JFK in Retrospect

I suppose the audience present at that time, why, even the world as a whole, went into a rapture of sorts when JFK uttered those words about not asking what the country can do for you. Two generations later, in a more placid state of mind, I feel that there is more to that statement than he cared to mention.

What he really meant, I reckon, was that if you are one to do something for your country, the very best it will do for you in return is drape your coffin with its flag, and give you a three volley salute, and that is if you die before you do too much good.

If one the other hand, you are one to do something to your country, then, there is much indeed that your country can do for you.

Nothing sums up my sentiment as today's editorial by P.Sainath in the Hindu does.

In retrospect it seems, that what JFK left out of that speech was prescient of what became of him and his brother.

Proximity-TOA Correlation

I think I just may have chanced upon a law from empirical observation, much like say Moore's law
or Murphy's law.

The observation is as follows:
"The farther a member of a rendezvous party is from the rendezvous point, the earlier he/she is
likely to arrive there before the others."

A plausible explanation I have as to why this prediction turns out true much more often than not
is because people farther off from a rendezvous point will make an effort to leave much earlier
than necessary so as to give themselves a buffer against any unexpected delays on the long way
to the rendezvous point.

The negation of this statement also holds good. People who are closer to the rendezvous point
tend to start later reassured by the fact that the rendezvous point is close by after all and
are unlikely to be delayed by any unexpected events. Unexpected events are by their very nature
rare, thus both the precaution as well as the lack of any guard against it seldom turns out to
be a factor in the arrival time.

Also note that this does not conflict the normal distribution of arrival times that is to be
expected in such cases. My proposition merely relates the proximity of the person arriving
the rendezvous point to how much closer or farther his time of arrival is from the median of
the bell curve distribution.

The correlation of this law is as high as the following factors are
relevant:

a) the formalism involved in the meeting/rendezvous (i.e. more applicable to a board meeting
than an informal party)

b) infrequency of the meeting (i.e. more often the meeting's repetition, lower the correlation)

The reason why both these factors will affect the correlation is obvious.

Hence, to put it succinctly, the early bird is the one farthest from the worm.

Guns and God(s)

Two key issues that rage in debates between liberals and conservatives in America are the twin issues of guns and gods. For the uninitiated, it goes like this: the conservatives want to keep guns with the people and get god into the Supreme Court (and schools, by the way.) The liberals want to keep god out of the courtroom and get guns away from the people.

Lets look at some examples of countries, and how guns and god are treated in them:

Case 1 : Guns with the people, God in the Courtoom : Afghanistan, NW Pakistan
(True, there aren't too many functional courtrooms in Afghanistan nor Pakistan. Yet, the ones that function at all are the Sharia courts where god's purported word is above all else. )

Case 2: Guns away from people, God in Courtroom : Saudi Arabia
(This is ofcourse, neglecting the suicide bombers and fellows who fly planes into buildings in other 'allied' countries.)

Case 3: Guns with the people, God away from the Courtroom : USA

Case 4: No Guns, no God : Scandinavian countries, Western Europe, Japan
(As per a Gallop poll, the most irreligious countries were associated with the highest standards of living in the world, and vice versa for the religious ones. As it turns out, these countries also have amongst the most restrictive gun laws. )

You can read a nice Wikipedia page on gun laws in different countries, here.

Now believe you me. I admire the 'Second Amendment'; I was also moved to tears when I first read the 'Right of Revolution' clause in the Declaration of Independence:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

However, one has to admit that right to carry a firearm, if it was primarily intended to be a deterrent against oppression by Government, is a bit outdated. No matter how many guns you arm the citizenry with, there are only so many tanks that all those guns are going to take out with a few rifles or handguns. So, you'll need to arm them with bazookas or rocket launchers or anti-tank whatever-it-is that the Taliban uses, and even then it won't suffice. Hence you need to grant the citizenry right to own artillery as well. And artillery units are only sitting ducks to an oppressor armed with F-16s so you'll need to let the citizens buy, own and operate their own air bases and air-force. Well, if you are smiling, you evidently haven't heard about Anarcho-Capitalism.

However, you haven't heard anything about American gun control either. Not yet. The following was a revelation during a chat with one of my friends, Rohit, in America. After hearing me talk so passionately about the right to rebellion:
Rohit: yeah

I know

you know what is more absurd?

the point is to be able to rebel against the government

guns are banned in washington DC

me: lol!!!

Rohit: no citizen is allowed guns there

permit or not

The Case against Heaven

(Obviously other people might have said this better, but hey, its my blog.)

Consider the following propositions or axioms common to all the Abrahamic faiths:

1) Heaven exists.

2) God gave mankind free will.

Heaven is the ultimate reward for all virtuous conduct. Its an etenally blissful afterlife, free of all the evils and sufferings on earth.

Free will is the reason for evil. Free will is also the the offered explanation for good. Greed, selfishness, good, evil all spring from free will, as natural consequences of.

Now lets consider these two propositions as valid simultaneoulsly. I draw the following two possible sets of conclusions:

a) Heaven is blissful.

b) Heaven is the epitome of goodness.

c) For goodness to be meaningful, free will must exist.

d) If there is free will, then evil exists as a consequence.

e) Ergo, there must be evil in heaven.

f) Ergo, there must be suffering in heaven as a consequence of evil.

g) Evil on earth is temporary, all things in heaven are eternal.

h) Ergo, there must be a lot of evil and lot of suffering in heaven.

Else

a) There is no free will in heaven.

b) Without free will, there is no notion of good.

c) Without the notion of goodness, there is no notion of bliss.

d) Heaven is not blissful.

Ergo sum, one of the following may be true:

a) There is free will AND (a lot of) suffering in heaven.

Else

b) There is neither free will NOR bliss in heaven.

The Patriot

This simply had to be on the blog:

I am standing for peace and non-violence.

Why world is fighting fighting

Why all people of world

Are not following Mahatma Gandhi,

I am simply not understanding.

Ancient Indian Wisdom is 100% correct,

I should say even 200% correct,

But modern generation is neglecting -

Too much going for fashion and foreign thing.

Other day I'm reading newspaper

(Every day I'm reading Times of India

To improve my English Language)

How one goonda fellow

Threw stone at Indirabehn.

Must be student unrest fellow, I am thinking.

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, I am saying (to myself)

Lend me the ears.

Everything is coming -

Regeneration, Remuneration, Contraception.

Be patiently, brothers and sisters.

You want one glass lassi?

Very good for digestion.

With little salt, lovely drink,

Better than wine;

Not that I am ever tasting the wine.

I'm the total teetotaller, completely total,

But I say

Wine is for the drunkards only.

What you think of prospects of world peace?

Pakistan behaving like this,

China behaving like that,

It is making me really sad, I am telling you.

Really, most harassing me.

All men are brothers, no?

In India also

Gujaratis, Maharashtrians, Hindiwallahs

All brothers -

Though some are having funny habits.

Still, you tolerate me,

I tolerate you,

One day Ram Rajya is surely coming.

You are going?

But you will visit again

Any time, any day,

I am not believing in ceremony

Always I am enjoying your company

- Nissim Ezekiel

Outsource This!

I'm sure you must have heard the usual Freidmanite drivel about why markets should be unregulated, and outsourcing is the surest road to better productivity in a flat market... so on and so forth. However, outsourcing doesn't work primarily because a labour camp sweatshop in China can produce an iPod quicker, faster and cheaper than American production lines. It is because of the fact that Steve Jobs, sitting in his Manhattan perch, can call up the Chinese contractor and say, without having to worry about putting on a straight face, that he wants another 100,000 pieces by the end of the week.

Now, hold on. I am not talking about the things that people like Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and Arundhati Roy write about. Sure, the contractor probably has to slave work a few hundred Chinese peasants to death. I need to emphasize that I, on the other hand, am referring to, the straight face, or the lack of any necessity for it, in orders from another continent.

Think about it. If your manager wanted you to stay back the whole weekend (without any extra pay) and labour to finish some report out in time for the client meeting on Monday, he'd go about it with circumspection. He'd probably dangle some reward of a distant raise in front of you. Or drop hints about some recommendation to a vacancy that might come up as a result of your immediate superior Suryakantvenkataramanulu's (why should it always be Bob, Jim or Joe?) resignation. He might also, if we were anything like me, resort to pointing out gaffes that you let slip in your report all week long, so that by the end of it, you are so crushed and pliable, eager to regain his confidence, that you offer to stay back and finish the aforementioned report.

This is where outsourcing comes in. If you had a back office with some hapless young assistants, you don't need to worry about all that effort. You just call them. Tell them crisply that you want the report by Monday. Then you hang up. Problem solved.

Ofcourse, clever entrepreneurs have already realised all this. For eg. take for instance, this site which already does things like break up with your GF/BF for you. Again, note, what's being done away with is not the inefficiency in doing something... its the Thespian effort needed to say that terrible thing right, the need to put on your poker face... and all that sort of thing. The oldest outsourced activity in fact is another case in point - assassinations. Heck, if you wanted to kill your own king, you'd need a tie up with Assasins Inc. in your neighbouring country.

In fact, if the Greeks had discovered outsourcing back then, we'd have had no need for terms like 'Herculean task'. Poor Hercules. If only he had known that we Indians were around even then, and kicked ass at math and spreadsheets, even back then; he wouldn't have had to bother with all his... well, tasks. He'd have simply sent a parchment through his half brother Apollo (whom we worshiped back then, still do) that read:

Aryabhat,

We are in need of a positional arithmetic system based on the decimal system that we can use instead of the clunky system we have now to show the Egyptian delegation visiting our home office. Also, as a secondary objective, we may want you to explore the possibility of incorporating some method to indicate null or void quantities. If you could mash that up with your number system, which we'd like by Monday, that'd be great.

Also, Archimedes is calling in sick next week. So I need you to stand in for him next week, on the 'Move Mount Olympus' project. Apparently, he was talking about something about being able to move earth itself. Please look at the project mail archive and figure out what he meant.

Regards,
Hercules
(Half) God
Olympus Corp

Money Marries Culture

This is an I came across in the July 2009 edition of Reader's Digest:

Since the image is a bit fuzzy, the ad reads

India's elite now have an exclusive way of finding their soulmates.

EliteMatrimony.com
A premium matrimony service from BharatMatrimony.

Presenting BharatMatrimony.com, the upper Crust of Matrimonies for the super-rich celebrities, royalty and who's who of society. Its a service for exclusively invited customers, who seek an ideal life partner to complement their lifestyle and cultural expectations. The way you search for your life partner will never be the same again.

I'm too sickened to type the rest out.

If this doesn't hurt you, or offend you profoundly, I hope that what I found at their site, will:
"The finest dining experience"?
"The best breed"?

What I really want to know from anyone who cares enough to read this is: is this an integral part of the hallowed Indian culture too?