मा फलेषु कदाचन |

I have been reading one of the articles by one of the persons
who happens to be my friend/philosopher/guide in some sorts.
In the article, he spoke about how powerful is the following
shloka from Bhagavdgita

"You have the right of only performing the actions, not of
the fruit. Do not live for the fruit of your actions, and do
not shirk from actions."

He explained it quite beautifully and quite in the same
spirit as I understand it (others may not agree!).

Here is a very brief summary of my understanding : You
don't have the right to consequences(fruits) of an action
because there are many factors involved in determining
the consequences, most of the times taking the control
out of your reach. But what you can definitely claim
as your right is the right to perform the action
because there are no other factors involved in it.
If you cannot control the consequences, you should attach
no importance to the consequences in your life. And though
you should practice detachment from the fruits, you
should not turn away from action.

Of course, it is a powerful message and I completely
agree with it except a small part. I find this
detachment-from-the-fruits-of-action part quite
difficult to cope with. I have thought of an alternative
which I feel offers more psychological support to me.

Instead of completely detaching myself from the consequences,
why I should not take a little joy in the thing that I
performed at least one of the multitude of the factors?
(If the consequences are bad, then regret a bit).
I will not claim that I am fully responsible for
the consequences because I know that I am not! I will not
claim joy/sorrow for the part for which I was not responsible.
But I would definitely like to feel pleasure/pain
for the part, even the minute part for which I was
responsible, because this gives me a motivation to move on,
and do more action, to live. Without this little
little joy/sorrow I will not be motivated to live.

Of course, different people will have different interpretations,
different justifications and so on. But I feel that
this little attachment makes me human, to enjoy life, to
give some justification for why I should perform the action.

And the above is also the way I interpret one of my all
time favorite quotes from Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore:
"Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is
no freedom for the tree".

- Onkar

...and the world lost an Euler !

Euler, the legendary mathematician went to the city of Konigsberg. The city was divided in four parts by rivers. The rivers had seven bridges on it. There he was asked if it was possible to travel all the bridges in a single journey without going twice over any bridge.



Euler realized that it was simply not possible !
He redrew the graph drawing edges for each bridge.

He said that traveling each bridge exactly once is same as drawing the graph without lifting pencil. Then he generalized the problem saying that drawing any graph without lifting pencil such that you start from point X (source) and end at point Y (destination) is possible if and only if each point (technically "node") had even number of edges connected to it, with possible exceptions of X and Y.

I had read about this long back but few days ago I tried to prove it and finally proved it. But proving it reminded me of my childhood days.

Someone at my school, mostly a classmate gave us a puzzle. We had to draw the figure below without lifting pencil.



I solved it after a few attempts. It turns out that you must start from point A and end at point B (or vice versa). Because Euler's theorem tells us that only source (A) and destination (B) are allowed to have odd number of edges connected to them, but every intermediate node must have even number of edges.


In my schooldays puzzle, only A and B had odd number of edges. So if your starting and end points of journey were not these points, it is impossible to draw the figure without lifting the pencil.

Though I solved that puzzle, I never realized that it was not the answer but the nature of question that was important.

But I never thought it that way.... and the world lost an Euler ! :P :P

Nescafe !

I love this Nescafe song ! Today I started out my day
putting this song in repeat mode. Not only its a
refreshing tune, but being designed for an
advertisement, its lyrics also makes sense !

=====================================================
"Open up !"

You can be rich with no money to spend,
you can be everything when you understand,
you can be mother when you are a man,
open up - you know that you can.

Open your eyes, open your mind, open your thoughts
- Don’t stay behind!
(Open up, open up, open up, open up)
Nescafé
(Open up, open up, open up, open up)

The key is inside you to open your mind,
you know what is out there - your heart can’t be blind,
open your eyes and open your mind,
open your thoughts - Don’t stay behind!

Open your eyes, open your mind, open your thoughts
- Don’t stay behind!
(Open up, open up, open up, open up)
Nescafé
(Open up, open up)

You race all the boarders and start in your head,
open your mind to thoughts seldom said
open your eyes and open your mind,
open your thoughts and don’t stay behind.

Open your eyes, open your mind, open your thoughts
- Don’t stay behind!
(Open up, open up, open up, open up)
Nescafé
(Open up, open up, open up, open up
Open up, open up,
Open up, open up)
Nescafé
(Open up, open up,
open up, open up,
open up, open up,
open up, open up,
open up, open up)
Nescafé
=======================================================

Lateral Thinking

(Thanks to Nachiket for this amusing real
life story. The boy in this story is
actually one of the family friend of
Nachiket's family.)

There was a boy at IIT, Kharagpur. There
were a lot of mosquitoes at IITKh so he had to
set up mosquito net before he could sleep.
Once unfortunately, this mosquito net
got a hole. Mosquitoes used to enter the
net through that hole and trouble the boy.

He simply made another hole in the
net and connected a flexible tube from
one hole to the another.

Poor mosquitoes, they did not know who
they were pitted against !!! :D

Coming of age

He was 60 years old.

He had retired as top exec.
He had two children, doing well.
A top investment firm managed his money.
His wife (still) loved him.
He reclined on his chair, sipping tea.
And he thought,
What was the purpose of my life?

He woke up.

He was only 60 years young.

The One

I often hear or read about people seeking the ultimate
truth. They speak with a sort of fantasy in their eyes.
To be one with the universe or to be in sync with the
universe, to experience that deep sense of unity with
the universe where there is no subject or the object,
just the one.

I do not want to speak about what that state might
bring about. I have a question about the ultimate
truth. Does it exist? And I want to present a
different point of view on this.

Human beings need to make sense of what they see.
They need to make abstractions in order to store
information and use. They need to make abstractions
of abstractions to simplify things. They tend to
seek invariant patterns in everything they see,
everything they do. It is perhaps necessitated
by how our brains work, tending to remember
patterns and attributes.

So humans are compelled to make a ladder of abstraction
chain. Perhaps the notion of the ultimate truth
which is the highest abstraction originates from
this tendency. It is the way we think, the way we
hypothesize that has created this hypothesis and
so it does not guarantee that such a concept exists.
It may be just a by-product thought generated
because of the way our brains work.

It does sound crazy but who cares !

- Onkar

Of food etc !

I went to a supermarket (actually it was a general commodity store) this Sunday after many months. AndI just stood looking at the prices, totally stunned ! It must not be a news to many peoople. Tur-dal Rs 110/kg, Mung-dal Rs 90/kg, Udal-dal Rs 85/kg, Rice Rs 40/kg (standard and non-exotic), Sugar Rs 40/kg! What a menace. One of my friends recited the story about buying Tur-dal. Three times he went to buy Tur-dal in few weeks time, and he heard rates of Rs 55,75 and 100. Crazy stuff !

According a not-so-recent govt survey, on average, per capita Indian expenditure on food was Rs. 440, for the duration of 2006-07. For a four member family, it amounts to Rs. 1760. Considering the spiraling rates this year, it must have crossed Rs. 2000 per month. I really am stupefied how poor people manage to have four meals a day. Here most BCom people or even BA people, hardly get salaries above Rs. 8000-10000. Considering some of the major expenditure channels like food, rent, travel, telephone, healthcare; I really cannot imagine their plight making both ends meet.

Government cannot provide jobs to all. Thats OK, in my opinion, the government should only foster the growth of employment. But food? As a touted superpower-to-be, we should at least succeed in providing food to people. This is the least you should do as govt.

Not that I did not know of the rates, but going to the shop this Sunday made me acutely aware of these rates. Just a glimpse of reality shocked me to the core.

If we are depriving poor of the food, we are doing them no good by the fake austerity drive. Austerity is a virtue, not a showcase item. I am not really against the leaders but against this showcase politics. We lament Shashi Tharoor's comments without understanding the English meaning and connotations of "cattle-class". Not only demonstrate our lack of maturity by flogging Shashi Tharoor, we also show lack of sensitivity by transforming the real issue into a totally unrelated one. We attack Shashi Tharoor for the so-called-meaning of calling them cattle but do not try to improve the conditions of cattle. In fact, we want to make them stay as hungry cattle so that we can feed them at the time of elections and get votes, then forget about them till the next election.

I am aware that as Shashi Tharoor issue was a superficial one, so are possibly my comments too, as I do not know a lot about theoretical government efforts. Still, you can get a feeling from the local news, local mess rates and from speaking to common people like auto-drivers, bus-conductors, hawkers. I also believe that if a politician has enough will power, he can definitely do most of the things in his scope.

Anyway thats the end of gibberish about the inflating prices. A small story to add a positive note at the end : Few days back I went to a State Transport bus ticket reservation center. And they were using Linux for booking tickets online! Yes, we can ! :)