Kedar's Log, Stardate 2010

Everyone comes to this world, with a handful of invisible sand of life and like the sand in a sand clock, the grains of life keep slipping away from our hand. Hardly does one realize when and how the sand he brought with him slips away from his hand..

My father passed away today (Apr 23, 2008) without hinting anyone or realizing it himself.. He was a heart patient for the last 22 years, disciplined to maintain a good diet and exercise. Really, nobody expected his sudden demise at 66. I am sure if God asked anyone, “are you done with your loved one.. can I take him now?”, almost nobody will say “Sure.. go ahead” – because you are never done with them… you think there is always a tomorrow. But in reality, there is no always.

All this time, I think I took the existence of people close to me for granted – even though I knew not to. I thought they will just live on and survive my own plans and dreams. But the world doesn’t live for you, it lives on its own and everyone in it lives all by himself.

I think about my father now and I just feel a lot older than yesterday. I feel my present fast distancing itself from my childhood… leaving me more and more on my own. I realize that there was a wall between me and some of the things my father dealt with and that wall was he himself and now it is gone. There is a certain kind of emptiness that’s hard to describe. Religion and Philosophy tell us that personal attachments are earthly possessions, but for a person like me with limited wisdom, his existence was the reality.

I think of all the memories of him right from my childhood days, when we barely had a camera to keep them alive. Now I record videos with my son and feel sorry that I could not record any of my life when I was a kid except for a few pictures. I see when I look at me and my son, that those are the first pure father-son moments – ones you can never remember by yourself because you are so young, yet ones that are so immaculately unpretentious.

Someone has rightly said – “Sons will always want to look up to their fathers, even though eventually they might physically grow so tall that they look down upon them..” I still remember the time when I was a kid and was traveling with my father in a ferry. The weather was rough and there were big ocean waves. I did not know how to swim and was so scared that I remember it even now. I could see the shore wobbling up and down, from a ferry that was being tossed around by ocean waves. I distinctly remember that my only hope was my father who knew how to swim, and didn’t seem to be afraid at all – at least not to me..

I always thought my father did not fear the things I did – fear of old toilets with no light, fear of lizards, fear of ghosts.. I had heard stories about his childhood… true stories, may be a bit exaggerated by my grandma sometimes.. but stories that made some impression all the same. I believe, fathers are made out of such impressions.

When he died, I wasn’t near his death bed, in fact I was thousands of miles away.. Being his only son, I flew in to perform the last rites..

I know death and subsequent disposal of human body is an integral part of life. But it was the toughest thing to experience this first hand. I had never seen a lifeless human body, so up close.. and this, was my father. It was hard to look at his body, kept at a morgue, for me to come and cremate it as per the Hindu custom. The father I had played with in my childhood, father I used to talk to, and sometimes argue with, father who brought me gifts, and whom I gave gifts when I grew older, father who posed with us in pictures, one who used to get angry and fight whenever he saw injustice, father I read in his letters, saw in his persona, heard in his voice…. now.. covered from head to toe in a body bag at the morgue..

It seemed as though he didn’t bother anymore.. as if he was saying, do whatever you want with me now, because that’s not me anymore. Yet those were the very hands, those were the very feet, the very face which I still see in his pictures. What if he would just wake up, I thought.. and I can continue from wherever we left off..? That wasn’t going to happen.. People kept coming to visit, saying things that did not matter anymore, some crying, looking sad.. It was really strange.. I just sat there, staring at him.. and then finally we took him away… away from the house where he had lived..

It all ended on the cremation grounds. As per the rituals, I had to set the pyre on fire and lose everything that was once my father, to the eager flames.. In a few minutes, there was nothing but just the flames and the heat, I couldn’t see my father anymore.. The fire destroyed everything, burned it to ashes and next day, that is what I collected in a pot. There was nothing recognizable, nothing that could remind me of him.. just this hollow realization that my father, as I knew him, was no more..

My mind goes back to that day again and again.. for some strange reason, I feel closer to my father that way.. I know for the world as a whole, it doesn’t matter much. But I think about all the things he did in his lifetime, places he visited, people he made friends with and where it all finally ended.. I am sure I might still see something in his handwriting, wherever he worked during his lifetime, maybe a signature on some form, the letters he wrote, his name in hotel registers, visa forms, my birth record.. they all must be still out there, all over the place, all over the world.. till they too are not needed anymore and vanish.

Back at home, I was looking through a few old pictures, my father holding me in his hands when I was 1 year old, my father and I on the beaches of Goa, my father on my wedding day, in my house and then holding my son.. life comes full circle, I thought.

I am just a father now, and no son to a living father anymore…

…and it is strange, that this post just doesn’t feel complete to me, even after hundreds of edits…!

There are a few mantras I believe I follow in my life. Just wanted to keep them all together. So I am starting a new post category today called “My Philosophy“. This is not something I have developed all by myself, rather, it is what I have picked from what I have seen around me. I will start this new category of posts by one of the mantras I believe in and then there will be follow-ups.

Many people don’t believe that. They feel hopelessly trapped in their life.
They do not believe they can go anywhere they want. Their options are
limited to availabilities. They consider what is available and discard
their choices in discouragement.
Other people believe that they can start from where they are and go
anywhere they want. Their options are limited only by their imaginations.
They consider what is possible and pursue their choices with vigor.

Have you been confusing availabilities and possibilities?

Having said what I said about my breakup with Ms Windows and a new relationship with Ms Mac, let me just say now, in all fairness, that I do appreciate some things about Ms Windows now that were more right than wrong.. that doesn’t mean I am not going steady with my new soulmate, no, on the contrary I have totally committed myself to ‘her’ now. This is same as my iPhone rant.. you gotta love it but sure, it is not perfect – kinda’ thing. So don’t think I am trying to get out of this!.. not yet There are more things here that I like or am interested in than I hate..

1. Windows Explorer rocks (the views especially). The Finder views in Mac are plain useless. No hierarchical view, not sure whose idea was the column view ‘coz it sucks so bad. The thumbnail view is stupid and unusable. Here is the thing, you can’t go into thumbnail view and select a few files to copy!

2. Windows Alt+Tab is much better than Mac (sure they have Spaces and all that fancy stuff but the basic Command+Tab is really not done right). The Mac Command+Tab does not show all ‘instances’ of an application, say you have 10 Firefox windows open, you will see only one icon for Firefox. So if you want to switch, you either have to search in the task bar or use Spaces.

3. Mac OSX releases a JDK version with its own release so you can’t just pick a JRE/JDK from java.com and use it on your Mac. How stupid is that.. apparently Mac mucks around with the JDK before it let’s it live on its OS.

4. No central program registry: While the Windows DLL hell is horrible, it still makes sense to me to have a central Program registry like Windows has, after having spent quite a few wild night-outs in the Linux and lately the Mac land. So I do like the convenience of getting rid of everything by just deleting the app instead of going through an Uninstaller that does not install everything (!) as on Windows. However, not having everything in one place is kinda’ not that great. Sure Mac has the Applications folder. But sometimes, you download something, install, and the app is sitting right there in your Downloads folder. Then you gotta move it to Applications… that’s a bit lame.

5. Resizing Windows:

This is really a bad usability thing. Again, I thought Mac OS X is known for setting standards in Usability and UI design. This is honestly a mistake to have the resize hotspot in the lower right corner. I use an external monitor sometimes and if I resize a window there, and return back to the laptop monitor, this corner is out of screen and there is no way to resize sometimes because you can’t move a window above the menu on top and off screen.

Let me state here categorically, whatever Mac loyalists might say, but using any window edge (like MS Windows) to resize is absolutely awesome. Even if a window is off screen in windows, you can switch to it, press <Alt>, <Dn Arrow> (this opens the main window menu), press ‘M’ which selects the ‘Move’ option in the menu and then just use the arrow keys to bring it back to the viewable screen.

6. Application Support: Some of the simple things in Windows life are fairly difficult.. now look, I have dealt with Unixes before, so I am not completely that “stupid-windows-user”! But if you don’t use Mac for a real hardcore *developery* stuff then you won’t realize these hardships. But then, you couldn’t get too adventurous with Windows on the other hand – you had to follow the stupid way or hit the highway which I finally did

1. VMWare Fusion : Had to use Windows VMWare Workstation for creating a VM with 2 network interfaces. There was no easy way (even the difficult is just hearsay) to create 2 interfaces for a VM in Fusion..
2. Apache – mod_security : The amount of time I have spent so far without success just to get mod_security installed on my Mac is crazy! I found out about MacPort (package management system for Mac OS X) that potentially has a port for mod_security – http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/browser/trunk/dports/www/mod_security – which allegedly has a variant for apache2 but everytime you do a “port install mod_security +apache2″ looks for and installs apache 1.3.7 and then the checksum for mod_security tar fails…. now how frustrating is that??
3. Enabling php5 for apache2, with mysql and pear support was just a port command such as – “port install php5 @5.2.5_3+apache2+macosx+mysql5+pear”

…there will be more as I get acquainted more…

When you talk about lifetime changes, you tend to think about getting married, having a kid, buying a house, getting divorced.. well, you know what I mean I went for a change in my life recently with the same bit of seriousness, as I would for any of the above, and it makes sense that I call it a “Lifetime change” too… Please read on, it is not a technical discussion.

The change was simply that I finally dumped my Windows machine, for a Mac, after about 16 years! For the non-savvy and non-technical, this may sound trivial. But having spent almost every day of my life, for the last 16 years, in front of different types of computers, I think they too, deserve to claim a piece of my life.

You know, I have ‘dated’ a lot of ‘damsels err, I mean computers.. a weird one called ZX Spectrum back in 1988 that ‘claimed to be a computer’ with a Cassette tape (!), the oldies – PC XTs, the ATs, Honeywell Unix terminals and many other Unix terminals whose names I have forgotten, the IBM mainframe terminals, PC 286s, 386s, 486s, Pentiums xxx, Dual cores… bla bla bla.

And I have seen the Operating Systems that control their behaviors, mood swings, tantrums – there was Unix System V, MS DOS 4, 5, 6, AT&T Unix, SCO Unix, IBM Mainframe OSs, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, 98, NT, ME, XP Pro, XP Home, 2000 flavors of Linux’s (!), Windows -2000, -2003, Mac OS-X, Mac Leopard..

So many of them, but I managed to stay loyal to one family throughout this 16 yr journey – the Microsoft family! I have dated many from that family, keeping the family loyalty intact for all these years! I have enjoyed the closeness, their popularity, their riches, and at the same time, have suffered at their hands, defended them out in the world, got embarrassed because of them, but still, at the end of the day, I came back to them – in their palace, to their kingdom, back to my in-laws…. And now this.. call it disloyalty or my mid-life crisis, but I finally realized that it needed to end.. I wanted out!

On that fateful day in the last week of February of 2008, I finally embraced a bright, slim MacBook Pro and flew away on my vacation to India. That’s when my love affair with the Mac started after so many stale years living with the Microsoft family. I had a few flings with the Mac family before but it was always too clumsy, since there was no commitment from my side. And I used to always complain as to why someone did not ‘click right’ or ‘close their windows right’… I guess I never looked at their heart, which is made of pure gold – the Unix heart – one that holds steady..

And all those complaints, I realize now, were just because I was so brainwashed by the Microsoft family members! I didn’t have a voice of my own, nor was I allowed to think outside the Window! I was comfortable, because it was all too familiar to me – someone blowing their fuse whenever they want, not having anybody to depend on, always living in fear of losing everything you have.. I thought that’s how it is in a love affair – you know, being ready to sacrifice, giving, forgiving, undemanding.. And I didn’t realize when those love affairs morphed into hate affairs.. I continued on as if I was married to the family and there were no divorce courts! It was as if, I had to go from one cousin to another…!

And then this day in February, I said to myself – hey! you are not so old yet.. don’t give up. You will find a soulmate if you are committed to making this change. Linux was too complicated and couldn’t have been someone to go steady with. The only other option I had been eying all these days was the stylish Mac, the one I had complained about in the past like a fool. I poured my heart out in front of her and she was magnanimous in accepting me.

From that day, I began living my new life, accepting things that were minor inconveniences, adapting to the new way of life, new moods, new responses, all the while admiring the beauty of my new girlfriend. And I told myself, nobody is perfect.

I still live my life, there is still programming, surfing, storing, retrieving, shutting down, starting up, but it is just done in a different way.

After all, life is a way of living rather than the living itself! Everybody has one..

Read the 2nd part of this post here

I have always been a proponent of “think positive” and I hate it when people think or say anything that is negative.

People sometimes say in frustration – “I know I am not going to get it”. If you ask me, there is no point in saying such things – then why do it? There is a saying in India that goes – “You should be careful about what you say, ‘coz you never know when God will randomly say ‘Amen‘ to that”. So one should think positive so that any random ‘approvals’ from Him will always result in something good.

I do want to revise that, however, to – “do not think negative, nor optimistic“.

Many times, being positive AND optimistic has had disappointing results for me. So I believe, it is safer to not feel optimistic about anything. That way nothing can disappoint you.

I am experiencing a temporary bachelorhood right now with my wife and kid in India.. My friends invite me to spend my weekends with them. So here is an email I sent to them as a Thank You.. Thought it might be worth a read:
Read the rest of this entry »

I guess a person views his/her childhood differently from different vantage points in life.

Before you are 16, you are in it and you want out.

Between 16 to 25, you don’t want any of it anymore because you just got free and are living the big man’s life.

From 25 to 35, you remember it fondly – yeah it was fun, but whatever.

From 35 to almost 50, you yearn for it, you just want it back somehow, you realize how valuable it was.

And beyond 50 or so, you see no hopes of getting it back and you just give up……….

I am reading a new book these days – The God Delusion – by Richard Dawkins. This is the first atheistic book I have read.. and now it has inspired me to read a similar analytical theistic book. I am searching for one…

For most people, the concept of God or the idea of God is introduced in their childhoods. It is something they start believing in because of the teachings of their parents and teachers, and the whole collective awareness of the community around them. Every person, some day in his/her life has faced doubts about his belief in God. It is interesting to see how each one of us gets over it.

I started investigating this from a different perspective. It is, after all, a perspective and how you defend that perspective because I do not believe anybody has SEEN God yet.

So my perspective is this: God exists. I think for anybody who has studied Astronomy in enough detail, it is so easy to appreciate God. One can go infinitesimally backwards in time and there comes a time when everything seems horrendously weird to imagine. One could theorize, speculate as much as he wants, but the scale of this Universe is way too huge, to say the least. We can explore questions such as why is the Universe expanding, what is the speed, what will happen to it, etc. But WHY is their such an immeasurably huge void, how did that come into existence. I think the cosmic proportions are way beyond the scope of any human exploration for centuries to come – unless some miraculous discovery gives us a breakthrough. Anyway, coming back to my perspective about God..

Try this.., why do we think that the world as we see around us is all there is to it. Think of a colony of ants. Ants, for all practical purposes can be thought to be living in a 2-Dimensional world.. well, almost. Now let’s say, one day you took some time away from your busy schedule and decided to observe them.. from above.. from a 3rd dimension. You throw some stones at them, some of them get killed or hurt, you help some with food, you play with some. From their point of view, things are happening to them – maybe randomly at first. Then you start killing every other ant which is going in a certain direction, now they see a pattern. Suddenly you get bored and don’t kill the ant who was to die next. That ant suddenly feels special. Let’s say an Ant is not finding any food anywhere, and has given up. Now you place some nice donut right in front of it. Hope you get my drift here..

Now think as if you are the Ant……. and who is You?

What makes humans to never be like those Ants? Nothing, if we keep some of that ego aside, that is! Humans have intelligence, and so does every living being with varying degree. In a 2-D world, an Amoeba maybe like an Ant and an Ant maybe like a human being in terms of intelligence. In a 3-D world, we sure are the crème de la crème! But why stop there? There may indeed be a 4-D world, or a 5-D world…

God, I believe, is in a different dimension altogether.. The strange things in the Universe are probably our perceptions from our lower-Dimensional world.

Now having said this, I do think God, who is above all the dimensions, created this Universe and set the whole thing rolling. But I don’t think he personally built every creature in it. This is more like creating the raw materials, processes and laws, and then letting the whole shebang take its own course. The reason I say this is because of the randomness of things at this level even though there is some order at the macro-level.

Popular belief has always portrayed Him as someone who is helping, punishing, guiding, hand holding insignificant creatures like us. But I think this is like belittling Him to an infinitesimal extent. Sure, like in my analogy of a human with a colony of ants, he may take some interest in this colony once in a while. But that’s about it. So that leaves Religion to be really a man-made concept that has nothing to do with God. According to me, in the pre-historic times, people were geographically divided. So each group set up guiding principles for good behavior for itself. But surely, there can be only ONE God if we think honestly.

So where does that leave us? I believe, we do have some piece of the creator in ourselves. When we prey or do good deeds, we are investing in ourselves by believing in our goodness. That helps in what we do, and causes good things to happen. And if they don’t, it is no fault of God – so no point asking Him as to why you did not get rewarded even after you behaved so magnificently. Someone gets more, someone gets less and God is not the one who is discriminating here. He told you to go live your life in the world that got created out of his first creation. I think God, as has been perceived by everybody is like a “personal God” – this concept leads to confusion, dissatisfaction and frustration. Great souls of our race have told us time and again, to not look to God to get something.

Now if any atheist asks me to prove that God exists, I am still not sure how to defend myself… And I sure do think that he won’t be able to defend his atheism either.. it’s just one ant trying to prove to the other ant that Man exists or doesn’t exist, but who has not been seen or felt by either of them in totality…..

I tell computers what to do today so that they can tell me what to do tomorrow.

-May 2006

Never judge people if your mind can’t act as two opposing lawyers at the same time.

-May 2006

I hate definitions.. I think a Definition is something that tries to show off real or fictitious complexity of the term that it is trying to define!