Chronicles of Nikhil Baliga

Swami Gulagulaananda quoted: " Only the paranoid survive " 'In these unprecedented times' may sound like a cliche, but it appears to be true in the context of this pandemic. Every single day, we are bombarded with statistical data quoting the number of deaths and active cases, infographics that discuss the spread of the disease, posts shared by people lamenting the deaths of their loved ones and how the healthcare and associated services are overwhelmed by the sheer scale of afflicted people, in addition to multiple forwards that discuss cures - some useful while others balderdash. Considering that a large number of my near and dear ones came in contact with the disease, I thought of putting together a note that may benefit others. It is important to continuously educate ourselves and make sure that we are protecting ourselves and those around us. As the old adage goes, ' Prevention is better than cure '. Intellectually, we understand this; and though a few pe...

 Swami Gulagulaananda said: " He who competes in a cooperative game is but surely a fool " When I watched the movie A Beautiful Mind , I liked the idea of Game Theory - And being a fan of all kinds of games, I thought Game Theory would be useful in some video game that I played (apparently I wasn't very smart). It was only later when I read about it, I found it to be something totally different. Game Theory is an interesting concept, and it helps us to choose the best move based on the outcomes that we desire. Let us look at the nature of games that we typically play - whether it is chess, carrom, football or cricket - Our objective is to win and ensure that the opponent loses. In these games, there is always a winner and a loser (Let's ignore ties), and such games are called Zero-sum games . Participants in such games play to win, to ensure their victory and the defeat of the opponent. On the other hand, there is a second type of games called Co-operative games , and...

Swami Gulagulaananda quoted: " One can wake a sleeping man, not a man pretending to sleep. " "Consensus" is an intriguing concept - It is difficult to get a group of people to agree to something. People who have tried to organise reunions or get-togethers will be familiar with the concept. It's incredibly hard to get people to agree to a date, a location, time - and eventually, some people will backoff nonetheless. Driving of consensus in a group is hard - and it becomes exponentially harder as the number of people increases. It is the same with debates where the two teams have different opinions, and each tries to convince the other. Historically, scholars in India used to travel across towns challenging various schools to understand which school of thought was the best. One of the well-known contests is between Adi Shankaracharya and Mandan Mishra, where the defeated scholar had to follow the philosophy of the victor (Shankaracharya won). What is more im...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " A thorough analysis of the problem will help in better, long-lasting solutions " Bangalore is a city of contrasts. On the one hand, we have multi-billion dollar MNCs and have common litter problems on the other. Primarily, there are two sorts of waste issues in Bangalore. The first is the garbage problem and the second is litter. I find the litter issue to be easier to manage. I was travelling by bus the other day when I happened to look at the ground at a bus stop. I noticed quite a bit of litter. On looking at the individual pieces of litter, I saw a pattern emerge. The bus began to move, and I started observing litter along the way in all subsequent bus stops. It was interesting to note that most of the litter belong to the following categories: Gutka and Pan Masala (Pan Parag) wrappers Cigarette boxes and match boxes Paper cups Plastic water bottles From this, we can conclude a few things. Customers can procure most of these ite...

Swami Gulagulaananda quoted Kanakadasa: " naanu hodare hodenu [I can go if I could go] " There was a tale that I had heard in my childhood. Kanakadasa, the great poet and saint, was asked who could attain salvation by his master, Vyasatirtha. Kanakadasa replied, " naanu hodare hodenu " in Kannada. The sentence can be translated to: " I might go if I want ". Many of the scholars at the convention were offended that Kanakadasa had earlier told that nobody at the convention, including his own master, could attain salvation. However, his master saw wisdom in Kanakadasa's words and asked him to elaborate what he said. Kanakadasa explains his pun, which can also be translated as " If I goes, I could go ", meaning that a person who rejects ego can attain salvation. As I looked around at society in general, I started seeing a pattern. I saw a certain quality lacking in most people, and I wondered what the right word for that quality should be ...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " There are always problems associated with scale... especially when my weight doesn't seem to reduce " Scalability has been a popular buzz word for some time and with the increasing use of the internet, social media and machine learning, data collections and performing operations at scale has become very important. But scale isn't something that is necessarily confined to the realm of technology. In this post, let's have a look at how solutions that work for some problems don't work at scale. A long time ago, I came across a fascinating website called Project Euler . Project Euler presented us with a series of mathematical problems of increasing difficulty and the objective is solve them under a minute using a computer program. The first few could be as simple as sum of the first 100 numbers or sum of first 50 even numbers which were quite easy to solve for even novice programmers. Most engineering students might remember thes...

Swami Gulagulaananda said : " Battles won are inconsequential when the war is lost " " Indians don't have any civic sense. Look at the way people drive! Look at all the garbage being strewn around. Tchah! That's why everyone moves to America and Europe. Things are so much cleaner there and people are so much better too. Not unlike here... " is a complaint that is often heard during moments of frustration - especially when that pesky autorickshaw driver cuts you off or comes in the wrong way in a one way road. I had often wondered if these claims are true or not. On a trip to the US, I decided to make comparisons and make some mental notes. My first stop had been the West Coast of the US - San Francisco and the Bay Area predominantly. I found that people drive in a very disciplined manner - There's lane discipline, people don't cut other people off, traffic signals are followed religiously and the distance between two vehicles is enough to fit ...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " With great ownership comes great sense of responsibility " Expectations vs Reality We like things to be perfect. We have a certain set of ideas of what perfection is. These are expectations. Then there is reality. The greater the gap between reality and expectation, the greater the disappointment. When there is disappointment, there are four things that can be done. We can sit quietly and remain disappointed.  We can try and do things to bridge the gap.  Change expectations Whine about it. Sitting quietly and remaining disappointed is not a great option. It quietly sucks out your morale and eat you away from within. There are many who do this; they end up feeling worthless. They resign to their fate. A good example of this would be women in Saudi Arabia. The society in which they live is in a certain way and they are, or feel, so powerless to change it that they have accepted their fate. Changing expectations is what Buddha suggeste...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " Some see the glass half empty, others see the glass half full " The reservation system in India is one of the most debated topics among people. I, for one, strongly oppose caste based reservation system. To deny meritorious students of seats in good institutions (and jobs) simply because certain seats are reserved for people who belong to a particular caste is as unjust as people looking down upon a certain caste because they belong to that caste. While many of you may agree with my argument above, I would like to pose a series of situations before you and ask you for your opinions and thoughts. I read a news article that spoke about the situation of daily soap opera makers of Tamil Nadu. 50% of Tamil Nadu's serials are local shows made by people of Tamil Nadu while the remaining 50% are Hindi series that are dubbed to Tamil. A lot of Tamilians feel that this is unfair because other serial makers are unable to compete against big bud...

Swami Gulagulaananda paraphrased Jacob Braude: " The duck seems calm and unruffled at the outset, but paddles like crazy under water " In the good ol' days when I was trying to learn HTML, there were a set of editors called WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get, where you could visually design web pages as you would write a Word document without writing a single line of code, and the final page would look as it did in the editor. However, a majority of the times, life is not WYSIWYG (pronounced wee-see-wig ). It is the opposite of that - thus WYSINWYG. Several years ago, before Facebook (and perhaps before Orkut) became a rage, I had a chance encounter with a website called Greenpeace. I was very young and I didn't know anything about them. The page I was looking at was campaigning for turtles against an industrial conglomerate. I immediately decided to join the fight - My reasoning at that time was simple: I love animals, I know turtles are getting extinct, ...