In the company of the Self

Some thoughts on compensation

2006-06-16T13:54:00.000+05:30

I am not a HR professional and neither do i know much on the theory of compensation or such stuff.

While working one does realise why "compensation" is so called.

It means that the company is compensating your potential by offering you a salary for doing the work that you do.

If one was paid for work the official term should be "pay" not compensation, what say?

Acid test

2006-04-25T10:30:00.000+05:30

In the preplexity that is youth, I woudl want to know how far can we challenge anything? Can we challenge the stars? Do we have to risk all to find out. but time is ephermeal isn't it? There is no 'real' thing per se that one stands to lose.

Hence challenge everything.

The will and the stars, the acid test.

Notes to myself 1

2006-03-07T00:36:00.000+05:30

Change comes with a force. A force not to be stopped, a force that can't be.

For every moment that seems to change, is but a child conceived by the many parents before it.

Every moment that you have played with, every moment that you danced and laughed, and of all the moments you cried too. None is a bastard child with an untraced birth. Each with a lineage you can trace back in time...and in your weaknesses and your strengths.

Like a gate who you pass only once, the cost of a irreversibility and the price of progress, you walk through it.

But it is all for the ultimate good.

I hope so, pray so, for you all...and as well as me.
Goodnight.

Suddenly

2006-02-02T00:06:00.000+05:30

To state the obvious, for it is in a pensive state of mind can I easily express the conundrums that riddle the deeper recesses of my mind. To wonder whether the current journey stands exposed with the path that I chose to carve or whether it was a tumulus wave of thoughts that crashed suddenly in front, ashore a beach that lay scattered with the remnants of the immediate future whose shore it lays to claim.
It is like living in all totality a novel, read rather easily but with some claim to a fantastic and unusual descriptive power, bought suddenly to life by the many myriads of reality, a seizure of a current phase of time, and the end of a paragraph, nay a chapter whose successor seems at times suddenly dreadful and suddenly exciting.
Time seems to be concentrated in some moments, concentrated by a cleansing of perception that the change brings, and the very change in the making blurs earlier.
Unknown elements, external factors, come out like sudden phantoms and dance a dance like ghosts would, in a sudden explosion of freedom, from the caves of darkness they lay caged in.
Such,(sic-in this case)and such, keeps happening, like an algorithm that beats hidden, underlying in the cycle of all things ( a much better phrase than using the word 'nature')...reminding of the many words of the many men who lived, yet by my limited perception and the deception of nature whom I cannot withhold now, ' myriad expression of light falling on the screen of your perception, the projector - the great known yet unknowable, singularly churning the great drama' which I currently perceive.
It is like an act, me suddenly thrown, a sudden glare of the lights, a flash of brightness, momentarily ceasing anything else, and then like an actor unknowingly emerging, suddenly, ready, in the readiness of the play.
.....

A joy that cannot be easily defiled

2005-12-07T22:48:00.000+05:30

Some joys can be shared with the world at a lesser risk of defiling them, a piece of good writing being one.

There is this poem by W.H Cowper which I had read in high school. Written somewhere in the last pages of 'Wren & Martin' .

Googled it to post a verse. Perhaps you may lke it.

DIFFERENT MINDS.

"Some murmur, when their sky is clear
And wholly bright to view,
If one small speck of dark appear
In their great heaven of blue.
And some with thankful love are fill’d
If but one streak of light,
One ray of God’s good mercy gild
The darkness of their night."

---W.H Cowper

Link: http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/gutenberg/1/2/7/5/12759/12759-8.txt

Thank you.

Sense doesn't require a garb

2005-11-15T15:39:00.000+05:30

Do companies and MBA's find it that difficult to understand?

it = Sense doesn't require a garb.

As******.

Currency

2005-10-21T19:07:00.000+05:30

It happens everywhere...sooner or later.

The concept of currency is very interesting. Currency is a language within an information system and also a measure.

Each of these "systems" have a common blueprint once you have figured out correctly the language used in them.

The currency used in your adult life system will be wealth... Money, primarily, social systems and its interactions shall evolve out of it.

The currency in a b-school would be your CQPI / CGPA or whatever you call the units in which you measure your mutation from a human to a rat ( in most cases, at least).

The same social structures evolve, restricted clubs, hierarchies...Preferences according to your currency holdings.

All these systems are symmetric, in simple words: if you know one, you'll know the other..Provided you get the language correct.

Moral of the story : Take your history lessons seriously.

Architecture..random musings from the past

2005-10-08T14:17:00.000+05:30

A few years ago, I had written this article, which I found while exploring my old PC.

Those were the days of unfettered wanderings,where you could play with your mind the way you wanted to, it was also much easier to mould then...less experienced isliye !

The article is on architecture, It is unreadable, juvenile, I am also sure for an architect it will sound like bullshit... but I believe it makes a point.

Hence in a world where style is substance, we will try giving the reverse a shot.

Here it goes...

The how’s and why's of architecture

Every time I am bored I got to my terrace and just stare at the trees. I don’t know what is it about them, their form or man’s natural impulse to be with nature that relaxes me. Mildly mesmerises me.

Why isn’t our architecture such? Why do we have such a never-ending fascination with straight lines? Architecture should blend into the surroundings not dominate or impose it. Harmony is the fundamental and underlying principle of all beauty. Imposition of any kind and any form except that of our minds over our ownselves is to be outrightly rejected that is the fundamental cause of all disharmonies, and on a larger extent war.

We are fascinated by lines as they appeal to our sense of symmetry, lead to an easy understanding of things which in turn helps us overcome our deep rooted fear of ignorance which in turn is the cause of all our fears. This isn’t enough; we have to extend out understanding of things much beyond the Greeks. Now our architecture should be symbolic, nay, the most important symbol of our progress. We have come a long way from the Greeks, we know now, perhaps even they did, a circle or any curve either definable or indefinable ,is but constructed of many lines, the very building blocks for our understanding, mother nature like all other things knew this way way back and thus the rarity of straight lines in nature.

Thus stands wonderfully destroyed our fear of the non-linear curves. What remains to be checked is on what scale do we implement our non-linear entities? City scale? Here most cities have a non-linear shape already (most Indian cities at least). Larger perhaps? Anything larger has a non-linear form already. Perhaps building size, colony size? Ok. Then where do the linear forms come into play, aren’t even the most 'curvy' curves made up of infinitely small straight lines? Well, we took care of that by accident, our bricks are linear by nature and form. So we need not bother about that one ever again.

So how does this great revolution in architecture come about from? Who stands to be the leader of this change? We do. Our art over the years has changed: the classicists, the renaissance, impressionist, post impressionist, cubist, neo-classicist so on and so forth. As we examine the history of this forms they started sounding and looking ridiculous in their times, wildly and widely criticized. Now they stand to command the same attention and the same 'utility' as did the phantoms that preceded them.

So will, this great new form of architecture that we conjectured and this heralds change, by default it becomes permanent form the linear we shift into the non linear, from the finite into the infinite. We will find this new form not only exciting but also much more relaxing and much more natural. This new dawn will not only involve a change in form but also a change in concept, from material to usage. For all we know it could even redefine society as we know it, be a harbinger of progressive change in the very nature of our thinking, and the best of it is that it promises to stand side by side with the forms and styles we know. As one is imposing and other unimposing, they stand to compliment rather than constrast. Who know we may land up exactly above where we started, genetics stands as a proof of this case.

Like all thing worthwhile in life this requires courage to try, and a deep understanding (assuredly increasing by the day) and a brand new way of thinking.
The new world, the new millennium is here, it is only a matter of time when we gather enough courage, hopefully out of adventure than desperation, that we implement what we have just surmised. Amen.

-------------------- Malhar Vadke.

Some of the most brilliant pieces of writings I have read

2005-07-01T00:32:00.000+05:30

First and foremost would be the prologue to Betrand Russell's autobiography. The essence of his life penned down on a page. For that matter, to great extent, of most of us. I have pasted the prologue below.

Then would come "Confessions" by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and "Reveries of the solitary walker". A testament to the fire within, of the father of the french revolution.

For the sheer brilliance of his wordsmithy, Mark Twain, esp. his newspaper articles and the piece he had to write on the very week of his wife's death: 'An article humourous in nature', bounded by a contract to do so. If you know the context while reading it, you would note the genius.To relish the same:"The Awful German Language", I have never laughed more.

He is also the only 'wordsmith' I have ever come across.

To read about the madness that lies within men, for the ability to freeze the moment in which the intensity of the human drama reaches its peak, Fyodor Dostoevsky. My favorite piece "Crime and punishment" .

For sheer consistency of thought, over prolonged periods of time, political as well as otherwise: Albert Einstein: "Ideas and Opinions".

The most incredible story I have ever read (perhaps one should not say such things) : "The Life of Pi" by Yan Martell. My sincere thanks to all the Richard Parkers.

And the greatest of anything in any medium at anypoint of time, I have ever read or will ever read: "The complete works of Swami Vivekananda".Incredible.Incredible.

The book that struck me like a thunder from the heavens : "Autobiography of a Yogi" by Paramhansa Yogananda. Investigating further in the 'effect' of this book it strikes people in a binary manner. It hits you hard, or you never get a chance to finish it.Believe it or not.

This piece isn't a contender for literary magnificence, but an anecdote, remarkable and stunning. All in a simple line that is to be read in it's context. The part when Richard Feynman's wife Arelene discovers he has lied to her and her reaction to it. Just a few pages from the start of "The further adventures of a curious character" by Richard Feynman. No one who reads it will ever forget it.

And finally a poem that would stand tall in any measure of comparison you can use: "The Ballad of the Reading gaol" by Oscar Wilde.

***
The Prologue to Bertrand Russell's Autobiography

What I Have Lived For

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

***

Faith

2005-03-22T19:42:00.000+05:30

Faith is like a frail thread.
The firmer you clasp it the stronger it becomes.
And you clasp it when there is nothing else around to hold. In complete void, this thread is all that you can see.

Faith requires Faith, else where will you get the guts to hold it with all the might you posses.
Faith also comes with the experience of Faith, for you are still existing, shaken but alive and well, not destroyed.

Does Faith develop?
I dont think so, the logic denies it.
Faith comes and it strikes when it does.

May God bless you all.

The need to be many

2005-02-06T01:22:00.000+05:30

I'll get to the point: "A man's family is an outcome of his need to be many".

The whole affair smells of the vedanta.

Of one being many and many being one.

Wow!
[Tried writing a larger post, couldn't do it. Just three lines described the picture.]

Less

2005-02-01T23:13:00.000+05:30

Less is indeed more. Think of it.
The more profound the thought you have to convey, fewer the words you'll need.
Sanskrit sholkas are usually one liners.
"Bhaja Govindam" by Adi Shankara, a page and a half.
Ten commandements.
The Bhagvad Gita, 700 verses...guaranteed to last a lifetime or more.
"I love you".
"Quit India"
"I am"
and in the words of the ancients...
"Om"

Thus by this logic management books every semester should be the size of telephone directories or " The detailed Indian census report". Which they are... QED.