STATING THE OBVIOUS WITH CONVICTION

17/3/2010
Mahatma Gandhi said "you should not lie", Jesus said "love your neighbour", Buddha said "you should not kill". So and so said "we should always strive for peace" or "you should not steal"

 These are obvious moral codes and you will not find any sane human being who will not agree with these. It irritates me when people qualify these statements with the name of an important person or religion. No religion says "do not help poor" "do not speak the truth" "make war not peace" but I so often hear people saying "my religion says "help the poor" "or my religion is peaceful". You will not start lying or stealing or killing someone whether Mahatma Gandhi or the Great Buddha said to the contrary or not.

 A fellow traveller said to me that his religion promoted well being of every human being. I said "can you tell me which religion does not claim to do that?" he got angry and further conversation stopped because we both wanted to reach our destination safely.

 Why does one feel the need to qualify an obvious statement?

 

I think people do this mostly to disown the exact opposite deeds in which they or members of their own creed are involved. The CEO of a big arms manufacturing company said that he was a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi who believed in non violence.

A child was caught stealing in the school. The headmaster phoned the mother to discus this. When he explained to her what happened, the mother haughtily said that it could not be true. The headmaster was taken a back and asked why the mother was so convinced. The mother said because her great-great grand father (who happened to be a well known leader in the last century) had said that stealing was a sin.

 It may also be that people do this to convince themselves that their religion, or their role model or their religious leader is some how better than others or simply to empower themselves with some false superiority which really does not exist.
Let me know what you think.

NO WIN-NO FEE CULTURE VULTURE

4/03/2010

I have been getting a lot of unsolicited telephone calls from "Mr/Ms unavailable no." They all seem to be interested in my good health and want to get some money for me. Nice people. They not only enquire about my good health but also about my family members, my friends and my neighbours. Here is a short conversation.

Telephone rings……. ……. ………

Me "hello"

The Nice Person On the Unavailable No.( NPU) " hello, Mr. Kumar , we have just come to know that you had an accident recently."

Me "not recently."

NUP "so you did have an accident, a few months ago. "

Me "no, not a few months ago"

NPU "aha! I know it was last year"

Me "no. It was not me last year"

NPU "oh, it was your good wife. We can get you 110% compensation. We won't charge you a single penny"

I am interested at the thought of getting some money. Now that I am on a small pension and it is a terrible winter.

But I am a bit suspicious. Who is this benevolent person taking so much trouble for my family?

But, I do not ask this. Instead I ask "who will be giving me the money, you?

NPU "no, no. The money will come from your neighbour or your doctor or the shop keeper who is responsible for the accident."

Me "but none of them was . My wife just fell down in our garden. She only had a little bruise. And that was ten years ago "

NPU "oh, in that case we will get it from the council. You don't worry about these little things, sir. Leave it to us. We will prove beyond doubt
that any or all of them, at one time or another were certainly responsible for your wife's physical and mental trauma."

Me "my wife's mental condition is very robust. She did not have any mental trauma. "

NPU "do not you worry, our company expert will turn her into a complete mental wreck. "

As I am getting older (euphemism for deaf), I am having this conversation with the speaker on. My wife just heard the last sentence as she came in the study. She cut the telephone off. "so, now I am a mental wreck!"

I had to do a lot of explaining and a bunch of flowers before the dinner was finally served that night.

HIRSUTIC & HIEURISTIC: TOOLS TO SOLVE A PROBLEM

 19/02/2002

I was writing an article about hair. How from a normal evolutionary appendage it has become a burden?. I wanted to describe a face full of too much hair and I wrote hirsutic, Microsoft word immediately put a red line under it. I thought the spelling was wrong and corrected it by typing hirsuetic. This was not red lined and I carried on with my article.

 I now know there is no such word as hirsutic or hirsuetic, the correct adjective to use is just hirsute. Microsoft word did not red-lined the latter word because I had mistyped it as heuristic. I got intrigued: what does this word mean?

To find this I used the common sense approach. First use the easiest available method in the word programme it self, by right clicking on it and look for a synonym. But there was none. Then I went to internet and Googled it. Walla! a lot of articles, 4,670,000 in 0.3 seconds. What an interesting word! It means exactly what I was doing: trying to solve a problem. It is derived from a Greek word heur; meaning to find out. Heuristic broadly means common sense or "a set of rule of thumbs" to solve a problem. It is used in almost every discipline of learning from philosophy to mathematics, from soft cognitive psychology to hard core engineering. Most lucid was its use in solving mathematical problems.

   I came across a book " How to Solve It" by G. Polaya who was a Hungarian mathematician settled in USA. In this book Polya describes 4 steps to solve any mathematical problem. Reading through it one quickly realises that these steps can actually be utilised to solve any problem in any walk of life. I will give a brief layman's summery here and you be the judge. Polya's 4 steps to solve a problem

1. 
   
   Understand the problem
   What is unknown? What is the data? What are the conditions?
   Draw a figure.
   Separate the problem in to simpler parts.
2. 
   
   Devise a plan
   Find the connection between data and what is unknown.
   Past experience of a similar or related problem or part of a problem If you can not solve the given problem, try to solve some related                     problem or part of the problem.
   Are you asking the right questions?
   
    
3. 
   
   Carry out the plan
       Check at each step.
   
4. 
   
   Look back
       Examine the result.
       Can the problem be solved in a different way?
       Can you use the method to solve other problem?
   

What do you think?

 Reference : G. Polya, "How to Solve It", 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1957, ISBN 0-691-08097-6.

CHINESE CIRCUS TO CHANGING REALITY

Friday, 05 February 2010

Last week I went to see a performance by Chinese state circus. It was more of a theatre presentation than a proper circus but nonetheless it was a circus with jokers, jugglers, unicycles and lots of pretty faces. The performers were amazing, doing almost impossible feats. Young children seemed very appreciative but among the teenagers and adults it was not so.

In the era of computer generated cinematography nothing seems impossible and we kind of get desensitized to real human achievements. We have become so used to the acrobatics in the Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers that anything less does not satisfy us. We have started to expect the same from reality which we get from imagination. The boundary between media generated virtual reality and our day to day physical reality seems to be getting blurred.

I was in India in November last year. I attended a marriage ceremony in a small provincial town. I was astonished to see how closely it resembled a Bollywood film set. The rituals which have never been a part of that community were adopted effortlessly because they have been shown in the recent films so often.

The films, theatres and arts did have an effect on our behaviour before but because we had only limited exposure to them, it did not overshadow the raw reality of our physical surroundings. Now a days the time for real interaction with people and objects around us has been heavily encroached by the films, television, and computers.

Because we are getting our information more from virtual than real, our reality is changing. The reality is not truly real anyway; it is only what we perceive to be real through our limited sensory input and with a profound modulation by the brain based on our past experiences. And if our experiences are mainly virtual, so will become our reality. A frightening thought !