Rape and the Disgusting Indian Mindset!

I wanted to keep quiet about my thoughts so long; reason – shame! Yes shame. Someone wise once told me, we repent for two reasons and two reasons only – guilt and shame. Is it guilt or the shame of being exposed, that there is so many hue and cries in India now? The truth is, we – all of us, have less reason to be in shame. We are in fact the guilty culprits! Men and women - responsible. 

MARRIAGE:

Most people I know from India look at the girl child only as someone born to get married. ’Marriage’ becomes their primary purpose in life. Doesn’t she need higher aspirations? Even when contributing to society, science and literature a woman in India is still constantly nagged, till she ties the wedding knot. Still many a widow has to wear white, not wear her pottu or bangles and stuff. Aren't we the brilliant culture, who used to burn the wife when the husband dies?

Indians have heavily skewed understanding of marriage in the first place. Marriage to most Indians is not something, where two souls compliment each other to better themselves in life and spirit. It is not even about companionship and compatibility. It is a deceitful lock of chains, which somehow every victim of an Indian marriage chooses to bestow upon and even make it look appealing to their children.

Even with so many Indian career women today, wherever they are in the world, I bet half of them still have to head back home and care for the children and their husband and maybe even the extended family. My dear women, don’t you think, that somehow you are getting the short end of the stick? And yet you still run after this so-called marriage!

SEX:

‘Sex’ is taboo! A woman having consensual sex – happens all the time, but ‘taboo’ should the news leak out in society. She will invariably be labeled ‘loose’. Imagine what all brands she will inherit if she has multiple partners? If it were a man; well yeah it still is not ok, but what the heck!

RAPE:

It is shameful on every Indian, to have our so-called ‘culture’ call a girl who has been raped as ‘kettu poitta’ or ‘rotten’. Nothing in fact went rotten; it is the rotten mindset that we have never set right in the first place. If our sons get lynched, would we say ‘he’s become rotten’?

Don’t hide your faces my fellow brothers and sisters. You raped her. Yes you did.

You men, who don’t look at your working wife as your equal; ordering her about, not partaking in sharing the chores, cooking, cleaning, washing and rising your kids. You are teaching your sons and daughters that a woman is someone who can be walked all over.

You Women, who don’t challenge yourself to be self-reliant; always looking to get married, looking for a wealthy, strong man to take care of you. Why wouldn’t the ‘male’ mindset look down on you? Why wouldn’t your in-laws treat you as a lesser mortal?

Your movies, that re-enforce the misogyny by carving out larger-than-life heroes next to submissive, all-understanding and accepting ‘virtuous’ women. Does anyone know many Indian men are turned on by rape scenes? So very Disgusting! Do you know why? Suppression! We can never call a spade a spade! 

Our culture, that teaches young girls to go in the kitchen and help their mothers, while the boys grow up sitting first at every meal, served by the women, who even do the dishes after. We worship women as deities in temples, treat our mothers as servants, rule over our the housewife, dominate and condition our daughters to be submissive, glorify our sons. I am talking about both men and women here. We are hypocrites to the core. 

Will we ever change? Will capital punishment change this mindset? All I pledge to do is this: Within my circle of influence, I will not let this rotten mindset enter my family or harm my friends!

Validation from my team

A pleasant surprise gift from some of my team members, that was awaiting me at my desk, as I returned from vacation!

Demystifying Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence! (DW & BI)

I think I’ve exhausted the most interesting things - Philosophy, history, daily events that caught my attention - that can be put to words without getting battered by the lady! :P Now like how the Monty Python feature film title goes ‘..and Now for something Completely different’- ‘Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence (DW & BI).

Yup, a dry subject at first glance, but very interesting if you probe a little. Demystifying DW & BI  and the myths surrounding it to fresh college graduates is what I’ve been doing for sometime earlier in my career. Thought I’ll share the essence with you!

It all started with this conversation I had, a long time ago, with a very senior member of a nationalized bank in India. He asked, ‘what do you do in data warehousing? Just store loads of data right?’ I was quite taken aback! Is this how the world views what I did? Like an old man who puts away junk in the dusty rooms of an old office! Well ok, at least he thought I push buttons to do the job, perhaps that made my profession look a little more fashionable in his eyes. I then took it upon myself and the fraternity of DW & BI professionals to clarify the role we play in the information age.

In a nutshell - I help businesses understand themselves better. This is my bread and butter. Unlike my other colleagues in IT who interact with the technology divisions of their clients, we DW consultants interact with the top level-management of global top-notch industries. (get to meet a lot of interesting pps there J )

Myth:

Data warehousing is to do with permanently store data in a warehouse, taking backups, retrieving lost data. Sometimes it is construed as running MIS reports for the management and industry from existing systems!

Fact:

DW & BI is a technology in itself that processes and transforms data into information for analysis. It is operationally different from other core systems which are more concerned about availability, storage and retrieval. Here the challenge is consolidation of data sources, integration into common agreed formats and summarization into facts and dimensions!

Why Data warehousing?

Data warehousing is essential for large scale businesses with data scattered over the different locations and branches and units and factories, to organize it into usable information. DW is the choice for businesses to understand their strengths, weaknesses, failures, successes, and opportunities and help them make strategic decisions to excel. DW and BI is aimed at ironing out operational flaws and helps understand and stay ahead of competition.

Business Intelligence:

BI intelligence is to do with providing complicated analysis of the information that is processed by data warehousing. It provides a complete integrated, multi-dimensional snapshot of where a business stands at any point of time or over a defined period. It allows for drilling down into specific areas of operation to understand why something happened!

Few area’s where DW & BI is used today:

Insurance -To identify and remove common risks from covers and understand claim Frauds etc

BFSI - To give multi-dimensional performance of portfolio’s of clients, gauge performance of branches, maintain credit exposure and control credit risk etc

Manufacturing- To streamline production line, customer and supplier relationship management, inventory management

New technology- Ultra-modern internet sites like eBay to understand and enhance user experience on sites and click-stream analysis

Life sciences - like in the genome project, gene mapping, FDA approvals on drugs

Retail                - Inventory mgmt., identifying and retaining top customers, top products etc

The list is endless. If you have a business you must have intelligence smart 

enough to manage it!

Evolution:

There have always been businesses and there has always been intelligent means of managing them. Technology pioneers like Citigroup started way back in 80’s to automate intelligence in their systems. Most of the coding was done in Pro* C and primitive Oracle systems. Phew those systems!! Writing in C with linked-lists creating reports with C with pie-charts and all! Thank God those days are over. Being from a mechanical engineering background myself, looking back I can’t seems to get over the thought of how I managed to go though all that! Today DW & BI professionals have a more simplified and sophisticated work environment and there are tools for everything, from Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) to complex multi-dimensional reporting!

The meaning of Life (Facts and dimensions):

DW & BI professionals have better, multi-dimensional perspective of not only businesses but also of life as such. For example to answer the question ‘why a person say Jack scored well in college while did badly in his high school final exam?’ To answer the question the parameters are can be Jack’s health, environment, training provided etc etc. these are called DIMENSIONS. His high school score, college academic scores etc. are called FACTS. Facts in DW refer to a numerical value which is proven measured definite value. Dimensions are the parameters that caused the outcome or score. So next time you meet a DW/BI Guy/gal.. be aware he/she has seen it all before ;-)

The future of DW & BI:

Unlike earlier when there was a constraint on storage and procession speeds, today storage is cheap and there is no limit in enhancing processing speeds! The future can only be like all existing legacy systems and operational systems can be re-engineered, re-architected to have a DW and BI systems built into them!

Why should you be reading this?

Data warehousing is hot in the market! The facts speak for themselves. The average industry pay for DW professionals is ranked along with the best like SAP / Oracle professionals! Training costs for DW & BI tools like hyperion runs into almost a lakh/person per week! Simple math if you train 10 people for 5 days you can walk away with like 10 lakhs! Why do you think SAP bought the company Business Objects? – to enhance its BI strength! Or Oracle buying Seibel analytics?

So if you’re an aspiring IT professional or want a change from the regular offerings your role has to give to something livelier, complete, interesting and challenging, you know this option better! Wanna hear more and in depth? Just gimme a buzz will ya! :D

Seven Steps

To dream big is one thing, while actually working to achieve it is quite another! Unlike a select few of us, most people just stop there; with a dream! There is a reason why many among us, who wished to be a pilot, soldier, fashion designer, astronaut…. never really get anywhere close to our dreams! It is because we stop with the dream! Over time and when you grow older, you realize, that you haven’t gotten anywhere! When you realize this, the dream seems so distant and almost impossible to achieve.

This is common in the corporate environment as well. When we enter as freshers, our dreams are big. We wish to change the way things are done; create new pathways and even dream to one day run the organization! What happened over the years? Yes, we worked hard and had great successful moments. Then why are we nowhere close to the summit?

I’ll tell you why. While you were sweating away on your task each day, there was so much going on across the organization and the environment; people changed, younger bosses came in, the economy collapsed. Suddenly you feel caught up in the rat race, that now you have almost forgotten your dream. Am I right? Actually no, I am not! None of these matters to those who have been working on their dreams! It was you and me who lost focus of the big picture!

Here is my simple strategy to achieve! I’d like to call it “The seven step journey to succeeding”! Why Seven? Well merely since the number ‘seven’, seems to have occupied significant importance in our history and culture! I mean, ‘seven candles’, ‘seven seals, ‘seven wonders of the world’, ‘seven years war’, ‘seven samurai’, ‘magnificent seven’, ‘seventh seal’, ‘seven sins’ and more recently ‘seven habits of highly effective people’. Just a drift!

Without any further delay, I lay down the concept that worked for me. When you have a dream, worth achieving, make realizing that dream as the 7^th step and write it down. Now you know, you have 6 major steps to get to that big achievement! Now write down 6 significant milestones, that you’d have to cross to get there. Each step should take you one step closer to you dream and be concrete enough to get you to the next step. I mean each step should be hard enough to achieve without having achieved the previous one.

Let’s take an example: To have a super toned body with lean muscles, six packs and less that 5% body fat!

To achieve this dream, let me set a realist timeline of 14 months (mere because 14 is a multiple of 7). Now let me lay out the 7 steps! Wait! Why seven steps? All I have to do is exercise and eat moderately right? No, not really. If that was all there is to it, wouldn’t I have got there by now? After all I have been working out for like a year now; I don’t eat too much carbs, never add sugar in my diet. Then why didn’t it work? The reason is simple! I had a dream, but did not have intermediate targets! I did not take into account the various small factors that have held me from achieving my dream!

So let’s me list them all down and take it as a challenge to overcome each obstacle spread over the 7 steps! Here they are: my dinners, though low in fat are heavy, I skip my workouts often after a late night party or drinking, I don’t limit my liquor intake during parties, overcompensate after workouts, when I don’t have access to quality food I sometime end up sneaking on snacks, I can’t resist those official dinners with mouth watering deserts… whew , the list is so big! No wonder, I never got to my destination!

Now to the seven steps!

Step 0: Where I stand! 91Kgs and 24% body fat. TO get to less than 5%, I got to loose roughly 17.3Kgs and get to 73.7Kgs; i.e average of 2.5Kgs every 2 months or for each step!

Step	Target	How
1	88.5 Kgs	Read extensively on weight loss and reduction. Experiment on the exercise(s) and diets that work for me. Prove it, loose that first 2.5kgs and document how you did it!
2	86 Kgs	Re-calibrate and improvise on what worked in step1! Find a quicker, timely and easily accessible supply for the diet (low in carbs and high in protein and balanced in good fats) Increase workload by 25% (8kgs dumbbell to 10kgs)
3	83.5 Kgs	Lifestyle change! Let me limit that beer, wine of drink to thrice a week and one glass at that! Increase workload another 25%
4	81 Kgs	Add 20 minutes of HIIT cardio in the mornings, atleast 4 times a week! Make weight trainings with double original weights and HIIT for 15 mins thrice a week in evenings!
5	78.5 Kgs	Convert late night dinner to thin soup after evening workout.
6	76 Kgs	Start a new sport for an hour – 3 times a week! Detox once a week.
7	73.5 Kgs	The final push! Eat to train, train to eat. No slippage period on cardio, sport, weight, diet and sleep.

Now I have a super toned body with lean muscles, six pack and less than 5% body fat!

You might be a little ahead in schedule or a little lagging. That does not matter. What is important is that you have thought the process through, attacked all your obstacles, made a plan to measure each milestone against and started working for achieving your goal.

Now you may loose some steam in between or find yourself slipping a bit. It is not of great significance as overall you will be on the way to success. Also achieving each new milestone with help you gather more steam and momentum in achieving your goal, especially if you get the first few right!

That’s it folks! I’m sure you apply this concept to quitting smoking, loosing weight, writing a novel, making a music video, finding a job in NASA or even becoming a belly dancer! Cheers and all the best and do invite me for the performance! ;)

Time never runs out!

Stuck in the “NOW”, without a clue about the “ABSOLUTE FUTURE” till time makes it our “ABSOLUTE PAST”, man is clueless about the “ABSOLUTE ELSEWHERE”, since not even light can reach it from out there till somewhere in the future!

It will take a load of deep contemplation, to decipher the truths that lay behind this natural law.

For instance man thinks he is bound by free will, whereas reality is it can be proved that he can never get to where we wants to go!

This drift, pessimistic as it may sound, was inspired by the space-time continuum theory I was looking into recently. Very specifically it points to the “ABSOLUTE ELSEWHERE”. Here goes from Zeno’s paradoxes....

“Suppose, I were to dis-prove that if I drop a ball, it will hit the ground; first for the ball to reach the ground it will have to fall half the distance, then half of the remaining distance and so on for infinite number of times. Infinite times in finite time is impossible. We are therefore frozen in time." 

தமிழா தமிழா!

தமிழ் கூவும் தமிழச்சியே, உனது வெற்றி உன் பிரபிலேயே, உனது நாவில் விதிக்கப்பட்டுவிட்டது! உனக்கும் சாதிக்கும் உள்ள 'unfair advantage' இதுதானோ?

Reflections 2011

It’s that time of the year again. This is when i reflect on the year gone by and see where I stand comparing the same time last year. Better or worse? Either way if fine by me, however more important is whether how I am today is a result of conditioning, intuition or merely a delusion. I will explain. We have often heard the below:

“I think, therefore I am.”

“You are what you eat.”

“Fitness First.”

“How does it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and yet suffer the loss of his own soul?”

Each one of these age old adages put one form of existentialism ahead of the other. In clear terms, they are mutually exclusive and don’t consider the individual as a whole! There are numerous divisions within as well. For instance ‘fitness’. It’s not gotta do with just weight loss. It’s about strength, speed and flexibility to convert strength with speed to power. Weight loss , therefore just becomes a by-product.

 What I’ve come to understand, is that we humans have heavy conditioning! Vast influences in childhood, school, teenage and even at workplace, we learn newer ways and ‘visions’ of the world around us which we decide to conform to.

Now getting back those adages. Though they all stand tall in their individual claims, no single can govern our entirety. A mix and match and play is the key. We stop youthfulness and start growing old only when we stop learning; when we stop exploring; continue to live in the past.

The best answer I looked for as this year’s fruit is freedom. Freedom from conditioning, a spike in intuition  and a consciousness, that exists in the moment. These are few questions I ask myself today:

Am I still a prisoner to my past, my habits?

Does behaviour still govern today?

Have I risen above conditioning?

Have I managed to avoid the delusions of the present, through spontaneity and intuition?

Have I been intimate in my words, thoughts, actions and interactions?

Or am I just another average in this 7 billion; born to wither and die, killing time!