Rootlessness

For long I have had this feeling which for lack of any other word, I would call rootlessness. All my life I have been hopping from one place to another. Some of it I wanted, some of it I didn't, and some of it just happened. At the end of it all, I hardly find anything in the world to identify myself with. Its like I don't know where do I belong.

At an early age, I found myself into hostel life, and would spend more time there than at my home by the blessings of the rules of the hostel. I would identify myself more with the hostel than with home. I would feel like that the people around me then would stay around me always.

But as it would happen, every year, a lot of faces would change. Lots of new students coming, new teachers coming, old teachers going, old students going, even the hostel building itself changing, nothing would remain the same every once in a while. And one day, I found myself done with my school and this sweet hostel of my childhood was no more my own. All of my friends there went on their own ways, and over time most of it faded somewhere into memory, and very little of it was left.

At IIT (my college), I was in hostel again. Somehow I never was comfortable with IIT. It was as if a great 4 year marathon challenge, where I had to work my way through, and create a niche for myself for my future. The 4 years taught me a lot of things. I met a lot of great people there. Made a lot of good friends. Learnt a lot of technology and engineering, and certainly a lot of computers and programming. I was never good with physical work, but with computers, I found something I could do well. At least well enough. And I learnt a lot more about human behavior, but somehow grew more and more introvert. But not everything was right. I had a failed internship after my 3rd year (in my own judgement). That was my first experience of putting my efforts into creating something useful and I didn't know the way. My final year project was also not worth much. I just did simulations of some digital filters and plotted their behavior at the end of it. Again, I didn't know how to organize my efforts into making something useful.

And one day, the 4 years were over again. After a few days, I was in my new job. My first job. The company worked in a start up mode. With the help of my seniors and colleagues, slowly I learnt the art of making something useful. Over time, I started appreciating that I had enough skills in myself to be able to contributing something useful to the world.

And then all of a sudden, a weird thing happened. I found myself roaming around different corners of the world for the good of the company. I would spend a good lot of my time in an year travelling around. While in India, I would be busy preparing things for next release of software, and rest of time, learning from people around the world, what all more needed to be done. A cycle which apparently has no end in itself. Life suddenly has gotten itself meshed into a sequence of imaginary goals and deadlines. Before I finish something, there is a big list of new things put forward and I never find myself having done enough.

In last few years, I have shifted my living apartment 4-5 times, stayed in N number of hotels. Have been stranded in distant airports, away from anybody I know. Travelled alone long distances to meet people whom I never met before and probably would not meet again. Made a whole lot of acquaintances but very few friends. I do not know what is the relevance of all this that I do.

I go back to my home town once or twice in a year. Except for my parents and a couple of people I know there, there is not much to relate to there for me.

This process has resulted into this exquisite feeling called rootlessness.

Photographs from PAN IIT 2008 Alumni Meet

http://picasaweb.google.com/shaileshk/PANIIT2008AlumniMeet

from my cellphone camera. Not really providing a detailed coverage of the event. Just some glimpses here and there.

MENSA

Mensa international is the largest, oldest and best known society of people with High IQ. It inducts people with standard IQ tests (like Stanford-Binet) and if you score above 98 percentile (i.e. you are amongst the top 2% people), you qualify for joining Mensa.

About 6 and a half years back, I tried the test and I failed. I had just completed my graduation with IIT Kharagpur, joined Interra and had generally done well. I was more than confident that I would be able to qualify. But fortunately or unfortunately I didn't.

It helped me realize that I am not really as intelligent as I used to think I am. The only other thing I could do was hard work. This has helped over the last 6 years and I have been able to do reasonably well in my career. I have learnt a lot and done quite good things so far. Probably it was good that I failed in that test.

Oh and since then I have consistently avoided appearing in any kind of tests :) I don't like them. May be I am afraid :)

Some truths about IITians

On Internet, I get to read a lot of criticism about the IITians in general. I thought I would write down some truths which are generally ignored.

It is said that IITs produce people who all go to US/Europe and serve the foreign countries and corporations. A detailed survey on this issue (officially released by PM of India during PAN IIT 2008 meet) has shown that about 66% of all IIT graduates actually stay back in India only. Only 30 something percent of IIT pass-outs move on to foreign countries. The recent liberalization has helped create a lot of opportunities in India itself and more and more IITians are actually staying back in India and helping build the future of India (including myself).

Prof Kalaam once said: IITians should not be employment seekers, they should be employment generators. I see so many of my seniors, batch mates, juniors running their own companies and generating so many jobs for the society. In existing organizations, IITians have contributed towards the growth of organizations by their efforts.

Some say that IITs have never produced a Nobel prize winner. It should be noted that Nobel prizes are primarily given in areas of Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Economics, and Peace. I would like to explain here the difference between science and technology. Basic sciences are focused on the discovery of the general principles which describe how things work. Technology is focused on applying these general principles into building things which are useful for mankind. IITs (Indian institutes of Technology) are focused on imparting the knowledge of technology rather than basic sciences. IITians have been at the fore-front of leading technology development all across the world. But for most of the part, their work is not directly qualified for Nobel prizes. It doesn't mean that any IITian would never get a Nobel Prize. This essentially means that Nobel prize should not be the criteria of judging the contribution of IIT system towards the society.

I don't say that all of us are great, or we have done enough for what we are worth, but any criticism should be well founded and based on proper facts. In any large group of people (there are roughly about 200, 000 IITians), you will find a wide variety of individuals with different capabilities, opinions, ideas, attitudes. The overall judgement of the whole group should not be based on a few individuals, but should take a wider perspective.

I am sure as a brand, we have done well over the years and our future looks bright. And one thing more. Our alumni network (PAN IIT) is probably one of the most active alumni networks all over the world.

A Wish

Main aaj udna chahta hun
Bahut uncha,
Aasmaan se bhi upar
Bahut door udna chahta hun

Nayi raahon pe chalna chahta hun
Nayi manjilein dhoondhna chahta hun

Ik lambi udaan me
khona chahta hun
apne aap ko

Main aaj udna chahta hun

Gaana chahta hun geet
apne dil ki gahraiyon se
Wahan jahan koi sunne wala na ho

Sunna chahta hun
woh aawaaj
jisme koi shabd na ho

Main aaj udna chahta hun
Aasmaan se bhi upar

I wanna fly
very high

Competition

Most of us are competing in one way or other with somebody else in different spheres of life. All of us have a fairly good understanding of it and there is not much I have to say, which you don't know already. But as I started thinking about it, I thought I would write down my thoughts.

Question: Is competition relative or absolute? What difference does this make?

The fact is competition is always relative. Unless you have a person or benchmark to compete with, there is no meaning of competition. If there is a 100 meter record of 9.7 seconds, then you may try to break the record. You fail or you succeed. If there was no such record beforehand, there would have been nothing to compete for. When I attempted IIT-JEE 1998, I was competing against about 2 lakh students to get into one of the prestigious IITs.

So whats so important about being relative? Actually relativity makes a lot of difference. It means that you need to be only slightly better than your competition to succeed. Being no. 1 requires that you are only slightly better than the no. 2. That means that you don't need to put infinite effort in achieving your goals. If you put more effort than required, no one is going to give you any special points for it. As long as you have a slight edge over competition, you are fine. Rest of your effort you can focus on maintaining the lead. And rest of your time you can use for pursuing the better things in life.

Strategy: A strategy is needed only when you are competing. The objective of a strategy is to identify a path which will lead you to become slightly better than your competition. A strategy is always against a competition. Without a competition, there is no meaning of strategy. There is nothing like an absolute strategy.

Question: Is competing the purpose of life? Is being better than your competition the most important thing in life? Should one really care too much about being the best?

I really doubt it. Though my friends and colleagues may point out that I am one of the most workaholic persons around, but that's not the complete truth. The purpose of competition is survival. Survival is the basic requirement of life. Unless you survive well, you cannot do anything else. Hence a certain amount of spirit of competition is necessary for anybody. The catch is to identify where to stop competing and focus on other things. And its necessary to realize that survival is not the purpose of life at all. Survival is only a basic requirement of life.

Beyond that a lot of things lie. Different people have different things as important to them. For some its their family. For others its some other passion(photography, travel, etc.). Some yearn for the goodwill of the society as a whole (revolutionaries, social workers, saints). For me knowledge is what I aspire and crave for. And I look for it wherever I can find it. I wish to know more about how things work and how to build great things (mostly software). And that's what I do. That's what I focus on. And this is absolute and infinite. There is no end to it. The more I do, the more I realize that I know so less. And that keeps me going day and night.

Hope

Hope is the most hopeless thing in the world. As they say, even if you haven't got anything, you can always have hope. There is always hope. Is this truly correct? Think about it. When one is in good shape and happy, there is no need of hope. Only when one needs something more, or is in really dire situation, he needs hope. Hope exists as a companion of need/desire. If there is no desire, there is no need for hope also. What will you hope for?

When Dharmaraj asked Yudhisthir (in Mahabharata), what is the biggest wonder in this world. Yudhisthir answered: In this world everybody sees millions of living beings being born and dying everyday. But still one never believes in his own death. This is certainly the biggest wonder in the world. What is this wonder built on? On the hope that one will not die. Is it sensible, isn't it hopeless?

There is so much contrast in knowledge and belief. We all know that everything that has a beginning has an end. But we never believe that it applies on us also. Isn't this madness? Insanity?

The purpose of life

What is the purpose of life? A question which comes around often amongst us when we are in a philosophical mood. And no matter how much we think about it, we are never sure that we know the answer. Or may be we know the answer but we don't understand the answer.

I had once conjectured, the purpose of life is to sustain life. This essentially comes from the field of genetics. All around one sees organisms living and dying and procreating to keep the life going on. For most of the living creatures hence, the purpose of life is pretty much about sustaining itself only. The selfish gene theory says that, the fundamental role of a gene is to spread itself all around as much as possible. They are programmed to behave like that. Why they are programmed like that? The answer is simple. Moleculer structures which are programmed to spread will take over any other kind of moleculer structure in the long run. And the history of earth itself is 5 billion years. So naturally what survive over time are genes which are fundamentally selfish in nature.

But as human beings we have got a special faculty, the ability to think and reason about the world around us. To ask such questions like why we are here, where have we come from, what are we supposed to do, and where will we go. And the fact is the more we think about such things, the more it kills us. Seems like that metaphysical questions are designed behave like a self-destructive circuits in our metal makeup.

All the gurus say that as human beings, the purpose of life is to serve others. And they say, that whenever you serve somebody else, your own happiness is guaranteed. I am not good enough to put their concepts into my own words, but I must say that they appear completely logical and sensible when I read them or listen to them.

But when it comes to translate those ideas into action, procrastination sets in. I have thounsands of doubts as to whether I am doing the right things and, doing them right. The fact is that the world will keep on going even if I don't do anything. And it will come back to the same state, even if I do something. The circle of life is always there which takes you back to the place where from you started. So why really do anything at all?

At the top of the world

What happens when you are at the top of the world? I mean not at mount everest but at something which feels like the top of the world for you. All along one struggles hard and looks forward to the thing that you are desiring, yearning for, wanting. And one day, all of a sudden you are there. How do you feel?

I don't know about you, but I know what I felt. I felt sheer joy and I was full of ecstacy. And for some time, it felt like nothing could go wrong at all. In my thrill, I forgot completely that although I had come there, the only places I could go from there was below it. Everything looked perfect then.

And then I fell down. For although I knew how to reach there, I didn't know how to stay on and what to do there. I didn't know that the storms are at the strongest there, as there is nothing to lean on to to protect yourself.

I just sit here and comtemplate about what all happened. Now it all looks like a dream. Why did this dream happen to me I don't know. I don't have the courage and ability to try it again. Its probably a mirage in an infinite desert.

An affair

It was wonderful.

It was great.

And then it crashed.

Nothing was left.