a mARTIAN dIARY

Recently during an internal class on Innovation, I was inspired by a story of how self cleaning windows/cloths for sky scrapers were inspired by our very own national plant The Lotus. A classic example of “learning from unusual sources”! It was an instant hit with my mind, which loves to draw analogies.

Fast forward to present, as I was driving to office in the morning, I could see ample signs of the grand Durga Puja festivities that were concluded yesterday. During my “studying” days  Durga Puja or Puja Holidays has always be something that I looked forward to since it meant a 10 day holiday for us KV’ties and also no studying for 2 days where you would do “aitha puja”. After moving to Bangalore, the word “festivities” have had another scene attached to them in the sequence of images that one attaches to a word, a image of a myriad of flowers, cacophonous bursting of crackers and the vivid lighting associated with them. Not to suggest that we don’t have that back in Kerala, but here it is stretched to the limits (Yes I have not watched thrissur pooram which my friend assures me is much bigger) , probably due to the closer proximity of flower growing regions as well as fireworks producing region (the latter I am not sure about).

Anyway, as I was navigating my way thru a thick colorful patch in the road, which till yesterday was embellishing someone’s beloved vehicle in a different form factor more akin to a floral pattern than the thick muddy paste that it was now, something stuck me.

The demand and supply relation of flowers!

Imagine the normal demand for flowers is some value of X Kg per day. This ‘normal’ demand would be constituted largely by demands from temples, homes for decoration (of puja rooms and framed photographs alike) and lastly but most importantly (from the sustenance of South-Indian race point of view) aphrodisiacal decoration of tresses. Now the next local maxima in the demand vs. supply plot would come on Sundays and other auspicious “marriage” days, which may push by the X by a factor of 3-4.  And the absolute maximums would come on festival days where the demand can spiral up to 10-20 X.

Now, take another look at the commodity here, its flowers, a sweet smelling, high on water content, easily perishable commodity, which has a shelf life of 1-2 days. Naturally this question of meeting demand was not asked just yesterday and the growing patterns have emerged and other supply chain techniques have evolved to solve it. An inquiry would probably give us more insight to the patterns and “innovations” that this has brought about and if one looks closely enough we might be able to abstract and get the patterns for the same.

Now coming back to our familiar world of 1’s and 0’s. Consider a server that hosts a college website. On a normal day the traffic would be X. On the day that an assignment is to be submitted (assuming that it is given online) the traffic would increase to 2X-3X with the frantic downloading of the pdf’s before the deadline. Again on the day of the result announcement (say of a test like CAT for MBA which 1-2 lakh ppl write each year) the traffic would be (number overflow) * X.
 
Same would be case of a site streaming online media (cricket for example) on the day there is an Indo-Pak game and all the poor engineers are stuck at office (assuming that the web administrator is kind enough not to block the site)

After seeing the similarities in the two situations, can’t the solutions of the former be explored to get a solution for the latter?