Captive Adaptations

The pesti-cola war rages on in India. While most of the main stream media is spending sleepless nights in providing coverage for this, I painfully would like to point out some even more serious threats (not that I back cola companies, or the Centre for Science and Environment), such incidents serve notice to all of us, to have a heightened awareness around us.

I was pointed out to heinous acts of deception, some 8 months ago, by one of my senior friends in the company. It was a casual conversation and for the first time I heard about Aspartame. It intrigued me because it had some high profile names like Donald Rumsfeld, I just decided to dig a little deeper(not to mention those were also my diet conscious days).

The new found evil,never escaped my mind, and it was shocking in late April, to discover that its presence was rampant in our own home. Both my parents are diabetic, and I have previously blogged about some not-so-good-incidents. The doctors at Diacon had advised them to use “Sugar-free capsules” as an alternative. And for a little over 2 years, my innocent and ignorant parents were blindly using it, and I was not informed about it, till I myself accidentally discovered them in our kitchen. Infact artificial sweetners were part of their regular daily diet.

The first thing I did as soon as I found the Artificial sweetner was to see if it contained Aspartame, and it was a sinking feeling to find it on top of the list of ingredients.

For the next month or 6 weeks, I advised a complete change in their diet and recommended my parents to switch their doctors as well. The transition was not smooth either as blogged in June, but I now have first hand experience of the many ills plaguing our society and how they have encroached our safe homes.

All you “Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, Diet Everything” guys/girls, its high time you realized that behind every “diet” word, there is mostly Aspartame, google it to realize its evilness. Pesti-Cola OR Diet-Cola, the choice we have as consumers is to choose the lesser of the 2 evils. Is packaged drinking water safe? Let me know if you find out.

Its been 7 years. 1999 was the last time when I was around to celebrate this festival with my sibling sisters. Not that I am religious or ritual, but I don’t miss an opportunity to participate in anything that symbolizes love and warmth.

The amount of time that goes invested as part of growing together, while learning more from your siblings than your parents, is what makes this day all the more meaningful, at least to me. Almost all virtues that I carry today are undoubtedly what I have subconsciously learnt from my elder sisters. And the privilege to be looked upon as a role model, is bestowed by my younger sister. In many ways they have been the true guiding forces for me to “behave”.

“Raksha Bhandan” or “Rakhi” implies that a brother protects his sister during the times of adversity, but in a deeper sense, I think its their prayers, love and affection that has enabled me to stay away from trouble, else its easy for a hyperactive individual like me to drift away into troubled waters. Call it faith, call it a belief system, even when I have not been around with my sisters, I have always momentarily paused and wondered, is it their protective shield that is still working !

Last week, we had to rush our Dad to the hospital, where he ended up spending the next 5 days. Well, he is diabetic and has to monitor his blood-sugar regularly, unfortunately for the second time, we did not do a good job in keeping his blood sugar at moderate levels, and early Friday morning we found him unconscious on his bed due to low-sugar.

He also has developed other complications with his kidney, so has to undergo medication simultaneously for that as well. I have always been highly suspicious of how most of the medications that doctors prescribe is based on their “gut feeling” or “intutive analysis” of the complications that a patient is living with.

So, this time I decided I will have a conversation with the Physician treating my Dad and asked him some simple questions on how they arrive at concluding that the prescription might work well for the patient. And noticed that he pretty much conceded that that there was no mathematical formula for arriving at such conclusions.

This prompted me to find out if complications in Diabetic patients with heart problems, kidney problems, and other ailments have a standardized or mathematical treatment. And while exploring for an answer, I found this.

Its highly interesting to note the work of Dr. Eddy, I totally agree with his theory that most of it is Medical Guesswork, we definitely need to find a more formal model, whose outcome we should be as sure as some laws of Physics. Also, its just another coincidence that Dr. Eddy has also chosen Diabetic patients for one of his experiments called Archimedes.

Read on, I have saved a pdf verion of the same article for future reference.

Fantastic!. Game theory according to me is a panacea for all complex social interactions, whether they are social conflicts or social co-operations. Reservation issue very much qualifies for a socio-economic conflict, and this enticed me to dig deeper into game theory, and find out treatments dished out in game theory to such complexities.

I did not have to dig hard, in fact, now I have scores of ideas to read and digest. For starters, evolutionary game theory is a vast subject that deals with such issues, and pans out various models to address these issues. Ecological Models of Competition, seems to be the holy grail at least from my initial readings to comprehensively understand such sensitive issues, but still gives tools to resolve these tight knots of social conflicts, leading a path-forward towards a sensible and amicable solution.

What are you waiting for ?. If you are not Buddha already, start googling…, seek enlightenment !

Finally the heat of reservation debate entered our office cubicles today. Like most startups we are always scampering to meet the deadlines and find very little time for an elaborate discussion on “events” which the main stream media projects day in and day out.

But, accidentally today, I found myself in the middle of a passionate discussion that my dear colleagues were having, and the impulsive disorder that I have to rant on any subject anytime led me to make my own comments. With the simple data I had known I emphatically proclaimed that both “pro-reservation” and “pro-merit” camps missed many vital facts, let alone missing the viewpoints of the other camp.

For all the brouhaha that this debate has caused, it just occured to me that all this attention and uproar was mostly because most of us, particularly the educated Indians have “pro-merit” or “anti-reservation” sentiments, this, mostly because we do not want to lose being the “privileged” and we easily choose to ignore the “socio-economic” reality. For example how many of us have made a sincere effort to learn these facts which went unnoticed for the past 6 months. The 104th Amendment Bill, passed both the houses with almost 100% “votes” in both !. And the bill was also signed by the President of India, on Jan 20th 2006.

The entire MSM is only now after nearly 6 months, cooking up a receipe for disaster. Is this the “Rang-de-Basanthi” effect ?. Yes, envelope ignorance, incompetence and greed, (mostly the psuedo-intellectuals in the urban educated society) and stamp it with arrogance they carry while thumping their chests on “pro-merit” and proclaim to be all-knowing, and we have a sure shot receipe for disaster.

May be its time for all of us to make an effort to atleast try and be better informed. Lucky us, just today we have a very good compilation of alternative perspectives on this. Read it here !

Four days have gone by, since my birthday and the dreaded question, was the most frequently asked. In this entry I have tried to find an answer as to why this question is the most FAQ ?

A few years ago, I used to get agitated & annoyed when friends, relatives and even my parents used good intentions to arrive at this question. But with each passing year, discretion has outmoded valor, and has indeed proved to be a well suited response than valor. And its also a coincidence that I happened to be reading Chapter 11 of the selfish gene since I purchased the book.

Here is a very valid reason for people to be asking the most dreaded question, and an equally compelling answer, for me to be more sensitive towards all people asking me this question. The idea is simple. Celibacy and Marriage are both memes that have been passed to us for generations. And it so happens that during the years between 25-35 the “Clash of these memes” is bound to happen pretty frequently.

The success of survival of a particular meme depends critically on how much time people spend in actively transmitting it to other people. And if celibacy weakened the power-of-people to influence and enforce the idea of marriage, its no wonder people feel threatened with the “Meme of Celibacy” as its sure to outlive the “Meme of marriage” for the very reason that it would have recieved more time and attention. Statistics easily show that with each passing generation people are waiting longer to get married, and at the same time are also producing lesser number of off-springs indicating the fact that Celibacy seems to have been winning over the idea of marriage.

Its very interesting to note that Dawkins himself wrote about this clash of marriage and celibacy although for totally different reasons than the one I have stated here. For more you can read it here.

This is a follow up to one of my previously blogged article on March 1st. Make no mistakes, this is no April fool post. Its necessary that we have a heightened awareness of what is actually about to hit us. True to some apprehensions that I expressed in that post, some of the major organisations around the world have confirmed the start of a crisis.

In mid march the LEAP/E2020 public communication confirmed the Global Systemic Crisis. They have published the nine indicators that prove the unfolding of this crisis. To corroborate their statements the Federal Reserve has also ceased publication of the M3 Monetary aggregates, see here and here. To understand the repurcussions of this move in a lucid style, follow this article.

We have heard of the Great Depression, are we about to witness the Great Economic Tsunami ? If some analysts are to be believed, be scared, be really scared! Darna Zaroori Hai !

A couple of days ago I strolled around MG road with my friend, we were hoping to spend some time at Crossword, one of the good book stores on Residency road (near old Galaxy theatre). As luck would have it, we missed our usual parking garage, and ended up on Church Street, even as we managed to squeeze some space close to Amoeba (The favourite Bowling Alley of Bangalore), we noticed Blossom - the house of used books, right across the street.

As both or us are impulsive book buyers, we decided to check it out. Its an interesting place, where you can not only trade in your old used books for a decent price, but can also buy good books at a great prize, and as I heard from the store owner, it was started around 2 months ago.

I picked up a couple of goodies - one is this, and the other is the one book, that has somehow eluded my grasp, but about which I wrote sometime back. I managed to finally pick it up for dirt cheap price, so I have some good reading to do now. What’s more, once I am finished with this, I have the option of trading the book back with the store for 50% of the amount. That reminded me of the vintage “Engineering Days” were this form of trading-and-reading was the norm for all books!.

Sweet Nostalgia, so if you land up on Church street the next time, remember to check out Blossom, and if you need some pointers to interesting books I think this new book of Amartya Sen - Identity & Violence, which I noticed in the same book store, might provide some good fodder for an intense social conversation with like-minded argumentative friends!.

IITians may have captured the attention of the whole world, including the US Congress, but its a little known fact that 90% of them fall short of their stellar performances when it comes to impressing girls. Blame it on all-brains-no-brawn did you say ?

Well, the administrators might have a found a remedy to that too. I just noticed this news article that IIT Delhi has equipped all hostels with a gym. A couple of my friends including my CEO is from IIT Delhi, so I do have a fair bit of understanding of how their life at IIT was. We can be rest assured, with this move IIT Delhi is sure to churn perfect 10’s in brawns but would that mean fivepointsomeones otherwise ?. Lets wait and watch.

Note: Interestingly, I am reading fivepointsomeone for the past few weeks, will provide my review on it along with Mediocre But Arrogant of the same genre at a later point.

The idea of CaptiveAdaptations has been brewing in our minds for some 3 years now, and less than 5 months ago, we had disclosed the CapAdap Methodology ™. Today we apply the CapAdap methodology to the various phases of human life and we will learn more about the central idea behind CaptiveAdaptations itself as it is applied to evolutionary process of each of our lives.

While we strongly believe in our theory, we are realizing the practical applications of our CaptiveAdaptations Methodology ™ by our own “application models” and at a leisurely pace. Here in the pictorial depiction below,

there are some clues about the evolutionary nature of human life. In particular all our voluntary and involuntary responses to external stimulai, at various stages in our life follow the “tive-based-abstraction-level” defined at that age-level ranging between Captive to Adaptive. (the numbers listed for each of the levels in the diagram, are not to be considered absolute or fixed, they are not validated and are just a benchmark for our initial analysis as applied to the life model)

Of particular interest are the directed arrows in the flow diagram, and the color codings of each of the abstraction levels. People who are willing to explore more on the ideas illustrated in the above figure, drop me your invaluable comments.