Life is a chain of availed possibilities

Life is a chain of availed possibilities. Most of us who are in positions to choose still don't make the choices that we know for sure would make us happy. The inertia in being in the current state and what it leads to in its natural random course is often very strong, and the mind cooks up all kinds of explanations and illusions for itself to justify why choosing anything else is not feasible. The so-called 'comfort zones' are hardly comfortable. But somehow the mind finds its ways to make us want to settle for what we've got, and yet regret not pursuing what we could have. Perhaps it's part of being an animal, and to break out requires a different mindset, unless constantly breaking out is more a natural course for someone.

How to train one's mind to make the choices it really wants to?

Kill your time wisely

Social media, regular media, mobile phones, TV - have all and together dumbed us down so badly and so tremendously that I fear we are losing our ability to think, reason and interact like erstwhile normal human beings. Things are getting integrated and we are pushed for ever higher adoption, so that more and more data is generated that can be fed into big-datas and AI's - and help businesses target customers better, create machines that are like the screwed up versions of humans that we ourselves are on the internet. The addictive nature of online platforms is no more a hot topic of debate, as it was in the Orkut days 10 years back - perhaps coz the debates that gain prominence now are controlled better by the platforms that host these debates, and there's no incentive for them in letting the content that hurts them show up, especially when they are listed companies and responsible for keeping on generating profits and shareholder returns.

Picture copied from here

Getting out of this quagmire is as nearly impossible as it is easy getting into it. It plays with your mind constantly, and the moment you try to distance yourself from it even a bit, the feeling of getting left out grips you all over, and when the cold turkey becomes unbearable, you are pushed back into the mess. And even if you are capable of dealing with the psychological complexities, the more practical issue is that the way most stuff works these days is tightly integrated with the web and the social media. How could you stay away from WhatsApp when everyone in your office is lying in that group in the app where office matters are discussed, although only for 1% of the time; and there are more 1-1 interactions happening on these instant messengers than face-to-face? How can you stay away from LinkedIn when networking has become the only way to get good jobs - true especially for MBA's? I owe finding my wife to a matrimonial site, so I shouldn't complain. But then, a matrimonial site doesn't try to engage you beyond its purpose. Same is the case with a job portal or a travel/hotel booking site, although they want you to return for your next job or booking. But the likes of Facebook and Twitter work on a different principle. Their goal is not to help the user carry out a transaction but to tie down the user and make him/her stay for as long as possible. And they do this by creating an environment where the users pull each other while the platform provides them with tools to do so. And smartly embedded in those tools and the environment are pieces that are paid for, not by the users but by the actual customers of these platforms for gaining access to the users killing time and exposing themselves to these pieces in the process, and also offering information about themselves that helps businesses target them more effectively. This is a simple and general way of looking at what happens on the web, but the point that does come out is that someone out there is using our time to help other businesses. In a way that's great for the market. We, as users, are undoubtedly served better in the process, but at what expense? The opportunity cost can't be quantified as any alternative scenario seems inconceivable the way things have evolved on the web and into our lives. Nor do I think we can go back from here. But perhaps some of us can make better choices and make something else of our time, while also not totally giving up the better service that's on offer!

Speed Bumps

We bought a new Air Conditioner in March this year. Twice since then some birds have screwed up the wires leading to the external unit outside. I earlier thought it was pigeons, as a lot of them fly around. But recently saw a few parrots going there, at the point where the wires were messed up last time. How to deal with this issue? I told my wife in Hindi - "Ye kabootar nahi, mitthu ne kiya". She burst out laughing. I came to know that Mitthu is more like a loving nickname for parrots. The more common word for them is Tota. I knew Tota, but didn't know that Mitthu is more the with-love kind of name. I sort of understand that now - Irfan Khan used to call Saba Qamar as Mitthu in the movie Hindi Medium - it was a love-name like for a parrot, i.e., Tota. I see that Tota is clearly masculine, I am not so sure about Mitthu from the sound of it, although it has to be masculine just to be consistent. Anyhow, the damn creature keeps damaging the wires of the AC, and I can't do anything about it. I have to set up some hurdles, so that the parrots can't reach the wires.

I came back just now from a stroll in our neighborhood - one of the 3-4 tea-and-walk breaks I take everyday as I work from home. There's a new ugly speed-breaker built on the nice concrete road in our area. I was totally pissed off looking at it. Firstly coz I hate these things called speed breakers in India, which you find all over the country, and which I find most idiotic as a concept. And secondly, a lot of times these are made really huge and high without any consideration for the vehicles that have to pass the hurdle... my brother's Honda City was hit at the base because of insufficient ground clearance.

The most ridiculous aspect of these so called speed-breakers is the concept itself - creating a hurdle on the road so that one is forced to slow down - who thinks like that? Well, I do agree that humans are a kind that don't adhere to speed limits if you just tell them to. You have to either penalize them effectively and without fail, or force them to slow down somehow. And the latter is what these bumps on the road do. It seems the more technical term for these is speed-bumps.

As is common with the way we Indians think about ourselves, I always felt that the these speed-bumps are so idiotic that they must have been invented and are used only in India. But when I looked up their history here - Speed_bump - Wikipedia, I came to know that the invention was by the Americans in the early 20th century, and the first ones were built in New Jersey. In my 3 short trips to the US over the past 10 years, 2 of which were to New Jersey, I've never seen these bumps. If they're still found in places, I didn't pass by any. According to the wikipedia page UK and parts of Europe have what are called speed humps, which are less aggressive than speed bumps, and are built with lots of regulation, oversight and research. I find them stupid too. Anyway, Indian city roads have all kinds of humps and dumps on our roads resulting from patches, stuff, gutters, potholes, and so on, besides the specifically installed bumps, which together make driving here a lot of fun.

Being a Civil Engineer only by a 4-year degree, I know that guidelines exist in India as well on how these bumps are to be constructed. And I know for sure that they are rarely followed. I still remember the lecture in my 3rd year at IITB where the professor talked about the guidelines present in some IS code, and then referred to the newly built super high and ugly bumps in the campus and talked about how poorly they were designed, rather not designed at all. That was in 2003.

We live with them. We adapt, coz questioning could be dangerous or tedious in India. It's much easier to just cross the bump and move on. Often when I am driving, I feel like I am running a hurdles race. Sometimes I refuse to slow down and let myself fly, but manage land immediately thereafter and keep going. They say if you take off and reach orbital velocity, you can go round the earth. And if you reach the escape velocity, you can go beyond. Some day these bumps will help me take off to heavens, not slow me down!

A few hours without my smart phone!

I forgot to carry along my mobile phone today to office. The last time this happened was in 2011. And on both occasions, nothing much was missed on the mobile phone when I came back to it. The difficulty for the most part was psychological. However, a lot has changed in these 6 years. And this time, I felt my life depended more on my phone than it did in 2011. How? -

1. I was not able to tell (text) my wife that I reached office. Nor was I able to be in touch with her.
2. I was not able to view my official email on-the-go, which created uneasiness and stress in my mind.
3. I was not able to carry out any digital transactions of small value that I usually did through my mobile wallet - thanks to demonetization, I now use digital means even to pay extremely small amounts, wherever possible. And therefore I keep very little cash. So I didn't have breakfast - the banana I had at home was sufficient, I told myself - and just had tea by giving away 10 rupees. Well, another reason I skipped breakfast was to not lose any more time and to reach my desk and get connected ASAP. But there were more challenges...
4. This one has more to do with the crappy way my company's apps work and my bad day - I reached office and connected to the LAN, but couldn't open Outlook or Skype. And for any internal site of the company, including email, to be accessed through the browser, these days every time you have to enter a One-Time-Password which is sent on your mobile number registered with the company. So.... I was totally cut off from connecting with anything inside the company, despite being inside the office, despite using the company laptop and being logged in using my corporate ID. To be fair, this OTP thing wasn't supposed to be every time earlier but just for the first time and the system remembered thereafter... but some fuck-up in the network has led to the system needing it every time now. I took my laptop to the tech-support guys in the office, and they helped me get the OTP through a voice message on a landline phone at office - I was not aware of this option before, and I guess it's rarely used. (They couldn't fix the Outlook and Skype problems though. Repairing MS Office didn't help. I just lost 2 hours staring at the monitor.)
5. The sub-conscious scrolling of news and facebook apps looking at random things that never register in the mind at all... I missed this only a little bit, coz the mind was totally occupied and stressed by the stuff above. The phone I have now is much more smart than the one in 2011, but it seems most of the smartness of phones generally gets utilized in feeding us junk information better or helping us buy more easily.
6. The near-complete digitization of my job, and even our lives to a large extent, resulted in me feeling totally useless and meaningless when not connected and online. I could usually sit alone all day in a room and work while mentally being part of various situations involving lot of individuals - who are all just IDs, names and voices in a way, and so am I in that model - when am connected and constantly exchanging information through various digital means; but when all connections were lost today, it was just me in the room, and I was alone, and the comfortable illusion of being part of the various herds was gone. I was really alone.

Common with 2011

1. Not that I get a lot of calls, but the fact that I could miss some was creating stress in my mind. Thankfully most calls (even 1-1) in my company are over Skype (internet), and so I was less likely to get any official call on the phone, unless of course I couldn't be reached online - which turned out to be the case today. But when I came back home today and checked my phone, there was not a single missed call. Nor was there any in 2011.
2. While the phone was away, I was reminded of all the calls I needed to make, and everything seemed like long overdue, that had to be done without losing more time.
3. I didn't miss social media at all.
4. Not being accessible to anyone meant nobody could contact me even in an emergency. While this level of being inaccessible was more than normal 10-15 years back, it was screwing with my mind now, making me quite uncomfortable. This was normal life before we had mobile phones, but clearly my habits have changed, and so has my mind and its definition of normal.

As I realized the inseparability of phones in our lives, for a few brief moments thoughts about the future of these gadgets crossed my mind. Perhaps chips embedded inside and connected directly to brains would be very convenient - you won't forget, your hands will be free, and data will flow more freely. But it may lead to such seamless shit that your mind may be full of junk in no time - not that it isn't now, and we are mostly adopting it by making that choice through exposing ourselves to all such media and letting them drain our mental resources. But the scarier consequence would be the potential differences in capabilities between humans based on technology that they can afford, and thereby have many more ways of screwing each other. May be it is happening already, while you and I are busy entertaining ourselves with all this junk! And getting increasingly dependent on it!

superstition, religion, agnosticism

We're in 2017! The digits of the number add up to 10. When this happens - 10 or a multiple of 10 - I consider it lucky. I don't have a reason for that, besides plain superstition I picked up and practiced as a kid, and want to do now out of vestiges of the habit still remaining, and me carrying it further just for the heck of it. The phenomenon also happened way too often for me to not give any importance to. Here are a few year-numbers and roll-numbers which followed the pattern and strengthened my belief over the years:

Year Numbers:

• Year of Birth: 1982 (sum of digits: 20)
• Year of passing out of school: 2000 (number itself is a multiple of 10)
• Year of joining MBA: 2008 (sum of digits: 10)
• Year of passing out of MBA: 2010 (number itself is a multiple of 10)

Roll Numbers:

• 10th Board Exam: 1117992 (sum of digits: 30)
• 12th Board Exam: 1215362 (sum of digits: 20)
• NTSE: 823205 (sum of digits: 20)
• BTech: 00004006 (sum of digits: 10)
• MBA: 24116 (24+116=140, well that's bit of a workaround!)

There must be a few more which I can't recall right now. Perhaps having sets like this with specific properties is common for all people, but I wouldn't worry about that. Like religion, this is something to hold on to when it is convenient.

I was extremely superstitious as a kid. I cooked up long prayers with certain requests repeated specific number of times, like asking to be 1st in the next exam, and then saying those a few extra times so that God could never blame me of falling short. I had a list of shlokas I narrated every morning in my mind standing in front of God's photo before I started for school, with a mandatory orange Hanuman ji ka teeka on my forehead. I learnt those shlokas at Bal Vikas - a center run by bhakts of Puttaparti Sai Baba. They liked all Hindu Gods and not just their Baba.

Traces of agnosticism in me had started emerging then itself, but I often suppressed it as coming first in class was too important for me, and anything that could jeopardize my track record of coming first every year was not worth the risk. This included doubting God, talking to gals, having a crush, talking dirty stuff, etc. But still I once dared to write a letter to Puttaparti Sai Baba questioning him. (All kids at Bal Vikas were given an opportunity to send a letter to Him with someone who was traveling to Puttaparti). I wrote to him point blank that I didn't believe in him, and asked him to do something so that I could believe in his Godly stature. I was told by the Bal Vikas instructors that if the Baba liked someone, he'd even reply to that kid's letter. I never got any reply. I can't tell whether my letter reached him or whether he read it. I got disappointed. But still there were other Gods I could continue with for some more time - they didn't accept letters, so imagination worked and belief could be chosen as long as my mind allowed me.

I used to stare at Gods' pics sometimes and imagine their facial expressions turning from serious to smiling, and believe it really happened coz God blessed me. During pujas which we did as a family on occasions like Ganesh Chaturthi or Saraswati Puja, when we all sat down in the puja room around God and threw flowers, or whatever my mother asked us to throw on God while she read out the mantras, occasionally if a flower bounced back or fell down from the God on to the floor, I gladly took that as a blessing from the God. I was definitely going to come first that year!

Coming first was so important to me that every year the night before the results day, I would hardly sleep and would instead keep praying all night. The trick never failed as long as I did it.

My prayers and everything I did to please God was only driven by my selfishness. Besides doing other necessary things, I didn't want to leave out the God part in ensuring I got what I wanted. Can't afford to make the boss angry. I guess that's the primary driver for most believers as well.

Things started turning in my mind after I completed my 10th standard. I started losing my hair, suddenly - so much that I started looking bald. It was too much for a 16 year old to bear, especially when he was least expecting it. It was unnatural for someone that young to start going bald, and it screwed with my mental state. I had phases of depression. I couldn't focus on studies. If I saw anyone laughing at a distance looking in my direction, I would imagine he was laughing at me for losing hair, and I'd get sad for hours after that. I didn't talk about it with anybody, as nobody seemed to understand what I was going through even when I tried. May be I was just stupid and hair or no hair made no difference in life, and it definitely didn't define who I was. But it took me some time and age to understand that.

Somewhere during this period, my religious beliefs started taking shape. I began to see the meaninglessness of all the God stuff around. Perhaps I also felt betrayed by God for making me go through the painful phase. I somehow cleared IIT JEE without studying as much as I could have if I were my normal self. My rank got screwed though, which I didn't mind. I convinced myself that I was now set for a life decent enough to build on and make big myself, and that I should not bother God with more requests from then on. I should let God focus on the more needy. I stopped asking for stuff when I prayed, and I prayed very little too.

I considered myself an atheist then, but upon further understanding the world we live in, I started turning agnostic, which I am even now. I don't really believe in God as defined by any of the existing religions, as they are too human-centered and unrealistic. However, the presence of a super power, of God, an ultimate creator, is a real possibility perhaps manifested in the extremely intricate yet organized and defined nature of things in the universe. All this could just be out of evolution over billions of years without any intelligent design - neither at the smallest scales, nor at the largest. All this could also have been created, and even designed to evolve, and if that is true, we may also be in a situation where we can never find out who or what created us unless the creator wants us to know. Deterministic framework may be discarded as it's too much detail for someone to bother defining, but there can always be a case made in support of it by saying we are incapable of thinking the way the mind of God works, coz we are only capable of thinking like humans. Even thinking like humans, one can consider the possibility that algorithms are laid out to decide outcomes of events, or some other mechanism for implementing determinism.

So, you see, whatever be our level of scientific achievement, we are still not in a position to tell what's the real deal. Believers only choose to believe. Atheists only contradict them by disproving the myths and then believing in phenomena with some scientific bases which are still not ultimate answers. But nobody really knows the complete story. Why is there something, rather than nothing? So being agnostic is a natural state for a questioning mind which goes by evidence, and never takes a side without 100% proof. I don't discard any possibility which we cannot prove false, and any proof qualifies as proof only if it has no fundamental assumption that cannot be established with 100% certainty. An open mind is the biggest asset of an Agnostic. The downside of such mindset is that such a person is always unsure and fidgety in taking a stand.

Efficiency in the real world is achieved through strong beliefs, gut-feel, focus and being sure. It needs some level of blocking the mind from wandering too much and from being too open or broad in perspective. This is contradictory to the usual leadership gyaan, but as history tells, nobody has really become successful by following gyaan. I believe agnosticism in every sphere of life is not very healthy for material success. But a true agnostic cannot help it. He has to approach material success in an unconventional way. He may choose success of a different kind in the process, or define success his own way. I am yet  to resolve these for myself.