Thank God it's Monday?

Note: You may not get the point of this post. This is just a musing.

For many of us, Monday is the most dreaded day. You hear Monday, you get a stomachache. The fear of Monday may be due to multiple reasons we all are familiar with. However, more often than not, its just plain laziness. After a good two days of fun and enjoyment, we are just unwilling to go working. 

Friday, on the other hand induces a pleasant feeling. Thank God it's Friday. However, if you notice, the Friday excitement only survives the day. You don't even realize how Saturday passes by and by the time it is Sunday, you have already started worrying about the upcoming devil - Monday.

The Friday bliss is about two things.

1. The days you are actually happy: Friday.

2. The days you are happy about on the day you are happy: Weekend.

On a deeper thought, the feeling of Friday bliss is not about the weekend but actually about Friday. We like Fridays more than the weekend. It is a feeling of anticipated fun. The actual fun days are the weekend days, but you feel good about it only on Friday.

This is true about any kind of anticipation: good and bad. This feeling of anticipation these days has grown so acute that even Sunday feels like a Monday!

Corruption

Corruption in any provider consumer system is fueled by two very human characteristics: laziness on part of the consumer and greed on part of the provider. To stop corruption, both the provider as well as the consumer must contribute.

Whistle-blowing is actually a very powerful technique to fight corruption. It works on both the ends: the provider as well as the consumer end. Only two things are needed to unleash its full potential: Protection of the one blowing the whistle and appropriate Reward/Punishment for the actions.

Officials and bureaucrats who spend so much of their time in weaving the web of red tape, could for once try to establish strong laws and strategies for whistle blowing.

Like every other technique, this may have pitfalls and we'll need to face a trade-off.

Job Satisfaction - What is it really?

A job, or more generally work is a noun which cannot attract any good adjectives. People may say various things about their jobs. "I love my job!" or "My job is very interesting" or "I have complete job satisfaction". People who run after job satisfaction are trying to catch a ghost. 

The key to job satisfaction or interesting work is non-monotonicity. You don't want job satisfaction. You want job rotation! Be it any kind of job. If you are asked to do it forever, it will ultimately become boring. If you want to maintain excitement, you must try and do different things.

Most employers today are resistant to practice job rotation for their employees fearing they would lose expertise. However, what is stopping them to gain expertise in multiple fields? It is the result of this resistance that the attrition rates are so high these days.

Life - A Dream - A Longer one!

Don't you sometimes feel that the whole world around is shattering and falling apart, and you just wished that it weren't happening and that it weren't true?

At that time, remember, it isn't.

In such times, you wish that that it was just a dream. Know, that it is! Troubling incidents in the dreams that you have while sleeping, cause you the same amount of pain and suffering as the incidents in your real life. However, that pain and suffering is short-lived as it ends as soon as you wake up and everything is alright. Similarly, this life is a dream of a higher being in you.

I don't want to sound like I know everything or that I am the "enlightened one". I just want to point out that there is enough evidence that there exists a higher self in each individual. Knowing or at least believing this even without experiencing it sometimes helps a lot to get through the hurdles in life!

Biomimicry - Real world problem solving

The key to problem solving is to know that the problem you are facing has already been solved in some way or the other. It could be a human being, or even nature. If you have studied computer science, you must be familiar with the concept of reduction. All you need to solve a difficult problem is to reduce it to an already solved problem.

This reduction is a way of making an analogy with a similar problem. In other words, analogy itself is a great tool to solve problems. For me, when faced with any problem, I simply make an analogy with some concept or phenomenon in the real world.  The I can notice how nature deals with it and what can be done to solve it. Finally, I need to map the solution of nature back to my actual problem context. Thats it!

Nature is the best thing to make an analogy with. In fact, I recently found out that Biomimicry is already a popular concept in order to gain inspiration from nature to solve human problems.

All you need to solve a problem is to make an appropriate analogy with some concept of nature and you have your solution!

Destiny

Note: My first attempt at poetry! :-)

Once upon a time, there was an ignorant man,

miserable he was, yes, he had no plan!

He had no idea, of what life is about,

Of what is one's purpose, was beyond him, no doubt!

As he tasted more life, his ignorance finally faded

Curiosity sprouted, questions sprang, about life, he now hated!

"Why me?" thought he, there has to be a reason,

"Destiny it is!" he concluded; his intellect had an off season!

He set out in a quest, a quest of destiny he thought,

Little did he know, all he would find was naught!

He waited and searched and then waited some more,

Lost he was in deep sea, he found no shore!

His desperation surged, restless he became,

To the extent, for anything wrong, he had destiny to blame!

Even more than before, miserable had he become,

That "this was supposed to happen", was his answer to every problem!

Then arrived a day, when he met a wise man,

Who seemed just like him, his life instantly fore-ran!

"Worry not!", said He, you are not alone,

That many a people, troubled of destiny, he had known!

"Is Destiny what you seek?, It's what you make, not meet,

A journey it is, not a final stop, where you rest your feet!

It's a mirage, it follows you, it walks with you,

Your actions define it, it changes with you, every moment it's Anew!"

Enlightened he was, by the words of the wise one,

His quest succeeded, he had found the solution!

His path looked clear, the sky was once again sunny, 

Feeling empowered, he walked back, to change his own destiny!

Beyond Apocalypse: What next?

Image source: Flickr

2012 it is! Just a month left. Ever wondered if actually there is an apocalypse, what would happen? I was just thinking about the possibilities. Actually a little creepy to think about it, but it's a different experience. Takes you straight to the ground!

We do not know what is going to happen, weather the oceans are going to take over like the movie 2012, or everything is going to freeze like in the movie The Day After Tomorrow. We can also consider an all-volcano event, where the earth just erupts, from all sides, to let the heat out, or even an all-earthquake event, where we just have quakes or probably just a mixture of all the above. Seriously, the possibilities are endless. The humans have harmed the environment in so many different ways, we cannot imagine how nature plans to revert it and get back to normal.

So, whatever way the nature chooses, the real question is: Is it possible that no one, literally no human being survives? Well the probabilities are far too low of that happening. A lot of people may actually get through, somehow! Now when I say a lot of people, it is like saying .2 to .5% of the world population. This seems like a fair estimate. 

Let's say these people make it to the new world. What next? What would they do? How would they start a new life? Well, the questions are not at all rhetorical but filled with genuine concern. These people share great responsibility in that it would be these very people who lay down the foundations for the coming generations. It would be these people who have the power to choose right and wrong. Their decisions would greatly influence the lives of the next generations. The new generations would not have the slightest idea of how the world looked just a few years back. No body knows if there would be experts among these survivors. All we can assume that it would be a few common men and women who have felt and tasted the real world. It would be these select few people who share the responsibility of showing our next generations, at least a blurred, if not the exact picture of the actual world.

In spite of all the harm that the human race has done to the environment, we have made a great deal of progress in terms of science, technology, philosophy and various other fields. This must not be wasted! The coming generations should build up starting from where the past generation left off, rather than starting from scratch and reinventing the wheel. Some way has to be derived to preserve this information and knowledge. Unless this is done, we humans, would be straight back to the stone age, carving caves and lighting fires with flint-stones. The knowledge has to be preserved at any cost!

Of course there will be difficulties and challenges, and the early ages might actually have to go through a pseudo-stone age. The point is to preserve the knowledge, so that once the basic needs are taken care of, people could start on a known road rather than wandering about for solutions to each and every problem they encounter. Their predecessors spent days and nights working on techniques and developed concrete things that worked. The judgement day may destroy whatever has been developed but it must not be able to destroy the very research and thinking, that has gone into it.

Slowly and gradually, these people could also try to right the wrongs that their predecessors had committed. With the right knowledge and a few early precautions, probably we could last a few more centuries before the next apocalypse!

Comments, anyone?