Gandhiji: His relevance as I see it!

There are unnecessary fears that grip Indian mindset.. Indian culture is replete with 'fear of unknown' and it has been exemplified over the ages in one form or another. Not making information available across all the sects of the society has never been considered as an offence of any form i.e. behavioral, cultural or criminal. We have unfortunately exemplified the “might is right” notion which has been judiciously called as the jungle law in many other parts of the civilization. We have constructed and reconstructed, preserved and managed effectively an information asymmetry. This has not been by coincidence but by design.

This has brought the biggest known vice that has debased our society for a long time – mediocrity.  Mediocrity can transform and then create higher order afflictions. In the Indian psyche it’s been the dishonesty.

Few understand the dishonesty that has grained the Indian mind. It is mostly confused by our introvert.  This introvert by intention is creating a dichotomy in our moral code and has made us dishonest. Introvert by exertion or natural is a personality trait but when it is with intention it leads to dishonesty.

Dishonesty to me is when one can wrong without any guilt or subside the guilt with ease. We, for one, transfer the epithet to our tragic past, molested society, looted country and what can stand to play the victim.

If one was to observe the semiotics used in our communications closely, one would find that this whole is a collective cognition, thus, we fundamentally validate this as a well accepted dogma in our Indian culture. I refute. I believe that we are molded by intention .. and not by observation!

Alright ..so simply put ‘we accept introvert as a societal function' which means .. It’s OK to hide things. We thus intentionally create barriers in the flow of information.

This is from very early start of concept of India - Vedas cannot be read by Shudras, Sanskrit is brahmin or Deva language. So the bias exist in our culture.

These are the hard lines I tow today for you to ponder upon! “Krishna chose Arjun".. is wrong

“Arjun chose Krishna as teacher” that’s true. This is what we have forgotten .. We’ve interpreted Bhagwat  Geeta as Krisna chose to give his divine knowledge to the deserving!

I term this as foolish dogma cleverly used for debauchery of whole!

It has made us impotent and raped us of our ability to question any instituted belief in our whole. This is because knowledge is not our right .. its a privilege in the mutated hindu society.

Thus .. we created a fear of unknown .. the biggest unknown we created is a HINDU!

But .. I believe .. when we will be more religious we will be a better nation, till then .. we are domed as a dishonest lot!

There was thus one man who understood and empathized with this deficit, who envisaged of a country which would self-introspect and become INTITUTIVELY RELIGIOUS IN ITS MORAL CONDUCT.  He understood that the real assault was the information asymmetry, the illiteracy that was malignant and fostered by the hindu rajahs, and zamindars and Brahmins. He knew that it was easy to molest because the mass was at the receiving end always! He wanted to question that and find the answer to that WHY!

He propounded a theory and communicated with masses to introspect and answer that WHY! He was singularly working on that WHY!

He created an icon for mobilizing this self-dependency and self-governance. Gandhi's CHARKHA was significant .. the self dependency was an epitome. My belief is that  self governance .. or .. at another level .. becoming intuitively moral .. was a significant gesture.

It is relevant today as well while we are a changing lot.. but .. i hope we change to adopt religion .. than abandon it!

On this day I salute you Bapu, a man so profound and adept in religion and a formidable pillar of Hinduism, you will remain with us forever!

Way forward for internet - are we ready for it?

These basic ingredients - openness, trust and decentralisation - were baked into the internet at its inception. It was these qualities, which allowed diverse groups of people from far-flung corners of the world to connect, experiment and invent, that were arguably the key elements of the explosive technological growth of the past two decades. That culture gave us the likes of Skype, Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

The internet's decentralised structure also makes it difficult for even the most controlling regime to seal off its citizens from the rest of the world. China and North Korea are perhaps the most successful in this respect; by providing only a few tightly controlled points of entry, these governments can censor the data its people can access.Savvy netizens routinely circumvent such attempts, using social media and the web's cloak of anonymity to embarrass and even topple their governments. The overthrow of the Egyptian regime in February is being called by some the first social media revolution.

Though debatable, this assertion is supported in the book Tweets From Tahrir, an account told entirely through Twitter messages from the centre of the nation's capital.It is tempting to think that things can only get better - that the internet can only evolve more openness, more democracy, more innovation, more freedom.

There's a problem on the horizon, and it comes from an unexpected quarter - in fact from some of the very names we have come to associate most strongly with the internet's success. The likes of Apple, Google and Amazon are starting to fragment the web to support their own technologies, products and corporate strategy.

As millions of people buy into Apple's world of iPads and iPhones, they are also buying into Apple's restricted vision of the internet. The company tightly controls the technologies users are allowed to put on those devices.Take, for instance, Adobe's Flash software, which most PCs support and most websites use to run graphics and other multimedia, and even entire apps. Flash is prohibited in all

Apple apps, for security reasons - which means that the iPhone browser cannot display a large portion of the internet. That creates a private, Apple-only ecosystem within the larger internet.

Should we care? On the one hand, these companies have grown so big precisely because they make products and provide services that we want to use. The problem is that this concentration of power in the hands of a few creates problems for resilience and availability. That problem will only intensify with the ascendancy of the cloud, one of the biggest internet innovations of the past few years. The cloud is the nebulous collection of servers in distant locations that increasingly store our data and provide crucial services.

The cloud could generate exactly the single points of failure that the internet's robust architecture was supposed to prevent. And when those points fail, they may fail spectacularly. During an outage of Amazon's cloud service in April'11, when the company's servers went dark, entire companies briefly blinked out of existence.

Had the internet been built with bulletproof security in mind, we might never have reaped the rewards of breakneck innovation. Yet as our dependence on the internet grows, we are more vulnerable to those who seek to disrupt - whether they are hackers exposing the internet's weaknesses, governments intent on keeping their citizens under control, or corporations driven by profits.

So how many of the internet's fundamental properties do we want to change? The nature of our future online lives will depend on answering this question, on how we walk the tightrope between total security and innovation-friendly openness.

Memoirs: Mexico City

Memoirs: Mexico city! 

(Reforma: “I feel”)

A walk on the streets of a colony, adorned by the wills of astute statesmen,

A passage in time well preserved, decorated by able craftsman;

(Zocalo: “I zeal”)

A melancholy successfully rejoiced - rectified of its gore remembrances,

A charade arrested in its bloom, amended for it’s reminisce reverence.

(Bellas artes: “I hold”)

A resolute charge of artists compelled by a nations’ daunting perplexity

An oath to find it’s identity over frescos that stitch patterns of society.

(Condessa: “I swirl”)

A hubbub of bold youth that drink to its beauty and glory,

A semblance of folklore and contemporary, united in effervescent story.

(Polanco: “I desire”)

The high streets of luxurious curios - picturesque in plush lawns and bistros,

Humbling edifice of auditoria secured in timeless collections of museos.

(Guadalupe: “I bow”)

Sacred strings of common thoughts for unstinting religious beliefs,

Bowing down to the cathedrals where holy lady blesses to relieves.

(People: “I love”)

Warm, sensitive, loving, beautiful – their eyes speak it all,

Who would rob you of your fears and pledge everything for your smile.

(City: “I honor”)

Mexico city and your wonders, you would charm me forever!

Random world of mathematical infinite as defined in S=k.log(W)

Our changing views of the infinite!

While looking at the world around us, we cannot miss the harmony and order that meets our eye and refines our perception. Yet, when human mind has tried to understand what holds the nature together, it has faced defeat in putting the concept into easy bits of understanding.

Take for instance a simple trajectory formed by a ball when tossed from hand to another. We could see that the movement is definitive and we have a reflex to move and catch it at the frail end of the trajectory. We try to model this information into a logical equation - what we simply call as the motion. To understand it accurately, we break the path down into smaller parts and try to define coordinates from one path point to another. This process can be carried out infinite times, to break the path into infinitesimally ( ΔX ) smaller parts that would add most accurately to the final path, which to us would be the most definitive description of the motion.

To our simplified perception, ∑( ΔX ) = X, and we complete the trajectory by successfully predicting the trajectory and catching the ball.

How easily have we built our understanding on the use of the infinite! Wait for a moment, and think about it. we have broken the path down to "infinite" parts and then simply added these "infinite" parts to define our concept. It is this infinite, that has for centuries built a base for us to build smallest and the largest concepts.

The question remains of how well do we understand the "infinite": ∞.

There have been attempts to unravel the infinite, take the circle for instance, you could fit a triangle, at the next level, quadrilateral, further a pentagon and keep increasing the equal sided polygons. What you would end up is an infinite sided polygon would be a perfect circle! Taking the concept further, if you were to draw lines from the center of the polygon to each vertex, then, you would have the entire area of the circle filled with lines. But, if we stretch our imagination a little further, and observe carefully, we would see that there would be still gaps between one vertex and another! Which would mean that after painfully building the infinite-sided polygon, we are unable to get a perfect circle!

This indeeds distorts our view that circle is perfectly rounded and leaves us with an indefinite view of what circle would look like. World it seems is not a perfection of order and harmony.

This disruption in order and perfection, because of the lack of understanding of the infinite has disturbed the normative characteristics of definite, the base of mathematics. It is true that one cannot build an edifice on thin air, thus, great works of mathematics could not be built on a limited knowledge of the infinite (which ironically is the building block of mathematics).

It was in such times that Georg Cantor built his famous theory that shook the world by bringing the infinite into the realms of arithmetics of infinite, thus destroying the definite view of concepts. This work was further carried out by Ludwig Boltzmann, who gave the final blow to the order and harmony by his revolutionary work in thermodynamics. He picked up from where Cantor left, suggesting that order and harmony is based not on the definite events but on the random collisions of atoms within the matter! While world understood events as symmetrical on time axis ( that is you could reverse an event and arrive back on the initial situation), entropy changed that viewpoint and brought decay into the heart of physics. Boltzmann went further to show probabilistic dependency of entropy, S=k.log(W) thus making the change irreversible. This proved that in what see as order, there remains an element of uncertainty at its core.

Thus, we have to believe that world after all is not definite! There is a chaos and randomness which is the pure essence of existence.

Indeed, randomness is our new constant!

Statistics are dangerous tools in the hands of inexpert or the biased

Was working on this problem for a friend and came across the thought of identifying what errors are grossed today and maybe some root causes of these issues:

Overestimation of causality: Most of the statistics text is mis-informed to be built on the principle of causality, which people take for granted. While clearly that is not the case - in simple words "they see elephants in the clouds instead of understanding that they are in fact randomly shaped clouds that appear to our eyes as elephants". This maturity would only come to a trained statistician, else everything would be oversimplified into patterns and normality.

Counter-intuitive distributions: This is antonym of the first one (in limited sense). Not everything is normal distribution and not everything can be fit to a bell curve. This premise is hardly checked before building any hypothesis.

Lack of understanding of characteristics of distributions: Seldom there are thoughts and efforts to see symptoms like(talking of commonly understood normal distribution) long tail, fat tail, kurtosis, skewness, etc. These are important yet forgotten episodes of analysis, for a simple fact that most amateurs are ignorant of how to deal with them.

Over dependency on chance and randomness: The base of probability is chance p(n), which assumes that the final output cannot be understood but probability can be identified with confidence level. There are other theories that build on deterministic models rather than chance models - chaos theory, lorentz attractor, relativity- unfortunately, due to their mathematical complexity they have been left for the work of physics and mathematics rather than we appreciating their objectivity in our "false world of randomness". There are cases where deterministic models are more appropriate than the random models.

Reducing complexity: The aim should be to simplify the problems rather than build more dynamics and complexity, but this cannot be achieved at the cost of neglecting vitality and objectivity of the outcome. This is also a critical area left unexplored.

While, I have tried to put my thoughts together for you to see which path you would want to develop, you would also observe that they might be contradicting (which is not wrong as we do not know what seems better). I feel all these aspects are grossly missed in building models and hypothesis. There are examples of VaR, financial exponentials and derivatives, inaccurate assessment of impact of interest rate revisions in economy, lack of accounting for the multiplier effect, oversimplification of regression in subsidy model, panic as observed by behaviorial economics, etc. that haunt us time and again.

There is a calling to understand how the best of works in physics, economics, mathematics, statistics, psychology can be cross leveraged to find new means of unified theory. I firmly believe - God does not play dice!"

Would appreciate your viewpoints and we could build the discussion here!

Immortals of Meluha

When destiny chooses a person to rise above his current life and become the mahadeva, the choice is beyond the willingness and contemplation. Here is a story of a simple man who rises to the occasion when he is called out to. Faith is deeply rooted in hope and the book shows how faith could change the fortunes of a state. The story is set in early days of civilization, where longitivity is a given and immortals live and walk on face of earth. It is a set on the philosophical grounds of hinduism and treads the very fine line of good and bad, balance and chaos, Gods and demons and most noticably the reality and legends.

The story is about a commoner who enters in a near perfect civilization and is recognised by a well-known legend, accepts the responsibility and uses his wit and statesmanship wisely to achieve the near impossible. Story merrily dances in divine romance, forces unbounded love, makes strong decisions, cognises science and religion, blends faith and destiny and shows how the character of a man is the character of Gods.

The author has kept the book conversational and added new characters and concepts at various stages to make the book an unstoppable divine adventure. The after-thought of the book is humility and how one can bow down to the greatness of these legends.