Trip To Ooty

January 5, 6: On this, the very first weekend of 2008, Abhi, Sudhi, Ketan and I went on a trip to Ooty, which is a hill station somewhere north of the Pacific Ocean. (Don’t listen to me; I have as much direction sense as a stuffed tiger.) Speaking of directions, our first destination was Mysore, the famous city west of Bangalore, given that you take a left turn at that point before Mysore road where people can turn left or right.

MYSORE:
This city is kind of like Bangalore, (it belongs to the same state) but has maintained its ethnicity very well as its infrastructure developed. In other words, “we saw no babes”. We went past the famous Mysore palace very quickly, deciding to get back to it later and went ahead to a great little hotel called Mylari, somewhere northwards, I remember the left turn. This is one of those tiny little places that makes the greatest-ever dosas, much like Bangalore’s Vidyarthi Bhavan, Janata hotel and Domino’s. After the awesome breakfast of butter dosas we went back to that big green circle and continued west, towards:

GUDLUR:
It’s not much of a town; its raison-de-erte is to simply connect Mysore to Ooty. It does have a few shops, where we grabbed some chocolates and banana chips and continued east or something. In a couple of hours, noon, we reached:

DECISION POINT:
There was a good road and a bad road both leading to Ooty. The bad one had great sceneries while the good road would get you to the destination fast. This is when we remembered the instructions that were passed on from our wise forefathers “ALWAYS PICK THE BAD ROAD”. This took us west, till we reached that beautiful place:

THE SMALL HILL WHOSE NAME PAVAN WILL KNOW:
This spot is very beautiful and scenic. I suppose one famous scene of a Kannada movie, “Mungaru Male” was shot here. According to Abhi, so was Ananth Nag. Yeah, we’re still talking about the movie. And then that Kannada hero sang in Sonu Nigam’s voice, Kunal Ganjawala’s voice AND Udit Narayan’s voice till the heroine (who held her own with Shreya Goshal’s voice), shot him on the forehead. It all happened in the backdrop of THIS hill, which we will repeat because it’s true, is very very beautiful. After spending two hours here, we went forth till we hit:

A VERY LARGE TREE:
Not really.

FROG HILL:
A series of hairpin bends and blind curves amidst the beautiful, natural background led us to a high viewpoint on top of a hill, where finally, there were babes. The view was beautiful, and Ketan had the time of his life shooting photos with that new camera of his. We’re talking about nature now, not the babes. After a while of making “king of the world” noises from the viewpoint, we headed further up and reached the actual destination:

OOTY:
It’s called so because “Udhagamandalam” is quite a mouthful. It’s a very low temperature town in Tamilnadu, which is famous for tea (OOH, tea!), home made chocolates and carrots. We ate lunch at a restaurant there and went to the Ooty lake. It’s a nice little lake that offers boating (the pedal boats are incredibly painful) and a mini train. What the hell, if we’re going to go to a hill station in the middle of winter, we might as well climb onto a kids’ train. After some miscellaneous sauntering and dinner, we ended up in:

GARDEN VIEW HOTEL:
Some room somewhere on some floor has a view of some garden. It was a decent hotel room with good service, albeit overpriced. After a good night’s sleep, we left and headed right towards:

DODDABETTA:
That’s a big mountain, which offers great views and charges hefty parking fees. It even offers a telescope around which so many tourists gather and fight that nobody gets to look through it. Along the way up, or the way down, you can visit:

THE TEA FACTORY:
That’s the name of a factory. Yup, “We went to a tea factory called the tea factory”. As the name suggests, it’s a very small factory that’s also a museum, a place where you can take kids for a field trip. They offer you a great cup of tea at the end, very good taste. Having enjoyed the tea and bought some packets, we headed south to:

THE OOTY BOTANICAL GARDEN:
A totally “DUH!” kind of garden that has a lot of grass and some occasional “DUH!” flowers here and there. And then we went to a place that DOES NOT HAVE BLACK ROSES:

THE ROSE GARDEN:
DUH! Red and Orange roses. Flabbergasted, we went:

BACK HOME:
On the way back, we encountered some wild elephants, tame elephants, wild boars, black-and-white-monkeys AND stuffed tigers across the Bandipur forest area. Free. Didn’t even have to pay for a safari! Then we came across Gudlur again (stopped for lunch), Maddur (vadas for dinner), Mysore palace again till we got to R.V. College, the place where we all studied. Driving past it at 90 kmph gives me an inexplicable sense of pleasure. Education is over for good, for the rest of my life.

We were finally at Ketan’s place, we parted after going “WHOA!” at the amounts we’d each spent for this trip. But it was totally worth it.

Happy Birthday, Whoever

If it’s your birthday today, I hereby wish you many happy returns of the day!

It’s quite amazing, how some people can perfectly remember everyone’s birthday without using any reminder service, or gadget, or even noting them down. They just care a lot about other people, even more than they do about themselves, and belong to an ayurvedic constitution called “Kapha”. Which brings us to today’s topic of discussion: Ayurvedic Doshas.

In the ancient Indian system of medicine, called Ayurveda (ayus is life and veda is science), the entire universe is made up of five elements: Earth, Water, Wind, Fire and Void. (I didn’t forget the fifth element, if that’s what you’re wondering. It’s really called void.) The understanding of people (psychology) would be based on Doshas, or constitutions, each of which is made up of some combination of these five elements. In the system, there are three main Doshas and all human beings have all these doshas in their own unique combinations. Let’s explore these doshas in an attempt to understand ourselves slightly better.

Vaata: This dosha is made up of earth and wind. If you have dry skin (earth), a naturally slim build (the statistically general case) and are very restless by nature (wind), you have a lot of vaata in you. People belonging to vaata are generally very creative and simulating conversationalists. They’re totally spontaneous, a lot of fun to be around. One week they’ll be talking about this great new project they just started “You know what, I’m going to write G.R.E and study engineering abroad!”, and the next week they’ll be talking about another new project they just started “You know what, I’m going to go write CAT and study management!” “What happened to G.R.E??” “That was a totally stupid idea.” And the same thing’s going to happen next week. Making plans and sticking with them is totally against their windy, volatile nature. Too much vaata leads to restlessness and lack of sleep. These people do great work in creative fields.

Pitha: This dosha is made up of wind and fire. Pitha people generally have a medium build, neat and tidy hair, and a general heat about them, the kind of heat that comes from being extremely ambitious (fire). These people, by nature, have high digestive power in all aspects of life, starting of course, with the rate at which they metabolize food and the speed at which they can learn. They are very goal oriented and seem to turn every little thing into a competition. They’re highly organized and disciplined, and probably have immaculately maintained rooms and cubicles. Their ability to stick with plans and decisions make them fantastic leaders. In any project, the Vaatas are good starters and the pithas are good finishers. Most of the great leaders today, be it in business or politics, belong mainly to this constitution. Too much of pitha can lead to health problems related to (of course) digestion.

Kaapha: This dosha is made up of earth and water. These people are generally overweight and have moist, glowing skin and hair. They’ve a lot of glow in their nature that comes, of course, from water. These people have high emotional quotient and make friends easily. They’ll remember your birthday perfectly, they’ll want to wish you at 12 A.M, and they’ll easily forgive you for not remembering their birthdays. So much genuine love and selflessness, the only thing they expect from you (probably) is to spend time with them. In corporate world, you’ll find them sticking with a company for many years even if they don’t like the work, just because they love the people there. Almost all moms are Kaapha personalities.

Someone might have made up that whole thing just to say “I’m very sorry, girlfriend. But it’s not my fault that I don’t remember your birthday. It’s nature’s problem, I’m simply a victim.” But seriously, there’s nothing to believe in here, it’s simply an old system for understanding people.

Remember, everyone has all three doshas in their nature, but in different proportions. These proportions can change by age, upbringing and a whole lot of other variables. For example, most kids are vaatas, most middle aged people are pithas, most old people are kaaphas.

Think about what makes you you, in terms of these constitutions. Then think about goals and ambitions (if any) and what kind of a person you’d need to be to have them; it’s very simple to make the necessary changes and bring balance. As an example, if you have trouble sticking to a plan (vaata imbalance), the solution is as simple as making tiny little plans, fulfilling them and working your way up to bigger plans. Simply act against your nature till it becomes habit.

Perfectly balanced constitutions do not convert you into a certain stereotype, rather they enable you to be the best you can be, to let your uniqueness shine through in your work and your life.

Mundane Problems

I have an IOC container with some beans which are listeners. I have a POJO which is in itself a listener to some events. I want to notify my beans when the POJO gets notified of some event. But, because of some intricacies in how my container works into which I won't go, I have to get the list of all beans only at the time when my POJO gets notified. Kapeesh?

Well now the problem is I can hack my way out of this by passing an instance of the IOC container to my listener which will then get a list of all the listener beans in it and notify it away to glory. But then, my POJO now needs to know about an IOC! Damn. So, I won't want to do this. This is how we solved it:

We created an interface which provides the listener beans to anyone who wants to notify them. Then injected this interface to the POJO. This is how it looked:

public interface BeanListenerProvider {

   List getBeanListeners();

}

public class POJO implements SomeListener {

  public POJO(BeanListenerProvider listenerProvider) {
      this.listenerProvider = listenerProvider;
  }

  public void getNotified(SomeEvent event) {
      //Do Anything...
      foreach (BeanListener listener : listenerProvider.getBeanListeners()) {
          listener.notify(new AnotherEvent());
      }
  }
  //Whatever follows...
}

The good thing about this is that I now have the POJO decoupled from my container. This may be a rookie thing to do but it is easily lost when you are working on a Friday afternoon after working a lot with Eclipse code base. This led to an interesting conversation with Hakan, my teammate, about being a pragmatic coder as against being an idealist coder.

A lot of problems are mundane. Its only what you do to solve them in a clean way is going to make your work interesting. A clean code indeed gives one a kind of satisfaction which nothing can beat. OK, may be sex, but that's about it.

LIG Musings

I somehow found more free time than I usually get at office yesterday and today. So, I was surfing for some blogs and reading stuff about LIG. Then I realized that of lot of people write for an audience and try to be "politically correct" and a few others are offensive for the sake of it. I, for one, write whatever I think is right, without trying to be generously obscene, at the same time not trying to censor myself when I think using a fuck here and an asshole there whenever I think its appropriate. Now, coming to what I want to say here, is it a necessity for you to be diplomatic in your opinions and liberal in your thinking if you want to be heard? This made me write this.

For one, I am more conservative than liberal and oriented towards the right.

And it is true that news channels, especially NDTV and the likes are laureling pseudo-liberalism, for that is what it is, so much that people actually hesitate to express their opinions any more, for the fear of being considered intolerant. At least the ones I have seen speaking are. And of course, everything is a "national catastrophe" these days. And the things that are actually one are a political taboo to be mentioned. Idiots. Hippocrates.

On a different note, do you like nude paintings? Would you gift one to your girl friend/boy friend's mother?

Another Number On The Wall

I used to work for a CMM level 5 company. That is to say I have been through hell and more. A lot of people I talk to believe that the off shore model of development survives on the number of people/resources that is at a company's disposal. Though, it is absolutely true when it comes to a lot of big shot service providers in India, I don't think services/consulting software companies are just that, a herding shepherd collecting sheep. It is much more than that. And people have a tough time comprehending why I say "Fuck CMM" because they are made to believe that you get your ISO certification, your CMM & PCMM certification and a business model following the Infosys and you are all game for a software company. Hell, just working at one of these places will make parents of girls virtually drool and ask you to marry their daughters. I don't have a problem with that, however.

By being a CMM level 5 company, a company follows a set of processes. Everything is process-driven and person independent. So, for a big shot IT company in India, more often than not, each person joining in is more of a head count increase rather than a value add. They aren't looking at heroes who can do a lot things on their own, rather people who do what they are told and do it well. So, your ability to do same things repeatedly without thinking is what counts and not, say, your ability to use diophantine equations to make your computer work in parallel universes to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem.

My point is as long as you don't mind the fact that you are just a number in a SAP software, another brick in the wall, just someone who is, by definition, "replaceable" by someone, anyone, else then you can continue what you are doing. Otherwise, its high time you had a good contemplative look at your job and say, "Fuck CMM" and move on.

Yet Another Opinion Seeking Blog

Given a choice between money and power, what would you choose? Choose under the premise that they are mutually exclusive. Don't start off with how valid that assumption is etc.

Random Conversation

(One of the random chats my brother and I have randomly)

M = Me, H = Him.

M: I think at least about a million chicken are killed everyday worldwide.
H: What?
M: Chicken. Killed.
H: Yeah. Somehow people tend to eat them.
M: Yeah. Imagine if they had like big time brains. They would have taken over the world. They would have waged a huge war and created a massacre. They would have made each and everyone pay for all the chicken they have ever eaten. They would have (is interrupted)
H: Flown away to some other planet.
M: Hmmm.
M: I think.................(Some other random thing)