DREAM - PLAN - EXECUTE explained

There have been lots of occasions, where people have failed to draw appreciable inferences from the phrase that I use the most, to describe my life - “Dream - Plan – Execute.” Resorting to the almighty (a.k.a Google) yields no luck. (Not very) surprisingly (for me) Google’s I’m feeling lucky button brings us back here. Lemme break the deadlock.

To be completed, shortly!

In Girinagar, on 12th - A Curtain-raiser

Last Sunday was special. Ferrari n Schumi gave glimpses of leaping back to the top at the season opening Bahrain F1 grand prix, the mighty Australians scored an ODI world-record of 434 runs (only to be chased later by the South Africans) and more importantly, my prayers for having a couple as close friends were answered.

Who! Do you mean Ashwini Bharadwaj of PESIT-IS 2002 batch? was how a common friend reacted upon hearing from me that Vinay Pothnis is getting married. Neither was my reaction any different when she’d told me about their plans, for the first time. He was my first friend in the engineering college and she was the first girl, whom I befriended in my entire life. Though I’d spent most of my undergrad days with these two, it took me a long while to get the chemistry between the two (actually I never managed, until she told me about it). I always believed that two guys who’d strong convictions cannot get along easily. Now I’m amazed at the way they gel with each other (I’m feeling like Joey now ^$#%^).

Rolling back to the present, March 12th was an enjoyable experience. After a very long time, most of the Unforgiven (sans the (un)fortunate souls in US/UK) had gathered with full josh and its trademark plans (the last such occasion I can recollect, would be Rashmi’s marriage in 2003). Though more than half of our plans didn’t materialize (hasn’t this has been very typical of us?), it was nice to get face-painted, stick posters along the engagement hall, sing for our friends-turned-couple their favourite song (jotheyali from the movie Geeta) and get back the unforgiven atmosphere (as none felt like going back to home, till mid-night!). The groom was easily the show-stealer with his designer overcoat, fresh-blue jeans and cool Redtape / Van Heusen attire (reminded me of Abhishek Bachchan, to say the least). The icing on the cake was to hear someone in the audience refer to us as RX-group (uninformed souls, read that as Yamaha RX-100/135 that 7 of us possessed). Nice curtain-raiser guys; looking forward to the wedding day – Nov 23, 2006. Congrats and all the best!

Newfound interest - chapter I

In a conscious effort to diversify my interests and broaden the horizon, I’ve started reading.

Way back in school, I had subconsciously made a choice not to read any stuff that wasn’t directly connected to my operating environment vis-à-vis studies; consequently I was glued to only text books and reference books. For someone who loved its results/powers (being the school topper, and being branded “panTa” by the peers), this association made all the sense. Though never a voracious reader, I managed to learn (by heart) the entire text books and that was more than sufficient to crack all the exams till Grade-12.

Times changed and so did my reading patterns! I began to understand during my engineering education that “grasping every nibble on the reference book was neither recommended nor necessary”, to be successful and that required something beyond. Suddenly, success and power ceased to be simple derivatives of the chapters of the text that I remembered by heart or how much of math I’d worked out during a semester! And for the first time in my life, I was faced with a “decide for yourself” situation that required me to identify (and then balance) the depth and breadth of whatever I wanted to study in my field. I must have had a pretty strong dislike towards undefined things and a sense of irony prevailed from within; I took a lot of time to digest this and had graduated from the college, by then. The next three years of my life that went in establishing myself at the job, trying for further studies, switching jobs twice and so on, made sure that I wouldn’t look beyond the DSP books.

I always had an appreciation for people, who knew things beyond their professional necessities. I had met people, who were conversant in topics ranging from peace to Bush, Surface integrals to Greek philosophy, Gothic architecture to Mars Rover; I always wished I knew more!

And I could finally decide that now is the time!

To cut a long story short, through the last couple of months, I’ve managed to start on –
1. Complete Short Stories of O Henry, O Henry
2. The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics, Gary Zukav
3. The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown
4. A beautiful mind, Sylvia Nasar

PS: I need recommendations on (i) a comprehensive text on America and (ii) Analytical thinking. Any help?

I talk JPEG. Do you?

“Is that the Matrix?” asks Neo, staring at the endlessly shifting river of information, bizarre codes and equations flowing across the face of the monitor, “Do you always look at it encoded?” To which, Cypher murmurs, “Have to. The image translators sort of work for the construct programs but there's way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, and redhead.”

After a couple of really hectic months – work wise (and otherwise), I got some time to pen down a thought going thru’ my mind. This post is a serious business (about Data compression and Efficient communication) and I think I’m gonna invest some time in thinking about it. Contributions are most welcome.

In the context of describing the JPEG syntax using Backus-Naur Form (BNF), Mitchell and Pennebaker in their classical book JPEG Still Image Data Compression Standard, considered the bible of JPEG, had an interesting thought - The JPEG data-stream syntax may be thought of as a language for describing images in a compressed way. Any valid data stream is a sentence in the language. Being a CS engineer, I liked the way they introduced JPEG to the reader (that JPEG is a language – just like C or English, used by JPEG-aware systems to communicate images).

It occurred to me that there should be whole lot of similarities between the Multimedia compression and human communication system. But soon I realized that there aren’t many.

If we give a thought to the trends in the Multimedia Signal processing research - Newer and more powerful techniques and algorithms are continuously being invented to compress the audio-visual data more and more – The latest ones being MPEG4 and H.264 (Give no special significance to any of these alpha-numericals – they’re just extensions of their predecessors, similar to that of C getting its name). The driving forces, as believed by the technologists, are storage space (wouldn’t you want to store 100 movies on one DVD?) and network communication costs (Wouldn’t you want to watch live webcast from Hubble telescope and World-cup simultaneously at 1024x768 resolution, devoting only 256 kbps on your broadband line?). So DSP scientists are going on inventing new compression techniques a.k.a new languages that use lesser bytes to convey the same information (at the cost of more processing power – needed for encoding and decoding complex sentences of the new languages). A challenge in the design of Multimedia systems (handycams, iPods etc) is the lack of hardware that can run these complex algorithms in real-time (This mostly explains why we can’t have a realistic image/video search, unlike the wonderful text search of Google).

Compare and contrast this with the human communication mechanism. We’ve an enormously powerful CPU in our brain (arguably, the best pattern matching, number crunching and analytical machine ever designed). Despite this, we aren’t seeing any such a trend in the human communication mechanism? It isn’t difficult for us to realize that we use very simple languages for our communications, which hardly employ any compression technique. It is quite disheartening to realize that I’ve to use about 400 words to describe a scene that I saw (Okay, my question is - Are we making use of the fact that the person listening to us is intelligent, has a very powerful CPU and not all things happen in English?). If we have a very powerful language that describes hell lot of information in a few bytes, then we can not only store multitude of data in our brain (assuming that brain = CPU + HardDisk and I’m referring to that Hard-disk part) but also communicate using less words (read the entire news paper in 1 minute, for eg.).

Hold your comments for a minute! I don’t want to learn Kung-fu the way Neo learns in The Matrix, but I surely want to digest Donald Knuth’s Art of Computer Programming, swiftly. I somehow feel that there’s awesome amount of information in this world that we should know, be knowledgeable about; but we’re inherently limited by the languages that we use for our knowledge communication (despite having a superior brain). If you haven’t yet nodded your head in acceptance, you may want to skip the rest of this babble.

I don’t know as to how this new language would be! It would probably be like trying to imagine the 4th dimension being in a 3-D world. But, I’m definitely feeling the need for it. I want to learn mathematics, follow everything that’s happened in Physics since Newton, understand psychology, master economics, dig into the law system, do 100s of other things in a span of just 60-70 years of my life. Are you with me on this? Aren’t the key things to this – Effective Communication and Efficient Data Storage in human system? This problem has been encountered, thought of, and even solved in some fields (Thankfully we don’t use English to write musical notes). But have we looked at it in a holistic sense? Is there a way to improve human communication mechanism?

To be continued (or concluded).

A Couple's First Diwali

My best friend's wedding

Oct 10, 2005

I strongly believed that 16 was not the age to choose one’s soul-mate. I never preferred working in a totally different field from that of my soul-mate (unless the fields converge, leading to the ultimate goal of life). I can never imagine being away from my soul-mate for years and yet keep in sync (rather I swear by the saying – out of sight is out of mind). To my utter surprise and eternal delight, two of my friend have done all these and come out with flying colours. Call it their strength of conviction, power of love, visionary planning or god’s grace – the outcome is an awesome couple, mature with real experiences of life, fresh with tender love in their eyes (that their 3 years of separation has brought) and raring to take on the world (must have started their conquer in Swiss, already).

It was the D-day for our lovely couple Kiran Kumar (called PJ, affectionately or otherwise) and Ramya Prasad, when they tied their knots in a typical South Indian marriage at Basavanagudi, on Oct 10th. The proceedings started a day earlier and at 5pm on Oct 9th, we (Aru, Ash, Bindu, Karu, mof and myself) jumped in, representing the once-strong unforgiven bandwagon. Honestly speaking, in the continued absence of majority of our friends-n-entertainers, social gatherings these days aren’t much fun (don’t you laugh, on-site ass***es!). PJ had promised Dandiya, Anthakshari, A master Hirannaiah play and lots of quality audience; As expected, only half of his words turned out to be true (Remember those trip days, when he used to say Just 2km ahead dude) but it was very well compensated by the REAL QUALITY audience – thanks to Ramya’s papa for inviting the right crowd (Praveen was almost ready to forego his future Tea-estates; Now he swears that his favourite colours are red and black – black in the border). Honestly speaking, that red saree with black border was gorgeous… what we particularly liked about his combination was the lady wearing the saree :-)

Very well prepared that PJ was for his marriage, things were neat and impressive – starting from a wonderful choice of words on the invitation to his marriage attires and the programs arranged for audience, everything looked planned and well-executed. The attempts to include audience in the marriage were commendable (which rarely happens in South Indian marriages), though our dude didn’t listen to my invaluable suggestions of giving a marriage speech and getting autographs from attendees (probably for the better ;-)). Dandiya was particularly interesting. The enthusiastic crowd that had gathered made it a wonderful success and we had our first tryst with dandiya sans the red-black combo (but moffy was allegedly reported to be found dancing around a black ghaghra!). Though Hirannaiah didn’t turn up, the day ended on a high note with a good dinner.

Getting to know PJ well was one of the best things to have happened to me in last one year or so - thanks to my wife, who’s a close friend of him. Until I got to know him closely, I didn’t have high regards for him. He looked immature, prankish, and goalless and I kept on wondering as to why he seems so less committed towards Ramya. Dude, sorry again – it all changed when we spent quality time together, during our UK visit early this year. This guy has a depth in his thought process, chases his dreams, stares challenge in its eyes, been successful at almost everything he tried and keeps his promises. Ramya’s choice made sense to me too! We hope and pray that our roads cross soon and for a longer time (We're seriously missing, being with friends, who’re a couple).

The marriage day, though the most important one in the diaries of the involved party, is expectedly a trite for the audience. We engaged ourselves in clicking snaps, trying desperately but futilely to sort out the gift issue and enjoying the company of unforgiven aunty-uncles (hey! Not me-n-my-wife… real aunties and uncles). The best part of the day was sitting besides the dining couple, accompanied by PJ’s layout boys. Though we didn’t choose to smash papads (hasn’t it become too mundane?), it was fun teasing the couple for every word spoken, every looks shared and every nibble eaten - the ISRO layout gang was freaking out on them like anything – though Aru was sometimes red with anger, we thoroughly enjoyed those wonderful adult teasings :-)

A couple of hiccups from our side; Firstly, due to an important, sudden and non-postpone-able appointment, we couldn’t make it to the reception. Secondly and more importantly, we couldn’t find/design a gift worthy enough to be presented to you guys. So, we chose the lazier way of not-giving anything. It wasn’t easy finding a great gift, given our superlative ideas and level of dedication for doing so (probably the same reason why we too didn’t get a gift from our group). My profound apologies for both and I’m sure you’ll understand.

All in all, this whole episode made us remember our marriage times and is worth re-living those wonderful times - thanks to you guys for giving us another success story – LONG LIVE LOVE.

PS: References to us/we/our etc, is context-dependent; Referring to my wife and myself in some cases and unforgiven group in the rest.

Couple (of) Stuff

Last couple of weekends have been quite hectic and rewarding (thanks to a good planning and execution) – details on these, later! An interesting thing to happen was that Acchu and I had gone out for dinner with one of our closest couples – not many would be able to guess them as a couple (and it is probably best that way, for now). It is always special going out with a couple and I just love it. We don’t always manage to hang out with couples (as majority of our friends are bachelors and the ones married are in US). Other than this couple, our favourite list would include PJ-Ramya and Sreenu-Aruna (though we would love to add Arvind-Sushma, Rashmi-Sandeep to this list... Guys, listening?).

Another interesting (and quite emotional) event was to accompany PJ’s dad and sis, to invite our friends for his wedding. PJ, it was an honour kano and we thank you for that. It would be a special moment to see you guys get married, after more than a decade of love and togetherness. All the very best dudes, as you get set for your Marriage in Bangalore, Honeymoon in Swiss and Living in London.

This event brought back nostalgic memories of our marriage prep; Searching for platinum rings, Composing our wedding cards, Buying Suits and Sarees, Furnishing our new room, Booking for the honeymoon trip, Finalizing on logistics, Traveling a hell to invite people, Preparing for a marriage speech (which we didn’t give anyway) and what not! Becoming friends, Falling in love and Getting married - Undoubtedly the best thing to have happened to us. But the transition from two-friends-in-love to two-friends-in-love-n-married was neither smooth nor swift. Having known each other for almost 7 years before marriage, didn’t help much either! In the initial months of marriage, both of us went through a host of negative emotions – varied/unmet expectations, time-offsets in our diurnal habits, need to accommodate a whole new set of people in our life and so on. It was I, who should’ve made things smoother for her but honestly speaking, I didn’t really succeed in that. Marriage is a different ball game altogether and calls for so many rearrangements, rescheduling and reprioritization. We realized only after going through it... life looks more stable now.

My better half had a rocking week – Firstly, got promoted as Senior Software Engineer (well before her company average of 3 years) and then smashed her TOEFL exam scoring 297/300 (98 percentile). And I, like a fool, believed for a long time that she isn’t very aggressive and her English isn’t all that great – what a way to disprove both. Congrats Acchu, Way to go!

Simplicity & Complexity (of Imagination)

There have been lots of occasions, where I’d to take the route of imagination to reach reality and vice-versa; I haven’t had a great success at either of them. I’m no expert on Reality vs Imagination topics either (so, let’s keep the duel between reality and imagination for a later date). This post is a collection of few anecdotes showcasing on the power of imagination.

An interesting forward that I got a few days back -
A snail, moving along the beach turned back to see that there were three turtles behind it, wearing leather jackets. After moving along for about four weeks, the snail looked back again and saw that the three turtles were still there and closing in on him. Sensing something, the snail picked up his pace. But the turtles were getting closer and closer! After about six more weeks, the turtles caught up with the snail and mugged him - took all of his clothes, cash and the keys to his car. After another couple of weeks, the snail got to a pay phone and called the police. "I’ve been mugged by three turtles wearing leather jackets! You need to get down here and take a report!" he said. "Can you give us a description of the turtles?" asked the police. "No, I can’t. It all happened too fast!" cried the snail.

This nostalgically took me back to late 1998, when I, along with my best pal of that time, Pratap was trying really hard to digest the first chapter of the Engineering mathematics textbook (We had made it a habit to study the texts, before they’re taught in the class). It talked about the 3D co-ordinate system, a topic that we understood to be a logical extension of the 2D system of the XII Std but couldn’t decipher the physical meanings of equations, so much logically. Converting my room into a math-lab (if there’s anything like that), we imagined a bottom corner of the room to be the 3D system origin and the three adjoining walls to be three orthogonal planes. We used couple of long sticks to reach out to 3D points from origin and somehow managed to move to the next chapter. Now I wonder how difficult it was for us, to take an extra dimension into our math world!

A Math Prof, once narrated an interesting story of a 3D thief, stealing things from a 2D world and how it was impossible for anyone in the 2D world to catch him. Though it wasn’t very helpful at that time in understanding the physical significances of 3D equations, it remained etched in my mind.

Best one to end with: Quote from a Princeton Prof, "Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet. The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself."

To sir with love (...a bit belated)!

Last week, Archana and I had been to PESIT, the last school that we attended, to meet some of our favourite faculty. I was rather awed to see the respect and warmth that was bestowed upon us (Surely PESIT is focusing on its alumni or did I not notice something while in college!). We promised ourselves to keep in touch with them and make a contribution to our school, at some point in life.

Looking back at the early days of standing upright with hands reaching the sky to say Yes miss, to the recent past where someone else does your duty in the class saying Present ma’am, it does feel that I’ve graduated. I’ve liked/appreciated/admired lot of teachers – they have helped me get up on my feet when I fell down, gave me focus and direction in life and made me run faster - but I’ve never met anyone, who is powerful/influential enough to bring about a significant turn-around in my life (I can partly attribute it to the fact that I’d never been a part of any world-class school). It wouldn’t be wrong to summarize that all my teachers were more of enablers than architects in my life!

If I’ve to choose TEN teachers (apart from my parents), to salute on this day (Sep 5th is supposedly Teacher’s day in India), the list would go like (Read as the teacher, their current institute and period of interaction. The ones in Blue are my friends in teacher’s role) –

Shantha (Mahila Mandali, 1989-1993)

D V Nagesh (National High School – Mathematics, 1993-1996)

H V Ramamurthy (National High School – Social Science, 1993-1996)

H K Gowramma (National High School – Kannada, 1995-1996)

Tejaswi Nadahalli (MTech IIT Bombay, 1996–2002)

S Desikachar (Retd. Prof, National College - Chemistry, 1997-1998)

M G Geetha (PESIT - Mathematics, 1998-2000)

Karthik C S (ThoughtWorks, 1999-2003)

V R Badriprasad (PESIT - Computer Science, 2001-2002)

Ashok I (Ittiam, 2003–Till date)

A couple of people need extended mention (and hence not included in the list above). Both were my supervisors (I can’t fit them in my definition of a teacher), and are awesomely powerful in their profession and work-environ. Interactions with them did have a significant impact on my thoughts, plans and dreams (still, I can’t agree that they are architects of my life).

The first one was Dr. Dipankar Bhattacharya, Professor in the Astrophysics group of Raman Research Institute, who was my BE dissertation guide (during early to mid 2002). What struck me initially was his technical prowess in the field of CS that he’d entirely developed on his own (after his PhD in Physics). This was the first time that I was working with a Scientist in a Research Lab (in the truest sense) and his life style impressed me beyond imagination – the most notable one, was when I came to know that his wife was also a Prof in RRI and they’re working alongside, towards a common research goal. Point noted (and partially implemented), sir!

The second one was Dr. Sriram Sethuraman, Senior Technologist in the Video/Imaging group of Ittiam Systems, with whom I worked for almost two years. He never seemed to like my approach and always felt that I was slow – Yes indeed, but I never tried to change (don’t exactly know if I didn’t or I couldn’t). He had earned his doctorate from CMU and is a genius in analytical thinking (donno, if they’re inter-connected). He did make me see what passion for work meant and that one shouldn’t be doing things that he doesn’t like for too long. Boy, didn’t I take the points well? It’s been 6 months that I’m out of Ittiam!

I hope and pray that I do get to meet an architect in my lifetime (sounding like Neo)!

Bangalore is crumbling… err, what?

These days cribbing about Bangalore (be it the infrastructure, rash driving or ever increasing land-price-index) has become a vogue – more like a weather talk that gets a Brit go on and on for hours. I get lot of junk mails quoting big (IT) celebrities unleashing their superior vocabulary, targeting Bangalore’s deteriorating conditions.

For someone who knows that Bangalore is experiencing such a rapid growth for the second time in less than 50 years, the outcomes aren’t surprising! Historically Bangalore has been a holiday resort, place to settle down after retirement and a British/Indian military base. The first growth wave came during Nehru’s tenure as PM, when a sizeable number of public sector companies (BHEL, BEL, HAL, BEML, ITI, ISRO and HMT to name a few) opened their plants here – owing to its congenial weather conditions and ease of access to quality graduates (being in the centre of South India geographically, sure helps!). As expected (though not planned very well), Bangalore could digest this growth and it was a win-win for everyone.

Digressing a bit, I’ve been living in Bangalore ever since my birth, thanks to my father who shifted to this city from the neighbouring Mysore in 1960s, to start his career as an Engineer in Indian Telephone Industries (ITI). I always looked up to Bangalore with great love, respect and pride (again thanks to my papa, who’s so much attached to Bangalore that he gave up his promotion offers twice, to avoid moving to other cities). In the early days of schooling, when I didn’t have much to boast off (apart from being an engineer’s son), Bangalore always came to my rescue. We were almost like celebrities – Be it at granny’s place, tourist resorts or school excursions – mostly because we’re from Bangalore!

As my subconscious mind still has such things hard-coded, my first reaction to such Bangalore Blasting mails/news/reports will be that of a deep and a visible anguish.

On one school of thought, Bangalore compares closely with the US (not much history of its own and has a small percentage of local/original inhabitants, with the majority of demography coming in from outside). Hence, it is not unexpected to see that Bangalore mostly has all the problems that US is facing (classic ones like shouting for a proper representation and equal opportunities to local junta/dialect). Adding to these, are their eternal desi counterparts like uncontrolled population growth, uneven wealth pattern etc. Handling such a chaotic and somewhat complex situation, would probably require hundreds of management gurus from the likes of Wharton, Harvard and Oxford.

Why is it that a guy, who comes to Bangalore for his job expects a traffic-free garden-like environment, multiplexes within 10 minutes drive and an 80*60 plot just for his two year salary? Wake up guys this is not USA – My papa worked for 34 years just to get his children graduated and build a decent shelter. The big (IT) celebrities, who go public with their grievances, are no saints either. With the exception of Infosys, no one has ever made any significant contributions (apart from paying taxes) to this beautiful city. Let us stop cribbing – Bangalore is giving us more than what it is getting from us!

Would Indianized counterparts of innovative solutions like SeaCode help Bangalore? Would neighbouring cities reduce any burden? I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end; I came here to tell you how this is going to begin. Now, I'm going to hang up... Where we go from here is a choice I leave to you.