Why should you control your desires and emotions

When I think about human mind there are two separate sets of aspects that I am interested in. One set concerns thoughts and related process that are within your conscious control and the other is the set of emotions and desires that are not normally within your conscious control. My hypothesis is that a person will be able to lead a happier and more successful life if the conscious/thinking part of his mind is in control over all his thoughts, emotions and desires. Let us see.

There is a small ambiguity here in that I am taking about a "you" and a "your mind" here. The "you" I am going to talk about will represent the part of your mind that is concerned with the first set mentioned above. It might look funny because under this notation "you" is a subset of "your mind". Leaving aside the play of words let us take a look at the issue I would like to discuss.

Any discussion on mind and its processes would inevitably touch a lot of different areas that I am not very clear about and these are discussions primarily to get my ideas clear on the subject. There are several interesting related questions like What is mind? What is matter? How is mind related to brain? What defines "I"? Is "I" different from "my mind"? How do you define consciousness? What is ultimate happiness? What is the objective of life? - that are still not very clear to me. However I think the topic under discussion is more related to practical aspects of getting in control over your emotions and desires than the epistemological aspects of these questions.

Every person has both sets of processes within his mind. Processes that are within his conscious control and processes that are not. Any thought or action resulting from a thought where the thinking part of his mind dictates the thought or action and where the person is fully conscious of the thought or action constitutes the first set of process.

Let us look at a simple example for a process that is within a persons control. Consider myself typing this article. My mind is framing the sentences that I am going to write and then this thought invokes the necessary mechanical processes in my hand to get it into typing. This is a process that is within my control. I have to decide to think about the next sentence and then I have to think about the ways of phrasing the idea into a good sentence. Once the sentence is formed I will to have my fingers type them in. These are processes controlled consciously by the thinking organ that my mind is.

There is now a second set of processes in human mind that are not quite within the conscious control of the thinking organ. Simple examples would be emotions like sadness, anger, happiness. Desires form another class of processes in human mind that act as root causes for further thoughts, emotions and actions. Habits, memories, recollections etc are another classes where the conscious being does not really play a role.

Why did we try to classify these processes as those that are within the control of your conscious being and those that are not? The objective is to find a way for a person to be more in conscious control over his life, his actions, his thoughts, his emotions and his desires. Why does he have to be more in control? Again, to be more in control over one's life will give the person an ability to chart out a fairly predictable life and allows him to increase the probability of him achieving his goals in life.

So the premise on which we are going to build the discussion is that people would be able to increase the probability of achieving their goals in life (and that they would have goals in life) if they are able to control their actions. Yet another assumption is that achieving happiness in life is a common goal for every man and the goals in life mentioned above includes this common goal also.

All of our physical actions are dictated by our mind - either consciously or not consciously. I type - because I want to. I sit late - because I want to. I quit my job - because I wanted to. I sneeze automatically - because of an itch. My eyes well up automatically - when I become sad. I smile automatically - when I become happy. These are small examples of how our consciousness dictates our conscious actions while the rest of the mind outside of our consciousness dictates the remaining actions.

Whenever a person comes upon a situation where he has to take some action there would be two different forces working in his mind. One would be the thinking conscious part of his mind and the other would be the part constituted by his emotions, desires and memories. The stronger of these two parts would take control over the situation and biases the decision making. A person who has more control for his conscious mind would take conscious decisions whereas the opposite kind would take more impulsive/habit oriented decisions.

If our actions are controlled by our consciousness then we can base these actions on a logical framework where we can weigh the causes and effects and decide for or against taking the action. If instead our actions are not controlled by our consciousness then they will not be based on a logical framework, rather they would be based on habits and impulses and their root causes would be emotions, desires and memories and they may or may not align with the rational choice under the given circumstances.

A rational action is the optimal action taken after analyzing the pros and cons of the possible alternatives. If we were to assume a generally applicable rational framework then all rational actions should lead to optimal solutions given the situations, issues and criteria. This would mean that such an action would be superior or at least of equal quality to an action based out on habits or impulses. This should mean that rational actions should be better than the latter set based on emotions, desires and memories.

A person who is more in control over his desires and emotions would be able to rein in these aspects of his mind and allow his reasoning to take charge and make decisions for or against possible actions. This would make sure that the percentage of impulsive actions would be fewer and the person would behave according to the rational framework mentioned above.

I don't think it will be possible for a person to bring the whole domain of his mind into his complete consciousness, but as the percentage of actions under his conscious control increases the person would start to act more rationally than otherwise. If people were to start taking actions rationally as discussed above and if we are to assume a generally applicable rational framework, then, a lot of problems faced by the human race like communal tensions, religious conflicts, international conflicts and most importantly general crime would start to diminish.

When we look at a more personal level, rational actions should allow the person to be more efficient in whatever he is doing. As was mentioned above it would also increase the probability of success in the endeavors since the actions are more tuned towards the outcome than otherwise.

We have looked at a cause perspective to see why controlling desires and emotions are beneficial. It can be shown that this control would be good from a result perspective also.

Irrespective of how much you control your own actions there would still be too many un-controllable external factors that will decide the final outcome of your individual action or the outcome of a circumstance. Now if you do not have control over your emotions then you will end up being depressed when circumstances turn bad or when actions don't lead to successes. There is also a corollary i.e. you will not be ecstatic when circumstances turn good or when actions lead to successes. Now by the elimination of ups and downs you will effectively increase your average productivity by increasing predictability.

I should however warn that a total control over emotions are desires would lead to a mechanistic world. Now emotions and desires are what makes humans humans. Without them we would just be machines. Emotions and desires give the flavor to life that has made the world what it is now. Since a total elimination of desires and emotions is practically outside of the reach of humanity we really don't have to worry about such a scenario

Rather, given the advantage of being able to solve some of the most acrid problems faced by humanity this is something that most people should strive to achieve. Moreover, being in control over your emotions and desires would also mean that you can decide whether to yield to an emotion or desire according to your need. So you could decide to be happy (or for that matter be in any positive emotional state like passion, affection) whenever you want and wherever you want.

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How to help your business connections?

One of the most important resources in business is the number of useful or potentially useful contacts that a person has. Business is all about making money and this might sound harsh. There is no point in having a lot of contacts if you have not been able to or will not be able to gain any advantage in your business by having these many contacts. Business is a different game than a regular employed job. Since you would like to make most out of your contacts you should also in turn try to help your business contacts in whatever way you can. This is the only way a good business networking system can be built. A person running a regular job, as part of his employment, probably would not require any kind of help from anybody else, other than those who have already been assigned to help them. And for those who have been assigned to help them it would be their responsibility to help the person whom they have been assigned to help. The person who is being helped can request/order the person who is helping him/her to help him/her. Simple isn't it. Unless the person is extremely selfless or totally foolish he/she would not (and should not) do things that he/she is supposed to do. So everything is supposed to be run like clockwork.

Additionally an employed person does not need any help in his/her work (other than perhaps when looking for new jobs and some marketing help if he/she is into marketing) from his set of friends and relatives. Even if they wanted to they would not be able to help him/her too much since things are mostly defined and predictable(more often than not) in a regular employment.

However in business there is a small difference. A business owner would be dealing with potential customers all across and all throughout his operations. He/She would be competing against a lot of other players in the market and would be able to use any and all help he/she can get from his/her friends and relatives. Unlike in the previous scenario, a person willing to help would probably be able to massively impact the success or failure of the businessperson.

Now here is the slightly tricky issue. Most of the regular employed friends/relatives of a businessperson would not have any clue about how to help a businessperson. They would always have been employed people and would probably have never needed any professional help from any of their non-co-worker friends and their relatives. They will very likely not understand the position the businessperson would be in and in most cases would not lift their little finger to help the businessperson in any way. This would apply even if the friend/relative sincerely wants the businessperson to succeed and thrive.

At the same time a businessperson would understand the position another businessperson would be in and would gladly lend a helping hand under the unwritten condition/assumption that the other businessperson would help him in a similar scenario. By doing this they would not only help their friend but in turn would be helping themselves in the future indirectly through a return favor.

Each of these businesspersons would know that the other would come to some help in the future or that they would prove to be useful to the other in the future and would therefore not hesitate to ask each other for help and would normally get help when asked for. This is the foundational principle behind business networking. You build more business connections so that these connections would prove to be useful at some time in the future. Effectively you invest in building your business network.

I can give a perfect example of how a simple good word about a businessperson could possibly help the businessperson. In the beginning of this financial year I had written a post on Zyxware Website thanking all the service providers of Zyxware who had rendered us valuable service during the last two years. One of the people whom I had thanked was a DTP center near us. A professor in the US who was searching for somebody in Trivandrum to do his DTP works came across our post and this resulted in him giving regular work to the DTP center. In yet another case another person who was looking for places to get visiting cards done came across the post and got in touch with our service provider and gave him his work.

Now let us come back to the friends and relatives of the businessperson. The probability of a businessperson proving to be as useful for his friends and relatives as for other businesspersons is relatively very low. This is because his/her (non-businessperson) friends and relatives would be normal employed people and they would normally not need any help from the businessperson. If the businessperson asks for help he/she would effectively be soliciting a transaction where he/she would most probably remain a debtor to another person. In my opinion no self-respecting businessperson [with a reasonably big ego :)] would want to do this and put himself/herself in such a position.

One of the easiest ways in which people can help businesspersons whom they would like to help is to put in a good word or two to other people they know and to possible customers of the businessperson. This might sound trivial but the impact could be statistically explained as highly significant. It has already been proven and well accepted that word-of-mouth marketing is the best marketing strategy. Now to put some numbers to the claim let us consider the following example :-

Suppose a businessperson has 200 friends and relatives, then of these 50% (by a conservative estimate) would want him/her to succeed in her life. Now if an average person has 100 contacts and if the 100 people who wants his/her businessperson friend to succeed tells half of the people they know about this businessperson friend then this word-of-mouth marketing would easily have reached 5000 people. Yes there would be intersections between the sets of contacts but this example should convey the general idea.

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People without Vision Perish

My idea of a company I would like to work for is what I have been trying to materialize through Zyxware. A company which would give its employees a lot of freedom and flexibility in what they do and when they do; a company where people would have infinite potential for growth; a company where people could have all the opportunities to learn whatever they wanted to learn; a company where people would have the freedom to fit their abilities to the opportunities available; a company where capability would be rewarded more than anything else; a company where friends work together for the heck of it; a company where working is fun; a company where employees share the profits.

Since inception we have hired a total of 15 people at Zyxware. Of these 6 have already left the company. In spite of my best efforts, which have been quite aligned with my vision described above, people have left the company. I am neither angry nor sad nor depressed that these people have left the company. Even though I had mentioned about a 2 year bond at the time of signing up these people I had not actually made them sign an agreement for the bond. The reason was simple. If I cannot hold a person in the company just with the vision, the work ethics, the environment and the actual work involved, then there is no point in holding them back with a bond.

Working for a small company is a risky proposition. The only way the risk can be mitigated is to work for the quick growth of the company. The company has been growing quite steadily in terms of market reach, internal capabilities, internal processes, brand value, brand recognition, generation of opportunities. Working for a small company is like digging an oil well. You have to work really hard with little or no returns on your effort until you strike oil. You wouldn't know when you are going to strike oil and once it does it would take only very little effort to get the oil out. The faster you dig the earlier you strike oil. If you quit before you strike oil, it would be tragic if you were only inches from the oil when you quit.

I am very confident about my vision and the possibilities of Zyxware. I know that it is just going to be a matter of time before we strike oil. It is one thing to dream about something and it is quite something else to make another person dream the same thing. I have been trying very hard to infuse this into the employees of Zyxware. I know that I have succeeded partially with this (only partially, as suggested by the attrition). One particular factor that I have identified as a common reason for employees (in most of the cases) leaving the company was the immense pressure from the families and friends of the people who have quit because they had no clue about the vision behind the company nor the prospects of making money in the Internet domain.

I am very confident about my oratorial abilities and I have seen sparks of excitement whenever I had shared my vision with my team. However from the attrition rate I can see that this vision has not quite managed to percolate in any level to their parents or friends. It is sad that even in circa 2008 people in Kerala make collective decisions about careers even in the case of people as old as 28. Again it should be noted that nobody is truly fully not responsible for their decisions. Friends and family can only influence decision making. Decisions have to be ultimately made by the people themselves. This again points to another peculiarity of Kerala culture. Most people are easily influenced and most people do not have solid convictions or opinions on their own.

There is a verse in The Bible that goes "People without vision perish". This is what I have to say to the youth of today. You have to have a vision and then follow your vision with your passion. You would already have increased your chances of phenomenal success, several fold by this single point of action itself. Life is not just about the mean, it is also about the extremes, because without the extremes the mean would have been something else. It is always better to be a leader than to be a follower. But then you will always need followers for leaders to exist. So we need both leaders and followers. Those of you who think that you should be leaders should try their hand at it and those of you who think that they are not suited to be leaders they should rather not and just be good followers.

I am not at all dejected by the fact that these people have quit the company. I hope that once the company gains a little more brand recognition, the possibility of grand success would reach the family and friends of my employees and in turn bias the decision making in the company's favor rather than against it.

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Can we remove evil from the world

I was a volunteer at the First GNU/Linux Install Fest in Kerala (first publicly held). The event was a lot of fun and we had a lot of technical discussions. One of my discussions with a volunteer diverted and ended up on a discussion about evil in the society. I am sharing the relevant parts and some of my related thoughts and questions here. We could not discuss much because of the busy schedule at the meet but it had set off a few trains of thought. This is still an idea in the works and this is probably going to be a lot of questions, if not all, than a lot of answers. Also this is probably going to be highly incoherent as some of the chains of ideas were widely separated.

I started Zyxware with a vision to build a business that itself will be able to drive the change I wished to see in the world and also to get me to a position where I would have the financial and operative base required to set off on my own towards this ideal. I am making a few assumptions as foundations for this vision. One is the existence of 'good' and 'bad' and the possibility of a positive change from good and bad. Two is that I would be able to distinguish between them and do what I think is good.

But is there something called an absolute good or an absolute evil? For example can killing a man be called an absolute evil? What if he himself was on a killing spree using a machine gun in a crowded street? Would it then become an absolute good?

For actions where the consequences are not directly evident, how do you know what is good and what is bad? For example, Is giving money to a poor man good? Wouldn't it have been better to invest the money for his children's education?

When you have alternative choices for an action, can we really classify the actions as good and bad? For example, Is distributing a given amount of money to build houses in a village better or worse than using the same amount of money to build a school in the same village? Is giving money for a charitable cause like an orphanage better or worse than giving money for a rural development program?

Can we really know whether the macro and micro consequence of our actions and decisions to be able to classify them or even attempt to classify them? Example - Have the invention of computers made human life better? Do we even know that our lives have become better? Is living longer better than living a shorter life?

What if something that is good for me is not good for others? Would it be good or bad? Say if we take democracy as a means to solve this problem and define that it would be good if it is good for the most number of people, then would it be good if it was good for me and not good for just one another person? What if it was very good for one person and slightly bad for another person?

Humans are not all rational and hence some of them will always do irrational things. So some of them will do evil things. But is evil always irrational? Can't evil be rational? Can it be? People are not all identical. They will perform different actions under identical situations. So there will be variabilities in life. Some of these variations would be what one could classify as 'not good' as there would be some variations that could be classifed as 'good' which have to be different from the 'not good' in some aspects. So there will always be evil.

Some people derive satisfaction in fighting the so called evil. If mankind comes to a stage where all the currently defined evils have been elimated what will happen to such people? What will these people do? They will probably then define something else as evil and then fight against that.

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Bending rules without breaking them

A lot of road widening has been happening in Trivandrum city during the last two years. Shops and commercial establishments that existed close to the original road boundary had to pay with their spaces. Some lost their shops completely while some lost them partially. Corporation of Trivandrum has strict rules when it comes to modifying existing buildings or building new ones. But quite a lot of the shops and establishments wriggled out of these regulations. One of the most frustrating aspect about city roads is the inevitable traffic congestion that you come across frequently. One simple and effective solution is to widen the roads. Building a wide road across a barren land is easy but widening an existing one right through the heart of a city is tough. It is tough because of the building infrastructure present on the edges of the existing roads.

It is not just tough but it is very expensive too. The Government has to pay a compensation for the part/whole of the buildings demolished as part of the road widening. It also has to pay for the land acquired back from the public. To reduce future expenses and to facilitate easier widening of the roads in the future there is a regulation that says that any new construction has to be at least 5 meters from the edge of the new road. This leaves scope for one more widening exercise in the future without any demolishing.

Road widening is highly beneficial for the public since it reduces traffic congestions, increases parking spaces, provide an opportunity to build bigger and better building infrastructure near the roads. It must be mentioned that the rejuvenation of the 'roadscape' is soothing for the eyes too as the facade of most of the buildings along the roads changes because of the demolishing and reconstruction.

As with any positive action there are some negative consequences for this road widening exercise also. Shops and commercial establishments that were close to the old roads were at the receiving ends in this case. Where ever shops lost parts of their old buildings they had to rebuild. Quite a lot of these commercial buildings were pretty old and any kind of restructuring were out of the question. So the only option available to the old shops was to demolish and build ground up.

Where ever the buildings had enough spare land available for them, they demolished the complete old structure and built their new buildings adhering to the 5m clearance rule. In almost all such cases the new buildings were far bigger and far better than the old buildings. Building these new structures provided the owners and opportunity to upgrade their infrastructure and hence open up the possibility of larger revenues.

Things were bleaker for a second category of building owners who did not have any spare land available for building a new building while adhering to the 5m clearance rule. In some cases the 5m clearance would have completely eliminated the possibility of building any viable commercial structure at all. Being highly resourceful and trained in the art of bending rules these people figured out a work around for this problem.

Corporation rules allow for restructuring and modifying an existing building without having to meet the 5m clearance rule. So they could avoid having to fulfill the 5m clearance regulation by demolishing just enough to give to the Government whatever is required for the new road and then walling up the damage and rebuilding the facade. But there arose a new problem here. The old structures did not allow for massive reworking. Additionally if they did just this they would have forgone an opportunity to increase the rentable area by building multiple storeys.

Most of the buildings of the latter category were very old single storied tiled buildings which did not provide the option of adding a storey or two to the building. To overcome this problem without breaking any rules the building owners demolished their old building in parts while rebuilding a completely new structure capable enough to be multiple storeys in height within the old structure itself. At any point of time the work being done would only be a modification work as the building would have both old as well as new sections. Although by the time the complete work is done the structure would not just be completely new but also would be a totally different structure and with a far bigger rentable area.

Strictly speaking there is no violation of any rule in this process. But there is a violation of the sense of the law. By building very close to the new road the building owners hinder future growth, makes future growth more expensive and make it inconvenient for the public by not being able to provide parking areas. There is also an aspect of unfairness in this breach. The situation is unfair to the people who build new buildings by taking unfair advantage in terms of getting more buildable area. It is also unfair to the general public as it increase a cost in the system through a 'violation' of a law.

Some cases where the building owner is the business owner itself or where an adherence to the 5m clearance would have totally eliminated the possibility of any building at all, might fall on the border of fairness and unfairness. What right has the society to deny a man of his current livelihood for the sake of its possible future growth. Usually if such businesses lose their commercial space it might become practically impossible to find a similarly convenient location and re-establish their business at the new location.

It would have been far better if the government had an option open for the building owners to violate the 5m rule at the risk of not getting paid for their buildings when they get demolished for future road widening. It would also have been nice if the government promoted consolidation of infrastructure during road widening exercises to increase the efficiency of the utilization of the land. If the incentive for consolidation is good enough then people could be lead to doing that without violating the law or the sense of the law.

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Retailers unite against big retailers

Last week there was a state-wide protest organized by the association of small retailers and traders of Kerala. The protest was against the entrance of big retailers like Reliance and Bharti into Kerala. The irony of the situation is that you have small capitalists joining hands together to fight bigger capitalists in a fight seemingly to protect the consumers. First let me take a look at some of the major issues raised by the protesters. A major concern voiced was that the foray of national and multinational corporates into the retail sector is going to cause loss of income, and loss of jobs of people owning and employed in the small and medium retail industry. Another point was that the big retailers would lead to a collapse of the small and medium retail industry, leading to monopolies and ultimately increased prices of everyday commodities. A third issue predicted was that once monopolies were established the farmers, manufacturers and producers would be at the mercy of the retail giants and hence they would be exploited.

Some of the underlying assumptions are a) Retailers and Traders have a right to be retailers and traders and nobody can deny their rights b) The association of retailers and traders are not just fighting for themselves but also for the vast majority of people ie the consumers, c) The existing system as such is very fair to the producers - farmers and manufacturers - in terms of giving them just shares of the retail prices of the products. d) Big retailers are bad e) Multinationals in retail industry are very very bad, f) The retailers and traders form a significant percentage of the population

Before we dissect these assumptions and claims let us take a look at the economics behind this. In any economy people generate revenue by the transfer of goods and services. Correspondingly you have the retail sector and the services sector. The retail sector includes not just the retail shops that sells us the goods we buy, but also the network of systems that exist to maintain these retail stores. Similarly the services sector has the service delivery framework.

From the point of manufacture, or cultivation as the case may be, of items bound for retail trade, to the point of the retailer selling the product to the consumer, there are usually several intermediate processes and people involved in these processes. Some of these would be wholesale purchasers, regional collection centers, transporters, distributors, sub-distributors. There would also normally be several layers of middlemen between these steps.

As the goods move along these chains of people the cost increases at each level until it finally reaches the customer. By the time the product reaches the customer the cost of the product could even have gone up a few hundred percentage points over the original price at which it was bought from the farmer. There would also be other intangible value additions like advertisements, insurances etc along the way which contributes further to the final selling price of the product.

However the real value of the product for the end consumer would not have changed as much as the increase in the cost of the product. Now we could deduce three different things from this. One is that the intermediary steps from the point of production to the final sale are very inefficient in terms of value addition. The second is that if the efficiency of these processes were higher the cost of the product for the consumer would become cheaper. Finally if some of the intermediary steps were avoided and the final price being kept the same a higher price could be paid to the manufacturer or the farmer.

Retailers exist to trade, and trade they do, and their motive is to make profits. The profits that are expected by the retailers would be in proportion to their investment rather than to their livelihood expenses. This rule would apply for all but the small and samll-medium retailers. The right to earn ones livelihood is a universal right, but the means to do that is not a right. A trader has a right to earn his living through his trade. But, the moment the returns are higher than his cost of livelihood his trade will not be covered under the right.

A retailer or a trader sells at a price which will yield him the profits that he is expecting out of his business. The price would also be regulated by the prices of the product at the other retailers also governed by a similar mechanism. A reasonably big percentage of the final price of the product goes towards the overheads in the retailing process discussed above. A percentage would go to the farmer also. This percentage that goes to the farmer and the small percentage that corresponds to the small value addition to the product are the components of the price that is effectively used to maintain productive labor. The rest is used to maintain unproductive labor working in inefficient processes.

A big retail chain in the market would be operating under a different framework. The entire chain of processes from the point of procurement from the original producer to the point of sale to the end consumer would normally be operated directly or supervised directly by the big retailer. This would introduce a massive efficiency increase in the process. Also the advantage of size gives another efficiency increase in terms of the unavoidable overheads. Consequently the big retailer would be able to make two changes - one is to reduce the final selling price for the consumer and the second is to increase the purchase price from the producer.

By giving better prices to the producers big retailers promote productive utilization of labor and by increased efficiency in the retail process the deviation of capital for unproductive labor is minimized. Additionally by reducing the prices for the end customers they are provided with excess capital than if it had been not so. This excess capital could lead to higher purchasing powers and in turn better average quality of living.

Both of the above changes provide the necessary financial incentive for the producer and the consumers to embrace the big retailers. This could result in a collapse of the existing retail framework. Now this is a potential cause for a problem as it could lead to monopolies at the purchase level and at the sale level. If monopolies are established both the above incentives can be taken out or even reversed by the big retailers. However big retailers can not exist everywhere. They will establish outlets only where it would be viable to set up one in terms of the market reach and the purchasing powers of the locality. So there would be big retailers in areas where the population sizes justify the existence of the retail outlets.

The emergence of monopolies in localities where the big retailers exist is a potential risk. This risk however could easily be mitigated by good ant-monopoly laws and regulations. Additionally the monopolies could only emerge even if it does emerge and in cases where it does, local trade establishments can reemerge to bring down the prices. So even in such cases the prices of the products would be cheaper than from an average retailer and the purchasing price given to a farmer would be higher than from an average retailer. If it had not been so the small and medium retail segments could re-emerge to neutralize the situation. So it would be in the interest of the big retailers to maintain the prices at such quasi-monopolistic levels.

Finally it might be good to take a look at the numbers. In an average society the percentage of retailers and traders would be around 10-15% of the population. Even including all the support framework it cannot be more than 15-20% of the population. In the case of big retailers this number would be reduced but would still have to remain significant. This reduction however will have to result in an increase in unemployment. The excess capital saved in the system by a reduction in the costs of retail products and a higher purchasing power for the producers would result in an availability of capital for non-retail use and that would mean the service industry. So this could result in an increased growth of the service industry where the lost jobs in the retail industry could be absorbed easily.

Having said so I still have reservations about multinationals entering local retail industry as it would result in a biased cash flow mechanism in the system in the short term and the Indian economy may not be mature enough to be able to afford that. Also the emergence of Indian big retailers is going to cause a short term aberration in the equilibrium in the system leading to undesirable results like the job loss mentioned above. However in the long run both national and multinational retailers are going to be helpful for the system. Efficiency increases has to be good in itself.

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Everything is relative including the colors we see

We depend a lot on our perceptions, how we see things, how we hear sounds, how we feel things, how we smell things, how we taste things. More often than not people take these senses for granted and never for once think beyond the senses perceived to the act of perceiving. I recently happened to think a lot about one of these perceptions - sight. These were afterthoughts of a discussion with a person I met during a train journey recently.

When we see something we don't normally think beyond the thing that was seen. We don't think about the physical process that happens when we see the object we are looking at. We don't realize that light waves reflected (or originating) from the object travels through the air and passes through our eyes and falls on our retina. The light that falls on the retina triggers signals on the optic nerve which in turn causes the sensation of sight once these signal reach the brain.

Television engineering was one of my favorite subjects during my undergraduate engineering course. It was very interesting because I was always fascinated about how a television works - how the images are translated to pictures in the television camera and how these pictures are transmitted to the television set where these are converted back to images.

Once the course was over the operation of a television looked simple and plain to me. However I still cannot fathom how human eyes work. Simple questions like the number of pixel elements on the retina and the way the signals are transmitted to the brain. Research has been going on to decode the signals that get transmitted through the optic nerve. I am sure that the person who finally decodes the signals correctly is going to get a Nobel price as the discovery is going to eradicate blindness in humans.

Decoding the physical process of the generation and transmission of signals on the optic nerve is probably going to happen soon; but what about the decoding the process in the brain that gives the perception of sight? What is sight? It is so complex that I cannot even begin to imagine a physical explanation for the perception of sight. This is somewhat similar to the discussion I had on the form of human memory. What happens when the electric signals from the optic nerve reaches the brain?

Now let me come to the point I would like to highlight. How do you define a color? For example how do you define Red? How many primary colors are there? What do you mean by a primary color? What is infrared? What is ultraviolet?

Let me try to answer these questions one by one. A color, for example red, is defined as something we see when an electromagnetic wave of a particular range of wavelength(625–750 nm) falls on our retina. There are three primary colors - Red, Green and Blue. All other colors can be generated as a combination of these three different colors in different proportions and different intensities. Infrared is defined as the range above the wavelength of red. Ultraviolet is defined as the electromagnetic spectrum below the wavelength of violet.

These answers look simple and looks almost like taken out of a Physics text book. There is one thing that we are taking for granted here. An electromagnetic wave does not have a property called a color. There is no such thing as color. It is just a perception that we get when electromagnetic radiation of a given wavelength falls on our retina. If by some quirk of nature, my retina response curve gets reversed and starts generating the same signal that your retina generates corresponding to light of 650nm and 380nm respectively, then I would start seeing red when you see violet.

There is a natural explanation for why we see the colors we see for the range of frequencies as defined by the visible spectrum. These are the frequencies of light that get reflected by the elements and compounds and mixtures that we see in nature around us. In other words, the rest of the spectrum (mostly) gets absorbed by these physical objects.

If we were on a planet that had a different set of elements (that would require a different set of sub-atomic particles and different forces acting on these particles than those that we already know) with a different set of absorption spectra then we would probably have seen the same colors(there is no need to think otherwise) but for different frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Colors exist only in our brains. Also for a given wavelength of light the colors that each of us sees are unique to ourselves since the physical response of my retina is for almost for sure different from the response of your retina. You will never see the red color that I see and my red color is always going to be my own personal red color.

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Is there an absolute fair price?

I had written once about my thoughts about fair margins while pricing products. I have been trying to get the concept clearer in my head but have not quite been able to do so till now. A few days back I had a rather productive discussion with a couple of my friends regarding the same issue. Productive because it brought a lot more clarity to my thought process regarding this issue.

When you talk about absolute fair price you are making a fundamental assumption that there is a price that can be called an absolute fair price. The definition of such an absolute fair price would be a price that is independent of the actual buyer or seller. Such a price will be the minimum at which the seller should have to sell and the maximum at which the buyer have to buy and would be fair to both the buyer and the seller.

In a perfect market where there is perfect information and market forces are working perfectly, competition and awareness of the customers will ensure that prices will be fair to both the buyer and the seller. Markets are seldom perfect, perfect information is only a myth and hence the above scenario never occurs in real life (at least it wont happen for all the customers at all the places at all times in the given market).

I am more interested in an answer to the question under imperfect market conditions where there is no perfect information and where customers are not fully knowledgeable about the market. The reason why the answer to this question is interesting is that it will give a solid basis of estimation of prices under any market condition and for any customer.

Before I proceed further, I would like to bring to your attention a few extreme scenarios. Consider a situation where a billionaire is convicted by the court and is going to be hanged. His death penalty will be canceled if he can write a letter to the President asking for amnesty. He does not have a pen. He has access only to a single store and the storekeeper, seeing his situation, sells him a 1 dollar pen for 100 Million dollars. The man gladly pays the amount and buys the pen to write his petition. Here there is no competition, the buyer does not have any choices and the seller sells at a price that the buyer can afford to buy.

Now consider another situation where a man walks into a store to buy a pencil. The storekeeper convinces the man to buy a pen, that is available online for 10 Rupees, for 100 Rupees. Here there is competition, the buyer has choices but he is not aware of his choices and is tricked into buying something at a far higher price than if he had been aware of the other cheaper options.

Pricing, as defined as a function of marketing, is an exercise of profit maximization. Prices are fixed between the total costs incurred by the seller and the maximum affordable price for the buyer. The exact value will depend on the market conditions including competition and consumer awareness. This is how it should work under the Capitalistic model of economy.

Earlier I had come to a conclusion that pricing was to be fixed based on the minimum ROI that is still fair to the capitalist and the growth rate expected of the company. The minimum ROI should be the market rate of Interest for the capital as otherwise the capital invested could have been invested in another venture that would have yielded at least the market rates of interest.

Now the expected growth rate is a tricky question. What should be the expected growth rate? Can't the company grow more if the margins are higher? Yes it has to be conceded that high prices might deter growth but still there is that positive slope till the peak. Should the expected growth rate be equal to the growth rate of the country? But then wouldn't a higher growth rate be better for the country?

I could just be a traditional capitalist and play with the prices according to how the rest of the market behaves. For example I could charge a person higher accordingly as he can afford to pay more or accordingly as he is less aware. I could charge as much as my competitors are charging. I could make a killing in areas where there is no competition.

But the socialist in me is pulling me back from doing that. I cannot give two rates to two different people based on their circumstances or their knowledge. I can not bring myself to give two answers to the same question - "What is the price of this product?". When I had stated my intentions of starting a company, people who knew me told I wouldn't survive as a businessman without engaging in malpractices. I said I will. Neither them nor me ever thought of this kind of predicament that I really have to face.

My take on the issue is that, prices should be determined by the costs involved and not the intended profits to be made and that the fair margin should just be a cost. So if we include a fair margin as a cost we have a solution to the problem. Price of the product equals the cost of the product (See also - True Cost of Things) + the Fair margin. Now if we have an equation or a method to find the fair price then we have a fair pricing strategy. But alas!, both the parameters - ie the true cost and the fair margins - are kind of difficult to find, as we have seen, and my pursuit still continues.

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Wishing your way to success

Yet another season of greetings have passed us by. I have been bombarded with new year wishes by SMS, orkut scraps and email messages. With the availability of simple and fast systems such as these the effort required to send a greeting has been brought down to almost nothing. But have you for a moment stopped and thought about the objective (if any) behind wishing somebody else and actual results (if any) of such wishes?

If wishes were to directly influence the possibility of whatever is being wished for, then the laws of probabilities would have to be redefined to handle these external biases. Events would happen or not happen based on the number of people wishing for that event. So it is quite rational to conclude that wishing does not directly influence the possibility of the outcome wished for. Otherwise I could have just stopped doing any work sit back and just start wishing for things I need or just ask a lot of people to wish me those things that I desire.

If that is not the case then what is the effect of wishing? When somebody wishes another person luck or wishes him good, the recipient gets a positive boost to his state of mind and this should in turn motivate him to work harder to get what was wished for or to stop worrying about not getting what was wished for. These factors should effectively increase the probability of him/her getting what was being wished for.

A corollary would be when the person does not get any good wishes or when he gets cursed upon by others he would loose his morale and thereby decrease his chance of achieving the objective under consideration. A simple example would be where you have a higher probability of making a mistake about which you have been warned, which in turn had your mind thinking about the probability of your failure in the given task.

However there is a small catch here. Suppose the recipient is not really affected psychologically by the wishes then the dependency of the probability of success or failure on the wishes is removed. This might look as a negative impact but in fact this gives the person more control over the probability of success or failure in the task at hand. The moment the person identifies that it does not matter what others say and, that what matters is only how he/she performs, he/she can focus his/her energies and efforts on the task and in turn should be able to have a higher average control over the probabilities than otherwise.

So wishes and curses do matter if you allow them to do so and if otherwise they would not matter. In addition, you should not let them do so, to have a more predictable outcome for your tasks/events in your life or in other words to have a higher control over the probabilities of successes for your tasks.

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Does it matter how I dress?

I had an interesting debate with a friend of mine recently about why we need to take care in dressing up the way we do and whether it is essential at all to take that much care in our attire. The whole conversation started when I jokingly said that I am going to go the RMS way and grow a mustache and a beard.

In today's society people give a lot of importance to appearances. It is no longer about how neat we dress, but how costly we dress. This depressing tendency has pervaded even developing countries like India. Probably a consequence of the growth of a set of extremely rich trend setters or probably because of the increase in affordability of riches and luxuries.

People not only want to dress rich but also rate others on how they dress. Sometimes this results in funny ironies in the way people dress. In India, known for its high temperatures and humidities, senior IT professionals try to imitate their European and American counterparts and dress in formal suits. They do this because they do not want to be placed on a different tier when they interact with their counterparts previously mentioned. This happens only because there is a prevalent notion, most probably true, that people rate other people based on how they dress.

It is fun to notice how people treat you (on an average) when you walk into an office unshaved and when you walk in clean shaved. When you walk in clean shaved and well dressed people normally will treat you with more respect and more attention than when you walk in dishevelled. Of course this does not apply to cases where the people in the office know you well.

The above deduction will stand true when you meet people randomly in a social gathering or in a professional gathering. So it is as if there is a social mind set prevalent among most people that rate people high or low accordingly as their attire and appearances. There is a rational explanation of this mind set. On an average there is a good probability for a person taking care of his appearances take good care in grooming his capabilities as well.

There is another small theory that has to be considered alongside the above one. A man has only certain amount of time to dedicate for all his different tasks. Most people run at less than 100% efficiencies and they would be able to do justice to all of their tasks. However those who are running at close to their 100% efficiencies will have a problem. Any increase in time allocated for any of their activities will eat into the time available for other activities. Now all of the tasks performed by such people will not be contributing to their efficiencies. So theoretically he can cut down on the time on unproductive tasks to give more time on the productive tasks. This can be explained with a simple example as given below.

Suppose a person has a simple set of 4 tasks - Sleeping - 8 hrs, Dressing Up - 1 hr, Travelling - 2 hrs, Working - 13 hrs. Work is where he actually produces something of value. Now if his work is not affected by the way he dresses (sometimes it does as in the case of a marketing executive) the 1 hr he spends on dressing up is a total waste as far is productivity is concerned. Same is the case with traveling. If however he reduces the time he spends on sleeping and instead use that for working he will slowly start seeing a reduction in the actual productivity because of a lack of rest. Similarly for marketing executives, spending time on dressing might actually increase their productivities.

Again there is another scenario that is worth looking at. Suppose you are an IT professional who has an idea that you would like to present to a group of investors. Even if the only thing that the investors are going to look at is your idea, if you think that there is a slightly better chance of you landing a deal if you go in formal attire, you should.

Psychologists give another reason why one should dress well. This might not apply to those people who don't give a damn to the way they dress and totally unaffected by the way they dress irrespective of the group of people they are in the midst of. Dressing well usually gives a more confident feel to those people who are aware of the notion that other people will look at the way you dress (read it as most people - at least in Kerala). It is interesting in this context to note that the notion is less strong in developed countries like US and UK and more strong in countries like India.

It is basically a decision that you have to make regarding the way you dress. Ultimately what matters is how you feel and not how others feel. If you think you should, you should; if not, you shouldn't.

There are a couple of seemingly contradicting sayings that relate to appearances - "Do not judge a book by its cover" and "First impression is the best impression". The first one is the general rule for all people to follow and the second one is a conclusion given the fact that most people do not follow the first rule.

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Why should you save water?

You must have heard it umpteen times through your newspapers, tv channels, conservationist friends - Save Water. Have you ever thought why you should save water? I used to ask this question myself. If you put some thought into it you will understand the reasons why you should save water and this understanding will make you save water more effectively than the barrage of "Save Water" messages you see.

Water is one of the most abundant natural resources that we have. More than three quarters of the earth's surface is covered with water. Besides you can't just destroy water like that normally. You change it from one form to another and also cycles through different physical processes and biological processes. On an average the total available water content on planet earth remains almost constant.

However most of the water that we have on earth is not directly in potable form. Seawater is not, neither is water locked in marshes, swamps, salty lakes. So that leaves rivers, fresh-water lakes, ponds, wells and ground water table. Now for clarity of reasoning we can divide people into those who depend on public water supply systems (city and town dwellers) and those who depend on natural water sources directly.

Public water supply systems become necessary when people cannot practically get all the water they need on their own from nearby natural water sources. This happens when population densities rises and the local natural water bodies cannot sustain year long the water requirements of the people. So naturally this process happens in towns and cities where water is pumped from faraway and larger natural water bodies. Additionally this centralized distributions also opens the possibility of filtering and purifying the water at source and reduces the possibilities of water borne diseases. So, off late, this facility is being extended to rural areas as well.

Of the natural sources of water mentioned above, public distribution of water has to come from reasonably perennial sources and from where water can be drawn in volumes without causing too much of an imbalance in the ecosystem. So that leaves only large lakes and perennial rivers available as public water supply sources. More often than not these water bodies end up being reasonably far away from the city and it costs energy to pump the water to the city and to bring it to the homes of the inhabitants.

In a rural area where there is no public water supply, people normally depends on wells, ponds and to some extend rivers for their water supply needs. Wherever electricity is available it will be used to power pumps to draw and supply water to the homes. Also, both ponds and wells depend on ground water tables. So using water from these sources puts a pressure on the ground water table.

So we have seen two distinct reasons why we should save water
1) In both cases, where we use water from public water supply systems or directly from natural bodies, saving water will save the energy required to filter, purify and bring the water to the end user.
2) Saving water will reduce the pressure on the natural water bodies and will help in ensuring year round supply of water and also availability of water for agricultural purposes.
3) There is again a third and not so evident reason as to why we should save water. This applies only to towns and cities that depend on public water supply systems. All these systems depend on an underground network of pipes for distributing the water. The pipes only can supply a certain maximum quantity of water. If there are n users in that town/city and this maximum capacity is W liters per year, then a person using more than W/n liters of water per year will reduce the ability of other people in the same town/city to enjoy an equal amount of water as him. So saving water will help in equitable distribution of water in towns and cities. This is especially relevant in places where the topography of the land leads to unequal availability even under sub-maximal usage limits.

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Richard Stallman (RMS) talk at UC College Alwaye, Kerala

Richard Mathew Stallman aka RMS gave yet another of his brilliant lectures at UC College, Alwaye, Kerala. I was fortunate enough to be able attend the meeting. The last time he visited Kerala, I missed his talk and I did not want to miss it this time. As is usual with his talks, he talked about what is "Free", why should software be "Free", what is wrong if otherwise, about GNU and Linux and FSF and Linus Torvarlds. I am sure that somebody will post a transcript of the talk and a video of the talk online soon. I would however like to discuss more about my take on some of the points he addressed.

Before I proceed further I must confess that I subscribe fully to the philosophy behind FSF, GNU and GPL(all versions). I must do this first, lest I accidentally irritate and turn away a cursory reader who could also be a FSF fan(atic). I will list some of the points where I have slightly different opinions as compared with RMS and I am sure he would agree to my freedom to voice these opinions.

1. The freedom behind the software is more important than the software itself

Freedom is definitely important; but when it comes to matters of practicality and when there is no other alternative you have to be able to accept non-Free solutions to get your work done. Take, for example, the simple case of CAD software. I have been having this discussion with a few of my engineer friends, to make them to try out Free Software alternatives to the proprietary solutions that they already use. The sad truth of the matter is that, some of them had tried and all of them have failed. The specialized need of some of the tasks that they do, does not really help in the probability of one of the users of the task actually writing a Free Software version of the same software. In such cases, what can one do other than to use the proprietary system, and at the same time contribute efforts in building a Free Software that can do the same set of tasks.

2. Free Software should not include proprietary components at all

The issue raised particularly dealt with proprietary firmware and binary drivers that certain distributions of GNU/Linux use. It is true that all proprietary code and binaries have to be ultimately thrown out but if it comes to be the only way in which you can get a working system you should go ahead and use it, and at the same time push for opening up the proprietary systems, or creating free systems that can replace the proprietary systems. The only thing that a novice home user would have between him and his using GNU/Linux would probably be the non-availability of Open Source drivers for his hardware.

The freedom behind an open source driver would be the last thing he would have on his mind. If using a proprietary driver would help him switch to GNU/Linux why not? We can always make him switch to the Free version the moment it is available. One point that needs to be noted is that, the community should not give up on its efforts to create a Free version of the driver even if the proprietary version is made available for GNU/Linux. So the strategy here is simple - let the GNU/Linux market explode and then leverage on its size to call for opening up of proprietary drivers and for providing of GNU/Linux variants where they did not exist in the first place.

RMS uses an interesting reference to market forces in this scenario. Once people start using proprietary drivers in GNU/Linux systems it is possible that the demand for open drivers would wane and would not be as effective as it otherwise would have been. My counter argument would be that this lowering of demand would be negated by the much higher increase of the GNU/Linux market as a whole and consequently for the higher demand for the open drivers from the larger market.

3. RMS' opinion on non-GPL licenses and the "Open Source" Camp

RMS has been strongly voicing his opinion against non-GPL licenses and the "Open Source" initiative. In his opinion both play against the Freedom that the concept of Free Software highlights either directly or indirectly by helping those who are totally against the concept of Free Software. It is interesting to note here that the actual causal agent behind this is the same market force which he had used in the previous argument. Market forces and the demand for maximizing profit by business owners and share holders results very often in scenarios that do not strictly align with the concept of freedom as outlined at FSF's definition of free software.

More often than not, these forces work against the concept of freedom, and where money speaks market listens. Now that is not a good proposition. You have a philosophy which goes against (or looks to most people as something which goes against) the principles of profit maximization and you have the whole set of owners of capital (with very few exceptions) against such a philosophy. So how do you fight in such a situation. Simple. Use the old concept of divide and rule. When the enemy camp is strong, try to divide the camp and see if you can get some allies. This is exactly what the non-GPL and the Open Source camp is doing.

Bringing in more owners of capital to accept the less tougher option of Open Source first and more tougher of GPL later is much easier than getting them to accept GPL in the first place. So with increased numbers market will see the real value behind Free Software and slowly tilt in favor of Free Software as opposed to proprietary software. However the totally antagonistic approach that RMS is taking is not going to get a lot of supporters from the business owner set. Unless you penetrate that community there is no real hope of making significant impact in the user community.

Conclusion

Having said all this I hope that the highly honorably efforts of RMS and the FSF succeeds to their fullest possible expectations.

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Piracy is not fair, Neither is Monopoly

Microsoft recently went on an Anti-Piracy drive in Kerala. They have been following a multifaceted policy of learned ignorance, passive warnings and timed & throttled acts of aggression to tackle piracy and to push sales of licenses. I don't condone piracy, neither do I approve monopoly. I would like to explore more on the legality/fairness issues of piracy, monopoly and the relevance of FLOSS in this context.

Let me explain the adjectives used above; Learned ignorance - by allowing piracy to grow in the home user segment and thus use it to open and grow new markets; Passive warnings - by showing funny messages during upgradation or service pack installation; Timed - at reasonably predictable intervals; Throttled - they don't catch everybody.

Developing software is a business. The people employed in the business will have to be paid their due rewards. So software has to be sold and revenues generated from the sales. From this revenue, a share has to be used to pay the salaries, and the rest is rightfully for the owners take. Anybody using a software and not paying for it is effectively denying the right of the producer (the company and its employees) to get a return on their investment(of money and labor). So piracy is not fair. As simple as that.

Piracy is illegal by law in almost all countries. Piracy is equivalent to stealing software and is no different from stealing a bread from a store. Neither can be justified on the basis of the need of the situation. Not only is piracy unfair as discussed above, it is illegal and is not justifiable.

Although I agree theoretically with what is said on simplymalayalees forum, I have reservations about the way the argument is put forward. I run a software company and I agree that people will have to pay for the work done in creating the software. In a normal market when the traded volume of a given product goes up the cost of the product has to come down. It has not happened with Microsoft Windows. The cost has been recovered several times over. What we see here is the effects of the Monopoly Microsoft is enjoying in the market.

Again my opinion is not to legally fight the monopoly or to deny Microsoft the opportunity to make the profit but rather, concerned people should take necessary steps to invigorate the market by introducing alternative options. This is where alternative operating systems like GNU Linux and FreeBSD comes into the picture, and this is precisely what the Linux community is doing.

Microsoft has every right to make a business decision to not reduce the cost of their operating systems below what they are going for currently. If they had perfect competition (in fact any serious competition at all) there wouldn't have been a scenario where they wouldn't have to lower their prices at all. Prices would have been regulated on their own by the free market.

So that must mean that they enjoy some level of monopoly in the market. Microsoft has successfully managed to build their business. They built it so fast and so big that they effectively swamped out all, if any real competition existed, of their competition. Shouldn't they be allowed to reap the rewards of their efforts? Yes. But they should be punished if they had broken any laws of the land along the way.

But monopoly is never good for the market even though it might be very good for the monopolistic company. Monopoly gives the company total control over the prices without any bargaining power for the market. So what should the market do? Demand the monopolistic company to yield to their demands? The market has a much stronger weapon but it has not realized that till now. It is the power of demand. The market has been meekly yielding to the monopoly through cowardly acts of piracy where they promote the monopoly and effectively preventing any kind of competition building up in the market.

So if you feel that Microsoft is manipulating the market and exploiting it using monopoly then rather than complaining, and pirating, you should start using alternative options. As demand builds up for alternatives, companies will spring up to meet this demand and a more vibrant market scenario will appear. Already Linux companies are geared up to take up this challenge, but is the market willing to take the leap?

Gandhiji fought the British East India Company not by raiding their factories or stealing their coffers but by boycotting their products. This is the same strategy that people have to use to revitalize the Operating System market. As a concluding note, if you have the money and you would rather not bear the cost of uncertainty (in the time you have to wait until competition builds up) then you are totally free to go buy your Windows Operating System. Such an act would not be considered an act of cowardice or unfairness

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What is the purpose of your life?

Through the ages man has changed from a hunter-gatherer to the modern day specialized employee. In this process he has upgraded his needs and desires from the bare minimum necessities of prehistoric times to the ultramodern luxuries and fancies of the 21st century. You and me being part of this mad race have been doing this same thing and are destined to do this unless we stop and think. What am I really after? What is the purpose of my life?

A typical human life goes as follows - birth, childhood, schooling, college education, job, marriage, kids', rearing children, children's education, retirement, children's marriages, their kids, rearing grandchildren, death. This is a cycle that has been going on since the birth of mankind. But am I bound to do these things? What is it that I am after? Why should I follow this routine? What is the ultimate purpose of life around which these activities are intertwined?

Most people do not get time to think about these questions, being busy as they are in the various activities mentioned above or planning the various events mentioned above. Generally these activities and events themselves becomes the main objectives of their lives. Once that happens the relevance of the above questions vanishes for such a person.

So the process can be rewritten as follows. Going through childhood is not optional and I have to go through it. I have to have a good education because I have to have a good job. I have to have a good job to be able to support a family. I have to marry because I have to have a family. I have to have kids as that is what is expected when having a family. Then I have to prepare my kids to follow the same cycle I went through. In the meanwhile I have to progress in my career parallelly to take care of growing needs. Finally I retire from my job. Along the way my kids will have married and would have had kids of their own. I play my role in bringing them up. In the end I die.

Did I miss anything here? I am sorry, but I heard that man is different from animals. I don't really see how different we are from animals who follow almost the same general routine as above in their own ways. So what is the point? Isn't everything fine the way it is, as it is now? Why do you really want to have any other purpose other than the process discussed above?

Yes you are right you really don't need to have any other purpose but you should decide on your own that the above process is your purpose. People follow the above process not because they have embraced it as their ultimate purpose but because they have been taught to do so by generations of practice and has been embedded into the society as the default expected behavior.

People should at least think about what they want to do with their lives. Not everybody has to go outside the set boundaries, but those who think they can, and those who think they should, should. People bold enough to tread uncharted territories should. It is the efforts of such adventurers that have taken the world to what it is now. If people had just followed routines I would not be sitting here typing on my laptop but instead would have been hunting for my grubs in the wild.

Going outside the orthodox routines does not just mean breaking the conventional routines. It is about thinking and deciding about your course of action on your own rather than following a set pattern of actions. It would mean identifying and following your passion. It would mean setting and embracing your ideals. It would mean taking control over your life. It would mean defining your future.

So if you are still living a life defined and dictated by others, stop, think, decide, take control and march ahead. Your life would be happier, more meaningful and ultimately purposeful.

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An year since I turned vegetarian

It was exactly an year before today that I switched to vegetarianism. People who knew me were not entirely surprised given my liking for Gandhian principles but they kept on asking me as to why I did that. They put forth several possible reasons why I took that decision. I didn't say yes, neither did I say no. So why did I take that decision?

There are several reasons one can come out with for supporting vegetarianism. I can cite a few here. One plain and proven fact is that vegetarian foods are healthier than non-vegetarian foods. Vegetarian food is also much lighter on the digestive system and leads to much smoother digestive processes. It has been said that humans are more adapted to eat vegetarian food than non-vegetarian food. Interestingly vegetarian food is also much cheaper than non-vegetarian food.

There is also one not-so-obvious benefit to vegetarianism. Vegetarian foods exert much lesser pressure on the environment than non-vegetarian food. Pound for pound, calorie for calorie, vegetarian foods require much lesser area of cultivation, much lesser environmental resources than non-vegetarian food. The per acre output of vegetarian foods are much higher than that for non-vegetarian foods.

The pressure exerted by non-vegetarianism is not limited to land but also to aquatic ecosystems too. A news report that came out recently in the news papers indicated that human pressure on the biodiversity in the oceans through excessive fishing has brought several species of fish to irrecoverable levels.

Given a choice I would stick to this environmental pressure advantage of vegetarian foods as my favorite. But none of these were the real reason why I shifted to vegetarianism. Not that these did not affect my decision making. They did, but the one main reason was my abhorrence to smoking and drinking (alcohol).

Some of my friends have had taken to the habit of consuming alcohol, and some others smoking, some to pan, and some to combinations of these. I have always been a big opponent of both these habits. I have always fought against these habits because of the obvious reason of them being unhealthy and the not so obvious reason for my loathe to these because of the way these substances affect human psyche.

Alcohol consumption results in a decrease in a persons control over his rational self. Smoking results in a uncontrollable dependence on tobacco to maintain normal life and additionally to control the persons psychological sensations of sadness, happiness, fear etc. I feel that both these are acts of surrender of ones rational self. This is the aspect that I totally dislike about these habits.

Of course these habits also increases the probability of an earlier death to a person addicted or used to these habits. Earlier than it otherwise would have been if they had not been used to these habits. I have seen highly educated people take to these habits in spite of knowing this danger. I guess it is like mountaineering for these people. Mountaineering, like smoking and drinking, increases the probability of an earlier death, for the people engaged in that. Only difference would be that the moment you stop the hobby the probability vanishes while it doesn't for these habits.

It was during last December that I had another set of heated discussions with a few of my friends to persuade them to stop these habits. As usual I couldn't make them change their decisions. I realized then that, I probably did not really feel how these guys felt, having to stop something that they like, and, having no real reason to stop, other than the risk factor I mentioned before, which they had probably decided to accept.

This is where Gandhiji's principle of Satyagraha influenced my decision making. Gandhiji always took to renouncing things that he liked as a way of coercing his opponents into agreeing to his terms or as a way of teaching people around him the values and principles like his fast at the Tolstoy farm as a penance for the children's mistake. There is another of Gandhiji's findings that I would like to cite as an influencing factor for my decision. It is his conclusion that control over food is the first step to control over will.

So I had to give up something that I liked and something that I would have to struggle to give up. That is where I came up with this idea about giving up non-vegetarianism. So en-route to a hotel to have a massive non-vegetarian dinner I announced my decision to my friends without citing the reason. I had to eat non-vegetarian food that night as my cousin with whom I was staying was caught unawares but since then I have stayed clean.

I did not announce the reason why I took the decision because I did not know how long I would be able to stick to the decision. Like my other experiments with my life this is a work in progress as I am never sure when I will fail in this pursuit or when I will change my decision. For an year I have held on to this decision. I had a tough time initially resisting the temptation but now I think I have got used to it. The smell of fish is probably the only thing that still tempts me.

Interestingly two other people in my family have taken to vegetarianism recently for their own reasons. One is my sister who took to it around 3 years back and another is my cousin Thomas(Appu) who took to it a few days before I did.

Click here to read the rest of this article - "An year since I turned vegetarian"