where's my oil...

“We are the consumers. We are the by products of life style obsession. We have jobs we hate to buy shit we don’t need…Things we own end up owing us…”

Tyler Durden of Fight Club (Directed by David Fincher) inspires a lot of scepticism in me especially, when I am having nightmares of the rising inflation.

I get dreams like I am riding my Pulsar and suddenly the fuel is over in front of a petrol pump but five kilometres away from home. How cruel! When my monthly fuel budget is already in deficit, I can no longer afford to buy petrol unless I realign my food budget which, too, is about to dry up because of rising food prices. I have to push that 140 KG of machine all the way to home, or better sell it off. When I am about to sell my beloved stead, suddenly I wake up and realize that I am currently in London, far away from the whirlpool of rising prices, but only for a short time.

Prices are rising. Not only in India – everywhere. Indians abroad are wondering why they are not able to save as much foreign currency as they used to a couple of months ago, while Indians in India cringe when they hear rest of the world (Ms Rice) say that hike in food and oil prices is because of the rising demand in India and China, which in theory is true though not the complete answer. One - USA’s bio-fuel programme is turning the grains into fuel and more here.

We (emerging market citizens and developed country citizens) are not doing that bad anyhow. Only our savings are not that much we can boast any longer. Worst hit are those countries where food is the indispensable commodity – the third world. Prime Minister of Haiti resigned when he couldn’t do anything about the rising food prices and about the rioters shouting slogans of ‘We Are Hungry’. Many got killed in Mexico riots. Army is guarding the paddy fields in Africa. Military is baking bread in Egypt. And to make things worse oil is touching $135 per barrel which is not at all a good price, not because it is high, but because it shows an alarming shortage of oil. Such sharp economic turns change the course of future, leaving layman in shock.

In theory - inflation is caused by either of the two shocks – Demand Shock or the Supply Shock. Demand Shock, as the term sounds like, is a sudden sharp increase in the demand of a commodity which drives the price higher, which is most conspicuous in the housing markets in booming times. Supply Shock is when there is a sudden drop in the supply of a commodity with an unchanged demand, like in case of oil prices.

People say ‘problems never come alone’. India was celebrating the Sensex touching 21k at the beginning of the year. Then suddenly the weather changed from sunny to cloudy to very cloudy and now it seems it is about to rain (if not pour). Elections are approaching, Gujjars are whirling their sticks around in Delhi, commodity prices and crude oil prices are rising. Now this is a really tough challenge for a government, which is interested in coming into power once again. Let’s keep fingers crossed for the best greater good and pray that our policymakers will see an opportunity in this problem instead of burying their heads in the sand like an ostrich to later blame each other and some invisible ghost. And everyone will be left wondering where the oil went.

poor programmer...

Problem with the application programmer’s job is that no matter how hard I work and how smart I am, I can never become a mass celebrity or win a noble prize or a Bharat Ratn, Padma Shree or Padma Vibhusan. I am the meek supporter of a bold economy. I am the wistful spectator of a celebrity world.

I mean, a programmer cannot reach out to the people of this world. A journalist writes an article and hundreds of people read it and make opinions about the world. A programmer writes a program and nobody but the compiler understands it, and years later if someone actually dares to go through the source code (which is like the junkyard of a programmer's irrational thoughts), the poor programmer’s soul gets all sorts of critiques and curses, whereas a journalist receives the Pulitzer Prize for his years of service to the world, or even gets the Best Critics Award of the Year!
In a group of people of different professions, a programmer appears like a laid back citizen of an undeveloped world, an unevolved civilization. That’s the problem with the world of programmers. We don’t have role models. If one wants to become a great journalist or a sportsman or a politician s/he has role models like Thomas Friedman, Christiano Ronaldo and George Bush. But if one wants to become a programmer – there is nobody, everyone is on his/her own on the road to perdition.

But it is good for unambitious people who don't seek fame and celebrity status, those outcast self proclaimed geniuses who want to live unknown to the world of natural human beings and go as the tiny footnotes in the pages of history.

evolution of a programmer...

To Quote Edsger W Dijkstra

If something goes wrong in the field of Physics or Geology or other natural sciences you can blame the nature. But if something goes wrong with your program you cannot blame anyone but your own brain.

An IT application generally evolves like a human civilization until the technology is able to support the changes in business environment. Once technology is no longer able to support the business, it becomes obsolete.

Consider this – the application I work on, was built some decades ago using CINCOM’s rapid application development tool called MANTIS. Those were the times of mighty mainframe machines, and elegance of modern day servers and MVC architecture was only in the visions of computer engineers. MANTIS is a straightforward, down to earth tool with hardly some twenty commands and an inbuilt compiler which sits on CICS. One of those tools, which experts say can be mastered in two hours. It has no inbuilt garbage collection or exception handling, and front end is very unfriendly compared to today’s sleek and funky JSP. You have to write some 100 LOC to implement the page logic, there is nothing to scroll. There are no date operations like Oracle. What the redundancy of code means becomes very conspicuous when one looks at the source code. On and all, MANTIS is now obsolete given the pace with which business is changing. It is full of known bugs, which can no longer be fixed. So the business is gradually making a shift towards Siebel CRM. Eventually, I have to start looking for a job elsewhere.

When a new person is inducted into the application, given the attrition rate of the ambitious people, the first question s/he asks is ‘Why don’t we write the whole code in J2EE again?’ That’s a valid question, and a smart, futuristic proposition. Who wants to listen to a gramophone record in the times of iPOD nanos? But consider this – you bought a gramophone record somewhere in 70’s and since then you have been collecting the records religiously like a music aficionado. Now you have a library of thousands of records, which has eventually developed an emotional bond with you. You can’t just throw away all of them and buy one 100 GB iPOD nano and download all the songs from Apple’s music store. Business, too, has this unrealistic attachment to the obsolete applications which, though highly inefficient compared to latest technology, give correct results. You cannot expect them to shift immediately; it is a gradual evolutionary process of business transformation which promises exorbitant jobs for enterprise architects.

Moreover, hardly there will be a business which runs on a single technology. Mine, runs on Mainframes, J2EE, VB, and all of these talk to each other through another middleware technology called WebSphere MQSeries. Ideally it looks like a stupid mess from neutral perspective, but for a support provider it is a blessing. Support providers are always in hunt for bugs which they can fix to bill their clients.

Conclusion: When looking/working at an application it is imperative to understand that application is not just the lines of code or the number of java classes. It holds in itself the history of how business rules have evolved, the frustration of restless programmers, the limited knowledge of overqualified application architects and ignorance of pandemic project managers.

money... my take...

Often, I am bedazzled by the concept of money. From simple barter of things to complicated derivative instruments - we have covered a long way across the evolution.

Once upon a time, two cows were bartered for one ton of barley, one acre of land for three beautiful wives and three silver coins for a sumptuous supper at a place where naked damsels served the food.

Today, the barter has become so complicated that without having an MBA in finance, it is almost impossible to understand what is being bartered against what. Consider this - 'X' bank gives loan to its customer 'Y'. The bank received that money by selling equity stocks in the financial market. A mutual fund bought those equity stocks in hope of making profit, and also hedged the losses by signing some derivative contracts which were sold by some foreign investment bank. There is no wonder that customer 'Y' himself invested in the money in the same mutual fund which bought the equities from the bank which helped the customer to procure the loan. Now, you call that the messy barter.

Still, simple barter does exist. 12 INR for a glass of juice, 99 INR for a pair of allegedly 'imported' sunglasses, £1 for a bottle of orange juice, $1 for a diet coke. But then, £1 is traded equal to INR 80 and $1 equal to INR 40 in currency markets. George Soros, made $1.1 billion on September 16, 1992 by short-selling $10 billion worth of pounds. Now, you think that's simple?

No, it's no longer simple. Different people have different views about money based on their education, culture, upbringing and last but not the least 'how-much-of-it-they-already-have'.

There are worldly, practical, realistic people who think that money is everything, money is power etc. Also, there are poetic, idealist and dreamers who think that money is not everything, and they even go to the lengths to saying that money is the root of all evil, or even money is evil.

I say - both of them are wrong. First kind does not understand the aesthetic sense of money, and the second kind misunderstands its beauty. Money has power, no doubt. It has power to purchase things. But how that power gets exercised, depends on the most complicated organ of human body called brain.

While spending money, we make choices. Those choices depend on our personal values, which we develop throughout our lives. Consider this situation where there are two guys 'A' and 'B' who are given 50,000 INR each to spend. Now what will they do with that?

1. 'A' buys a multifeature mobile phone with 50,000 INR and person 'B' puts it into her savings account and forgets.

2. 'A' buys a multifeature mobile phone and person 'B' after seeing 'A' also buys a mobile phone.

3. 'A' and 'B' collaborate and invest their 100,000 INR in a new business.

4. 'A' goes to a pub and throws a party to his friends. 'B' buys some mutual fund.

Anything is possible.

We have unlimited wants, but limited resources. Based on this and our predilections we make choices of where to apply our available resources and which wants to satisfy. Economics is the study of this, at individual level (micro-economics) and at country/industry level (macro-economics).

prelude...

One day, when I was bored to my bones, a thought clicked in my brain and said that education has ruined my life more than it has made it. I still remember that Alexander the Great invaded India somewhere around 326 BC and died somewhere around 323 BC, ‘x’ is the capital of ‘y’ country, ‘d’ is the head of ‘w’ state, ‘d1’ is the date when ‘t’ was born and ‘e’ died on date ‘d2’. Apparently my brain, overloaded with unnecessary information, is now struggling to find some space in its intricate anatomy where it can process the information it has and make sound judgements. I mean, what do I care if Aurangzeb levied taxes on Hindus on 17th of February 1655, or Mahatma Gandhi died on 30th January 1948? Sadly, the educational system I grew upon was mal-designed to judge a person’s memory and ability of retrieve the information from his/her brain instead of sharpening his/her intellect and strengthening the ability to infer from what s/he knows.

So, I thought I will re-educate myself all over again. I decided that it is imperative for me to know something of everything and everything of one thing. But it is difficult to unlearn certain things, and those things prevent me from learning the right way. Because most of the time I have suffered from not knowing what I really wanted, I dared to choose Economics and Computer Science to be the ‘one thing’ and ‘everything’ remains everything like political science, sociology, driving, swimming, psychology, combat, management, finance etc… Strangely, everything interests me now, when there are no exams which judge me against some stupid definitions and dates.

Till now, I have been putting all the noise of my brain here. That's moslty unstructured and random, as the life is happening to me. That randomness will continue along, and now I am attempting to structure my way through life as I learn and evolve.