Fabric of Reality !!

It was 1:50PM in my watch as I was busy wrapping up a document review which was supposed to be sent before 2PM.. Every movement of that seconds hand made me feel more and more helpless as I could feel the sands of time slipping through my fist.. My increased heart rate was witness to my anxiety .Guess watt!! My cell phone rings and as I pick it up...my desk phone accompanies it too, so much to do in so less time.. After those action packed 10 mins, things were done and I was as peaceful as a ship’s captain who witnessed the most turbulent storms and crossed it courageously. I was a soul totally engrossed in his own reality. As I stood up to take a break and as my eyes discerned across the office space I witnessed people all around busy struggling with their own life problems, trying to steer their ships through their own storms. All of a sudden a strange though struck me, I felt a Paradoxical realization of connect as well as a disconnect with the people around me. I could empathize with their struggle yet I was totally oblivious to their existence because I was so engrossed in my own existence. I guess..I was witnessing Objective and Subjective reality at the same instant. In Objective reality, it’s the objective world as viewed by science and society as primary and as experienced by our senses. Whereas, in Subjective reality, it’s an experiential world of an individual world (mine, or yours) as primary with our mind creating our own reality.

Quantum reality, currently considered to be the true nature of reality by scientists all over the world , has proved that if two particles get entangled at quantum level and are then separated or even if taken to two corners of the universe.. still there exist some kind of cosmic connection between them forever... This also called “Quantum Interconnectedness” or "Quantum Entanglement"

Back here in my office, the feeling of disconnect was overwhelming, but still I could empathize with people in my office or for that matter the victims in Japan’s flood when the horrifying videos kept getting uploaded on Facebook.

In today’s highly interconnected world, where everybody is connected to everybody else through FACEBOOK, MYSPACE, TWITTER, SKYPE which have become symbols of interconnectedness of human race. They are pushing the ever expanding circle of human consciousness beyond blood ties or friends to cross borders. Bringing people nearer to each other.

In his new book NEW CONSCIOUSNESS, Kingsley describes

“A new form of integral consciousness is less likely to embrace a global techno-industrial complex future. a collectively evolving emphatic mind that will inform a greater awareness for working together; community-building; shared values and ethics; and working towards re-modelling how the world operates. It will not be ‘business as usual’ as most future forecasters seem to predict;”

The futurists predict that the hyper connectedness will keep bringing us nearer and will change the human society forever. What the human species may now be witnessing during this great acceleration is the rise of intuition, empathy, and greater connectivity to the world and to people. We might be stepping onto the next level of human evolution a step towards the formation of “collective consciousness” or the MIND OF MANKIND.

Nature of reality as we know is still unknown to us, even as one of the brightest minds are still trying to unravel the ULTIMATE TRUTH. But somewhere down the line I guess the equations underlying the complicated matrix of reality are nothing else but the mysterious equations of love :)

Let the Music Play..!!

"Oh Come on..!!!" I screamed.. on those lifeless headphones as I struggled to untangle them and wondered "How the hell do these wires always manage to get tangled in my pocket?".It was almost midnight & I took refuge in my night cab as a part of my week long ritual while returning back from office after a long paralyzing week .. which was marked with deadlines and endless meetings ... and most importantly no breakfasts & ironically Bread omelettes for dinner...not to forget loads of caffeine to keep zombies in IT companies, like mine, awake..."What have I become?" I asked myself and unfortunately there seemed to be no answer. The nerves in my brain just gave up and I just hoped to complete those 20 mins of my dreadful journey in non AC cab on way back to my PG..Nothing seemed to go right that week..!! But all of a sudden, the deafing silence was disrupted, as my fingers fumbling over my mobile's keypad hit the play button. It was a composition called "Almost A whisper" by Yanni ..The mystical piano chords just enslaved me from the very first note .. I was indeed defenceless..!! .. The music just touched the very depth of my soul...the melody just kept continually growing and melting away..it was so pristine and sacred that it breathed my immortal sadnesss...My heart beat quickened and I could feel the tender throbbing of happiness and beauty seeping into me. Within few seconds, the nostalgia gripped me and took me back several years in my MBA days, where I first heard this song standing bare feet on the Calangute beach in Goa..I could very clearly see the waves & even feel the sand, as Yaani continued to spread his magic.. I was weird but mesmerising... I wondered," How can a song evoke such a powerful emotional and physical reaction and transport us unconsciously to a different place and time ?". Its said that “Close to events of high emotional charge and change, the brain takes a ‘recording’ of all the other things that were going on at that heightened moment. Emotions are tuned to detect change and when the emotional temperature has risen far enough the move from recognising something to feeling something is triggered. There is something about music evolves over time, as do emotions. When we hear the song we re-live the emotional sequence that happened when we first heard it”... It’s called ‘Darling they’re playing our tune’ theory"...Its very personal to each of us.. The huge treasure of MP3 files in our computer's hard drives defines us...Its unique to us...! The complete orchestra of these hormones which result in such an emotional climax and the symphony created out of it is still unknown to humans. There are no definite answers even for the well known "Mozart effect" either. We keep creating new moments experiencing new emotions and creating the bitter sweet symphony of life ourselves..Nobody knows how it all happens...How a electrical signal from the mobile through earphones gets coupled to the rhythms of our heart...May be its better that this mystery remains unsolved... May be that’s what makes music divine... The train of thoughts was sabotaged by the sudden break of my night cab.. I had reached my destination...And Yaani's magic worked..as I came back to present. It was midnight and as I got out of the cab, I thought, "Till the time those geeky scientists keep slogging for building a Time-machine which can take us to our past through some forbidden Wormhole ,we human's have smartly invented our own way of traveling back to our memories through our own Music Spaceship!!"..and with a light hearted smile on my face and me nodding my head said to myself... Life is not so bad..As they say.

“Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up”

What's the point ??

“Come on run...only 4 mins are left...!” I uttered, as I dragged myself to the company bus stop. By the time I made it, it was a deserted land, the bus had left... “What a start for the week...!” I moaned like a troubled soul. People would simply accuse me of suffering from Monday Blues. Well, there I was, all marooned, at 9 a.m. monday morning, waiting for the local bus to arrive. The silence at the bus stop was deafing. All of a sudden, taking advantage of my aloofness, random thoughts started rattling my brain. As the sweat rolled off my forehead , I thought, “There was a time when, I think I had voice, but now I never make a sound .. !!"

It’s been 3 long years I was stuck up with this job, with the days spent sitting at the office desk, gazing at monitor, hearing the dreadful tapping of the keyboard keys. The place, where the office zombies would get animated whenever the discussion was about the pay hike or how the tyrant company is exploiting the innocent employee. Suddenly, I realized I’ll be late for office as my eyes searched for any glimpse of the bus making its way towards the stop, as the sun continued inflicting the scorching heat onto me. I was sapped. But then an agonizing questioned dawned on me. "What’s the Point?" I murmured. Suddenly, this uncomfortable feeling of meaninglessness of my life was staring right into my eyes. I had no answer, how to cope with this ever changing stuff called LIFE, who doesn’t give me a single chance to catch up with it!! The absurdity of my existence was evident.

I remember the words of famous thinker Nietzsche, which said “He who has a why to live can bear almost anyhow.” The primary motivational force of an individual is to find a meaning in life, he said. Humans exist first before they have meaning in life. Meaning is not given, and must be achieved. The best part about this is the freedom to create your own meaning for your life. A person must find a truth that is true for him.

We humans do not find meaning in life by analysing our marksheets or by our paycheck. Instead, we find it through passion & desire. It’s not the dry intellectual sermons of saints or some national best seller book on self help or some motivational thoughts that get us through life—it is ACTION; and what motivates and sustains action is passion, the desire to overcome hardships, pain, and suffering. It’s a battery which powers the core source of life itself. Passion exists in everybody’s life e.g. Painter, who is passionate about painting, just paints & loses the sense of time. He doesn’t care whether anybody will judge him or how much the painting will be sold at...These thoughts spoil the very essence of his work...

One of the famous existentialsit of his time, Soren Kierkegaard said,“To live and die for a belief, to stake everything one has and is, in that belief, in something that has a higher meaning than anything in the world”—this is passion at its zenith. The climax scene from movie Rang de Basanti flashed in front of my eyes ,when the where the two protagonists Amir khan & Siddharth are having a laugh before being shot, the fear of death seems to fade away for them; as they stood for what they believed.

The gentle breeze brushed softly against my face & I was already smiling; remembering the lines from poem”If” which said.

“If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!”

INDIA BOOTS UP..!!!!

I looked at my watch...it was showing 10:30 a.m... the sweat on my forehead was witness to my tiring 5hr journey from Chennai. All of a sudden a cool breeze blew up my hair the minute, I landed out of Bangalore station, it was soothing.. I said to myself "This is it ... the Silicon valley of India"...had read a lot about it, but now was the time to experience it...I straightaway headed to the bus stop since I had plans to catch up with my friends,. The bus stop was like any other bus stop one would find in an Indian City...all crowded, no queues. As my journey continued I passed by various buildings one or two malls, road covered with trees on either side, offices of Accenture, Oracle passed by…Though it was good, I said to my self ..”Big deal...Is that all it takes to become a centerpiece of an International bestseller by Thomas Friedman…"The world is flat"...somehow the city was not convincing enough.

A hint of nostalgia for colonial days co-exists with Victorian architecture buildings; even the police wear white cowboy hats. A statue of Queen Victoria stands in one of the main parks; streets are named after British commissioners.. As i was walking down Ulsoor road into the by lanes of the city; things started getting interesting..I could find offices of small technology companies sprouting all over the area promising cutting technology services all along the road.. While walking on the road u could here people debating the advantage of using .Net over Java.. Geeky huh..!!! At the same time the dust all along the road gave a sense of desperation with which the city is trying to struggle & win over the problems of sprawling population, crumbling infrastructure, etc..With all this; as the evening came along, I thought of indulging in Bangalore's second favorite activity after software porting and patching: pubbing. Indeed, one of Bangalore's charms is the nightly cruise among the umpteen bars around M.G. Road .You can easily make out that, almost every night in establishments like Pub One, Knockout, NASA, etc. the young guns of India's software industry gather, drink beer, groove to Music, and, naturally, talk computers. You could see the young vibrant crowd all set to experiment right from their bikes to their hair styles. You could see the cosmopolitan culture of Bangalore at its Zenith.All this was like a glimpse of what INDIA is going through, where a perfectly explosive combination of struggle (to overcome its crumbling infrastructure) & aspirations ( of the youth, that they can take over the best minds of the western world) co exists..It was Simply Awesome.!!

Here was a nation of staggering ethnic and religious diversity that somehow holds together by dint of tolerance and a sense of shared destiny.

So, how did it all happen...??? What changed..??

Well, It is said ...“Delhi is Keynesian while Bombay is Schumpeterian.” One city gets its importance from being the heart of government, while the other thrives on entrepreneurial energy.

Almost 60 years ago in a ground breaking article, Nobel prize winner Ronald Coase answered a question "So the question was: why are some things done better in the market and some within a firm?". He said, "Firms exist because there are costs involved in market transactions. When these costs are too high, it makes sense to coordinate certain activities within the boundaries of a firm. Whether a transaction would be organized within a firm or whether it would be carried out on the market depended on a comparison of the costs of organizing such a transaction within a firm with the costs of a market transaction that would accomplish the same result,”

In a very crude sense, a company employs workers on a long-term basis because the costs involved in finding skilled workers every morning would be too high. If by some wave of the magic wand, it would be possible for a company to locate just the sort of talent it needs for the day, then we would all be freelancers. “So what does all this have to do with Bangalore and its success as a global outsourcing hub?” you might ask. Bangalore’s astonishing boom over the past 15 years can best be explained by using Coase’s insights into the nature of the firm. Bangalore had most of the ingredients on its later success in previous decades—including a skilled workforce that could be employed at a fraction of the wages paid for similar work in Europe and the US.
Coase’s insights on transaction costs help us understand why Bangalore eventually became an outsourcing boomtown. As firms in the rich countries grew in size and became large and tangled conglomerates, the cost of carrying out certain activities within these firms went up. It made economic sense for them to focus on their “core” activities.

It is now 60 years since Coase wrote about the nature of the firm, a paper that led to the rise of an entire discipline known as transaction cost economics. The young techies who gather in Bangalore’s buzzing pubs should perhaps raise a glass of cold beer to salute the man whose work so neatly explains why their city is such a success today....CHEERS..!!!!

When the web starts reading your mind..!!

It was in year 1920, when Edward Bernays (nephew of famous psychologist Sigmund Freud) who pioneered application of psychoanalytical techniques on the masses for advertising, asked a simple question …..“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?”
He called this scientific technique of opinion-molding the "Engineering of consent.”. He observed...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

Fast Forward to year 2009, the Netizens are hooked up to Internet spending, more & more time online (especially on Social Networks which have become hubs of social interaction). Many of the new sites, thanks to Web 2.0 technologies, have allowed for the easy creation of heaps of digital data. With Blogs, Social networks, RSS feeds, Flickr feeds, Twitter messages, video clips…the data just keeps growing on and on and sharing information becoming as easy as tweeting from your cell.

There is an emergence of what people call, “River of news” — where stories would flow as a river and you would dip in and drink what you could. As bandwidth (and connectivity) grows, we would be using the web more, including sharing more and more objects. With our innate human need to interact with one another in this connected world, we try to mimic our offline interactions online in real time. It’s a way to share your life, your opinions, with those close to you, no matter how far away. With more than 175 million people signed up across the planet, Facebook in many ways has started to resemble our real-life social networks.

This has given an entirely new dimension to public opinion & online social networks, making it more powerful and disruptive than ever before. Instance like the Kryptonite scandal, where a small kid sitting in his basement almost drove a company to bankruptcy within 9 days by just blogging about it, has given nightmares to every CEO on this planet.


Today we are sharing links, text messages and photos in these streams. Videos or video life streams come later. These streams are more relevant mostly because the context comes from our social graph.

The online world is in a dying need of A Psychoanalyst, another Edward Bernays, one who could understand user’s online behavior and tap these vast amounts of data for business & commercial purpose…Welcome to the world of WEB ANALYTICS…A land where complex algorithms based on tools like, Recommender systems, Collaborative filtering, Information Scent, can read your mind, understand your underlying intentions, without even letting you know…spooky isn’t it ?

Web analytics (in simple terms) measure a visitor's online journey. It includes the measurement of a website's potential audience (opportunity), share of voice (visibility), and buzz (comments) that is happening on the Internet as a whole, assigning a cookie to the user, which can uniquely identify them during their visit and in subsequent visits. Calculating Information Scent, which measures how attractive is a particular link, which could compel a user to click & follow it (or in other words how strong the is scent..??)

Armed with cutting edge algorithms & technologies like Click Stream analysis that collect data about user movements on a website, keeping a track of the links visited, including where a user came from, their route through the website and their destination on exiting the site. Link analysis can include observations of the links clicked and their associated position on the screen, time spent within a web page and making connections between links visited and consequences (e.g. purchase made). Others include techniques like Collaborative Filtering, which compares user’s tastes with those of other users in order to build up a picture of like-minded people. The choice of content is then based on the assumption that this particular user will value that which the like-minded people also enjoyed. The preferences of the community of like-minded people are used to predict appropriate content. Some of the online social networking sites are planning to model the social graph of its members. By this they mean that they want to model the relationships between all people.

So while on Facebook, whenever you are taking a quiz, becoming a fan, commenting, etc. the algorithm crawls looking out for your data, knowing more and more about you, studying you, analyzing you.

A typical a Dominant Social Metric for analyzing a person can consist of parameters like:-

Cognitive Similarity
Tie-Strength (Relationship Duration, Interaction Frequency, Closeness)
Trust (Competence, Benevolence, Integrity)
Social Capital (Reputation)

In fact, Facebook will soon be debuting a “Social Rank” algorithm which determines which of your friends are most relevant and important to the task at hand.

This understanding of user behavior and hyper connectivity can have amazing and limitless possibilities in future. Imagine a service that would scan through your twitter messages, your news feeds or communities and marry them to data on internet, such as a nearby movie theater or a mall and Bluecasting it on your cell phone, as to whom you can contact for what& giving suggestions tailored exactly to your taste, an ultimate mash-ups of diverse data sources keeping you in mind… Interesting isn’t it?

Ignorance is Bliss …Really??

Well last few weeks have been one of the most interesting times in life. Where I am abounding with one of the rarest resource on earth…TIME..!!..Well, the weekend as over & there was this whole week standing right there in front & staring at me, right into my eyes…pretty scary huh..!! It was a cold Monday morning….I thought of switching on my TIME KILLING MACHINE…My PC…but even that couldn't cure my boredom...What a pity…!!

All of a sudden ...one of the most beautiful questions mankind ever created hit me…WHAT IF..?? which hits each one of us at some point in life epitomizing all the desires & dreams in ones life all in one go…Isn’t it ?? For example…

What if I had a chance to go for an MBA in Harvard..?? What if I had been one of those lucky people who knew their passion in life quite early & accomplished it..?? What if the girl whom I liked, had liked me too…?? And on & on & on…

This reminded me one of my favorite movies…Vanilla sky which talks about the story of David Aames (Tom Cruise) the man that had everything he wanted…& one day he finds love of his life but more or less loses it on that very day… But he is given a second chance with a catch to regain it all back. The catch is he gets to live his dream but in a simulated dreamy life & a chance to be HAPPY FOREVER.

He now faces a choice to live in a dream or face the cruel reality...By the end of the movie, I was awestruck. I couldn't get it off my mind. The whole idea of it just blew me away. The ending, was more of a surprise than Shyamalan could ever do.

In the end facing his demons and the full scope of what is happening David chooses reality, simplicity, and normality to see if he can finally find the one thing he could never get a grip on: happiness.

Vanilla Sky touches the idea of making a choice between fantasies, dreams, and all-consuming materialistic pleasures, and then the stark realities of actual life. I was shocked at David's choice but not disappointed. Or perhaps I was disappointed in his choice but not shocked. It made me consider the way in which humans, when given the choice, will always choose knowledge over happiness. Ignorance is bliss, but no one ever chooses that path; as in the Matrix, no one chooses the blue pill. Humans resign themselves to "reality" (which is subjective anyway), & moan about the tragedies & the bleakness, but when given the chance to be comfortable and peaceful and to luxuriate in pleasantness and dreamy times, one will give it all up in the name of "truth".. it seems odd…Truth over happiness…But still natural. David's best friend in the movie Brian makes references several times to the sweet and sour nature of life, i.e. things are more sweet, when you've experienced the sour. The beauty of life is more truly appreciated when the trials and heartbreaks are fully experienced.& Its not about wondering What if..?? its about moving ahead, enjoying the Sweet & sour Symphony of life..!

So the question is which part of the BELL CURVE are you in..??

Most of the time we feel, what does mathematics have to do with the way we live our lives…? What lessons could those dry & abstract theories teach us about life...? And we feel it’s better to live life as it comes, allowing the so called ROUTINE (like worrying about things like people, salary, parents.etc.) to dominate over us.Hence, we spend our life busy worrying about how to cope with this ever changing stuff called LIFE, who doesn’t give us a single chance to catch up with it !! We spend silent moments of our lives, staring at the cover page of some magazine carry pics of people like Dhirubahi Ambani, Sharukh Khan.etc and etc. & somewhere down the line, spend the time day-dreaming abt them or discussing them & get used to this ROUTINE & ACCEPT it as a way of life.Thus, majority of us become another face in the crowd..an AVERAGE person.…Now the question is..So what?....How does Mathematics come into picture..??.. If we look closely at a stuff called BELL-CURVE in Statistics, it speaks a lot..it says that majority of the samples about 96% of them are found to be very close to mean or the AVERAGE…there are very few distinct points at the tail ends…these are the people who are different...people who are truly successful…not an average guy…So question is how did they escape this brutal & dominating PRISON called ROUTINE ?? … This reminds me of an old movie called “SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION” which talks about the people who have been in jail for a long period of time, who get used to the simplest things in life. These prisoners get food, have a place to sleep, have clothes to wear, and have books to read. They adapt to the guards always telling them when to wake up or when to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. Prisoners are used to a small world and when they have to go live in a big world, most of the time this is scary for them, because they are acclimatized to the environment of the prison except the hero (called Andy in the movie)..He never developed that kind of hazy dead look that the other inmates had. Nor did he adopt their hunched over sluggish walk when it came time to go back to their cages. The thing that constantly beamed from him, and differentiated him so much from everybody else was the thing he never gave up; HOPE. This man slowly and steadily by waking every night, when others used to sleep, digs a deep hole through the prison wall, which was thought to be insurmountable. And becomes the only guy in history who broke through that jail, leaving everybody including the prisoners dumbfounded who just couldn’t believe it…thus making him among those few people who are at the tail ends if the BELL-CURVE…

So ultimately the question is which part of the BELL CURVE are you in..??