It was Nietzsche who put into words that what was already known by most living creatures innately - Life is a constant struggle between heaviness and lightness - One of freedom against that of duty, of faring on as opposed to faring well. In the history of life, long as it may be, lot has been written favouring both but never has one won over the other. Yes, there have been momentary victories but that’s where they stop, and then fall back to their patterns as the summer in all its fury still gives way to winter when the time comes.
It is such an observation that makes me believe that it is not fight at all, but rather a more like a staged one much like the ones we see in wrestling. Each wrestler knows that it’s not the fight that’s important, but the ratings and the money that the fight can bring in, as they make pre planned moves and get hit at the same place they would hit, if the script had been written differently. Likewise heaviness and lightness smirk at each other as people fight about them, wrestling with all their emotions, raw and polished, to concede to either. Finally it’s a victory for one and a defeat for the other yet, always a victory for the subject.
Of course for a person there should be multiple victories in life but the defeated enemy must differ at different times, for both heaviness and lightness have their own purpose. For a life , once its over, is never felt if it been light throughout its existence, for it’s the dull, boring hours in life that make you feel contented that life is long enough and a life is will never seen fondly in pictures if its been heavy throughout, for the long 2 month summer holidays during school and the hours and hours spent whispering sweet nothings into your significant others ears are the lightest memories, memories which are so sweet that you never feel that they got enough time, in your life but are also the pictures that flash you by as you are about to breath your last.
As for me, let’s say that I am I am going to be a bit more heavy by the end of the month and I just can’t stop beaming
A while back I had written a post Flowers Vs Servers pointing out the similarities between the demand for flowers and the load on servers catering to educational institutions. I had ended the post concluding that since the former was a comparatively old ‘solved’ problem, we could try and extend its solutions to the latter. This required for us to understand how the old problem was solved and this in turn necessitated talking to the flower vendors and distributors.
For months this laid low on my list of things to do (along with a LOT of other stuff) but by providence rather than intent, I was able to do exactly that last week. While waiting for bus at KR market early morning, I glanced across to the countless flower vendors on the street across and suddenly the to-do list in my mind got re-ordered.
I immediately crossed the road and walked up towards a person who looked to be in his early thirties and a bit free from the selling (and the ungrateful wretch that I am, I forgot his name….thank you Mr Anonymous for all the help). To cut a long story short , both our verbal and non-verbal communication skills were tested to the extreme, so much so that, I am confident of cracking any dumb-charades question that even the most wicked of minds can cook up.
Anyways, among the stuff he said (or the stuff that I understood him to be saying) one idea particularly struck me as applicable in our Server case. Recount that our original crunch times came during festivals. Now think of a regional festival like Onam in Kerala, or Uagadi in Karnataka and Andhra or Ganesha Festival in Maharashtra (this is arguably not a good example). Now in all these cases the demand for flowers is very high, as flowers are one of the most important components in the celebration. BUT the demand is regional, so a solution to meet the excessive demands would be to import from other regions.
Now translating this to our scenario, let’s think of the results of different exams of different colleges. They are usually announced at different times, so in the analogy terms, the ‘demand’ for bandwidth is ‘regional’. So a solution similar to the ‘import’ solution would be to link up the servers of the various institutes using a common backend and share their resources for showing the results. By doing this they will be able to cater to the large traffic without increase in their infrastructure.
Of the solutions I heard this was the only one I was able to translate. Others included selective farming and also use of refrigerators (cold storage) at the retail level.
My favorite teacher, Miss(Or is it Mrs? 
) Life today gave me two important lessons.
The first one was taught early morning (too early actually) when I went in for giving my Bike for service. In Cochin giving bike for service is a 10 minute job at best; you just go in, give the bike, take the slip and get out. Initially in Bangalore, my experiences were the same, abet with increasing delays each time around. But the last trip to the service center totally pissed me off. Owning a Unicorn which unfortunately (or fortunately) is from the same company which makes another kind of 2-wheeler that the young girls today fancy was the primary cause for my disenchantment. With a combined service center for both, what happens is that you end in the service center alongside lots of cute college/office going chicks in their perky little cloths(in a comical rather than a sexist way 
). And with the service center have a low staff sex ratio (0% actually) chances are that the staff‘s body as a whole is attracted in the direction of the gals irrespective of the actual time of their arrival. Of course logically they should serve them later so as to keep them there for the longest time, but in front of a girl I guess a guy’s logic goes berserk. Anyways, such a situation leads a particular class of guys to go berserk in a different mode unknowingly uttering addressing the staff with words they probably would never utter in front of a girl otherwise.
But this time, as I went in, the system had changed at different places. For one you had to book your appointment in advance and only then could you go, so that they could try to distribute the crown evenly. Also as you go in, a chauffeur takes the bike off your hand and parks at a designated location which is associated with a rank or slot for the service man to attend to. Of course this extra process pulls the efficiency down a bit from having that guy also attend the incoming bikes, but there is a definite process in place and sense of justice to the whole exercise.
This “Sense of Justice” is something that I think will (or should) drive customer service in India. Our large population is something that will make most things, that seem trivial in other countries, manifest into logistical nightmares and with our cost of living most companies (I am talking about companies that cater to the middle class which is going to be the largest section in India in the coming years) can’t afford to have the extra manpower to solve it though quantitative solutions. But by driving their initiative using the mantra of “Sense of Justice”, they will be able to get Satisfied and consequently repeat customers. Come to think of it, I waited for around the same time I had last time, but I left the place with a much calmer mind and without embarrassing myself or others with any verbal gymnastics.
The next lesson was after the morning break which constituted of getting to office. The venue was my cubicle and medium was thru an e-learning module. Going thru my daily reads, I was lead on to a blog post about the archaic TOS of BW. At a superficial level it was about reinventing oneself to survive in the industry as the equations change (The so-called Point of Inflection as coined by Andrew S Grove). But the deeper message that I came across was the simple message “If you make decisions for a company use what you produce or at the very least think like someone who does and if you cant do that listen to people who think like it”
Class dismissed 
Hurry is one word that epitomizes Bangalore. The transformation from a sleepy pensioner’s paradise to becoming the bustling IT capital of India is one thing that might have annoyed the older residents but also greatly pleased economists and anthropologists alike. Both of them being observational sciences, such a large laboratory, where the aforementioned “Hurry” element expedites the effects would have them drooling over then desktops.
One such pattern is what I now christen the “Chicken Biriyani Dating Method” (Dating as in “Carbon ‘dating’” and not “Opposite Sex Dating”. For prospective ‘OS daters’, who are searching around for sharpening their restaurant ordering skills, this would be the time to go else where. And anyway a chicken Biriyani after which your breath smells worse than a dragon would be the wrong choice, more so with the veggie fad going on.) Coming back to Our Chicken Biriyani Dating method (henceforth CBDM), it tries to derive an empirical relationship between the pricing cycle of a restaurant (Non-Veg obviously) and the percentage composition of meat in the Chicken Biriyani.
Some basic assumptions of the study is that
- Inflation is always positive
- Bangalore traders are greedy like hell
- People in Bangalore are seemly unaffected in their enthusiasm to gorge down Chicken Biriyani irrespective of the cost.
The cycle can be explained in these simple steps.
- Start New Restaurant ( or enter loop in existing restaurant)
- Provide Chicken Biriyani B at Rs.X
- Set Z% as Meat Threshold and start with Y% meat in it. Such that Z<Y
- Is Y<=Z? If Yes GoTo 8 Step If No Continue
- Wait A days
- Y = B*Y (where B is the meat multiplication constant such than B<1)
- GoTo 4
- X=X*C ( C is the price multiplication factor with always C>1)
- GoTo 4
- Stop (Only thru interrupt)
Interrupt condition: Consumers Grow wise/crazy and trash the restaurant.
Note on constants: A, B and C are normally constant but are largely influenced by Temperature, Humidity and Customer Sentiment
Dating Formula
By knowing Initial and final values of X Y and Z and assuming appropriate values for constants , the growth of the restaurant can be plotted.
The author wishes to acknowledge the unique opportunity that Bangalore provided as the price cycles repeated them selves 5-10 times in the 2 years of study
I was finally able to update A Sneak Peek Into The Wonderful World Of Voltage Regulator with all the images that were so conspicuously absent from it.
The popularity of this post ( most hits than any other post I think) can probably be put down to abundance of technical terms like 317 and 78XX in the article which are Googl’ed everyday.
The post was originally taken from my old website and I had lost all my images during that transition. Recently I was able to recover these images from my old hard-drive and do justice to the post
