Resurrection OR Divine Grace ?

I have been wondering a lot about this lately. Is Resurrection some form of Divine Grace ? or if I quote from "Da Vinci Code" - Divine Intervention. This is based on experiences in life, which in retrospect I think - I have worried a bit too much about things - which I should not have. Anyway - everytime if I compare myself - I have emerged stronger, wiser and with increased FAITH. Let me try to define FAITH here - FAITH is a somewhat stronger sense of belief. Belief can be fuzzy - there can be a degree associated with belief - where as FAITH is digital. It is either there or not there, just like a binary digit. I am not very sure, how else I can state this. But well - FAITH - is a state of complete dependence, a state of complete absorption, a state of complete oneness. So - FAITH cannot be a continuous or analog entity, it has to be a digital or level entity. I am not very sure - how else I can put this - it is a feeling which I have had - everytime in my life I faced a difficulty - in really difficult circumstances - I have felt the invisible hand - pulling me out of it - but with such subtle moves - so that the purpose of getting into that trouble is well justified and served for. I come up with renewed energy, renewed wisdom and most importantly renewed faith. In moments of difficulty, you can really learn and make yourself strong. In one of his books, Oghareswar Bhagwan Ram writes - "Suffering more often than not, breaks a person than make him". (It makes also) Suffering he tries to emphasize is a blessing in disguise. If you hold onto your inner FAITH - you resurrect yourself - You find yourself in the realms of Divine Grace. In my life - if I look back - I can see there have been difficult situations more often than not - and I have come out of them clean - with the aid of my pillars of strength. There have been many pillars - who have been the guiding stars of my life - who have shown me the way to maneuver through the difficult oddities in life. In many a case, these are the people who are GOD sent for me - to handhold me through the difficult phases in my life. They are the people who help me Resurrect, help me get my renewed life. It is a CONNECT-THE-DOTS feeling for me - if I look back - and try to find out the exact reason for the presence of these people in my life. All my life - and my souls knows it for sure - I will be ever indebted to the guardian angels who have helped me in resurrection - Divine Intervention indeed!!!

Happiness - A Myth ?

So what is happiness ? I have found that there is no absolute definition of happiness. It is very subjective. What makes me happy, may not make you happy. For example, a good quality work will be a priority for me which gives me happiness but good money would be priority for someone else. What gives me happiness now will not give me happiness say after an year or so. I may be craving for a car now but after an year the same car wont make me happy. There is a relativistic sense to happiness. It is a function of time and circumstances and the individual subject under consideration. For a person who is going to be hanged, a lottery prize of a million dollars wont bring any happiness. One important observation that we should take care of is that happiness is tied to objects, or at least that is what we have observed in the last few lines. So, there is an additional parameter in the function for happiness - which is the object one is craving for. In fact, if we carefully sample the function - we can see that the object of happiness, which is again temporal in nature, is the necessary and sufficient condition for happiness. It is therefore important for us to understand the nature of this craving for this object of happiness.

The craving for the object of happiness is called DESIRE. Essentially, it is also said in the Holy Bhagwad Geeta that - "Desire is the root cause of all action." Everything that we do is driven by desire. The only consistent desire (root - desire , desire can have a transitive nature) that we find in human beings is the desire to be happy. What ever we do is to make us happy. So, we essentially keep looking for happiness in those objects that we desire for. The next question that arises in me is - Is happiness meant to be shortlived ? Or am I looking for at the wrong place ? Either one of them has to be true, because typically I cannot remain happy forever with the objects that I crave for. My desires change every other day or rather every other moment. How can I then be sure that my happiness is not meant to be short lived. Because, it is not necessary that I get the object that I crave for and that will deprive me of happiness.

Happiness cannot be short lived. I will try to explain why. If it was meant to be short lived, we would not be looking for it every now and then even though we loose it. It is in our inherent nature (prakriti) to be happy and thats why we crave for it despite all the problems and issues we face. If it was meant to be short lived, we would not be looking for it every now and then, we would have come to terms with it and would not be looking for it again. Loosing happiness would be acceptable to all of us. But that is not the case, I guess we are looking at the wrong place. More later, till then be happy.

The Beginning of an End

I am blogg-ing after a long long time. I was so-called busy writing my PhD thesis, trying to get a job in a situation where the market is at its lower best because of recession. There were a couple of other things which kept me busy but primarily its the thesis. Completing the thesis is not a big task according to me, if one has done his part of technical work and documentation properly. The only effort being that one has to do a survey which in more scientific terms is called literature survey, which by no means is interesting and eats up a lot of time and energy. I do not know what to say about the time I took to complete my PhD. It is because of many other constructively distractive works that led to the delay. I have been involved with two startup activities in which I had to put considerable amount of effort and time. And I liked taking up challenging projects ranging from automated Analog placement and routing, behavioral modeling of AMS to Mobile applications, data mining and data security. These were by no means correlated to my thesis which was on "Simulation Based Verification of Pipelined Processors". It was a wonderful experience walking down the road of research with so much of breadth in terms of experience. I liked it a lot. Anyway, now that I am out of the wonderful years of academic researcher life, I have to face the world. I need to work hard and stay focussed now. I can feel, its an even arena. Its the beginning of a new phase and the end of of a much loved phase in my life. This is the synopsis of how I completed PhD, gave my synopsis seminar and joined Synopsys India at Bangalore. Looking forward to the late but extremely new beginning in my life. Will keep you guys posted.

The Art of doing a PhD - Part I

It has been a really long time since I last blogged. Life has been pretty busy these last few days/months. I have been trying to finish my long-pending PhD. To update my thesis work is over, it is writing which is taking time. I need some more time to finish the writing part. Well as I am nearing the end of my PhD life, I thought I should jot down a few valuable points of learning before moving ahead from here. There are 3 basic laws of PhD which I would adapt/rediscover. As it is said, research is inspired so are my laws from Newton the great scientist:

1. PhD follows a sine curve, there are ups and there are downs. Both of these states require external force which comes from two very important components of PhD: The Guide and The Student. PhD will remain in the downs until the guide pulls the student out of the down to up, and the student will move down with his force of distractions as and when possible.
2. The time period (T) required to finish a PhD is depend on 'p' - The problem taken up for solving and  'i' The interest the student and the guide have in the problem. "p" has multifareous objectives and definitions which is beyond the scope of this blog( a typical term used in technical papers),  but " i" has two components which follow the law of vector addition: is and ig, the interest of the student and the interest of the guide in the problem respectively.
3. For each and every work that you do, you shall publish or you shall perish.

I will explain these laws in Part II which will be a continuation of the current subject we have undertaken for the purpose of subjective research.

Knowledge and Realization

I woke one fine morning and found that the way I perceive events have changed. Life has taken a new turn all of a sudden and every event, thing or whatever it is, is understood from the minutest of details possible. The world no longer seems to be a jumble or a puzzle. The missing links have been found and the various events in space and time can be easily correlated. Perhaps, this what I would feel when I realize. There is a subtle difference between Knowledge and Realization. Knowledge is the stage which involves 'Knowing' the facts involved, where as Realization is the art of 'Becoming'. From a computer science perspective, Knowledge of an algorithm signifies knowing the steps of the algorithm, where as Realization signifies understanding the intuition behind the algorithm or rather becoming the algorithm. I can say from my experience that a realized master can teach better than a knowledgeable master. Although both may have equal expressive power, the one who can inculcate in the students the intuitive nature of the subject is definitely a better teacher. This is however knowledge and Realization is yet to come. Some day I will.

What is FEAR?

I was reading the news paper(TOI) yesterday, when I gazed through one of the statements in the Speaking Tree section. It was written by " Swami Sukhabodhananda". The statement was very wonderful, "It's not wrong to have expectations, but our happiness should not depend on them ." This made me think a bit deeper into myself and I landed upon a very subtle aspect of human existence, FEAR. There has been a lot of discussion on what is FEAR and where does it come from. I need to correlate Expectations and Fear, or else this assimilation of words would appear incoherent. Expectation is the root cause of FEAR. We expect things to happen, people to behave in a certain way, events to happen in a certain way. Now, FEAR comes from the fact that expected things may not happen, people do not behave in an expected way. Sometimes it is the fear of losing something or somebody, which we never expect to loose in life. As Swamiji says, Its not wrong to expect, one's happiness should not depend on them, I totally agree to it. Even though we expect things to happen in a certain way, if our happiness is not dependent on the expectation, our state of mind, our very existence will never be deterred by the things, events or people not meeting upto our expectation. Well in our lingo..its called the " Chalega" attitude and its the fun loving guy attitude or rather a happy-go-lucky attitude. Once our mind is not deterred by such nuances, FEAR no longer has an existence. Expectations do remain but their perception changes and the attitude with which one co-exists with his/her expectations is transformed from one of dependence to that of independence. FEAR cannot blemish the mind any further. And once FEAR goes away..where is the question of one not being HAPPY at any state. We need to seek this state of HAPPI-ness and FEAR-less-ness.

Thoughts on THOUGHT

It has been a really long time since I have discussed anything about thoughts. The "MIND" as we can understand is a bundle of thoughts. The MIND ceases to exist when there are no thoughts. Thoughts and mind are inter-related and depend on each other for their co-existence. On a subtle note, actually Thought and Mind are not two different things but the one and the same. Imagine no thoughts coming out from the vast sea of consciousness that we all live in. Well consciousness we will take up later in detail, but as of now, consciousness in brief is the knowledge or sense that I exist. This however is a very crude definition of Consciousness. If you observe the human mind, to be more exact, if you observe your own mind, you will see a chain of thoughts in a split second. The pictures of the thoughts are vivid if you just want to see them as they come. If there are no thoughts landing on the flexible wall of the mind, the mind is simply blank. It is the mind that gives form to the thoughts, or rather makes the visual play of the thoughts possible. So if we analyze things at more depth, the thoughts and the mind work in tandem and make the whole visualization process or the manifestation of the thought possible. One cannot work without the other. If the mind is absent, the thought cannot be manifested or visualized vividly and if the thoughts are absent, then mind has nothing to focus on and is idle. If the mind is IDLE it is as good as annihilation of the mind. Since both these entities are inter-related and cannot exist without the other counterpart, they are but one and the same entity, only thing is we are able to view them separately. One cannot distinctly say as to which is the cause and which is the effect because they are both inter linked and work together, giving rise to effects for every cause that is perceived as a cause by the mind or descends down as a thought in the form of cause. Well I need to seek more to understand things in a better way!!!