Of Progressiveness and Disasters

I'm a big believer in the old saying "Results talk". Results, alone, talk. Which probably makes me a conservative person. The institution of marriage, when looked at from a conservative point of view, paints a pretty bleak picture. Bleak, because among the two choices people have (Love marriage vs arranged marriage), love fails miserably. The exciting stuff always fails.

If you look at countries where the majority of marriages happen between people who're in love a.k.a. "Developed countries", the divorce rate crosses a whopping 50%. More than half of love marriages end in divorce. Some guy in my family who had an "exciting" love marriage, just ended the whole thing. Which is why this topic came up today. On the other hand, if you look at most of the arranged marriages around the world, the couple tend to stick together forever. The right decision, when it comes to marriages, has never been simpler or more painful. It's clear, obvious, "right there". Arranged marriages work. Love marriages have much higher probability of failure. Ouch.

I like to embrace love for what it is, it's the spiritual positive; (fear is the spiritual negative). It isn't just something that you need to get a girlfriend/boyfriend for. It can just be felt and accepted as the ultimate source of energy and passion. Especially if you have no other option! I know that I have none.

"What happened on valentine's day?" Nothing. There's no one,really. There cannot even be anyone. The "perfect girl" for me is something like this:

She's young, about 3-4 years younger than me, very beautiful, from a classy, "high-status" family, belongs to the exact same religion and caste as I, well educated, well read, smart, possibly from the same state (Andhra, is it?), respectful towards her family and ours, orthodox, and jovial.

Of all those specifications, "JOVIAL" is the only thing I got to add; the other specifications are from my parents. That's how bad life is. I did have other things to add but if the list got any bigger, I might be describing a non-existent girl, maybe even an "impossible girl".

So, I've happily outsourced the problem of finding such a girl to the elders. "SHE HAD BETTER BE JOVIAL."

I'd said in a previous entry that Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 is my valentine. Maybe people don't get how serious I was: I love it, i trust it, it makes the majority of my "awake time" exciting as hell, nothing in the world can change how I feel about it. Oh wait, Visual Studio 2008 was launched one month back!

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Swaroop Murthy
http://360.yahoo.com/swaroopmurthy

I am what I am because of who we all are!

Yes. I installed the new revolutionary Linux distribution called "UBUNTU" that's caught everybody's imagination. No. I'm not slowly but steadily turning into an open source geek. It's just that I'm not entirely satisfied with anything these days.

The last time I installed Linux was when I got a dangerous virus in the windows installation, causing all the data to be lost. "Install some Antivirus no, dumbo". Yeah, that's like saying "go to the gym, you'll look better". Things that I somehow never get around to doing. The distribution I installed last time was Fedora. It probably did many things well, but there was that one single power cut that fried the entire file system. The thing couldn't handle one stupid power cut. Being in Bangalore, it's a crucial thing that any system should be able to handle.

Much like being in a support job or a security job, these operating system companies run under extremely high pressure. People never forget the one thing that you did wrong, even if you did a million things right. Even when you did something right, you're simply keeping things the way they're supposed to be, you're not adding any value. If you're in a support job, do what I did: write scripts  to do your job automatically and go to sleep!

Anyway, why did I install Ubuntu today? Don't say it, I'll take the pain myself.  "Dumbo. Big fat dumbo." Ok. This system, my friends said, is far more user friendly than anything else you might have ever seen. Of course, it's not like you can install it and teach mom to use the web cam before going abroad for many years. But it's pretty great. Linux for humans, finally!

I'm thrown a bit off-balance when I write this. I just had the most incredibly exciting day at work, with my valentine. Microsoft Visual Studio 2005! And now I'm back at home, working around with the open source revolution UBUNTU. This thing is bloody fast, lightweight and gorgeous looking. Hopefully, it can maintain its impression for a long long time before it gets dismissed as "another thing that doesn't come from Microsoft".


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Swaroop Murthy
http://360.yahoo.com/swaroopmurthy

IT Slowdown.

As expected, the slowdown in IT has percolated it's way into India. TCS has asked 500 of it's employees to resign. This move is after cutting 1.5% of all the employees salaries. TCS HR head has moved out to Tata Power. He was believed to be the reason behind low attrition rate at TCS till now. IBM too has laid off around 700 employees according to an unofficial report.

Is this the beginning of an end of Indian IT growth story? Have your say.