Chronicles of Nikhil Baliga

Swami Gulagulaananda wondered: " Sāma, Dāna, Bheda, Danda - Which of them is the most effective of all? " Sāma, Dāna, Bheda, Danda This is a political methodology to approach a given situation. Start with conciliation or gentle persuasion (Sāma). If that does not help, offer money/material wealth (Dāna). If that still does not change the status quo, use threat or cause dissension (Bheda). Use punishment or violence (Danda) to resolve the situation where the previous three fail Media in India has lost all credibility. And just like the boy who cried wolf, it has become difficult to judge when the media is being aggressive with an honest intention and when they are messing with our minds. Of late, every day I see a report on rape, and I wonder if the rapes have been happening with this frequency all along or if it is being reported more frequently after the ghastly Delhi incident that made the entire country livid. Whatever the reason be, it is not pertinent to the discu...

Swami Gulagulaananda heard: " Growing old is mandatory, growing up is optional " [Ok, I could have sworn that I knew the English equivalent of the Kannada Girgitle once upon a time... I think it's called Paper Wind Turbine?] In this post, I want to show you how to make a Girgitle . It's basically a simple paper toy which turns around a pointed pencil or pen when wind blows. See the video at the end of the post to see it in action. Step 1: Tear out three thin (about 1.5 cm) equal sized vertical strips that are about 16 cm long Step 2: Fold the strips along the middle. Step 3: Hold one folded strip (called 1 ) horizontally such that the fold comes on the left. Now, hold one of the other strips (called 2 ) such that the fold comes on the top and slide it between the two legs of 1 . So basically the two legs of 1  should be around the two legs of 2 . Hold the third strip (called 3 ) such that the fold comes down. The two legs of 3  should come aro...

Swami Gulagulaananda wondered: " If you keep wishing for wings for a million years, will you sprout wings? Can I ask for a jet-pack instead? " I recently watched this video on Youtube where David Attenborough describes how life evolved from the basic primitive unicellular organisms to the superior organisms that we see today. Evolution is not something as trivial as becoming more advanced from a simpler creature. From a strictly engineering standpoint, it is a process of upgrading the version to build extensible systems. Let us take an example of one of the most primitive organism called Charnia . The structure of Charnia's body is simple in that, the body was based on fractals . It's like - You take a unit, and each of  the sub-units are similar to the main unit, and each of the sub-sub-units are also similar. If you were designing an organism, the fractal one can be very tempting because of its simplicity. It is like recursion of programming. You write it o...

Swami Nikhilaananda said: " We work, we fail, we dust off, we work, we succeed. Rinse. Repeat " " It's a start-up. It's basically an e-commerce site for selling clothes. Are you interested? " asked my senior who was quitting Oracle to join Zovi . " Who even buys clothes online? And a start-up? Should I quit a stable multi-national giant to join a company nobody has even heard of? Ok, people say start-ups are cool all the time, but what if one day I go to office and I see a large -CLOSED- board there? " I thought to myself. " Yeah, I am very interested! " I blurted... Okay, I didn't blurt :P I gave it quite a bit of consideration. People always talk about how cool start-ups are. And a lot of people are concerned about start-ups too. So I thought I should write a post about my experience in Zovi so as to give a picture of how a start-up environment can be. After bidding farewell to my former colleagues and friends at the large o...