Chicken Soup for the Scientific Soul

Quotes by Feynman :

"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it."

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool.

I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.

Chicken Soup for the Techno-Entrepreneural soul

This is the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005 at Stanford University.

Quotes by Steve :

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

Take this SOP with a pinch of salt

An anonymous quote that I found in a cookie goes "To eat is human, but to cook is divine". This perfectly describes my attitude towards cooking. From time immemorial, my passion for cooking (and eating) has never faltered.

Throughout my early childhood and adolescence, I have always been one of the best cooks in my family. Whenever I tasted something out of the ordinary, I was always piqued, and tried my best to find out more about the dish.

By virtue of the 10,000 plus taste buds (see letter of reference from family physician for proof)on my tongue and my shark-like sense of smell, I was the official food-taster in the Balaji household. Food tasting is a rigorous task, and requires extreme mental concentration. It also taught me to take courageous and risky decisions, like deciding to be truthful when my father asked me how his Sambar tasted.

In my house I was the youngest member to be allowed access to the kitchen stove. In what proved to be a seminal experience, I prepared Maggi noodles for the first time when I was only in 3rd standard. Making Maggi at such a young age gave me significant experience in cooking, and has served as an inspiring force which has kick started my lifelong tryst with cuisine. I was completely involved in all the stages of making Maggi, right from using correct type of scissors to cut the masala packets, to arranging a fork and spoon at 120 degree angle over the finished delicacy.

What I learned from this is ability of independent thinking and research. I learnt what research really means, the importance of hard work and perseverance. While in my initial years I attacked the problem of maximizing taste, later on I moved on to the most important problem mankind is facing today : how to make a healthy meal while maximizing taste , speed of devour-ment, and looks. I never gave up, and dutifully had my parents and younger brother sample every dish I made. Considering how obstinate they can be, this speaks volumes of my leadership skills and delegation abilities.

I believe discipline, determination and ability to work hard are qualities essential in a research cook. I look forward to a fulfilling career in cooking and particular, I relish the prospect of experimenting in interdisciplinary fields. I have sizeable experience in this matter. A selected list of my most innovative and bold dishes are as follows:

1) Ice-cream –la – Tomato sauce
2) Rabid Ragullas – Rasgullas dipped in cream colored phlegm-like molasses-derivative.
3) Brown Sugar – A highly intoxicating powdered mix of Marie biscuits, cashew, pista and sugar.
4) Curd Bread – Quick snack of curd, garam masala and groundnuts sandwiched between bread.

It is my firm belief that no other university can offer the exposure, experience and multicuisinal experience that Rice university can offer. And I have to admit the name of your university carries enormous symbolic weightage. I would thus like to submit my application to your university, and hope to receive admission, fee waiver and free meals.

Ignorance is bliss

PS: To all the ECE,EE undergrads who like me never paid attention in college but now entertain romantic thoughts of doing further studies and making seminal contributions to world at large.. do not lose hope, there a good chance the textbooks will be rewritten and your ignorace will cease to haunt you...

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207403521

A Hairy Tale Ending

(first appeared in www.thousandwordpicture.blogspot.com)

Henry Baldacci hated his last name. Baldacci is definitely not as cool a surname as Bond or Balaji, but it isn’t something to be horrified about either, like Bush or Bairappa. Henry however was 18 years young and balding. Every morning his pillow seemed to have more hair than his head. He felt as a chicken must feel while its neck is stroked by the fine blade of a butcher. Childhood dreams of becoming a rock star and romancing bimbos seemed to be getting thinner and thinner….
It was the eve of his 18th birthday. Henry had two things to do before he officially became a man a) Get a tattoo b) Either get a respectable last name which didn’t hint at his (soon to be) unhairy status, or some sort of treatment for the time being. The former, being comparatively easy is no more the subject of this post. About the latter. He met up with his underpants friend (chuddi dost, if you will. Meanings do get lost in translation) Nick. “Wasssssssssssup maaan !!!” Shouted Nick, clad in a shorts, sea blue shirt and a hat that looked more like paper dosa. Nick, having discovered he was one seventh Jamaican now wore a Jamaican accent and dreadlocks. Angered by his ample dreadlocks, Henry asked him to shut the hell up.
So how’s it going with Shruti maaan, countered Nick. Henry and Nick were exchange program students at the IIM, Bangalore. And Henry was trying to convince Shruti how spending quality time with a (soon to be) tattooed American hunk might not spell disaster to her family after all.
“Forget her and get the car out, we are going to Dr Batra’s. And get rid of that hat, jackass”
“Maan , never heard of a pub like that before.. So you get some different sort of stuff there eh … and what about the drugs, are they medicinal too ..he he “
“Its not a pub”
“Whaaaat? So we are actually going to a doctor??!”
Henry painfully and shamefully told Nick that Dr Batra’s was a homeopathy clinic. Nick’s eyes took eternity to swivel on to Henry’s pate, during which time Nick was struggling to keep his mouth line as parallel to his hat as possible.
“So, you going there for stomach trouble??” Nick’s mouth gave up all pretense of being a straight line and assumed the semblance of a lopsided grin.
“ Cut it out and get the car, dude” Henry was definitely not in a good mood today.
“Why don’t you go by yourself, maan. The car has hardly any petrol by the way"
“Then people will think somethings wrong with me”
“Oh so nothings wrong eh?” (After an afterthought) “Maaaaaaan”
“Of course, nothings wrong. Just have a bad case of dandruff” Nick’s mouth began the struggle again. “And if you come, people will not know who’s got issues. You don’t look too healthy with your dreadlocks and all ,y’know” Fed up with his friends cowardice, Nick resignedly agreed but told him not to expect birthday presents for the next decade.
Nick got out the four wheels and both of them proceeded to Dr Batras. The tension was palpable. They parked the car far away from the clinic and furtively looked around. Convinced that no one they knew were in sight, they rushed out of the car and made a beeline for the clinic. Nick entered the clinic first. No sooner had he proceeded two steps ahead when he turned, and laughing uncontrollably he dragged Henry back to the porch. Henry looked mutinous. Before Nick could stop him again, Henry shrugged himself free and summoned his guts to walk straight in. And then he walked straight out. Although he knew the answer, he hurled a perfunctory “Why’d younotstopme???!!!” at Nick. But it was too late.
Shruti now was standing at the clinic door. She had clearly been accompanying someone elderly to the clinic. “Whats wrong with you two? In India people generally don’t act like raving lunatics at the doctors place” “Unless they are at a mental hospital…. she continued, extremely pleased with her sense of humor.
For Henry however , it nothing remotely close to humor. He felt completely exposed , balder than the baldest man alive. Nick asked me to accompany him, he shouted shrilly. Even a four year old with buck teeth could have sensed what Henry was trying to hide. Eyes swivelling on to Henry’s pate, Shruti desperately tried to keep her mouth as straight as possible. She failed spectaculary.
The tragic final scene looked like this to a concerned passerby : A girl and a dreadful looking dreadlocked foreigner rolling hopelessly with laughter outside a respectable clinic, with a albino kid looking at them defiantly and angrilty, all the while trying to force his wisps of hair to defy gravity and the forces of wind. This story being set in India, the passerby played his part by offering no help and continued walking with a chalta hai kinda attitude.
Unable to laugh any further, the two looked sheepishly at Henry while their brains raced in time to come up with possible words of comfort. Shilpa decided to humor him just this once. “So about the movie plan I cancelled last Sunday….”
“It’s still on this week at PVR” gushed Henry with bated breath, reminding Nick of the friendly IIMB dog which would wag its tail at the slightest hope of reward.
Ok, just this once... said Shruti.
Fine. I’ll pick you up this weekend. Henry barely managed to keep his cool as he walked back to the car.
“So its goodbye to Dr Batra eh “asked Nick from behind the steering wheel.
“Yup, goodbye to good old Dr Batra” told Henry. “And Baldacci’s definitely not such a bad name after all” thought Henry.
(This story is a product of my unbridled imagination, and is fiction to the best of my knowledge. Any resemblance to real people must be an act of God )

And then came the smile

(first appeared in www.thousandwordpicture.blogspot.com)

“Keep steady man, be cool, be cool “I told myself. She was 200 meters away from me. Immediately I sucked in my burgeoning paunch, adjusted my Infineon badge so it was prominently displayed (why I do this every time, God only knows. Even the sweepers in ITPL, Bangalore have their own badges to show off).I walked towards her with an air of nonchalance. She was my junior from college, and a damm pretty one at that. I had never spoken to her in college though; this must have probably been due to the aura of nerdiness I used to radiate back then. Now the aura has turned into a small halo, but is still definitely there.

This is my big chance, I told myself. My plan was simple (too simple, some of you might argue). As I strutted past her with my stomach tucked in, she just had to notice me and say Hi, I reasoned (the smallness of my halo of nerdiness being prominent in my reasoning). I would then pretend to notice her and feign surprise. In my surprised state, I would blurt out how beautiful (and sexy, if I still had my guts around me till then ) she looked in her maroon outfit today. She would then have to blush, I reasoned again. And so on continued my reasoning. I’m actually very good at reasoning , be it logical reasoning, verbal reasinong, reasoning to evade blame, to gain time etc.

Alas! Today my reasoning made me lose time instead. Before I knew it, she was only 20 meters away from me. And to add salt to the injury, she walked with this huge swarthy bouncer like character next to her. What I had imagined to be a magnified shadow when I first saw her had suddenly turned corporeal. Complimenting her sexiness seemed akin to committing suicide now. Why can’t I be one of those pathetic losers who miraculously seem to have a hot babe stuck to one of their shoulders, I sighed at the world in general and at God in particular. I resigned myself to fate. I decided to go with the ‘strong hunk’ look. Puffing my chest and narrowly avoiding a coughing fit in the process, I walked majestically towards the ‘couple’, all ready to supremely ignore them.

And then came the smile. Bang; without warning, when I least expected it, when all my defences were low. This girl has one of the cutest smiles in ITPL, and that’s saying a lot. ITPL has at least fifteen thousand people, to hazard a guess (as with all my guesses the figure may be considerably off the actual value, so please take this with a cup of salt). We can safely assume that 40 % of them at least are females, which gives us a minimum of six thousand females. Of these at least four thousand would be in the age group of 18 and 27 years. Needless to say, every girl in this age group is trying her best to look gorgeous. Let’s say about one fourth of them are successful. That leaves us with thousand gorgeous females in ITPL. My girl (‘my’ sounds possessive and ridiculously untrue, but what the heck it’s my blog) would rank somewhere in the top twenty to thirty – close to 99.9 percentile.

Anyway, about the smile. She did notice me, and flashed her perfect teeth at my two day stubble. Her face was framed by two narrow strands of jet black hair and her right cheek showed the hint of a dimple. It was a warm smile to say the least and a super hot smile to say the most. And she waved at me in a silly girlish manner which I found very arresting. And even more embarrassing was the fact that I dropped my strong hunk attitude before one could say ‘strong hunk’ and stood engaged in a silly hand wave exchange program with her for a full 3 seconds. And even more embarrassing was the fact that the bouncer guy started waving back !! I smelled something fishy here, and I was not standing at the seafood counter of Civet.

She came forward and introduced me to the bouncer guy. Believe it or not, the bouncer guy was actually a co-worker of hers. I still looked quizzically at him, I had not taken well the act of being waved back sillily(dictionary check) by a hot babe and a monster man at the same time. She explained. Turns out during the time we were separated by a distance of 200m to 20 m, the effects of my mental reasoning were quite physically conspicuous. I had narrowly missed colliding with who dustbins, trod on the toes of a elderly man, walked mostly on the wrong side of the walkway leaving big brown footsteps glistening on the otherwise spotless recently cleaned surface.I had even walked headlong into a nervous gang of girls without noticing, scaring them away from Coffee Day Café. The bouncer guy had found this very funny (I hate his guts by the way) and had motioned my girl to observe me.

I grinned sheepishly at them with a men will be boys kind of look. And walked away huffed. However the after effects of her smile lingered with me, strong and everlasting like the smell of my socks (note to self: quota of one disgusting comparison over for this post). Everything in the mall began to look brighter, and my work for the day didn’t seem so hectic after all. I was even prepared to walk all the way upto the barber shop to get my unsightly stubble replaced by an irresistible clean shaven silkiness (if half of what the Gillete Mach 3 advertisement promises is true)

Ah, the simple pleasures of life! A smile is all it takes to make the world a better place. So I need to stop cribbing and start smiling more even if others take me for a dork, I reasoned.

Learn to Forget

Yesterday Chandrika and I won First place in the anagram contest held by EMF (elctro motive force ) club in Infineon.Yay!!! Its been helluva long time since I have competed in any event, let alone actually winning something.

Competition is in todays world a part of everyones life, we are dead if we forget to compete in the a proverbial rat race.Or stated in an optimistic way, competitions and contests keep us alive !! This fact is sometimes easy to forget, especially for those people who are in a relatively stable job, whose basic necessities in life are met. These are the people who need to be all the more careful about what awaits them in the future. Its not like they dont have goals or passions in life. They have loads of aspirations, but what they lack is the COURAGE or GUTS to carry out their ideas. Getting out of the comfort zone which they build around themselves can be very painful, and many of them succumb to the withdrawal symptoms and relinquish their dreams. They are the people who are prisoners of their past successes.

In todays information age past success or experience is sometimes the most worthless quality you could possess. Nowadays, a persons success is measured by his adaptability or response to situations he could never fathom. When I look back at the last 3-4 years of my life most of my conjectures and theories about my future were not to happen. My life has been a roller coaster ride with joys and successes, as well as frustrations and failures. But these successes and failures always amaze me, I never seem to have a clue about either !

So I'm now trying to adopt a new way of looking at things, after being mesmerized by CK Prahalad and Gary Hamels signature book - Competing for the future. Heres the funda :

Its not about learning baby,
its about forgetting !
You have experience, maybe
but do you have innocence ??

So high and mighty yesterday you were,
that you forgot you might have to compete tomorrow.
Blunt are your arrows, broken is your bow,
How the hell will you compete,
with those kids with AK 47's ??

Forget your arrows,give up your bow
Practice using the gun,without any ego.

If the above lines are a poem ,I'll be dammed
but you will never get so much wisdom elsewhere,together crammed.

Calendar man

Its been a long long while since my last post, Ive been really busy (note to self : see randy pauschs’ time management video again). To break the ice, here is a 20 min post.

Ive lately been using the Outlook Calender whenever and wherever possible to “improve my efficiency ”. Ive realized that just putting down bits and pieces of things down in paper and then assigning them a deadline in the Calender actually does save some amount of time per day, infinitisimal though it may be in the beginning . The first few days you try this the results are invariably hilarious – My list had things like

Use red color toothbrush,
Meet [amees] at bus stop
Phone friend and apologise for telling the truth about him – DONE


Ive come up with some simple conventions .. like words enclosed in square brackets to be read in reverse – so I can keep some stuff encoded from “evil” eyes..

After a long day's work I go home and check the calendar for a series of “DONE” remarks against all my tasks. If most of them have this remark, Im happy !!
Ah, the simple pleasures of life !!

Damm this post took 23 min… one task wont have a DONE remark tonight :(

Home Bound

Bumpy Roads
Half Filled Bus
Window Seat
Sudden Break
Screeching Halt
Anxious Whispers
Lucky Escape
Relieved Sighs
Speedy Recovery
Endless Highway
Deserted Landscape
Rustling Breeze
Animated Discussions
Ridiculous PJ's
Furtive Glances
Knowing Smile
Traffic Jam
Horning Cars
Teeming Malls
Garbags Dumps
Traffic Jam
Roadside Temples
Mercedes Benz
Snakelike Streets
Sleepy Suburbs
Idling Engine
Quick footsteps
Musical Doorbell
Pregnant Silence
Home Sweet Home

.

Bangalore--Its a jungle in here.

The temple priest is surprised. "Very good, Nikhil, very good. You have finally realised that God is all powerful and omniscient. That is why you are here every morning to pay due respects to Anjaneya" (he actually spoke in shuddha Kannada but since blogger does not provide Devanagari font, I have decided to translate (transmaul?)his great words in English) I squirm uneasily at this point and make an ambivalent gesture to indicate that I have indeed become wiser. Little does the priest know my intentions are much more cowardly. I come to the temple out of fear.

I am afraid, terrified of the Roads Of Bangalore(ROB). Yes, dear reader, this is no exaggeration, the ROB is (is or are? grammer check) among the most dangerous forests in the world. The Rainforests of Amazon or Borneo pale in comparison to the mighty man-made Roads Of Bangalore.

"What an absurd comparison" Some of you might ask. To those of you who asked, I counter with this point: (those of you who didnt ask may skip it if you want)
Think of the name: Bangalore. Bang.. I guess you know what it means. Galore..means in plentiful amounts. Bang+Galore = Bangs in plentiful amounts. Not a very comforting name to boast of, is it?

And what creautres inhabit this god-forsaken place! Vehicles of all shapes, sizes and hues are waiting to make your life miserable once you step on ROB. Whatever kind of roads you travel on (tar road, mud road, "is that supposed to be a road??!!" road, no road) there seems no respite from the other vehicles.

The potbellied overaged and errant bus driver, the sly foulmouthed autodriver playing Kannada songs with full bass effect so you can hear nothing but bangs and thuds intersperced with an occasional grating voice, the crazy stressed out IT/BPO professional on the bike driving with suicidal(and worse, homicidal) abandon, I see them everyday, only with different faces.

Having asked Anjaneya to give me strength and courage for my heroic endeavor of trying to reach office in time, I set off on my rickety fifteen year old Kinetic Honda (the only thing kinetic about it is the name). I finally reach office after the ordeal which lasts close to an hour.

But Im safe and sound-thats all that matters. Now to rest for a good six hours before I start worrying about returning home again....