International Terrorism

It took me almost six weeks to complete this esoterica (if such word exists) but I am still not very sure what I am trying to say.
The Fox History series ‘International Terrorism since 1949’ with its punch-line ‘Know terror to fight terror’ is really nice one. Although I always fear the history they put forward is somewhat US biased, but truth even though one sided is still truth, its upto us to look at the other side of the coin.
Take the example of Nasir and his support to PLO, in some movies on Fox History like Sadat, his portrait is quite dark but the episodes like ‘The Greats’ praises his leadership and vision for modern Egypt.
The point of confusion for me is the thin line between freedom fighter and a terrorist. How to differentiate both?
Today morning I was watching this episode about Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Cuba.
Although what these guys did in Cuba is always inspirational to me and maybe many people in the world, the program seemed to be United States propaganda to sketch him as ‘terrorist who became president of a nation and survived for 60 odd years’. It is USA’s open and dark secret that the bulk of terrorism, today the world is fighting against, is the descendent of US policies and their intelligence agencies.
But for now, let me explore my confusion in more detail and with some crude examples. Prabhakaran and his Tamil Tigers, who were they? Terrorist who killed thousands or Freedom fighters who betted their lives for their Tamil nation? Terrorist in Kashmir, Khalistanis, Irish Republican Army, PLO and many similar? My patriotic mind easily categorizes Tamil Tigers, Kashmir separatist and Khalistanis as terrorist, but on the similar lines if somebody from England thinks that Bhagat Singh and Hindustan Socialist Republican Association as terrorist is he/she wrong?
I don’t know if I am being hypocrite or what but let me put it simple; fighting for our soil, nation and people is a right given by our destiny and the same applies to others. In the fight against unjust powers if we forget this for a single moment and deny this right to others, we may cross the boundary between freedom fighting and terrorism. Well, that’s where Bhagat Singh and Prabhakaran differed, even though both used violence as a mean to achieve liberty, one was never involved in bloodshed of innocent British men and the other never spared a single man, woman or a child who raised voice against him.

Your honor

Last week, for the first time in my life I stood in the courtroom before CJ of family court. (I filed my petition for divorce there) Unlike my expectations and imagination about legal profession the environment over there was really sick. It will really give major attack of nervousness if anybody spends a week in atmosphere like that. I was fascinated by this profession since I was working with Spectrum (Once I even thought of studying law).
The three years at Spectrum were some of the great days in my life. My career was just kicking off then. My earlier job was in Oracle/D2K. I always dreamt my career in C++, so when the opportunity to work with Spectrum came I just grabbed it without a second thought. For the first few days I was just wondering why my boss was bombarding me every now and then with every small-big tasks when there were 20 other experienced programmers around. A week later I realized, I with a just passed-out were the only programmers there and the other guys were either data entry operators or Lawyers.
So I started with Spectrum as junior programmer. It was fairly easy for me, as my boss and his bosses really showed trust in me (It might be that they didn’t had much choice either) to climb up the ladder of promotions as the team gradually grew up. We used to work for days and nights dreaming that one day Jurix will become major share holder in legal information retrieval market. We used to have long and brainstorming discussion about search and retrieval algorithms, database design and so on. Most of us were fresher or less than one year experienced, so everybody was trying to put things together which he/she learnt during academics. We never had any formal training about any language/technology, but we were so full of enthusiasm and energy that we managed some Herculean tasks without knowing what we were upto. (My first COM server was sheer product of my understanding of pure virtual functions, the words like interface, inproc server etc were not even in my dictionary then) The side effect was that we were never contented with the end product as by the time we were close to deliver it, somebody or the other used to discover much better technique to do so.
One of my bosses used to call us bunch of masons, who never had any plan, schedule or even an idea about the deliverable. He used to blame us that we start putting bricks and cement if somebody asked us to build home, without even understanding how many rooms there should be. Today when I can see myself surrounded by so many smart architects, I wonder if anybody of them has ever built a single room out of his knowledge. Most of these smart architects do the maintenance of old houses or put extra storey to the building which probably was product of some enthusiastic masonry. :)

Simplex Method

Sometimes I wonder how I managed to fail so many times during my graduation. A moment back I was looking for my LPP and transportation model notes. (BTW I am pursuing PG diploma in ORM). I managed to get those from my best kept secret treasure. (Well, my parents don’t think so… and they even offered a helping hand towards dust bin. For my mother it’s not even worth than 5 Rs/Kg from raddiwala :-(
Anyway these notes are really good and helped a lot to learn transportation in just ten minutes for which I was struggling for whole of the Sunday at Vaibhav’s place. (He may term my ‘whole of Sunday’ as 30 min including a nap) But the point here is, even after doing so much of hard work I never cleared a semester in one shot until seventh. I heard a rumor that since the University was falling short of funds they found this innovative way to raise it up, other wise who else will fail in a single subject for seven times, paying Rs 450 for each attempt.
No, I am not joking. There are quite a few evidences to prove this theory. This incident took place in my third unsuccessful attempt to start Elec. m/c III. Ten minutes after distributing the question paper Shailendra (he is my best pal and accompanied till sixth attempt) looked at me shaking his head in disgrace. I signaled him to wait for another 15 minutes, so that I could help my friend in need. But the poor guy was so nervous that he left the examination room in just 30 minutes. I fought back and survived there for next two and half hours. On the result day Shailendra came all the way smiling towards me, not because of his 13/100 on scoreboard, but 9/100 against mine. Can you guys believe this? But our University could make you believe on such nasty things terming them as controversial as NASA’s expedition on moon.
BTW even today sometimes I wake up dripped in sweat with the nightmare, a clerk found out that my convocation of bachelor's degree is not valid as I am yet to clear Electrical m/c III.

ischool ke tem pe aana

JEOPARDY

The title is derived from one of my friend’s story (visit http://jaaramaaz.wordpress.com/category/saurabh/). It seems the virus of writing spread rapidly in air over last few months. Many of my friends got infected by it and got cured soon but I am not yet, so here is a new post. I don’t know if this makes any sense but it gives me real pleasure. Anyway that is not the subject of the post; I am going to post more and more as long as I am enjoying the stuff.
Last week I have been to ‘Torana’ fort. This is really nice trek. Shailendra and Sandy accompanied and both are just hopeless, they can’t even walk one KM in a stretch. Every 200 meters I had to show them some carrot like bread and eggs carried with me to walk next few more meters. The weather was just awesome and while on fort we were in real clouds and couldn’t even see beyond two meters. We had almost walked ninety percent of the distance but were not sure where we had reached. The fort was curved in clouds and we couldn’t see the walls. But the last ten percent were really tough for me.
I am always afraid of the height. My limbs start trembling and I can’t stop myself thinking of falling down. (I remember my younger days, during summer holidays we used to play on the building terrace, while others walked smartly and without showing any notion of fear, I used to literally creep. The fear of crumble down was so filled in my mind that I never enjoyed those games on terrace.) I think this fear of height will accompany me throughout my life. It’s not just about the ridge; it also applies to relationship, friendship and career.
I am always hesitant about crossing the boundaries and exploring the new horizons. But these new horizons are really attractive and I suppose it’s worth betting your achievements to reach over there. Over a period I realized the height may kill, but it really thrills. I would have never enjoyed the ‘Torana’ trek, if I couldn’t overcome my fear and climbed that 200 meters difficult pass. And ofcourse the other two musketeers were always there to push me and make me reach the top. Friends are for that only, aren’t they? (Even though they demand a Chicken Tandoor for doing so ;))

Ten Jobs I always dreamt about (and the dreams which never came true)

1. ST Bus driver
2. Fast bowler
3. MLA
4. Police Inspector
5. Teacher (I seriously want to do this)
6. Farmer
7. Road Construction worker (The one spreading 60 degree centigrade tarmac with his gumboots on)
8. Soldier (See Arnold in Commando)
9. Rickshawwala
10. Proud owner of wadapav stall (Anybody interested in partnership?)

At some point of my life I realized that I am not even worth the candle, so I became programmer ;)

First Sunday of August

Those who know little about me consider me shy, lonely, studious, introvert. They might be true in a way as they hardly ever saw me expressing myself. Conversely those who know me will never dare to say so. I have never been a popular dude, neither in school nor in college and not even today. It takes me a while to get along to strangers, but bonding friendship is just matter of time I spent with them (For me every stranger is potentially good friend). If you ask me about my best friend, I may not be able to name one. During this little (?) journey of my life (I am almost 30 now), I met many of them in different phases and each one has reserved his/her special places in my heart. How can I compare my childhood friends to college ones and those met me in NCST, Spectrum and Persistent? For many of them I lost the touch now, but not their place in my heart.

It just happened few weeks back that nobody was around for that weekend and I was all alone myself. I was surfing internet aimlessly looking out on gmail and Orkut for any one of them. While doing so I came across this blogspot and I registered. But the real problem was what should I write here? Lots of thoughts were going through my mind but nobody to listen. Keeping all the gloomy thoughts aside, I started with the least of my misery and came up with my first piece of scrap. (and I am still doing the same ;))

The Dilbert Principle

Last week I had a word with my manager for the release from the project. After being corporate victim for quite some while, now I realize the universal truth about managers, ‘They are always right.’ I wonder whether they get this talent in their genes or there is some secrete corporate training program going on to teach them this attitude. Whichever is the case, I am sure their seniors must have been well acquainted with this potential of theirs before promoting them.
This month we had our objective settings done by lead. After 15 min. speech about my objectives in coming year, his expectations and my achievements (?) in last quarter he asked me whether I always nod to everything or do I want to say anything? Well, I was not at all interested in discussing my goals for the year, as by now I understand, ‘IT DOESN’T REALLY MATTER’. First thing, the goals are never meant to be achievable, second if you try hard enough and lets say really achieve all of them your performance review will be discussed on what was silently expected from you and how you failed to read between the lines, and the last thing you can get good raise or even promotion for just being in good books of the manager (and for that you don’t really have to work hard and achieve all the goals). The good part of the story is, I got good remarks in my performance diary and even some appreciation for my work for the quarter. That’s really funny, because I haven’t done anything different than last year, infact if I go by the statistics I worked less - less hours, less call handling, less defect fixing, less defect verification, less test case execution. This might be the effect of my improving (?) relations with my manager after I asked for release in last performance review meeting!
Anyway, so I opened my mouth to inquire about the status of my release request. This followed by my meeting with manager. This lady has amazing skills of convincing one, how always she is right. I was told that rating below three out of five is quite fair and how she overlooked many negative aspects raised by my other senior (I wonder if all of them were being considered what was my offering then, one or 0.5? Thank god we don’t have negative ratings!). Being firm on my decision I again requested for the release timeline, which is not committed yet, but definitely not before this December. That means, it takes more than six months to release a guy below average (less than 3/5 rating) while others (might be with better ratings) get released in less than a month (even though they didn’t ask for it). Finally I was told that, I am being pessimist and I should think about it.
Why did this happen? I really had thought about it many times. I still have no answer. The performance award in first three months, 5 out of 5 rating in probationary appraisal after six months, early promotion in nine months and suddenly below average performance for next one year, ironically this all happened under the same manager. It would have been better if she would have shown some trust in me and judged me by her own experience rather than just blindly following others perceptions. I was going through very bad era of my life those days, I was always tensed and that could have been seen on my face. Ofcourse that’s not any excuse for degrading performance, infact I always tried to keep my professional life unaffected from my personal dilemma. Going by pure stats I can really prove it, my self evaluation always put me in much better ranks than my work in first nine months. But their remained something unsaid from my manager which I failed to read and this followed series of review meetings. Almost every 15 days or month we had this meeting where I was told that my performance has too many crests and dips, it’s not steady (as if a chromatogram ;)). So going back to my desk I tried even harder to make it ‘steady’. But it never helped as I failed to realize the real problem and it was never told clearly.
It was late November when I began to realize the real issue which had nothing to do with my work, it was more about satisfying my senior’s ego. So there enters this new character in the story about whom I haven’t mentioned yet. I have a senior in the team (not my manager or lead, I don’t know where to put her in hierarchy, but surely she is senior in the team). I don’t have any friendly relations with this lady. That doesn’t mean I don’t respect her or I have any enmity with her. And I don’t consider doesn’t liking somebody is to hate him/her. I always had this feeling that, when I was new on the project, really required help to grasp the project, she hardly helped me, even ignored sometimes. This senior was then looking into only one module of the project, and the manager assigned me tasks from different modules. Unfortunately even though I was primary resource of the module where this senior was leading I was hardly assigned 10% of the total work I did. The reasons were different, there were two dedicated resources (apart from me) for that module out of which she was quite knowledgeable and the other was equally competent, the workload for that module was less and for the other modules I was working, I was the sole owner. So I reported her for very less time, and even put some of the tasks asked by her on low priority. But this gave her different impression and she raised the point to my manager which followed all the fuss I explained earlier. I started making mistakes and in process to correct them made more. This was the real vicious circle. In one of the last few meetings she humiliated me so badly that I decided to quit. I don’t know where I am heading but I think it’s better to turn around the page to start a new chapter in life (both personal and professional) when people lose faith in each other.
Moral of the story is, this Dilbert is in complete agreement of Murphy’s law,
‘If anything can go wrong, it will’

Mumbai – University, Swapnil, Ameya and Sea link

Last weekend in Mumbai was fantastic. For the first time I noticed that University Physics Dept. is heaven for nature lovers. ;) After that eyeful feast of bird-watching we (Vaibhav and me) headed towards Andheri to meet Swapnil. Not to mention, as usual in his unique way he showed all his love for us and this time it was witnessed by our ears and hair. I just wonder how somebody can give such torture to a man behind wheel in bumper to bumper traffic.

Ameya’s office is in Pawai, Hiranandani. That’s the wonderful place. Hardly ever I saw any builder/developer putting so many efforts on the exteriors. Buildings in that part of the city are as beautiful as crowd over there.

That night we went to Warali Sea link. Fortunately Vidyadhar was there to direct us. This guy knows every road and every lane in the city may be because he lived all his life in Dadar or may be due to his marketing job. And when Ameya and Vidyadhar both are there its obvious to keep all the gossip we had about Spectrum unmentioned.

It was almost fifty minutes in more than half kilometer queue which allowed us to enter Sea link. People were so crazy to watch it that they came in taxies, buses and even in tempo with entire family. It was more like tourist spot than a mere bridge connecting two shores of the city. But the beauty of this sea link made my hour long struggle with clutch and break really worth.

I don’t know whether it’s my perception or what but I hardly ever saw any building, any structure in independent India made with eye of beauty. Look at those made during British rule, whether it’s GPO in Mumbai, Railway Terminus like CST or even Mandai in Pune, all these places were made for public use, but are so beautiful that any visitor to these places will obviously praise them. Definitely it was not proud feeling for me while I was on the sea link but certainly it was great pleasure to watch the most beautiful sculpture in independent India by Indian engineers.

That day was Ashadhi Ekadashi and it started raining heavily on that day, as if Vitthal has heard Marathi people’s cry. I love rain, but I think I will write about it sometime later. It’s getting too long here (and I am feeling sleepy). So… Goodbye Mumbai.

On the accounts of ‘New York’

Last week Govt. of India rejected GUJCOCA (Gujarat Control of Organized Crime Act). I always have this question, does this kind of law really necessary? Specifically the provisions like ‘confession before a police officer will be admissible’
I know this is quite debatable issue, especially when we all are facing the heat of terrorism. I agree to the point that more authority should be given to police forces and investigation agencies. They should be better prepared and more equipped, not only in terms of arms and ammunition but also with strong backing of law. But then the real question is to what extent, shouldn’t there be some limit over that, shouldn’t these agencies be answerable? Is the cost we are going to pay is justified?
Whether it’s GUJCOCA, MCOCA, POTA or TADA from my point of view the law that gives unlimited authority to any Govt. agency can not be justified.

Sometimes I think we are trying to fit ourselves in the shoes of USA, UK or Australia. We are so much fascinated with these western countries that we just become blind to the pitfalls in their systems.
Take the example of USA where post 9/11 thousands were kept behind the bar without any specific charges, most of them were innocent. After eight years USA president is now saying ‘America will be safer when Guantanamo Bay is closed’. But who can return the life of those thousands of innocents, tortured, humiliated, and destroyed forever. Of course nobody will take any responsibility for the loss because it is justified by the law of US government.
Do we forget the detention of Dr. Haneef in Australia? And after all, even without the enforcement of laws like POTA our investigation agencies have already shown their potential in misuse of so called weak IPC and CrPC. How can we believe our life will be in safe hands once such kind of law is in force?
It really doesn’t matter whether the government is Communist, Nazi, Talibani, Muslim republic or Democratic, it doesn’t even matter whether the society is orthodox or liberal, if unlimited authority is going in certain people’s hands without any control over them, misuse will come to pass.
Fortunately whenever such brutal laws tries to conquest freedom of mankind, there comes a ray of hope, sometimes it comes with Gandhi, sometimes with Tank man in Tiananmen Square and sometimes she is Iranian Neda Sultan, showing us the way to civilized society where our cast, religion, race, political view or skin color is not the measure of our innocence and fight for freedom, equality and justice is not termed as anti-national activity.

Prologue

So here it goes…..
Well, I almost always spell my name VINIT, but the smart clerk in my school corrected it on my SCC certificate as VINEET. And so the confusion started…
After two weeks of joining Persistent, one fateful evening at around 2100 hrs I received a call from Persistent HR on my landline. His voice seems to be somewhat irritated (I never saw HR guys working late-night ;-)) but the real blow was yet to come my way. The HR guy immediately came to main subject and asked me whether I rejected the offer Persistent had made one and half months back. I didn’t understand what he said, as for me it was totally out of context. (Besides I was still on bench and there were all kinds of rumors about ‘bad/no performance gift’ floating around) Keeping aside all kind of thoughts and possibilities filling my mind, I gathered my words and told him my employee ID. After checking the employee database he laughed and said ‘Oh, you are VINEET and not VINIT, but your resume carries VINIT?’ Great!!! What’s in name? (Somebody might have lost his performance allowance due to my name ;))
I don’t believe in numerology kind of stuff neither do I am superstitious. But I like spelling myself Vinit. Besides its short, I don’t have to type/write one extra character every time. But now that all my certificates carry Vineet, I have to stick to my corrected incorrect spelling. :(
So the point is…If your name can be spelled wrong, it will.

Murphy Says

If anything can go wrong, it will.