Teaching Dinosaurs to dance digitally - Part 2

Part 1 of this article was about why PDF India is not #DigitalIndia and some thoughts on access to public data and data submission. 

Now that the rant is over, let me document some of the woes that I came face to face in accessing public data.

A couple of years back, I was consulted by a friend once on having to extract select data fields from hundreds of PDFs from SEBI website, for research work. It involved the extraction of fields such as Offer Price, Negotiated price etc (well, whatever their finance lingo), from Letter of Offer documents submitted by merger/takeover companies to SEBI, over 15 years. Putting together a strategy using open-source/free tools and an eye to automate most of the tedious tasks to the maximum and maintain accuracy, a sequence of steps was devised for automated extraction. In some stages, semi-automated. Some steps required human eye reviews from time to time, about whether the automation ghost, that eerily moved the mouse pointer at midnight, is working properly or is being interrupted by the invalid data ghost.

Here are some of the concerns I came across. 

The SEBI page of Letter of Offer for Takeovers, was treated as the starting point for collection of data fields related to Final Letters of Offer. ​

Original data collection by SEBI is not structured :

The fact that information was collected as PDF and not as structured data gives less scope for meaningful analysis of data. Ideally, the data should have been collected from the companies in more organized formats such as XML, Excel or CSV or by seeking information in a web form, as is the standard practice. This would have allowed the collection of raw data by SEBI in a database-friendly format. Since this was not to be, it led to a situation where the structured data have to be sought by sifting through PDF documents. For ages, we have been looking at standards like IFRS and XBRL from a distance, but nothing moved because SMEs complained of compliance cost.

No options to bulk download :

There were no options to bulk-download documents by querying for multiple companies based on search criteria. One had to traverse the pages a few links at a time to download the documents. This constraint was later overcome partially by a series of semi-automated steps using tools such as FlashGot, TinyTask and the parsing of the pages for file paths.

Inconsistency and non-standard methods in the organising of PDF links in the SEBI website :

The formats in which the document links were organized varied between pre-2005 and post-2005 periods. Links to pre-2005 takeover documents, would lead to a direct download link of the Final Letter of Offer. The file name would be numeric, giving no idea about the company in question. Such as this.  On the other hand, post-2005 takover documents, would lead to another intermediary web page of links for the company (such as this), which in turn would lead to the PDF link. In the later years, the PDF file would be named more meaningfully such as LOF etc (which is a relief), but not consistently. This meant more manual downloading and filtering of necessary documents from unnecessary ones. Some HTML tags filtering using tools such as NotePad++, followed by exporting to a database, were used to partially overcome these constraints.

Unsuitability of PDF format for structured data :

The PDF format doesn't lend itself to efficient parsing to collect data. Moreover, the data fields required (such as Average price), were often presented in a table inside the document. This meant that the PDF documents needed to go through a series of steps before data could be culled out from them. Calibre software and the online service pdfonline.com were used in batch processing to convert PDFs to HTML web pages. The individual code lines from the web pages were exported to an SQL database and parsed for HTML tags to look for tables that contained the required fields.

Lack of uniformity and fixed format for the presence of data in the document :

Inside the PDF document, data was not found consistently in the same location or format. One had to look for references to the section title such as 'Financial Justification' and then look for the data in the table that geographically followed it below. Keywords such as 'Negotiated Price', 'Average Price' and various combinations of such phrases had to be listed to look for data. Even after all this, one wasn't sure whether the data fields would indeed be found or not. 

Inefficiency of using text-based search to identify data fieds :

When found, they may not be found in a consistent form or a phrase. For instance, 'Not Applicable' could be any of NA, N.A., N-A,a hiphen etc. Sometimes, the justification section would be a paragraph that contained none of the keywords. For an automated lookup, references to 'infrequently traded' might often been confused with 'infrequently traded on NSE and frequently traded on BSE'.   These made automated collection inefficient and necessitated a manual study of the PDF documents.

Mismatch between different databases in company name mentions :

While some data fields required for the study were to be found from Letters of Offer, others were extracted from the Prowess database. The takeovers involve an acquiring company and a target company. There were inconsistencies and mixups in both these names between the Prowess and SEBI data sources. SEBI would list the letter of offer against the target company whereas Prowess would list it the other way round. In some cases, where there were multiple takeover instances relating to same company names, requiring the PDFs of multiple years. This meant resolving the mix-up by manually reviewing the PDF and data fields. One had to arrive at a cross-tab of SEBI name, Prowess Name and the correct Letter-of-Offer-Name in the takeover context before one could collect accurate data.

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This is not the issue of a single website of one government insitution or a government department. It’s the opposite, of being unable to work as a single website for the whole country. It’s about the isolated approach to.presenting data to the public or seeking data from them, sulking it as an unwanted duty imposed by the Digital India frenzy.

The data.gov.in  sets an excellent precedent with public APIs throwing an ocean of private opportunities open. It is high time that other government institutions join the bandwagon of unified data view architecture both for submission and presentation of data, in truly seamless transactional digitization, keeping in view bulk submission and bulk download options. Data.gov.in has plenty of uncompleted agenda ahead of having to unify the data from the states at a regular timeline and keeping it update and in getting the various uncomplying departments to co-operate.

Some data dinosaurs have to be taught to dance digitally, because evolution is binary. 
You either become distinct or you become extinct. 

Teaching dinosaurs to dance digitally

It ain’t so much of #DigitalIndia yet. It's just PDF India. For those looking for meaningful, processible data, the difference between the two can make a world of difference. For some government institutions, digital means PDF or JPEG image of scanned print reports, including spreadsheets and balance sheets. One might argue that nowadays it's possible to extract data from PDFs using technology. But it's like garbage disposal and recycling. The messup shouldn't be created in the first place. Image processing algorithms were not invented for spreadsheets.

A good example of a bad PDF document is the District Census Handbook of 2011. It will have reams and reams of pages, with one page showing the first half of a horizontal spreadsheet, titled “Industrial Catgory of”, and next page showing the other half, titled “Marginal Workers”. Man, that must be some innovation in bad design .

Switch to the good example of presentation of the same data. data.gov.in presents hundreds of datasets from the Census of 2011 in open formats for public access. You can access the data for the same district in CSV format, loadable into Excel. Did you know you could download the Indian Railways timetable in Excel ?. How sweet!

The salient rule in data collection or presentation must be that, at the raw source, the data must be collected in a format that is processible by automation. It should minimize human eye intervention only for reviews and green/red flags and throwing up exception patterns. Or for discovering insights of wisdom from "rich experience", which a chip can't discern. Days may have come when chips outsmart elders in experiential wisdom as well, LoL.

Companies like HowIndiaLives.com , where my friend Ramnath is involved, address this problem by helping their customers and website visitors make visual sense out of the non-sense data in India's public domain. They also present it in a beautiful and user-friendly ways and help project stakeholders glean useful insights from data. That data shouldn't have been nonsensical in the first place, in its raw open form, is the sad fact. That they converted rants like these into a business opportunity is their ingenuity. While raw data must be disseminated in open processible formats, it should lead to an ecosystem of companies like these, which compete in discovering insights from data and presenting them, without having to spend too much time cleaning it. Not just cleaning it, but having to fight inconsistencies between multiple sources of data for the same item of information, I guess, must be another tedious task.

Taking a leaf out of international open data like data.un.org, the open data platform for India is a big leap in this direction for sharing of public datasets (though they don’t have options to bulk download data). 

On the other hand, some of the transactional websites of the government websites can make life extremely tedious. If you are a high-volume transaction submitter, your life can become miserable, having to submit thousands of records into old-style web forms. Some of them must have been in a cave since AJAX was invented. They can put thousands of person names with option buttons on a single page, expecting the user to scroll down or use the browser's Find, choose one name and then submit. Wwwhaaat!

The format in which data must be submitted to government websites must be pre-defined with digital processing in mind. For a billion-headed Titanosaur like India, it should definitely have scale in mind too. Ideally, it shouldn't even be Windows OS intensive and Windows OS requiring. Kerala, for example, wants to dabble in Linux and it's a good thing. I hope they don't up give up like Munich, the city that wanted to run on Linux. But, that kind of thinking is good. It may lead at least to the adoption of open formats for seeking data, if not an open-source OS.

Not all is a sad story with Digital India. There are a handful of bright spots in good design, that take scale and digital processibility into account. Aadhaar, no doubt, is a beautiful example. The Income Tax website often has some sudden quirky differences between its Java tool and the Excel tool with mysterious conclusions of inability to generate the XML file. But it at least uses XML to upload data. Thats a good thing. Even within the Income Tax Department, you may not find the same kind of good design for other tasks, for instance, for applying for non-deduction of TDS. Another of my favorite examples of handling technology at scale carefully is SBI's transition to core banking and their merger with associate banks. It was not about open data or about government per se. But, at its scale, it's truly a project of teaching elephants to dance, and for their size, they did a mighty good job at it. The GSTN must be the next Aadhaar-like unifier, after the easing out of the initial troubles.


This is the intermission, the end of Part 1. 

In Part 2, I mention some of the woes I faced while extracting data from PDFs from the SEBI website. It has a sad ending that rounds up by saying :

Some data dinosaurs have to be taught to dance digitally, because evolution is binary. 
You either become distinct or you become extinct.  

Lot of technical debris ahead on Part 2. Blissful poets, musicians and other non-tech readers not allowed beyond this point. :-) :-)

-->> Part 2 

On Success, death and Steve Jobs

A friend's post on Facebook drew my attention to an article about the posthumous tribute-wave for Steve Jobs. For a quickie without following the conversation elsewhere, the article says 'Steve Jobs wasn't great, he wasn't even close' . Among other things, it draws a comparison in terms of greatness, to Jonas Salk, who invented the polio vaccine and gave it free, deciding not to patent it. In other words, who is greater and, mummy, why is Steve Jobs getting all the attention ? I wouldn't have noticed if Ramnath didn't mention it, but after he did, I noticed that it was a 'sad essay, with weak arguments and too many fallacies'.

Great is a generic adjective that spans many fields. For example, a great musician, a great emperor, a great surgeon and so on. You cannot exactly compare greatness in one field with another and often, greatness in certain times, with other times.

In the field of, say, technology business, and in his times he was greater than many of his contemporaries. He did things differently. Many clicked, some didn't, some clicked later. He was thrown out of his company and staged a comeback and then staged a turnaround and rebuilt the fascination full circle. He might have been heavy-headed, but lot of creative/successful people are that. In the field that he chose as his passion, he manifested that passion into results that satisfied him and those he sought to impact. Such success was also acknowledged by others. That, in itself, is what only a small percentage, get to do.

He chose expensive style for his products, and was convinced there was a market for it. In all possibility he could have flopped, thats what the gurus would have got to say. But he defied tradition, the current market gyaan, and clicked, not once, but time and again. To have an intrinsic sense for a niche market, spot it and pursue it, entails the risk of stepping out of your comfort zone and being ready to sink in the process. You need to be grounded in your security with your own self, to be able to confront and conquer the insecurity in the world. It's the stuff true entrepreneurs are made of, or seek to be. We can't think like them and they can't think like us. They better not.

The article questions people's assumptions, success = greatness. But the article also assumes, charity > commerce. Coming from the charity bastion, I should have jumped to agree with the latter, but, sadly, not yet. Even if it were true, I guess we are too far away from that . Those beautiful times are yet to come. It requires our entire civilization, or huge parts of it, to think differently, on complexly intertwined issues: regarding our motivation, our money, our work ethic and our duty as a human on earth. And it will take lots of births for all of us to get there. Call it the critical mass for compassion or the escape velocity for enlightenment. Like in climate change, we have a reputation for refusing to learn until we get whacked thoroughly by Mamma Earth. Inner climate change is not going to be any simpler and Pappa God is going to have a tough time handling us. Hearts, take a lot more time to melt than glaciers. Questions like these are important to contemplate, but the answers need to be well-written.

Finally, think of the praises that arrived as like people attending a e-funeral. A life gone unnoticed or less noticed (say, Salk) is not any different from a life gone well-noticed, after it has gone, that is. In the former case, lives were impacted, sure, but most people may not have related to the individual, so they didn't write. In Steve's case, he too impacted and, it so happens, many people seem to relate to the individual, because the device was such. Interestingly, I noticed a billboard at the Kundarapalli Gate signal in Bangalore, a huge billboard ad by a real estate developer, saying just 'RIP Steve'. It's still an ad, but it shows people who used the devices fell head over heels for the brand. To connect two obituaries and compare their impact, would be like comparing the tears of two funerals, one with 10 people and another with 1000 people. Sorrow is the same for everyone. Death is a great equalizer in that sense.

Of course, great is different from good. To evaluate goodness is a larger call, you need to be able to evaluate the interplay of motives, constraints, values etc and in the light of the operating environment. Goodness is all-inclusive, includes personal life, relationships and even preservation of monuments :) :) , which Steve Jobs wasn't particular about . Greatness, on the other hand, is more explicit, can be segmented into streams, and therefore gets evaluated quickly and easily. You can't evaluate your goodness, because that'll be biased. Others can't, because they have incomplete information. Only God can, but He doesn't publish the papers. What to do ? :) :)

Yes, there was a good Steve and the bad Steve in the same person. Even in judgement, it's sad that someone with such business acumen, had to fall for a fatal over-belief in alternative medicine. People who praise the good Steve may choose to ignore the bad Steve. But, isn't it true that all of us suffer from the good-bad dichotomy ?

That is why the scriptural prayers say : Lead us from darkness to light, falsehood to truth. Lead us from proprietary software to open source. Trap us not into Apple, but deliver us from Microsoft. Give us our daily bread and butter, Facebook and Twitter. But don't lead us to immortality, it gets boring. Life without an end, will be like watching a terrible movie in a dirty theatre, all the time you are wondering, when will the movie end and the mosquitoes stop, and the lead jodi is still dancing around the trees and rolling on the hills , on the screen. Death, disease and dumping are part of the grand game. Sing a kolaveri song to release your stress, and move on to make your life colorful, cheerful and creative. Like a Mac.

Oops, for fair disclosure, like the author, even I don't own an Apple device or share. :) . And probably, that's why I am like this !

Who wants to blog and who wants to read ??

Few years ago, one day, a point about online writing was brought up during a discussion. This was much before I started blogging and was more in the context of writing at forums and the like, a bit extending to discussion-type writing. The point was :

Online writing suits only people who have lot of time in their hands. People who have important things to say or do will not be frequenting online forums and blogs, they will be busy doing such good work on the field, dirtying their hands to transform the world !! Even in the case of some well-known forums or blogs, interest wanes with time in spite of a initial spurt. In short, It is the jobless people who are creative !!.

The last phrase wasn't exactly voiced, but you should know by now, how much in this blog is fact and how much is my own spicy sauce, particularly since I updated the disclaimer just yesterday.

I think certain parts of this are quite true. How many blogs or websites, will survive, say 15 years ? Like SlashDot, whose interface pre-dates even the word blog, but is still quite famous in its segment. Whether blog as a medium will survive itself is a different question. How many now-famous websites will stand the test of a decade ? And if around, would they just continue to be famous or continue to just exist or, worse, go through a series of takeovers to be merged into one of the biggies, like AltaVista ?

I find it interesting that, for many bloggers, interest in blogging does wane after a while, may be goes through a lull and then strikes back or takes a different form (or most often dies). I often wonder what kind of frame of mind, may be a periodic wave, pushes you to blog and at other times, pushes you away from it ? Is it that, you are at a particular level of seeking intellectual stimulation or creative expression but later graduate to something higher or degenerate to something lower ? Or life just gets busy ? Would you still blog at 60 as much you did at 30 ? Gazing at the moon from the riverside bench, a friend recently asked me : You went to Orkut, you went to blogging, you went to StumbleUpon, now you want Facebook and Twitter, what do you seek and when will you stop, having found what you sought ? I was suddenly struck by the question, he was right, and I had to put up my patented heheheheh face and change the topic to elections. May be he was just adapting Bhartrihari's Vairagya Satakam to the internet audience. There are not many blogs in the Vedanta segment, so he could start one.

Before I took to blogging, my own views about this may not have been so well-formed , since I was more of a devouring consumer of online writing than of a contributor. As if all my views got formed just last night :) :). But they were on these lines, during that on online writing :

There is always a section of people who are creative and have the urge to write. These are folks who will find time to write, no matter how busy they are or whichever high position they may be. For them, it's not like 'do it if you have the time'. Since they enjoy doing it, they will find the time anyway. Like some people have a natural inclination towards gardening. The Net gives more impetus for people with even the faint urge to write (though they may do it in SMS lang) . Authenticity, relevance and good-evil-mix-up of Internet phenomena like blogs and citizen journalism are still being disputed heavily but most agree that it has indeed thrown open the doors of creative writing to far more people than who used to write only to newspapers and magazines and then wait for Mr.Editor to garland them. The Net is also a place, where someone can start writing though he is diffident or ruffian in his approach, but hope to refine on the way by learning and improvising. The not-yet-edited entries in h2g2 that need editing help are examples of these.

The Net also provides for bi-directional feedback and a far more lively discussion than other media provide, including the radio and television where interactions are limited by air-time. Can you have a television debate, that is open-ended until settled ? Not that anyone asked for it. There is also this view that, instant writing, does not necessarily result in thoughtful writing, but then that can be said about newspaper writing too. Editors from the traditional print media, hold that Internet writing is not so authentic, reliable etc. I agree on this, but then traditional print media isn't bidirectional either. If I am allowed a strong opinion, I feel, the reluctance of traditional media to accept the Internet as a far more powerful medium with its unique benefits, is parochial, as time, tide and technology (and markets) wait for none. As I have said before here, Technology denied, just means, Technology delayed, You can't deny it for long. How many newspapers have websites that allow discussions, how many of them are able to exploit even just the commercial potential, even if you forget the crowdsourcing and ideas-potential for a moment ? How many have helpful, in-line text links, even to their own earlier news pages or to non-competitive pages like government websites, which even an average blogger will explore to provide ? Some of them don't have advanced search and certain others, it seems, do not want to do any more extra work than convert the print paper into the e-Paper. For all the rightful glory of The Hindu Classifieds pages in print, the online presence is offered as a freebee, so a search on Classifieds across, say a few months, either has an extremely poor interface or disallows searching the archived classifieds. Such indifference towards the Net as a medium, as if it would cost that much more or the bride found her groom after the first ad :) . From their perspective, I think not all of these may be commercially viable, with margins in the print business not that attractive any more, but I think that should only encourage them to explore the usage of the medium even better. If there are other news aggregating websites who are able to make money without getting news from the field themselves, the news gatherers should try it themselves and beat the algorithm of the techie aggregators.

As for visitors, I think spending time to visit a forum or news site, is similar to (and takes away) the time spent in reading a newspaper or a book. The time spent and thinking process remains the same, only the medium has changed. The flip side, however, imho, will be not, "who wants to visit these blogs and sites", but about the fact that, the Internet is open only for english-literate + net-friendly + writing-urge type of people, though the language insistence has begun to change in a small way. There are, I am sure, hundreds more of potential bloggers, who still have plenty of ideas, like the vernacular-medium students who are masters at trigonometry, and do a good job of sharing these ideas in face to face in their gatherings, but still far away from the Internet, because they arent net-write-qualified. Well, that is the nature of the Internet, so we have to live with the limitation. Imagination and interactive zeal, I think, is far more bigger than what technology can capture and the distance can reduce but may never be eliminated. And who knows, may be they are better off in the brick-and-mortar world than in the click-and-mouse world !!

Free Will and the Video Game called Life

A friend made me sit and watch this Ted Talks video on the human brain last night and it turned out to be a worthwhile session. It gave a fillip to an idea that has been brewing for the past couple of days. Though the video itself has nothing in common with this post. At least, it fired my brain and kicked me out of the blogger's block, that has lasted over two months now.

About how much freewill does a man have ? Oh, the question, I know, is atleast as old as my great-grandmother and probably even hers. But there is a modern phenomenon that resembles the handling of the questions of Life and Free Will. Gaming.

We have heard before about 'Life is a game; Play it'. I am thinking of narrowing it down further. Life is like a video game. Role-play it. I haven't played many video games, so my tech knowledge is not much, just what I have observed, heard and outlined in a broad way. I like the hint from this book, that, as Man evolves, lot of things today he does for War, like flying advanced aircraft, he would do it in a spirit of Games, without the killing.

In the beginning of a video game, you get to choose a lot of things, your profile, your level of difficulty/speed, the cool looks of the bike, probably the colour of the cap of the prince, number and type of bombshells and life-chances/energy chances and so on. But once you choose these and the word 'GO'-es, you have pretty much only the steering wheel. There is hardly anything you can choose after you start off. How much free will ? But it will be fun, though. The events in your life, the twists and turns, the preset or random obstacles that come your way, the preset or random credits you get on the way to bolster your confidence, are they determined by your actions ? Yes, they are determined by the way you handle the steering wheel of your life. So much for Karma and the ability in your hands to make choices enroute.

But that isn't much. You have free will enough, alright, but only as much you can do at the steering wheel. That much, Oh, and Man thinks he has all the power and free will in the world. Why isn't that free will not much ? Because the complete exhaustive set of objects, events and methods have been programmed already into the video game. Gosh, is that why they use these very terms in object-oriented programming ? You get to choose five or ten or fifteen parameters from a hundred or a thousand that have been programmed for. But do you get to do more than that ?

This design of Life covers only the most basic of video games. However, in the next level, there are also MMORPGs where the players get to choose lot more complex things, like characters with roles. The abbreviation might as well have referred to Life in general, Massively Multi-player, Online, Role-playing Games!!. They can not only play games by choosing roles for themselves, but also with hundreds of players. Let me quote here briefly from the wiki page:

In nearly all MMORPGs, the development of the player's character (as in role) is a primary goal....there is the eventual demand on players to team up with others in order to progress at the optimal rate....

They might have as well put the same text on the wiki page on Life.

Now that's certainly an improvement on the level of free will in Life, we do get to play it with hundreds of others and improve our character and become better day by day. Take it to the next level of Meta. What if someone wrote a meta-game-writing software, that is a software that allows you to build your own games by choosing a hundred parameters. Remember, not just choosing roles, but building entire games, out of raw material stuff that the software will set out before you. Wouldn't that be the next level of free will ? Life does seem to provide such chances, in that sense, Life is probably the most meta-level-ised, most genericised, video games of all kinds. Today you could be a master violinist, tomorrow you could choose to try out mountaineering and in a said amount to time and a said amount of effort, assuming you have a average startup qualifications, you can probably acquire as much mastery with your foot, as you did with your finger. That definitely is a relief and makes us feel better, doesn't it ? Your life is in your hands, Choose the reality that you want to manifest and there...Booom..... there does it bubble and bloom, dive and dance before you. Your choice made, at time X, and your results, here it is Monsieur, your custom suit, delivered to you at time X + N. I have also wondered that why most video games are modelled on gaining points through combat ? Don't the characters perform good deeds like, patting someone for their good work or give a food packet in charity and get a smile in credit for that ? Or combat the evil within and gain points ?

Now that you have taken video game to the next level of abstraction, shouldn't the question of Free Will be taken too ? How much Free Will, do we have, even at the this level of choice ? Still, not much, buddy. Why ? Because you didn't get to do the programming. Thats what drives, whatever it is you are driving. Sure there are open-source video games, you get to read the code, learn from it, fix bugs and contribute to newer branches and features and probably work with others together to take the game as a whole to the next level. Life allows that too. People who reach a certain level of awareness, not only have their lives in order, they endeavour to raise the lives of those around them, making better steering wheels, showing others how to handle them in those lower level games. Showing how to play our roles better and improve our character (this time, it means a set of principles) and how to perform better even while playing with a lot of other people at same or different levels.

So, is that all, have we achieved free will ? (Oh, finish this, and say yes, please). No. Because we still have to work within the game, within that game we started. You can start a new game yourself, all of it open-source. You can start tens of them, a bike game, a market game, a combat game, a music game, whatever. You seem to have the free will to do that, but wait a minute, that is, as they say, a different ball game. It would no more remain the game, with the same name, which you played in the first place. In Life, do we have such a choice ? If you didn't like earth and its Life, do you get to shift to say, Saturn for a while, and get back after the riots have cooled off ? Oh, don't bother, Sometimes, Saturn seems to control our lives here, instead !!. Even if a geographical location shift were possible, it would still be the same game called Life. The same programmer. The same program, everyday extended with new features and a million parameters, out of which you get to choose very few. May be a few more bonus ones on a sunny day. And hope to have Saturn on your side.

Thats not much of free will. But I should qualify this conclusion, because, thats how it looks from where I stand and see, and only to the level of Meta I can handle. Because I am going to go above my own head in the next paragraph. I tend to subscribe to what Sri Ramakrishna, used to say often about Free Will. That our free will, is "like that of a cow that is tied to a pole and gets to graze the grass around it". It might think, in all its cow-level meta, that it has quite a lot of free-will. But you and I, who are at slightly better Meta than the cow, know the length of the rope and its circumference. The cow, though not meta enough to work out the formula, will surely come to terms with its limitations and pet ideas of free will, once the grass (or the meta) is grazed enough and exhausted. Then, it looks up to the Master, and he releases it from its pole and allows it to graze further beyond. [Don't mention to the cow, that it will be tied to another pole, :) :) , thats part of the original game. ]

There, however, seems to be an even higher possibility, That we are 24x7, co-creators of all of world and Life, just that we forgot, and such Illusion seems part of the design. [Don't say you didn't put that into the design, stupid, you put it and forgot]. Uf! Suddenly, you are promoted to the Board of Directors! Even higher is the school that, 'we' is wrong usage, and all of it is actually ONE single stuff and the dream and waking states are just parameters in a combo box, and one is as real (or as unreal) as the other. Well, there is only one Director, and Thou Art That ! Now, don't ask me, which video game most maps that level of abstraction ? As I said, Life is a meta-kaa-baap-kaa-meta, when it comes to gaming. It seems the Matrix game has characters that are aware that they are under simulation, and they even have a rare one, that has self-substantiated itself out of the game. (What the hell is that supposed to mean in Life ?)

The higher truths about Life and Free Will, we may not be able to comprehend now, we dismiss it in sarcasm and quips, but there may be few die-hard game programmers out there who have seen the software design of the Game called Life and come back. If their experience is anything to go by, we just have to increase our meta and re-meta it until we experience those very truths we find as abstract. It won't be meta anymore, it would just give us the feeling of having designed an amazing game for billions of species to play. Till the end of Time. And start all over again with a different profile. Happy Gaming!

Fresh Upma and Old Bindi Fry

Let me serve some old cold bindi fry from the refridgerator as promised in the opening post. Here are links to stuff I have written before.

Before I landed with Blogger, I used to linger in BBC's H2G2 for a while and these are links from that phase. (Note: You won't require a h2g2 id to access these links, so you can click on.)

On Leadership and Management
On Micro-Finance
On Open-Source and Healthcare. This is admittedly an emotional-type article, but it isn't entirely off-track since Economic Times mentions this as a development that is brewing in this debate a few days ago.

Quite interesting, that my first movie review is not on a movie in English, Hindi or even Tamil but a Telugu one. Coming of age as son-of-soil of Rayalaseema, Uh ? A kind of content and theme review of Bommarillu on MouthShut, after I saw it at a friend's place. For the type of person I used to be, it might even come as a surprise to many, that I am writing, of all things in the world, a movie review!! But riverside walks and talks may range from pin to plane, so you never know, I might even write about Hindustani Music tomorrow !!

If you have an Orkut Id, you can read up on how I had answered someone's question on:

Why did Jesus Christ and Mohammed not explicitly restrain the consumption of meat and alcohol among their followers?

If you don't have an Orkut Id, please wait till an edited version of that is put up here. Or as they say, watch this space for updates.

Each of the above are longwinding and verbose posts, so typical of a whirling mind and so untypical in this age of SMS-slang blogging. So reserve them for a Sunday afternoon. I always wanted to have a diverse topic cloud on my blog, I guess this post comes close. Life goes on in phases and patterns, so I hope the day doesn't come when I have to post this blog's links on some other website after a few years. :) :) For those who have already read all these before, please wait till fresh upma is served. :)

Defragmenting the Mind

Ever wondered what regular clean-up and maintenance activities are required to keep up this big, complex, mulithreaded, multitasking, operating system called the Mind ? If your mind is like a strong, stable and secure OS like Linux, then probably you would need to do very little to maintain it or you might already be doing it by design. But if yours is an old, average commonplace mind like Windows 2000 Professional, then, after a while of using your mind for all kinds of activities, you might actually find, things have become slower from that first day when you had this freshly installed OS. You have been installing and uninstalling all kinds of software left, right and center. You never knew that there are these hundreds of little files with extension .tmp. You have been browsing the Net, with cookies planted three years ago still crawling in some deep non-descript local settings folder, like cockroaches in your kitchen proliferating until the Annual Cleaning Mela. If you have been acting really irresponsible, not updating your antivirus software and clicking on any link anyone presents to you, opening attachments indiscriminately and enjoying a false pride of administrative access while doing these things, then even the Cleaning Mela might not be of much help. You might be better off with an overhaul of your operating system.

Our minds too have these issues. We interact with all kinds of people everyday and sometimes, invite good and bad events and sometimes are bombarded with them. Sometimes a situation presents itself from which we can actually walk if we act like a responsible administrator, but we still don't. We know the thought cookies which others plant in us can be both good and bad, sometimes they enhance our experience by being there, and sometimes they proliferate even after their due validity. We should be knowing that we should give temporary phases in life, like temporary files, their limited value and delete them regularly, if our minds should start nifty and fast. We know opening untrusted attachments in life can have malignant effects on our mind and even worse, when someone is going to exe-cute something on us without our conscious knowledge. We seem to be enjoying administrative access but we have actually given it to away to the other person who tries to use that very pride of ours to piggyback on us and crash our mind. Keeping your mind's health often involves updating your definitions of defence against evil, regularly, so that the bad ones are knocked off by a real time protection scan even as they try to enter us.. Some thoughts are like worms, they self-replicate themselves at a furious pace and consume all your bandwidth. Some thoughts are like trojans that mask their sinister motive, look like performing one action while performing right the contrary. Some thoughts are like viruses causing visible damage to your mind and might even require an exclusive removal tool session to restore order. Even then normalcy cannot be fully restored. We run around like cats and rats from pillar to post, that even by plain regular usage of all kinds of compartments, the average commonplace mind that it is, it gets fragmented with thought pieces not lying in contiguous stretches. You wonder often why your mind sometimes is just lazing out, sometimes is so busy doing "its own" work and not your work, then you know that some unhealthy background processes are taking all the energy. You have just been on auto-pilot for a while and dozed away in a state of suspended animation causing the much-dreaded blue screen.

To keep this complex operating system nimble, use a tool regularly like Meditation or Social Work or Music or whichever tool that suits your regular maintenance schedule. Just as you might use Ccleaner to clean your computer or Lizol to clean your kitchen tiles and Mortein to kill those domestic nocturnal pests. Defragment your mind. Remove temporary baggage that has been accumulated out of age-old bitterness. Attach yourself only to trustworthy friends. Give thought cookies which others plant in you their due validity only as long as they enhance your experience of interacting with them. And most important, remember, there is nothing greater than keeping yourself alert for a real-time protection scan of your thoughts, when they are just about to enter you. For this, connect online to God from time to time and download your defences against unhealthy entrants. Be a responsible administrator of your mind. If you can't do all this (or if you can be diligent enough to do all of this), overhaul your mind and develop a strong, secure, stable mind.