Neutral thinking

**Note before writing this blog - This blog speaks about something I always felt in life but I think I got words to express these thoughts after reading of Know thyself

I always I like to (love to) read books. I was reading Dale Carnegie and Shiv Khera for quite some time in my college days and continued with some of the books talking about the positive attitude even after college. Though reading books by Dale Carnegie like "How to win friends and influence people" or reading something from Normal Vincent Peale like "The power of positive thinking" makes you happy for the moment. If you loose contact with these books chances are you will forget this superficial positive thinking course.
Why? either of the positive or negative thoughts makes you think of the partial side of the object. I have belief that half truth can never make you really happy, it can take control of your conscious mind for some period of time but it will never be able to satisfy your sub-conscious mind (rather soul). It is as simple as if I keep looking at the positive part of the number line I am never looking at the complete number line - I am only looking at part of it, and to face the real world we can not ignore negative numbers.

What I believe could be the ideal way of looking at things is 'Neutral thinking' i.e. Neither think positively nor negatively - just observe the things as they are, and never 'how they should be?'.

How can neutral thinking help me?
Neutral thinking could help everyone because then you do not get positive or negative surprises or chain of inter-woven positive and negative thoughts. This is because I am not thinking about something - I am just looking at it. When I think with positive or negative perspective then having the perspective of looking at the subject makes the subject hard to digest - because then you do not look at the actual subject - you just look to verify or you make fool of yourself my making your mind convinced about the thought which is not real.

When I say that I am born to win then it makes my mind constrained to think of victory as the purpose of life, is winning the purpose of your life? Does winning matters more or the joy of play? I am convinced that for me the joy of playing matters much more than winning. What if I loose? - I need not think that I will win next time - but I should look forward for the joy I will get from the next play. Though I have used the word joy here I think really what I mean is 'feeling being an alive part of the play' than just a stupid player who plays not for himself.

So decide what you want to be optimist, pessimist or just an observer.

Learn good things from others

Just some time back I had dinner with my friend (+ philosopher + brother) Madhav (aka Mady). We were talking about natya sangeet and I started criticizing one great singer with examples pointing to his personal life. Mady did not said that I am wrong, he just said that if we have to take examples from others lives or if we want to talk about others personal life then we should look at the good things they did in their life rather than the bad ones.

In Delcam me and one of my colleague always used to have verbal fight regarding Aamir Khan and SRK. I always attack the subject of SRK with comments like "he is not more than ta ta pa pa and ka ka ka ka Kiran" or "he is not worth watching". One fine day I faced question inside "do I deserve to talk about SRK?", "Who gives me rights to talk any shit comes to my mind against anybody?", "Do I have ability to act at least 1% good as that of SRK?, have I ever faced camera?". After that I always tried to kept mum on this topic (rather I promised I will never talk about SRK again on lunch table and forgot my promise once - hope this will never happen again). I think it would be worth observing why SRK is so much popular - definitely it is because of hard work. SRK is the person who came from non-filmy background family and reached the King Khan position. I will not discuss his personal life in my blog but if you search for SRK on google I think his personal life is great.

We Indians say lot of times that western culture is bad culture and western people have bad personal life. I think we discuss it so much that when Indians go to west most of the times they take bad things from west and forget to look at the good points. I was in UK for 6 weeks, I could see that people come early to office and they leave early (mostly 9am to 5pm). I hardly found anybody working after 7pm. But the other side of the story was in day time I never saw them browsing personal emails or orkuting or chatting for long hours or taking long lunch break. I think we should look at the positive side of the western culture. I was talking to one of my Guru's few weeks back and we were discussing about western culture, his comments made me think - "In India people do not take divorce because of the social pressure they might face or because they think about their kids future, rather western people are bold enough to take divorce and find better match for them" - definitely I do not want to learn that "divorce is good" - but think about the attitude western people that - they do not cheat their mind.

Imagine how great we can become if we take good things from everyone we come in contact? I do not say that follow others but take good things in them if you like it and if you do not like something then do not make your judgment go beyond your mind. Life will be wonderful if we start looking at the positives in everyone we come in contact with. From today I will try to make note of at least 5 good things in the person with whom I come in contact.

NTPEL lectures on Youtube

Hi friends,

If you want any lecture series on particular subject try searching youtube.
NTPEL (National programme for technology enhanced learning) - have recorded number of lectures from IIT professors and they have made them available on youtube.
I am posting few links here -
1. For Computer graphics - 43 lecture series
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=338D19C40D6D1732
2. Internet technologies - 40 lectures
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=04D5787E247DC324

If you find any other such good link - please post them in comments.

Cheers!!
Ashish

Astrology - my views

7-8 years back I started studying astrology.

First I started with study of Kundali, but I could not learn much that time. What I understood at that time was study of kundali is based on the positions of the planets in sky their effect on our life. Few year later I started studying palmistry, I could learn palmistry much easily. Palm reading is easier for new comers than Kundali (at advanced level both might be equally tough).
I saw hands of more than 200 people in 2-3 years. I could see that different people have different good and bad things in life.

Sometimes my reading was perfect sometimes it was totally absurd. Most of the times when I could not read hand I used to tell the person that I do not understand your hand.

I stopped palm reading almost 2-3 years back after death of my mother. According to my reading I thought she will have life of about 50 years and she died at 48, I did not feel any shock when she died. Rather when my father called me saying mother is serious I went to Lord Shiv's temple to pray for my mother. I had institution that she is no more. After that I thought that palm reading made me unhappy much before actually she died.

I had also read hand of few others and told them some of the bad things that will happen in future like accidents and divorce etc. and when that actually happened I felt bad, I used to think that, by telling them about bad things in future I removed their joy of present.

Some remarks before I write negative side-
1. Like any other science astrology and palmistry is also science. Ancient Indians studied these sciences to good extent and lot of knowledge is available on today's date on methodologies to make astrological predictions.
2. There are people even on today's date who also know the detailed reasoning behind the predictions they are making. It is very much similar to how an engineer reads engineering drawing or architect reads plan drawing.

Negative side of astrology (rather negative side of the way it is used) -
1. First and most important reason why people should stop use of fal jyotish (prediction science) excessively is that
i. People forget the power of present. This is worse effect.
ii. People forget that they are the god/ architect/ designer of their own life.
iii. If you know the future in advance then you can not enjoy present. Then you can not observe life - you can just verify it.
2. Sometimes even though there is no problem with somebody, but astrologer will tell him/her for some big Pooja or will advice them some costly stone. I firmly believe that stones should not be used to solve problems which come because of your karma. Face the problems - do not find easy solutions, when wrong stones are used person using those stones might have to suffer a lot because of it.
3 . Sometimes they tell the predictions just to make the listener happy.
4. Remember you are paying fees to someone who is taking away joy of your life. Do remember that whether the prediction is positive or negative it takes away the joy of your life - simply because you loose the newness of experiences. Your mind becomes prejudiced.
5. It creates a mental block in your mind because of which your attitude shifts from 'can do it' to 'should happen'.

The positive side of astrology -
1. There are scholars who have studied astrology to depth and have found methods to find predictions about weather. I think this can be very useful if we verify the results scientifically. The predictions should be verified with the statistical data and then this can be used as a help for farmers. I know some might think that why not to use satellite etc. methods. my answer is
- astrology is also science. It do not require you to spend any money on the infrastructure. Just use it as guide line - I am not telling that do not use other scientific ways.
2. One more use I think of astrology is for deciding child's name. This is the only science I know which has reasoning for "what's there in name".
3. Though I do not completely agree astrology could also be used for making decision regarding marriage. I have firm belief that those who choose option of love marriage should not at all verify things from astrologer this is wrong. Regarding others who do arrange marriage and the boy and girl do not know about each other, for these people astrology is useful science.

Friends I know that you are going to criticize me a lot. Do write your comments, your views. But before you write any question I have some requests-
1. I have learned astrology methodically, I (almost) do not understand the reasoning. So do not ask me basic questions like - prove that it is a science or prove that predictions made by astrology are correct.
2. You might have experienced sometime that somebody gave your wrong prediction
- true, the reason was the astrologer failed to analyze. Remember when some satellite goes out of control we do not say that science is wrong, rather the scientist who designed it failed to study some parameters.
3. You might tell me that Ashish you are in 21 century and talking like 400BC. I won't mind. I have verified the truth of this science from my own experiences.
4. Why do we require it for weather prediction, marriage decision etc.
- Fine if you don't want it but then why do you either want satellite results (afterall this is also a way of prediction) or partner compatibility tests (they are also statistics based - there are no proven formulae)?

Use Open Source

I think I do lot of criticism in my blogs - thought of writing something new.

I would like to share with you my little knowledge about the world of open source. I should also mention thanks to my couligue Chetan Verma and Great friends Ketan Deshpande for introducing me to many of these programs

For those who want to know "What is open source?" - I will suggest them movie/documentary "Revolution OS".

Operating system -Linux
Thanks to Linus Torvalds for giving us truly free operating system.
I use - OpernSUSE 11.0, I think Fedor10 is also good (I have not tried this much)
Good thing about it - when I started working with OpenSUSE, I do not feel like working with XP. You can use every thing like -
- Internet
- auto detect camera
- auto detect USB
and other things which you generally need.
Takes me to next software

MPlayer
If you want to take total control while watching video like
- Change frame rate
- Adjust lag between sound and video
- give post process quality option
and feature like this then MPlayer is for you.
Though VLC is also good option I personally do not like VLC much.

GIMP -
GIMP - GNU Image manipulation program
Try this if you like to edit images (even if you don't like you will start liking it after playing with GIMP).

InkScape -
InkScape is program for creating SVG (scalable vector graphics). I personally like to play with InkScape- quite simple to use but very powerful. People with CAD background will find it quite easy. Good thing about SVG images is the quality remains same even if you scale it 100 times.

WinMerge -
Open source utility for solving merges. Earlier I was user of araxis - but I think win-merge is equally powerful. If you want to compare 3 files at a time then try KDiff3.

Emacs -
My favorite editor for coding. Customise it to suit you requirements.
Best thing is you can make it's background completely black - your eyes won't feel stressed even if you spend 10hours in front of computer coding in Emacs (I personally even use black background for Visual Studio 2005 - but the feel is not as good as emacs)

Dia -
Simple and useful software for creating flow-chart diagrams and network diagrams.

OpenOffice3.0 -
I agree this is not as great as Microsoft office, but this is free!! And you can create PDF just by clicking on one button.

Voilet UML Editor -
Simple and very useful for creating UML and class diagrams. If you want advanced features then you might need StartUML - I am happy with Voilet since this is easy to use and solves my needs.

GCC -
I have not learned this yet - but heard that this is good and powerful compiler.

Mozilla Firefox -
I have tried almost all web-browsers like - Internet explorer (worst), Safari (amazing), Opera (good) but Mozilla Firefox is "The good one". Just look for it's customization options - choose your favorite theme and enjoy.

Pidgin -
Do you want to use single application for numerous chatting accounts like - yahoo, Gtalk, ICQ and what not - use pidgin. You can login into all your accounts and see all contacts from single application window.

It is possible that I might have forgot to mention many other good open-source projects. If you want to know more, go to http://sourceforge.net/