Inspiration

From my childhood days, I remember one of our teachers telling us that success is ninety-nine percent perspiration and one percent inspiration.  No doubt, hard work is essential in any field to become successful. But I feel the role played by inspiration is under-rated in this statement.

A few days back I attended the annual event 2013 of IEEE Bangalore Section. In that event, Prof Jayant Haritsa of Computer Science & Automation Department of IISc Bangalore was felicitated for being elevated to IEEE Fellow. Prof Jayant Haritsa gave a brief speech while accepting the felicitation. He attributed the honor to his team at IISc and some of his professors. He also touched upon how he was inspired by two other famous persons named Jayant right from his under-graduate days in IIT Madras.

When Prof Jayant Haritsa was doing his B.Tech in IIT Madras in the early 1980s, there were two famous engineers by the same name - Jayant - in US. Both of them are professors in US universities and they published influential research papers. Both of them were famous in the academic community because of their work. Their works inspired young Jayant Haritsa and he always wanted to be like them when he grew up. Both of the famous Jayant were from Karnataka. Jayant Haritsa too was from Karnataka. One of them is Prof Jayant Baliga of ECE Department of North Carolina State University. (In 2010 he was awarded National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the highest award for an engineer in USA by US President Barack Obama. Amongst many other accolades of Prof Jayant Baliga, he became IEEE Fellow at the age of 35!).

Today Prof Jayant Haritsa is very well in the area of Database Systems. He is an IEEE Fellow, Distinguished Scientist of the ACM, Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award winner (2009) etc.

The Selfish Life

Recently I was reading about Arvind Kejriwal, one of the leading social activists leading the fight against corruption. Arvind Kejriwal was one of the leading guys behind the Right to Information (RTI) Act too.

Arvind is an IIT Kharagpur B.Tech and then he joined civil services in 1992 as Indian Revenue Services (IRS) officer. While working with the Income Tax department, he saw the widespread corruption prevalent there. He started Parivartan, an NGO for bringing in transparency in Government.

I am also an engineer and went to one of the IITs (for my masters). But our similarities end there. After reading about Arvin Kejriwal, I have realized what a selfish life that I am living! Our lives are too materialistic nowadays. We are busy buying a house, a car and then paying mortgages (EMI) for these in remaining of our lives. We are busy thinking how to get the next salary hike and how good will be this year's bonus. We are busy replacing the our old (CRT) TVs with a LCD/LED ones. We are just busy with ourselves and no time to think about the society. We feel we live a comfortable and happy (?) life. One day we will die and no one will remember us.

Arvind Kejriwal could have led a life like ours. He was an IRS officer and could have accumulated tons of wealth like other IRS folks. But he opted for a different path. He left his own comforts so that he can make  the lives of millions of his fellow country men less miserable.

Do you also lead a selfish life? Are you happy with it?

Cable Black Out! Thanks

Yesterday I spent a relaxed evening at home after so many months (or years).  Some good music was being played in our our music system. The idiot box was completely shut off. I was pleasantly surprised thinking that it was something by choice. There were no cartoon shows, no boring soap operas.

It later turned out that the pleasant evening was not by choice; but by compulsion. There was some problem in the cable connection of our apartment complex. There was no signal coming in our cable connection since morning till late into the night.

These days I feel irritated at the  sound of the idiot box.  The same boring programs - cartoon shows or soap operas - the same story keep repeating. So, thanks to the cable guys, I had a pleasant evening.

It's my life! Really?

I've just listened to the song It's My life by John Bon Jovi after a long time, perhaps after a few years. This song was one of our favorite songs during our college days. I still love this song. Only difference between now and ten years back is that I can't feel oneness with the song that I used to feel in 2000. It's not just my life now in 2010!

Ten  years back, I was a student at IIT Kanpur earning Rs 5000.00 a month from the government as scholarship. There was zero liability on my head, no income tax to be paid, no EMI to be given, no credit card bill to be missed, no frustration at not getting salary hikes, no late night calls to attend, no worry over sensex going down, no rat race at all. I was really free (free as in freedom) then to enjoy my life my way.

Why do I blog?

Once a friend of mine asked me: why do I blog? Let me try to answer that question now.

First, life is a journey. We pass through different stages in life: early school days, college days, job life being a bachelor, marriage, kids etc etc. There are different moments  throughout these stages - some are special, some good or some bad - which constitute life. Then we move from one place to another for education, job or to see new places. We meet different people. Life is an interesting journey with all these. There is a related question: why do we take photographs of different moments? We want to capture different moments of our life. We want to capture time in pictures. But pictures capture only the outer side of a person. How did I look like when I was at school? I had a moustache in college. I was lean-and-thin before my marriage etc. I visited Agra and took a picture in front of the Taj Mahal. These are all the outer side of a person. But there is an inner side too of a person. The photographs don't capture it. The inner side consists of his mind, his thinking, his feelings etc.  I believe a blog can capture the inner side of a person during his journey called life.


Second reason for a blog is to learn from someone else's experiences. Nowadays we search the internet before buying any product: be it a dinner in a restaurant, a movie, a new place to visit, a hotel to stay, a school for your kid, a book to read, a new car to buy, even a medicine to buy etc etc. We can search it because there are people who share their experiences using these products. If I depend so much on other people to know their views, why shouldn't I also contribute to them by writing my experiences?

Third reason is introspection. How do I look back into my different frames of mind during different times? It's through my blog.

Fourth reason is a bit philosophical and related to the first one. What legacy will I leave when I leave this world someday? How people for whom I matter - my family, my good friends, will remember me? An actor will be remembered through his movies. A singer will be remembered through his songs. An author will be remembered through his books. I consider my blogs as my legacy.  My journey through life will be captured here.

Why am I so concerned about Time Management now?

Of late, I have started focusing a lot in managing my time efficiently. What is the reason for this? Well, primary reason is that I now have to spend one and half hours every day from my work hours in gym. Last October I got an injury at my left knee. (I'll write a post on that). I'm yet to gain full strength on my left leg after that. As per the advice of my Ortho doctor, I joined a gym to undergo a post-surgery rehabilitation program. I do my work-out from 11AM to 12noon every day. Then I take a shower. By the time I'm back to my work, it's 12:30PM. Well, it's lunch time then. I finish my lunch and come back to my cube. It's 1 PM. So two hours from my day is gone! Then my two year old son Krishu expects me at home by evening. On top of that, I have important projects at office. On a first look, it seems each of these jobs (office, gym, family) suck time off from the other. It's not so if I manage my time well. Hence I must manage my time so that I don't waste it. Remember that time is a commodity.

My biggest inspiration in my hope to manage time efficiently is someone who led multiple lives in a single life - a professor of Physics at Gauhati University, an Assamese author of repute who wrote many short stories and novels (he won Satitya Academy awards), a famous movie director (he won many Swarn Kamal & Rajat Kamal awards), editor of the famous Assamese magazine Prantik, editor of children magazine Sofura, Chairman of Indian Railway Service Commission etc etc. He is none other than Dr Bhabendra Nath Saikia. How could he achieve so much in a single life? I never had the opportunity to ask him that question. But I'm sure he was able to play so many roles at the same time because he could manage his time well.

For more on Bhaben Saikia, see the following two links:

• http://www.bhabensaikia.com/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhabendra_Nath_Saikia

If Dr Bhabendra Natha Saikia could manage his time to do so many things in a life, why can't I manage my time to do just three simple things - office, gym and family-time?

BTW, I have created a Time Journal for next three weeks. It's a simple excel-sheet with multiple tabs, one tab for a day, that logs my time for every 15 minutes from 8AM to 6PM on all working day. My sample Work Journal can be viewed here.

Time Management

Continuing with my post on Prof Randy Pausch, let me now write on his speech on Time Management that he delivered to University of Virgina. It was 850 capacity auditorium and it was full to its capacityon that day.

There are many talks, seminars, books etc on Time Management and I must confess - most of these are boring. But the one that Prof Randy Pausch delivered is just too good. It was a pragmatic lecture unlike the Last Lecture that he delivered to CMU. The speech was very special. We all can talk of time management. We all feel that we have just lot of time for us. But Randy had maximum three more months of his life left. Three months before he gave the speech, he was diagnosed with pancreatitis cancer. His doctor told him that he had 3 to 6 months of healthy living (euphemism for death in 3 to 6 months) ! This talk on Time Management is special because it was delivered by someone who really had a limited time in his hand.

The full speech is available at https://youtu.be/oTugjssqOT0. The power-point slides for this can be downloaded from University of Viginia's website here . I've just finished watching the video. I took some notes from this. Let me share these now below:

• Time is a commodity. Manage time the way you manage money
• Time is money. When we talk about household budget, we mean household money budget. Do we have a household time budget?
• Money can be earned any time in life; but time lost can never be re-gained.
• We just have too many things to do in life ; but time is limited.
• Better time management leads to happier and wonderful life.
• Fun: If you're not having fun at your work, why do it? Life is too short. Why not enjoy it?
• Goal is to maximize fun.
• A typical office worker wastes 2 hours a day. It's a universal thing that plague all of us.
• Being successful doesn't make you manage your time well; but managing your time well makes you successful.
• He said that he was not a smart person. There were smarter people around him. What he was good at was managing his time well. If you have to run with faster people around you, then you have to find ways to optimize what skills you do have.
• Doing things right way is more important than doing the right things adequately.
• Plan: Planning is very important. Failing to plan is planning to fail. Plan each day, each week and each semester.
• TODO list: break things down into small steps. Do the ugliest thing first.
• Multiple monitors at work helps. TODO list, email, calendar etc in separate monitors.
• Speaker-phone helps in saving your time.
• Telephone is time waster. Use it efficiently
• Learn to say NO.
• Know your Good or bad times: Find your creative time. Defend it ruthlessly, spend it alone. Find your dead time and schedule meetings, phone calls etc during it.
• Interruptions: Every interruption takes 4 to 5 minutes for recovery. We must reduce frequency and length of interruptions. New email alert is also an interruption. Turn it off.
• Time journals: Time a commodity. You better track where your time is going. Monitor yourself in 15 minute increments. Update every 1/2 hour throughout the day - not at the end of day.
• Work-Life Balance: You can become more efficient at work. So you can leave office at 5PM and spend time with family. Randy worked fewer hours after marriage and still he got his works done. In grad school, people who completed their PhDs fastest are those who are married and/or have kids.
• Procastination: It's the thief of time. Doing thing at the last minute is expensive. Stress comes in. Deadlines are important. Create fake deadline which is before the actual deadline and treat this as actual dead-line. Usually when he was procastinating, there was a deep psychological reason. We feel embarassed because we think we won't be able to do it. When you're procastinating, identify why you're not enthusiastic.
• Meetings: An average executive spend 40% or more time in meeting. There must be an agenda. A one minute minutes noting the decisions taken in the meeting...who is responsible for what by when?
• Email: Save all of it. If you want something done, only one recipient. If you really want something done, CC some powerful. If you don't get a response in 48 hours, most likely they'll never reply. So nagging is ok after 48 hours.
• Managing Time with bosses: Write things down. When is our next meeting? What's my goal by then? Remember bosses want results, not excuses.
• Important advice: Kill your TV. Exchange money for time at every opportunity when you've young children. Eat, sleep and exercise.
• Feedback loop: Ask in confidence what good or bad you are doing.
• Books: The One Minute Manager, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
• Action Items: Get a day-timer. Put your TODO list sorted in priority order. Do a time journal. Make a note in your day-timer to revisit this talk in 30days. Ask "What have I changed?"

This talk is highly recommended for any professional. I'm going to start with the action items immediately after this post.

Once upon a time when gay meant merry, joyous, cheerful, happy; but now..

I go back to my high-school days in a time machine. It was late 1980s and early 1990s. I read a story that has the following two sentences:
Once upon a time there was king. He was always gay...

Being gay at that time meant being cheerful, full of merriment. I use my time machine to come back to the current time. Today is June 29th, 2009. This morning the newspapers were full of news and photo-graphs of many gay people. It was a front-page news in all the news papers. Many gay people organized a parade (all the newspapers made a spelling mistake and they printed it as gay-pride. I think nowadays there is scarcity of good proof-readers in news-paper houses!) in Bangalore yesterday and it got full media attention. I was happy thinking that finally newspapers have started writing stories about some happy people in the front-page instead of the daily dosage of news full of murder, rape, bomb-blast etc. I was happier when I came to know that similar gay-parades took place in major cities across the world. I felt that at least some happy people wanted to display their happiness strongly and collectively to the enemies of the humanity - the terrorists, religious fundamentalists, racists, and many other evil elements that threaten humanity these days.

I turned my newspaper and saw the picture of a very beautiful girl (along with some other girls) with a placard in her hand with the message "repeal IPC 377". I thought that this girl must be from IT industry and writing system software code. She is probably appealing to IEEE or USENIX to do away with certain Inter Process Communication technique. My Linux-friendly-mind quickly translates 377 to --wxrwxrwx. But then I was flummoxed by the news that said that Veerappa Moily, Cabinet Minister in the Department of Law, Government of India, will soon take a decision on IPC 377. Then I read that certain Muslim cleric has opposed repealing IPC 377! I was completely at sea. I wondered when Veerappa Moily and the Muslim cleric started writing Unix Inter Process Communication code! Due to recession, our programming jobs (I call it thinking-typewriter's jobs) are in peril. Now we're threatened by our in-house politicians and clerics too! I was calculating how much agricultural land my dad has in his village. I see no future but to go back to farming if everyone starts writing software programs in India. I was lost in my thought when G's banter about my absent-mindedness woke me up. I told her: it's time for us to pack up and go back to our native village and start farming. She asked me what did I drink last night that the hangover was still not over. I told her that I was frightened of the job prospects since everyone around now was talking about IPC. I showed her the news items, including statements of Moily and the cleric. She said they were talking about Indian Panel Code and chided me for being a nerd all the time!

I then went back to my all-weather, trust-worthy buddy named Google and ask him what was the section 377 of Indian Panel Code. Google told me Indian Panel Code 377 considers gay activity as a criminal case. Come on, why on earth the IPC section impinges upon someone's right to be joyous and cheerful! I smelt something wrong. I then approached another buddy Dictionary.reference.com and asked what was the meaning of the word gay. Amongst several meanings, one is described in uppercase letters and underlined: HOMO.....L!

It seems the world has changed a lot since my high-school days. Dictionaries still say that gay means merry, joyous, cheerful, happy etc. But then there is a more powerful meaning to this word. The later meaning has come to be associated with the word gay predominantly now.

I do have a liberal mind. But I still cannot accept the new meaning of the word gay. I consider it to be unnatural, against the law of the Nature. But at the same time, I don't deem it as a criminal offence too. Section 377 of IPC is too draconian.

I read the same story of my high-school days about the king who was gay. But hey, my impression of the same king is different now. I soliloquy - the king too was gay!

Falsehood sucks!

I hate liers. I don't challenge someone's right to lie. You're free to lie. But it hurts when you assume that the person to whom you're lying is a stupid person. When you start lying to me and consider me to be fool, then you suck! I feel pity with such lier.

A lie breaches many things: integrity, trust, friendship -which take a longer time to build. In the shorter time, you may consider yourself as smart because you could hoodwink someone with a lie. But in longer time, a lie is more expensive thing than the truth. You have to follow-up the first lie with many other lies and then you lose your integrity, trust and friendship. So do consider the longer scenario before you lie next time.

I rarely lie. I find it very difficult to lie. In order to substantiate one false statement or conceal some fact, I then have to say many other untrue things. I find that to be the most difficult consequence of a lie. Rather than saying one lie and concocting many other follow-up lies, I'll prefer to say the truth in the beginning.

Purpose of life

This morning one of my good friends S asked me how is life. Usually I answer this question with a smile saying that life is good. I was in a pensive mood today. I didn't immediately answer that life is good. Instead, I wanted to introspect: what is the meaning of life? What is the purpose of life? Why am I here - money, fame, recognition, love, education, work, spiritualism or what else?

According to my friend P, purpose of life is simple: Survive-Reproduce-Be Happy. He believes that Survive and Reproduce are in our gene and it is more to do with the animal part of us. He thinks that there is only one way to be happy.. and it is "be happy".

But can you be mechanically happy this way?

Sometime life seems to be meaningless! Sometime everything around you just seems to be an illusion.