Blissful Life

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Notice: after planning it for years, I moved this blog out of blogger/blogspot (which google has abandoned long ago) to wordpress on a fine evening in Dec 2024. This notice will stay here to warn that things might be broken. Let me know if you find anything.

  • Two Ways to Go Crazy

    Yesterday was a Sunday entirely different from the hundred before it. I did two things.

    Quizzing
    8 hours of questions and answers (and excellent guesses) with my partner – Shruti parimoo
    General Quiz #1: At NIE, Mysore. We reached about an hour early and talked about neuroplasticity, and the like. Then, the first round started. There were about 14 teams and about 24 questions. Some of them:

    What does the following cartoon represent? (Of course it wasn’t this easy in the actual event)

    feet-to-meters cartoon no. 1

    Whose old logo is this?
    http://media.gizmodo.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/18afup0k2v6oqpng.png
    Cricket question.
    “I would say the difference between the two side is the fielding. England
    are an all-round good fielding side. I do believe that India have
    few…3 or 4 very good fielders and … X”
    Fill X.

    Which phrase in English owes its origin to the fact that density of water at 0 degree Celsius is 0.93 g/cu cm and that of water at 4 degree Celsius is 1 g/cu cm?

    And, we didn’t get selected for the second round.
    But we watched it along with very active others.

    Dry round – a lot of questions based on “pounce and bounce” format (That is, after the question is read out, every team has a chance to write the answer and “pounce” on it, getting +10 for correct and -5 for wrong; and then teams who haven’t pounced will get the questions in infinite bounce format)
    List it – to list all the 13 individual olympic medal winners of India, all the 9 movies of Ranbir Kapoor, and all the Shiva temples based on 5 elements.
    Short Visual Connect – A set of images on the screen, find what connects them.
    Long Visual Connect – A long set of images coming one by one, find what connects them at the earliest. This one was about Raghu Ram

    Having been only to quizzes where the quizmaster rein and the participants open their mouth only to answer or “pass” this first quiz in two years was mind-blowing, not blowing, mind-expanding for me. I’d never thought quizzes could be fun too (and not just exciting)

    And then General Quiz #2 at SJCE Mysore
    Here’s where I got really surprised. Not just that all the teams who participated in the previous quiz was here, one of the QMs at the previous quiz was a participant, and one of the participants there was the QM here.
    For now, this is the longest (5 hours) and the most interesting (unlimited fun) quiz I’ve ever been to.

    Questions have all been uploaded to slideshare here.
    The preliminary round was much easier (in terms of the number of questions we could answer). My personal favourite would be:

    What is this? 😀 (See how the big circles are linked)

    And all the 9 teams participated in the second round (which turned out to be a wise decision, because the teams left out would have to watch from outside the rest of the quiz)
    In the second part, I started with a -5 for pouncing. I said “simple majority” where it should have been “The common parlance for the minimum number of members of a deliberative assembly (a body that uses parliamentary procedure, such as a legislature) necessary to conduct the business of that group and its requirement is protection against totally unrepresentative action in the name of the body by an unduly small number of persons”

    And a lot of questions later, including one that looked very similar to this tricky graph question I found from Quora, the Sheldon Cooper round started.
    We had to give the Latin phrases for the descriptions. And Shruti absolutely rocked.
    So did she in the round about books, and also the Southpark round.
    The LVC about Cricket stumped us, but those about buildings were easily solvable.

    And then it was late night, they had already began singing songs at Jayciana outside. So it was time to find out the winner, and as there was a tie between KP‘s team and the other awesome team. It couldn’t be resolved even after a few questions, so everyone left in a jovial mood.

    But here is a way to conduct quizzes that I’ve never experienced before. Find excellent questions. Pose them. And let everyone have fun. Get up from the seat. Argue with the QM. Argue with other teams. Go touch the projected image, just to see if the texture gives any clue. Look for clues in all the words spoken by each member in the hall. And successfully spend a lot of time into something that’s well worth it.

    And, Rock Music
    If I had returned to hostel straight away, it would have been an above average Sunday, but not an exceptional one.
    There was some kind of musical show to be expected later in the night. So I stayed back to join my friends. And after the fashion show, beauty pageant, results of previous events, etcetera, it started. A sexy male voice attracting crowd like shit does to flies. +Akshaya Fadnis and I climbed inside the VIP section with the first song. And within minutes we were right next to the stage. And the crowd was going crazy. The music would awaken even the comatose. Hands would not agree to stay down. And the rhythm shook the whole body.

    After being completely lost in that experience, I spoke: “Buddha calls it meditation, we call it rock music”

    Now, that tranquillity was thanks to Underground Authority.

    And that was a Sunday truly worth its name – Sunday. 😛

  • Things You SHOULD Learn from M K Gandhi

    I woke up today morning reading this on Quora: What are the biggest mistakes of Mahatma Gandhi?

    The answer tells that the British were comfortable with Gandhi heading India, and that complete non-violence was probably a big mistake. Two things.

    1. Non-violence works in international affairs. Especially after the second world war.
      This must be self evident. Today’s wars cannot be won with weapons. It is won only through diplomacy.
    2. Non-violence works even better in interpersonal affairs.
      This goes without saying. Getting angry and not cooperating with nasty people is how we’ve learned to do it. But that is violent. A better way to do it would be by helping the nasty earnestly, and sternly but politely making them a request to stop being nasty.

    But that’s not what surprised me. When someone pointed out in the comments that Gandhi had also told that non-violence is better than cowardice, the answerer said: “Well this shows that he was totally confused“.

    People, it’s not just fine to change your convictions with time, it is sometimes necessary to do so.

    That is one great lesson from Gandhi that not many have heard of or practise. He conducts experiments with his life. And he corrects himself when he’s proven wrong. Like his U turn on milk, he just needs plenty of reasons.

    We form most of our convictions in childhood. The same childhood when we are not even eligible to vote. And amusingly, we carry these convictions to our adult life, unquestioned. Think of it. Would it be clever to make the same choices in food, clothing, dreams, hobbies, and lifestyle as those you made when you were much younger and more stupid?

  • The Difference Between Interesting Things and Useful Things

    How many times has this happened in your life?

    You’re travelling in a bus, and the person sitting in the first seat at the front suddenly puts his face outside and looks at something. Within milliseconds, people sitting in the window seats in the 5 rows behind him do the same. And in the next few milliseconds, others who can’t just turn their head and see outside, stand up and do so.

    Sensing and responding to changes around them as quickly as possible, gives monkeys a survival advantage. And there’s a monkey carrying out its survival trick hiding inside all of us. He guides our senses towards all stuff that’s different from the normal – a cool new gadget, random shit facts, photoshoped images uploaded in facebook, utterly useless questions on quora, the gap that a broken tooth leaves, a friend’s new haircut, uncovered body parts – any stuff that’s new. These are the interesting things.

    Unfortunately for us, interesting things most of the times aren’t useful things.

    Books, subjects, exams, practice, revision, exercise – things that happen everyday, the normal things. They are what turn out to be useful in one’s life.

    It’s only been a fraction of a second since that first person turned his head. You still have a choice – whether to turn your head or not.

  • New Year, New Heights, New Directions

    It’s often good to be resolute even if it doesn’t last in you for more than a few days, because you end up doing something rather than waste your potential.

    I’ve made a few impossible resolutions which will let me have fun for the next week at least.

    I’ll be getting a mountain bike from Schwinn or Giant tomorrow. That’d be in line with a resolution I made last year.

    And I’m gonna be blogging a bit more frequently thanks to my resolution to quit fapping which was more or less a daily practice.

    And then I need to think of some project to be done for ICMR STS.

    Then in the self improvement sector, I should break out of my addiction to routine. (If anything irregular happens, I get disorganized badly)

    Should learn English. It so happens that since I’m an Indian, a lot of words would have wrong pronunciations associated with them, in my little brain. And I’ve decided to look up the dictionary wherever a doubt arises.

    And I recently noticed that Ubuntu is indeed an African word meaning “humanity to all” and that the operating system was named after the concept.

    Still making up resolutions. Are you?

  • How Life Can Be Lived One Day at a Time Only

    It is very difficult to plan for the future.

    You can never say what’s going to change, what isn’t.

    And that makes it impossible to plan everything in advance.
    You can prepare for everything. But you cannot plan for everything.

    Sometimes, things have to be solved on the fly. 
    Situations unseen arise, but so do solutions. All we have to do is to associate them. 

    And that requires being present in the moment.

  • Faults that are Nobody’s

    More often than not in life things go wrong because of nobody’s fault.

    But the trouble is when we try to find someone to be blamed.

    With the realization that some shit happens because of cumulative errors that cannot be stashed upon a single person, comes the inner peace of not having to argue over split milk.

  • Are You Cool if You Perform Bad in Your Duties?

    It is not cool that you don’t touch your textbooks.

    Seriously.

    I’ve hundreds (literally) of friends who when asked how studies are say "Who cares?" maybe because they actually don’t care, or maybe just to appear cool.
    But it’s just painful. To think that not studying properly, having fun all the time, makes one cool in a degree college, is like thinking not practicing in the nets will make Sachin a cool cricketer. It’s just wrong. You’re cool when you do it all.

    You are cool when you play carroms till midnight and then learn till you sleep. You are cool when you text your girlfriend "I love you" and then read your books with the same amount of passion. You are cool when 5 or 10 years later you still remember what you study this year in your college. You are cool when you are the most awesome professional in your field inside a 10 mile radius. You are cool when you can stand up in an international crowd of colleagues and speak for 10 minutes without losing attention. You are cool when you just don’t give up your integrity and sincerity for the sake of running with the crowd.

    It might be something about our classrooms too. Maybe we do not have classrooms where active, interactive, and amazingly creative learning is promoted or encouraged. Maybe we do not have students who are willing to learn what they are not required to. Maybe we do not have down to earth professors.

    But that doesn’t prevent us from changing it all.

    We can direct our classroom story in any manner we find fitting.
    We can choose to have lively, enthusiastic, energetic, amazing, persevering, smart, creative characters in our story.

    Talk to the professor in the classroom, search all over the world for the derivation of that formula on the board, learn the nuances of your craft, embrace success, be willing to be a master in your art.

    And then they’ll tell you, you’re cool! Only that this time it’ll be honest.

  • What Ails Our Higher Education? Let’s Stop Blaming The System

    This post is intended to supplement the post of the same title in SVYM founder’s blog.

    "Simple living and high thinking" was Gandhiji’s motto.
    But most of the Indians have failed to imbibe that.
    And that’s indirectly led to all problems we are facing today.

    Education, from the elementary level, is failing to make children think high. That’s because the faculties, the teachers aren’t themselves thinking high. And that’s because the whole system is only very slowly changing.

    And where does that change come from? From people who think different, who go down untrodden paths, who communicate and exchange ideas with foreign cultures, who read books other than prescribed textbooks, who embrace the idea of change, and self improvement.

    It’s a positive cycle. We stop blaming the system, and improve ourselves. Slowly, the system begins to improve.

    And as a student who boastfully regards himself as having broken free from the rat race, I give you a few tips on where to begin.
    There’s actually just one tip.
    Use the internet. The world wide web.
    Read blogs, articles, newspapers, journals, magazines of different geographical regions.
    Learn about the culture, ideas, notions, and the system at other places.
    Find out interesting leads.
    Be willing to change.

    And to begin go to google.com (No, I am not paid by google for leading you to them)

    Go find out "how to win a nobel prize", "life at MIT", "buddhist philosophy", "barefoot running", "minimalism"

    You will soon run out of things to search for. But things keep popping up too.

    And while reading you’ll find out new books, blogs, websites, ideas, philosophies, games!, activities, organizations, mailing lists…
    Do not skip any. Follow them. Subscribe to blogs, add yourself to mailing lists, play games, do further searches on things.
    And you get more pages.
    More to read.
    More ideas.

    And that’s all you have to do.
    Slowly, your mind will begin to expand, to see alternate views, to discover solutions that never seemed to exist, to think in new patterns, to imagine, to create, to evolve.
    And then you can never go back.

  • Is Corruption All? : A Look into the Real World Problems in Government Offices

    There seems to be a consensus on the idea that all problems that we face in our governmental system is due to corruption. This anecdote might help you see some other complicated and routine sides of the “efficiency” issue of our offices.

    My dad is a medical officer, and he told me this story last night.

    If you go to his Community Health Centre (a small hospital with a few doctors, in-patient facility and operation theater, and just over 20 rooms) you’ll find 3 rooms fully filled with old tablets.
    To know where these came from you need to know a bit about the way tablet distribution works. The government orders a huge amount of tablets from companies, and distributes it to each government hospitals of the state according to their need (mostly freely). This need is calculated by multiplying the number of doctors working there with the number of tablets they prescribe. So, in dad’s CHC it’d be, say, 7 * 300 per month (like for ORS, 10 packets are easily given away per day). And the government gives 2100 ORS packets. Now, 3-4 doctors go on leave. And so, no matter how many people get diarrhoea, there’d be an excess of at least 1000 packets in stock. And then these get expired. Laws are that 6 months before expiry date the pharmacist must distribute these to needy organizations like orphanages. But there’s so much of about-to-expire tablets that when he asks the organizations whether they need tablets, they ask the same question in reply. And the pharmacist keeps them with him safely. Let’s assume this kind of loss is minimized by asking only around 1000 packets from the government.
    But there’s another problem. If in any hospital of the state any tablet is found sub-standard, a committee sees to it and blocks the distribution of tablets of that batch number throughout the state. And these kind of sub-standard batches occur every year. Since the tablets are costly, the pharmaceutical company is written a letter informing the defect and reimbursement is asked for. After a month, the company doesn’t send any reply. Another letter is sent as a reminder. No reply. (And sometimes these letters are not sent at all. Companies could bribe clerks at the office to prevent the letter being sent) Now, a registered letter is sent. No reply to that either. And then, everyone forgets about the matter. And back at the hospitals, the pharmacist is left with a whole batch of tablets that he can’t distribute because they’re of low quality, can’t burn/dump because he needs to return them in case the company decides to reimburse and asks for the tablets.

    Thus, hospitals get filled up with tablets.

    Whom do we blame now? If the Lokpal bill had been introduced whom would we want hung?

    This is just that kind of a cumulative error which Nedumudi Venu points out to the court in the movie Anniyan and gets laughed at. Errors for which you cannot blame a single person.

    And it happens because human beings are not machines. Human beings are, well, humans. They make mistakes. And our rules do not make a differentiation between humane errors and human greed. It doesn’t matter whether you do something slightly wrong because you’re stupid or because you’re corrupt. In fact there’s no “slight” wrong before the rule. And that’s machine logic. 1 or 0. Corrupt or pure. That’s not how human beings are. Human beings can  be something in between.

    No, I’m not blaming the legislature. Because to codify the various processes, the algorithm by which we decide what is right, what is wrong and what is in between, is equivalent to designing artificial intelligence. You can’t do that.

    And that’s why we have courts! Courts are rules with a human interpreter. In fact judges are allowed to interpret rules. They decide who’s wrong, who’s right and who’s slightly wrong, by applying human intelligence.

    So, why do we have corruption though we have courts. Because courts are slow. Not all cases reach courts. Not everyone gets to present their cases fairly before justice.
    And if we try to hasten, the decisions could become inaccurate. If we try to expand, the average intelligence of the judiciary might go low – it takes years of experience to become a judge, that’s because you learn to apply non-extremist, non-digital (non 1 or 0) logic to questions, and it takes people years to learn that (or for others to be sure they’ve learned that).

    But it’s not just the courts that are slow or inefficient. Offices, officers, administrators, organizers, chairpersons, presidents. Anyone could be inefficient. Because just occupying a government seat doesn’t automatically make a man superman. He’s the same adolescent turned young man turned adult who has all the follies, imperfections of a human. He will make mistakes when work becomes tedious for him. He will make the wrong choices when presented with too many choices.

    And where we go wrong is when we think that forcing them to do the right, putting pressure on them to perform will make them do the right. It may or may not. But I know something that has a better chance for working. And that’s technology. Sure there are things that cannot be modernized. But still, we’ve not yet achieved that much which we can. The GoI is definitely taking the right steps by implementing UID and related projects. That’s just a start. Everyone, every office, could benefit from technology. And it’s the software engineers, IT professionals, etc who can identify these areas. Funny that I didn’t start writing this post with this intention. But I suppose, if you’re an engineer, and you’ve been told that a career in medicine or administration is the best way to serve the people, well you’ve been misinformed. You have the key to the solutions of our 20th century problems.

    And I’m just trying highlight human imperfections that need to be corrected not with stricter rules, but with productivity tools.

  • Be Fearless

    “Be not afraid of anything. You will do marvelous work. it is fearlessness that brings heaven even in a moment.” ~Vivekananda

    What is the root of all miseries in the world? Worries.
    Why do we worry? We are afraid something will happen. Fear.
    What is one major reason we fear? We have done something wrong, something that others should not come to know of.
    How do we prevent this fear? Do only right.

    How do you decide what is right?

    Choose your principles wisely, and stick to them.

    How do you choose your principles?
    Look at great others.
    Gandhi had just two principles – truth & non-violence. (These are almost enough to live a safe life)
    Buddha had an extra principle – unconditioned love.

    And you could add other principles from other greats too. (Just try to avoid thinking people who live to please others, people who live to make money or people who live like slaves are great)

    Not many principles are required for a blissful life. Choose whatever you feel necessary. And then stick to them.

    When you do, you will find that you begin to fear less. And then you become fearless.

    Courage is the absence of fear.