Sohni meri Sohni Sohni (Sohni my dear Sohni)

Sohni meri sohni sohni
Aur koi nahi honi sohni
Rab se jyada tera naam leta hun
Rab muze maf kare
Mera insaaf kare


Sohni my dear Sohni
There can be no other Sohni (for me)
More than God I take your name
May God forgive me
May he do justice (to me)

Deep pangs of selfless love, as sparkled in this old song from "Sohni Mahiwal", touched my heart. Where is this love, why so much hate and killing in the world today.

We get only a few years to live, why not spend it with your Sohni or Mahiwal. What is this fight for money, religion, fame, ego, position.

Long back I said so, and still say so. If I make you smile in a day, then my God lives in your heart. That's my God, my religion. After that, Rab muze maf kare, mera insaaf kare.

Kal ho naa ho

An old mail sent to friends

Today I saw the 1970's old movie : Love Story. I have not read the novel yet. After watching the movie, I am in sense of awe. Similar stories I have seen in countless indian movies. But probably, right now I am more able to connect to the author.

Love means never having to say sorry ever... This is the catch line of this movie. The girl Jenny says this to Oliver. When she dies in Oliver's arms in the hospital, the thought of that beautiful girl with the sweet smile dying, made me get into tears.

We keep running after things, degrees, money, jobs, visas, green cards, cars and the things which we buy end up owning us. I have realized that the biggest joy I can buy is by investing in making someone happy. Investment in a person is the biggest capital a entrepreneur can hope to reap.

Life is very unpredicatable, you never know what's going to happen the next moment. Dont lose a single moment. Tell people whom you like that you love them. Do something for them. Time is flowing away a second at a second. Dont hate anyone. They come into our lives for a reason, season or lifetime. Thank them for the reason, season or lifetime. Dont keep bad feelings for anyone, dont harbor ill, don't
wait for events to occur, if you want to do something, if you want to say something, if you want to give something, if you want to feel something, do it. kal ho naa ho.

Musings of a thoughtful young man

After a hard and satisfying day of work, I was lounging by below the apartment. Lost in my thoughts, watching the american flag flying by on the house on the hill opposite me. Years, months, hours, seconds passed by in the twinkling of an eye. Felt for a moment, that it's been just yesterday when I came here, with a dream in the heart and sparkle in the eyes. As if it was yesterday when I went past the los angeles freeways to my destination in the lincoln sent by niranjan uncle to pick me up.

God really knows when to strike the point, in the matters of the heart. Aptly the song started playing at the moment, "raat ke humsafar, thak ke ghar ko chale, jhoomti aa rahi hai subah pyar ki. dekh kar samne roop ki roshni, phir looti jaa rahi hai subah pyar ki." We gave each other a smile, He winked down upon me.

The long hours passed in leavey library, I sometimes would spend entire nights there sleeping if you may, on the chairs. As I used to wake up sometimes or be half awake, I used to gaze by my favorite place by the window, as the morning mist would rise from the fog swept twinkling lights over the lawn. Sight of all the students, working hard for a dream, for a promise, for a loved one, for success. The first rays of the sun, bathing us in the glory, filling us with energy. On a clear day, you could see the Hollywood sign over the santa monica mountains from the library window on the 3rd floor.

The almost loving discussions I used to have with professor michael crowley, sometimes waiting for hours in the line to meet him in his office hours. I used to sit down on the passageway, and scribble all sorts of C++ code and algorithms on pieces of paper. I have never told him, but sometimes I went just to see him and listen to him, although I would not really have a question. The day he told me to call him just Mike, meant a lot to me. Then there was the professor who just loved programming, Jorge Seidel, hacking away on his Python code all the time. I loved talking to my students in that class, the undergrads. They were young and carefree, and had a desire. Be it to watch the game tonight, to see a movie with their girlfriends, or be it the one point I had cut from their homeworks.

All these thoughts were musing me into the dying hands of the night. Sleep is such a sweet lover, shows you the dream and then goes away. A jeep came hustling by, jolting me from my slumber of thoughts. There came out this very black man I had wrote about earlier. As he was going down inside, he waved a hand to me, and impulsively, my hand waved back too. The single moment of interaction, spoke a lot of words. If you could see a flow of karma, you could see this electric wavy line connecting. We both were satisfied men at the end of the day. We understood. We had done it, we are on our way. Seeing this man earlier carrying his kids on his shoulders giving a smile to his wife, I knew that this man might not become a millionaire, not because he cannot do it, but because he was satisfied. He was just happy. He had reached his goal. Now he was laying the boulevard with flowers. For a moment, we exchanged this satisfaction.

And then I started thinking again. Oh these thoughts don't leave me. I am foolish. I am an explorer. I want to take you all on a journey with me. I would gradually shift into the left lanes, the fast lanes of the freeway. Here we go, we are rising, up up we go. We are almost taking off. Left for the clouds, left this earth in search of my boulevard of dreams. Planets we explore, stars we gaze. I would then proclaim, we are free, we are there, I love you folks.

Glimpses of new Indians

I just opened the much publicised Citibank Rupee Checking account.
After initial headache of website difficulties, un-advertised fine
print and fear of getting stuck in red tape again, finally am pleased
to see the results. Things can get better, but for my expectations,
it's fine for now.

As I interacted with indians regarding this account, I found a
energy in their voice. Almost like a elder brother, I was happy to
feel that these young kids, who are just working part time, or fresh
college grads or at the higher rung, MBAs are talking as if they mean
business. It's not just about money.

This girl called Sophie called me up from Citibank, Bombay. I was
almost smiling at her playful tone, in an attempted ascent. I had all
these roles open to visualize myself in : -a elder brother smiling at
her little siter's innocence, see how she's grown up into a fine young
lady, -a tutor's role who is brandishing moustaches in a proud feeling
of how his tutelage has gone about, -a father's role who is worried
about his young kids getting spoilt by kaanta laga, -a sister's role
who is giggling along and sharing the girl power, -a flirtatious role,
where I am letting myself flow away in her sweet talk so that she gets
the 1000 bucks out of me, -or I could be Buddha.

It's surprising that now I know a second before the second inside
that very second, that I have choices. And what I am going to do, will
be solely at my discretion, and I should know that what I did, was
because I chose to. It's my karam. There is always the one boring
choice, the run-of-the-mill approach to throw in the towel. And then
there is this exciting world of opportunities, where I can unleash the
inherent potential, and try out new things, experiment.

My sweet little girl

As they say in math, lets form a notation which can be typed on the standard Qwerty keyboard, and then a postulate.

A' - stand for inverted A, which means : 'for every'

E' - mirror image of E, which means: 'there exists'

iff - if and only if

<--> - one to one

'All other things remaining the same, A' guy who loves, E' a sweet little girl, with a <--> correspondence.'

Now that we have formed the language, lets denote a function:

F(x) where x is the guy.

Now that we have the function, we want to find solution for F(nishant). We will have to design optimal algorithms and datastructures for that. Also, the solution should have a solution in polynomial time. This world allows only a finite time-space solution, NP complete alogorithms can be realized only in utopian time-space.

And when we do we get a realization of this function, the next step is to devise a inverse function:

G(y) = F'(x).

And then this will bring us to another postulate:

A' x that satisfies F(x) in polynomial time, E' y and vice versa.

All I want is a solution to this algorithm, and find my y. Are you my y?

Power of Nature

Just when I was thinking that grief has taken a vacation, the tsunami disaster came as a grim reminder of the supreme power of nature. God is kind, he is sending us gentle reminders of showing remorse and mending our ways. I do not intend to say that those who died or are homeless did a crime. The entire humanity is accountable.

Just as the Ents (giant trees) attacked Saruman, the evil wizard in his haven of Orthanc, I am noticing the world balance changing. Un-seasonal rains, cyclones, earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, temperature changes, they all to me are an indication of our abuse to earth.

I don’t see any indication of improvements in our ways. I forsee that our future generation will live on the moon and Mars. Then after billions of years, same will happen to those planets. The Dinosaurs were wiped out by global catastrophes. As said in Fight club, our life is diminishing one minute at a time, every minute.

I have felt many times, that our entire ecosystem is part of a larger whole. As we think that we have blood cells, bones and so on, similarly, we in fact might be the micro parts of a larger individual. Difficult to say in words, but there is a lot of science we don’t know.

The best life is that of the Hobbit, as described by Tolkien in his Lord of the Rings books. The ring is symbolic of our material desires, the attachments. We need to cast it back into the lava of Mount Doom, but the “I” sense does not allow us to do so. The Nazgyl continue to torture people, who can neither renounce the ring, or accept their dark side openly. I could go on and on about this analogy. Who shall be the ring bearer for the entire humanity. Christ did that long back. Also Krishna promises that whenever adharma will occur, righteousness will be forgotten, evil will rise, He shall take birth again. When Noah’s ark sets sail again, will there be a place for me, for you?

As we make nuclear bombs, fighter jets and missiles, a higher power sure is laughing at our foolishness. He says that, who are you to kill each other. I made all of you, whenever a life is taken, it’s because I decide to. Whenever a life is given, it’s because I decide to. And then when He sees us trying to snatch away those powers from Him too, his laughter turns into a grim smirk. It’s like AI (artificial intelligence). Some day, will we really enable too much AI into machines, as they would turn against humanity itself, as shown in Terminator. We are getting too smart.

I want to physically contribute somewhere. I want to fight as a soldier, I want to do manual labor in the relief operations, I want to clean dishes and sweep floors of a temple. There is a time bomb ticking in my mind, unless I release this energy, I cannot rest comfortably. For each piece of dirt I have thrown on the street, for each time I have thrown away cans to be recycled, for each piece of paper I have wasted, I feel I am responsible for some deaths in the tsunami.

I acknowledge the power of nature, I bow down before it. I don’t challenge it, by thinking of building warning systems, and colonies on the moon, and searching for water on Mars. I pray, and ask for His mercy. And promise that I will, as an individual, never harm It.

How much do you know about yourself if you have never been in a fight?

How true this line by tyler durden would be, I did not realize when I first saw Fight Club. When I came to study at USC, little did I realize that its motto for the trojan : Fight On. , would be so apt as to mirror my life.

Looking upon life now, I have realized that it always offers you a binary tree at any moment when you feel that you are stuck. The root of the tree is instantiated since you are born. You just dont realize it, or take time to realize it at a later stage in life. The end of the binary tree stops on a leaf node, after which its back to square one, the root, if you believe in theory of Gita, or luckier still, in the pool of the system where Krishna resides, the system where the algorithms, arcane to men, have been running since even time did not exist.

One branch is the easy way out. The other is the perilous way. The former always seems to be the only option. But if you realize, as I have, failure is not the only option. I strongly urge people, who give up, and blame life or even God sometimes, to relax, and think, and realize that its just an algorithm, you cannot simply fail unless you want to.

The algorithm has a lot of dynamic late binding to it. Almost nothing is compile time, except for the family, the country, the time you are born in. Rest everything is run time. You instantiate the objects, and God invokes methods upon it. The base class already exists, from which we inherit and then the "strong" man defines and declares his own functions to override the virtual functions defined in the base class.

Now, if you dont do this, and go the run of the mill approach of already using the virtual functions in the base class, or you instantiate a weak object, and expect God to get you out of all your miseries, you are mistaken. God has given you a lot of polymorphism, it's upto you to make good use of this powerful facility. Only at run-time, it's decided what method to invoke. You already have an interface. You have the full power to make objects as you want. You have the power to override all virtual methods. You are so powerful, please realize that.

People who have realized this, find no fun anymore in this code, and God invites them to his abode, where they can help him design future algorithms and data strucutres or better the existing ones. There is nothing like, "oh, I am so unlucky", "why does this always happen to me", "God does not like me", "I am poor" and so on. You have been given all the choices. Be Arjuna, and Krishna too, guide yourself when you are weak, and guide the weak when you are strong.

There have been many times in my life, when I felt that, I should give up arms. I should lie down in the lap of my mother, and hide from the world. But somehow, something, some desire in me, coaxed me to fight. This warrior resides in all of us. Dont supress Him. Let him out.

As long as my mind is with me, I know that I will always have a choice. I can never lose. There is always a choice to fight. To work hard. To repair your follies, if can be, or if not, to go ahead after learning from the past. And at times, I feel that there are people who trust me, they have seen this in me. People like Dr. Michael Crowley, Daniel Kegel, Dr. Bharat Thakkar. Sometimes I have realized that my parents have had this glimpse, my grandfather too. Some of them trust me like Morpheus did for Neo. Slowly and surely, like Neo, I have begun to believe. When I felt life has come to a standstill, these people, somehow emerged from nowhere, and guided me, as if Krishna himself sent his agents.

Sometimes, in the haze of this hustle bustle of life, I feel I can see the green matrix code. I look up there, and see Krishna smiling with his huge, wonderful, loving, beautiful eyes. He calls out to me:

"Son, you are me, you all are one of me. Don't lose heart, perform your karma. Be a warrior. Fight."