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....