the delicate dragon

This post is just a thought that struck me from nowhere. I would have a lot to write about it soon. For now, its just this paradox.

One of the frailest things in this world is the DRAGONfly's wing.

Will try to elaborate on it sooner or later.

To know the Secret or to be Fooled .

Are you watching closely?

Every magic trick consists of three parts. The first part is called ‘The Pledge’ , the magician shows his audience something ordinary , a deck of cards, a bird or a man.

The second part is called ‘The Turn’. The magician takes his ordinary something and turns it into something extraordinary.

Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it because you're not really looking. You don't really want to know the secret... You want to be fooled.

But you wouldn’t clap yet, because making something disappear isn’t enough, you have to bring it back.

That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the most difficult part , the part we call ‘The Prestige’.

The above lines are from the movie “The prestige”. Watch it to test if your brain cells are still working and good enough to work non-stop for 2 hours.
I am getting back to my habit of finding analogy for everything , universal language as Paul Coelho calls it. This might get a bit complicated from here.

The pledge: You meet a person or go to a new place. Only knowledge you have about it is what others say about it or what you assume about it . Its just in the first blink of your eye. It’s the first snapshot of your brain.

The Turn : Your idea shatters , you see white instead of black , you don’t see what you saw earlier. Every thing you assumed or expected goes wrong. You would be too surprised and shocked to react. You will be struck by either awe or grief.

The Prestige: Everything comes back, like a full circle. Like they say, history repeats itself. But how do you see it, do u see it the same way as you saw it during the pledge or do you learn the trick behind the turn.

The point is , are you looking for the secret or do you just want to be fooled?

What is the magic here? It’s the change in life.

Are you watching closely?

From The Devil's Workshop- "Practicing Practicality"

One phrase that had been coming to my mind very frequently. I wonder if that’s grammatically correct or not, but it’s practically true.

Imagine this. You wake up on a Sunday and you feel like sleeping again. Reason: you know that it’s Sunday. You might feel the same on Monday, but you actually wake up and go to work. This is where you practice practicality. Every Monday you wake up, you try to tell yourself that you have to go and work and it will soon be a habit. But this is not as easy as it is said.

I somehow discovered that it takes a lot of strength. Every part of us has a tendency to challenge a direct truth; we try to make our own rules. It’s an innate art that everyone is born with. Everyone is an iconoclast at birth. We state it loud with a cry. A cry so loud and shriek that rings a bell to everyone that you have arrived and that’s the first change. But then, you start to practice practicality. You walk into a crowd which offers you varied opinions and at the end of it asks you to choose and adopt an opinion. But you don’t have an option to make your own opinion.

This I believe is a very subtle process that you will not even be conscious of. This process has very interesting consequences, at one or the other point of your life, by extrapolating your past into future you figure out that some things are going to occur in a specific way or pattern. This is where you practice practicality again. You design your present based on facts from past and assumptions of future. There is something very logically funny about this, just check it out again, you have a concrete past and you try to build a present to make an assumed future, so what you would obviously end up with is the realization of the assumed future and thus you continue Practicing Practicality.

IPod Vs Radio (the softer side of Me vs Myself)

My previous post 'Me vs Myself' , seems to have scared many of the few people who read it. Some felt it was gruesome, too gory, some felt that the idea was excellent and some said its nonsense. This post is like the "behind the post" part.

I believe , one of the easiest way of classifying our school of thought or i should say our orientation towards life is by dividing it into two ways, by choice and by chance.This thought took form while i was travelling from hyderabad to guntur and was listening to songs in my Ipod. I have two or three favourite playlists which i listen to, for most of the time.I somehow felt bored of hearing the same thing, so i thought to put a shuffle on all the songs on Ipod(that was about 1500+) and listen to any song in random. I was already feeling asleep, so i thought i would as well fall asleep in half an hour or so. I was expecting a very bad string of songs. To my own surprise, i kept listening to those songs for almost 2 hrs. Whats the point?

IPod here stands for choice, we choose what we want to hear, though i left it to choice by putting it on shuffle. This is what typically happens on a radio, you do not have a choice, you listen to what ever the radio station plays. Using these two and my little experience, i would like to go forward on the topic.

what happened to me that night...

I was bored with my choices--Many times in life, we are so excited with new things, first day in college, seeing a movie on the first day etc. But slowly we get bored of them. And sometimes it so happens that , our choices lead to failures leaving uf feeling that we are ineligible to make a choice. So we give way for chance.

I came across new things-- While listening to songs in random, i came across a lot of new songs which also seemed very good. These are like opportunities that we rule out without any information about them. We typecast ourselves to a certain category and we go blind to anything other than those. Chance gives us a chance to explore such new avenues.

I was compromising-- While listening, there were bad songs too, i mean songs which you would hear for the first 10 secs and say "forward". But sometimes, you comnpromise with that, you look at the good part of it (when you dont want to go back to Choice mode). You will try to listen to one instrument in the song that is being played well etc.

A more clear analogy to this is the funda of marriage : You meet a person , get to know each other for a few days under the condition that you are going to get married(you dont have much choice). So we obviously tend to like the other person. We get married and now its like a one way, so we compromise and fall in love again. So we would be happy for life. There is a funny question here (from a movie Missamma), the whole process that happens here is not dependent on either of the persons involved, i mean it is like X1 marries Y1, the process works fine even if its X1 marries Y2 or X2 marries Y1.There is nothing like the "Someone somewhere is made for you" or " Neo is the one" type funda.

This shows that everything in life runs on a track with two rails, one is choice , one is chance and may be, what connects these two is compromise.

PS: I would like to be clear that , i am not for or against any of the schools of thought or the marraige system.I only wanted to tell that these schools of thought are embedded in our lifes right from our birth and they keep fighting and compromising through out the life.

Touch

I thought I will be open to a movie like Brokeback Mountain. I was already bowled over by the simplicity and the undeniable truth in tag line “Love is a Force of Nature”. Though I did not see the whole movie due to some reasons, but there are some things from the movie that touched me.

The setting in which the movie starts with green meadows of the Brokeback Mountain leaving the two lead actors all alone with a large flock of sheep. And the move just stays there with this background for a while and lets nature show its force. That very slow pace at which the movie was set in the early part was just to make the audience feel the inevitability.

The rapport the lead actors share was a beautiful presentation of the vacillating but sensible and sensitive side of human emotions. As the movie moves ahead and the actors get separated and start to lead their own lives, it left me waiting for the moment at which both of them would get back together. In fact I was waiting for the eruption of long suppressed emotions within their own waiting to tapped open by each other and how all this would be presented.

At last , the characters meet , as one of them runs down the steps and embraces the other with in his arms. They hold each other tightly for a few seconds and I don’t know why for those few seconds, I felt the emotions were not communicated in detail. Just then, one of them drags the other aside catching him by his collar and they both start to kiss each other as is they wanted to gulp all the love emanating from them. I felt satisfied.

On one hand my satisfaction could be attributed to my own standards of filmmaking and raw presentation of human emotion. And on the other hand , I loved the way the director could actually dare to deny the so called taboos of the society and put things as honest as they were. In this process, I could not help acknowledging the fact that Touch is a very important and integral part of human life and it is The most significant thing while expressing emotions.

But at the same time, I believe it is the least used form of expression in countries like India. I don’t think conventions in a society would ever help in creating an environment where ones mind could follow his heart. By setting some rules, the conventions rule out half of human’s honest instincts as taboos.

There a lot of instances when a boy feels like touching a girl to show his concern for her or vice versa, but it might just be curbed for the sake of virtual society. The fact many of us prefer to Touch each other only when we are private proves that our instincts are succumbing to an external force. It seems we are programmed to emote in such a way. But in such a way we seem to be bypassing paradise.

From the Devil's Workshop-II "A&P"

Sometimes, there seems to be some words in English which seem to be used very rarely and doesn’t seem to be very important to have a place in our vocabulary. There are two such simple words that i discovered recently.
1)Priority.
For the sin I have made that I fell in love in with a subject called Operational research in my engineering, though I could only remember the greek letter ‘mew’ of the long formula from queuing theory, whenever I used to stand in a queue in a railway station , I used to think of the service rates and the demand rates and the 'n' number of queues and how each queue is getting serviced and which queue is the best to stand in.

Now the last idea “which queue to stand in” would have been easily solved if it carried 16 marks in my final exam and I had all the data to solve it. But it’s a totally different thing here. Any way I feel taking a decision about which queue to stand in is a lot easier than to choosing among people.

This is where the word Priority comes in. And before I go further into Priority, there is a very good logic in set theory about how many subsets are there for a set, it says we should count the null set also. Now there is something, which one forgets a lot of times while Prioritizing is the person himself. I feel that’s the unseen null set.

Now I can't even imagine the number of factors that influence a persons Priority. But I wonder at the frequency of the rate of change of Priorities. Let us assume two sets , where both the sets contain all the people in the world. Now if we are mapping both the sets and for each mapping we give a number based on his or her priority (I mean explicit priority). There is a minimum probability that a person is mapped to his own self in the other set.(This is my belief, however there is another side to it.)

To be clear on the word Priority in terms of people, I would like to refer to 7 habits of highly effective people where it is said every thing is created twice, once in mind and the other in material or physical. So if you are deciding between two persons, the degree of thinking about them in mind is what I would call Implicit Priority and the conversion of thought into practice by doing something or spending sometime is what I would call Explicit Priority. Its not for sure that both the lists would match.

Now to move ahead, I would like to bring in the next word,

2)Acknowledge

I some times feel Acknowledge is a very young brother to the word empathize. Its very funny that we don’t acknowledge the word Acknowledge itself until we receive an acknowledgement card.

So moving ahead Acknowledge is what acts as a bridge between Implicit Priority and Explicit Priority .There are many things we feel in ourselves but never acknowledge the very feeling that exists in ourselves. For instance , selfishness exists everywhere , infact in every person. The fact that we feel happy after doing a so-called selfless act is a proof of our selfishness. One would not have done a selfless act if he or she doesn’t feel happy. There is this wonderful line (or a rather cynical line as some would call it) “Buddha wanted all his followers to be devoid of desires, which in itself is a desire”. May be He just didn’t acknowledge it.

There is an interesting Phenomena of Acknowledgement while prioritizing. At every step of explicit prioritizing , we put ourselves on the top of list of Implicit Priority. That is, if we are spending time with some person, it is only the happiness that we gain through that meeting that makes us to put that person on the top.

In that case there might be a statement or rather an argument that a person himself will always be at the top of the Implicit Priority list. There are a lot of things which we do even if we are not interested in it , but we do it for someone’s sake and which is absolutely by force. We will not be on the top of Implicit Priority list as long as we are thinking of someone else’s happiness and not even acknowledging our happiness and how many other people we are ruling out and whether we are ruling them out with or without a reason.

There is one more interesting proposition where the person himself is on top of the priority list. This would happen when we are in control of every decision we take and every priority. In fact I skipped a significant case where your priority number towards a person is not matching with the other persons priority number towards you. To analyse that case, I think one can refer to the Law of Demand and Supply. I don’t think there is a better way than that law to explain it.

One last case-When there is no one to prioritize, even in this there are two cases, that the person may still be not on top of the priority list as he is still thinking of someone else whose priority relation is not at all mapped to him. They can be called fools.(and people like them write articles like these).Only way out of this case can be derived from age old process of formatting our computers. We use a reboot floppy which supports to install a new operating system. The only reboot floppy we have is we ourselves. All we can do is put ourselves on top of the list and reboot.

P.S : It seems the devil had gone more devilish. I could not cover the word Acknowledge as much as I wanted to. I have strayed from my usual style of writing where I do not make statements regarding personal issues. And I think , the usage of the pronoun of the word “we” would have change the essence of what I wanted to say. It could be replaced by “one”.But as usual , it seems I have been successful in negating myself a number of times.

From The Devil's Workshop-1 *THE "1" - THE "0"*

Two things that rule our life. They are the root of every software program that runs in this world and every semiconductor that is moving the world and simultaneously making its way to the much debated (especially in the movies) artificial intelligence.
Other than that i strongly believe that every new technology is only a new version of our real life in a technical world. It is like the Nueral Networks and genetic algorithms which are extensively used for Optimisation are a product of study of human evolution and the interaction of nuerons in our brain.
Now coming to the inter-relationships between real life systems and the technologies, 1s and 0s also have their origins in the human mind and many of our activities which take only two answers yes or no.When i say "many" , these are the "many" which we acknowledge as affirmations where only yes or no are used.But actually, every activity of ours is a result of yes or no or rather 1 or 0.

Now what is special about this 1 and 0, these are objectivity personified, i will not try to define objectivity as I might end up manipulating Ayn Rands definition. When we say 1- it does only one thing, when u say 0 it will do nothing at all. Whatever happens with these two, they have a reason which is Absolute and thus they work by it. To be simple it is like the Dialog popping up with the message that says "Do You Want To Save -Yes or No".Where "Yes" means yes and "No" means no. I know there will be people who will be saying what does the cancel button in Microsoft Word or Excel.That is where i will be getting to.

Every thing we do actually starts from 1 and 0 , which in turn generates a lot of binary operations which also works by the 1s and 0s and the end result is what we call a thought sometimes and sometimes feeling and sometimes emotion.The first one i.e thought is the one that we acknowledge is a product of the 1s and 0s, while the other two are apparently a product of the same 1s and 0s, but the difference is we do not acknowledge it and thus drive away the reason behind it and thus give birth to subjectivity.

This can be demonstrated from many examples that are related to science, we will start with the assumption anything that can be reasoned by science is a product of 1s and os.If a boy sees a good looking girl, the end result (depending upon the boy ) will be a nice feeling, what is behind this feeling is a million binary operations , of which some are, see the girl -yes or no, image loaded yes or no, image processed-yes or no, is she good -yes or no, if yes-( is she very good-yes or no(if yes generate adrenalin-yes or no)if yes(generate the thought to move towards her-yes or no)if yes (move towards her yes or no))else (is she very bad yes or no)... so on

i have used some terms like good and bad which are supposed to be subjective, but at the lowest level they are driven by a reason, they only move across levels like good, very good, excellent etc.There is a better example which i picked up from Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy- Place one hand in hot water and place other hand in cold water. After sometime place both the hands in normal water, now what we experience is what we term as a confused feeling, but which is actually a result of the previous experience of hot and cold water. It is like the result of one process is 10 and the other is 01. Any decision or emotion we face is only a result of a prior experience , so as the experiences are different for different people, we tend to call many opinions subjective but it is not so, it is an outcome of the undesignated objectivity.

And the Cancel button also means just Cancel, it has an objective,a purpose as Agent smith says in "Matrix Reloaded". We just need to recognise that purpose and reason behind whatever we do rather than disregarding it.

P.S: I have just written the most confusing and futile article, but thats what i do in the devils workshop, when i am absolutely idle. It is actually open to one's own interpretation. So nothing much to say about that.

Coming soon in Devils Workshop-Heart and the Hypocrite .

The Butterfly and the Big Bang .