A joyful peek into a mind at play - A book review

A gross misappropriation that the modern world is likely guilty of is to assume one’s professional capability as one’s own identity.  And this isn’t only because one need not be limited by our professional avatar because we too often take our masquerading avatar at workplace too seriously. Nearly everyone who reads this piece is an engineer. But are you really one or you are masquerading to be one? This book holds an introspective mirror if we are worthy of our professional identity through the example of one of the world’s greatest scientist, Dr Claude E Shannon (1916-2001).

One of my professor’s favourite line was, science is not a profession. It is a way of life, which an individual is incapable of switching it off at home and turning the fountain of creativity on at will. This book captures the life of a genuine scientist, the joy de vivre associated with a life in science. Shannon is considered as the father of information theory and his contributions to modern day computer science are frequently compared with the brilliant minds of Turing and Von Nuemann. Shannon’s 1948 papers on “A mathematical theory of communication” is widely acknowledged as one of the seminal works towards the creation of modern internet and credited with starting a field on its own.

The book traces a biographical account of Shannon from his early days in Michigan, rural southern USA, his parents influence on him and extensively documents the various experiments of a young Shannon in high school. Think of a Dexters Lab. No, seriously! Brick and mortar experiments, not abstract experiments. As it becomes evident through the book, these science experiments are a common recurring theme in Shannon’s life and help shape Shannon, the genius of a scientist. There isn’t a serious Shannon divorced from the playful experiments at the basement of his home. After a first failed marriage to a leftist activist, Shannon marries Betty a technician at Bell labs who remains his constant companion in all his work and even the various wonderful experiments at his home. The author provides a vivid account of the various experiments – elevators, automatic maze beating mouse, Theseus and an automatic chess playing machine. Shannon truly is a scientist who does justice to the title of the book, a mind at play.

The book leaves us with an impression of Shannon, a mind for which the entire world is a playground and every problem but a puzzle. And he did solve one of the world’s toughest problems of the era – the limits of information theory. For most of us engineers, Shannon’s theorems are but a passing chapter or another course in the syllabus. This book provides an insight into the science and engineering of that era, the corresponding efforts of other scientists and how in this background Shannon’s efforts are magnanimous. Though one could argue there is a timelessness to Shannon’s work, the author’s picture of the 1940s provides for a wonderful backdrop. With more scientific knowledge and history of other scientists of the era, a more informed reader than me, am sure will get much more from the book. Infact, I think many scientists hold that the era of the Russell, Godel, Turing, Von Neumann, Shannon et. Al. was one of the liveliest eras for computer science and math punctuated with landmark results compressed within a short span.

This book leaves you wondering, are you really a scientist?

Crushes, life after 27

I am 27. That makes me old to have been smitten by a few crushes. It also makes me old enough not to write about crushes. The age also affords me the luxury to indulge in the warm remniscing of my crushes with fond nostalgic eyes. Affectionate feelings for the crushes don’t translate positively to the process of crushing, in itself. I am scared of the uncertainty involved. Every crush has changed me, mostly for the better. Any change, though is painful. Some crushes made me a better speaker(somewhat!), some others a feminist. At the least, it has made me a more rounded person than before. One of the most heartwarming incidents was when, a crush said I've been trying too hard to be an asshole and perhaps, I wasn't one. And I really did believe her.
To think of it, who are crushes?To me, these are examples whom I wish to emulate, by whom I am smitten and are better examples of humanity than me. They are myself, I see in the future. But, I am scared of change and by extension, I am scared of developing a crush. Age, one assured oneself granted immunity against crushes. The receding hairline, one supposed repelled the women I admire. And a wit, which only I think can even be called wit!
But, strikes it does every time, with a vengeance. Even, at this age.  Initially, one just laughs it off. After all, isn’t all this for the teens? Like waiting for a message, sounding nervous when you meet the person. You assure yourself, “No, I am not nervous. This wasn’t how it was the last time, when being crushed”. And indeed it wasn’t like this, the last time a crush happened. Because, every crush is different and it is exactly why crushes, by definition are so attractive. Yet, I can slowly find myself opening up to her, one message at a time. Revealing the silliness of me, which isn’t guarded by anything better in the first place.  I am now scared and concocting theories of how this can’t be a crush and how it is a logical impossibility. And to be fair, my theory is logically sound too.
But, when were crushes dictated by logic?

TSG

TSG

New four lane, six lane, eight lane highways have changed the nature of travel. Chennai to Bangalore is all I know which houses an A2B in between and multiple toll plazas. The villages on the road pass by in a blurr as tiny unwanted dots on the way. My grandfather lived in one such village on the Trichy Madurai highway. Viralur Agraharm. Just another nondescript village with a few houses nearby and where power cuts are the norm. Another village where commonsfolk converse about the Thiruvizha (village fest), an illegal liaison in a neighbouring street and the latest scheme by the government.

Mr. T S Gopalakrishnan (TSG as he liked being called!) was a government school teacher who worked in a number of schools in the locality. Perfectly run-of-the-mill till now. Till you know his father from a Pudukkottai agraharam was a lorry driver. And his wife worked as a teacher in various schools, sometime as far as tens of kilometres. Surely, agraharam maamis were supposed to be grinding batter for the morning dosaai and making the best kaapi in the village.

My grandfather, TSG was a perfectly unreasonable man for most part. And believed in doing things which he was not supposed to be doing. Like driving two wheelers immediately after surgeries, opening small scale industries near home! The upside of him opening the small scale industry was I used to meet all the unmarried girls in the town who came to work here. I was only 8 then.

After having lived a full life till 80, he passed away last year. And I went to his home (or mine?) to clean the remaining things. And it was one of the most heart wrenching chores I’ve done in recent times. Every hook around the home carried a story. Like the new bathroom he built near home a couple of years ago because my cousin could not go till the end of street for defecation. Or the peacock feathers(maayil rakkai) that he must have collected from the backyard for me because I will be home for summers. For the best part of their retired lives, my grandparents spent the year waiting for us to come during the summer. Oh, and I used to complain about how boring days were in the village. How I wish I could have been a better child!

The things that people leave behind also allows us a peek into their lives. The choice of the marriage invitations that he thought he should save in the cupboard or the rather “useless” notes of his son that I had to painfully discard was such a poignant experience.

Some losses are painful. Some others continue to be so.

About the house, it now looks like this. The lamp remains, but the light is off.

Smile ek, memories anek

Masochism comes in many forms. And one of them is to take a bus from office to home at 6 pm to travel 30 kms. Never mind, the small stretch of Graphite India, notorious as India's biggest free parking facility.

The bus made its way out of the office through a narrow lane when London's cousin clouds hesitantly opened up after threatening from days and cheating the meteorology department for weeks. The traffic was threatening to swell. And I cursed myself for boarding a Volvo.  It wasn't because it was creaking but I could not smell the fresh scent of rain. The chill of AC only reached as far as the skin, unlike the breeze accompanying the rains which touch the soul.

Most other passengers were captive to their mobiles. Some to their wives who were perhaps travelling in another bus like them. Perhaps, they were talking about the pesky co worker in their office. Or the wife warning her husband not to look at the pretty new intern.Left to myself, I opened up a book.  It was only a few words before my mind just flew back to the window.

In the 90s, there were only a dozen cars in India and yet I thought there were different cars plying on the road.  Today, there are hundreds in the market and yet they all seem the same. White, black, red, yellow they all crawled ahead of us.With a laptop bag for company, these collar button clad drivers seemed to race ahead of my bus. And I continued staring aimlessly across the window, as in life. And another bus came and stood besides mine. Like freshly ironed uniformed school students standing next to each other for a Physical education drill.  Amid the passengers lost in their own worlds was a woman lost in her book. Fictional or otherwise.  In between this, my bus threatened to leave the other bus behind. But only for a few feet. Now it was their bus turn's to play jugalbandi. Her eyes never left the book and mine never her.

And when i was least expecting it, her eyes met mine. Or that is what I thought. But, she most probably saw the book in my hand and smiled. I thought she smiled at me. She smiled at the book. These books I tell you get loved more by women that we poor men get. Being the chivalrous gent, I returned back the smile with double the interest.

And she burst out laughing. As her bus started picking up speed, she showed the cover of her book through the window. We were reading the same book. Her bus left me with an embarrassed smile for the rest of the journey.

Tin Factory to Whitefield

Even if it was only a couple of days back, my memory fails to register the bus number through which I travelled. Being written Kannada challenged, but adequately comfortable in the tongue I asked the friendliest looking face in the bus, Whitefieldu hogattha? This reminds me of my first years in Bangalore, when I first asked a shy “Mathikere hogthara?”  to a rather bemused commuter. Much more assertive now, I received a rather warm but slightly hurried reply, “Hoggathe banni” (Goes, come in) from the conductor.

                I trudged inside and sat comfortably in one of the first gents’ seat in the bus.  Those familiar with the topography of a BMTC Parisara Vahini bus would identify the first gents’ seat peculiarly housing another seat opposite it. Like it or otherwise even if it most often the latter, one would be forced to appreciate the half shaved face in front. The situation is even more acute to the minority population which does not have the luxury to fiddle with a Whatsapp or a Temple Run.  I had to make do watching the temple of an old man. After multiple failed attempts by passengers to proxy the conductor’s whistle, the bus slowly entered into the road only to stop again with all the other vehicles in the road.  At least, the bus had company. A panting school boy boarded the bus and sat down with a violent thrust that only tired people are capable of. Gopalan High School, his uniform read and the pencil moustache hinted at the lad studying in pre University College. This age is better remembered for its second crush and the first one sided love affair than the Irodov problems which most of us fail to understand, leave alone remember.

                “Pass thorsi, ticket thogoli” said the conductor and nonchalantly walked behind much before I could dig out my pass from the bag. As any experienced commuter would testify, the first announcement by the conductor is only for commuters to keep their wares ready and sit with a 10 rupees waiting for the conductor to come back. So, did he. He scantly seemed keen to look at my face in the pass.  After punching a few holes, he looked at the school boy’s face which exactly meant, “Your turn”! The boy in turn removed a 50 rupee note.  These bigger notes always tend to bring out the growl in the conductor and he yelled a very predictable “chillare kodi”.  Apology written over all his face, the boy looked around in his pockets to find none. The conductor wouldn’t budge on his demand. It was his territory after all. And he walked away towards the ladies section, with an air of having conquered his little duel with the little boy. The ruffled boy flashed his 50 rupee note to an onlooker who was eying it all. Not me, someone else who replied a polite no. He then enquired the man standing next to him, who twitched his lips. The desperate boy now looked at the man next to me. “Illa”, he said and stretched his hands deep into his pockets to pluck a 10 rupee note and handed it over to the boy. The boy was totally puzzled. The conductor just walked by. The boy mumbled something to the man who assured him he didn’t want the money back. The conductor was totally ashamed by his high handed behaviour and tried explaining that this was how he ensured commuters carry many ding-dong sound making coins in their packets. As the conductor left for his next round, the boy once again dug deep into his bag. And this time, his hands did not return empty.

                One, two, three,….  seven of them. He removed mint chocolates and forced it into the hands of the benevolent donor who was grinning from ear to ear. And so were all of us onlookers. Sometimes, good things happen in Tin Factory and Whitefield too.

A demonstration of non-linear reduction of estimate through bargaining principles

                It’s tempting to start with an abstract, followed by an introduction, a section on literature survey and make a pointless conclusion about how our method is 0.002% more efficient than the neighboring researcher’s method. But disruptive outcomes deserve better treatment and hence this post on one of the most “productive” meetings that I have attended. Wait, did I tell a “productive meeting”? Wasn’t that phrase universally accepted as an oxymoron now?

                If productivity is measure in rupees, then 11 lakhs saved in 2 and hours has to be one of the most productive hours. As a part of a tech fest in office our department had to set up a stall and we were promised 5 lakhs to do it. As is our wont, we drew elaborate drawings in our mind, scribbled a few of them on the board and went to the contractor. And said, Boss kitna chahiye?

                2 days later in a hurriedly convened meeting, the contractor meets us and demands 18 Lakhs! 18 Bloody Lakhs for a stall we thought in unison. And the castles in air or rather our stalls in air came crashing down. Were it to be our friendly National market, it would have been easy to bring down the cost through the standard Indian method of bargaining. The standard Indian method I hope you are all aware of and I shall reiterate it for the convenience of the disadvantaged. Fix up the price you think the product is worth, say X. Let the quoted price by the shopkeeper is Y. Y would obviously be >> than X. Start demanding the product at a rate (X-(Y-X)). After n rounds of iteration, the shopkeeper eventually gets rid of the item to you with curses muttered so that it would fail in a day or two.

                However, the comparatively posh environment of JFWTC and the august company of our co-workers was restraint enough to avoid an exhibition of the above mentioned method to bargain. This proved to be the “pathfinder” to a novel attempt at bargaining. In this method, each component of the sum total is separated out such that no item is a combination of two or more primary components. This is important as every component in our bill has to undergo a GRC* transformation which reduces its price non linearly.

                Back to the bill. The contractor opened a very professional looking excel sheet to show us the bill. Somehow, I have begun believing that the word “Microsoft” brings a lot of monetary luck. Gates became the richest man. Wielders of Microsoft powerpoint and Excel always seem more blessed with their bank accounts than the poor ones who see more numbers regularly in their Matlab screen.  The first item was ostensibly titled “creative charges”. And it costed us a whopping 35k. Inspite of our protests that most of the design being provided by us, contractor seemed in no mood to relent. Our complaints were dismissed off with little reason but good English and we moved forward to the next item. To the walls of the stall. Off went the fancy material and in came the flex. A few lakhs chopped and yet, we were unsure if that could make any difference. The molten cabin was replaced by their more humble cousins. Bar chairs were thrown out. Every table debated.  Some of the ideas were ridiculous. Of course, I must admit that the the higher the degree of ridiculoulessness the more you could be sure they belonged to me. Like doing away with the platform! Finding the colour which would cost the least.  And after finally after nearly removing everything, we arrived at the magic number 7.7! From 18 to 7.7 at the end of two hours. Ofcourse, we got complimentary headphones at the end of the ordeal. But the best bit of bargain had to be not letting the contractor not buying drawing paper. We promised to get them from the stationary store in office who is obviously going to throw a very curious (but hopefully not a dirty) glance when we order 500 drawing papers in a single shot. And the lovely catch by Sudhanya in not letting the games to be bought by the contractor to avoid 22% of taxes.

In my next visit to National market, hopefully this experience will embolden me to scare the wits of the shopkeer!

Winners are not always heroes

Dreams don’t occur naturally. They have to be dreamt. Yet, are we allowed to dream?

Meet my friend, Abhijeet Shedge. He joined my school, Crescent High School when we were in 4^th standard and used to wear that blighted yellow half trousers as uniform to school. I tend to call it my school because I was already a veteran of 8 years in the school when this little fellow trudged into my school. He introduced himself with his name and history of having studied in a nearby district, the name of which my ageing brain cells fail to remember. His eyes seemed to have shrunk from some severe nonexistent drought which immediately earned him one of his nicknames that would haunt him forever during his school life. Nepali was one of them. Butka was another because of his dwarf like height and Shegdi, which meant a cooking utensil in Marathi.  The geographical intimacy of our homes and the fact that not many people  in our school rated the area we live in of any great standard, we immediately hit off as close friends. Soon, it was lunch with him, wada pav with him. Lots of teasing, fighting and even physical assaults. We once bit each other bringing out the innermost Tyson in us.

               Tonight, he reminds me of a deep malaise which I am guilty of. Of which the society should be guilty about. While I agree to be every bit of douche bag that I sound, I have always managed a better score than this lad. Even better in Marathi, his mother tongue. And the chap used to study, and study. Unrelenting. Inspite of the poor marks, inspite of the many times the teacher has been unfair and awarded him less than what he deserved. His notes always showed the wear and tear that accompanies incessant dwelling with it. Textbooks bore the valiant marks of studying and struggling with a language he and his mother fought hard to understand. Unlike today’s age where you can know the current prime minister of Scandavania, if that is the most obscure country, within seconds, those were the days when you kept newspapers as archives for future reference. He scored well, just not as much as me. And my mistake? Teased him over studying a lot and yet scoring less. It is always a romantic idea of the last bencher not studying and yet acing the exams. Yet, we are celebrating a man who has not discovered his potential. It wasn’t about teasing him about the lesser marks. A number of students scored less. But, they never cared. They never studied. But the subject of ridicule was studying “pointlessly” without results. That stud attitude on my part! The only days I’ve seen him playing with abandon was the day the exams got over. Or a day after.  A day after he has got enough sleep post the stress of exams. I’ve ridiculed him for this and much more.  While my evenings were spent trying to emulate Rahul Dravid, the young man was honing his preparation for the exam.

               For a long while, till today, I thought he was perhaps a loser. Worked hard without results. And then the epiphany stuck me. He indeed could be a loser. Yet, he is a hero. Our society has mistaken winners to be heroes. Heroes are everywhere. They might lose our exams, their girls reject them. Yet, these fellows dreamt more than their allowed quote. The rebels of our age! He dared, dreamt beyond his natural and latent potentialities, if that is the word to use. Punching above one’s weight or even daring to think about punching above one’s weight is what makes a hero. And then, the cliché about failure not really making losers out of men suddenly made sense. Failure implies your ability to think beyond what you can achieve. And that is victory in itself.  These are the small thoughts that lift you when you are stuck in the dark abysses rejected by the world.

               Abhijeet, you are a hero. You make me feel a hero too.  Let the dreams continue.