Life, The Universe and a Few Other Things

“Deep in the fundamental heart of mind and Universe there is a reason.” 
- Douglas Adams


As per tradition, I start out with a quote which you would naturally assume has something to do with what I am going to write, well you are half right. The quote is from the book from which the title of this post was fashioned (Life, The Universe and Everything). Its irrelevant because well, there has not been a lot of thought put into structuring the post.Therefore you are going to read a random assortment of umm.. (What would be a good word to put in here. Something which can describe how important the post is to me, Ok I have got it!) stuff (Duh!(Appropriate on more than one level (My blog now supports nested comments apparently (Yeah right! That was the big improvement this blog needed))) where it would be hard to make sense of anything (individually or as a whole (Mostly because of distracting comments like these(And these(And these (Infinite loop.. break; break; break;break; break;)))))) but like always I am gonna go ahead and write it down anyway. So here we go:

What prompted this post was a tiny little change involving a displacement of around 10000 miles into a new world. Which means that yet again I am writing about something which directly involves a personal experience which is totally incongruent with what was defined when I started the blog but then as Dumbledore says, that sometimes even the best of us have to eat our words. (By that logic I need to eat my words for breakfast everyday. But then.. Ok moving on!)

Life 

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.” 

- J.K. Rowling

(So now we are doing this at every subheading huh? Interesting quote though now we can assert that Mr. Dom Cobb didn't read or pay particular attention to Harry Potter. Ok! Back to business.)

How much time do you spend in life running away from something and how long do you spend running toward something. Is it surprising that you are lost most of the times? When you are running away from something you lack direction, when you feel that you have put sufficient distance between you and whatever you are running from you don't know where you are, you don't know what you want. You don't why you are where you are. You don't know where you want to go, you might know where you wanted to be but that doesn't make you feel better does it? No nowhere close. And then you throw up your hands and say: "Life is unfair!"

Is life fair?

Short answer (emphatic) Yes!, and I am going to prove it using basic mathematics (The only kind of math which I am mostly sure of being mostly right most of the times).

Event: Is anything that might happen to you during your life. Each event have a definite probability associated with it.
So each event will be associated with an m/n where m,n ϵ N. The distribution of events over the lives of everyone is random, so you can't question the fairness of that. (By this I mean you won't have anomalies where one person experiences a 1000 events of 1/10^10 probability in his life time of say 10000 days.)

Assume that there are three kinds of events which you would encounter in life:

Favourable (+1)

Neutral (0)

Unfavourable (-1)

(I would have said Good, Neutral, Bad but then I thought of the ethical and moral implications and I did not know a good way to model them mathematically.)

Claim: Running sum over all events in your life would be zero. (I hear your skepticism)

Base Case:
Birth
Death

If you come from another school of thought:

Birth
Death

Or yet another school of thought:
Birth
Death

See zero (I checked the math. Twice!). Now we get to the harder part. This involves several definitions and several (arbitrary) assumptions:

Assumptions:

i) Life is a set of discrete unambiguously classifiable (into Favourable, Unfavourable, Neutral) "events".

ii) Two people whose lives are the same length encounter the same number of events in their life.

iii) You are taking this seriously.

So there are n events in two people whose life length is exactly the same and the (tall) claim is that the sum of the weights assigned to them is 0 in  each and every case. Now obviously proving this is somewhat difficult. But let's look at some cases where this looks plain wrong:

Consider four events. For brevity (I am sounding more and more like one of those textbooks which you dread. Aren't I?) number and probability of favourable and unfavourable events is the same :
Win toss, Lose toss (Probability of 1/2 each)
Win a million dollar prize in the lottery, Test positive for Huntington's chorea (Probability of say 1/10^7 each)


(You CAN dispute the probabilities assigned for the latter events but then again there are a lot of other things you could have disputed but you got up to here anyway)

Let's say there are 2 people A and B who know each other and these events have to be distributed in their lives. Now according to what I previously stated the sum should be zero.

So here is an arbitrary distribution:
A:
Lose toss
Win a million dollar prize in the lottery

B:
Win toss
Test positive for Huntington's chorea

Doesn't seem fair does it? Let me take it up by a notch. Riddle me this:

Let's say there is this person, call him Butterfingers because he drops anything which he is holding with a probability of 1/100 in a single day. If he gets really lucky and doesn't drop anything for a 1000 days in a row(Really lucky?). That's a neutral 1/10^5 event. Something which Butterfingers wouldn't really notice, given the tendency of humans to notice things only if an emotional value attached to it.

Let's say he goes to a museum drops an expensive vase with a value of say $20000. Now the museum doesn't have the vase insured, so they are forced to collect from Butterfingers. Being an average Joe, Butterfingers doesn't have enough money to pay that off. So he loans money from a menacing loan shark and pays the museum. It just so happens that Butterfingers bought a new set of wheels last week after taking out a loan from his bank. He can't afford to pay both the loans, not at the interest rate which our loan shark is charging. After a lot of contemplation, owing to the lack of options he decides to give up his car (A pipe dream at some point in his life). But before repossession Butterfingers decides to take his car for one last spin. He decides to push the car to its limit and (predictably) loses control of the vehicle. What follows is a horrific accident with a minivan. The air bag system is faulty on the minivan, the lady driving the minivan dies, Butterfingers breaks his spine and ends up as a vegetable. (Could the last few lines be more emotionless? The post was getting too long so I had to remove all elements of drama from it)

Now if he had dropped his coffee earlier in the day instead of the vase, life would have still been rosy (or normal), for him and for the lady in the minivan. The lady probably experienced a 1/10^2 (Buying a used car with a faulty air bag system) 1/10^10 (Being in the precise position on the opposite side of the road when a financially and emotionally stretched man loses control of his vehicle and ends up in the opposite lane) which fatally conspired against her but then she had to be at +2 before she died. So again life is fair if you choose to look at it objectively. Add emotion to it (And everything becomes chaos!) then you have two bereaved families (none of whose lives will ever be the same) and a slightly boring moving documentary (Probably). What I mean to say (in addition to a cry that I am not a sociopath) is that our definition of fair and the universe's definition of fair do not match per se (If you are expecting life to be fair in terms of weighted probability that's asking for too much (Woohoo! Not an entirely senseless comment (And we are back to familiar territory))). After all what we call life may be nothing more than a series of experiments for someone (funded by mice).

Conclusion (?)

Life in addition to being everything you want it to be is also about teaching you a thing or two. Like keeping the people you like at arm's length, embracing people that you don't particularly like, putting you in situations which you were sure you could never be in, not putting you in a place where you thought you deserved to be, contradicting what you always thought to be true, learning a few ugly truths which you never thought could be real and it goes on and on. Why? Because that's how you build character.

Life is indeed a bed of roses, but contrary to popular opinion it is not a bed of just the petals, roses come along with their thorns, so whenever you feel a prick you better be reminded that you shouldn't be one.

(Last paragraph had exactly 42 words. I am not saying it is the ANSWER! But one of them? Eh, why not.)

(That's the end? Where is The Universe and a Few Other Things? By the way I know how stupid it sounds to add an "and" after The Universe, but even by my standards the original post was ridiculously lengthy, so I decided to break it up into 2 posts.)

(More than) One Night at a Call Center

Imagine that you are driving on a freeway. Its early morning and you have been driving all night and you feel very drowsy. You curse yourself for having decided to drive in the night but then you didn't have a choice. You roll down the window and you feel a cool breeze blowing across, your eyes start closing on their own and you feel relaxed. Suddenly you are interrupted by a loud horn and you jump up in your seat.

DISCLAIMER: The following post is part fiction and part reality. I am not at liberty to say (or rather you are not at liberty to hear) in what proportion. Most of what I write (up to and following) are intended to be funny. That being said you need not feel obligated to laugh. If you feel offended at any point (I'd like to add that it is a likely scenario) then it would be a good idea to leave. It would also be a good idea to leave if you feel you belong to one or more of the following categories:

• You work in one of the said places and have a good feeling about what you do. (I could do with fewer unsavory comments)
• If you have created an illusion that you actually like what you do. (or even if you know that your illusion is shattered and you are hanging onto the pieces so that you continue feeling good)
• You do not like sarcasm and/or you have trouble understanding it.
• You have not laughed, felt remotely amused, smiled sarcastically up to this point.
• You do not understand obscure cultural references.
• If you have not realized that the actual post is yet to start.

So you are here then? Do not tell me you weren't warned!


[Personal moment] So I am back after a hiatus of more than an year with a title inspired by the book of an author who I loathe unconditionally (You might ask why that's why I *cleverly* added the word "unconditionally") (The next line marks the beginning of the actual post although what I have written till now might qualify as a post in itself. Oops! Sidetracked again.) [/Personal moment]

Coming to the freeway story, well that was a metaphor as most of you may have guessed (or not. It wasn't particularly obvious). What you read in the beginning mimics the expected response of a call center employee who gets a call towards the end of his shift. Now continuing with the metaphor:

You sit up straight, curse a lot, steer to the left, hit the brakes (and do everything else that you usually do when you are panicking). You curse yourself, you curse the driver who was was responsible for the honk, so close but yet so far!

What is a call center?

call center n. A workplace which under the best of circumstances is semi-ideal.


To explain the concept I will use another metaphor (Again!).

I believe most of us are familiar with the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf . I am going to build my case based on the story. Now after the villagers failed to respond to his cries, the boy decided that he would pay the villagers each time he calls upon them to drive away the wolf. This way the boy can call the villagers each time he thinks that there is a wolf and the villagers are contractually obligated to look into the situation and drive away the wolf (real or imaginary).

The villagers accept the proposition and decide that they would take turns to respond to the call of the boy. They decide that each villager should be responsible for a particular duration in the day, and when more than one villager is on active duty they have to respond in a round robin fashion. To make the process even more streamlined they divvied the villagers into teams where each team was responsible for a different type of wolf (The metaphor is starting to fall apart a bit but at this point I'm kind of committed to it). So for instance if Team 1 was responsible for the Grey Wolf they would have to deal with problems pertaining to grey wolves. This raised another issue, the boy was not particularly well equipped at finding out what type of wolf was bothering him. Being the spoilt brat that he is, he would just say "I don't know what I am dealing with, just come here and fight it! What am I paying you guys for?!" . Despite knowing his complete uselessness in the aspect the villagers would still ask him to take a stab at it. Based on the wild guesses of the boy they would dispatch the "appropriate" team. The team would first check what kind of wolf they were dealing with. If the grey wolf team goes to the villager and finds out that it is actually a maned wolf then they would say "Sorry mate,not our problem I'll send in the maned wolf team to handle this". After the other team get there they might think it is in fact not a maned wolf and they pass the baton to another team (Sometimes the baton passing was circular, frustrated the boy to no end). The last team in line might say, "Uh! I think we are dealing with a werewolf here and we are only paid to fight wolves. I'm sorry buddy but this one's all yours."

Of course the previous scenario would make the boy really mad. So the next time the villagers were there he decided to make their lives miserable. Even after they fought and drove away the wolf the boy would ask questions like "Why was the wolf here?", "You guys came in and drove away the wolf less than two days ago, why is it back? I want a refund". Of course the villagers had several good answers like "You need to learn what to let in and what not to." and "The wolf that came yesterday was a different wolf. That and this are not connected". But the boy (in all his ignorance) is adamant, "I need to know where the wolf is coming from and fix this once and for all", "Its still a wolf ain't it? How can you tell they are different". (Inside the villager's head "Duh! From the forest", "Because this is what I do everyday idjit!") The villagers often felt that no amount of money which the pinhead gives can account for the misery they have to go through every time he calls.

You can't always blame the boy for the way he interacts with the villagers, the villagers have different methods of dealing with wolves. Some kill them outright (Not to imply that I am for animal cruelty, you know just a part of the metaphor) which is the right way of doing things. Some tranquilize the wolf, which would come back to bite the boy (literally) and the villager responsible (figuratively). A few others had the audacity to say that there was no wolf while standing in front of it. Others had the unenviable task of proving that a wolf wasn't actually present and it was the farm dog with a bad case of whooping cough mimicking the cry of the wolf, and there is in fact no wolf present. All in all there was a lot of dishonesty in the whole operation. One more reason why a few villagers might not want to be a part of this contract.


That concludes the boy and wolf portion of the evening.  The general opinion seems to be some bits made sense, the rest was a desperate attempt at not letting things fall apart.

How people work here?

Metaphor time people! (Apparently this is my answer to everything now)

Ever considered a career as a baby-sitter? This comes real close to it. You will have an arbitrary number of babies entrusted to you. The number varies wildly, it is usually high on Mondays, pretty low on holidays (because you know the parents are at home). Murphy's law is applicable as always: When you think you can no longer handle it you will have another crying baby waiting for you. Consequently when you feel ready to tackle the naughtiest baby everything seems hunky dory and you find yourself a bit let down.

The bundles of joy comes in many varieties. There are the angels who wait for you whilst you attend to the other babies, the ones who don't complain even if you ignore them completely. They are capable of entertaining themselves and expect minimal everything from your side. Ah bliss!

In your heart you know that there must be a yin to the yang you just encountered. Of course there is, there are some babies' who are the devil's incarnate. The ones who start crying the minute you put them down for a nap, the ones which make you look like the most incompetent baby sitter on earth by crying at the top of their voices the minute their parents are about to leave. Regardless of how many poopy diapers you change (or the number of boo-yah!'s said), there is no making this one happy. Every time a parent sees you with this one your credibility takes a dent.

It goes without being said that most babies fall in the range between the extremities described above. If you are not a fan of the angel-demon scale then you could possibly use the other scale which is described from "Intolerably Obnoxious" to "Mostly Harmless". Depending on the scale you would experience mood swings regularly regardless of your gender.

When you are in a long phone conversation, there are those few minutes where you zone out and come back with a "Hmm". Well you don't have the liberty of doing that here. Although zoning out might be beneficial at times, overall it is not recommended because people have the weird tendency of saying something extremely important right in the middle of something (you think is) unimportant. Brain freeze is another hurdle which you have to overcome, it is quite embarrassing to get stuck halfway while speaking a simple sentence. But then your right hemisphere of the brain might say "Its 1 AM, I need some rest. Good luck forming cohesive sentences, Ciao". Comeback strategies from brain freeze and zoning out are very similar. (you know just a bit of improvisation and buck passing)

Funny sign right? If it were true we would have a slew of serial arsonists, and if the other side felt like returning the favor then we might have seen what would have appeared to be a series of racial hate crimes.

How to deal with working at night?

When your day starts at 2 PM in the evening you need to do something about it right?

Live in denial: Try to convince yourself that there is nothing unnatural about your schedule and go about your business as usual. Side effects may include telling people "Good night!" at 6 AM or referring to the later part of the same day as tomorrow just because you have not slept yet. A friend of mine used to say this in the wee hours of a Saturday, "I have not slept yet so it is NOT Saturday!".

Live in a delusion: Take the previous suggestion to the next level. Reset all your clocks/watches to the time zone in which you work and do everything accordingly. Side effects may include finding yourself in a strait jacket and being told that you have a god complex by a person in a white coat.

Of course there is a third option of accepting things which is good mental health wise. Bad happiness wise, you will realize on everything you are missing out on and feel bad about it occasionally.

Personally I have never experienced a hangover or jet-lag but from what I have read and heard, what you feel when you wake up in the late afternoon is a close match. In fact it used to feel like you were jet-lagged AND hungover at once.

Sleeping in the day has its similarities to the lifestyle of a zombie. You don't sleep all that well in the morning, you are in this semi-conscious state which barely passes for sleep, funny thing is you are in the same state even after you wake up. Now the duration of this period (read zombie-trance where you have absolutely no interest in doing anything, you could possibly sit and stare at the clock for an hour and think of it as an hour well spent not realizing that you were actually watching the clock) varies from person to person but it goes on for a few hours and by the time it ends you have to get ready to work again. So your life consists of two phases: Work and Zombie like trance. Your weekends on the other hand is 80% sleep (Fully unconscious "dead as a log" sleep).  If I made a career out of this my autobiography would be title "Chronicles of an Insomniac who mostly dealt with half-wits". (Now it won't, but that's kind of sad because I have to decide on a new name for an autobiography)

Please imagine the next quote in the voice of Sir Michael Caine:


“Every great support case consists of three parts. The first part is called "The Pledge". The guy tells you that he will do everything in his power to fix the problem. But of course... he probably won't. The second act is called "The Turn". The guy after hearing your problem    fixes it, but you are still not satisfied because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why there is a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige"."
(Of course there is the small matter of making it disappear again)

Yours whimsically,

M

(Now that's a good title for an autobiography. Dammit I should stop using parentheses as thought clouds!)

Y-A-P-P-A

"One day a doctor, an engineer and an architect went to a zoo. When they were passing by a monkey - they couldn't resist testing themselves against each other.

The doctor said "Let's have a test. Whoever makes this monkey laugh, has the best job".


The doctor tried to make the monkey laugh by telling jokes. The monkey stayed still. The architect tried to make funny gestures but the monkey stayed put...
Now, comes the engineer, he whispered something into the monkey's ear, and it burst out laughing at him.
The other two were astonished.


So the architect said "OK, let's take another test. Let's make this monkey cry!!"


The doctor narrated sad stories, the architect made sad gestures,and they failed again...
Then, the engineer whispered something into the monkey's ear and lo! It started crying, patting the engineer's shoulder!
The other two just could not believe their eyes!


So the doctor said "OK, you've won twice. If you can win just this one, we will bow to you. Let's make this monkey run".


And he barked at the monkey and ordered him to run. Of course, it did not move.
The architect pushed and prodded the monkey- still no go.
So... here comes the engineer, again, and whispers into the monkey's ear.
The monkey just takes off!
It runs and runs as fast as it can, as if it was scared to death!


The other two surrendered. Said: "OK, we give up. You're the best among us. But please,please tell us your secret," they begged him.
"Well", said the Engineer,"
The first time I made it laugh, I said I am a Software Engineer
The next time, I told the monkey how much I get paid
And then I said that I was here for recruitment!!!"

So I decided to start this post with a (modified) joke which I read somewhere, the problem is the joke threatens to be longer than how much I write and I don't want that to happen, So get ready to read a long long post. The story is fictional but if you think of it, it isn't too far from reality. I heard that a Mumbai BPO was making spot offers to people who were walking in a mall. The fictional story may turn true sooner than you think.

Oh and by the way Y. A. P. P. A stands for Yet-Another-Placement-Process-Article.

First things first, why did I write another article on placement? Some of my friends pointed out that there were a few points missing from the previous article, that is I had forgotten to mock a few things. For example interviewers, job profiles! And I thought I wasn't quite done with mocking Dr. Bozo and MT. So I decided to think like a second-rate Bollywood director and write a sequel to my previous post  (To be fair it would be a better comparison to a director's cut edition of a movie, few of the things were left out since the previous article had gotten too long). If you aren't familiar with my first post do read it, the link is mentioned in the next line, it is kind of a prerequisite to some of the references in this post.

The Absurdity of Placement

The Talented Dr. Bozo

Or "The Arrogant Defective Disillusioned Lazy Naive Obnoxious Pathetic Thick-Skinned Worthless Dr. Bozo"(For those of you who think I am being caustic, it is a reference to the movie "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and its full title) has become more famous than I expected so I decided to dedicate a paragraph to him.

Creative Visualization of Dr. Bozo. Credit to "the scientist" 

The Star Wars fans probably recognize the image of Jabba the Hutt, but it works for Dr. Bozo as well, especially the neck and the facial expression. When we call Dr. Bozo 'Sir' we don't actually call it out of respect, in fact it is a an abbreviation for his character description it stands for Semi-Literate Ignorant Rude. There was a recent event which happened in Dr. Bozo's life which is presented in an over dramatized way below.

Dr. Bozo was in a fix, not only had the good and decent companies stopped coming but the desperate ones were laughing at his inability to provide a decent crowd for the written test. He thought long and hard, "What excuse should I come up with?" was his thought to be precise. But he came up with no good answer. He thought fervently for months then he thought "Oh!...", a smile lit up his face, "I should have done what I always did! Blame someone else". So the next day he makes an announcement, "None of you are writing companies now since you think it is beneath your level. I am going to "teach you a lesson". I won't call any good companies also. All of you suffer. Muahahahahahahaha!!".
 
MT
A few suggestions to MT to improve upon their "evaluation" system.

Make the system transparent: MT has a strict code of confidentiality as its first rule. Of course breaking it means that its patented system of evaluation will no longer remain a secret, but they are blissfully unaware of the fact that all lottery companies worldwide use the same system.

Hire bimbos: An "attractive" scheme, it ensures that they maintain the same level of IQ among its staff and lets face its the only way that at least some part of the college population will look forward to their visits.

Hire Dr. Bozo and troupe: This will achieve the impossible! Everyone always thought MT couldn't sink any lower but hire Dr. Bozo's troupe and you will see how low they can sink. This won't exactly improve their standards but it will certainly exorcise Dr. Bozo's placement department.

The Interviewer's Mind ( A not-so-Beautiful Mind)


You know I have always wondered what goes on in an interviewer's mind through the course of the interview and I came up with a few fascinating ideas.

When making er, questionable choices..


NOTE: The use of the word 'guy' doesn't mean I am a male chauvinist, I thought it would be pretty stupid to write guy/girl everywhere.


"Hey I was a moron just like this moron when I was his age, I am going to hire him."


"Oh! This guy is a moron! He is perfect for the job."


"I have had enough, I am hiring the next guy who walks in."


"Eeny Meeny Miny Mo.."


"Inky Pinky Ponky...." (This line is as redundant as the interviewer's line of questioning)

"Hmm I don't know about this guy's knowledge, but he is sooooo cuteeeee" (The vain lady interviewer, similar line exists for the vain lady's male counterpart)

While rejecting a potent candidate,

"This guy actually knows something, my job will be in jeopardy if you are my competition, my deepest sympathies to you.."


"Er.. I am not able to follow this guy, I am gonna pick someone my own speed."


"I am going to give myself an ego booster, I am going to prove that I am better than the next guy who I am going to interview and totally screw him over in the process."


"I am bored. I am going to reject the next guy who walks in and mock him before I do."


"Hmm this guy is a little too confident for his own good.. I am going to assist him in dialing it down a bit."


Of course all these opinions are totally made up, as they say you can never read another person's mind (Thank God! Some of us might have died of depression otherwise). But interviewers of certain companies will definitely have this on their mind
"50 more to go.. 50 more to go.. 49 more to go......" 


Job Profile-d


So there are all these different job profiles offered by the companies, you must have obviously heard all about the roles and responsibilities of the various profiles. But what are the companies not telling us?

Analyst/Architect/Developer: Undoubtedly the most coveted profiles in the field. You'd probably think your life is settled once you land a job with this profile, but within a few years you'll realize you only have a job, no life.

Test Engineer: Ever heard of the term "test dummy", well with this job you'll be the dummy who'll be running the tests. I am sure it'll be very fulfilling.

QA Engineer: (For those unaware Quality Assurance Engineer) You'll be given two seals, one says "ACCEPTED" and the other "REJECTED", and you need to give your stamp of approval once the dummy sends the code to you. So in other words you are the dummy's dummy.

Support Engineer: The first thought which came to my mind when I heard the term support engineer was "glorified receptionist". But then when I thought more about it I realized its not glorified at all. Remember school where the peons, the maids were all termed as "support" staff.

Associate Software Engineer: Four years of engineering and later you are not even an engineer, everyone knows associate is just a fancy term for assistant. You are officially at the lowest possible position. Your pay scale is on par with the support staff.

System Engineer: This is a popular profile in one of the mass recruiters, there it means that you are an engineer without a "system" (And by system I mean PC). The name of the profile makes the least sense amongst all profile, what are your responsibilities? An engineer in charge of a/the system? Sounds preposterous.


Some (sensible) Concluding Remarks


I am hoping I completed mocking every aspect of the recruitment process. All kidding aside, engineering (in India at least) is by far the best way to lead a reasonably comfortable life. All the IT sector companies have done a decent job in improving the pay scale when you compared it to what existed before. Some companies absorb students of all companies and provide training to them so that they are ready to enter the IT world (Why they would want to enter it is a baffling question indeed! They'd do better if they stayed put in the field which they studied.)

So in my opinion if you are an engineer, you probably won't have the most satisfying job, but you are better off than most other professions.

And if you are an aspiring engineer with some misguided ideals about engineering, please speak to someone experienced and decide on what you want to do. My personal advice would be "Run Forrest! Run". And by that I mean do something more meaningful than following the herd. If you have another area of interest you'd do well to pursue studies in that area, don't give in to parental and peer pressure.

Now a few remarks about the post. The aim behind writing the article was for completeness of my previous article (and not cheap publicity). I wouldn't be writing anything else which is remotely related to placements. I wouldn't want to be categorized as a one-trick pony or a one trick two-part pony.. Oh great now I am feeling like how David Yates ought to feel. Doh!

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Comments are welcome, as long as they don't accuse me of being too sarcastic! That's the definition of my blog. Literally!

The Absurdity of Placement

WARNING: High Content of sarcasm, skepticism, narcissism (I just added that so that it would rhyme) and any other x-sm's you can think of. Read only if you want the illusions about engineering to be shattered. Comments and criticism will be subjected to further comments and criticism. Written by a frustrated computer science student who will insult, well pretty much everybody.   

"If you stand on a road and throw a stone it will either hit a dog or an engineer."

-My college teacher

The quote pretty much sums up the current position and value of a degree which says "Engineer". According to statistics there are 600,000+ engineers who graduate every year in India alone. Based on the number of colleges which can be termed as decent, you can say that about 15% of these graduates are "hire-able". Luckily for the top 15%, there is no dearth of jobs. Thanks to the "mass" recruiters. 

What are "mass" recruiters?

"Trespassers will be recruited"

This is a joke about what the motto of these companies should be rather what the notice on their campus says.

Mass recruiters in simple words are those companies who have more people leaving their company than the number of people joining them in spite of the thousands of employees who are hired each year.

If you prefer a more formal definition these are companies which offer IT services without having any product of their own (or in other words you have to work on code which has been written by someone, debugged by someone after that, modified by someone, debugged again, tested by yet another one, checked if it is up to the mark and then sent to you. It would have been serviced at least a  couple of times before being sent to you, so the job in the purest form is what people in the olden days used to call "The Odd Man Job"). These companies require large number of employees, since there are a lot of international companies who want them to "repair" the programs for them that only means that these companies are scraping the bottom for all "hire-able" engineers (irrespective of what they have studied) into their organization.

According to recent reports, the appetite of the mass recruiters is particularly large this year, with the count exceeding 100,000. That is more or less the whole batch of 2011's employable pass-outs. So yay us!

When you put it into perspective, its not just these companies who have the Indians doing the dirty work. All international companies who outsource to India make us do second string jobs which is very expensive when done on shore. So don't be fooled when a company representative says "We work on cutting edge technology". They probably mean cutting edge a decade ago.

WARNING: If you are a student of Electronics and Communication do not read the next paragraph unless you want to be thoroughly insulted

What the placement process taught me?

 To get placed you need to have little skill, a whole lot of luck and the uncanny ability to lie (convincingly) through your teeth.

Placement is the worst place to be a student of Electronics student, these people get very few jobs which are in their domain, even if they do the pay is not very good. So eventually they write for companies of our domain, where they are not preferred over students of CS or IS (unless they are extraordinary). Sadly they had to work harder since their subjects are harder, they had to do better in their 12th standard, exams and get a better ranking and after all this they have to still learn subjects what we learnt in college AFTER they start working and whatever they learnt in their four years was a complete waste of time. I seriously don't see any reason to take EC, I know even after all this they say I am "passionate" about EC, where does this passion come from? I have never heard the biggest nerd from computer science tell "I am "passionate" about CS".

A moron should not be in charge of inviting companies and looking after the whole process, from personal experience that is always a bit of a snag. I would like to tell the story of one such moron, lets call him "Dr. Bozo" (Unfair characterization I agree, my due apologies to Bozo the clown) is a very engaging (Haha!) character.

Dr. Bozo is the Alan Harper (for those of you who aren't familiar with Two and a Half Men, Google him and read his character profile) of the placement world. Dr. Bozo gets a straight no from the "good" companies. The "decent" ones are hard to come by, in case one of them agree due to some misconception Dr Bozo gets stood up (the most recent being on Feb 25th). And the desperate ones come to him because they have no where else to go,  and these companies boost his ego far more than it should and he thinks he is blessed if everyone gets into the "desperate" ones.

Most companies which visit campuses are too lazy to set their own test paper for the written test and evaluate them, hence they hire people from an agency whose "specialty" is creating and evaluating written tests. I would like to talk about one such agency, I shall refer to them as MT which is a surprisingly apt name for them since, you know all of their employees heads' are "m-t".

So the guys from MT have mastered three sentences in the English language perfectly over the years (Sadly that beats Dr Bozo's knowledge. Ouch!). And they manage their entire job with these sentences. The MT people (Pun intended) have a notorious reputation of not correcting all (sometimes even half) of the papers which are submitted to them. I personally have a theory as to why they do it. 

Amongst the troop of guys who march over to the college every time a company visits the college, there should be a guy in charge, the "manager". It is my belief that the paper "correctors" are given a remuneration based on the no. of papers they correct. So what the manager does is, he counts the no of students in the room, after collecting the papers he manages to give his boys half or less than half of the bundle. Since most of the papers are uncorrected the remaining money goes into his pocket. Ingenious! (and fictitious. Lol!)

Law of Placement

"The happiness quotient achieved after getting placed is directly proportional to the pay and the reputation of the company and inversely proportional to the number of people who are hired by the company" 

Well it is not a law per se, but you could term it as an observation which holds good most of the time. Given that enough time passes and you are frustrated a new corollary can be formed out of this "Once sufficient time has elapsed and you have attended more interviews than you can remember, the priority of profile, company and getting placed itself reduces".

The Aftermath (Highly Pessimistic!) 

So what next after placement? Training for a brief period of time, then you get involved in your work, you lose track of time, you are middle aged, your waist line is as big as your pay packet, your hair line is receding and you probably have a few people who actually like you because of the tremendous stress you have been under. So at the end all you have is a morbidly obese guy with a correspondingly large amount of money with him who's battling Diabetes Type II and Hypertension at once and his best friend is his workstation. If you knew me you'd probably understand my skepticism. Or not..

I mean everyone won't end up that way but I thought writing this would be way more fun than writing a success story, which according to me is a cliche. I am not a believer of the phrase "Happily Ever After". But I guess we will do alright.

We seem to have a bright future ahead! Good luck!

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For the next part of the article please click here

 

And The Oscar Goes To..

It is that time of the year again, the 83rd Academy Awards will be held on the 27th of February and I thought this would be an ideal time to write a little about the front-runners for the Oscars, along with my opinion of the movie. Of course I haven't seen all the nominees, but I suppose I have seen all of them which matter. So here goes.

Black Swan

"I was perfect..."

-Nina Sayers

And perfect she was, Natalie Portman's portrayal of the character and as the prima ballerina is absolutely brilliant. This isn't the first time she has proved her mettle at acting, she was impressive in her role of an aspiring "cleaner" in the movie Leon, she showed tremendous potential at the young age of 12, then we all know of her character in V for Vendetta and how she agreed to go bald for the character just shows her degree of involvement in the movie.

This movie comes from the director of Requiem For A Dream Darren Aronofsky. As if the latter wasn't traumatizing enough, the director attempts at recreating a similar atmosphere, and he succeeds doing so. Everything from the background score, story narration and camera work reminds the audience of the movie.

The story is about Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) who is a ballerina who gets chosen for the lead in a play called Swan Lake. The play involves two characters the White Swan and the Black Swan, as the names suggest the White Swan is pure and the Black Swan is the evil twin. The entire movie shows the transition of Nina from a white swan to its evil twin. The theme of the movie is dark, it is disturbing but that doesn't mean you should miss it. Watch it for Natalie Portman's brilliant acting the sure-shot Oscar winner for the Best Actress and of course if you want to relive the experience of Requiem for a dream again. This is one of the contenders for Best Film but it is unlikely to win the accolade. I would say it is the #5 contender for Best Film.

Definite Oscar:
Best Actress in a Leading Role

127 Hours

"You know, I've been thinking. Everything is... just comes together. It's me. I chose this. I chose all this. This rock... this rock has been waiting for me my entire life. It's entire life, ever since it was a bit of meteorite a million, billion years ago. In space. It's been waiting, to come here. Right, right here. I've been moving towards it my entire life. The minute I was born, every breath that I've taken, every action has been leading me to this crack on the out surface."

-Aron Ralston

Danny Boyle continues the trend of making movies based on novels, Trainspotting, the ridiculously over-rated multiple Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire and now 127 hours.

First of all it is a much better movie in every department when you compare it to Slumdog, I have never been a big fan of Slumdog, it won so many Oscars mostly because the people liked seeing India as a collection of dirty and desperate people with no values whatsoever.

This movie though is genuinely good, James Franco does a brilliant job of portraying Aron Ralston. A.R Rahman's background score is very much in sync with the theme of the movie and the direction and screenplay is decent as well. One funny mistake in the movie is how Franco's stubble remains the same throughout the entire 127 hours. Still it is excusable since everyone's stomach would be pushed to the limits after seeing the amputation and the colour of the liquid which he uses to hydrate himself.

It is ironic however that this movie wouldn't win any Oscar except for the outside chance which it has in Best Background Score. But of course after the embarrassing number of Oscars which Slumdog received, Boyle shouldn't be complaining if he doesn't get any for this movie. Its only fair that you don't get an award for a movie which deserved it when you have got an award for a movie which didn't deserve it. That's about the #4 contender for the Best Movie.

Inception

"What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed - fully understood - that sticks; right in there somewhere."

-Dom Cobb

And the quote pretty much explains what Christopher Nolan did, he had an idea more than a decade ago right after his first movie Memento, he took his time to refine the idea, made sure that it is fully formed and then he made it into a movie which pretty much confused everyone who watched it and the people who claimed to understand it on the first watch were clearly lying through their teeth.

Inception is Nolan's transition from mind-blowing (The Dark Knight) to mind-boggling, and the transition couldn't be more perfect (Yes! I know perfect is an absolute term). Who ever thought that one movie could be interpreted in so many different ways, it is simply amazing how all the story arcs combine and fit together so seamlessly. Hans Zimmer's background score cannot be expressed through words, the finality delivered at the end of the 3rd dream level, the chase sequence score through Mombasa and the final soundtrack which plays during credits are simply amazing, it keeps you so involved in the movie.

Nolan used to have this tendency to use female characters as a source of guilt in ALL of his movies, well that doesn't change this time around, however there is a second female character Ariadne played by Ellen Page who in my opinion is the best ever female character written by Nolan. I wonder what we could look forward to in The Dark Knight Rises with Selena Kyle's character after this.

All the praise aside cause I am not the first to praise the movie and I certainly won't be the last, when it comes to Awards all of Nolan's movies have more or less been snubbed. But this marks the highest level when Nolan didn't even earn a nomination for this epic movie for direction. But a director of Nolan's caliber doesn't really need an award to show that he is a good director, he can always plant the idea that he won the award!

Likely Oscars:
Best Original Screenplay
Best Random-Tech-Category-Award-No-One-Really-Cares-About


This happens to be my favorite movie of all time and this particular dialogue is my favorite.

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

-Mal

I am almost as big a fan of Inception as I am of sarcasm, hence the picture on the left which is an unholy mashup of Inception and mean girls. I know it is an insult to the aura of the movie, but you gotta admit that this one's pretty funny.


There is a parody of the inception trailer which is pretty hilarious as well, it is called "Inebriation" and you can watch it here.

Inception in my opinion is the most deserving candidate for the Best Film, but unfortunately the Oscars aren't given to the most deserving movie, so this is my #3 pick for the Oscar.


 The King's Speech

"If I am King, where is my power? Can I declare war? Form a government? Levy a tax? No! And yet I am the seat of all authority because they think that when I speak, I speak for them. But I can't speak."

-King George VI

One of the overwhelming favorites to win the Best Actor category as Colin Firth stutters and stammers his way into our hearts with his brilliant performance as King George VI. When I heard that a movie named "The King's Speech", I thought it'd be one of those boring historic movies and had no expectation when I started watching it, I soon found out that I was wrong. It actually turned out to be a pretty engaging movie. Helena Bonham Carter (Bellatrix Lestrange of Harry Potter) is gracious in the role of the Queen and deserving of the Best Supporting Actress nod. Overall expect this movie to be a multiple Oscar winner, of course you wouldn't expect any less from the BAFTA winner for Best movie and 12 nominations at the Academy.

Likely Oscars
Best Actor
Best Supporting Actress
A few technical awards surely, and the #2 contender for Best Film

The Social Network

"People want to go online and check out their friends, so why not build a website that offers that? Friends, pictures, profiles, whatever you can visit, browse around, maybe it's someone you just met at a party. Eduardo, I'm not talking about a dating site, I'm talking about taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online."

-Mark Zuckerberg

I have major issues with this movie,

• A movie which is based on a website. Seriously?
• "Feeding chicken to a chicken is considered as animal cruelty". I am sure chickens will start attacking and eating each other after that.
• The poster illustrates the issue, the reason facebook exists is because Zuckerberg wanted revenge against his girlfriend.

I am not one of the guys who can appreciate a movie when I don't like the premise of the movie, well it is kind of sad that others don't seem to think so. I did liked Jesse Eisenberg's acting, a little iffy about the music. The only part of the movie I liked was the ending, even after becoming the CEO of a promising company, the youngest billionaire, he is still where he was at the beginning of the movie, emotionally speaking, hitting refresh continuously kinda smacks of desperation. Ouch!

I really wanted a better story behind Facebook, but what can you do right?


Likely Oscars
Best Movie
Best Director
Best Adapted Screenplay
Best Music

The Others

Toy Story 3

"To infinity and beyond . . "

-Buzz Lightyear

Pixar comes up with yet another gem of a movie, one of the few trilogies where the third movie is the best of the lot. Woody and his friends written after a hiatus of more than a decade, but they still manage to strike the write chord with the viewers. Most of the viewers were kids when the movie released and I am pretty sure all of them turned out to watch this movie, none of them would go home without thoroughly enjoying the movie. Pixar never disappoints, one of the few 3D movies where one could actually feel the third dimension. Everyone knows an animated movie is never gonna win an Oscar for Best Picture, a nomination is as far as it can go, so after Up last year Pixar has yet another animated movie in the category this year.

Likely Oscar
Best Animated Movie

I haven't watched any of the other nominees but the other movies which matter seem to be

The Fighter
Seven nominations and the story of a boxer, it rings a bell doesn't it? Christian Bale seems to have a sure shot Oscar here for Supporting Actor

Biutiful
A Mexican story about after-life and stuff. Best bet to win the foreign film accolade.

True Grit
Another multiple Oscar nominee directed by the Coen brothers of "No Country for Old Men" fame, have to watch this one, seems to have an interesting story.

Fan Favorites
According to a poll conducted by IMDb these are the favorites in various categories:

Best Film: Inception (41.4%)
Best Actor: Colin Firth - The King's Speech (55.6%)
Best Actress: Natalie Portman - Black Swan (83.6%)
Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale - The Fighter (63.3%)
Best Supporting Actress: Helena Bonham Carter - The King's Speech (33.1%)
Best Director: David Fincher - The Social Network (39.9%)
Best Foreign Language Film - Biutiful (Mexico) (56.8%)
Best Adapted Screenplay - The Social Network - Aaron Sorkin (52.6%)
Best Original Screenplay - Inception - Christopher Nolan (73.2%)
Best Animated Feature - Toy Story 3 (72.4%)

And now we await the 27th of Feb.

Hope

n.a feeling of expectation and desire
"Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.", "Hope springs eternal" etc etc. I'm sure you would have heard a lot of other quotes on hope. The question is hope what it claims to be? I'd like to talk about three very different scenarios and the different manifestations of hope in the respective scenarios.

The Good
This is the default definition of hope, the one which all of us are familiar with. The exact feeling which made Vasco da Gama change the name of 'Cape of Storms' to 'Cape of Good Hope'. That is when the events occurring in the future happen regardless of what your action are, the only thing you can do is hope. This has to be the good part cos, sometimes things work out the way you want them to sometimes they don't, but you are ready for whatever comes your way.

The Bad
Consider a student who's not written an exam particularly well and is hoping to pass. Fast forward to the results, if he passes well and good. If he doesn't then he's miserable for quite sometime cursing himself, with disapproval from teachers, parents (and in some cases friends too!) alike. Next time around he'll never be the same. So now do we say hope is a bad thing?

The Ugly
To fully explore the darker side of hope consider a scenario:
There are two families, perfectly normal and happy with the way things are going. Unfortunately both of their daughters are kidnapped on a particularly bad day. After a few days one of the girls is found to be dead, the other girl's whereabouts are unknown.
Everyone's sympathies are with the family who has just lost their girl and the other family has hope, they are hoping that their daughter is still alive. Fast-forward a few years, the family who lost their daughter would have moved on with their lives, there will be pain, but they would have come to terms with the truth of what had happened.
Imagine the state of the other family, they don't want to lose hope they want their child to be alive, they probably haven't moved a single object in her room, every time the parents see a child of their daughter's age they'd think "Could this be our child?", think about the state of mind of the parents, for all we know this child could be dead too, but they don't want to accept that. They want to believe that their child is still alive.
Compare the two families, we accept that there is no 'happy' family, but arguably we could say that the family who know of their child's death is blessed.
The scenario is entirely fictitious and has a very low chance of occurrence, I used it to just show that 'hope' is not a rosy picture.
What's your view on hope now? Do you look at it as something which paralyzes you? Is it something which prevents you from moving on?

Now for an insight into the three scenarios.

The Good
This is the scenario which defines hope as it was truly meant to be. Hope is just a good feeling about the future, no strings attached.

The Bad
Though I said that hope is a good feeling, you should know what you are hoping for. In this case, the student is hoping for luck. Now luck is not something which anyone should rely on. Luck is nature's perfect random function. So if you are just hoping that you get lucky the odds will always be against you.

The Ugly

Fear n. a feeling of dread and reverence

Yes, the feelings experienced in the ugly scenario is fear. Fear is the anti-particle of hope. Fear is just hope mixed with negativity. Hope was never meant to paralyze anyone, if there was one perfectly good thing in the universe it has to be hope.
If the feeling which the parents were experiencing was hope, then they'd know when to let go. But since that wasn't the case, it has to be fear, when you don't want to do something because something can change (for the worse of course.) due to your actions. In the scenario fear has successfully plotted the downfall of the two individuals (the parents) and what's worse if the individuals themselves were responsible for the creation of their nemesis.

Hoping is never a wrong thing to do, unless there is something which you can do to improve your chances of attaining your goal. When you know that things aren't going your way then you must learn to let go otherwise you are allowing fear to take control and everything is downhill from that point. I think this is precisely what made Dr. Gregory House says, "Hope is for sissies". But I beg to differ, "Hope is for everyone, the ones refusing to let go are sissies"

Definitions

Blog’s name:
There were a lot of candidates to start with. First I thought of was “Deep Thought” (After the supercomputer in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy). Then there was "Confessions of a not-so-dangerous mind". It sounded original, but when it comes to the actual contents of the blog there would be nothing even close to a 'confession' and the phrase 'not-so-dangerous' sounded a little self-depreciating (Okay now I'm pushing it). Practically, the name was too long and didn’t carry any inner meaning as such, so that was discarded. Next I landed on “Blogical Thinking”, I'm pretty sure that I am not the first to think of 'blogical', but then I got tired of thinking of another name and hence the name of my blog. I just tinkered with it for a little and made it “Blogically Speaking..”. Ok enough said about the name.
Screen name: “M” is not a fancy title neither is it inspired from James Bond. It is only my initial.

Display Picture:
(This portion of the post is subject to change)
The display picture is something abstract, you should open your Inner Eye to see what it truly holds, the picture when you fully understand it will never cease to amaze you.
Only joking, it is actually a pitcher plant seen under the microscope.

Contents:
What you can expect out of the blog:
• Random Topics (I mean completely random topics)
• Vague Metaphors
• Totally unrelated topics in the same post (sometimes in the same line)

History:
Long time coming, It took me a little more than an year to create a blog. I planned on starting it from January 1,2009 but I was a little apprehensive, you know things sound much better in your head than they actually are. So after some serious contemplation and a lot of time, I’m finally here.

I guess I'm done defining my blog. You'll probably be thinking "What was the point again?!". Makes me wonder too I have just written a blog whose contents define the blog itself, which makes it dull, boring and completely useless. Then again a definition is necessary to understand anything. I think I can come up with something better next time around, for now I’m signing off.