It's been an Year .....

Thought i would never write such senti (aadat par gayi hai ab to)posts, but then i am giving away my inhibitions or wiping away the smoke that i have built over the past one year , pretending that i am happy being alone and independent , being somewhat indifferent to the feelings of my family members and relatives ..(as if i was ever concerned ).

Circa , July 3rd 2007 .. it perhaps is the day which has changed my life forever and for my good. I was bit apparent coming here , coz i had never been away from my family for 23 long years of my existence on earth .... or technically 22 , coz i did stay away from them during the year before ... but i did return to them in 4-5 days ....A sense of vacuum or a feeling of emptiness did develop inside me , during my early days of stay here .... i always thought (and still think) that Delhi is far better that bombay anyday ......i don't damn care about the night life in this city coz i hardly have one ... but the twists and turns of lutyens and bakers lane can never be eclipsed by the scenic beauty of marine drive or the the so called crowd at the bandstand. Mumbai might make people happy , independent and wealthy ... but to me it's a strange city ... a city where no one has time for anyone ... a city where people go into church gate station like swarms of bees ... , some how i do feel that i never belong to this place and never will.

But , then mumbai is called the city where you can make your own destiny for nothing , be it the bollywood or the financial hub , millions have made their fortunes in the city ... and perhaps i am no different .. but then my fortunes have come in the field of academics .. so be it . Before coming here i took things for granted , a sense of complacency had set in me ... which prevented me in fulfilling my potential to the fullest .. but being here away from my parents and loved ones a sense of emptiness did strike me .. and the best thing to get out of it was to devote my self to my passion of ...... u all can guess by now ....bloody ......ALGORITHMS .....:) .

I did feel some kind of independence here .. away from the constant bantering of my parents and relatives ...as if every move of mine was being scrutinized to the fullest ....( those crappy associations which i had last talked about ...) , but coming here i felt free to do whatever i wanted to do... In my present day i have become less opinionated ... not caring about others ... and somewhat selfish ... always weighing in the pros and cons for better of my self.... This has moved me away from my parents .... though i was never that close... i have never told them about the difficulties that i am facing , always trying to get out of it myself 's ... I generally do discuss about topics related to my career with them ... but never have felt the need to go into more of the details.... some how think that a distance has remained that i have never tried to abridge... for some odd reason ..which i have never understood and may be i never will. I don't care much about the things going in my house .... having built a cocoon around me ... always end up fighting with my father ..on any issue .. may it be Indian Hockey (his passion) or if it concerns me ....My mom does understand me somewhat ..(being a psychologist does help :)) .. she can make out by my face ... my happiness and disappointments ... but she observes me ....most of the time without interfering in my stubborn opinions ....she knows i am opinionated, but i do look forward to that day when she comes to know about my blogs :) .... i hope she won't be shocked or horrified ...( God save me !!!).

My parents always complain that i don't end up calling them for 7-10 days .. somehow don't feel the need to talk to them ...to tell them everything in going in my life .... perhaps it's the reason they don't know me ... or my friends too well ....they do know about some of my literary abilities..but then i have never felt the need in revealing this side to them ... perhaps i don't want them to be worried about me .. that much ....coz may be i am not that worried about them ...In the last one year i have developed the confidence to handle and resolve most of my problems .. and i want them to be happy coz some how i do feel that i have taken them for granted ..(most of us do that) .. so it's better that i don't tell them my difficulties if i can't share with them their's.

Barring all this i do think that i have the best dad , the best mom and best sis that there can be in this world and i am thankful to them for bearing with an eccentric son like me. For long i have worried them with my sudden and strange whims , but they have gladly faced them all.The times when my friends were made their parents proud by taking their first job , i was busy searching for my destiny, i hadn't been easy if i hadn't got their support and encouragement. They deserve an applause !!! I will be grateful to them till i exist.......

Bonferroni's gyaan

so Ladies and Gentlemen(if any) i am back with more of the "geek" gyaan ... that i somehow can associate with real life situations.... got this extraordinary ability to link theory with practicality of life ...(ya i know most of you would envy me !!)........

In short this is Bonferroni's so called principle............

if you look in more places for interesting patterns than your amount of data will support, you are bound to find crap....

so all the men will quite agree with this ... when they take their loved ones or so called their female "friends" .....( we all are tired of hearing the cliche statement , oohh.. we are just friends) .. out for shopping.Bonferroni's gyaan fits perfectly in this situation ... all the men have suffer the ordeal ... when the ladies ... just can't find enough of their passion for shopping , they go around and around mining for stuff ... that would even put the mining algorithm of used by Google to sleep ....zzzzzzzzz..., but then men can't even utter a single word in front of them ... though a volcano full of lava .. would be erupting in their minds for sure ... praying that the ordeal will get over soon,, promising to themselves that they would never come accompany in this shopping spree.... but all they can say in front of her is "anything for you ma'am" ..........

I also had the privilege of accompanying one of my friends to her shopping spree's on an eventful Sunday at phoenix lifestyle in mumbai .... though i was blessed with the fact that two of my good friends were also there .... nahi ..to i would have also joined the long list of martyrs ... who were blessed with such experiences of there .....thank god for that .... Now no words can describe the path or the journey we took ........on this auspicious day ..... even Dijkstra the designer of the shortest path .. problem would have pulled his hair out ... by looking at our adventures ,when hopping from one store to another ..... and surprisingly in the end ... she bought none of the stuff she was looking for ... surprising ???? ....Naaahaa....

Jokes apart .....(b'coz i am going to get a real bashing when i make her read this stuff) .... , Bonferroni's principle which i took up from web mining is applicable in our real life too.... , many of us would have felt at some stage in our life .. that we think too much . collect too much of information .. analyze it by using those crappy statistical tools and... in the end we infer our noble prize winning discovery ...which turns out to be crap...... . The best word the , the so called gyaan gurus have given is the "strategy"... writing realms of pages on how you can be successful , rich and powerful in this world... but if reading biographies of great people would have been the solution ... then all of us would be great and successful ... pity it's not the case ... So reading those crappy stuff for motivation .... is not the solution to your problems , coz what they did was to take risks ...which ultimately resulted in success for them .... they did not follow any so called blue ocean strategy ...... to reach their goals ... So the best thing is to clear all the clutter inside your brain ... without trying to look in for associations ....and patterns ....the best thing would be keep it straight and simple ..without much of the complications ...in life ( ya i am not that gyaan guru ... but can relate it from personal experiences.........).. the following lines from a song in Taare Zammen Par .. would sum up my thoughts.......


Tujh Mein Agar Pyaas Hai
Baarish Ka Ghar Bhi Pass Hai
O, Roke Tujhe Koi Kyon Bhala
Sang Sang Tere Aakash Hai

Ye meri kahani...........

No, its not that i have reached the end of my life , having accomplished everything ...., but surely i am at a state in my journey where i can look back and dwell upon the past five or six years. The following piece of Pseudo code( can't think of another term!!) bundled with the Aerosmith number best captures my journey .........

do
{
Dream on..............
} until , your dream comes true;

Ya .... for all the geeks would say that it's not the exact syntax of the do-while construct, but i am not trying to make readers learn any programming language. And for all the morons and non-geeks who don't understand even a bit .... it's a vicious loop that you have to enter irrespective of whether one wants or not .... The best escape route could be to surpass this loop and continue this journey of yours. But i did enter this loop ... at a very early stage of my life ... ever since i was able to spell my name .... though the "dream" always kept on changing.

In the early stage ... the dream was about getting good numbers in class ... to finish in the top three in the school ....which i somehow managed by FLUKE!. Then the dream reached higher orders of madness , to graduate from the best engineering college in the country .... that failed at the last hurdle .... but this failure spurred me on to think even more ...... transcending all the limits that one could do..... I started living it through the web pages of people i used to be fascinated with ...... their accomplishments of having published some 30 odd research papers on my favorite topic ALGORITHMS and OPTIMIZATION. The proofs, lemmas and the results fascinated me ...or you could say inspired me to dream on..... further and further ..... , some how felt if two scholars could revolutionize the way we search for information on the internet ... then given iota of a chance .. i could also replicate a fraction of their work.......

This fascination ... did urge me on towards studying papers and courses .. which were never supposed to be part of my UG curriculum , in the hindsight it proved out to be a good move .. whose benefits i am able to reap now....... I can boast , that i am a pretty good analyser of such stuff now.... But some how feel that i should have used these abilities in my practical life too. Problems could have been tackled with the same analysis as any theoretical design problem....perhaps the approach was not right ... In order to solve my problems , i used the easy approach of GREEDY ALGORITHM ANALYSIS , though the intention was to produce the result easily ...... the complexity in the worst case was high .... which always marred my progress further .... or in a layman's language ... the journey from point A to B ..... was not carried in a shortest distance possible .. i always somehow managed to route my journey via point C, ( Some how the fundas ... of displacement ..had stuck to me for long.. :) ..).

The best approach would have been to use a DIVIDE and CONQUER approach ... to divide my problems and conquer my fears... though these approach required many resources ... coz a recursive costs add to your solutions..... but the resources in this case were more time and effort .. which i could have managed... if i look back now....... Enough of this looking back business .... coz time cant really come back ... so after a really sorry and sad post ... which i had written some time back ... and got lots of choice words ... from a dear one .... i decided to look somehow positive in life .... NO the dreaming did not stop .... but the dream went to the background .... and the small aspects of life were PAGED into the .....my RAM (limited though) ...... these were always kept in the back store ... and never did i transfer them to the faster memory (RAM). Perhaps studying OS(operating systems) ...... was also useful :).... hough i wished i had followed this approach a little earlier ..... So after following this approach ...... i did start to enjoy the small aspects which i had somehow forgotten ..... the results were good ... may be my memory was refreshed after flushing out the PAGES .... which had stuck in it for ever................


So finally the dream .... is getting a picture of some sort ......surely i would be able to fulfill it in the coming months ......... just praying for it.........

PS: this one's for the numerologists and the astrologers..... , who the hell says 13 and 99 are unlucky ...?? remember it's us who make the numbers ..... numbers don't make us .........