What motivates us?

What motivates us? It is not just the money but also purpose. Somehow big corporations separate the two for small fishes like me and that is the part I don't like!





One more interesting video on Family values.

Google wave APIs

You can paste a google wave to your site so that users can collaborate. Pretty cool, as you customize the wave and make it specific to your use case.

Thoughts on life

At times I wonder about what is this life. Probably everybody wonders about this paradigm and has his/her own thoughts about it. This is my blog and so I get the honor to put my thoughts. They may sound weird to few but actually I don't think anyone will have an all logical and straight forward reply to "What is life?"

I at times imagine world to be a simulation being run by superior beings (may be we call that existence as God). We are their puppets running around or living as we are designed to and they are watching us and getting amused on how we react to various situations and so on. God gave us a canvas consisting of land, water, air, vegetation, etc. He also gave us senses to know the world around and also "mind" to think and interpret. I am not sure what we think, is actually what we wanted to think. I believe Matrix movie depicted this very artistically. It showed that the way humans understand is by the process of neurons interaction in brain. Neurons being electric signals can be very well altered (by God, machines, super beings) and humans can be made to think what they were supposed or designed to think. Matrix movie had this concept of matrix world where humans live in a virtual state and consider it as reality. What if that is somehow true? What if we are really being controlled by God in our thinking process? We live in a world created by nature, we think by the mind designed by nature, etc etc. What if the mind is itself biased in a way that it keeps humans busy / engaged with non relevant tasks (such as making money, fighting each other). What is nature? Is it just another name of that super existence?

This is somewhat similar to ecosystem in which we are playing Mario, where we provide Mario the environment and canvas to run around, earn coins, fight his enemies and win his girl in the end. But in reality he is doing nothing but just consuming some electricity in CPU. Mario can never cross his boundaries of his virtual world and he is doomed to stay within that canvas/ unit. Now can we escape this world? Don't you think the idea of infinite space around is just so fictitious, unrealistic? Can infinite space exist? Yes it does as per our current science and we are just a small small small small part of this infinite space. Well this may be just be a limitation of science, after all couple of centuries back we considered earth to be flat and that we would fall if we cross the edge :)

I do not believe completely with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. According to it, we evolved to what we currently are on the basis of constant development and adjustment to the nature, and also on the basis of survival of the fittest. Instead, I feel that we were designed to evolve this way. It is hard to believe that all our senses viz. eyes, nose, ears, touch and smell, developed just on the basis of adjustment to the nature. I mean how come a complex organ such as nose developed from zilch just on the basis of survival of the fittest. Even if we assume that we developed as per the support / canvas available to us in the form of nature, why is it that other planets have no life? Life could had also developed on those planets as per the resources available there. Why it is that only earth among billions of planets and astronomical bodies, supports life?

I also believe that our mind and other body organs are just highly sophisticated machines. Humans have already gained technology to replicate memory storage (hard disk), mind (processor), eyes (camera), etc etc. There is a long long way to reach when we can actually create mind, eyes and other organs. However there is something more than just working organs in a life form. That is the "existence". Think about it, if someone's heart stops beating and after couple of minutes you start his/her heart beats with some mechanical machines, will he/she come back to life? No! But what really changed? He has his organs, probably they didnt die as we started artificial heart beats soon enough. But he is still not in conscience and that means there is something more than just your body, your thoughts, that define you. Is this what we call our soul?

Further there are a lot of fantastic phenomenon that are interlinked to sustain the life. I do not think they just got created automatically without any divine intervention. Think about some of these beautiful and complex systems:

• Underground fresh water to sustain thirsty cities, regular rains to replenish the underground water, monsoon seasonal winds to create water logged clouds, and seas and vast oceans that act as a source of water
• Ecosystem, where a huge mass of fire i.e. Sun is the source of energy. Grass and plants absorb sunlight and water to produce vegetation, herbivores eat that to sustain themselves and in turn provide themselves as food for omnivores and carnivores. Not only that, each species has a vital role in the ecosystem without which everything will just fail. A subtle example is earthworm, which makes land porous and helps vegetation to grow.
• Astronomical bodies revolving and rotating to give us various seasons and different flavors of life. Creating day and night to provide us with sleeping and working hours. Both day and night are necessary to sustain our life. These astronomical bodies are also responsible for creating tides, monsoon winds and so many other necessary phenomenon for our existence.

It is hard for me to to believe that all this is happening on its own and we just got evolved in a perfect way to suit it the best. What sounds more convincing to me is that it was designed to be what it is and also our mind has been designed to think in a manipulative way.

C++ Array vs Object - Pass by value

You can not pass an array by "pass by value", whereas objects can be passed by value. Here is a snippet:

You can pass an array to a function in only following manner:
int arr[2] = {0,1};
void s(int arr[]){ //This statement is equivalent to: void s(int *arr)
arr[0]=2;
}

s(arr); // This passes array pointer by value and hence the complete is passed by reference. Meaning to say function s will operate on real array and not on a "copied" array of the one passed in argument.


You can pass an object to a function in two ways:
void s(Obj* o) // this statement is equivalent to: void s(Obj & o). Pass by reference
void s(Obj o) // Pass by value. The actual ojbect passed as parameter when invoking the function, gets copied and function acts on copied object and not on actual object

C++: Char vs String initialization

#include "iostream"                           // a PREPROCESSOR directive 
using namespace std;
int main()                                    // function header 
{                                             // start of function body 
using namespace std;                      // make definitions visible 
char * t1 = new char;
*t1 = 'a';
cout<< "Case 1: " << t1 << "\n";          //Output: a.    Valid output

char * t2;
//*t2 = 'a';                             //Can also lead to bus error. Incase it is out of memory assigned to t2
//cout<< "Case 2: " << t2 << "\n";       //Output: a???.   Garbled output, since you are trying to store 'a' in neverland

//char * t3;
//t3 = 'a';                              // Compile error: myfirst.cpp:15: error: invalid conversion from 'char' to 'char*'

//char * t4;
//* t4 = "a";                            // Compile error: myfirst.cpp:18: error: invalid conversion from 'const char*' to 'char'
// "a" is treated as string. 'a' is a character

char * t5;
t5 = "a";
cout<< "Case 5: " << t5 << "\n";         //Output: a.     Valid Output, understand that here "a" is a string and that get space assigned in memory. On the other hand, 'a' does not get stored in memory when getting assigned to pointer. Also "a" is of type const char *, where 'a' is of type const char

int * fellow;
*fellow = 123;                           //Garbled output, bus error.
fellow = (int *)123;                     //fellow points to some location in memory and will result in bus error while we are accessing it.
return 0;                                // terminate main() 
}   

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/lang/eng/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

Jill's speech was so impressive. Setting up the mind to share Her experience during a severe hemorrhage is great..the feeling of 'nirvana' is the most inspiring though I am little confused about the experience during such trauma.
Buddha and few other persons are known to experience the rare NIRVANA during their lifetime..bt here,JBT experienced that rare happening during hemorrhage..unbelievable and inspiring.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/lang/eng/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

Hans Rosling: New insights on poverty and life around the world

Hans Rosling: No more boring data: TEDTalks

How to talk to VC (Dos and Donts)

Some sample questions a mentor can ask:

• If I give you 1 crore how will u invest that in a day
• Best ans: 30 lakh for myself and my family future and comforts, rest 70 lakh for business. May be I will hire 4-5 best brains to work for me, etc etc. Or how u plan to grow your current business
• Mentor wants to judge how much are you concerned for your personal comfort, do u have a vision to invest money in your business
• Most exciting thing you did in college or life
• It can be academics but also something non academic. How passionate you are to achieve what you want. Something you really wanted to do and you went out of way, went crazy to do it
• Winning some trophy, Getting gf, some adv trek
• How ur friends describe you?
• Friends can judge you best. Some answers can be:
• visionary, Reliable, strong temperament, enthusiastic, etc
• Family background
• Mentor wants to figure out if you have future personal commitment. Most of entrepreneurs drop because of family reasons
• Why do you want to open a startup - THIS IS IMPORTANT
• Don’t say lame reasons here. It will haunt you back :)
• Something like: you know you company earns 50 lakh from you and gives you only 10 lakh of it. You think you deserve better with you skill set and ideas and want to make a place for yourself. Please note the assumption that if your company make a profit of 100 crores with 100 employees, it entitles you to get 1 crore, IS FLAWED. Company doesn’t make 100 crores only from employees but also from the idea, its brand value, etc. But then you also have a great idea WHICH ADDS VALUE to current market and hence you want to follow up your dreams.