Happy Holidays

We have had an exceptional 2008, so many changes, both positives and negatives including Obama’s successful campaign to White house, Capitalism’s usual constructive destruction (Lehman’s brother and other banks’s collapse), painful job losses, melting housing market, government’s bail outs, Mumbai’s terror attack and finally Madoff’s fraud. Good news is none of the above was caused by natural force, all are by human. Our greediness caused all this, and some extra-ordinary human required to clean up this mess.

For me, personally 2008 was great year learned some new things and found some new friends. As an acme of 2008, my dad’s kidney transplantation is scheduled on Dec 28^th 2008. Looking forward, 2009 will be another ebullient year as usual for all of us. Normally the year after recession will be excellent for growth, with the combination of new administration and rock bottom oil price, i’m imagining a paroxysm growth.

Again Happy Holidays and Happy New Year 2009, after a long time i’m going to celebrate new year with my parents in India. My musings will resume after Jan 10^th 2009. Have fun friends…

New Year Resolutions

Again it is the time of year, we are thinking about our usual New Year resolutions. For me, last 15 years my favorite resolution was to quit smoking but this year there is no need for that because i already quit. But i was addicted to web 2.0 world so my next year resolutions are 

1. 200 hits per day for my blog http://ibloggergeek.blogspot.com and 200 more posts.
2. 20 subscribers to my YouTube not yet created music channel.
3. 50 followers for my twitters and to follow 50 people.
4. Create 2 best tools for social networking sites. One was already work in progress (http://www.tamilscrap.com).
5. Loose weight by at least 1%, that is, from 210 lbs to 208 lbs
6. Buy a home in Naperville as soon as possible, after the real estate mess subside.
7. Spend more time with family at least productive 30 hours per week.
8. Visit yellow stone with family (this was my trickle down one from 2008)
9. Teach Ram how to play baseball or football in summer.
10. Teach Meha how to ride bike and how to beat her brother.

Blagojevich – A Case Study

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is facing an uphill task to clear his name from FBI charges. He is booked under almost all possible corruption charges. He is classic example of "Power Corrupts" and transforming "superior from inferior". He was from a working class neighborhood from Chicago north side. His father and mother both worked very hard to raise him and his elder brother. Based on his childhood history, he was a straight A student. He worked hard himself to stay in college, he even worked as dishwasher.

After he was arrested by Feds, rumors twirl around Chicagoland and local media that he is a gambling addict, or drugs or some high level illegal activities, that’s why he needed more and more money. But the truth is he has enormous debt to pay back for his houses, campaign legal debts etc. As per one report his debt is almost $1.5 Million.

Surprisingly, here Illinois is most tolerate state of corruption, because 6 of the ex governors from Illinois are in jail or faced some kind of corruption charges. What one will do? If he/she is in a seat which is already corrupted, he/she had inferior childhood and bloated ego because of unbelievable growth. Any one would decide, let’s play the same game rather than play by book, which is, cut short budget to pay debt or declare bankruptcy etc. Everybody do mistakes, bad judgment and wrong decision, if we try to cover up those by doing more wrong doing is bad. Here Blagojevich also simply fell into the same trap.

Did i sound like supporting Blagojevich? A big NO, he was just betrayed millions of people in Illinois and U.S. But my focus is, what we learnt from here. I believe corruption is because of social and peer pressure. A man or woman not born with corrupted mind but society and peer group, history is responsible for corrupting one’s mind.

Here are some points to how to live with dignity.

1. Friend’s selection: Selecting friends is really important. We don’t need 100 friends but some real good friends are more than enough. But when you are growing faster, we can not control whom should we friendship with. That’s why grow as per age and maturity.

2. Addiction to money: Addicted to money is worse than heroin addict, it was well analyzed and documented. This is i think because of fear, fear of rejection from society and lack of individuality, most of the people addicted to money. Money is a tool created by human to exchange goods, it was not meant to increase one’s dignity or save for future use. If we ignore fear and society then addiction to money would gone forever.

3. Inferior/Superior: This is really important and sole responsible for many crimes and violent behavior. As i said in previous point, if one take an account of overwhelmingly society point of view then they are prone to inferior/superior complex. Society is made with group of people and their judgment is not 100% right and we should not give more important to negative aspect of society view. At same time one should not treat themselves as superior also, being in middle is really tough and required numerous self-realization, meditation and yoga are the best to over come inferior and stay at middle. I think i need to write a post about it
   

I think Blagojevich case is best example of Narcissistic Personality disorder(NPD), his attorney going to use this as an escape point. Even after he knows that Fed was taping his phone, he couldn’t stop what he was doing is the great point of NPD. I’m not very sure about this but i believe sudden growth and eager to make quick money might contribute this disorder. i have to do more research about this.

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Blagojevich

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122904253463000251.html?mod=igoogle_wsj_gadgv1&

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferiority_complex

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_complex

http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Addiction-Philip-Slater/dp/0525477047

JavaFX

Many technology pundits predicated that Rich Internet Application (RIA) is the product of this year 2008, but it was not taking off this year as expected. I think this is because of tough economic conditions and most of traditional companies were delayed to start new projects. But there are several web 2.0, mainly content based sites are using RIA. The results are awesome and definitely RIA going to rule internet in coming years. Just see a full expressive, rich content site http://www.scrapblog.com/, this site was developed by using Adobe Flex RIA technology. Excellent don’t they? Another one is http://dsc.discovery.com/guides/discovery-earth-live/discovery-earth-live.html?dcitc=w99-502-ah-1051, just roll over mouse to GM ad on right side of the screen and see what happens? This all can be done only in RIA.

EBay’s desktop application was a huge success and it was downloaded more than 1 million times just after 5 months of initial release. http://ebayinkblog.com/2008/07/17/ebay-desktop-turns-1-million-steve-jobs-likes-meat-and-potatoes-ebay-iphone-app/

I think struts2.0, JavaFX or Flex, Ruby on Rails or Groovy and iBaits or Hibernate are the great combination of technologies to build or enhance

E-Commerce, content based, web 2.0 and transactional based web sites. This all improve development time as well as quality and rich user experience.

Last week, December 4^th 2008 Sun released the first version of JavaFX, here is the press release.

“December 4, 2008 -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today unveiled one of the most significant advancements to the Java(TM) platform with the release of JavaFX(TM) 1.0, a new platform that merges form and functionality for building rich internet applications (RIA) with immersive media and content for Web browsers and desktops. The announcement signals a broad expansion of Java software's ubiquitous reach to a wide range of Web developers, content authors and visual designers, and marks the next big innovation for the Java platform, extending its capabilities to include rich applications for all the screens of life, from desktops and browsers to mobile devices and TVs. Developers can download JavaFX 1.0 at: http://www.javafx.com.”

Please note that this release of JavaFX 1.0 only supports browsers and desktops. The mobile and TV support will be release on spring 2009. Now JavaFX is tightly integrated with NetBeans IDE, since I haven’t found any good plug-in for IntelliJ for now, I think Net Beans option is monopoly now.

JavaFX download page: http://javafx.com/downloads/windows.jsp

JavaFX step by step guide: http://javafx.com/docs/gettingstarted/javafx/create-first-javafx-app.jsp

Happy digging…

Ouch!!! Headline Hurts

Again today morning flashing headline was 533,000 jobs vanished in November month alone. And the revised job report for September, October also very deep. As soon as flash news showed in CNBC, as usual some of us pressed panic button and affected with negative emotions. This event is not new to us, we are experiencing this since 2007 summer. As I said before, don’t jump into conclusions by reading headlines. Yes, we are in trouble right now, and all government’s engine started fire to resolve it. Patience will prevail.  

Even though employers cut job for last one year, unemployment rate was holding up between 5% - 7%, I agree that anything above 5% is not good for developed nation like U.S, but because most of the people left job market to find an alternatives, some left for long vacation to explore the world. A piece of advise is this is good time to go back to school and enhance our skills. 

Here are the points I have here to justify that we are not in deep recession as media hyping. 

1. Last month job report suggests that we had job cuts ranging from mining industry to jet engine manufacturing. It is the clear indication that we are having a domino effect, that is, employers fear that credit market is frozen so they have to cut some expense to preserve cash. If that is the only reason, what will happen if government unfreeze credit market, will they hire all back? http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/06/business/economy/06jobs.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

2. I was under impression that this job report only includes adults, but after reading detailed report i found out that this includes teenagers also. Obviously they all went back to school, and the unemployment rate for teenagers is 20.4%, most of the cut come from temporary jobs. So before getting jump into conclusions, have this in mind and read detailed report. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

3. “Statisticalphobia”, I don’t know how to coin this but we are now affected by this new kind of phobia, all the numbered were compared with 30 years ago, 35 years ago and so on. 2-3 weeks ago, Steelers game ends with the score 11-10 and headline was, this is first time a football game ends with 11-10. why bragging about it? Steelers won and game ended, that’s all. The same happened now also, some one in press ran a query to found out when employer shed 533,000 jobs last time to hype about it. I like comparing situations but not this far apart. 35 years ago, German was not a single country, there was no European Union, USSR and U.S had cold wars, Larry didn’t invent Oracle database, Gates was at school and most of the web 2.0 CEOs and I was not even born ;-).http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081205/ap_on_bi_ge/financial_meltdown 

4.CNN.com, I believe they are most negative hype news organization, they just appended all negative things (as a year, as a month) into one and reported in there front page. See the headline…

“Lost: 1.9 million jobs

The 2008 tally soars after payrolls shrink by 533,000 in November, the biggest one-month decline in nearly 34 years. Unemployment soars to 6.7%.” 

 See the choice of words double “soars”, and just took all 2008 job lost in to account, we have one more report pending for 2008 as whole year. Why can’t they account for since 2000 or 1990, this is called manipulation of data to substantiate some specific objective.

I’m happy that most of the investors agree with me, they didn’t take media’s hype seriously, because market was not crashed today,matter of fact all indexs went up. As always market was already predicated this and now calm bull investors are busy with bargain shopping for both stocks and Christmas gifts for their dear ones.

Recession: Really??

It looks like people are really spending money freely, and malls are again packed with foot traffic. Are we hyping about this recession? I think say last 6-8 years we have a tendency to hype negative news, especially after Sep 11, 2001, I think now also we are hyping about this recession. As per comscore, this year cyber Monday was second heaviest sales on record. May be NBER come back probably on December 2009 to declare that we are not in recession since December 2008, because it took one year to find out that we are at recession since December 2007.  

As of Stock market, it is going up and down like bi-polar disorder, with in minute’s changes from south to north. But clearly unemployment rate is soaring(mainly construction, manufacturing, finance) and house price is keep on plummeting, since both of these affecting people directly plus usual media’s negative hype, we are feeling more recession pain than reality. Sometimes I feel that this is the way it should be, we have to have some discipline with spending habit and reality check. In other words, people flying high 30000 feet above earth and thinking that is normal. But after coming down to earth (reality), feeling depressed and recession and all pain.  

Greatest example is Google,where free 3 times food, free dental, free medical,free massage, free car wash, 20% free time for thinking, free laundry, free movie tickets, free weekend games ticket, free yoga, free meditation, free internet, free phone connection and free gas. Now the name of recession Google going to cut all and people is going to scream and complain about recession. I don’t know for how long they want to enjoy free stuff in a public traded company and high capitalist country and 97% of revenue still come from online ads. It is laughable and illogic. 

But as a country this negative hype is not good. It creates reverse brain drain and reverse migrations. For example, during last recession in Silicon Valley, the same negative hype created some panic with in immigrants and they just left the country to Canada, Australia and to their own country. The major benedictory of this is India, because after the last recession, India boomed a lot because of available experienced returned Information Technology man power with fresh pool of youngsters. But this phenomenon was not well studied or documented. 

808s & Heartbreak: A Solace

Kanye West’s fourth album released on November 24, 2008, my initial reaction was “wow…excellent”. For first time Kanye West tried with pop, yes this is his first pop not hip-hop. First time Kanye West tried something different style of songs, auto tune and new instruments. I like Kanye West because of his depth of wordplay, rhythm, hi-pitch vocal and trying always something new and most importantly, typical artist’s fearless outspoken, well tamed bloated ego.

This album was obviously out of his heartbreak after his mom’s accidental death and his relation breakdown with his longtime fiancee, and increased media scrutiny after his Graduation album’s huge success. He didn’t want to go with his usual rap because he said that he can’t do rap with broken heart. 808 is Hawaii’s area code because most of the songs were recorded at Hawaii but Kanye West suggests that 808 is the new tribal supposed to invoke emotions drum used for this album’s songs and he named this album well before Hawaii’s decision.

Songs with ranked as my most liked ones

1. Robocop
I liked this song most. The use of 808 drum was apparent in this song. His usual trademark of wordplay, hi-pitch vocals and more importantly music with mix of usual Kanye West’s rhythm makes this song a unique piece.

2. Love Lockdown
The hi-pitch “love lockdown” repetition with high 808 drum beat is something new for pop song. I would say that make some difference for this album. Again 808 drum beat was excellent. I think here he used auto tune a lot but not sure.

3. Heartless
Written for his ex fiancee about his love breakdown. He used his frustration and jealous, ego everything in this song. Very emotional song.

4. Street Lights
Soothe high emotions with high 808 beats and mild melody.

5. Welcome to Heartless
Featured Kid Cudi, I liked this song very much.

6. Coldest Winter
Sad song again about love failure.

7. Amazing
A soul song. I believe he written this song from his heart. Good song to hear. Featured Young Jeez.

8. See you in my nightmares…
Again soul song, presumably he was indicating that he was over with all heart broken. A song of seeking new direction. Featured Lil Wayne.

9. Paranoid
Featured Hudson. A classical pop song.

10. Bad News
Mild beat and melody. I could not recognize the different beat towards end, in fact last 2 mins.

Overall 808s & Heartbreak is an emotional, pop album from Kanye West with overwhelming 808 utilization and going to be another success for him.

PS: I don't know why but thinking due to hi-tech instruments, 808 and auto tune, all songs should be listen from Bose speakers/headset, iPod headset okay. Normal speakers/headsets no good.

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanye_West

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/808s_%26_Heartbreak

Mohammad X Vs Anish Prabhu

Anish is from Trivandrum, Kerala, as usual he was one of many hard working kerala’ties in Gulf to run their family. He is young 24 years old and a best friend of my brother in law and my wife family’s friend. He is from lower middle class and he want to go again and again to Gulf to make money to support his family, he has a huge responsibility to support his 2 sister’s marriage expense. He and his dad went to Mumbai for Qatar visa’s medical test on last week, after completing it, they were waiting at Chatrapathi Sivaji Terminal for train to back home, 2 terrorists storm into the station and start shooting the at crowd, our friend Anish got hit and died on spot and his dad died at hospital. His family now with out any support. We offered our hearty condolence to his family.

This is crazy, what did Anish did with Mohammad X (I just named terrorists as Mohammad X), Why this Mohammad gone “mad” at Mumbai. There is no demand, there is no personal vengeance, and there no discrimination against them, they just want to kill people in the name of god. Some are taking religious words as literals and fighting for it.

I can imagine now in India emotion runs high and some want to take military action against Pakistan, but we should not allow our emotion to turn anger. We have to keep cool and analysis all evidence to double confirm that Pakistan’s terrorist’s outfit involved in this tragedy. Pakistan’s government is now indolent, most of Pakistan’s providence now ruled by extremists, so taking military action against those pockets is wise decision if this ruthless massacre planned and executed by one of those extremist outfit.

MUMBAI attacked again and again...

Bunch of cowards again carried guns and bombs, this time for a change, they came from sea route persumably from Karachi. This was very terrible situation and our police, army unable to stop this because of hostage issue. I believe this is something planned for years and each move was well co-ordinated. This kind of co-ordination can not be done by local groups, this is definitely a foreign group. This cowards don't like India's growth of last 8-10 years and India-Pakistan's improved relationship. I hope all this cowards will be killed and Mumbai will return normal soon.

Struts 2 – Makes developer's life easier

When ever a new framework got released, first questions from developers are, A) Will this make my life easier? B) more documentation? C) Is it easy to understand and intuitive? As soon as, Apache released initial details about Struts 2, I got a sense that it is the framework for next generation. Now after reading some good books and documentations, I can strongly say that yes, struts 2 is the next generation framework for web development. Now we are in the position of talking about less configuration, and less coding, struts 2 is the answer for that. 

MVC Shift:

A fundamental change from Struts 1 is, constitute of Model-Viewer-Controller pattern, beans/EJBs are no longer a model rather the action servlet itself act as a model and action. The filters, interceptors are the controllers for Struts 2. 

Controller – Dispatcher Filters, Interceptors

Model – Action Servlet

View – JSPs 

Configuration Changes:

As per Struts 2, Filters and Interceptors can act as controller, this is really good because filters are basic J2EE servlets and highly reusable. So filters will be configured in web.xml and interceptors would be configured in struts.xml. One more change is struts.xml would be placed in classes dir not in WEB-INF dir. 

The nightmare of maintaining multiple struts xml files of struts 1 was answered really well in struts 2. In Struts2, we can include other struts configuration files in struts xml file. This would improve maintainability and modularize of multiple struts xml files. 

Action Classes: 

Action classes are now a POJO (Plain Old Java Objects), for sake of naming convention, we have to use execute name for method. But that can be changed by using configurations. Action classes would have an execute method and bunch of getters/setters. One interesting thing is, there is no need of getting many model beans and setting it in request scope, and then display it in JSP. Struts 2 is using highly intuitive ONGL (Object Graph Navigational Language) to access objects from value stack. It is not required that we have to champion of ONGL to use Struts 2, because Struts 2 provides JSP tags to get object data from stacks. Since we are dealing with low level language here, a basic understanding of ONGL is nice to have. 

Dependency Injection

Struts 2 are highly depend on dependency injection to access other business service objects. I don’t want to dive into details about dependency injection here, because now everybody knows what is dependency injection and its advantages etc. 

Interceptors

One good thing about Struts 2 is, introduction of interceptors, it is very useful for cross cutting functionalities and simplifies some reusable business logics. Interceptors are like a use-as-you-want basis, really good for plug-n-play, very loosely coupled. 

Free maker, Velocity Support

There are something we can’t configure so far in web application because they are consider an independent entity of web applications, but Struts 2 tries to integrate Free Maker, Velocity (template tools) also configurable. This is something required greater understanding before using it. 

Source:

http://struts.apache.org/2.x/docs/guides.html

http://infoq.com/minibooks/startingstruts2

http://www.ognl.org/2.6.9/Documentation/html/LanguageGuide/ 

Wind Power

I was always in favor of alternative energy, mainly wind power. May be my home town back in India is famous for high force wind. When i was kid, in our town, power cut normally ranging from 30-40 hours per week. But after private companies installed wind turbine through out our area, power cut reduced to 4-5 hours per week. It was excellent growth for under developed places like us, Indian and our state politicians don’t even notice us because we are 3000 KM away from Indian capital and 650 KM away from state capital (pun intended, but truth is we are like many other place in India, under developed,under utilized and mass migration to cities are happening in large scale now).

I was closely observed our Western Ghats Mountain’s (Sahyadri Mountains) rocks and they are shaped based on wind direction, the sea facing rocks are flat, because of high wind force from Indian Ocean. The Indian Ocean wind was very strong because no obstacles from Antarctica to my home town, just open ocean water. The first barrier is our Western Ghats Mountain’s. There is adage in our area “adika adika ammi kalum nagarum’ loosely translated as “a rock can move after constant wind force after wind force”. When i was kid, i used to hear news that a car was lost control from road because of high wind and even larger truck was made accident because of high wind, I can’t imagine bicycles and motor cycles.This kind of high force winds are not suitable for wind mills so they would switch off power generators for some times.

In U.S, i felt the same, but not strong as my home town wind speed in 2 places, one is Livermore, CA, especially 580 corridor, and other one is of course our windy city Chicago, IL suburbs. But Livermore already has some wind mills and the geographical set up also just similar to my home town, a seashore, valley and mountain, mountain provides a barrier for sea shore wind to circulate in land with high force. I hope Obama will make sure to increase alternative energy investment and make use of high wind power, because of current economic climate and low oil price might tempt them to forget alternative energy plans.

Source :

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/newenergy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagercoil

Anti Brahminism and Tamils

I want to write about it a long time ago, but decided not to, because now in this advanced progressive growth of India and Tamil Nadu, anti-Brahminism is a myth. But there is something we have to write/talk for researching and shocked to know that still there is some anti- Brahmanism going on conjunction with Sri Lanka issue and what happened in Chennai law college (my wife cried for 5 minutes after seeing video from you tube please don't see unless absolute necessary, it was really brutal, no pun intended), it is clear that still there are lot of caste feeling in Tamil Nadu. As my dad always say, don’t talk the following with your fellow country (wo) man

A) About Reservation (affirmation action in India) with anybody

B) About Periyar with Brahmins

C) About Brahmins with atheists

D) About money with anybody (causes belly fire)

E) About sex with anybody (piss/shit in public place is okay but not kiss in my country ask Richard Gere),

F) About minority with majority

G) About majority with minority

H) About south with north

I) About north with south

J) About Tamil in Karnataka

K) About Kanada in Tamil Nadu

L) About north in west (this is something new)

M) About west in north

N) About Hindi with Tamils

O) About Tamils with Hindi

P)  About Muslim with right wing RSS

Q) About RSS with Muslim

R) About Christians with VHP

S) About VHP with Christians

I can go up to Z and alpha, beta etc…. so we can happily talk about food, more food, lot of gossip, more cinema and some cricket that’s all, but my dad is from old school, always want to keep “all happy all time”. But we have to express our opinions in some where, just to unclog our brain so that we can explore more and more.

 I may not point to any reference to substantiate my opinion, because all are my personal opinions and unbiased and some generalization, based on my experience with Brahmins, non-Brahmins, Atheist, Believer, Suppressed Peoples, Backward, most Backward, Forward, Other Backward, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists. 

Brahmins contributed a lot for Tamils and Tamil Nadu. I can not imagine Tamil Nadu with out Brahmins. In my opinion, Tamil Nadu with out Brahmins is equal to Bihar (very under developed, see law college video) state in Indian union. Education and Hindu religion are the main for Tamil Brahmins, there contribution to Indian Army also worth to note it here. They helped most of Tamil people to understand Hinduism, work ethics, hygiene lifestyle etc. They uplifted Tamil society from downward sprawl to upward. Now most of the companies come to Chennai (Tamil Nadu’s capital) to start business because of Chennai’ ties work ethics and hard working that is mainly because of Tamil Brahmin’s impact. With out Brahmin’s mantra, we can not marry, can not carry dead body to final resting place, can not enter into new home, can not open new business and nothing can be done with out the presence of Brahmin in Tamil Nadu. We will not and should not forget their contribution towards Tamils. At same time, all castes in Tamil Nadu contributed their own share otherwise we won’t be this advanced in all areas.

But there are some negative aspects of Brahminism are, they are very conservative, domination and fragile. Due to conservative nature of them, they never ever completely assimilate with main Tamil stream. Different food habit, even different hairstyle, Different Tamil slang, Different lifestyle, Different dressing and segregated themselves from main society, they prefer to live near to temples. The main connection point for Brahmins and non-Brahmins is temple, that’s all, after that complete isolation. They created so many illogical customs with in Tamil society. I can list all illogical here, but it required 100 pages.  The most dislikes are, separating time into three parts and one should not do good things on some particular time slot, one should not travel some direction on some days, three persons can’t go to complete a task, if cat crosses on one’s way, they have to return home immediately, one can’t sleep with head pointing to north direction, etc…etc...

Anti Brahmanism was started in Tamil Nadu a long ago, to be specific when Erode Venkata Ramasami Naicker (EVR aka Periyar) went to Kasi in 1904. He witnessed immoral activities of Hinduism in holy city of Hindus.  He got frustrated with Hinduism and its inequality practice. The specific incident is, in Kasi food was served only to Brahmins, and identity is a thread running thru Brahmin’s body crossly, EVR wore a false thread intentionally and entered into line to get food but food servant found EVR is a non-Brahmin based on his moustache. So food servant pushed him down and refuses to serve food, after some time remaining food was wasted and served to dog. Irony is the food service place (choultry) was built by a non Brahmin from Tamil Nadu. [Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periyar]

Periyar actively involved with Anti Brahminism in Tamil Nadu side by side with his main Indian independence movement. I don’t want to go to details about how he did it but it affected each and every single person’s mind in Tamil Nadu. People who born before 1975s may be affected by “brhaminophobia” or “periyarophobia” depend on which side they born, because of Periyar and unlimited propaganda by his followers, this phobia was even affected in neighboring states as far as Orissa and other religion also. 

The youngest generation completely out of this and they even don’t know who is Periyar and what is Brahmins means to them, now Brahmins living like any body else in Tamil Nadu. Due to economical changes Brahmins came out of segregated places and living with in society and all are happy. We are living in a global village and all are connected with digital cells, and people are moving very fast, endless opportunities, no room for hate in this world. But what ever happened in Chennai Law College makes me think that we are traveling backwards again.

Jump to conclusions

I very often come across some “jump to conclusion’ers” in my life. I think the following factors are contributing jump to conclusion.

1. Want to achieve something quickly and desperate, spontaneous and impatient.
2. Lack of experience, novice, immature, tyro.
3. Unable to see big picture, see things as half full or half empty.
4. Chimerical, impulsive and erratic.

Jump to conclusion is any other psychosocial disorder can be cured but there is no medication. The only cure is Cognitive behavioral therapy, which changes the way brain digests the information and producing results.

Here are some tips to avoid Jump to conclusion.

Set the context. Jump to conclusion happen mostly after a conversation (formal or informal), but one have to use common sense to understand the context.

For example, we are at some informal meeting and talking about American football, person A is saying “yesterday’s match between Bears Vs Titans, Chicago should used most of running game rather than passing game”, person B is observing the words, can Jump to conclusion that Person A is not a risk takers because A is supporting running game. Person B completely missed the context, A expressing an opinion about a game not general football. If person A says “football coaches should use more running games because that is very safe and low risk” then B can use that as some judgment.

Judging others: Unless our profession required to judging others, don’t judge others. There are several negative aspects of judging others, if a person found that someone is trying to judging them, they try to avoid them altogether, in other words withdrawn. Judging others is the main recipe for jump to conclusion disorder. Person A is not a judging character and Person B is, person B can be professional jump to conclusion for all the aspects of his/her life.

Graphical contents also misled us to jump to conclusion. The latest example is Obama’s national anthem issue during his campaign. In sastwingees.org we discussed it extensively.

Taking literals as literally, this is really important and once we learned how to take literals as perceptive or alternative meaning, we can avoid most of the jump to conclusion. The advance reading and writing ability would give us maturity for not taking literals as literally.

For example, my 5 year old said, “Dad I’m starving and gonna die”, I knew that he ate enough food just before, for some reason he is hyperboling. But a stranger overheard this, and murmuring that “see this monster not feeding his kid, even though he said he is going to die”.

Reference:
http://www.sastwingees.org/2008/04/27/building-a-belief-system-why-do-we-believe-what-we-believe/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conclusion

This happens only in America...

We witnessed an once in a life time event, that too we (me and my family) are at ground zero from Chicago. It goes like this, 1969 when U.S successfully completed moon mission, USSR started jealousy because of envy, all European countries lined up to get technology as friends, third world countries started in believing something, that belief now helped them to grow this level, so they looked U.S as role model .  Now the same thing happened again, there are millions of millions still at ground level, unable to overcome their fear and inferior because of prolong suppression, here a man from minority become president of world’s oldest and greatest democracy, which was largely segregated by race 40 years ago. Nothing is impossible, all we need is courage and ultra confidence like Obama.   Obama is a great role model for millions of millions people around the world for his will power, courage and ultra confidence, even though he is leaning towards protectionism for now. YES WE CAN....

Obama and Global Economy

All set for election and Obama leading in all the opinion polls. His last night solo presentation on major TV prime time slot was great. His vision and articulative views are great, he is a clear next generation leader. But one thing he is failing on is Global Economy, he has shown protectionism from the start of this presidential campaign. I thought may be, i’m monomaniac with “One Human One World(OHOW)” concept, that’s why i disappointed with his protectionism and all others are agreed with his views. So i have decided to check with other’s pulse for this matter. As usual, i started my research with real person opinions, first target was my wife, as soon as i asked the question, she refuted immediately “what’s wrong with that, first their own country people and then others”.

There is one more OHOW monomaniac like me across the country (California), we used to talk this kind of prescient matters a lot, i decided to call him, he also sounded like my wife, i felt like a thunder struck on my head. [Of course pun intended]. So the point is, everybody overwhelmingly supporting Obama without knowing his global economy policy. He used all the following rhetoric “outsourcing”, “foreign cars”, “protect our workers”, during his speech all the time, it is funny that he wants to talk with Iran leaders face to face but not liking imported fuel efficient cars from Japan and South Korea. I’m thinking that we are all shortsighted with current economy crisis, hence we want a change, our brain taken over by heart and forgetting logic here.

Since all are unable to fathom the issue, i decided to go with Google, just typed “Obama and Global Economy”, i was astonished with results. There are some results but none of them from trusted sources. 

Global economy (free trade) serves a better tool to trickle down wealth from top to bottom in other words rich countries to poor countries, and rich is already rich, they don't need any support but poor countries need rich countries support other wise they can't survive. Any ways, we have to wait and see who is going to win. 

Unbeatable Titans

8 weeks completed since this football season started, as usual lot of interesting games and surprises. Titans came out as unbeatable team 7-0 so far, yesterday they beat Colts.  This team has all chances to win super bowl, they are fundamentally strong. It was great rejoinder to last 5 years continues domination of Colts.  Way to go Titans. But my favorite team for this season so far is Texans, what an offensive play by them. But they lost so many matches early, but last 3 games they are really good.

Bears came back really good after the lost against Falcons.  Lions, Raiders, 49ers, and Rams are really wasting their fan’s money and time. Lions are playing like cats nowadays, may be bad economy really hurting them very bad. For a change, Dolphins started winning some games. 49ers fired their coach and again they promised to build a good team, the same they announced when they hired Nolan 4 years ago.

Again NFL players started using steroid like substance, this time it was some weight loss pills to mask steroids. Saints players 2 of them are tested positive and 10-15 more players from other teams also tested positive. This is really bad for NFL and fans.  

Source:

http://myespn.go.com/blogs/afcsouth/0-5-176/New-Titans-winning-with-a-cushion.html

http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=3654528

http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/8705732/Report:-NFL-hit-by-'rash-of-positive'-drug-tests

 

TGIF-No-SGIF

“Thank god it’s Friday” is famous and happy phrase but not now, for bull investor it is “Save god it’s Friday” from bears.  All bear investors hibernating in first 4 days of week and collecting all information (I don’t know where are they storing information, but bull know source and why) and dumping stock like right, center and left on Friday. This Friday’s sell offs are very well coordinated, bears coordinated from all over world, it was happening very early in the morning. Most of the sell off are out of panic and with panic these bears loosing logic and thinking power, just take all news as literals and getting more panic.

So for a smart bull it is good time to jump on, I don’t think so, this is tempting to jump in. Very low P/E ratio, major indexes lost almost 20% on average this month alone, all panic sellers are done with their selling (still they are out??), in other words bears are gone for permanent hibernating. All reliable technical indicators, fundamentals and theory, are showing to return to the market. For example, Google is selling at 21 P/E which is unbelievable and highly attractive now.  

We are having following positive factors.

• positive GDP growth so far (which is why we are not officially recession yet),
• very low oil price (comparison wise now oil $2.78 per gallon is almost free),
• second stimulus package (hopefully)
• narrow timeline to election (find some concrete answer about who will be next president)
• positive existing home sales(just starting to turn as green)
• ASEN influx of $80 Billion into market
• Dollar value increasing against all other currencies. (Especially Indian rupees now Rs 50 per dollar first time in history, hence most of my Indian friends tempted to go back India, but Indian government don’t want to us to come because they can’t handle more population…just kidding).

The sole issue now is, some banks are run out of money to lend again to consumers. The money rotation stagnates and people unable to borrow money.  But I think it will time to reenergize credit market again, the $700 Billion bail out package would take some time to come into main stage. But real remedy should be government buying unsold house from buyers and hold it for sometime or help them to refinance toxic mortgages.  

But here I want to follow blatantly the 2000-2002 market pattern, which is S & P index fell to 700-750 points with economy was deep recession. We are not there yet at the current situation. Now S & P holding at 870 points, still 170 points to go, which is right time to jump in with aggressively towards stocks not mutual funds or ETFs?

THE ADVENTURES OF LITERAL MAN!

Excellent Story from http://www.storiesville.com/content/view/1557/65/

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At one point in his life, Literal Man owned and ran a small 'fruit and veg' shop in a shopping mall. Like many other of his endeavours, this one was doomed to fail. One day a lady came into his shop. She was an older lady, about forty or fifty, who had a pleasant smile and seemed to be in the mood for conversation. Attempting to engage in small talk was one of Literal Man's weaknesses, for reasons that he never quite understood, yet nevertheless he tried his best to make the lady feel welcome in his shop.

"I hope that you are having a good morning" he said as she walked towards him. She briefly looked confused at the unusual greeting. Not 'good morning'? Despite this she smiled and said;

"The morning will be good once it's over, just kidding! I'm fine, How are you?"

Literal Man was confused; by kidding, did she mean that it would be bad when it was over? Or that it was bad and she would appreciate it more once it as over? He decided to ignore it and answer the last part of the sentence.

"I am also "fine". Can I help you with something?"

"Oh I don't know..." she said as she casually strolled past the register where he stood, "...what do you think, should I buy a half a cauliflower or a whole? I'm not sure if it'll be enough"

"I am sorry I am unable to answer that question properly. I do not know you or your situation. I cannot advise you to purchase either option when I do not know what you are planning to do with the cauliflower, or even how many people you are feeding."

The lady again looked confused, but seeing Literal Man standing there with an apologetic look on his face she decided that he must have been joking around with her.

"Ha! You're funny. Do they all come as funny as you?"

"Who?"

"Shop owners you silly chicken!" she was smiling as she walked around the shop picking up items to buy.

"I assure you I have no idea. I have not attempted to be funny since you walked in here, yet even so I doubt that "all" the shopkeepers would be equally as funny as I am, as every person has a unique and inividual sense of humor. And where is it that you are implying that shopkeepers come from?" He decided to ignore the blatantly impossible supposition that he was a 'silly chicken'.

"Um... ok" she said, now looking at him with less of a smile on her face. "Wow, you really take everything literally don't you?'

"Taking "everything" literally is impossible. I would be unable to even so much as watch a television show, without thinking that the events in the fictional shows were "literally" happening or had actually happened. So no, I do not."

The lady was no longer smiling. She had encountered a man who had difficulty differentiating between literal meaning and implied meaning; Literal Man!  She stopped looking around the shop and turned to face him. To her, Literal Man had crossed the border from joking to being flat out rude

"Um... yeah I was just joking." she said.

"When? "Just" meaning the last thing that you said? Or "Just" meaning that joking is all that you were doing?"

"What? what are you talking about? You're really strange"

"I am talking about what the intention of your usage of the word "Just" was when asking me your previous question. And why do you call me strange? I am previously unknown to you, unfamiliar as well, but that is to be expected. We have never met before"

"Uh... what? You're being a jerk aren't you? I have to tell you I'm not appreciating this at all. Who wants to come into a store and be asked a whole pile of stupid questions every time I say something?"

Literal Man stood there for a moment, trying to make sense of her latest confusing statement. He could feel that somehow he had once again failed in his attempt to have a conversation with someone, and once again he would never quite understand why. He could sense her getting angrier.Every where he went, whatever job or business he tried to run, the same type of person had to be dealt with. He always encountered people who said illogical, even ludicrous statements.

"Madam I apologise, I am not attempting to be a jerk at all. I am sorry if you believe that, and I wouldn't appreciate it myself either. And, well I am unable to say who would want to come into a store to be asked a "pile" of stupid questions every time you say something. Frankly, I find that whole scenario quite bizarre. What shop? Why would you be there? Who would ask the questions? I would almost suggest to you that it was a "stupid" question to ask me"

"Oh!" said the lady, who did not like hearing that she had asked a stupid question, her eyes now flaring outrage and anger. "You're unbelieveable if you think I'm going to stand here and take **** from you. You should learn to keep that horses arse you call a mouth closed, you piece of ****!" She said this with a raised voice as she threw the items she was carrying on the ground and started walking out of the shop.

Literal Man was now offended himself. This was not someone he wanted shopping in his place of business, as she was clearly insane! he followed her out of the shop, now raising his own voice in frustration

"Well, I honestly hope that I would not be believed if I suggested that you recieve faeces from me, which I did not suggest, because I would never do that! And I do not own a horse Madam! I do not see any reason why I should keep its "arse" closed even if I did own one, that would be pointless and bizarre. Even more bizarre if I called that horses "arse" a mouth. I would have to be quite stupid to make such a mistake.You Madam, are not welcome in my shop! I believe you are insulting me when you call me a piece of... ****" Literal Man said the last word with disdain, for even though he had a habit of offending people, without understanding why or how he did it, he still believed in using good manners.

"Fine!" yelled the lady from outside the shop as she turned to face him hands on her hips. A few people in the mall stopped to look their way. "See how I care! Shove all your fruit up your arse! Jump off a cliff you evil freak! There is no way that I would ever want to come back into your shop, ever! Not in a million years!" The lady strolled off at a fast pace. The many confusing elements of her last statement simply floored Literal Man... all his fruit up his arse?

"You would be dead long before a million years had passed, lady!" he yelled after her.

"AAARRRRRGH" she screamed down the mall past startled onlookers.

Literal Man sighed. This was all too familiar to him. He may as well close down the shop and find something else for to do for a living. Like everything else that he ever tried, this was not going to work for him, he could tell.Maybe it was something he was doing wrong, he thought. How well could this business go, if that lady was anything to go by? After all, she was his first customer...