Chronicles of Nikhil Baliga

Swami Gulagulaananda said: “ Every person is the same from the outside, and the insides are merely implementation details " A long time ago, I was introduced to an interesting concept called The Black Box. A box that takes something in and gives something out - and what it did to convert the input to the output is not something that we are supposed to be concerned with… It is a black box, and its insides are opaque to us. The black box paradigm can be used in a multitude of places and is very useful to simplify flows of thought processes. You move away from the so called 'Implementation Details’, the nitty-gritty details, the brass tacks if you will and assume that whatever is inside performs its duty. In our electronics course, a cell was often connected to a load. The cell didn’t really care about the load - it’s job was to supply voltage and current. The consumption was the load’s job and not the headache of the cell. The load itself could have been a bulb that could glow, ...

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: "I call a spade a spade " If you came to this post by reading the title - You are one of the following: You are seething with anger, wondering what nonsense is written in this post. You are getting worked up and aching to fire up some comments calling me an insensitive bigot, communal and what not. You are also readying some choice expletives You have adopted a holier than thou attitude and are ready to give me advice on how we should all live together happily or throw words such as " I did not expect this from you " You secretly don't like Muslims and are here to read what I have got to say You are still unbiased and are simply curious to read what is in this post Once you have put yourself in one of those groups, continue reading... Let me clarify at the outset that I just wanted you to realise that we all belong to one of those categories. But tell me, is what I have said here wrong in any way? Isn't it my prerogativ...

Swami Gulagulaananda wondered: " Can we recreate evolution and the world programmatically? " Classes and Objects form the core of object oriented programming. A class is basically like the floor plan of a building, and an object is the instantiated version, a physical manifestation if you may, of the class - viz, an actual house. What's interesting is that with one class, you can have as many object instances as you want - one house floor plan, but multiple houses that have the same house floor plan. Now that we are clear with classes and objects, let's take a look at modifying the properties of objects. Two houses can look alike and have the same characteristics - that is, doors and windows in the same positions, etc. but can have different properties, such as paint colours - one might be red and another blue. Similarly, if you look at people, though we have the same general structure, we have different properties like skin tone, height, weight, eye colour etc....

Swami Gulagulaananda said : " The course of the law is the longest course in the world " Important Note -  This is just a thought experiment - I DO NOT endorse nor encourage anybody to take law into their hands and go around dispensing theirown brands of justice.  Not a single day goes by when we don't see the words 'scam' or 'rape' or pseudo-secular behaviour in the news. Everybody talks about how corruption is bringing ruin to the country. Some others talk about this as the reason for Indian brain-drain and talk about how the Satya Nadellas are leaving for the US because of transparency and openness. Fine, the need of  the hour is a political overhaul, they said, and at the risk of sounding like Rahul Gandhi, let's bring the youth into politics, they said... There was great rejoicing when AAP came to power in Delhi and people waved brooms, promising to sweep away the filth of corruption from within the system. We will punish the corrupt, they...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " It's simpler to tackle problems with divide and conquer - Crowd Sourcing is the next big thing " When a very large problem has to be solved, and I mean one that involves a very large number of people, it is often simpler to use the people themselves to solve the problem. While this can have a very wide range of scope, let me limit myself to a simple problem that we see everyday... Traffic. Everyday, while commuting, we see scores of people breaking traffic rules - Some times, we ourselves do it, but for the sake of simplicity, let us assume that everyone around us are rule breakers while we are law abiding citizens. It is physically impossible for traffic policemen to be everywhere or to catch everyone. Putting up video cameras is a possible solution, but needs expenditure, approval etc. Mobile phones have become ubiquitous - From rich businessmen through professionals, from auto rickshaw drivers to vegetable vendors and...