Shorts
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10 Myths About Introverts~
It’s a list. It’s about me. It’s about telling the world how to deal with me. How could I not link to this?
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Stammering
I’ve had a stammering problem for as long as I can remember. It’s a very selective stammer—surfacing only when I try to say certain words, and that too only in certain circumstances—but it’s enough to play on my mind whenever I talk to groups of people1.
Usually one wouldn’t be comfortable writing about such a thing unless it was glaringly obvious, at which point it wouldn’t matter. But writing about things like this goes with the territory—I write what I think about, and this is one of the things I think about.
I’ve lived with this for close to 14 years, and I’ve tried to figure out what sets it off the hardest as a part of self-therapy in controlling and reducing it. The usual suspects are always there—anxiety, emotional state, et al.—but there are some specific triggers that seem to stay constant regardless of the situation.
Through various experiments, I’ve concluded that words starting with the sounds 'bə, 'pə and 'tə are the hardest for me say unless I’m already in a flow, i.e. not starting to talk again after a pause. So if I’m supposed to start a new sentence with a word like, e.g. bubble, I would get stuck unless I compose myself and try to say it with a little concentration. Of course, depending on the situation, words like “because” or “private” can be equally hard to say.
This might come as a surprise to many people who have spoken to me or heard me talk in person over the years—I would think even my parents to a degree. It’s like one of those things you probably won’t notice unless you are looking for it. I guess people who read this and know me in real life will have it at the back of their mind whenever they meet me from now on.
Though I must say that my condition is a lot better than a lot of other people who are suffering—in every sense of the word—from stammering. Mine is barely noticeable owing to the fact that I speak so less (whether speaking less is a cause or result of my stammering, I will leave it to you to speculate), and partly because I’ve worked on it for the past four to five years, trying to reduce its severity. It used to be so bad that I wouldn’t be able to say even my name properly (which I can’t, sometimes, even now).
My mother tells me that my tendency to talk has grown inversely with age. I.e. I used to talk a lot as a child, and now I barely do. It’s funny though; I don’t remember stammering as a child, but I do now. One of the great ironies of life. It’s funny enough to make me smile—sometimes.
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To be honest, it’s groups that make me uncomfortable, not individual people. Nothing gets a crowd going like realising that they’re a crowd. Talking to one person is a lot more intimate and I find it much easier to talk to a single person or very small groups of people; small enough that I can look them in the eye when I say something. ↩
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Cranking~
Weeks and months from now when I’m scrolling through my posts like I habitually do, and I see this, I will stop to read it after reading this little introduction. And after reading it, if I have forgotten or have been slacking, I will be reminded of the things that are truly important. Otherwise I will be reassured that my priorities are in place.
If there is one thing you read today, it should be this.
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Inspiration comes from experiences. Anybody who tries to say otherwise is pretentious or giving himself more credit than he is worth. “Experiences” is a big word though, so it shouldn’t be taken lightly. It encompasses everything that you observe using the five sense organs everyday, plus how your mind puts them together to remind you of something from the past, or envision something in the future. Or it might skip both of them and create a hypothetical “this could’ve happened” scenario. Any one of those things can inspire you to do something, whether it be good or bad.
The trick is to have as many experiences as you can.
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“You get better at what you do”
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Cutting That Cord, John Gruber.
Rather obvious, but something we tend to forget when the going gets tough.
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(Source: curvedwhite)
- “When people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.”
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What I Learnt From Soap
As a user, it is your job to understand how something works if your goal is to use it. Today, we harp on about simplicity, simple interfaces, usability and such. Everything that says “You don’t need to spend time understanding how to do something; you just do”. Unfortunately, “just do”-ing doesn’t result in efficiency. What’s natural doesn’t usually mean efficient. Walking to the local grocery store is natural, but cycling or driving is efficient.
If you spend five minutes actually understanding how your tool works, you will end up using it a lot more efficiently which will pay for those five minutes over and over again. And this isn’t about big things either. Take small, everyday things. Like soap. How many people know how soap really works? As a child, I was taught to rub the soap in my hands and then use the foam on myself. It was a lot later that I realised that that way was a lot less efficient because it didn’t really clean anything. The reasoning behind using it like that was obvious though: you use a lot less soap, which makes it cost-effective because it lasts longer. We weren’t the richest of people back then, but more importantly, this is probably how my parents were taught to use soap by their parents, who were taught by their parents, and so on. The chain of knowledge establishes itself, and you can see how people never take the effort to understand if how they do something is really the best way to do it .
Take a look around you. Take one thing everyday, and find out whatever you can about it. With the Internet, that doesn’t take long in ‘11. If you don’t learn anything new, you can rest happy that you’re using it the best way it can be. If you do learn something new, well, you’ve just improved your life by that much.
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State of Computer Science in India
This is mostly a reply to Shyam and Apoorv interspersed with some commentary about what I think the general state of computer science and programmers in the country is. I must admit that I was never really a part of the system while I was in India, but I do know some people who were and my opinions are based off what I heard from them, as well as conversations with my father about the topic. Then again, what opinion is not biased?
I read a couple of blog posts about the state of computer science and startups’ mentality regarding programmers in India. Nothing new in their conclusions; we all know what the problem is but do little to change things. Fortunately or unfortunately education is one of those sectors that are the most resistant to change. Fortunately, because a good education system benefits greatly where a bunch of retarded politicians cannot come in with a few policies and screw things up. Unfortunately, because a bad education sector is hard (if not impossible) to fix. I believe India falls under the latter.
Placing the blame squarely on the education sector will be unfair, for it is merely the supply to the demands of the industrial sector. I’m not a part of the industrial sector, so take whatever I say about it with a grain of salt, but the fundamental flaw lies in the people’s motivations. The people of India are driven by money, not excellence. We don’t do things for the sake of doing them. We do things because we’re getting something out of it—that something usually being money. Yes, there are exceptions to this. With a population as large as ours, of course a statement like that won’t apply to everyone. But a large part of the population is driven by money.
The reason that is wrong is because we essentially become a state of implementors, not designers. Think about that for a moment. I’ll come back to this a little later.
Indian Startups Don’t Need to Learn How to Program
They need to know what they want to accomplish with their product. This is the fundamental and most important thing.
Programming isn’t something that you can learn by reading through an O’Reilly book. Programming, like any other discipline, takes time and effort to learn. By telling startups to learn how to program, you’re effectively limiting the quality of their product. You cannot claim that the quality is important and then ask people to learn how to program before making it in the same passage. Will you tell them to go learn how to design as well? Is a few month’s learning a good substitute for years of experience?
See: Why Indian Startups Need To Get Off Their Asses and Learn to Program
Once you’ve realised what it is that you really want your product to be, start finding people who will do it for you. This can be one person (a consultant) or a team. Outsourcing is not a bad thing if the people you’re outsourcing to are good. The post by Abhinash reads more like a egotistical rant that can be summarised down to “I’m not here to implement your ideas, and my experience cannot be bought.” It’s a conflict designers face all the time, it’s why we hate working with some clients. But design studios still exist. The idea is to state and establish that you’re the expert, not them. Experience can be bought, but the problem in a country like India is that we don’t understand the value of that experience. Our main criteria is the cost of things, not the quality. And keeping those two in mind, we don’t pay our programmers and designers what they deserve1.
In that sense, yes, learning to program would be better—not for the startup—but the programmers the startup is hiring, since they’ll get paid what they deserve as the startup will understand the complexity of the undertaking. But that isn’t what Abinash’s point was.
What My Contribution to Fix the Situation Has Been
Very little. That’s because the problem has very little to do with the education sector itself, as I pointed out earlier. I did try and get some people involved in extra-curricular hacking, but that didn’t turn out so well because, and continuing the point I left dangling above, their motivations for joining a computer science course were misplaced. I don’t try and preach to people beyond a certain point (that point being very close to the starting line) and I decided to make the most of the time I had to learn and achieve something by myself rather than continue barking up the wrong tree.
Related: What’s Wrong With CS In India
Outside India, students join universities and courses with “job opportunity” as a very low priority. People stay on to become lecturers purely because for the love of the field and teaching (because let’s face it, the pay isn’t that great). Plus the way universities work in India is completely different from how they work outside. Research, publishing papers, all that stuff. That leads to an overall better student-lecturer relationship as well as a bump in the quality of the material students are taught.
Changing the system in India will take a lot more than trying to change the education sector. And I personally rather do something which has a higher chance of giving back than waste my life trying to fix something that may never be fixed. As we look towards the west at countries like the U.S. and try to emulate them, combined with new startups being started by people returning from abroad with a more progressive outlook and western companies showing a growing interest in India, I hope that the system will fix itself over time. But I personally am not going to concern myself with it.
People need to understand that money isn’t everything. That’s where our problems start, and that is where they will end.
Related Reading
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For Want of Knowledge
Knowledge is this wonderful thing. It is infinite, in the practical sense of the word. There’s enough knowledge in this world if one seeks it. Knowledge isn’t right or wrong. It’s one of the few things that’s available in such copious amounts and yet isn’t bad for you regardless of how much you consume.
Everybody in this world wants to share their knowledge. People write books, blogs, newspaper articles. If they can’t write, they talk at conferences or public gatherings—there’s always someone willing to share their knowledge.
The only reason a person might not know something is because they actively chose to not know it. Ignorance is voluntary and intentional. That’s why we always look at a person with suspicion when they say they “I didn’t know”. It’s because we just expect people to know … because knowledge is so prevalent.
We as a species have lost our “want” for knowledge. We know what we need to know, and we’re happy with that. We wait for knowledge to come to us, rather than go out and find it. How many times have you said “Nobody told me”? Was the reply “You never asked”?
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Hey Dude, Where's Our Future?~
We also have an “us” vs “them” situation again, just this time it’s mostly based on religion. And whenever there is the promise of paradise, life down here seems to turn into hell. I’d rather have the cold war back, because in retrospect people who fight over ideology seem a lot less likely to blow the whole place to smithereens than the ones who fight over religion.
If there is only one thing that you read today, it should be this.
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I agree with Shyam.
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I Eat Alone
Eating is one of my highlights of the day. I love to sit down to eat a beautiful, plentiful and satisfying meal at the end of a day. And I do it alone.
I’ve long maintained that every day that we are alive and a part of society, we spend it compromising in everything we do because that’s the only way to keep your sanity and get things done. Which is why when I do something that is a hundred-percent mine, I don’t like anything less than getting a hundred-percent out of it. Eating a meal is one such thing. It’s an activity that is all about me; my food, my senses, my satisfaction, my time. I don’t want to be hurried or disturbed. I don’t want to hear about your day or what you felt about it. I want to be left alone with my plate of food. I spend that time looking at other people (if I’m at a restaurant. Yes, I go to restaurants alone.) and how they’re behaving with others around them. Or I spend it thinking about an idea that might have caught my fancy that day, or just thinking about life in general. The point is, I can do anything I want with that time I get to myself. And I like having that choice.
Of course, being at a University means I usually hurry through my meals because I have something important to do afterwards. But given the opportunity to have a good dinner, I usually eat it alone. Given a choice, that’s how I like it.
