Hazaron Khwahishein Aisi

Hazaaron Khwaahishen aisii ki har Khwahish pe dum nikale
bahut nikale mere armaa lekin phir bhii kam nikale



All I want is everything. Desires. They seem to have no beginning nor end in space, time or space-time. It's like a continuous cycle of unlimited demand that worldly supplies can never keep pace with. What I want today, I get for myself tomorrow and what I get tomorrow leads me to yearn for something new and beautiful which kills me not to have.

That's the absurdity of desire. Of that insatiable lust of the human mind for more and more. Success, happiness, love, fame, wealth, health..... no wonder Bruce Almighty couldn't catch up with people's spam prayer-mails. It's an inexhaustible, ever-expanding, all-encompassing monster of a emotion, is desire.

So is desire evil? Is it an agent, an instrument of the anti-christ? The very lure of the devil's apple? Maybe. But to find out the answer to that question you'll have to fall prey to desire. That's probably the only way of finding out what lies beyond. It's the passion of desire that pushes the human race forward into inexorable progress. Hazaron Khwahishen- a thousand desires are the cornerstones of our quest for a better tomorrow.

Romancing the unromantic

How do you take something as unromantic, drab and boring as steel-making and try to make it look even remotely fascinating? That's the answer that I've been looking for over the last two weeks.....without any success. It's just so in-the-face dismal and depressing.

But.....it has to be done nonetheless and the fact of the matter is that people are making fortunes making steel. Mr. Mittal has made himself the third richest man in the world and the richest man in Britain thanks to steel. Steel drives the global economy like no other raw material does and for decades on end, a nation's steel consumption has come to indicate it's level of development and pace of growth.

So unless you look at the ends, the means shall carry no appeal. If you think of steel-making as an essential, indispensable part of industrialization and technology and then look to make better steel for better industrial applications, only then do you stand a remote chance of romancing the unromantic! It's all about the big picture baby.

Six degrees of separation

To get you started on the six degrees of separation, I'll quote Wikipedia: "Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that, if a person is one "step" away from each person he or she knows and two "steps" away from each person who is known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is no more than six "steps" away from each person on Earth."

Amazing isn't it? Just the thought that there are no more than six people between you and.....well, George W. Bush, Julia Roberts or even Fidel Castro! That's how small the world has gotten. And it's no news that it's getting even smaller. So what are the factors that are literally challenging the expansiveness of the globe? I personally postulate that online social networks are one of the most significant shrinkers of the world today.

It's an analogy to globalisation. Thomas Friedman theorizes that globalisation is a flattening force, in the sense that it's making our world "flat" and giving us a level playing field in a global economy. Well, I hypothesize that our world is getting smaller and the degrees of separation between individuals are successively diminishing. Thanks to the Orkuts, Facebooks and scores of other burgeoning social networks on the world wide web.

People across various cultural and social fraternities are getting to know others way beyond the limits of their geographies and demographies. And online social networking is makng it possible. Think about it. You now know about 400 different people from 30 different countries who share the same birthday as yourself. You can now connect with individuals who share with you an obscure passion or an esoteric hobby or a vague fear. And the fact that you know them brings you a "step" closer to the acquaintances of these people, two steps closer to the acquaintances of their acquaintances and so forth. That's phenomenal if you grasp the immensity of the idea.

So what's next? One degree of separation? Maybe. But there are other natural and artificial forces which tend to subvert or neutralize the "shrinking world" phenomenon, the effects of which are trivial, yet not negligible. Population explosion for one is a disrupting factor. When there are so many people entering the world every day, you tend to fall behind on the shrinking ;) Then there's death. If an important link in your chain of global acquaintances passes away, you've lost a large chunk of contacts!

Upsetting tendencies apart, the "shrinking world phenomenon" has gathered a tremendous amount of momentum for any force to able to reverse it in the near future. I see the world as a place that'll be much smaller for me tomorrow than it'll be today. Literally.

Gaining perspective on commerce

It was an unlikely Eureka moment for me today, after my first visit to Tata Steel. Watching Steel being prepared from scratch and following the lifecycle of a bar of steel was eye-opening to say the least. Steel is a primary mover of industrial growth for any nation. Name an application and chances are steel was used in the making either directly or indirectly.

So I've been wondering....steel is a raw material that's used to produce other goods. And what are these products? To name a few.... automobiles, machine parts, pipes, air-conditioners, construction materials.... the list is literally endless. Now, it's not difficult to see that among the consumers of these articles are industries and among industries....well, steel plants themselves.

So steel plants use a lot of steel ; in the form of finished products that required the use of steel as a raw material in the first place! For eg. employees in steel plants use vehicles--which are made of steel (among other materials)...... the steel making process involves the use of heavy machinery, piping and construction equipment....all of which involve the use of steel.

It' a viruous cycle. People live in townships, cities, villages......all settlements are based upon the use of a large number and variety of goods. And if you observe carefully, all we're doing as a "global civilization" is fulfilling each others' endless needs. What this essentially means is that we're indirectly engaging in...barter!

So millennia have flown by but the cornerstone of commerce, the very founding principles, reasons and motives of trade continue to remain the same. You make me some steel, I'll use it to make you a car that'll help you to commute to your steel plant, Mr. X in the next city will take care of garment manufacturing, Mr. Y will grow us some food, while Mr. Z will build all of our homes....

That's how complicated trade is. One significant change in the nature of trade since its inception is the fact that services have probably dominated products in importance over the last century. After all our needs stretch beyond the material. So where does trade and commerce go from here and what role does steel have to play in the journey? I guess we'll have to wait to find out...

Surprise! It's not about you!!

I was going through Paul Graham's blog a couple of days ago and I came across an idea that I found really interesting. I obviously hadn't realized this myself before and now that I do, I really think it has changed my perspective about..well, a lot of things..

Now, the argument put forward is that most selections or judgments about you...are...umm...not about you. What this means is that most choices that people make in selecting other people in various realms of life are impersonal. Paul Graham vividly illustrates this by an example: A selector picking a football team( assuming it's from a group of non-celebrities) wouldn't quite care about who got picked and who got left out as long as he thinks that he did a good overall job with the team... i.e. margins for error are accounted for by the quality of the median.

Now if only one were to realize this, you may start to see that a lot of selections or omissions that you're involved in, which you thought were either fair or unfair.....well, they weren't about you anyway.....the person doing the selections was more concerned if he did his job well on the average.....so if you're not getting picked on a team and the average team member turns out to be good....chances are there's no use thinking the selector was unfair because he wasn't judging you personally anyway.....

Lessons to be learned? Well, for one....relax....take it easy....the world is not out to get you....for all you know...most of the time it's not even about you....and on a positive note....maybe you need to work even harder now that you know that the individual selecting you is probably not going to make too much of an effort checking up on your case.....

Well....there it is...take it as you please...but yeah...it's not about you!

Intel Inside!

Funny bone moment of the semester!

My friend's new "Dual Core" notebook seems to be in deep shit.....This is what another friend had to say about it:

"U See, the problem with having 2 processors( Dual Core!) is that each processor thinks the other will work and neither does!"

Now I'm not too much of a Mu-P guy, but really....is this what they mean by Intel Inside?? lol!!

Some of the best feelings in the world

It's like that sublime emotion. That feeling which comes and stays but for a fleeting moment and leaves you mesmerized and longing for more. It happens when you're least expecting it. May not coincide with the greatest achievements in your life. But when it appears for that evanescent instance nonetheless, it leaves you feeling like you're on top of the world and life couldn't be better.

It's often very hard to equate these feelings with material pleasure. You can't buy that emotion for the world. Some of these feelings may just come from doing something that you wouldn't usually do.

Ever woken up at the end of the night to see the moon shining its full glory, even as daylight edges in stealthily? It's the diurnal inflexion point of sorts. A time when it's neither this nor that, and yet there's both. And even as you watch on, daylight creeps in adamantly, forcing the majestic moon to surrender in subjugation.

Ever understood someone completely? It's that feeling which tells you that you're in complete harmony with the other person, that you can understand his every emotion and almost read his mind. That's the perfect sync.

Ever been to the top of a hill or a mountain only to see the world in a new perspective? To realize that only if you rise above the confusion and chaos at the lower rungs, there's calm and serenity at the upper echelons. It's that feeling of getting the big picture. Of seeing everything from a different vantage point. It's when you get that Eureka feeling of disillusionment, of having the muddled clouds in your mind clear out forever. It's difficult to describe, but it's as beautiful as it is indescribable.

You can't exchange these emotions for anything in life. And it's as difficult to feel this way of your own volition. It's probably serendipity. Random occurrences-sporadic distributions of ecstatic elation on the fabric of your life.....

Terrorism : The Why's and What's behind the twisted thinking

It's very difficult to look for reason in an act where a gun-sporting juvenile massacres fellow humans whose "ideology" differs from that of his own. But then, there must be something that drives a young man, extremely capable of achieving a socially productive end, to annihilate hundreds of people. The question then, is, what cause can be so all-effacing and overpowering?

Religion, they say, is one overarching motivation. I personally have my doubts. If you seek to define religion, in its authentic spirit, as devotion to a superior force, then I'm not inclined to believe that thousands of fanatic young men do what they do for the love of God. It's got to be something else. Like brotherhood, of an evil variant. Like sympathy, for a radical belief.

I can understand when the hungry, exploited kids in Africa carry guns, firing arbitrarily to maim scores of people. But I fail to comprehend why well-fed Britons and their perverted Sheikh counterparts from Saudi Arabia, take to terrorism. How Osama Bin Laden and his accomplices have come to believe that they shall someday be exalted in the eyes of the Almighty because they have slaughtered the infidels, is beyond my reasoning.

So is there a cure? Or are we certain there's a disease to begin with? It's tough to say. And even as we try and figure out answers to this and other such baffling queries, the pervert is planning his next massacre.