Why men Fight?

The recent Israel air strikes on Gaza reminds of this conversation in the movie "Munich " - "We(Palestinians) did not kill your people, the land is as holy for us as for you, but still you strike back at us".
Thats what I recall, i cant understand why israelis hate Palestinians more than Germans. Logically Germans who supported Hitler rather caused more harm to Zionists than anybody else.
My eyes tear every time, I watch a war  time movie like - Schiendlers List or the Pianist. This is my one big question, I am holding when I meet a israeli .
For all i Know somebody in israel might be thinking -"Why does India hate Pakistan". Which I can answer because I am an Indian :-).
Nevertheless, I never stop pondering about why war has become inevitable for peace.

Note: Do watch Munich to see Daniel Craig, he proves that he is not worth to be 007 :-)

DejaVu

It happened today. I met this person in lift, he was my ex-collegue who had now joined at the client location, where I was now a contractor. IF it was only him , it was ok. But the minute another ex-collegue and current client entered the lift, I realized, I had a faint memory of this happening and then I was waiting for something and thats when they asked me about one of my current collegues and again with the same mistake of not pronouncing his name properly.
I was very sure , this is DejaVu - Same faces, same mistake. I could not believe that this is just a mess up by my brian where it pushes something by mistake to long memory although it should have been in short memory. This is the most known scientific explanation for DeJaVu.
It sometimes apalls me that with all our scientific discoveries we have still not been able to know what causes such small incidents.
At the same time, I am amazed at how brain of human beings has evolved to the level it is. It distresses me that we don't realize this beautiful gift of nature to us and make the best use of it :-)

English - Hinglish - TaHiEnglish

Recently I travelled around south India and during the journeys went to Tamil spoken regions - Kanyakumari, Rameshwaram and travancore.

During my journey, I found some interesting posters here are a few.

If you did not still understand, the shop keeper meant Flour mill.The next one is miserable and infact punishable.

Now this one is - I do not know which language.(zoom in)

But beyond all this is the clincher. The super hero.

East or west India is the best.(Zoom in)

Why does everyone hate IT and IT people in Bangalore?

First the History of what factors caused Bangalore to be the IT hub

Bangalore was a place which was known for its weather. The ideal weather rather with not too much of heat during summer and not too cold in winter.
People not to mention were and are not aggressive. When you roam around to different parts of India, one would always consider Bangalore a comparitively peaceful place for one to live.
People usually have - "mind your own business policy" - unless you go and poke , there is no concern. For example when BDA started falling trees in Bangalore, people's societies started protests only when the plan showed deforestation in their areas - when they fell trees in Basavanagudi, the people's association in Malleshwaram did not bother and vice versa.
The biggest factor also were the local governament policies - this boomed the industry both in Bangalore and Hyderabad.
Also the first and the largest IT companies were setup here.

So what went wrong?
When the initial companies were setup by the two big wiggies - NRN and Premji, a lot of our local folks got in. The field boomed. There were a group of VCs in Silicon Valley, who supported and setup firms in Bangalore. Gradually there were a lot of IT folks travelling to western countries at a very young age - to USA, UK. Suddenly they had travelled and roamed more than the sum total of three generations of their forefathers.


Stay in Foreign countries
There  is saying in Kannada - "Kosha Odhu Desha Suttu". It means roam around the world , read knowledgeable books. Our IT guys did the earlier one and forgot the later.

The oppurtunity to see a new country and an advanced country and additional money is a very lucrative offer. Some just fell for it and were swept in it, never to come back. Some took a dip and started realizing that with all the luxury and comfort in other country, they are still a secondary citizen in  these countries. They still need to get permission for fireworks for Deepavali.There was a lack of identity. Now for a considerable percentage of people, although they would love to stay back in a foreign country, their terms were over and they had to return back. In simple words, they were not needed in the guest house anymore.

We are happy for the first group, which is now not in India, they helped reduce the population burden and also spread the Indian roots elsewhere. Its a pleasure to get the second group back, which might get us some intellectual thoughts which will steer the city and the country in the right direction - or atleast put some effort into it. They are the rational thinkers. The last segment which still dreams about staying abroad is the detrimental one. All of these folks, are proud they went abroad and want to realize the comfort and luxury here , in India. They need their USA here.

To start off, they need to match money, now if you have to get the kind of income you would have earned in USA, you will need to take on some competitive work - work under pressure, touch the niche areas. This has made IT work more than a 9-5 job.The work is not something where you go in and come out, you own stuff there. There is tension. These are the first set of people who want to stay close to office within the radius of 10kms. They caused the rise of apartment culture.

Rise of Apartments
Frankly I still dont like apartments, they seem to me like a glorified version of "Vatara's of old bangalore".  No offense to anyone, after staying in single houses for long time, it is a little difficult to be accustomed to apartments.You can smell neighbours kitchen, you can hear shouting next door and most of all, there is no identity of the place you live in.
Apartments are a problem in other ways as well , because of their creators which is the real estate business. Just like any other natural resource has been exploited, the real estate owners exploit the water , air and the land itself to make quick bucks. The massive pressure on water these apartments have put with no proper foresighted planning is already evident with Bangalore seething under its garbage and never satisfying thirst for water.

All the people in Apartments are busy lot , they need shopping malls to finish shopping and get some food and get recreated with movie - the bare minimum luxuries of USA. So we have now shopping malls at every end of the street. Our people have sufficient money to get an apartment , shop at malls, every week and now buy a car . This is the mini-USA they had hoped for.

While you think all of this is not just IT employee problem, a lot of it like the Regulating real estate is Government business, we all understand, how democratic our governments are. So we are still quite far from getting the right regulations and following them to make sure our progress does not hinder our environment.

All of these have now wiped out trees because they need space to drive cars, build malls , Emptied the water in the lakes and underground to fulfill the needs of apartments.
The development in Bangalore is like the thin Ice crust formed on a lake due to the lower temperature. It looks like a flat and strong plateau,You can walk on it , but only one at a time, too many of us go in, the layer will break and we will be drowned in cold water. The Garden city is now Concrete city.

The surrounding of people have suddenly changed.The inside of the house is also changed.Every house has a person in IT  Industry. He can afford the mini - USA. Their lifestyle lures others to imitate them.There is pressure on other businesses and professions to generate sufficient income. Everywhere the price is rised, the doctor from bangalore starts charging more than the doctor in Udupi, the vegetable vendor starts hiking prices.The housemaid expects double the salary she would get in some other place. The cost of living increases and now this becomes a place with reckless development at the cost of killing nature and actual and original culture of people which facilitated the business in the first place.
Lately its not just the IT folks, almost every profession is providing lucrative money. A person with an MBA from any local university will be paid 60-70k per month in retail, automobile, travel companies.

The lucrative jobs and the mini-USA in Bangalore has encouraged a huge migration of people from the populous states like Bihar , Uttar Pradesh, Delhi. Due to the conducive environment, a lot of these folks are not going back and are settling here in Bangalore. this and lack of proper planning has become detrimental for the city.

The common man and the old people who have been here in bangalore for more than 20 years, start hating the community which started or rooted the culture of money and hence everybody blames IT for city's detriment.

In my opinion, the problem is with the IT companies rather than the IT employees. The companies like Wipro, Infosys, TCS, CTS are taking away the best of our engineering colleges and putting them in a lowely job of maintaining some existing software and getting them used to mundane tasks of software. IF these companies could setup an equivalent research centers, encourage labs and innovation, worked with universities and help us get more patents, we would have still continued to consider IT as lucrative. Ayn Rand , they say , did not believe in charity. The IT companies are doing megre charity and believe they have fulfilled their responsibility for the society, but unless they dont teach our folks how to fish, no matter how many fish they get it will not solve our problems.

The other problem wiht IT is they have not setup enough shops in the northern India, this area requires a boost from governaments  in supporting more IT . This will let a lot of the crowd go back and stay closer to home. This will also help in an overall development in India rather than development in pockets. Unfortunately although we are the biggest democracy we are very poor in planning and with the huge corruption , this seems like a far off dream.

The IT employees are no different from somebody getting good money - all they spend on is - Food, drinks and the luxuries. If they start using what they have judiciously especially the natural resources, we will be far better  than today.Everyday when I am in my cab, I pass by numerous cars with just one person in the driver seat, i know they are IT by the bags they have and by the tags they wear.Although educated, we lack wisdom. This year, during May we had the driest stint and one of my collegues had a jacuzzi at their home and there was no water in their borewell. If she had probably been judicious in using water and infact invested on Rainwater harvesting, she might have probably still had a working borewell.We will soon not have water for drinking if we do not use the resources judiciously. The attitude of  IT employees is that - Money can buy anything , there is very less social responsibility, they own.


Anything which is lucrative just because of the money wont stand for long, it needs to go further into the intellectual aspects of the life. It needs support in our value system and if possible needs to relate to the spiritual layers of the society in the right way .

Anologies for Marriage and love

I was downloading the next episode of Big Bang Theory which has now become my sole source of twenty minutes of healthy humour, an anology came to my mind.
I am a technologist by profession, so with no surprises, my analogies usually will have an actor from there. The analogy that I am blogging about  is Arranged Marriage and "HTTPS" - the secured version of http Protocol. If you do a google search you will understand that for https to work, SSL should be established and kept alive. No data present in the https session will be allowed in http, ofcourse it is secure.

Arranged marriage is similar, the first premise is both the families need to agree and continue it till marriage. In some cases this will include a three to four step protocol of caste match, Sub-Caste match, age match and Horoscope match. Only when this is established do the groom and the bride get to the next level of communication. If by any mis-communication, the initial protocol breaks ( has happened in some of my acquaintances), then communication between bride and groom breaks .

Love marriage on the other hand is like TCP,  both parties agree and communicate . Families dont matter much, its a three way handshake - Guy, girl and at least one family to support

On the other hand one sided love(Usually guy likes the girl but girl does not have the same feeling) is like UDP, there is no acknowledgement, there is no guarantee that the packet is not dropped during transfer.

What should not be sold?

There is a very interesting program relayed on DD chandana on every sunday at 9:30 AM.

The intent of the program ofcourse is to help us understand , what the ancient vedas state and how over a period of time as tradition, we have totally changed the application of these concepts and how these have become meaningless now.

The presenter is a Veda expert by name Sudakara Sharma.

One of the interesting things he mentioned recently in one of the episodes was - What are the things which Vedas say should not be sold.

There are three things which Vedas say one should not sell. Firstly "Anna"   - Anna translates to food. Secondly "Oushada" - Medicine and thirdly " Vidya" - Education.
Because these are so essential for the society, selling them will bring in imbalance in society was the thought process. So how would somebody get one of these if they dont have it. All of these are to be shared, shared from one who has abundance of it with the one who does not , and not to be sold.

Today, all three of these have become bigger industrial areas - Food is no more food alone, its a complete industry in itself. Education in India is a business, every school has its own rules about how much donation the child's parents should pay. Thirdly, Medicine, this is now a booming industry with a lot of the people moving to higher per ca pita income, medicine and medical facilities are as important today as food.

Although we have gone so far that it would almost be impossible to get us to a situation of not have these three sold, it goes on to show the high thinking expressed in Vedas. By probably studying it , we will be more wiser humans than studying the current curriculum which is more fact based.

If you can make out time and get the TV's appointment for this time on Sunday and if you can understand Kannada, do not miss watching this 30 minutes program. Another interesting program relayed after this is again based on Vedas and Upanishads in the form of smaller stories from Indian history. This starts at 10.00 AM on Doordarshan National .
 

Where god's presence is felt

Usually my travels include places which will have religious importance, architectural importance, a river close by. Reason for such choice is my family.It  includes my parents , my sister's kids and us - basically the old, young and the middle aged. So to satisfy all the sections we end up choosing places which have something for all of us.

In all such travels in the last few years, what I have observed is that there are smaller places close by to the main place which are much better and enjoyable than the actual place itself.

Here are some examples
Tirupati , Tirumala
The name of Tirupati takes one back to thoughts of  the long and lengthy queues, the hot weather and lots of people with hardly any peace for mind, sometimes making you wonder - "I am soaked in sweat and I will feel Godliness once I reach the sanctum of Balaji ".  So our usual journey included the traditional visit to Tirupati, the lower temples of alamelu Mangapura,a Papanasanam . But on our second day we headed to a place called "Applaayakunte", this was not more than 40kms from the main Tirumala. Here we found the real peace, the drive itself was wonderful in the midst of paddy fields with the view of how the seven hills look like Sesha - the snake on which Lord Vishnu rests . Once we reached there , unlike the hot weather we had lived with so far, this place had cool breeze and the sculpture of Lord Venkateswara was also beautiful and so huge.Not just this , the water from the well was very sweet , most of all there were far less people and the ones who were there were a lot sweeter.

Mantralaya
Second in such experience is Mantralaya. Good thing about Mantralaya is , it has lesser crowd compared to places like Tirupati. We enjoyed the river on the first day, but were really upset after seeing that the sewage was let into the same river not too far from temple. So we decided not to goto the river the second day. On the second day, after the darshan of Raghavendra Swamy's Brindavana, we headed to cross the river Tungbhadra in a coracle and visit Panchamukhi Anjaneya. We visited another place called Bichhali, this was the most serene place and as the story goes, Raghavendra Swami's disciple used to come here for meditation. Apparently, the place has a lot of Nagarakallu - snakes carved on stone and worshipped. Place is famous to have had very frequent snake visits.
The places was serene and the river's flow was aggressive. So visit to Bichhali made our visit to Mantralyam more memorable.

Udupi
Udupi is known for the Krishna Matha and is a hub for the various dwaitha matha  Matas.The main city of the Udupi was very hot since we went in early may. Here we went to a place called Pajaka Kshetra which is the birth place of SrimadvaCharya. The place was about 15 kms from Udupi.This place again was very serene and scenic.

We usually goto religious places to get a divine place and reach out to the divine energy.But sometimes, we cannot get the real peace we need and we believe we get when we reach the sanctum because of the now common long queues for darshan . But In all the smaller places the biggest difference from the main place is the number of people. The reality is that when with nature, man feels the presence of god more than in the actual temples.

Change is Eternal

This is a mantra - Change is the only constant. Without it  we would not grow. But still our inertia to change puts us in a very bad mental state from the time we know its going to come till it ceases to be a change anymore.
I have recently been suggested to work on a new project, the project entails me to leave my team, leave my collegues, goto a new company and be a consultant. I am already getting allergic to the thought. From the time , I wake up till I goto a deep slumber, this is one thought that bothers me terribly.
But then it is required, it will happen . I hate tomorrow since this question will starkly stare at me tomorrow. But nevertheless "Thou will have to change your routine" is the rule.
Everytime I face this situation, I think that "I dont think enough before making decisions", I jump to conclusions. But no matter how much I do -"Think", i end up in this not so happy situations. But typically, one put into it, I have so far managed to wade my way and still feel the experience worth the risk.
Lets see where this takes me to.

Sunrise

Where are you?
I have come alone to talk to you

oh! thy sun why dont you come out
Its the early summer and I need your warmth
I have gone through a lot

Where are you?
I have come all the way to talk to you
Alone and awake and thinking aloud
While the green parrots speak
and the birds chirp
In the silence of the trees

I want to talk to you
Where are you?

I have been waiting all night
To meet you and greet you in the young morn
To welcome the new day, to bring new thoughts
oh sun why are you so shy
come fast and give me warmth and
the strength to face every thing under your eyes

oh Sun!! where are you?
I have come to talk to you! all alone!!

Full circle

We usually say life comes full circle. We have a lot of evidences in our personal lives and social lives.
Recently while watching the poster for a movie , another 3D , this is the same thought which crossed my mind.
The history of today's films starts way back and the forefathers for today's movies were the dramas.
So initially the Drama company had the actors come on stage and act. Live. If they did some mistakes, they had to correct them intelligently . In fact if you listen to some of the veterans of this field, they give us details of how an actor had to be all rounder  - singer, good speaker , command over language , suitably looking for the role and most importantly actor. And how although not well educated, these dramatists evolved to be the best.
The next phase was to record these and play them and we got the movies . The history of the movies can be a subject for a whole book and still the author might be left with a feeling of incompleteness. Its a vast subject.
Today we are crazy about three dimensional viewing. Every new movie can now be viewed three dimensionally.
Does n't it seem as though we are going back to the drama season? we are going back to age of dramas -  actors as they are, how they would really look if they stood in front of us. Not the fullest sense, but still is. Its an evolution at different level. While the yonder year dramas had the actors present , the background scenes were two dimensional . Today 3D is best used for the surroundings the actors are still acceptable as two dimensional views.
So then what next, my guess is that the view will be different every time, with something new and interesting. Imagine watching a different ending every time for the same movie, or different pairs of actors, or different backgrounds , what will it be  - time will answer.