Essence of a goal

We humans do everything in life with some or the other goal. Sometimes a goal is very clear to us sometimes its foggy and sometimes we see right through it.

1) A child cries with a goal of getting its stomach filled, a goal of conveying its desire to sleep, a goal of conveying its displeasure to something or a goal of wanting to be with its loved ones.

2) In sports a goal is almost always visible.

-In cricket you need to send the ball outside the boundary.

-In foot ball in a goal post.

-In basket ball in a basket

-In golf, pool, snooker, carom in a hole

-In snake and ladder it’s the last square.

-In chess its by method of elimination

-In volley ball, tennis, table tennis badminton, throw ball you need to keep the ball within the boundary.

3) I was once asked why test match gets less audience than a 20-20 cricket matches. Here are some points I could think of;

            1) It takes a real long time to set a goal and a whole lot more to achieve a goal in a test match, where as in a 20-20 the whole process is a whole lot quicker.

            2) In test match there is a huge chance of a draw match. Very rare in 20-20.

           

Time is thus of a great essence when it comes to addressing a goal.

4) I had a beautiful lesson in Sanskrit in my 9^th standard named 'Shraddha'=>belief.

Shraddha means honest dedication but in this chapter it addressed belief.

I still remember that this lesson spoke all about how belief has held our lives together.

While on one hand a goal gives you a sense of direction, it is the belief that finally keeps you going in life.

• We sleep every night with a belief that we are actually going to get up the next day in the morning.
• A monkey hangs on the branch of a tree belief that the branch is going to remain intact.
• A sentence said “Yo yat shraddha sa aiva saha”, which means that a person becomes what he believes in life.
• The lesson also had an abstract from ‘The Bhagavad Geeta’,

“Shraddha vishwam idam jagat,

Shraddha vishwa vyapini”

            According to the lord, it’s the belief that keeps the world going, belief makes the world a better place.

5) Other instances of setting a goal include:

a) People buying lottery ticket with a hope of getting a lot of money(goal).

b) Students write exams with a goal of passing (however some aim higher (~_^).

c) Ideally the end objective of education system must be to make the students good citizens, how ever, most institutions have lost their track.

d) Students go to class everyday, believing that their teacher is going to show up.

6) There are a lot of examples of people who have reached their goals after setting a goal. Some of such examples include.

   a) Master blaster – Sachin Tendulkar.

   b) Kiran Bedi.

   c) Mahatma Gandhiji (next Anna Hazare)

   d) Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Page.

   e) Nicola Tesla, Edison, Einstein, Newton.

   f) Charlie Chaplin, Lata Manjeshkar, A. R. Rehman.

   g) Dhirubai Ambani, Narayan Murthy, Ratanlal Tata.

   h) Swami Vivekananda, Mata Amritanandamayi, Pandit Ravishankar, Baba Ramdev.

  i) Barrack Obama, S. M. Krishna, Yedyurappa, Jailalitha, Lallu Prasad, Narayan Modi, Mamatha Baneerjee, Adolf Hitler.

7) Set a goal today machis and machas!

            “Failure may be the stepping stones of success, however don’t aim at failure for this reason! (~_^).

8) Most engineers join a company in the beginning to be promoted over time to raise up to the top position in a company. A really passionate employee, gives his best at his work and is often recognized in a company. Its the goal that drives employees to work everyday and come up with faster and more efficient solutions to everyday problems.


Note: the following picture says more than enough of things to be aware of when a goal is set. Make sure you have overlooked the consequences of setting that particular goal and stick to it if you think it is worth it.

9) In most situations in life, we realize it much later that we were actually closer to a goal than we had assumed to be. It is very important for a person to visualize a goal so that he at least has an idea of what he is going to see at the end of the tunnel

10) Here are 3 illustrations by that I felt needed some light in this discussion.

a) this is a very funny instance from the popular series ‘friends’, the way I remember it (^_^).

Chandeller Bing is this amazing guy who has a typical way of always thinking out of the box in all situations in the series.

One day at work, Chandeller hears a fellow work discuss amongst them on how Chandeller is being under-paid for his efforts. This somehow triggers a logic in his mind and he comes up with a master plan to get fired, because he considers it less dignified to give out a resignation.

According to his plan, He decides to over-work right from the next day. He shifts his work space closer to the paper copier, in order to avoid spending time moving back and forth during his paper works.

He starts to really focus on work and 3 days from this day he finds out that the guy sitting next to him has been fired. He feels a sense of victory and finds out other ways to do more work out of his time.

He starts to attend a call, write his report and type in his computer all at the same time. He next day the guy in front of Chandeller gets called by the boss and when he returns, the finds that the guy had been called to tell him that he was fired. He now decides that he is next on the line and keeps doing his work as planned.

The next day, the boss calls him and he goes with zeal of satisfaction that his time has finally come. However in reality, the boss of his boss would have fired the boss of Chandeller and made Chandeller the boss, due to his failure in recognizing the talent of this worker.

Thus Chandeller gets his pay to be increase, and a promotion at the same time.

At this point we must note that, the problem he was having was a low pay and even though we can’t agree with his logic, he reached the goal of solving this problem.

Yes, most of the time, goals are not reached as we plan them to, but the universe has the most unexpected way of talking us to the goals when we least expect it to. So; Do set a goal.

b) Story of the cobbler.

            I had read this story a long time back so do forgive the glitches.

Once upon a time there was a cobbler in a small village, he had heard many of his relatives’ talk of the lord’s temple in the Himalayas, and had the desire to go see the lord himself. So when he managed to collect enough money, he set out to reach the lords temple in the Himalayas.

This cobbler managed to reached the Himalayas in the end of rainy season, and winter had just begun. When he reaches the directed place, only to find a board that said that the path had been closed due to high expected blizzard. The cobbler felt disappointed and decided to go back to his village.. But while on his way back a blizzard really sets in, and just at that time he hears a voice from a distance.

He finds a shepherd taking his sheep into a small cave and decides to follow the shepherd to the cave. The shepherd and the cobbler talk till late in the night about their experiences and go to sleep by the fire.

However the next morning when the cobbler wakes up, he notices the shepherd missing and when he reaches the mouth of the cave, he realizes that the blizzard has ended, and the path seems to be flooded with people.

It is only then that he realizes that the night that he had spent with the shepherd in the cave lasted 4 whole months outside, and summer had set in by the time he had woken up.

In this story, the cobbler reached his goal by first setting it. And because of his belief he made it through the hardship.

c) Walk to the end point at Manipal.

            I had set to see the End-point of Manipal hill one day (this is a very beautiful spot and I hope you don’t miss it when you visit the place).

Since I had never been there I just kept on walking till I reached the place. It was as if every roads corner was a short term goal, eventually leading to the final destination.

Only when I got there, did I realize that I no longer felt a need to return because I had reached a goal eventually leading to the final destination.

Clases were just beginning at MIT and I had nothing to study at home, I had just eaten food so did not have the excuse of hunger.

I took a different path hoping there to be a short cut some where how ever there were none and I felt like walking a long way back home. Infact home never appeared to get closer.

I finally reacher back and that evening when we were discussing about End Point I realized that End Point was 6 Km from their home. And I had walked 6 km back and forth without realizing the distance.

To sum it all up

comparison Child Vs Mobile phone

All of us adore a mobile phone when its first handed to us.

Having a mobile phone is like having a little child with you. You feel the need to lift it every time it cries. There is a sense of satisfaction every time you make it stop crying. And suppose you leave it back at home while at college or at work. You just cant thinking about the several possibilities that could be happening all the time. You have to feed it from time to time. And some times it makes you get up in the middle of the night!

Oh. And the feeling you have when your mobile phone gets spoilt for the first time is so silly. That you just can’t stop thinking about it; This feeling of uneasiness ends only after the mobile gets completely repaired.

My mobile got spoilt for the first time (or so i thought) about one month from the time i had got the mobile. I used to get a hell lot of messages. I just loved reading forwards and do even now. One day the mobile stopped opening un read messages, and i began to panic.

I tried asking friends and relatives for a solution and finally went to the place where i had purchased the handset. There the person erased all my  contacts. Still there was no sign of recovery. Then I deleted all my messages and found that the problem occurred only because of message overflow.

I still remember that day. I had gone to Malleshwaram and had to travel back and forth several times to get it repaired.

I first got my mobile phone when i was in the second half of my 5^th semester. I remember how I used to give my number to every person I met; Just expecting the person to send forward whenever he gets one.

Yes mobile phones are not a necessity and I stand by that statement even now. You can get along an entire day without using the mobile. Not just one day. You can really go on with your life without a mobile phone.

Some of the reasons why we feel the need for a mobile phone are:

• Instantly access any person in your contacts.
• Cheap call rates.
• Free SMS’.
• The need to talk.
• Privacy.
• Feel of security.
• Many features such as games, torch, alarm, internet, etc.

Mobile phones have certainly brought about a lot of revolutions. For one, they have almost replaced the landline calls completely.

I have never changed my handset or number ever since I got my mobile phone. So I don’t consider myself qualified of talking about that matter.


Newer technologies are making their way into the mobile phone system.
It was noticed that we needed the buttons only when a call needed to be made. So some clever fellow reverse engineered this problem and brought in the new Touch facility.


Though this facility was around for a long long time, it was not until the release of IPhones that the facility really made its mark.

My fascination with mathematics

What is mathematics?

• The study of numbers.
• An approach to solve every day problems.
• A natural way of representing the everyday experience in a quantizable manner.
• An order that underlies everything in the universe.
• The pattern that nature shows to us.

I have always liked mathematics all through schooling. The subject offers the thrill of getting an output at the end of every problem. The mathematics studied in school days did not have to do much with practical situations.

We see a lot of pattern in number tables and the existence of the various patterns makes mathematics a very beautiful subject.

However when I saw the mathematics related problem in engineering I felt quite surprised that I no longer had the same attitude towards the subject.  The maths involved was much more complex and situation based that it did not really appear that attractive. It was as if maths had grown up into an un-attractive woman (^_~).

The word Calculus means rock. Many of you reading this might not know this, even after working a life time on Calculus.

Yes i struggled to solve the Fourier transform problems and Basier Spline problems and did not really understand the applications of these methods while studying engineering, nor have I appreciated it for what it is during the course. This feeling has also shown itself while attempting to solve problems in Calculus while solving greens theorem and stokes theorem especially while attempting Field theory problems.

I really appreciate the efforts put in by great mathematicians such as Gauss, Einstein, Poisson, Newton, Pascal, Pythagoras, Kepler, Raphson, Stoke, Galileo, Simpson, Crammer, Euler, etc.

Yet somehow, when we apply the mathematics to specific problems, the mere number of possible explanations, overtakes the simple elegance shown by elementary mathematics (^_^).

I am thankful for the league of mathematicians for presenting us with these marvellous tools that help us come up with quick solutions to everyday problems in electrical, civil, commerce and several such fields. I believe that there is much left unexplored that will someday emerge into our textbooks. But is it really necessary for an everyday person to learn all these methods even without which his day would have passed.


Mathematics has no boundaries. It is something that manifests in all areas of studies

I might someday contribute to mathematics myself... but at this point the only thing i am trying to express is the kind of change in attitude that can come about in a person’s life, not just because of everyday experiences, but also the way he chooses to see a subject for what it is.

Fractal geometry is something that is gaining great recognition today. It is as if we are looking at the same object when we zoom into the object. When I first heard about fractals I tried to gather as much info as I can from the net. But the branch itself is so complex; all I could learn was the theoretical implications of a few structures.

For several decades, a lot of mathematicians have found themselves lost while trying to explore the mysterious world of mathematics. And this will continue for times to come. But we have to make sure that we learn everything that is relevant to us before setting out on such ventures.

Computers, which were made powerful just for their ability to calculate complex mathematical problems, are today serving as tools to entertain children. It’s as if the purpose of certain tools gets re-established, as times pass. Not like we don’t solve problems in MatLab when there is a need. Rather it’s as though, the very purpose of a machine has been forgotten in our attempts to educate the entire human society.


here is a funny joke to end this topic.

Happy - Or is it just you?

The road to happiness is always under construction - readers digest

If you know what you are looking for, you can always find it! And it hold for happiness as well.

We decide to be happy, sad & angry based on our past experience, and we choose to be and if you look at it close enough, you can choose to be happy, sad or angry for any given situation.

Consider the situation: a person slips and falls. Like my friend Vinayak said, falling was made funny by Charlie Chaplin. Before him, it was really not that funny. Yes you might say that you have not seen Charlie Chaplin, but there are those who did and on seeing others react to the situation, we too have caught up.

It is interesting that all incidents in our lives somehow affect a future event. When a certain incident happens for the first time you won’t really know how to react but its as if we are programmed to learn from the surroundings and catch up with life.

Suppose you are new to cricket and see that Sachin has hit a century before getting out. You won’t know if you should be happy, if it’s a milestone, won’t know his past and won’t know the importance of a century. At this point, the incident goes un-noticed, but your mind keeps track of all reactions to this situation from people around you.

However, you can decide to be:

• Sad that Sachin got out.
• Angry that a guy got Sachin out.
• Happy that you get to see the next player play in the field.

(Suppose you choose to support Sachin at that point.)

So its in your hand how you decide to treat a situation. Its not like there are a set of rules as we can perceive it. but there is certainly a pattern in happiness.

I have begun with cricket, because its the most popular game in the country, the result of this observation can be generalized to all games including chess, football, basketball, tennis, table-tennis, carom, and further generalized to all vents that include commerce, trade, economics, science, geography, humanity, culture etc...

And here we are, focusing on one incident trying to come up with a reaction based on the outcome of an incident and trying to get ourselves accepted in the society (Yes it's that complicated (~_^)!). 

Flies and wasps swarm around a lamp because before the invention of light bulb, nature has instructed them to move towards the moon light during the night, but this artificial source of light has had a greater effect in influencing their behaviour.

Similarly, we have an inner intuition of how we are supposed to react to incidents. Yet this often gets ignored because of the daily experiences that we all tend to have. (TY)

Ask yourselves these questions

Consider this scenario, you read about the US president Obama in the news paper, an article or listen about him on the news. How many of you have actually seen this person? For all you know the concept of a president itself might be a hoax.

We experience this life from birth to death as if under a simulation from the movie ‘the matrix’. We accept the world for what we see in it, live by rules and experience the world as if everything revolves around us. Yet the existence of the world itself cannot be guaranteed.

While on one hand you cannot be sure if you yourself exist and on the other you are continuously arguing and questioning about existence of god (lol).

We live out lives based on what we can relate to using our 5 senses and by the rules that people around you tend to follow, such as manner and behaviour of an individual. It seems impossible to prove whether the world itself exists because everything you come across in your life can be customized to satisfy whatever curiosity you can come up with.

Consider another scenario, where you talk to the person next to you. After the conversation, yu are no longer really conserned about what goes on with the other person, this effect is true for the situation before meeting the person as well. Yes you can ask him and find out, but that could be a manifested reply to satisfy your curiosity.

Yes most of us assume that others too lead a life similar to ours and just let go of the matter. But there is no way you can really know this.

A lot of questions such as, ‘Is this world really a made up place?’, ‘is it possible to see behind the curtains of this made-up-reality, or is it just me (^_^).

Most of us believe in god, pray god and what not! We follow traditional patterns and lead every day lives. But if we one day realize that there is a layer of world that has surpassed all our reach, then it might be really difficult to adapt. For the time being, make good use of your time and have a nice day.

And what are dreams really?

You go and lie down on the bed everyday and close your eyes and you no longer feel anything around you till you wake up... What is it that really necessitates sleep/dream. Is it that we are worn out every day and jump into this state everyday or is it just another trick to reset us to performing a different series of activities the next time we wake up?

(TY)

Unholy merger – Plant + Machine

In brief : A combination of trees and robots to produce a league of self powered energy driven vehicular bots.

As a student of biology I found it very interesting to learn that plants synthesize their own food by photosynthesis and also store the extra energy generated as fruits which the non energy generating creatures utilize for existence.

When you look at the differences between plants and animals it is very interesting to note that plants generate food but don’t have a brain as such to analyze the surroundings. While animals on the other hand, have a brain to understand the surroundings cannot produce their own food.

It’s as if nature has intentionally separated the two so that the creatures have a goal on the short term and a purpose on the long term.

As creatures at the top of the food chain, we have taken the leisure of developing robots to mimic creatures around us.

And we have mimicked the solar energy generated by plants in the form of solar powered cars, robots, lights, calculator, clocks, cookers... there are even entire villages that run solely on solar energy.

At this point we must notice that on one hand we have plants which are generating this energy, while on the other hand there are these robos using solar energy to power themselves.

So i thought, why not create a sort of merger that is half plant, half machine which can generate its own energy, release oxygen to the environment, store the surplus as food and do useful work in the process...

Since its isolated from nature in the sense of the dependence on purpose, this might as well be the solution to today’s global warming and green house effect phenomenon.

Here is the catch:

We have to notice that most advantages come at a heavy price.

For instance, plants send water from roots to the leaves by the process of reverse osmosis; so this new genere of creatures will have to have both locomotive ability as well as the ability to work on the given task, and be able to root into the earth to generate its energy. 

As a solution:

I had once imagined that we could grow trees on top of machines but i am not aware of such an experiment. There could be mud filled into the cavity to grow plants, but this is easier said than done in most practical processes. The roots might interefere with the wiring and circuitry of the machine thus making it hard for repairs.

Then i imagined that we could develop robots that can themselves root along with plants thus solving both the above problems, but i am not aware of such a technology either.


Plant + Animal seems pretty awesome what do you think of Plants + Birds? (^_~) [flying plants]