Filler

Over-analysis - I do that a lot. And in my continuing effort of overanalysis I somehow felt an urge to tear the guts out of a James Blunt song - whose songs generally seem to be heart wrenching storied of unrequited love. However, my analysis runs the risk of not understanding maybe a lot of common phrases having standard meanings.

"Goodbye My Lover"

Did I disappoint you or let you down?
Should I be feeling guilty or let the judges frown?
'Cause I saw the end before we'd begun,
Yes I saw you were blinded and I knew I had won.
So I took what's mine by eternal right.
Took your soul out into the night.

So probably the couple just broke up and the guy (lets call him Joe) is trying to figure out how much of it is his fault. I think it is normal - people try to figure out what went wrong and what was their fault (or at least they should). Then Joe starts thinking about how he started dating her (lets call her Callie). When he says "I saw the end..", it can mean two things - either he was so into her from the beginning that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, or he knew that this was a relationship just destined to end. I will attempt to follow both story lines -

1. Since he was so into her, he also felt that he didnt deserve her - so he thought he managed to trick her into falling for him too and so he "had won". And then he tried to keep this up as long as he could.
2. He feels that Callie was always blinded (by maybe a previous relationship or something else) so the relationship was destined to end - so he tried to make the best of what he could (but here the "won" part doesn't seem to fit in)

It may be over but it won't stop there,

I am here for you if you'd only care.
You touched my heart you touched my soul.
You changed my life and all my goals.
And love is blind and that I knew when,
My heart was blinded by you.
I've kissed your lips and held your hand.
Shared your dreams and shared your bed.
I know you well, I know your smell.
I've been addicted to you.

Here Joe seems to be talking about how into her he is and how they grew really closer. I guess if you are together with somebody for a significant amount of time, you get dependent on that person, you get addicted to that person. I did not quite understand the blinding part. Maybe its related to the second storyline:

1. The blinding part doesnt make sense here except that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with Callie because his love for her blinded him and he was so addicted to her that he wanted her for always.
2. In the alternate story line, Joe might be retrospecting on the fact that even though he knew that the relationship was destined to end, he was blinded by his love and he couldn't see that obvious truth anymore and started getting used to her and addicted to her. Against all his proper judgement.

Goodbye my lover.
Goodbye my friend.
You have been the one.
You have been the one for me.

I am a dreamer and when i wake,
You can't break my spirit - it's my dreams you take.
And as you move on, remember me,
Remember us and all we used to be

1. This part actually just seems to be fit into the first storyline (the spending rest of the life together line). Joe might be telling Callie that by breaking up with him, she just woke him from his sleep and took his dream (to spend his life with her) away. So now all he is wishing from her is to have a fond memory of him.

I've seen you cry, I've seen you smile.
I've watched you sleeping for a while.
I'd be the father of your child.
I'd spend a lifetime with you.
I know your fears and you know mine.
We've had our doubts but now we're fine,
And I love you, I swear that's true.
I cannot live without you.

1. But here Joe just gives into his feelings and can't stand to live without Callie and just begs her to be with him and come back to him. And I speculate that they probably got back together because they"'re fine".
2. Although in the alternate story, Joe might be trying to say that he got really into her and wanted to spend his life with her, but she did not want that and that might be a possible cause of their breakup. And now post breakup, they are learning to live without each other and he is getting "fine" without her and so is she. Because I would imagine that after any breakup, even if you do not want to get back together and you never meant to stay together for long, you do feel a void without that person, because you did love that person and that means a lot.

Goodbye my lover.
Goodbye my friend.
You have been the one.
You have been the one for me.

And I still hold your hand in mine.
In mine when I'm asleep.
And I will bare my soul in time,
When I'm kneeling at your feet.

1. Here Joe probably is saying that now that they are together, he feels normal again. And soon he will propose to her.
2. However in the alternate storyline, he might be saying that even if she is gone, he still dreams of her and he is hoping that one day he will beg her to take him back.

Goodbye my lover.
Goodbye my friend.
You have been the one.
You have been the one for me.

I'm so hollow, baby, I'm so hollow.
I'm so, I'm so, I'm so hollow.
I'm so hollow, baby, I'm so hollow.
I'm so, I'm so, I'm so hollow.

1. This just makes sense in the secondary storyline where they are broken up for good where he feels empty inside without her. He was so dependent on her that without her he feels completely incomplete (oxymoron I think)

In any case I just feel that if I read through my analysis I can probably find many holes and probably merge both the storylines into a single one and have the consistent story. But I don't feel like, and the reason I wrote this is because I just wanted to see if I could still write.

Inceptron

"You're waiting for a train; a train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you can't be sure. Yet it doesn't matter - because we'll be together."

Obviously another Nolan movie is out and I have to obsess about it. But I do not understand why Inception is advertised as "Your mind is the crime scene", whereas it contained one of the most heart-wrenching love stories of this decade. It is selfish but at the same time so heart warming - the quest to keep your love alive even though the object of your affection is gone. It is an instance of pure love!

And I feel that is what a lot of people are actually looking for. But in that case, you might get obsessed about the idea of perfect love. And any relationship you subsequently have is a quest to perform inception of the idea of perfect love for you in the mind of your partner.

Anyhoo, I think I recently saw a Level 2.5 dream. It involved me being in my friends place meeting my parents and then falling asleep in my dream (yeah I remember that part of my dream vividly) and then I remember lying on a couch in a theater watching a movie (so I assume this was the level 2 dream), and I was in the movie too (hence 2.5). That's when my mind just realized and said "what the fuck! Is this some leveled dream shit?". And after that I remember nothing. Nothing interesting, but totally weird.

My sister gave the best explanation for Inception - like recursion! And that made me think what other things I do in my daily rituals that are similar to some programming technique or construct. Obviously I have not thought about it much. Otherwise, it would really easy to find examples.

Eating breakfast reminded me of LIFO stack. How so? I generally gobble down my breakfast at breakneck speed. This involves stuffing a bite of bagel, a piece of pineapple, cantaloupe, omelette and roasted potatoes at the same time. I never realized how automatic it had gotten until one day, while I am chowing down the mouthful, I get a weird shock when I bite on the pineapple piece having forgotten ever putting it in there. Thats when a bulb lit over my head and I realized I eat like a LIFO (last in first out) stack. Except in case of eating, it is more like last in first in.

(....continuing after a day..)

Back to Inception. Another line I like from the movie is "True inspiration is hard to fake." But isn't true inspiration hard to make too. Getting a truly original idea in itself is so hard that most of the time I am blindly looking in all directions (I know this line is so epic I have to say it again - blindly looking in all directions) that if somebody enters my subconscious and just nudges me in any direction, I will happily accept it as my idea - obviously only if it is something I consciously want and like. In fact the want is probably absent, because if it were there, the idea would have incepted itself.

On that note, how do you perform inception or extraction from yourself. As in there are so many things/memories in our subconscious which we are not aware of consciously. But if we want to dig in it, it would be cool to be able to explore your own subconscious. But in that case, the secret belongs to your subconscious whereas your conscious self is the extractor - so you might run into yourself, which might be interesting.

All in all, as it is obvious by now, I loved the movie :-) .

The memory remains

"Moments are temporary, memories are forever"

After some thought, I realized that Dorian Gray, poor Dorian Gray, is actually a victim. He did nothing wrong (in my book at least). He was made into a photograph, and he did what a photograph does - stay the same forever (mostly). I do not get it why he is declared to be a bad guy.

Look at it this way. A good photographer waits for a moment, a fleeting moment, a moment where everything in the universe seems to fall into place (at least in his/her eyes). He (or she) waits and then he/she sees it, and when he/she does, the moment gets captured in the camera and then us mere mortals can see that moment, which is long gone, again and again. And only then can we see what the hunter saw - the moment (although sometimes I can't even see it after looking at it for a long time). The photographer made the moment into a memory.

But what about the photograph itself. People come by, look at it,appreciate it and at times pretend to appreciate it. But after the crowd has passed, what happens to the picture? It just stays the same. It can do nothing else. And that's what I think happened to Dorian. People admired his beauty for sometime, but after that he had nothing to do. Out of desperation (and possibly boredom) he started to indulge. Was is right? I do not know. He could have possibly used his eternal youth for the greater good. But he was made into a memory of a moment, and the memory of a moment although eternal, the moment itself is still momentary.

P.S. This was not where I was trying to go with this post, but here I am.

Earth Day

This is an easy post, courtesy Dave Matthews Band:

Mother, father please explain to me
Why a world so full of mystery
A place so bitter and still so sweet
So beautiful and yet so full of sad, sad...

Mother, father please explain to me
Why forests march to desert speed
While snowcapped mountains melt away
What do we tell our babies, when do we say, oh

Mother, father please explain to me
How a man who rocks his child to sleep
Pulls the trigger on his brother's heart
He digs a hole right to the middle of this storm of hatred

Mother, father please explain to me
How it could be so this world has come to be
A precious balance in between
Such cruelty and such kindness please

Mother, father please explain to me
How this world has come to be
Unequaled in her blessings, oh, I see
Unbridled hatred so extreme, please tell me

Mother, father please explain to me
How this world has come to be so
Twisted between time and dreams
Oh, mother, father please explain to me
Oh, what's all this talk about?
All this talk about it
Spinning down, down, down, down, down
All this talk about
Endless words without
Nothing's done

Mother, father do you know
Why one man's belly overflows
Another sleeps in hunger's bed
Oh, we trade our world for a piece of bread

Oh Mother, father please explain to me
How this rare world's come to be
A place so full of color yet overflowing
Always in black and white
Drowning in the waters of our...

Mother, father please explain to me
How this world has come to be
While still blessed in all the things we see
Such a sad, sad home for you and me

Come out, and hold,
Come on out you
Come on out you
Come and save yourself

Come on out you
Come on we're taking the water
We're taken the water
We're taken the water
But you know
We got the freedom
We got the freedom

There's no God above
And no hell below
Oh, it's here with us
It's up to us
To keep afloat

How this sweet world has come to be
Oh to keep afloat

Mother, father please explain to me
How this rare world has come to be
Oh, let the blue planet
Let the blue planet

Mother, father please explain to me
Mother, father please explain

Confuscious

I was a firm believer of the notion that education is a possible way of solving most if not all problems persistent in the present world. Emphasis must be put on the word was. My basic premise was that if people were taught science and mathematics, they could follow logic to get to the correct course of action. When I say correct, I basically mean globally optimal to that person and others. This assumption in itself is so flawed that I do not need to explain it. But rest assured, I will. I also believed that even if people were not taught about science, but even the basic doctrines of religion (any one of them), they would learn rudimentary lessons like being nice to your neighbors and respecting others. I believe that religious teachings are also a valid part of education. Now allow me the freedom to assume that every religion has the aforementioned lessons somewhere in there.

Since I am reading/writing so many academic research papers, I can't compose a wholesome story in which all my points and digression sit perfectly (also I suck at writing essays). So I am just giving a point-wise explanation of everything I mentioned earlier.

Following logic (as defined by mathematics): Working towards local optimality, or your own/your family's personal gain will lead to a crazy world where everybody is completely selfish (and it might be one extreme form of capitalism). Trying to get to a global optimality would imply everybody donating money to the needy and never wasting it by going to GAP or NIKE stores. Obviously global optimality does imply that you yourself have enough for yourself (there has to some notion of enough - bare minimum and some conservative maximum after which you donate). So you wouldn't be suffering for others, but it might lead to a world where there might be people who might slack off because they know that others would help them. This is obviously against the logic of obtaining global optimum because if you are pursuing that, you would never slack off. So technically, the logic of trying to obtain global optimal appears to me to be sound. But it might appear to be an extreme form of socialism. But if everybody pursues global optimality, eventually everybody would have enough to live without any physical hardship (I am not claiming they would be happy, because human satisfaction and happiness evades any attempt of formalizing it with logic). So what I infer (or actually previously inferred) is that logic does solve a lot of the problem. But it wouldn't and I will explain that later.

Disclaimer: I am no economist, just took some economics in high school and that was more that 10 years ago.

Following religious teachings: I do not have much knowledge about any religion. I was born a Hindu but I do not claim to know much about Hinduism or any of the doctrines or traditions. So obviously I have no idea about the other religions. But for some reason I thought I could write about religion, but right now I am stumped. Whatever I was thinking of writing seems to be just my instinct and intuition, and have no empirical evidence to back them. So I shall just state my conjectures:

• The fact that any group of people decided on following some religion (here I am using the word religion in a way which is not common - I am also considering any doctrines and traditions any small tribe somewhere as religion too) implies that the set of rules (I am also simplifying religion to be a set of rules - the general case can tackled once I figure out what else encompasses what they call religion) would lead to overall good to the whole group - kind of a global optimal on which every body agrees upon. Obviously I am wrong when I say that some religion begins like that - and you have religions all around where the "keepers" of the religion end up bending the rules for their advantages. So here I ended up refuting myself.
• So I shall not talk about religion anymore, I can just hope that all religions begun with the notion of having a set of rules which would maintain order in a group of people and hence obtain some form of optimality.
• Obviously satisfying a smaller number of people is easier than satisfying a larger group. Classic optimization problem where adding more constraints generally makes the solution of the problem harder. So when some religions reach a much larger scale, more number of people are unsatisfied (since it is probably impossible to consider everybody's situation).
• This leads to people expressing their discontent in different ways, or completely submitting to the rules over their own satisfaction.
• But then, as I mentioned earlier, is the presence of the 'keepers' who might twist or misinterpret the rules for their own good.
• But my point is that even here, if everybody aimed towards the global optimal, the keepers would never be selfish, but rather change the rules to help out more people.

But after enough digression, I get an opportunity to say what I wanted to say all along. As long as people have choice, they can choose to not pursue the global optimum. They can choose to just do what's best for them (in the short run maybe) and not care about others. For example, education helps nothing, people still drink and drive - even the smartest and most educated of us. Generally the only reason people don't drink and drive is not because they think it is dangerous to them and others, but because they are afraid to get caught. I know this is a small thing, but this is just an example of people exercising choice over reason. If you think about it, there are many other examples you can spot happening all around you. But the problem here is that there is no way you can have a globally optimal world without people with free will.

Well I guess the only solution then is to change education in a way that everybody chooses to pursue the global optimum. Because even now there are a number of individuals who choose to pursue some form of the global optimum. Since choice goes both ways :-).

The Flow

"All is not lost, everything is left to be got"

I believe that when somebody falls in love (whatever your equivalent for it is), you do not fall in love with a person per se, but rather with an idea of that person or a perception of that person. It is not that whatever you think you know or believe about the other person is false or wrong. A significant part of those beliefs are generally true. At least in the beginning. Obviously love starts with attraction, hopefully mutual and there are possibly multiple intermediate stages. I do not have any idea about any of these, I am just trying to relate something I realized over time. So after the beginning, you start spending time - together or apart.

If together, you start learning about the other person, changing certain previous perceptions (good or bad) and adding more facets to your idea of the other person. You can think of it in a statistical learning theoretic sense. As you obtain more and more samples, your final estimate of whatever you are trying to compute changes a bit here and there, but it generally converges (at varied rates - sometimes you find out immediately and sometimes it takes years) to what the other person actually is around you. So obviously the longer you are together, the better you start to know that person (duh!). And sometimes (or most of the times) as you get closer to true value, you realize that this is very different from your idea of your prospective partner. In that case, you either compromise and settle for a "weak learner" (something or someone in this case which is at least close to what you want more than half the time) or you move on. In my opinion settling for a weak learner is generally done to avoid going through the whole learning process again and again and the fear that you might never get a "strong learner" (your soul mate :P ) and the hope that, just once in a while, the other person (the weak learner) will be what you always wanted, and those moments should be enough. And who knows what you truly wants. Since your perception about others are so skewed, there is no guarantee that your perception of yourself is even remotely accurate. Hence, this can be thought of as a double learning problem - you learn about yourself and about the other person simultaneously. The more you sample, the more you know what you might truly want. But if you settle early, you stop learning. Consequently, your perception might not change after that, so you might never know if you actually wanted something else. So you would be satisfied with your weak learner. I guess ignorance is bliss!

However, if you decide to move on, you might feel like you are back at square one. But I believe that you are not - you learn more about what you truly want or what actually is really compatible with you. So you have made some progress towards finding your strong learner. But you do have to start at the beginning to learn about the other person. In fact you start at negative, because it might be quite some time before you actually are with some one new.

Now occasionally, after the beginning, you end up spending quite some time apart. And having a long distance relationship (or some thing even less serious) might have an inherent problem which I will try to justify by drawing an analogy from machine learning. If you have this other person in your life, but you are far apart from each other and see each other only occasionally in the beginning of your relationship (or whatchamacallit). But that does not mean you do not think about that person. You think of the all the time you did spend with that person, all the happy fun experiences. The problem here is that you made the cardinal mistake in machine learning. You learn over and over again from the same sample set. You do not get yourself new samples because you are not spending any time with the other person. So you might think you have a good idea of the other person, and many a time, you think that you like that idea of the other person. But the problem with any learning model trained too much on the same example set is that it does terribly on a new sample set. What it means is that when you do see this other person again and spend some time with that person (still thinking that you have a good idea of how that other person is), if the person does something which is something out of character for you (since you have never seen it before), you are terribly shocked. Shocked because this concrete vision you had in your head does not accept this new behavior. If you were together, the vision would be molded over time, hence generally more flexible to new behaviors. But when you are together only momentarily with extended gaps of absence, you just think that everything is wrong. However remember that this line of inference is mostly valid if you have been having a long distance relationship from the beginning itself. If you have spent quite some time together, the aforementioned line of logic does not necessarily hold. On the other hand, I do not claim that long distance from the beginning would never work - using some great and fortunate sampling techniques and settling for a weak learner are one of the many possible routes to a successful long distance relationship.

But at the end of the day, you have to be a risk taker to find yourself a strong learner. If you want to that is. I mean it is quite possible to live meaningful, rewarding lives without ever pursuing your strong learner. I mean, just think of Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa (if you do not like my examples, just go with it and try to see the point than the specific examples). I do not think they ever spent any time looking for their soul mates, they spent it in service of others or maybe to the service of a higher idea. Just think about how much time a person spends in trying to woo a partner or in spending "quality" time with a partner. If only some one spent that time in doing something creative or helpful you would get so much more man-hours towards something that is more fruitful to the masses.

In short, finding your soul mate is not for the faint hearted, but then "love" might be overrated. If it were not for the survival of the human kind and people were not that goddamn sensitive about sex (the activity), the world might have been different - for better for worse? How do I know?

Blackberry Toast

Hungry?

VNC (dont know why it is YVR) ahoy!

"The easiest way to lose something......is to want it too badly"

But how will you get it if you don't want it badly enough to do anything to get it. Firstly, there might be many others who want the same thing and if they want it more than you do, chances are, you are going to be the one quoting "If you love something, let it free. If it comes back, its yours, if it doesn't, it never was". Victory does not come to those standing on the sidelines hoping for the ''right'' thing to happen. There is nothing wrong with hoping for the best, but if you are not going to do anything, you need to be prepared for the worst.

That being said, there is no way I can relate this to my trip to Vancouver and Whistler.

The Vancouver trip was actually mostly a trip between Hyatt Regency and Le Soleil, barring some mis-adventures out into downtown Vancouver looking for food. The first night was interesting because I managed to pull my friend up to the bar and club district to go to a club where a band was playing live reggae. But other than the music and the noticeably better ratio (of boy is to girl or men is to women) in the club, there was nothing exceptionally good in that club compared to any club in Atlanta. So the music ended at 2 in the night, putting an end to my night, which lasted for another 5 hours, after which I had to get up for the conference.

Now lets not talk about the conference, except that it was a lot of information and by the time my night ended at 12 in the night, I was so exhausted that I again slept at 2 in the night. Tuesday lunch was interesting because we went to this sushi place and I enjoyed the sushi (not that I have ever hated it). But my opinion might be biased by the fact that everybody who knew that I was going to Vancouver told me to try the sushi there.

Lest I forget, I should mention that for my flight from Toronto to Vancouver (which was around 4-5 hours), I was sitting next to this girl (name forgotten) who was very enthusiastic about telling me everything there is to know about the country of Canada. And since I am an awesome listener, I entertained her, and by the end of our conversation, even she confessed that she was exhausted. And everything I learned about Canada from her seemed strikingly different from the Canada I know from the very educational series South Park. Surprised?? Even I was! But in the end, I had learned everything from how the global warming was affecting the permafrost in arctic Canada to the First Nations citizens of Canada (the US equivalent of Native Americans) to the reason why Quebec was trying to secede from Canada and how that crisis was averted by a brilliant Prime Minister of Canada (whose name I conveniently forgot). I also learned so much about Vancouver that I surprised my friends in Vancouver when I was telling them about Vancouver and they knew that I have never been there before. I tried to convince them that I had not read the Wikipedia page on Vancouver but to no avail.

Back to the conference and sushi. Nothing exciting happened on Tuesday and Wednesday except that I went for a pizza at 12 in the night with some locals from the University of British Columbia. Well nothing exciting happened there either, except that the pizza was really tasty (or I was really hungry, or both). So having spent 3 days in Vancouver and done nothing touristy, I decided to skip all conference sessions on Thursday to go to this well-recommended Stanley Park. It was a pretty place, albeit too small for what it was trying to be (which I am not sure of either). But that is where I experienced the high point of the Vancouver trip, where we came across this frozen lake. Being boys, we got down to breaking the ice by throwing huge rocks on it, but the ice was way stronger than we expected, and eventually we gave up and went on.

That evening we headed to Whistler on a bus and after 2 hours, reached our destination. The next 2 days there was really awesome for me because that is when I learned to love the snow and hate the ice. For some reason, I decided to skip all workshop sessions to just go snowboarding. First day I decided to take a lesson, and that was a really smart decision because I managed to learn some of the basics to finally be able to enjoy snow boarding. Our group was really diverse. The instructor was Japanese. The rest of the composition was a Swiss dude and his South African girlfriend, a British Couple, and Australian bloke and me. Pretty diverse, and I found it really happy how so many different people come together for a common purpose. Not that any of them were different in any way other than their way of speaking in English.

But both days of snowboarding involved a lot of falling. I could not sit without discomfort until 2 days ago because falling hard on your bum on hard ice is not fun. I even had some pretty bad falls on my knees and shoulders, but luckily I am still up and running without any serious injury (touch wood!!). Lets just say that I was lucky and the instructor taught me well enough for me to make sure not to get hurt too bad. As an achievement, I managed to ride all the way from the top of the mountain down to the village, albeit on a beginner trail, but all the way through the mountain nonetheless. And this is something I am going to tell anybody and everybody I meet, because I am proud of it!

But the maximum action happened when I was trying to get back from Vancouver to Atlanta. Some flight delays, delayed luggage and all that usual stuff. Nothing I feel like talking about unless I was writing this blog while I was on some airport waiting for my flight.

Lets just say, I went to the conference to learn about Machine Learning, and ended up learning only about snow boarding (I hope my advisor is not reading this post!)

Back to the lesson of this post. I can see so many ways I can spin this trip to fit what I said in the beginning, but I shall not waste either of ours' time and stop here.

The Incomplete

"Tears stream down your face,

When you lose something you can't replace"

- Coldplay, Fix you.

Sometimes you just do not have any control over it. And you cannot reason yourself out of it. Maybe you are not losing something at all. Its there, just a bit farther away. Maybe you are not losing something you can't replace. Or maybe you are losing something that was never yours. So technically you are not losing something at all. But the tears roll out all the same. Unexpected, uncontrollable.

But strangely supportive. It feels like these tears are that friend you can always rely on. Whenever you have this barge of feelings that overwhelm you in any way, this friend is there to take the pressure off you. Whenever you are at this airport bidding farewell to somebody you are really really close to and are hurting deeply, or when you miss somebody dearly, or when you are so happy to see your loved one after ages, or even when you are watching this really tragic movie. Your tears are there for you. Even when you are completely alone.

I have completely lost track of what I was thinking when I started writing this post, but I guess I will just put up what I have right now.

Water - 1 Me - 0

Woke up one Sunday morning. Decided that I should go kayaking. Luckily I found a buddy to go with. And after driving around for 30 minutes, we reach this kayaking place where we rent our kayaks and they give us a ride to the river (in this case being the Chattahoochie, and pretty calm and shallow river and on that day was full of a lot of fly-fishermen). To give some premise, I should mention that I have never kayaked before in my life, and any kind of boating I have done is a really sad attempt at canoeing once. But that does not mean I was at all scared about kayaking. All the while I was thinking "How hard can it be? And what is the worst thing that can happen? I fall over and then I know swimming so I will be fine. I dont even know why they want me to wear these life jackets".

So I get into the water and start rowing. Turns out that rowing is not that hard, but making sure you are going in a straight line is not my cup of tea. I spent most of my first few minutes being sideways. I was like I was unwillingly 'drift'ing on the water. And while I was trying to figure this out (with my buddy laughing her ass off at my inability to kayak), I managed to go and get myself stuck in some shallow water on some rocks. Not knowing how to get out of there, it took me around 5 minutes to get out of that mess, all the while holding back my partner. Finally, after going downstream sideways for a while, I finally caught up with her. But I still couldn't figure it out. All this while we had other kayaks, canoes, and even tubes overtaking us because I was so ridiculously bad at kayaking. I think I was even slower than what you would be if you are just drifting downstream.

But after a while and some tips from my partner, I start to get a hang of it. I start going in almost a crooked straight line. So I start going forward. We even managed to overtake few of the canoes and the tubes. I keep growing in confidence. I would kayak fast, and then would turn around and drift backwards waiting for my partner to catch up. Really stupid move, and I will figure it out later the hard way.

So then from somewhere, we hear a rapid coming up. I didn't even think to worry about it. I decided to lead and get into the rapid first. But for some reason I decided to enter it sideways, and within one row overturned and fell into the water. My first instinct was that everything is fine, I will just get back up on my kayak and keep rowing, since I still have my row with me, let me just hold on to the kayak. In one second I realized that the water is freaking cold, and that there is no way I can hold on to the kayak or the oar and I let go of both of them. I couldnt even handle myself as I tumbled through the rapid, unable to get a rapid footing on any of the rocks, bumping my knees and ankles against them. I did grab my shades and a shoe but was screaming and gasping like a girl all the while. So bumping and bouncing I finally make the shore, having lost my kayak, oar, water bottle, a shoe, a spare t-shirt I kept with me and my self esteem. But I was amazed to see my partner save my kayak, oar, shoe, water bottle while going through the rapid herself. It was just awesome. Then she brought my stuff up to the shore where I managed to get out of the water, all soaking wet.

Now I grabbed all my stuff and got ready to start kayaking again. I got on the kayak somehow, took five strokes, hit a fallen tree in the water and tipped over and fell in the water again. This time the kayak and the oar didnt go too far from me, but I lost my shades, shoes, and water bottle. My partner picked out the shoes and the water bottle from the water, but the shades were never to be seen. A bit frazzled now, I start kayaking again. And luckily the river calmed down completely and it was all easy going from there.

But after sometime I heard another rapid coming up and my heart started beating fast again. When I saw it, I realized it was less half of the previous one and the previous one wasnt even a rapid. So I again decide to lead, but this time make sure that I enter it straight on, all the while mumbling "please dont fall over please dont fall over please dont fall over". Luckily I survive this one and then till the end, it was all smooth rolling.

After we got out of the water, my partner said she asked if I am ever coming back to kayak, and I said "hell yeah". In fact, in retrospect, I am glad I fell and then survived, so this way I have this story I can tell people instead of me just saying "Oh I kayaked for 3 hrs". But I guess all my false notions about kayaking are gone and next time I hope I will be more attentive and hence better.

The light that shines on you

I got myself a ride on a space ship once. I took off from the earth's surface, easily acquired escape velocity and was out of the earth's gravitational pull pretty quickly. Once out of the earth's atmosphere, I got to see beautiful starlit nights (in space every time of the day is a starlit night). It was really beautiful. It is not something you can ever see or experience from spending your whole life on earth. You have heard from people that the space is beautiful, but you never could imagine how beautiful it is until you are already there. Along with that, you get to experience the zero-gravity life. It was all good and it was something you would really like to experience, and I was lucky enough to actually do it.

I decided to fly to the moon. I landed there, stayed for a while, looked around. The craters, the clear skies, the blue planet, the bright sun - I saw all these things and it was all new. Not necessarily awesome, but a new experience nonetheless. But I did not want to spend my whole space trip on the moon (I forgot to mention that my trip was actually limited in time). So I decided to explore more of the solar system and headed towards Mars.

I didn't feel like exploring Mars too much, so after orbiting around Mars and both its satellites once, I headed towards the asteroid belt. It was really intriguing, small particles flying around each other. Flying a ship through it was really a great thrill ride for a thrill seeker like me. Almost through the belt I was deciding my route towards Jupiter, I see a comet entering the solar system. It was really bright, and attracted me towards it. But I was in a way intimidated by it. I obviously wanted to visit it, but I thought that it was a big bright comet and I didn't have the capability to land on it.

So, having decided to go against my heart's wish, I kept flying towards Jupiter. But somehow, as I was heading in that direction, I got closer and closer to the comet. That made me feel better, but I stuck to my route. So as I was orbiting one of the satellites of Jupiter, the comet sent me a message saying "Hi!". I was excited to hear from the comet. So I replied back instantaneously. And then we started talking - while the comet was still flying towards the sun and I was flying through the satellites of Jupiter. But we were just talking once in a while. General hi, hello and how's it going.

Then when I was just about to exit the orbit of Jupiter to head for Saturn, the comet asked me "I am going for a drive around the sun. Do you want to take a ride with me?" I was really surprised and glad because I never thought the comet actually noticed me. I always thought that the comet talked to me out of common courtesy. So I grabbed the opportunity and decided to make the most of it. The comet was actually really friendly and not at all as intimidating as I thought it was. I landed my spaceship on the comet and went out. I was always so insecure about my abilities, that I was surprised to find out that the comet was actually even remotely interested in spending some time with me. But from that time on, time seemed to just fly.

So forgetting about my plans. I just kept going with the comet. The thing is that we were not doing anything special. We were just hanging out, looking at the stars, listening to music on my iPod, stuff like that. When we were close to the earth's orbit, we also caught some satellite television and watched some TV shows and some football. And all this while we completely lost track of time. We flew from Jupiter , all the way past the asteroids, past earth, Venus and even around the sun all the way to Uranus. We even passed really close to Neptune's ring, but we were just too busy doing nothing to notice it.

The comet told me about its life. How it has been through the darkest parts of the galaxy all alone and also through really beautiful and bright star systems. The comet told me how every thousand years it crosses the Orion Nebula and that it is just beautiful. We went through all its photographs in all different parts of its orbit. It was really overwhelming to know that a comet like this which has been all over the galaxy and seen the most amazing views can still be interested in spending time with me. Maybe the comet was the most sweetest thing and took pity on me when it saw me going around the solar system all alone and decided to give me company. And for that I consider myself super lucky.

But like every thing, this had to come to an end. We had just crossed the orbit of Venus and flying towards earth's when I had to get off. It was hard to let go off it. I just wanted to with the comet while the comet flew through the galaxy and even just to be with the comet. But I knew that I had to get back to my life. And the realist inside me got the better of it. We said our goodbyes and headed our ways. Obviously the comet couldn't come with me to the earth. It had places to go, things to see, dark places to light up.

After I landed on earth, I still heard from the comet. I would sometimes take a peek at it through a telescope and we could send each other some messages. But now, as I am seeing it fly out of the solar system, I am wondering if I will ever see that comet again. I certainly hope to, and I will certainly wait for it to come back. This is a certainty that it will come back, just that I will never know if I will ever see the comet again until I see it. Till then I guess I will have to be content thinking that I was one of the many lost souls this comet lighted up. And believe me when I tell you, this comet was one bright one and you will have no idea how many parts of the galaxy this comet lighted up. I just feel honored to meet something like that.

The balls they keep rolling

Sitting here in my lab on a Friday afternoon 30 minutes before our group meeting, I feel so sleepy (nothing new about that) that I thought the best way to do something productive is to try posting something on my blog. It has been 3 weeks since I left the paradise called `Google Internship' and came back to grad school (or what some others call Hell, although I would beg to differ). Looking back I must say that life at Google was pretty luxurious, free food and no hassle of making food or cleaning dishes or cleaning up after yourselves. But the thing is that even though it has just been 3 weeks, I do not miss it at all and have happily gotten into the grove of my usual motions of waking up and putting a bowl of milk in the microwave and a pan on the stove with my eyes still half closed (mind you it does not mean it is really early, generally it is like 10 in the morning). And I finally wake up halfway through my cereal just in time to make sure I do not burn my eggs. And I must say, I do not miss the ease and availability of food there. But what I do miss are the great friends I made there, people with whom I used to have lunches and dinners and then go out for drinks. And I miss playing soccer every monday and wednesday evening and at times on friday afternoons. I made a lot of friends and acquaintances on the field (I hope I made some friends though).

And at soccer I was amazed to see so many people so talented at it. Such great ball control, great passes, great vision. It was really fun playing with them. And then I met people who never gave up, people with broken ankles who would still keep playing for the love of the game. After duct-tapes and wraps and ankle braces, they would jump on to the field and be awesome as usual. Looking at all these people, I felt so inadequate and useless. But I am just glad that I was allowed to play with them. Reminds me of my time in undergrad when I used to play with some other really talented people.

The thing is that I have played football long enough, but I still suck at it. But that is true for swimming for me too. I have been in a swimming pool since I was 5. You would think I would be some amphibian. But alas, I am a slower swimmer than people who have swam for less than a couple of months. I am sure there are a whole bunch of 5 - 6 years old kids out there who are quicker than me, and the only reason I might be able to beat them (if I can that is), is because of my longer stroke length and height. I guess I can never get better at swimming or football ever. Nor can I ever figure out why.

Sorry for digressing. So yeah, as much as I used to enjoy football at Google, I am back to playing water polo here at Tech. And as usual, it is painful as shit for me. But I do enjoy it, I just don't know it yet. And if only I could swim faster, I could have been more useful for our team. So my point being that even though I miss a few things from the summer, I am really glad to be back to my life here in Atlanta.

Now my meeting has started so I might have to get to the point of this post in another post. Later!

Confusion

Hungry at 2 in the night in San Francisco is not something you want to be. However, if you are hungry, eating some random hot dog being sold by random chick on some random street corner is probably not a good idea. You know what is worse - eating two of those at that. Well in my defense I would say that it seemed like a really good idea at that time. I immensely enjoyed the hot dogs a lot and felt really good after eating them. But, obviously, I learnt my lesson when I had to visit the rest room five times the next day. Without going into further details, I would like to say that even though this should be a lesson enough for me, I have a feeling that placed in the same situation again, I would probably make the same decision again. Probably explains why my sister calls me a hard headed dumb-ass (mind you I am removing a lot of expletives from the this title).

Well this was probably the most memorable part of my past weekend, because the rest of it was mostly sleeping. Endless shameless utter lethargy. Oh yes, I did go kart racing. And after racing continuously for 15 minutes, I was just hoping that the race would just end because it was really strenuous. Made me wonder how the Formula One racers would keep on racing for 90 minutes at much higher speeds, much higher g-forces and thousand times more stress. But when I was thinking about this, I started thinking about how I am thinking. Call it meta-thinking. Made me think how full of myself I am. Just driving a kart for 15 minutes, I started relating myself with Formula One car racers, people who have dedicated their lives to racing, and are the top tier of racing in the world. Oh well, I guess the whole thing is about trying make ourselves feel better about ourselves instead of seeing ourselves as utter failures.

But then I do not think much of introspection. So moving on. This summer I have been really really disappointed with the movies that came out. I am not an avid movie watcher, but being bored here in this small city of Mountain View where you do not have too many things to do, and having a movie theater 5 minutes from the my place made me catch almost every movie that came out this summer. I think that is also a reason why I came across so many movies where I just wanted to shoot myself. I mean it started off with a movie like Star Trek, which I liked a lot. Not being a big fan of the original series or the movies, I utterly enjoyed this movie. But then after that, it was all downhill. But I think the movie that broke my heart was Terminator Salvation. I mean seriously. You call that a movie. It is a bunch of out-of-place action scenes stitched together. At least the new transformer movie tried (emphasis on 'tried') to get a story in. But Terminator Salvation! I mean every 5 minutes of non-action scenes, you would suddenly have machines show up from somewhere and then explosions. And if that was not enough, an attempted rape scene in the middle of nowhere and the subsequent courtship between the two characters. Reminded me of the really tacky mid-90s Hindi Bollywood movies where the protagonist saves a girl from getting raped and so the girl decides to let the guy have his way with her. And to top it all, you have Mr. Batman after some throat infection treatment shouting "We are all dead!" every 10 minutes. I know that it is just a movie, like it or forget it. And I agree that I should not go this ballistic just because of a movie. But it really broke my heart. And as if the movie didn't piss me off enough. I hear more and more people telling me how they liked the new terminator movie. SERIOUSLY! I have to count till 20 to stop myself from punching them in the face.

And you know what I am most confused about. I cannot figure out why I care so much. It is just a movie. A crappy movie, but then it is not the first crappy movie I have seen. In contrast to this, I enjoyed the new transformer movie (I still do not remember its full name). But that is mostly because of the extended footage of (hot-hot-hot-hot)^100 Megan Fox running in slow motion whereas everybody around her is running normally. (Just so you know, she is coming in a new movie called Jennifer's body, after seeing whose trailer, I feel it is going to be all about her being nude in it, which in my opinion is going to make her lose a lot of sexy points) I mean why would you give the whole world what they want from you so easily so soon. You should play your cards right and save your ace in the hole for the right time. But maybe she does exactly that in this movie. I will only know once I see it. But I am confused, why would somebody give away that one thing that makes them sexy.

But yeah. Before I completely forget about what I was talking about regarding the movies that came out this summer, I want to just say that most of them sucked. Period.

Perspective

I was at the Pride parade at San Francisco yesterday. I saw a lot of things, a lot of ways in which people were trying to express themselves, a lot of which did not make any sense to me. But then there are a lot of things I do not know or understand. I mean I understand freedom of speech and expression, but what is the point of standing stark naked in the middle of the road while people around you are staring at you and taking pictures of you. This is not a rhetoric question. I am really asking. Unless being naked stands for feeling liberated and since the theme of the parade was freedom, it seemed fitting, but still kinda ridiculous.

So I did have fun and some form of weird social and cultural experience, it kind of reminded me of the kind of procession and demonstration going on in Iran. Even they are fighting for their freedom, freedom from the theocracy controlled by the religious leaders, freedom to make their votes count, freedom to have a democracy. And when I thought of that, this parade at SF seemed so superficial. It is not that I have anything against gay rights. On the contrary, I believe everybody has the right to do whatever they want as long as they are not hurting somebody else (but then again I cannot discuss the fact of where to draw the line on hurting somebody else). What I am trying to say is that asking for the freedom to choose your sexuality is a fair thing to demand. But it kinda loses any substance when compared to fighting for you actual freedom. But then it is human nature to always ask for more. On one hand, you have people who are getting beat up on the road and getting tear gas thrown at but still not budging, and then you have people who are getting invited to the white house and have an audience with the president and are still discontent.

I mean it is only fair to be discontent when you do not get what you want, but looking at all this, I have this weird feeling. It is something I am not able to explain. I feel it is fine that if you are just doing the parade with the desire to party, do whatever you want, it is your day. I am a big party animal myself. But what I hate is the so-called anti-establishment crowd who want to change the world by doing pot and playing guitar in their moms' basement. I think you have guessed right - I am talking about the ridiculous hippie crowd. A really good friend of mine aptly summed them as "They want to fight against what's happening in Tibet, but cannot point on the map where in the world Tibet is".

But then I feel I should not be saying anything about them - I am not doing anything about what is happening in Iran or give too much sh*t about it. I read about it, feel a little sad about it, have a sense of admiration towards the people fighting for freedom, but after that I simply go about with my day and Iran is lost somewhere in the plethora of information that goes into my brain. So who am I judge.

But I feel somebody should. Somebody who is deserving enough to do so, but then if somebody is deserving enough, he is probably too busy actually dealing with the problem rather than dealing with how people react to it or perceive it. However, if enough people actually care about their fellow human beings, about people they do not know and probably would never meet, the weak law of large number kinda says that eventually you will have somebody who not only cares but go farther and does something about it. But I do not think that growing long hair and sitting in circles is ever going to work.

Serenity

I am here sitting by Lake Shoreline on a bench at 6 in the evening while the sun is still pretty high in the sky and a really chilly breeze is blowing. It is so cold that I might have to leave soon since all I am wearing is a polo shirt and surfer short. But while I am here on my laptop, listening to my iPod, seeing all these people around me in the lake and the park around it, I feel strangely alone. And somehow it is so soothing. Not that I am in any pain of any sort, but it is really nice feeling to have a conversation with yourself once in a while. I wish I was asking my self questions like what I want to do with my life, stare deep into my soul and find out what is it I really want, but I was too lazy to do so and settled for writing this blog.

As I was saying. It is a strange feeling being alone in the middle of everybody. And sitting here on my laptop with Google's free wifi all around town, I am even connected to a lot of other people through this fancy box. But alone is good. But only at times. Unlike last night when I eventually visited San Francisco after spending more than a month in Northern California without going to San Francisco. But I do not like doing all the artsy/touristy stuff. Like biking across Golden Gate bridge or sitting in Golden gate park. I bike everyday to work thank you and spent a lot of time in green parks all my childhood. But then I guess this are uncommon things for people living in big cities which do not have parks and the only mode of transportation is a car. And I am not a big fan of museums or operas and stuff. So in a way, SF does not have anything that I desire. And if I think about what I desire, it seems I am simply a thrill seeking guy. And I think that this world is full of people like me. Thank god for them since it is because of them you have stuff like roller coasters and sky diving and snow boarding and so on.

Well what I am trying to say is that... actually I have no idea what was the point I was trying to make. And it has gotten too chilly and windy and I am going to head back indoors (which is atleast a 20 minute bike ride away).

Death and All His Friends

"Those who are dead are not dead

they are just living in your head"

- Coldplay - 42

A few days ago I watched this movie called Star Trek. I was a good movie in my opinion and I enjoyed it a lot. So as usual, I was busy dicussing the movie with my sister during both our office hours (I have no idea how we managed to get paid from our work considering how much we IM each other the whole day). Apparently she liked the movie as well (a thing to clarify here is that our opinions rarely match). Then she asks me the following question : "Did you notice Randy Pausch in the movie?" Obviously I reacted "What?!! Randy Pausch was in the movie!!" Subsequently she sent me a link to Randy Pausch's website where it did say that he was in fact in the movie, albiet for a short time. But that does not in any way lower the awesomeness of the fact that Randy Pausch was in Star Trek. Then innocently I say to my sister "I wonder how he is doing now." To this she replied "He's died dude!! Which planet have you been on? He passed away almost a year back." To this I replied with an expletive. You can imagine my surprise when I realized I somehow managed to miss a big news like this (to those who do not get it, read on, I will provide some premise). This reminded me of the time I first caught Randy Pausch's "Last Lecture" live at school. It inspired me to learn a lot of things. I was all set to write a blog on that and wanted to spread all the things I learned. But I never got around to it. And those lessons have been wiped away from the desert that is my brain and all I remember are small things. And right now I could have watched his lecture again, but then with the fear that I might forget to write the blog again, I decided to go freestyle.

Luckily I did make some notes about writing that blog and I did find them so here it goes. Randy Pausch was this professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University at Pittsburg (yes there is more than one CMU). He was very productive in his career and was supposedly a really great speaker. However, since life likes ironies, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and sometime in September 2007 he decided to give his last lecture. This lecture got a lot of following and was also made into a book. I managed to catch only a part of it (I was attending class!!!), but there were certain features of it which struck me very deeply. Even though he was giving his celebrated "last lecture" in front of the packed crowd at CMU (and also much more since this was telecast live at many other locations), he knew how to move the focus from himself to somebody else. He brought out a birthday cake for his wife's birthday in the middle of the lecture. Although I am not a big believer of the celebration of birthdays, it was amazing how easily he could take attention away from himself (if you notice, even in this line I had to bring the attention to myself by having to say what my opinion is on birthdays even though it is totally irrelevant here). In this world where everybody tries to shout over everybody else, rarely does anybody know how to or even want to not be the center of the attention.

Another striking thing he mentioned was to accept your mistake. You can try to explain as much as you want and bend stuff as much as you can, but in the end there was something wrong with your answer which made others think that it is a mistake. So learn to accept your mistake, take feedback and make you answer better so that nobody finds a mistake anymore. This is so hard for me to do. I try to smooth talk my way out of any mistake and I pride myself on that. But in retrospect, I would have learned so much and been so much better off if I had just accepted my mistake and took feedback to become better. But another point he raised was something I totally believe in. He said that in all his life's experience, he learned that doing the right time always leads to good things happening to you. This is totally against the doctrine that "nice guys finish last". What I feel is misunderstood about this saying is that people confuse being nice with inaction.

The final thing he talked about was the secret to success. And what he said seems so simple that it has to be true. Hard work is the only secret. There is no magic formula, no luck, just plain simple hard work. However, simpler the way, the harder it is to traverse it. Atleast in my case. He also said a lot of things and they were all equally important. But I shall stop here to say that with his life's work and with this lecture, he managed to leave behind a legacy. People will remember him. The nice thing is though that during his last few days, thousands of people were eagerly following his progress in the fight against cancer. And even though he did lose the battle eventually, he had a lot of people who were trying to give him some form of support.

On one hand, you can die with thousands wishing the best for you. Or you can die of a freaking drowning incident in your backyard swimming pool like Rajeev Motwani. I never heard him speak but I did read some of his works for research. And his work was pretty amazing. For those who don't know this guy, he was the advisor of Larry Page and together with Larry and Sergey Brin, created the 'PageRank' algorithm that was the backbone behind the startup which is now known to the world as the super giant Google. And Google was not the only feather in his cap. He was involved in a lot of startups in the Silicon valley including another big one called Paypal. I forgot to mention that he was also a professor of Computer Science, but at Stanford. I do not know much about him as a person, but from what I have read, he was a person who was always ready to help others. And even though his life came to an abrupt end at an early age of 47, he managed to accomplish more than what a lot of people combined might not have been able to achieve. I do realize that it is really hard for his family to cope with this, but considering the finality of death, they might be able to take solace in the fact that his work has touched millions in a good way. And the funny thing is that, when you help others, good things happen. For you not just for others. Maybe it is a simple cause and effect scenario or maybe there is a God (or something) counting your good deeds. But generally this is what happens (atleast what most people tell me).

Even though these two people died in different ways and touched people in different ways and in different magnitudes, but there is something common about these two professors of Computer Science. The UN mandate states that "all human beings are born equal", but I do not think they die equal. Some just die, while some others live in your heads.

Change the world, something like that

There is that innate urge to rant about how I didn't blog for almost 5 months now and how I cannot feel anymore and that I have gotten myself into a groove that I can't get out of. But the bottomline is that I didn't write so lets just not talk about it anymore.

The last four months have been interesting. After an awesome winter with my sister and brother-in-law, I finally got my sleep cycle in control and actually I spent the whole spring semester waking up before 10am almost everyday. That might sound nothing exceptional, but compared to waking up at 2pm everyday, this sounds like a big leap forward. And 10am is the worst case. Usually it was closer to 8-9am and I am so glad that I got my schedule right. In fact in the beginning of the semester, I started coming in relatively early, my labmates would be amazed to see me there. And I am so glad I have made it through 4 months of being a dayman (fighter of the nightman!).

Other than that, this semester somehow ended up being a semester all my projects reached a logical break points. So I ended up having 2 submissions in the span of 2 weeks. The first thing was started and finished in 3 months and I felt it was a decent paper but then my opinion doesn't matter, since the paper eventually did get rejected. But it is ok. Then the next two weeks were spent trying to finish off this other paper on which most of the work was done by my labmate Dong and exactly after 12 days, this paper was submitted in no other than a learning theory conference. And the paper was kinda cool, but it was obvious that the paper was cooked together really quickly so there were a lot of apparent silly mistakes and lo and behold, it got rejected. But I am glad it did, because now I have made some fixes and I am resubmitting :). Afterall thats PhD - reiterate until somebody eventually sees it your way :P. Well other than that, there is a paper on which I have been sitting for a while. Hopefully I will be submitting it in the upcoming deadline and be done with.

Other than that, the semester was pretty relaxed, except for a operating systems course (the easier one at it though). This semester I did manage to go to Mardi Gras at New Orleans at the peak time and it was awesome. By awesome I mean awesome. I am so glad I did go there because you won't believe whats going on there until you are actually there. Just that I cant say too much about it on the blog. Just that it is one of the best parties I have ever been (if only I didnt need to look out for the guys who were completely s*&t-faced).

But the reason for going for Mardi Gras was a conveniently scheduled water polo tournament at the University of Tulane. And that was fun too :). Talking about water polo, this semester was pretty packed with tournaments and it was a lot of fun. I learnt a few things about being the goal keeper. Applying those things in practice is a totally different issue and lets not go there.

And yeah I was thinking of writing something about changing the world. But am too lazy so that has to wait. Baby steps!

Watching the world burn!

I was never the guy who looked around the world and tried to understand what is going on. The reason for this being that I was never the guy in the news. It wasn't even anybody I was remotely acquainted with. But that luxury didn't last forever, and it made me look around. "Search for meaning" or "make sense of it all" as they say. I am not saying I put in much effort to do so, but even to my ignorant self everything seems illogical (although this might be self-explanatory).

The obvious absence of optimality in the schemes of killing innocent people is apparent by the vague goals of the schemes. I mean other than the very common "spread terror" and "send a message", I don't see what else they accomplish other than obtain the brunt of public hatred and bad faith of people in power (this doesn't mean that they actually care, but do it just for the sake of it because everybody wants to look good; I don't mean to say not caring is bad, I am not judge of that, I am just saying that lot of times people do/say stuff they are supposed to do/say, but actually don't care about it). I am not sure where I am going with this but I can't understand what is the agenda of terrorism. However, if a "powerful" country did what they do, it would just be the protection of independence (read Israel and China). But these countries do seem to have agenda - it amounts to land = money = power = etc and at times just suppression of opposition. I was just wondering if terrorism will be called anything else if they got themselves a more concrete agenda than "freedom of holy land" and "punishment to innocent people just because they have been wronged". I mean they must want something. They don't want to spend their whole lives fighting (although the futility of the point is apparent in the fact that the leaders are the people who actually don't do the dirty work and live in luxury, equivalent to leaders of any country using its military forces). They must want something - money, land, what. Or is there hidden agenda - population control, and they are doing a favor to the world?

Lot of things that I have said here lacks a lot of general knowledge and information and I am just a bystander standing really far away, and although I might be in someway affected by all this, I wouldn't know about it until it hits me in my face.

Come to think of it, with the same argument, I can say that the spending of millions of dollars for running a huge collider to understand the origin of mass and sending a huge telescope to figure out the origin of the universe is equally pointless. Or huge build up and the eventual victory and celebrations of the first African-American president of the United States. It is probably because I am an alien here, but I don't understand why this is considered a great leap in democracy.

But a little thought makes us realize that we do not always need to look big issues or events to understand that the lack of logic in human action. I have heard of people living their lives as per some great quote by some great person. I mean how do you understand anything by applying something someone said thinking god-knows what. This doesn't mean the quote is not artistically great (and I can't be any judge of that either), it is just that it was about some other person. What I feel is that we try to justify what we do by these things. It is not the reason, rather the justification. We have already made the decision, we just want to look good to others, so we compare ourselves to somebody whom most think of as great. But like history, the greatness of something or someone depends on who is talking about it (read whoever in currently powerful).

Talking of the way we make decisions, I feel our decisions are generally locally optimal (not necessarily temporally, rather on the number of people being affected). Religion, as I see it, is just the same thing, but with some people spending time to find a global optimum. I am not saying that any religion is more optimal than other or that they have been able to obtain the global optimum.

But if I am asked if I would like to change something, I would say no, but that is mostly because of my lack of knowledge, not because of the non-existence of anything better. What I feel is that the world as a whole is trying to find a global optimum and these perturbations happening all around are implicitly intended towards that. What we need is a guide for the world, analogous to the gradients in any optimization problem. But on the other hand, if we reach a global optimum, what next?