of hEavEn, hEll and EvErything ElsE

'been a long time since my last post on anything under the sun. but today's post topic aint that new. even that is quite an old thought.

why do people believe in heaven or some place after death? what prompts people to put their faith in an unknown world which no one has provided them with proof for? what is heaven or afterlife?

i believe the answer is simple, human ego!

at some part of the evolutionary process of the sapiens, they evolved a self conscious. a consciousness of who he is. realized that he is not a part of the herd, but an individual with a self, an ego, some uniqueness just like everyone else :)

so the thought of where that self of his goes after death came alive. i cannot be dead and gone for ever. i'm a unique being, i have a self. it cannot just, poof, vanish into thin air. it has to go cling on to something else. i'm so important a being that death cannot just erase me away. 

obviously the men of those age were ignoramuses compared to the wisdom that the modern day generations hold; they did not hold the power of science. so for them, heaven became a place where their selves go after they are dead. 

the life of them were a constant struggle; against nature, wild animals, weather, other tribes, their wives and so on :). a lot many of them would have identified this struggles with the life on earth. even the organized religion together with the ruling classes would have knowingly or unknowingly formulated the theory of heaven to continue with their regime of oppression. the oppressed were constantly fed the idea of an afterlife where they will reap the benefits of their struggle in this life. 

naturally the oppressed did not want the oppressors in their afterlife. after all they had suffered enough from the bad guys. but by then afterlife was so much imbibed in the minds of people so that they faced a dilemma now. where does the bad guys go? thus another version of the afterlife was invented where the bad guys go so as to suffer for their sins in this earthly life. how else one could serve justice to the oppressor. thus came hell where bad guys of earthly life would be meted out the right punishments for their sins of this life.

also to be read together is the invention of gods. perhaps the god delusion came first and then the house of gods was modified suitably to fit the description of heaven. hmm, as i came writing down to this point, i feel this is more probable. heaven was too high a philosophical destination for the early humans who invented their gods in seas, mountains, lightnings, rain and so on. they were unable to find the controlling power behind these natural calamities or the mighty beings so they might have believed gods lived in some unknown place. perhaps later on this unknown was substituted for heaven...

so this is a concise take on the origin of afterlife. perhaps this is all bullshit. maybe some sociologists have come up with a more accurate and fool proof definition for the same. so what? who told i cant hypothesize?

in fact free thought and hypothesis bought humanity to this juncture where all the open minded people could thwart all attempts to whitewash the miseries of this life. science to the rescue.

this life is the only one you have. when you are dead, the fundamental particles making you become part of the earth. when the earth dies, it becomes part of the solar dust. when the sun dies the atoms which once was part of some star, which became part of you, becomes part of star dust again. it probably gives birth to another star or nebula or some planet and some being, probably humanoid. who cares...

think free. live free.

peace :)

the crickEt captain

cricket is the best of all strategy games, you may think about chess now. But ain't that a more on "paper" game? 

the strategist on field, the captain plays and manipulates his pieces/players just like a military general- you observe the enemy, analyze them, understands the 'battle' field, figures out his/her strengths and weaknesses, balances the pros and cons, and to top it all, everything of this is done in real time. 

team games have captains, but more as a namesake with the coach taking up the leadership position and players merely taking his orders. no other game comes anywhere closer to cricket on its dependence on captain and his leadership. even baseball, the closest counterpart of cricket, does not depend on the captain so much.

this is more relevant in test cricket as it is spread over 5 days. the battle feild changes, weather changes, people changes, pitch changes. the fella who went for a duck in the first innings could come back and hit a double century, the bowler who took 8 wickets in the first could be beaten left and right in the second. The job of the captain as a strategist is still relevant but reduced when the game was shortened into the 50 over format. This has become less so in the 20-20 format. This change is typical of military strategy too. Battles planned over shorter durations weighs heavily on the might of the strategist rather than the planning whereas war plans over larger durations are a game of wit, might and strategy.

the way the captin responds to these sitations and events and how he cleverly manipulates and swerves around is the epitome of a strategist and leader. a successful cricket captain is that's why such an asset to the team as a good military general or ruler.

dilEmma of EquitablE dEvElopmEnt

If we look at the history of development of free market economies it is evident that from the beginning of the 19th century the growth rate of these countries was phenomenal; both in terms of GDP as well as social development index As industrialization grew there were more and more refined industries which pushed the workers away from less skilled industries to highly skilled ones and machines replacing the low skilled workers. Social development and salaries of the workers seem to be very closely tied, as the more developed the country is socially, the more is the standard of living and the salary paid out to them. 

Any naive child of economics will undoubtedly say that the sign of a healthy economy is the domestic market. If most of the goods and services manufactured within one’s own boundaries could be sold within that confine itself, lo, we have a sustainable development model. If we look at the USA of the 80s & 90s it had one of the best in house production team, good domestic market, happy people, good social development and standard of living as a whole. 

The cost of development is that as the living standards of people increase, so does the average cost of production of goods and services. As the living standard of the Westerners increased, so did the cost of its products. As a result, to remain competitive in the huge American market, they had to outsource their manufacturing business. This was seen as an opportunity for the Asian tigers and China to push their cheaply manufactured goods to the American market. It turned out such that for an American industry operating at the same product base as an Asian country, to remain competitive it had to reduce the wages drastically. As the prices of goods came down, so does the wages and for the inflation adjusted measurements average American is poorer than his parents who worked during the 70s & 80s. Poor citizenry means lower domestic consumption which again gets bad for a capitalistic economy. 

The Indian financial planners seem to be well aware of this situation. That’s why they seem to be keener in keeping a section of the poor manufacturing workers poorer. Only if they remain poor, goods and services can be manufactured at low cost. But the middle class sitting above these oppressed poor workers seems to be getting better at the cost of the people beneath them. Of course the middle class is needed for domestic consumption. So Indian planners are using a two pronged strategy in which the primary and secondary sector workers remain as poor as possible so as to keep the product costs low, and a middle class ripe with money power so that they can drive the domestic consumption. 

As is evident from the example of the Americas, if you let loose the free market demon, it is always going to prefer the products from the poorest (as in socio-economic development & standard of living) of nations, which no doubt can manufacture at a very low cost (again the world of today is a perfect example), and reduce the real income of a nations citizens and make the country as a whole poorer. 

So the lesson today is you need a mix of capitalism within the country to sell of the goods and a certain level of protectionist measures when dealing in international trade so as to facilitate a more equitable development model.

holE in thE wall

I'm a timid eater in captivity being reluctant to try anything new "alone", but in a tag team with a foodie; I turn into a vicious connoisseur devouring anything that comes in my way like a true predator in the wild ;)

Lucky I got a good partner foodie for a roommate; we decided to try out a place called Hole-in-the-Wall, which was recommended heavily by another food junkie in my new employer's payroll. Verdict is that it was one of the best decisions of my life to have switched job and roommates ;)

After waking up at 11 am on a nice Sunday morning, it was the perfect time for brunch (thanks to the west). Giving heed to the stomach's starved howls and grumbles, we packed light and set off on our quest. Thanks to Google maps, finding the place was not that much of a pain. What struck us as the most astounding fact was that the place literally lived up to its name, being a hole in a wall which can accommodate hardly 6 tables with max occupancy of around 20 mouths. Needless to say, the place was packed and overflowing for its size. We had to wait almost an hour for a table. Although we heard some whispering voices mentioning Thulp and some other places, we decided to hold our ground and ignore everything else lest we fall into temptation. Finally by 12pm, we were rewarded with a nice cosy place next to the kitchen & cash counter.

No time was wasted in placing the order as we decided to gobble up on an English breakfast with pancakes to be washed down with hot cocoa. English breakfast was done and placed on our table with the egg prepared sunny side up, in a jiffy but nothing was cut short on it- there were sausages, bacon, beans & mushroom. It was whole sum & pleasant for my not so tiny stomach and don't bother, the taste was awesome. By the time we finished it, pancakes felt like overkill, but decision was already made by our taste palates; so we decided not to renegade on that. It was my first time with pancakes, but lo, it tasted like something my mother used to prepare of which we didn’t know the name until then. Finally as a tangy afterthought I got a lime and ginger juice which was quite unlike anything I’ve tasted.

Overall one of the best brunch experience in Bangalore. Apart from being a hole in the wall, I can’t think of any other USP for the place besides the food. Ambiance is normal, with a couple of photos of B.Marley, some paintings, cartoons, this-and-that framed and kept around. Even the hotelier licenses are framed and go well with Bob’s twitched smile. all this coupled with the antique furniture, closely knit group/family(?) of people serving and managing the place, the rock and a strange feeling of being in the mama's kitchen (believe me, if not for the billing counter separation, you are 2-3 feet away from the stove) could be cited as the wonder glue holding the place together.

To rate it; hole in the wall sure fired in the hole :) [4/5]

Here are a few links which may provide more thorough and tasteful insights with menu and pictures shedding light into the "hole".

Menu: 

http://www.zomato.com/menus/50237/menu-photo-for-the-hole-in-the-wall-cafe-1.jpg

http://www.zomato.com/menus/50237/menu-photo-for-the-hole-in-the-wall-cafe-2.jpg

http://www.zomato.com/menus/50237/menu-photo-for-the-hole-in-the-wall-cafe-3.jpg

http://www.zomato.com/menus/50237/menu-photo-for-the-hole-in-the-wall-cafe-4.jpg

Review & Photos:

http://www.bangaloresrestaurants.com/2010/08/hole-in-wall-cafe.html

Bifurcation

Today's a wonderful and memorable day in the history of blogging as the omniscient blog of all the "fuk"ing things under and above the sun is bifurcating so as to better reach the targeted audience and fully utilize the brand potential for all markets developing and emerging so as to exert the leverage that we command in the area of all sh*t...

enough of all this fu**ing sh**. i just thought it will be a good idea to "fork" to two different blogs, one catering to the English self and the other to the mother tongue self. For the English rantings this will remain the place to be and for the mother tongue rants i have chosen the following name, എന്നാ-കോപ്പാ  which will roughly translate to the same meaning in my mother tongue, as this blog conveys, the only difference being calling someone 'son-of-a-bit**' and 'നായിന്റെ മോനെ'. 

as simple as that. if you understand my mother tongue, wouldn't hurt dropping in once in a while @ http://enna-koppaa.blogspot.com/

chEap labour in india

This is a conversation that occurred among three selves of mine- the sceptic, the politician and the capitalist.

(Prologue) India is a predominantly agriculture economy; not that it contributes much to the major indexes of development like GDP or the BSE index, but because it employs more people than any other sector. When the number of people employed by this industry and the output of this sector are tallied, free market entrepreneurs shudder.

(C): So little from so many and we say we have labour deficit in the cities for all the developmental activities we throw away to these third world pieces of shit. Why don’t these labour resources come to cities and work cheap for us?

(S): But how do we get them work for us? Hmmm, let’s see. They may make the bulk of the food eaten by the well to do cousins in cities; they may sell out their produce for paltry sums to the middlemen and eke out a living;

(P): In actuality the government could not care less. They don’t contribute to the stock markets, they are a bane on the nation by pulling down the per capita income with their substantially low income and their only power of self worth, the voting rights can be bought out once every 5 year for a paltry sum and some empty promises. Let’s drive out some of these scoundrels out of their villages ...

(S): Where they have a decent place to sleep under more equitable and liveable conditions.

(P): ... and bring them to cities. Let’s build dams, umpteen lane highways, mine in their territory so that they can be driven out in the name of the greater common good and nationalism.

(S): But what about our food production and security?

(P): Who cares? We have enough money to buy anything we want. If farmers insist on farming we will make it conducive to produce cash crops which require substantially less labour. Thereby a section of the framers, namely the wealthy cash crop farmers get wealthier and the poor will be driven out to cities for our nation building.

(C): All these worthless beings will then folk to the city and will form the basis for the cheap labour that we've been looking. We will get to pay a lot lesser for them. Maybe we can even manage to pay them lesser than that they used to get in their villages.

(S): But then what about the lowering of per capita income?

(C): Fool, PCI of the developing and powerful middle class will rise faster than the rate at which these scoundrels can bring it down.

(S): But what if someone tries to be a hero?

(P): We have all the tags to assign them, like that of nationalism, patriotism, terrorism - we can always sideline, eliminate or make them irrelevant.

(S): What are the ramifications?

(P): India will continue to grow at double digit growth rates. Our stock markets will continue to rise. More foreign investments will come in.

(C): Using which we can gobble up still more land in the villages and drive out more of these scoundrels to cities from which we can pick and choose cheap labour.

(S): What an idea sirji (sigh)...

hypocritE

I'm a hypocrite
As I enunciate the morally correct and righteous
Whereas I hardly practice the same
Hence I'm a hypocrite

I say I'm an atheist
As I say I don't believe in God and divine interventions
Whereas I go to the nearest God and temple in the vicinity of the slight disturbance
Hence I'm a hypocrite

I say I'm a secularist
As I proclaim all the religions the same
Whereas I personally consider my religion the best
Hence I'm a hypocrite

I say I'm a liberal
As I proclaim myself to accept all philosophies good or bad without conviction
Whereas I consider all new philosophies as subservient to my beleifs
Hence I'm a hypocrite

I say I'm a communist
As all property should be owned and operated by govt
Whereas I may seldom give up my land without a fight
Hence I'm a hypocrite

I say I love the poor
As I blame the govt and the rich for the plight of the poor
Whereas the sight of a begger loses my appetite
Hence I'm a hypocrite

I say I'm a feminist
As women are socially, politically and economically capable as men
Whereas I consider women only equal to themselves
Hence I'm a hypocrite

I say I'm intelligent
As I write a poem with supposedly intellectual gibberish
Whereas I know how stupid and shitty this looks
Hence I'm a hypocrite

minimalizE/trim down your firEfox browsEr

Are you a firefox fan?

Do you love the Google chrome interface for its sleek and minimalistic interface but love Firefox for its openness and functionality?

That's the case with me.

So I decided to trim down Firefox by removing the unnecessary elements from the browser and increase the screen real estate. After some help from the net and some configuration file edits, this is how my Firefox looks like.

So here's how;

Open Chrome and the first thing you notice is the absence of a Title bar. I wonder what this screen hogging useless crap does which is none in particular. For this, the plethora of Firefox extensions come in handy. Download and install the "Hide Caption Titlebar Plus" add-on for Firefox and voila your title bar is gone. With a few adjustments on the add-on options you can opt to hide the title bar of all your Firefox windows and pop-ups. 

You might have seen the three toolbar- menu, navigation and bookmarks. What I did was to drag all the buttons from bookmarks and navigation bar into the menu bar. You can do this by right clicking any of the toolbar and opting for "Customize". From the customize window, you can add/remove and  move all of Firefox buttons, address bar, search bar and other elements to wheresoever you wish. Once all the components were moved to Menu bar, hide the navigation and bookmarks bar. This can be done by unchecking these toolbar from View->Toobars->.

After doing the above steps you may find the address bar and search bar too small. For this I came across another solution. The menu bar, which has all the File, Edit, View, History and miscellaneous menus are seldom used in the course of a normal browsing session. So why not compress this into a single menu button, which when clicked displays the menus? For this after some search I came across another addon- "Tiny Menu". Install this add-on and all your menus are compressed into a menu button. A great savings in screen estate. This is how it looks like;

Another element which eats up my screen is the status bar. But removing this? That's tricky. I wouldn't know what's the status when a  web-page loads and neither would i be able to see if a link is pointing to some ad site. For this too the solution came in the form of another add-on, "autoHideStatusBar". This is exactly the stuff I was looking for- it will hide the status bar whenever there is some activity whose status needs to be shown- like loading of a web-page. This has also configurable options to show the link when the mouse is hovered over hyperlink for some time. 

This is how the status bar will look like when the page is loading;

And this is how it will look like after the page loads;

That's how I saved my Firefox from falling prey to Chrome.
At the end of the day, a comparison of Chrome and Firefox seems reasonable and FF is no longer a spendthrift of your valuable pixels.

intErnEt, cEnsorship, frEE markEt & frEEdom

Through the mainstream media, we are told that China, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea and the likes are states that restrict freedom of expression through censorship and limits freedom of expression. On the other side we have the free world which mainly comprises of the US and the Europe where we have unlimited freedom, choice and the entire freedoms one could possibly imagine. I would have taken these down just like any other life in the "Matrix" had I not taken the red pill once in a while. This time it was an article that came in the IEEE Communications Magazine written by none other than Richard Stallman. It had startling revelations which I would like to broadcast with GPL and fair use permissions from Stallman.

The So-Called Free World

1. Let’s start with China (although not a "free" state), where the government plans to Identify and photograph everyone that uses an Internet cafe. ⁽¹⁾

2. Some of the cell phones can be activated by remote command to listen to the user's conversations without giving any sign of listening, by the police⁽²⁾ and by unauthorized individuals.⁽³⁾

3. The European Union mandates keeping record of all phone calls and emails for periods of up to two years.

4. Your cell phone can be used to locate your position by triangulation to amazing accuracies.

5. Denmark’s government has blocked access to a secret list of web pages. Australia’s government plans to follow suit but has met strong resistance, so instead it has forbidden links to a long list of URLs. Australia now says it will sensor access to a secret list of foreign sites starting this year. ⁽⁴⁾

6. Electronic Frontiers Australia was forced under the threat of fines of AUD 11,000 per day to remove a link to an anti-abortion political web site.

7. India has announced a broad plan of censorship that would effectively abolish freedom of the press on the Internet. ⁽⁵⁾

8. In the United States, people have been imprisoned as “terrorists” for running a website which discussed actions taken against experiments on animals.

9. Microsoft Windows has features to spy on the user⁽⁶⁾, Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) features designed to stop the user from making full use of his own files⁽⁷⁾, and an all purpose back door with which Microsoft can forcibly change the software in any way at any time⁽⁸⁾. Microsoft can alter any software, not just its own. ⁽⁹⁾

10. In 2009, Amazon remotely commanded the erasure of all the copies of 1984, by George Orwell, that users had bought from Amazon. ⁽¹⁰⁾

11. The French government recently passed a law (HADOPI) to abolish the principle of due process of a law, by punishing Internet users with disconnection on the mere accusation of copying. Although this law is not in effect, United Kingdom has proposed such a law too. 

12. Canada reluctantly published a list of suggestions it received from private parties, and HADOPI style punishment without trial was one of them. ⁽¹¹⁾

When the so called democratic and developed countries pursue such forms of censorship, intolerance and restriction of ‘fundamental’ rights, who are they to blame countries like Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, china and the likes of press censorship and restriction of freedom ? It will be sheer hypocrisy and nothing else. It’s nothing new that the developed countries are becoming more and more plutocratic and authoritarian. When George Orwell wrote “1984”, he had in mind the closed structure of some of the communist nations. But whatever the free world doubted and feared in the communist ages of post World War 2, is in their backyards.

References:

1. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24510571-2703,00.html
2. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/12/remotely_eavesd_1.html
3. http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/local/news-article.aspx?storyid=84936
4. http://www.efa.org.au/2009/12/17/filtering-coming-to-australian-in-2010/
5. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Govt-gearing-up-to-gag-news-websites/articleshow/4562292.cms
6. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/02/28/windows_update_keeps_tabs
7. http://badvista.org
8. http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201806263
9. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/05/microsoft_update_quietly_insta.html
10. http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/some-e-books-are-more-equal-than-others/
11. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/11/canadian-wish-list-for-secret-acta-treaty-long-varied.ars

how far arE wE from thE Matrix???

When I saw the movie “Matrix” for the first time I couldn’t fully comprehend the fine idea embedded in it. It took me multiple viewings to fully envision what the Wachowski brothers were trying to say. Even then at that time, I never thought this could become a reality; not that now I think it will become a reality in the near future. But the way things are shaping up I'm beginning to realize that I cannot fully dismiss that notion.

My biggest doubt against a successful Matrix was that how a computer based network can understand and replicate the complex social, physiological and emotional thoughts with an even bigger amount of randomness in such a way those human beings will seldom know when they are in a dream and when they are out of it. More recent advancements in the field of science, technology and the "Internet" have exponentially reduced this chasm between reality and computational psychology.

In this connected world as more and more people are logging in and all their thoughts, actions and interactions are published for anyone’s and everyone’s taking, it becomes too easy to predict and replicate someone’s thoughts and actions. For an illustrative example take a look at Google Inc and at the technologies they are developing. They started off with the innocuous search engine and later diversified into various other technologies. Everybody is aware of the apparent uses of these technologies, but I will add a few more phrases to bring out the concealed and nefarious for which this could be used.

Search engine	Omniscience. Grab all the worlds’ knowledge so that it could be used in Matrix for deductive reasoning and research.
Mail	Learn about one's social/professional network, what/when/how they are doing in their personal and professional life.
Calendar	How people organise their lives and how they spend their time
Documents	Access to people's private documents
Orkut	Map out one’s friends, who they know, how they know, what do they do
Picasa	What/when/where have they been/seen and who else they spend their time with.
Groups	Find out people's interests, hobbies, affiliations
Youtube	Understand/control what they see for infotainment
Blogger	Direct access to your thoughts and whatever otherwise repressed emotions.
Android Mobile Platform	Track where you are (using mobile based triangulation), find who you talk to, what you say, and what you see
Books	Condense and archive the world’s written knowledge
Desktop search	Access to whatever documents that you have not put up on the net
Google talk	Whatever you say and chat with your friends

Socrates ones said, “Tell me who your friends are I will tell you who you are”. With all this tools and the other multitude of stuff like Twitter, Facebook etc your life is for anyone’s reading. How so ever you try the connection between your private, unexposed and unconnected life with the connected one is rapidly increasing. There are such intelligent search engines like Wolfram Alpha which aims to find and almost figures out answer to intelligent questions.

Once all the blanks are filled-in, in the future, at the end of your every online connection there may appears a completely intelligent system which will be able to replicate any human behaviour. The distance to Matrix from there will be very short and fast.