I don’t know

Are you the one who always answer a question, whether or not you know the answer?

If your answer to above question is yes, then  please read further. If you think that you are helping people by satisfying their every question then here is the reality check  the only need you are satisfying is your own. The need to collect brownie points by imposing yourself as encyclopedia. The fault is not all yours. Everybody have acquaintances who are quite popular in their peer group due to knowledge spectrum they have, and willingly or unwillingly you take the same road despite having a lesser bright spectrum. Who is to blame if envy is your capital vice.

Reading habit, a decent memory, and most importantly ability to cook up a story on the fly helps a lot in making a heap of brownies in your backyard. Years pass without your ignorance to any question asked or not asked from you. It is a feel good factor having a small yet faithful “You Know All” fan club. One day comes when the wall whose every brick symbolize someone’s trust in you, will start having cracks in it. More importantly it happens to be the wall which can’t be rebuild once it collapses. This is how the cracks can come…

“Answer all” habit is quite addictive. You don’t realize that their is stranger in the usual crowd today, and he may know the actual factual answer. As some query arises you start cooking the solution and delivering it fresh from the barbeque. The stranger observes that deliverable is pork yet watches you delivering beef. At first he remains astonished and silent, later he digests your pork and then tell all other customers that actually beef was on the menu today. No point arguing because being a fast operator and smooth talker does not make you pragmatically correct. So cook tastes embarrassment, moreover the shield of faith in him gets a dent.

Like above a catalyst is not always needed to hinder a cyclic chemical reaction, sometimes one of the chemical decides to explore further. This scenario is far more worse than the one mentioned above. You told a story, afterwards one of your faithful recipient just got to know about a thing named google. Being a blind follower of your revelations he knew that google will tell the same he already knows; the knowledge that you imparted. He matches your facts with the ones he got from a search engine and here comes a small earthquake of 4 on Richter scale. At first your flock member will despise himself upon having a doubt on you, but further exploration on different topics and with different people  the situation aggravates. The earthquake causes a Tsunami which washes away the castles of the trust which was put upon you. Probable exploration by some chemical may lead to explosion, so be cautious.

Before the trust word completely vanishes from your world start saying I don’t know at least when you actually don’t know. There is no harm in saying it even if you know. At last you knowledge is your property. Potential benefits of saying I don’t know:

• People consider you a normal human being who has a trait of being little bit ignorant. They be more nice with you, it is the best benefit of being normal. After all no one hates a normal i.e. simple guy/girl.
• Your mind finds peace which was long overdue.
• You can actually give more focus to the areas in which you actually want to be knowledgeable.
• If you answer less, then you get more answers. Remember in the class if nobody used to answer a particular question, then teacher used to provide a detailed illustrated solution to it. Akin to that in this tradeoff by not lying and keeping mum you are getting truth.
• I don’t know is the best answer you can give to people with whom you don’t want to interact. Use IDK for every query they fire on you, soon they will realize your intentions. You didn’t fire a bullet and you killed the fly.

If you also suffer from the disease of  “Answer em All”, and agree with what I have written above. Then start practicing I don’t know.

Do not be confident unless you are competent.

Sincerity of the south Indian love

There was a quite famous blog (An Open Letter to a Delhi Boy) written by self proclaimed Madrasan last year, which shocked many egos. I liked it, it inspired me. As I myself have seven months in South India under my belt, I would like to present a little glimpse of  it as seen from my eyes.

My friend Gurpreet has three things on his mind; Love, Chennai-ites (I find madrasi offensive), and food. Lets just ignore the third one, and mix up the love and superclass of Chennai i.e. South India. Deep down we all know south Indians are more sincere than us if not anything else, and there lies a veracity in their love or being more peculiar the way they express it.

I saw a south Indian unmarried couple sometime ago, well it is a rare sight in Gurgaon. At first glance they didn’t look like that they were on a date or something, because in NCR eyes a date means an over-glamored girl with an over-pretentious guy in an over-hyped environment, not to mention the expenses over a date are always overboard.  Well I assume they came there straight from office and silently sharing a plate of pav-bhaji. No hands on ass, no kisses on neck, yet they were  enjoying their last evening of 2011 as they were the only two survivors of the planet. The sincerity of the south Indian love encapsulated them from the world full of vulture visionaries.

I saw one of the similar variety on the Thiruvanimayur local station in Chennai. They were together but maintaining a distance, after all railway platform are not the platforms to showcase public display of affection. Train came they sat, and that what is important if they get seats they sit, if they get one unfortunately, the boy shows his respect and let the girl sit. What happens in Delhi metro we all have seen or many of us have done. The position of a couple at platform and in train, in analogous to foreplay and main action of a soft porn. They play Di’Caprio and Winslet of  Titanic while waiting in the line, Butler and Swank of P.S. I love you if they get seats, and * Emraan and Mallika * of murder if they get the standing space beside the metro gate. That standing space is so hot in demand that often seats are ignored for them, and if it is a group date you will find more than one couple per space. While they are treating their other half as touch pad, the bystanders/sitters have shame in their eyes. Here once again the sincerity of South Indian love respects the views of the world, and don’t let the love be mistaken as lust.

Up here in the NCR most of the affairs don’t end up in marriage, because parents of many don’t agree. Actually a majority can’t gather the courage to let their parents know of their wishes. Ignoring the issue and parting the ways is all they do, but again in most of the cases. Down in south where affairs are rare, the sincerity of south Indian love, provides enough courage to get the parents consent for marriage, and they happily live ever after.

I am not implying that having an affair up here is easy, yet in NCR it is more of a commodity, so use and throw cases are common.

Down their youth love is in scarcity, so finding it is equivalent to finding treasure, and nobody throws treasure, as it is meant to be treasured.

P.S:- Gurpreet you cook good, you are sincere, just find one south Indian girl, because down there it is Engeyum Kadhal.

*….*: I have used Emraan and Mallika because Indians will remain Indians when it comes to Sex.

As I write today

As I write today, the year 2011 AD, is about to end.

Many will blow the horns about the things Homo Sapiens have achieved in the year going by, but a few will look back and ponder upon the losses and calamities that were brought upon the humanity by the same homo sapiens who claim to be wisest and smartest species ever to occupy a small planet, “Mother Earth” as we call it, which is a resident of the solar system of a comparatively smaller galaxy Milky Way.

All of us are good runners when it comes to something that provides us enjoy, happiness, wealth in short benefit; but our feet cease too move and what is more shocking that our mind hibernates when the matter relates to something which does not offer us direct profits.

We run after our governments to cut the prices as we can buy less with the same money with which we used to buy more, but we never walk forward to a man who never had a penny to eat a healthy dinner.

We run after our police, shouting their inability to cop with the crime and criminals, but the sound of a car security alarm irritates us. We never give it a shimmer of thought that somebody’s hard earned and  well invested money is about to be stolen.

We run after our employers for promotions, raises, bonuses, and blah blah, but often the donation boxes kept at the reception of our companies are filled up to 10% of their capacity, were we too rigid to have a stroll towards them.

We run after our politicians for being corrupt, we chastise them, we participate in marches against them, our walls are overfilled with words of anger against them; but the same us never hesitate to offer the green leaf to make ourselves bridges over blunders for which we should be accounted and punished for.

We run after comfort and coziness, impatient and irritated enough whenever we encounter a day of extra heat,cold, or rain, but we never contemplate about those breeds which no longer exist, because out greed contaminated the nature and ecology to an extent that they could not hold on.

We run away from all the above any many more problems within us, very shy to encounter them until they touch out fingertips, because it is too easy to ignore them unless it is the judgement day.

But we ignore a very simple fact, our life is not a sprint, it is a marathon. So running fast will not solve the problems for us. The word human has originated from dhghem which means Earth, and everything we are doing is against the Earth and its residents.

We all must have read that “Problem lies within”  as is the “Solution“. So start introspecting and start changing, as a popular branch of Computer Science ADA (Algorithm Design and Analysis) provides a way of problem solving known as DP (Dynamic Programming). DP tells us that optimal solution of a problem can be derived by combining the optimal solutions of the sub-problems of that problem. Start adopting the dynamics of DP, and sooner or later we are gonna make a change, and hence a better world.

If we don’t take a serious diversion from our existing ways, then we will be very unlucky if we have to live beyond 2012.