an irreversible process. But the other part of the aim was a bit difficult. What kind of irreversible processes are helpful to others?
When you don't know what side effects a process can result in, its always dangerous to execute an irreversible process. It can do more harm than help.
Finally, after a great bit of thinking, I found an irreversible process. Yes, it was both harmless, not at least for others, and it is useful in a way.
Thanks to my Chemistry professor who once mentioned that this kind of processes are also helpful in some ways.
So one Sunday morning, I had a hair cut. Yes, the irreversible process was executed, though it was a temporary irreversible process.
Observation - Entropy of the universe increased. But I couldn't exactly measure by how much it has increased, owing to my poor knowledge of formulae and stuff.
Result - Experiment conducted and aim reached. Oh, I forgot to mention that this experiment of mine has provided some extra stuff to work on, to the alpha-keratin research community experimenting on the keratin content in human hair. So it was both helpful and also successful.

the eye or the ear

A guy calls his s/w friend and says, "Dude, you know what! I got a job in XYZ, awesome package, great work and all".
And the s/w friend replies, "Sh!t, this happens every time. Not again!!!"
The first guy - "What??!!!???!!"
Poor guy, little does he know that the message on the monitor of his friend has "FATAL Exception occured!! Please shut down." flashing in red on it.

And the topic - The eye or the ear.
No doubt both these sensory organs are the most important, but when a conflict arises, which one of these does the brain prefer?
The one you see or the one you hear? Is it a general phenomenon that the message you see has priority over the ones you hear?
Is it context and the importance of the message that decide which one is preferred?

But given the same message and the same priority, which one does the brain understand first? The one read or the one heard?
In that case may be the language of the message and the complexity of the sentence are the deciding factors.
Seems like this topic is much more complex. Leaving it here, with a few questions unanswered.

a tour to europe..no, not me

You think it will be a great day ahead if your day starts with the sun smiling on your face bright red at the time you wake up, you see no red signal all along your way to work and you hear no screams of "Dikhta nahin hai??" [Can't you see?]
Your day gets even better when you see that there are fewer mails than ever in your inbox, and not a single meeting schedule in your outlook calendar and and and ...when you see a comment on your blog.

And the day immediately seems like the best day if that comment was for a not-so-good post of yours.

And the best day turns into a more superlative form of a good day once you see the starting words of the comment "What a nice blog you have...".
Wow!! Great!!

The same happened to me too. Thanks to gmail, I could see the starting lines even before opening the comment-mail for reading.
I thought it would be a good thing to return the favor by thanking the reader and asking the person to frequent his/her visit to the blog.
And so, I started typing my reply. "I love my blog too. Its really nice of you to comment. Thanks for the compliment.
Do keep reading my blog and commenting on the posts.". I go back to reading the comment completely to recheck if the person had said anything else, so that I can also thank/answer for that.
The result - my message changed to
"Not again guys !!! Please stop putting-in ads in my comment box. Thanks. I do not need any PhDs without exams and I am not going to fly Europe, not at least till someone offers me free tickets to the FIFA world cup in 2006."
But I did not know where to send this. One more unsent message.

And the greatestest day turns to the same normal day again, except for the fact that the already present count of fewer mails in my inbox has decreased by one.
No, I won't keep posting about every ad-comment that I will be getting in the future.

a pseudo-interview

Ever read an interview of a celebrity visiting a city and responding to an eager Page 3 journalist asking how he/she liked the city?
They always say 'it's a great city', 'oh! the food is great' and 'the people, they are very hospitable'.
What if it wasn't the case always?

J: Hi, so how do u like the city.
C: City? Which city? Oh, you guys call this city!!! Fine!
It's awful. I hate this place.

J: And how's the food here?
C: Don't get me started on that. I am dying of hunger since the past 3 days that I am here.
Even bread here is the worst I have seen. I am living on water.

J: And the people?
C: People!! People here look at me as if I am some alien dropped by a leaking space ship.
And the people, who walk past me, turn back and take a second look at me if my presence was an illusion.
And tourist spots, the so-called guide took me all the way atop a hill on foot and pointed to a small pebble the size of my ring and said it was a "History's Lost and Found" marvel.
And you call that - a 'place to visit'..!!!

J: So, are you planning to come back sometime?
( The journalist, being a novice in the field, had no choice but to ask all the questions in the book )
C: Yeah sure, when I have nothing better to do and am desperately waiting to experience the worst things of life.

May be there are such interviews, only to be dumped in thrash cans, never to be printed.
After all, the pride of cities is to be protected ;)

And no, I don't hate this city. Not as long as I get my favorite biryani at 2.00 AM. :)

luxuries or needs?

Sunday evening.
Free thoughts flowing in my head.
Peace while walking.
It was a great evening, while I was returning from my office.
Suddenly some message flashed before my eyes.
I thought it was an imagination, for the message and the location it was placed were so contradicting each other.
But then I realized that I did read the message. I went back a few steps and re-checked my observation. Yes, it was indeed true.

It read "The world has enough for every man's need but not for any man's greed.".
And the place was the entrance of one of the lavish star hotels in the city.

So many thoughts struck my head as what would have led to post that message there.
A bit of research provided me partial answers.
That it was one of the quotes of the Mahatma. So obviously it would qualify to be placed in such places with utmost priority. National pride.
The other reasons, well, I can only guess.
One being that it was part of the long chain of quotes by the Mahatma spread all over the place. The next guess would be it has a meaning that applies to the place.
That, such lavish hotels are part of some person's 'needs' and so here is a place that provides the 'needs' for such persons.

Hard to imagine such needs.

smoke-free thoughts

I have been reading 'Atlas Shrugged' by Ayn Rand lately and this conversation in the book caught my attention.

"I like cigarettes. I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips.
I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours.
When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind-and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression."

From times I have known, smoking has been a symbol of deep thinking.
Be it Sherlock Holmes, who would always get a mystery-solving brilliant idea after consuming good amounts of tobacco.
Or the innumerous novelists/writers depicted in movies. Everywhere smoking is associated with creative thinking.
As if something great would always be born out of the smoker's mind.

How true is it? Out of the whole smoking community how many of them will be thinking creative while smoking?
Or may be whatever smokers think while smoking is in one way or the other creative.

However, the analogy of the spot of fire in the smoker's mind and the fire held in his hand impressed me.
Really a good expression.

a brief pause . . .

Before Aristotle, with his sheer brilliance, came up with the idea that Earth is in fact round, people believed that earth was flat.
And then Ptolemy came up with the idea that Earth is the centre of the universe.
Then it was the turn of Copernicus to state that the Sun is at the centre and planets revolve round the sun, shattering all the earlier theories to pieces.
Then followed Galileo and Newton, each one of them proving a new theory, thereby confuting all prior beliefs.

What if someday in the future, some intelligent scientist comes up with a new theory disproving all the facts we believe to be true?
Then, there won't be anything called the gravitational force or quantum mechanics.
Bodies don't attract each other. Neither is the Big Bang true. Space time correlation does not apply.

Sure there is going to be someday, when the basic thing we believe to be true is going to be proved false.
So, is it better not to believe in any theories that currently exist?

May be we can prove more facts if we don't believe in already proven facts.
If Aristotle believed that earth was flat, he would never have discovered that Earth is in fact round.

teachers day

Thanking all my teachers for all their efforts to make me a person capable of thanking them in this way.

A tribute :

Gurur brahmaa gurur vishnuh
gurur devo maheshvarah
gurur saakshaat parabrahma
tasmai shree gurave namah.

pressure?

Back in class 7, when I was participating in the first elocution competition being conducted outside school, I was all geared up for the event. The topic being interesting, I was prepared for all the 3 minutes I will be allowed to speak. And why was the topic interesting? Yes, the most common reason. Movies. "Impact of cinema on today's youth". I had content covering the Baazigar spects, the k..k..kiran touch and was sure I would emerge with one of the prizes. It was all fine till my name was called. And then feet started trembling, voice went dead. I could barely speak a word. All of this just because, one person in the audience was interested in my performance. And that person wanted me to emerge the winner outperforming all others no matter how good they were and how weak I was.

Imagine a Sachin Tendulkar in the middle of 100,000 people at the stadium and millions of them watching him offline, all of them wanting him to get a century, no matter what the opposition is and what the circumstances are. I agree. To be chosen out of one billion people should make you all strong to face such pressure. But is it justifiable to ask every innings of his to be the best one? Is it justifiable to ask the Indian team to win all the matches? And yeah, I am also one of the persons who want our team to win all the matches.

But as some great person said, "The audience is always right".
Leaving it to the audience to decide.

a comment and a zillion thoughts

Ecstatic I was, to see a comment left on my blog.
Why should I not be, for it was the first valid comment somebody ever put on my blog.
I know that I hardly have any readers. But when I saw there was one, I was impressed.
After all some unknown person is also reading my blog, I thought.

Then started the guessing game. Who would it be? someone I knew? somebody I told about my blog? someone who accidentally came across and either was impressed by my writing or was totally disappointed at me having a blog? Thousands thoughts crossed my mind, but they lasted only for a few seconds before the much-awaited precious comment unleashed before me on my favorite browser.
And I was dumb-struck.

The comment:
"Reading your blog and I figured you'd be interested in advancing your life a bit, call us at 1-206-339-5106.
No tests, books or exams, easiest way to get a Bachelors, Masters, MBA, Doctorate or Ph.D in almost any field.

Totally confidential, open 24 hours a day.

Hope to hear from you soon!"

I just can't resist appreciating the way marketing is changing the world.
Of the umpteen number of ways of promoting your business, this blog-commenting is the latest I suppose. Generating bot-programs to scan people's blogs and put in an ad there. Wow! What an idea clubbed with efficient technology.

But, a few things. (if the comment was the result of some bot.)
Is the program so intelligent to decipher that I am interested in advancing my life, just by reading some irregular posts of mine.

The idea is promising, though. Imagine me getting an MBA and a Ph.D with no exams and the best part is: in any field. Be it Microbiology or/and Astronomy or/and Paleontology.
That would be a great idea.

And why should all this be confidential?
So many questions left unanswered by a single comment.

And the highlight of the whole comment was it inspired to make a new post.
It came in the right moment, when I was searching for topics to post about.

Till one more comment gets me to write more.

coincidence

Call it coincidence, call it irony, call it anything, but it happened.

A few hours after I posted about swades and about returning back to our home country, this friend of mine comes up to my office to tell me that he was flying the same night to the US of A. And 12 more hours later, I was in the airport sending him off, all the time wondering what he would do if he gets to listen to the song.

So Mr.US-going-swadesi guy, don't forget to put a comment about your reaction to the situation, when you stumble upon this blog.

And coming back to blogging and me, I feel the length of my posts has increased quite a bit, compared to the earlier ones. So to make it even, let me leave this one here.

Short posts are easier to read and forget. So says the Tao of Psychology.

swades

Thanks to the Public Transport system in Hyderabad, because now we can hear our favorite songs on the radio plugged into some of the buses. And more thanks for they are the reason for this post. For guessers, this is not any complaining or cribbing about the poor state of the buses. This one is something different.

Imagine you toiled pretty hard to complete the GRE and then tried your luck at the visa and bang! You are all set to fly, with your dreams in one hand and luggage in the other. You have your boarding pass, get into the plane, settle down and to get rid of the disturbances of people settling around you, you plug in the ear phones of your MP3 player dreaming about the i-pod you will soon be having once you land there. And guess what, the song you are hearing is

"Yeh Jo Des Hai Tera, Swades Hai Tera
Tujhe Hai Pukara...."

What would be your immediate reaction?

Your conscience springs up, stands before you and says
"Dude, this is your calling. Listen to it. Get out of the plane. Go straight to home and serve your country." or like the famous dialogues of the great Bachchan in Sharaabi,
"Ek aap hain, aur ek woh the" you will be hearing "Ek Shah Rukh tha, jo NASA mein job chodd ke vaapas aa gaya, aur ek thoo hai, jisko job bhi nahin hain, phir bhi jaa raha hai".

OR

you listen to the song for some more time till you hear
"Mitti Ki Hai Jo Khushboo, Tu Kaise Bhulayega
Tu Chahe Kahin JaYeh, Tu Laut Ke Aayega"

and draw solace from the fact that you will be returning back after a hard earned degree ( and some bucks?? ) and then serve the country.
You say to yourself "Yes! That is what I will be doing. I will come back home and be the real Shah Rukh."

Peace.

The announcement: "Passengers are requested to.."
and you will be singing...
"Yeh Jo Des Hai Mera, Swades Hai Mera
Mujhe Hai Pukara....
Yeh Woh Bandhan Hai Jo Kabhi Toot Nahin Sakta .."

Back to present.

This was the song I was listening to when I boarded the local bus from my office to home and ding! this post is born.

And I was guessing, which one of the choices mentioned above would the people I know be taking, when in such a situation.

why?

why do I blog?
what inspires me to post?

I know, I know. These are not questions without answers.
But let me see how well I can answer them.

First of all, why do I blog.

A quick answer that comes to my mind is "to be tagged as blogger", to get my share of the free web space.
And to take some time off the visitors who read this blog, if there were any of them :).

But most importantly I blog to record the non-persistence of the chemical signals in the synapses of my brain thus, creating a persistent abode to my thought factory.
Yes, you heard it right. I don't want to let go my thoughts unrecorded as they are overwritten by new synapses reaching the neurons, thus changing the state of them.
In short I blog so that I can jot down my thoughts/ideas, before I forget them, in the form of a post.

Then, the second question: what inspires me to post.

A little alteration to the great saying "An idle man's mind is a devil's workshop” would make it "An idle man's mind is a blog workshop". And by blog workshop I mean working on the blog, a.k.a posting.

So that defines it. I post when I am idle. And that is the time when the thought process in me begins to search for post-able content and the result is a new post is born.

That is one reason. And the other is the change of state of neurons in my brain.
Before a thought is over-written in my mind, I make sure it is posted.

But a possible doubt here is out of the 100 billion nerve cells present in the brain and the 100,000 chemical reactions that occur in it every second, which ones, do I pick to make a post? And that is one of the questions which do not have an answer as of now. Let me think about it.

one year at the firm

Its becoming more and more difficult to find questions without answers and even more difficult to search for the answers.
And that explains my irregular posts to the blog.

Anyway, its been one year at work, out of the golden days of college life.
The flattering thing is that I am a taxpayer now. And that impresses me the most.
Because the next time a cop comes up and asks me "idhar kya kar raha hai?" when I am staring into the skies and searching for the answers to my questions on a desolate road at the peak of midnight, I can say "Dude, I am a taxpayer in this country. I can stand wherever I want and whenever I want."

That means freedom.

Now that I am a tax-paying citizen of the country, I need to revise the Constitution once, so that I can be aware of my rights and duties. One more pending task added to the big list of to-dos :)

Of course nothing comes free. This freedom is accompanied by involving in umpteen numbers of things; I thought I never would bother about. That includes the stock market, the Income Tax rules, the Government in power and even The Economic Times.

Life has changed in more than one way. Gone are the days when we went to a movie irrespective of the day. But now, its a big no on weekdays, fearing it may effect the next days work. :( Gone are the days when meeting friends was a regular thing done everyday, every hour but now, nope, its only in mails that you see your friends.

It wouldn't be so good to end this post without my regular questionnaire. Any way here comes one.

Lately, I have been reading the novel "The Firm" by John Grisham. The protagonist, a top notch lawyer, straight out of college, after being hired by a law firm offering big bucks, comes to know that the firm is a mafia operated organized-crime(now, that’s a word. I like it) station in disguise. Well, as every other tax-paying loyal citizen would do, he busts the whole racket, gets the cops onto the place and flees the country with lot of dough back in the bank.

Till now everything is fine, but "They never forget" (The mafia never forgets). So by the end of the novel, he sits on the beach, waiting for death to come in any moment in any form. That’s life.

Now, the question : "What would you do, if some day you get to know that you MAY die the next day, the next hour or for that matter the next minute?"

May be there is an answer to this one.

question answer world

"Where are the answers to the questions of/in the world?", asked the student.
"You can find the answers in the same place where you found the questions.", answered the teacher.

and the student went in search of the answers. . .

Testing the new Blogger Images feature brought out by google.

Faith in question.

This post is dedicated to the people who can sense things before hand.
( But cannot do anything, since it is destined to happen anyhow )

So the question is :
What if you sense that an event X may happen and
1. if it happens immediately,
2. if it happens later in the day,
3. if it happens after a few hours.

Discussion :
1. If the event happens immediately, is it because your inner conscience was working to make the thought come true.
( to make you believe that you have this power of sensing the future )
2. If it occurs later in the day, then is it that you are really gifted with the power of sensing things before hand.
3. If it occurs in the mean time, then is it point 1 or point 2? or that your memory has more cache to hold your thoughts for some more time and then implement them.

D for deductions.

Well, the earlier sequel said "Sab gandha hai par dhandha hai ye".
And this one started and ended with "Dhandhe mein dosth dushman hotha hain".

I think even from these kinds of movies, people can learn a lot of things.

First of them being,
Love thy work as thyself. The protagonist goes on proving this saying
"Koi engineer hai, koi doctor hai aur main gangster hai".

There is nothing called destiny, everything is hardwork.
"Main kismat ko nahin maanta"

Have the courage and you can work wonders even in a new field ( I dont know if this works for all the fields !)
"is line mein experience ki nahin, daring ki zarurat hoti hai".

And with the knowledge we have about the Chaturvedas, the Mahabharatha and the umpteen mythological stories that say "Among the 64 arts, theft is one, war is another, business is one more"..etc, and with a little bit of predicate calculus, can we deduce that "Crime (theft+war+business+others) is also an art"?

If so, can all arts be professions?

Simulation of the brain

Wow, that would be great. A brain creating another to study about itself.

Now, I have a doubt. Wouldn't all this lead to recursion? One brain creating another to study about brains. If the created brain is a perfect simulation, even that would create another brain to study about brains. And this process goes on and on and on ....till what/when?

The following is an excerpt from here

An effort to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain, right down to the molecular level, was launched.

The “Blue Brain” project, a collaboration between IBM and a Swiss university team, will involve building a custom-made supercomputer based on IBM’s Blue Gene design.

The hope is that the virtual brain will help shed light on some aspects of human cognition, such as perception, memory and perhaps even consciousness.

back without a bang.

Nine months since my last post and I thought my blogger account would be deleted.
But no. I think the people out there are pretty patient. However, their hopes of me returning back to blogging have not gone waste. So here I am starting my second stint as "GK - the blogger".

Well, starting off with the latest thought in my mind.
What if someday, you get an answer to the question : what powered the Big Bang
First of all, would you believe that your reasoning is correct and go ahead working out ways to prove your theory? Like what Newton did to prove his apple-falling theory, ending up creating the Calculus? I think that's the difference between Newton and the zillions of people born after him.

For a starter, I think this might be enough. So, signing off.

More thoughts in future.