Thoughts – Page 3 – akbar's blog

The GOTO of Meditation

I try to meditate on a regular basis. There was a time when I meditated for an hour every day, but now a days if I get 15 mins I am very thankful for it. Anyhow, what I realized recently is an analogy to programming headache. A GOTO statement in computer language is an instruction to the compiler/processor to jump to a particular line of code. It was invented long time back (I am guessing in FORTRAN) to make the computation easy. As it’s easier to jump the control anywhere you want to. But, this turned out to be a nightmare at later stages of programming where some applications may have millions of lines of code. There rose a criticism of the GOTO statement and you can read about it online.

There are many kinds of meditations available. Especially with the globalization, all kinds of meditation practices has been transported to America’s latest YMCAs (checkout Kalidasa @ Berkeley YMCA). But the whole premise or principle of meditation stays very simple. It’s like whoever/whatever created us wanted to have some fun, so he/she/it installed a ‘mind’ between our ears and hence begun the struggle over the control of thoughts. Our thoughts are streamed at much higher rate than any twitter system imagined. They are always chained. One thought leads to another and to another. By the time you become aware (if at all you can become aware) you are far away from where you started.

lake yoga

So, the principle behind any meditation technique is to not to follow this crazy route taken by our thoughts. They ask you to close your eyes, to reduce one more sesory system mis-leading you into distraction. Almost all kinds of meditations involve following something and doing it repeteadly. It could be your breath, a lamp or the train of thoughts itself. Like the weight loss programs, a meditation methodology is unique to each person. You need to try a bunch of them before you stick to one. The one I use is to follow my breath. I watch myself inhaling and exhaling, it’s not easy but slowly I get into a flow and then I am able to feel whatever people usually feel when they meditate.

But the mind is so cunning or distracted that I keep forgetting that I need to keep my focus on my breath and lose myself in the stream of thoughts. But then when I remember, I gently come back to watching my breathing. This reminded me nothing but GOTO statement of meditation. It’s like when I am lost in my stream of thoughts I remind myself and issue a GOTO to go back to watching my breath. So, please be my guest and go ahead and use GOTO exhaustively in meditation. It’s not considered harmful in meditation. 🙂

Growing Roots

If I may steal Mark Twain’s quote “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it”, I would like to say that same thing applies to “Depression” that we are going through too. Everyone I talk to, believe me that just very few people in this cold winter – at some level depressed or saddened or feeling hurt about something. It could be that their credit card is maxed out, it could be that they are not getting new jobs etc. Even my friends in India wonder how I am doing when the market is so down.

I am not closing my eyes to reality – I know we are in recession (now that it is official) but I am baffled by how much people get stuck with something like this. We as humans have immense potential within us – we survived all these years. We are the best survival machine when it comes to Darwinism. One credit card declined can’t put a frown upon our faces forever. We are better than this.

I do believe that this is a chance to look at ourselves deeply. Not just at our bank balances, but deep within our psyches. It’s time to regurgigate our beliefs, thinking and how we deal with this so called ‘reality’. It’s time to hibernate. It’s time to get lean with all the things in our lives. It a time to test how much are we slaves to our senses.

Recently I got an email which talked about how a tree grows. When a tree grows taller, even before it grows taller – the first thing it does is to spread it’s roots deeper. Otherwise the height won’t be stable and it will fall. I think similarly, this depression time is the time for us to grow our roots deeper. It’s the time to make our bases stronger and then there would be a time for us to grow taller.

These are the times that bring out the best in us. These are the times that make us think creatively. The theory already exists in Business – it’s called “Theory of Constraints“. Just treat it as a constraint and see how your mind cooks up new solutions. I keep wondering “What is that life demands from me?” in these times. I don’t have the answer yet, but I for sure know that it’s not something I have already done in the past.

Peace to all the people who are on this path of transformation.

Knowledge is Power

I think that I get a lot of ideas to blog about when I am in India. It’s been frantic one week I have been here, now that I have internet connection I can get back to blogging. When I am in US, a lot of stuff that comes out of me is very personal which I usually journal. In India though it’s different. My mind is filled with ideas for blogging here. So, here is something I have come across recently.

Who ever said that “Knowledge is Power” wasn’t joking. It’s true and I think there is a flippant side to that quote too. In India, you will come across a lot of elder people who use their ‘Knowledge’ to yield ‘Power’. India is a smorgasbord of forgotten traditions and new consuming habits. In this variety of feelings – the person who ‘claims’ to know the answer is the king. You see, you don’t necessarily have to be right because you could use your ‘elderness’ to make it right.

Recently my sister had a baby. My nephew shares his birthday with me now. And I was excited to see him. But it was not going to be that easy. There was this Aunt. Let’s call her – Aunt Kia(Know It All). Aunt Kia used her knowledge and put forward a rule. She said, I can’t see my nephew without hearing him cry. And after I see him, I need to give him some money as a gift. So, when I entered my the room, I literally closed my eyes and they made the baby cry – which I think is CRAZY. Once I heard him cry, I saw him and gave him a gift of Rs.500.

Now, I don’t mind following this weird tradition because all the elders were happy I did that (they expected me not to respect any traditions after living in US and marrying a Hindu). But what boggles my mind is that there is no logical explanation to this. And ‘Aunt Kia’ wields her power only because she can blurt out these kinds of things in everything we do. I have seen her in action in the past too – she has a age old tradition for everything, from taking a shower to raising a baby. But, no one questions her. Because then it would be chaos as you would be pitting your heads against the tradition. In all this craziness, ‘Aunt Kia’ happily paddles her way by throwing around commands. I am pretty sure every Indian family has one such ‘Aunt Kia’.

I think this is one aspect of Indian family where this ‘hidden knowledge’ of tradition gives immense power to the elders. I am not sure when does tradition stops and manipulation starts. It’s kinda easy to trespass that line.

On the other hand, I see another kind of power being yielded by the young people. A lot of young people know a lot about technology in this country. SMS, Email etc are so easy for these young people, but very difficult to comprehend for the elders in the household. So, in this case the youth uses it’s knowledge to wield power. But, at least it’s not based on some superstitions.

The real clash of ages happen when the traditions’ superstitions clash with new ages’ arrogance. I am not sure who will win eventually but I do know that it’s going to be a long battle. In the mean time keep gathering that knowledge.

Life in 3rd person

This has been on my mind from the past 2 months. I have been wanting to blog about it for such a long time. I may not sound very clear as the topic I want to blog about is very complex and when I bring it from the level of thoughts to level of words, some stuff does slip out though. Not everything I think of can be translated into words easily.

I have wondered about religion, spirituality and meditation for a long time. First I tried to take my refuge in my religion. But being not able to speak or read the native language of my God’s literature (as it was Arabic) I couldn’t be very successful. This was like 20 years back. So I gave up on religion and kinda didn’t pay much attention to God as an organized form of following till I met with the concept of Spirituality. There was this one book which I believe completely changed my belief system and made me admire and love ‘The God’ more and more.

It was ‘Conversations with God – Book 1‘. Even though it has a Christian twist I was able able to very successfully block it out as I did with my very own religion and just tune into what the Author was really saying. When you do that you really understand the book. Otherwise, you would end up judging the book by it’s Christian value connotations which could be good or bad based up on where you grow up in this country. Anyhow, that book introduced me to Spirituality. Mind you, I am not referring to ‘Secularism’ here. I was down that path after Islam didn’t work out for me. I adopted a formula where I treated all religions as one (being the Libran I am). So, Spirituality came after Secularism.

That’s there, we will get back to that part of the story shortly. I wanted to talk about another trait of me. From my childhood I have been verily fascinated by Brain/Mind/Cognitive studies (although the term Cognitive studies is something I learned couple of months back, I have been interested in that study for a long time). May be it was my Dad’s influence where he imprinted on my mind that mind is the most powerful thing in our lives, may be it’s the popular Hindu belief that says ‘Mind can either bond you or liberate you’. Not sure what it was, but I have been fascinated by mind studies and cool things you could do with it.

I guess the fact that it looked very interesting to me was I got one right with me (I mean my mind) and I can do all the cool thigs with it. This is when I started to learn Harry Lorayne‘s super memory tricks. This is where I trained myself in ‘Vedic Mathematics‘ where I could multiply multiple numbers simultaneously and quickly. It started out as a play thing for me. I would look for information around me and see how I can organize it in my mind. I would not hesitate to take any help from outside. Like eating ‘Okra’ or ‘Bhendi’ as we Indians call it – would enhance your mental prowess and guess what my favorite curry, growing up was? When I was 18 I read an amazing biography of ‘Ramanujam‘ – the greatest mathematician ever lived, called ‘The Man who knew Infinity‘. I was obsessed with Maths and Number Theory. I read that book back to back 3 times but still couldn’t control my obsession. I wanted to have a brain like Ramanujam. In that book the author mentions that Ramanujam’s favorite curry growing up was ‘Brinjal’ or the way Americans call it – ‘Egg Plant’. And I adopted it thoroughly. Eating Egg plant atleast 3-4 times a week. Even though I didn’t like it back then.

So, to make the story short. When you come across Spirituality you also come across a very important tool of which is widely employed by many – Meditation. It was about mind control and I was hooked. Looking back – every religion has some kind of ritual built in where people can get into ‘meditative state’. Muslims pray and count the ‘Tasbih‘. Hindu’s pray and sit in ‘Dhyanam’. Sufism followers get into whirling to get into that state. So, this organized religions have all some way of rituals instilled within them so that they will let us have that one moment of zen.

But at the Spirituality level this is employed very openly and encouraged. But again, Spirituality is like a nameless river. Religions are all like named rivers. No matter how cool Spirituality may sound like but still it has it’s boundaries or edges. It’s still organized and any organized system inherently incorporates things that someday will break. Because to be complete and whole we have to include or take into consideration EVERYTHING. (This is where you should consider my warning of not being able to translate my thoughts into words, again)

So I realized that even Spirituality has it’s short comings and I just focused on Meditation. This was interesting phase and it still is for me. Now, we come to the point I want to put across. I know there are many variations in meditation again. But I think no matter what path you take in Meditation, all the paths are always leading to one destination. And that is ‘Self-Awareness’. That word has been used in so many contexts by now, each of you reading that word ‘Self-Awareness’ has different interpretation. So, let me tell explain what I mean by that.

The state of Self-Awareness is a gradual one. For some lucky people it’s instant. Like 1% of the whole humanity gets to Self-Awareness instantaneously. But since this blog is for the rest 99% I am going ahead with the statement that Self-Awareness is a gradual achievement. When you reach complete Self-Awareness you are in nirvana state. Nothing bothers you. Nothing concerns you. You function in this world perfectly, but nothing in this world will affect you.

So, how does this Meditation lead one to Self-Awareness? If you take all meditative processes and traditions there is something very common in all of them. It’s called – “Watching”. Yep. Watching. Watching the inner watcher who is watching the world. You see within us lie a powerful force which is functioning in a perfect way. There is something that helps us to pump our blood, breaths automatically, make the whole body function in perfect harmony. This is the core. A lot of people call it with lot many names. Atma, Soul, Higher Self, God etc.

Self-Awareness is the state where there is no difference between you and this Core. Where you are ALWAYS AWARE that You are this Core. Meditation kick starts this awareness process. So, how do you know whether you have started it? By watching. Watching your thoughts, feelings, actions without prejudice or judgement. As you start to watch yourself you will start to see how things are moving in the 4 dimension of space and time. This watching is very difficult in the beginning but with enough practice you will get to used to it.

Here is the beauty of it. Once you get to used to this watching – you will start to live life in a 3rd person. It’s as if you have separated yourself from self and you are living life in 3rd person. That’s what I mean when I say living life in 3rd person. Like some people refer to themselves in 3rd person, people who are advancing in meditation are living life in 3rd person, not just referring their names. This is such a powerful idea. That’s what you reap after years and years of meditation. Nirvana doesn’t come in few days. First comes awareness and then Nirvana follows. And meditation enables it.

So now if you look back to religions – we said that they have rituals which basically give a glimpse of what Mediatation does. So to reach a 3rd person life – you have to spend a lot of time in religion. But you can do it with meditation in short period of time. It’s an ardous process. We really don’t want to know what goes through our heads. We are so good at being in denial with our own thoughts and feelings. But once we start to watch and once we gather courage to face our internal stuff, we emerge victorious and happy. It doesn’t end there.

Scientists seriously believe that there are about 11 dimensions in our world. Google “String Theory” or watch this video. But we are only aware of 3 all the time. So where are the rest of the 8? If you take time into consideration you still have 7 more. I believe that those 7 are not outside of us. They are within us. Those 7 remaining dimensions are the stages or persons we will have to go within us to reach that core.

Once you start to watch your thought process in 3 person, after some time you would go one level higher. 4th person. You would be watching the watcher who is watching the watcher. It’s hard. Just imagine it. Close your eyes and see yourself sitting or standing or whatever you are doing right now. Now as you observe yourself try to pay attention to the person/entity who is observing you. I know I sound crazy, but if you can’t never mind. This is what I have learned and this is something I believe. As I go on my own meditation path, it fills me with wondrous possibilities.

Believe me life in 3rd person is really fascinating.

Role of Creativity in Consciousness

It’s been a long time I have blogged and I have been wanting to blog about this topic for a long time. Recently Lynn came up with an idea of having our own household TED talks. So, last Friday I did a TED talk on this topic and it gave me an opportunity to gather all my ideas in one place. I also uploaded a PDF of that talk in the end of this post.

To start with I have 3 basic theories that intertwine to form this grand picture.

Quantum Physics, NLP Theory
Thinking in genenral, Creativity Frameworks
Creation Theory (Not the Church one)

Let’s look at each of them:

Theory # 1: Quantum Physics

It’s a very well known fact that once we break down and dig deep into physical things, there a whole new world out there. Take a strongest microscope and take a deep look, the world within things is totally different. It’s not like the way it has been described – a planetary system. That’s classical physics take on it. Quantum physics says that at a quantum level, things are made of something called “Quanta”. This Qauanta is not a thing, but it’s a energy packet.

In other words this ‘Energy Packet’ is also called ‘Possibility Packet’. Meaning, it’s a proven thing in Quantum physics that at any given time we can only measure one thing of a Quanta. Either ‘Location’ or ‘Speed’. It means that if I go out to find the speed of a Quanta that’s exactly I would find. If I seek location, that’s exactly what I would get. But say, I would want to know at a given time where quanta is at a given time and what is it’s speed – it’s not possible. Think about it. The cop need only find out your speed to check if your are speeding. You just need to find out where your car is parked in a parking lot. You cannot figure out both at the same time.

So this leads us to the fact that we are somehow getting what we are intending for. It means that at quantum level, these energy packets – quanta give us what we seek/intent. Meaning we pre-destine the possibility of what these quanta would be. Meaning we choose what these quanta would be. That is the reason why these are also called ‘Possibility Packets’.

Now, hold that thought and zoom out to regular physicality level. This draws us to conclude that our thoughts basically affect the possibility of certain thing we are seeking. Our thoughts are in turn tied up with our behaviors, habits etc. In other words, what we observe has direct relation to what we intend or looking for.

Remember that, we are going to recall that again later.

Matter Vs. Energy

Let’s talk about matter and energy for a short time. We are used to seeing matter around us all the time. We also see energy in various forms – electrical, chemical(batteries). Long time back Einstein proved with his very popular equation:

E = mc²

In other words energy could be equated with matter with something else. Basically telling us that energy and matter are same things in different forms.

Rehash – Top down approach:

Let’s rehash what we have learned and try to make a connection.

We know that energy and matter are same
If we dug deep into matter(or energy) we would find it filled with possibility packets
These packets behave according to the intention of the Observer
More importantly, the observer can totally change the possibility packets to change by changing the thoughts.

That’s good enough about Theory # 1. Let’s take a look at the next one.

Thoery # 2: Thinking and Creativity Tools

Our thinking consists of 2 components:

Perception
Logic

We all tend to equate logic with thinking. When we refer to thinking, we unanimously tend to think of logic. The logic would say that Obama got enough super delegates to become a democratic candidate. We are obsessed with logic. So much that we totally ignore the ‘Perception’ part and just straight out jump to logic. What we forget is ‘Perception’ is what gives fodder for ‘Logic’ to work on. Taking the Obama example, if we look at perceptions – it would mean that for the first time in history an African American could be a President of America. It’s a powerful thing. You cannot deduct that through logic. You need perception for that.

A lot of daily problems we come across are mostly to do with ‘Perception Errors’ rather than ‘Logical Errors’. We have mastered the logical part of our thinking. So much so that, we can either give it to the computer to figure it out or outsource it to figure it out. Perception is what makes us more humane.

So, how can I be more creative?

If you think about it – Creativity is nothing more than coming up with more options, choices, solutions. So, generally if you expand your perception –> you expand the input –> there by you give more choices to work on at logical level –> there by you get more outcomes, more options and more optimal solutions.

You can use many perception expanding tools. One of the popular one is Edward de Bono’s Six thinking hats.

Let’s check out next theory.

Theory # 3: Basic creation theory (not the one Church is proposing)

This involves all the new age gurus. This is more spiritual and involves a lot of teachers who have been talking and spreading knowledge about this. For example – The Secret.

We usually have 60,000 thoughts per day. And recall from Theory # 1 that our thoughts change possibilities. So, imagine each thought is altering some possibility. Meaning we have about 60,000 alterations going on in our one day at Quantum level.

How in the hell do I manage those 60,000 alterations?

Welcome Feelings.

One feeling is worth a thousand thoughts!

We can keep those 60,000 thoughts in check with the help of feelings.

Remember what we learned in Theory # 1. Our thoughts alter possibilities –> meaning, our thoughts alter or can also create possibilities –> meaning, our thoughts can create matter or energy (Thanks Einstein)

Let’s take a visual representation:

Here are our thoughts:

This is how Feelings Orchestrate thoughts:

It’s time to mix all these 3 theories and see what come up. Before we do that, let’s note the key points.

Observer changes possibility
Creativity enhances perception
Perception is at a thought level
Feelings affect multiple thoughts
Observer have feelings

The Big Picture is:

So, if you look at it – creativity plays a very important role in our lives. At a sub-conscious level it helps us to perceive more options and there by helps us create the life we want.

Here is the Role of Creativity in Consciousness slides in PDF format.

Movie themes I love

I watched Iron Man yesterday. It was kinda cheesy, but it did satisfy the geek in me. As I was journaling today I realized I like movies for with mostly two themes(so far).

I like movies where the protagonist does something ingeniously. Something he/she builds, or something original. Something new and creative.
I like movies where the protagonist starts out to be an underdog and eventually wins it.

This itself is such a revelation to me. It speaks a lot about the inner me though. I love to create stuff ingeniously and I love to start off in anything as an underdog.

On becoming a freelancer

You know there are sometimes in our lives that we have this inner voice telling us something but we ignore it for a long time and then go through all the ‘physical’ obstacles and then later realize that the inner voice was right in the first place. Something similar happened to me recently.

After I got back from India – I went on frantically looking for a job. I think I attended about 20-25 interviews. I got 3 offers which I didn’t take. While I was interviewing it was becoming very clear to me that the kind of work I am seeking – freelancing would do. But I was really too scared to do that. I was scared to become a freelancer because I was not sure what kind of life it would lead to. Sangita has already made her mind and she became one when she got here, but I was not sure whether it would work out if we both did freelancing.

One thing led to another and after 1 month of searching for a job I realized that the reason why I didn’t like most of the companies I interviewed is because I didn’t identify myself and my values with what the company is trying to accomplish. So, freelancing is one way where I can be very particular about my project selection and totally enjoy working on it.

Now I am a freelancer. How did it change my life? So, far it’s been very good. I am lucky to have some good friends who got me in touch with some really cool people. Slowly I am building up my network and I can totally see all my fears falling apart. Freelancing does made me realize a bunch of things:

I need to be very self-disciplined. I cannot get up late and stay and work in my jammies all day. It kinda puts me in bad mood by the end of the day.
I need to move for a change – I mean I cannot work from home every day. I need to go to nearby coffee shop or a park to work
I need to be very organized with my time. Still working on this one. But my calendar has never been so busy
I need to be very organized with money. As a process of basically trying to write off most of the work related stuff and in a world where your pay check is not a regular occurrence, I need to be very careful with how I manage money
I need to enjoy the freedom which I have. No more stay till 5pm policy. If the work is done, I am out and I can utilize that time to go workout or just cook amazing dinner.

Not sure how future will roll out, but in this moment I am really excited to be a freelancer and I totally enjoy the freedom it gives me.

Why do I like to create Software?

I am looking for a job right now. I have had couple of discussions with some recruiters, companies in my first week here. A couple of people asked me a very interesting question – “Why do I like to create/write software?” or in other words, why do I like to do what I do? I knew the answer to the question to some extent, but I realized that I need to look deeper to get to more core reasons. So I did my bit – journaled, meditated etc and I think now I have good enough reasons to blog about it.

So, here we go – the list of reasons “Why do I like to create Software?“.

5. Creative Canvas: Like for a painter who plays within his canvas area, like for a sculptor who dabbles with his chisel and carve out the image from stone, Software environment gives me a creative play ground where I can test out my ideas. It’s the playground for my creative self to express itself. I write programs that crash and then I make them work and once they are working fine, I make them better. I talk to myself, I try to find inspiration, I read, I discuss, I think deep until I find a solution to my problem at hand within this area of canvas. It fulfills my creative needs and gives me a satisfaction of I created something new.

4. Problem Solving: Software is a very specific instance of problem solving. In this area I can apply my problem solving skills which are generic to the context of software. “Breaking it down”, “Problem re-statement”etc problem solving tools can equally be applied to Software and the outcome or result of those techniques is most of the time immediate. So, not only it’s sharpens my problem solving skills but it provides feedback and lets me improve my skills in that area.

3. Fun: Let’s me just admit, if it weren’t fun I would have never been in Software field at all. This process of taking up a problem or task, thinking about it, applying my creativity to it, trying out a solution, gathering feedback, re-trying the solution, learning, perfecting the solution – is an immensely gratifying as well as a fun filled process. I always imagine myself as a 5 year old kid with a paint brush, having fun with what I am doing. What I create may not solve world hunger, but it’s unique to me, it came from me, it’s an identity for me and it gives me a perspective of where I stand out in this world.

2. Interaction: It’s not any fun to write software inside an Igloo. It’s no fun to write software where I use the same solution again and again. Having other people who are also writing software around me and interacting with them makes it worthy. I realized (about myself) that my learning accelerates when I have a very quality technical interaction with other quality software people. Learning by reading, practicing comes next. Interacting, discussing, talking it loud about any software topic with others is such a creative process. It enhances my point of views and makes me a better software developer. I take back all those learning and try to adopt them in my daily programming.

1. Greater Good: This is a little tricky to explain. I would love to be a part of team which is solving world’s biggest problems – like poverty, global warming etc. But I also understand my position and purpose in life. So, I try to look at the work I do and think of what ‘need’, is my software fulfilling?. I am not big on bashing corporates for the sake of non-profits. It would be silly to do that. A lot of Open source zealots do like to bash anything Microsoft. I think it’s silly to do that too. When you look at the bigger picture, it’s the Ying and Yang.

I try to look at whether my software is meeting the required needs in the best possible way or not. That itself is inspiring to me. Yes, my software doesn’t help global leaders to take preventive actions on eradicating poverty (yet!), but I am happy that it solves a very tricky business process and make my client’s life as easy as clicking a button (so far!). I would love to solve big problems but I always try to see, irrespective of how big or small the issue at hand is, whether what I am doing is aligned to the needs of my client. That’s greater good for me.

As I was typing this, I got a great feeling of Deja Vu. I realized that almost all the above reasons I mentioned fall in the categories/bucket of what Maslow has proposed long time back. So, I checked Maslow’ hierarchy of needs and realized how most of the reasons why I create software fit into Maslow’ hierarchy beautifully.

Stage Actors Vs. Backstage Crew

The other day I was having a chat with one of the very bright colleagues of mine. He mentioned something that stuck with me and kind gave me a big picture of what I have been thinking of. He mentioned about how on a broader scale job skills are divided. I am currently looking for job and also trying to get into a career which not only would be challenging but also deeply meaningful to me. What he mentioned kinda gave me a picture of what I should be looking for in an Ideal Job. Ok, here is the scoop on the story.

There are 2 kinds of job skills – to make it more analogous, let’s consider Theater performances. You have people who perform various roles on the stage and then there is a whole crew which makes the show happen behind the scenes. Now if we generalize we can cast them in basically 2 groups(very broad).

Stage actors
Backstage crew

So, in the area of job skills – Stage actors are the ones that deal basically with one idea – ‘CRUDding on the client data‘(TM). All these guys do is to take the content which gets created or exists and show it to client in various ways so that it’s easy for the client to modify and maintain the data. Irrespective of job descriptions and technology used almost all of the people in this bucket(Stage Actors) do this perennial task. Your American Idol in this area would be DHH

Backstage crew are the ones who deal with ‘In-Memory computation‘. These are the people who pull the strings (or threads, or processes). These are the experts of code optimizations and innovative algorithm designers. These people make the machine do all the grunt work using automation and make it work the way they want it to be. Your American Idol in this area would be ZSFA

A simple example would be of Facebook. When it started, Facebook is nothing but a bunch of PHP files and MySQL database. The stage actors did a great job of making it popular, but then when it started to have millions of page hits – this actually made the expert backstage crew to step in and write those smart programs that can deal with those millions of hits. In the early stage the backstage crew was present too but their role was not that prominent, in the later stage the stage actors are still there but their role has become one of the important role, not just the only important role.

Serendipity again I guess, it so happened the day we talked about this – Steve Yegge came out with his stunning post of ‘Get that job at Google‘. If you carefully analyze what he says or the skill set he is looking for, he is actually referring to the back stage crew guys.

So what can I do to advance my career of 7+ years which I spent in ‘CRUDding with client data’? I took the clue from Steve and got myself 2 books.

As I go through these books, I realize they have a deep learning curve and probably it’s a good thing. You just don’t get to become a stage director (part of backstage crew) over night. I am going to invest my time and energy and see where it goes. I already enjoyed couple of cool moments when I try to implement some of the ideas in those books in Ruby code.

Also I have decided to learn Erlang. I think that learning a functional language actually twists my brain cells in such a way that I would end up being more creative and start to think about computation in very different terms. In addition to that I am going ahead with Flex learning too. The reason why I love Flex is that it gives super wings to my programming imagination. I can actually write Actionscript code and generate a visual way of saying things.

My immediate idea would be take for example – take binary search, implement it in Ruby or Erlang and then write a program in Flex which would visually follow, in slow motion how binary search works and shows it in the browser for the user! Now that’s what I call complete learning.

Note: The credit goes to Ratheesh for discussing with me the pattern he saw. I added in more of my flavor to it.

Bricks and Sheep

I find two aspects of Indian system that are very disturbing to me. I try to tell about it to everyone I come across here in India, but not everyone understands it or sees it the way I see it. Hear me out.

1. Bricks – The Educational system: Whenever I think of the Educational system and the IT training system in India, it reminds me of that song “another brick in the wall“. The system just churns out bricks after bricks. Same studies, curriculum and no creativity. I am more close to IT training system here, so I want to pick out an example from there.

Recently I happen to go to the IT training capital of Hyderabad – Ameerpet. I was there to checkout Adobe’s Flex training. I was shocked to see what has happened to the place. The place is filled with posters and banners – everywhere about all the technology training they are offering. The place is filled with pamphlets. Oh, let me correct myself – the place is ‘littered’ with pamphlets. All the time I was there, I was actually walking on them. People just randomly give out details of IT training in those pamphlets. When some guy offered me one, I said no thanks and you should look at his face. He was shocked to see some new response from people. No one there says no to the junk that gets handed over. They just take it and drop it right there on the street!

So, anyhow my point is not about the junk yard IT training. It’s about how all these million training institutes are giving the same training and churning out same damn bricks. A typical Indian guy comes out of college and heads straight to one of these institutes. This is the place where his American dreams are crafted and sharpened (Another blog post on American dreams later) He learns some course which is in hype and everyone else is learning. Putting in no love in what he does. Later enters the market where everyone else and their mom has the same skill set he has.

There is no differentiation. There is no creativity. The training institutes makes a lot of money. The trainers actually mint money. If the trainer is somewhat good, then there is a queue for his classes. I used to attend a class where there were 1000+ students in one class. We used to watch the trainer in a TV sitting in some 50th row. The trainer also can get weird with their hubris – once I attended a very popular class on EJB (don’t bother if you don’t know what it is – the world doesn’t care) where the trainer came to class drunk! He did a great job of lecturing though.

So, my point is – almost all the training institutes do the same old training and make a lot of money. The end result is we have a lot of Indian techie population who are trained in same things. There is a reason for these bricks and that’s my second point.

2. Sheep – The herd mentality of Indians: At my job I tend to mingle with everyone. I talk to almost everyone and check what they do and how they are doing whatever they are doing. I try to talk to young people who joined the company recently and ask them questions as to what they want to become. I don’t blame them for not knowing what they want, but I do feel uncomfortable by the way they are thinking.

These guys, most of them are in IT field because:

Someone told them that there is more money in it.
Their cousin did it.
It’s cool to sit in front of a computer all day (You can browse!)
Most frequent and important reason – Everyone else is doing it.

I feel so sorry for them. All these sheep that are coming in to IT world are just going to be some tech slaves to someone in some corner of the world. Not many of them are in Tech field because they actually love it. Very few and very rare to find a non-sheep in there. These guys just blindly follow what others are doing. They have some ideas about how they do “follow the often followed path”. Everyone thinks that they are doing it different, but frigging no. They just think that they do, but they are just following someone in the tech field.

When they ask me questions about my career and my life, I always tell them that I always tried to differentiate. That’s how I got so far. I always wanted to stand out in my field. So, I end up learning different language other than Java (gasp!). I try to read people, software management books even though I am not doing management actively (gasp!). I try to draw up my thoughts, ideas etc on white paper rather than typing the code first (gasp!, you should look at my school exam papers – they are filled with my creative art. Hehe)

I believe we are all unique. If God intended or made us same then we all would be carpenters – Hint: Jesus. But nope. He made us unique. It means that we as human beings, every one of us,has something in us which is so unique that there exists nothing else like that in this universe. It’s our job to find that out and just enhance it. Viola. The world would love you for just doing that. To follow some dumb, rotten well followed path means to ignore the uniqueness within us and disrespect the uniqueness that Universe has bestowed upon us.

My unique interests are Technology, Software, Economics, Spirituality, Cognitive Science – all mixed up together. I add a little of all of the above when I write code or pick out a language to learn.

So, coming back to sheep. This herd mentality actually hurts companies, teams, even our country. These sheep produce crappy software, crappy team management etc., because they are not in the business because they love it but someone else has led them there. I know a lot of guys, who actually, literally cried in front of me because they couldn’t work on Java! They were frigging working on far more advanced projects and technolgy than Java. But they were whining about not being able to work on Java. Why? Because their friends we able to go to US of A because they knew Java. Phew! It’s like their hands are in India and heads are in US.

So, I conclude:

Sheep Mentality + Brick Training == One nation of followers

If you think seriously, so far India hasn’t done anything pioneering in Software/Technology even after having so many tech aware people. We are all good followers, but never make good leaders. I think it has something to do with those 400 years British ruled us. The imperialistic mind tend to follow instructions a lot than making it’s own rules. We lost it so much that now we have to learn Ayurveda from Westerners. We are a very good nation for BPO work. And if you come across any great leader in India, just look back and see where the person did his/her education or work in the past – I bet it’s some western country. Don’t believe me? Checkout Gandhi’s history!

So I end this with one last thing, if we ever do a evolution chart for Indian Tech people it would be something like this:

Brick -> Sheep Evolution