Is it fair to be critical of the situation in India?
Every time two Indians meet up, at some point in their conversation the discussion ends up in the state of affairs in India. Sometimes it ends up in an optimistic beat. But more often it ends up with a sigh of disgust of how corrupt, unfair and desperate the state of affairs are. So the question I am trying to ponder today is, is it fair for us to be critical and, for lack of better words, bitch about the state of the nation?
The greatest argument that comes up in my mind and I am sure I have heard from many quarters is why the person who is so vocal in his or her disapproval of the way things are doesn't even raise a finger to act to do anything about it. Since I am one of those mentioned above I guess it becomes of ever greater interest to me to ponder over this.
In school we were taught to be be constructive critics, which meant that when you criticize the way something is, you should also suggest what would have been the appropriate act that would have remedied the situation. The classic example always quoted is the democratic house of representatives, which in India is the parliament at the national level and the state legislature at the state level. Most days proceedings get disrupted or come to a premature end as a result of the opposition crying out endless arguments and many a times abuses criticizing the ruling party for inefficiency and inadequacy. The irony here is that almost all these allegations get repeated by the current ruling party the next time they became an opposition.
So the question is, is it natural human tendency to be critical of the other. I guess it is so. The curse of self righteousness is ingrained in all of us, and it takes great effort and discipline to break out of the shell and learn to appreciate the point of view and the thought process of another person especially when the other person subscribes to a different school of thoughts. So coming back to my original question, is it natural and normal for persons to be critical of the state of the nation even when they have shown no interest in involving in any actions to do anything about it. The answer would be yes, its normal.
So let me venture to ponder over the more complex question. Is it fair or is it morally right for a person to do so? The answer sounds straight forward enough, its wrong to do so. I guess a simple litmus test for this would be to answer the question what does these discussions often result in. Does it help improve anything? Does it hold anyone accountable to make improvements? In most instances if not all the answer is no. so what does it lead to then? A lower national pride among Indians, an even lesser engaged group of citizens who have lost belief in the opportunities that nationhood and concerted efforts can bring. It mars the hope of change and spreads the sickening feeling and evil of disappointment and disenfranchisement. The most outrageous part of all this is these are people who do this consider themselves extremely patriotic and feel they do great good talking about all this.
So what should one do about this? Well to answer this question I would go back to the answer to the first question where I talked about. One should come out of their aura of self righteous egos and try to think in the shoes of the players who they are criticizing. Many a times its true that individuals in the system deserve to be blamed and condemned, but if your individual condemnation in your living room wouldn't make an iota difference in the state of affairs I would guess you are doing more harm that good by discussing this. The other aspect to think is our nature to generalize based on a few bad apples, or may be a few baskets of bad apples. But the good news is that a bunch a really good apples still happen to exist even in the midst of all these bad apples and still continue to be untarnished by all the infection around them. I believe this is what each one of us should concentrate on. The act of concentrating on the good boosts our morale, makes each of us feel good, makes us feel like emulating some of them, reaffirms our belief in all the good in the world and inspires the spirit of nationhood and patriotism that is probably at the lowest in all of us. And if sufficient momentum is attains in this movement, who knows the bad apples might realize they are starting to get ignored and might decide to follow the the bandwagon and make amendments to their attitudes and actions. Good events have as much a tendency to snowball itself as bad events do.
Information technology in India
Its a popular joke that when you walk on any Indian street every other person you meet would be an IT professional. With globalization and open market economy introduced into India in 1992 by a visionary finance minister who is the current prime minister of India, the country has in a short period of 15 years established for itself a complete monopoly in the industry of IT.
Its interesting and perhaps quite alarming the way every Indian youth today aspires to be an IT professional. Its as though all of a sudden all the Indian youth seems to be good at is just one thing, writing software code! I wonder if the very people who take up the profession realize they are doing this mostly out of peer pressure than real interest. Evidence for this is on the rise as more IT professionals in India confess to be victims of stress and mental turbulence, even a whole new trend of suicides and attempted suicides!
So what led to this dangerous state of affairs? If you are someone who is not familiar with the economy and social setup in India I should start by saying that about 95% of people living in most Indian cities belong to the middle class, a majority of whom struggled all their way to the life they have today. For these individuals, all their memories till date are filled with events in life where they struggled to make ends meet with their meager 4 digit salaries they earned even after years of service. Money, or rather shortage of money has been a pivotal point around which their life has revolved, and they knowingly or not passed on most of the same stigma to their kids. So it shouldn't be surprising when the same kids when faced with the prospect of earning 5 and 6 digit salaries find themselves carried away from any aspirations or dreams they carried.(If at all they bothered to find out where their heart lay at all. )
So is this a good thing or a bad thing? Probably I just did a major disservice to the industry that has earned me whatever I possess today, even though that is an extremely modest much. But we should not try to ignore that fact that we might be losing out a lot of talent in our young and booming country to a profession that, to remain honest to my word, I should profess doesn't need much of brains to be a part of. Probably our present day Ramanujans and CV Ramans and wasting away writing java and .net code for Walmart and JC Penny!
When I write this article I look upon myself and call me the greatest hypocrite to be born on earth. I ask myself what stopped me in choosing something of my liking, something where my heart lies. Well I can tell you the answer is simple. I didn't know where my heart lied, still cant name one thing that I feel I should have chased to the end of my passion. And having asked this question to almost every friend of mine who is a part of IT I know each and every one of them feels just the same.
So do I feel miserable being here? Definitely not. I feel like this was where I was always destined to be. I feel I couldn't have done better anywhere else than here. So to be frank I really have no regrets of being here at all. But would I advise my sister or my kids(some day when I have them) to aspire to enter the IT industry? HELL NO!!! I cant let this happen to another one of my kin!
Making of a genius
They say there is a genius in all of us. All humans are supposed to be born with similar abilities. Its the environment and experiences that his life goes through that defines where he/she reaches in life. At least so goes philosophy.
I had the fortune of doing my bachelors in the most sought after department in the most sort after Engineering college in my state. So for my part I have seen quite a few geniuses in the making. One thing I could pride myself with is my sense of observation of people around me and their habits, and I have come to the conclusion that there is a lot in common among these individuals.
That being said, going by the converse theory if all geniuses had similar habits, would developing the very same habits make one a genius? Probably not, but it would definitely give you the same edge these genius have besides the blessed brainpower they possess.
So what are these traits that I am talking about?
Confidence
Each one of them knew themselves that they were exceptionally good at what they did. This gave them an enormous sense of confidence. If I took one example from the many individuals I am talking about that would be a friend by the name Srinath. He was a mathematic freak to say the least. When a problem of the most challenging nature was thrown at the whole class many of us approached it with the stigma of an unattainable goal. But not only was he blessed with one of the best mathematical acumen, he never ever had any second thoughts about weather he would be able to solve the puzzle. I believe that freed up his mind from all qualms and made a huge impact in the results he produced.
Passion
All genius that I have come to know have had a passion for the subject they excelled in. They might stay up night after night obsessed with a project once they get started with one. I remember this friend of mine who is a computer nerd. I remember the first years in college when none of us had a PC at home and only access to computers was the labs we had at college. There was one point at which they had expanded the facilities but for some reason new chairs hadn't been added yet. This was the state of affairs for some time. So we had a few precious PCs that could not be used because there were no chairs! This friend of mine, RG, used to work on these PCs, even the entire day at times standing, or on his knees. It seemed even more awkward because he was 6'2” and he had to stoop like an arc to do this, but he never seemed to mind. He had so much passion in what he did that he was always far ahead of even perhaps most of the lecturers in the department in his knowledge of computers. He got selected from campus to Lucent Techologies, but then went to work for Texas Instruments and now moved on to Microsoft.
If there is one trait each and every one of the genius-in-the-works I have come across, it was passion for what they did. A passion that could make them stay up nights, forget pains or strains, give up all other pleasures for the one passion they believed in.
Know where your heart lies
One unique quality about any genius I saw was how early in life they knew what they were good at.
When I look at the facts through a dissection microscope I see these men and women started what they did at a very early age in their life. So in effect they focused all their efforts and honed their skills over a long period of time in this particular field of theirs. Well, considering the amount of time they consciously and unconsciously put in towards improving their skills in one particular subject it might not be as surprising after all what they have become at the end.
The right connections
It is said the birds of the same feather flock together. I see this very much true with the people we are talking about. Each one of them tend to get along with only those people with acute interest in the field of their liking. As a result they end up talking about their subject all the time. This I see goes in a big way in building their skills. This is a classic example of what synergy and group work can do to people.
Hard work/ Long hours
This is probably a repetition of what I said in the previous paragraphs. Each one of these individuals spent long hours, well basically most of their waking hours (if not all) learning, practicing and improving their skills, thus getting even better at them. The best part is they enjoy ever second of it to its fullest. A classic example of the saying “Find a job you love and you wouldn't have to work a single minute in your life!”
Well there has been other traits I have seen in these people such as ambition, huge personal ego that drove them ahead, lesser sociability skills which freed up more time to let them pursue their interests, an inquisitive mind that makes sure they completely comprehend what they observe and study. But then I believe these aren't as consistent or pervasive as the above said traits I described.
As the human race comes to conclusion a millionth time that the power of the human mind is beyond comprehensions, these observations helps explain to me in a big way what makes some people geniuses .
Why should I build a datawarehouse? Why do I need to invest on BI?
Well, lets start with basics. Every time you had to recruit a new resource to share the increasing load on your staff, what is the picture you have in mind? An exact clone of the perfect efficient guy X you have with you, who understood the way the company works and feels the direction in which the business went. We know that its not possible as of today to clone people, but what if there was a way the same X you have had a way to do the work he did today in half the time he did today so that in effect he had the time to do twice the work he did today. What if all the associates in your company could do their work in half the time they took today. With rising HR cost today and the huge crisis in getting and retaining brilliant employees this would sound like directly from heaven for CEOs around the world, and has over the past few years which led companies to invest hugely in better and more efficient tools for their employees. Now who among your staff is highest paid most critical of all resources. Its definitely the higher management and analysts who are empowered with the responsibility of making decisions in which the company goes each step. And its these same decisions that make or break the future of a company. For the same reason there are no other employees in your company who need the most intelligent, smart, robust and reliable tools as these people do. This argument alone gives you more that enough reason for any company to pull their act together and building a BI & DWH establishment for themselves. Considering your competition reaching there ahead you and fighting you with a weapon much advanced to your arsenal is a inescapable impetus.
Posts for a change
After a long break i come back to this page and take a look at all that crap i had been writing in the past and i say to myself; did i really expect someone to be visiting my page and reading the stuff i write? What the hell am i doing wasting my time putting up all this crap out here anyway.
At least going forward i
don't think i am going to write the kind of
no-brainer stuff i wrote. I hope i am going to write things that make sense to me when i get back and read all that i wrote in the past. So i think that resolve calls for a new start. So, so much for nothing!
Informatica PowerConnect for Webservices
I started working with Informatica powerconnect for webservices with Informatica version 8. I was mighty disappointed to see that the infromatica manual said very little about how to use the transformations. The web wasn’t of much help either. Lots of trial and error, figuring around and hours of calls with Informatica support finally got our mappings working the way it had to. More because the webservice we were calling were rather complex, but even with a far simpler webservice it still is a herculian task getting the thing to work without help.
This article is written with the assumption that the reader has gone through the Informatica manual related to power connect for web services.
We can use powerconnect as a source, target or consumer transformation. The chance that you use as a consumer transformation being the highest I will talk mostly about that.
You start with using a WSDL file that the webservice provider has given you. Most probably this would have been provided this on their website. The wsdl file is like a dictionary that has all the information of the operations that the webservice provides the URL to the soap requests and so on.
In Informatica if you select consumer transformation it takes you to a import WSDL pane. Browse to the point where you have the WSDL.
There is on tricky option here that turned to be of great importance in my experience. The webservice that I was calling was returning images in binary format. The werbservice was failing with base64binary conversion error. Eventually it turned out this was because I had to set the field lengths of ports very high since the data stream was very long.
Click on advanced options to override field lengths if you are expecting long strings of data.
Select the operation you need to use in the next window.
After you have done this step you are presented with a window which gives you an option to use entity relationship or hierarchy relationship for your xml view of the webservice transformation.
This is another area I found tricky. Heirarchy relationship gives issues unless you are using every group of input ports. I found using entity relationships better when you don’t plan to use all input groups.
You are now presented with the consumer transformation in its xml view in the mapping. You can see there are different groups of input ports. Each group has its own primary key. Make sure you provide a sequence generator to the primary keys in each of the group you are using.
Each group is related to another with foreign keys. So make sure you connect the sequence generator output of the groups primary-key to the other groups foreign-key.
Eg:
If you have two groups, envelope and body.
Envelope has primary_key
Pk_envolope
Body has a primary-key pk_body and a foreign-key fk_body_envolope.
Connect a sequence generator output to pk_envolope of group envelope. Connect the same sequence generator to fk_body_envolope in group body.
Connect a different sequence generator output to pk_body in group body.
Once you have connected all input and out fields as required you are all set as far as mapping development goes.
When you configure session for webservice, create a “Application connection” with username and password as the webservice provider expects.
Its likely the webservice fails (mine got me working on it for 3 days before it started giving me outputs the way I wanted) the first time you run it. The easy way to analyze errors is to set the override tracing in session to verbose data. This way the soap request and soap response is visible in xml format. There would be a fault message embedded in the SOAP response that tells you what the issue is.
Above all this Informatica Support turned out to be quite helpful in resolving our issue.
Nostalgic - Thats how i feel!
Have been thinking about the concept of nostalgia. Its amazing that everyone feels the same way about their past. “Those were the days! Gone are those days!” Two statements you keep hearing all the time. It struck me as an interesting phenomenon more because I found myself saying the same more and more in recent days. I realized there should be some simple explanation to this amazing phenomenon. On thinking further something else struck me further interesting. You find all periods of your past particularly pleasant even though you might have drudged through the time with pain and agony.
So what’s this concept of Nostalgia and what makes it such a nice feeling? The explanation is simple enough. When you look towards the past there are basically two reasons that make the feeling pleasant. The first reason being that, of a million events that happened in the past you would remember only the relevant and pleasant ones. The second reason which is even more significant is that they are just memories now and you don’t have to face them anymore. It’s like daydreaming of things where you don’t have to go through the pain of the matter, and can just concentrate on the pleasant part.
But all said an done, nostalgia is one of the greatest gift to mankind and I wonder if there is anything that gives one as much pleasure as it does.
Feynman - The curious character
Completed the second book on Feynman "What do you care what other people think"., the first one being "Surely you must be joking Mr,Feynman". Its a matter surprise that so many people have heard of Stephen Hawking and not heard of Prof. Feynman. Its yet another proof that people are carried away by drama, emotions and sympathy than hard core "stuff". As I read through his stories the strong feeling kept building in me how similar in character Richard Branson of Virgin was with Feynman. Wise men said "Life is not measured by the breaths you take but rather by the moments that take your breath away." These are people are/were living embodiments of the principle.
Another aspect that struck me peculiar in his books was his ideas about education and how much he differed from the present day conventional concepts of education. I was thrilled to realize that for some unknown reasons the ideas that he propounded were thought that had been haunting me for a long time now. His statement that many a times he met a person who knew the theory in and out but never understood what they implied in the real world is something I felt about the Indian education system. I wouldn’t say Indian educations system is an exception here, its pretty much similar across the globe but American system by comparison is far more liberal in freedom of thoughts and expression. Creativity is not nailed down with iron fists at the early ages as it is done in India. There are quite a few things we could learn from all these.
Feynman books not only tells you he was a genius in all aspects with an abundant knowledge in diverse fields, it also instills in you the confidence that with a minimal effort and determination anyone could look upto these standards. The books are a real eye opener to how one can reach zeniths of success after living through horrendous failures and depressions in life. All in all the books are a must read for ignited minds.
