Amazing Words

And I quite literally mean "amazing words". A couple of weeks back I was in Kuala Lumpur for official training. We had some 80 - 90 analysts over in KL from all over the SEAAK region and I hit it off with the Japanese crowd quite well. Anyway, it's there that I heard of this Japanese word: Itadakimasu. In general, it's translated as "Let's eat", something the Japanese (I'm sure not all of them) say before they have food. The deeper translation seems to be: I will humbly receive [this food]. In this sense, it's a kind of a thank you to the entire operational supply chain that led to the food right in front of you. e.g. if you're having rice and you say itadakimasu, you're literally thanking the rice farmers who cultivated the rice paddies, the guys who processed rice from those paddies, the guys who packaged the rice, the workers who managed the rice until it arrived at your home/restaurant and finally the chef who prepared it for you. Isn't that just amazing!

I was reminded of this when I was reading about Adrian Tan's Commencement address at NTU. He used the Japanese word "Karoshi" which literally means "death from overwork". The amazing ability of languages to capture these facets of human life never ceases to amaze me. Someday, I'll talk about similar Urdu and English words for comparison.

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Life and How to Survive It

There was the Steve Jobs Commencement address at Stanford in 2005. Here's our very own Adrian Tan with his own ideas on life:

I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.
My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.
On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable.
Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.
And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.
Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you.
The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You’re done learning.
You’ve probably been told the big lie that “Learning is a lifelong process” and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.
The good news is that they’re wrong.
The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy.
I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.
You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.
Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.
So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.
Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy.
I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.
After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average.
Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.
That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.
If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.
What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.
Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.
What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over.
Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.
The most important is this: do not work.
Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.
Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.
There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.
People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan "Arbeit macht frei" was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.
Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.
Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.
I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction – probably a sports journalist.
So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.
Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working.
Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.
In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.
I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated.
It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.
One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.
The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.
I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.
Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable.
Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.
Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.
You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.
You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.
Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.
Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.
You’re going to have a busy life. Thank goodness there’s no life expectancy.

Amazing to see someone coming out with this perspective in Singapore. Kudos to him for trying to open our eyes to what's life pretty much about. I just wonder how many people at the commencement really thought about what he said rather than discuss the remuneration packages available with different jobs right out of university.

(via Mr Wang Says So)

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Why market share is not always important

It's a pretty obvious point but worth repeating. We question why companies fight for market share in increasingly competitive markets, where revenue streams are not guaranteed (or cases where their products might never be monetized effectively) and the competition is fairly entrenched in the business. Case in point: Google's Knol. You have to ask, didn't they know how well Wikipedia's doing and how it's the Google Search of online encyclopedias? Consider that given Google's investment, even if Knol displaces Wikipedia as the dominant player in the market, it's not THE business you'd expect Google to chase after. Then why come up with such products? The answer's really simple: provide your existing customers with more and more reasons to stick around with your business. They might not want to be number one but they definitely want to address your needs as their customer with their own services rather than to see you go elsewhere. Going elsewhere for one service could have grave implications as well e.g. using a competitor's product to satisfy one need will make it easier for us to consider switching to other products offered by them. The other aspect is bringing in new customers e.g. Knol users (who are not users of other Google products) will find out more about Search (are there really people who don't know of Google Search :)), Gmail etc. 

While I was working on the new template for this blog I noticed how I'd made the various product choices leading upto using several Google products. I started with Google Search and quickly switched to Gmail when it came out. Both products were eons ahead of their competition at the time (and well they still pretty much are). When I caught the blogging bug, I searched around for the different options and settled on Blogger since I already had a Google Account (through Gmail). Google Analytics and Adsense quickly followed. The primary reason for picking up these products (despite their quality) was the simple fact that as an existing customer if my product vendor already provided me with an option, I'd evaluate it first and probably even gravitate more towards it. Hence, I hedge my bets with the company at a much deeper level. Earlier, to make a switch away from Google, I only had to type in a different url in the browser, now I have to consider migrating all my data stored on their servers (emails, blog entries, Analytics data etc).

The other aspect is that any company that expects you to consider their additional products first, should also have the best policies and practices in place to ensure the safety of its customers data and to provide a clear path to them should they decide to switch away from the company's services. How well do you think Google's doing on both counts?  

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On excessiveness

I've had some seriously bad flu for the past one week and in between trips to the toilet, I've often lashed out at those automatic water taps that are installed in pretty much all modern office buildings. They don't work perfectly and it's as if the designers imagined something that'll work 80% of the times and for the other 20%, users could just do all kinds of acrobatics around the tap to make it work. I'm a huge fan of the technology but the experience has to be better than or atleast the same as the manual option.

Anyway, this got me thinking of some fun little advice I got before I came down to Singapore. One of my relatives had stayed on-campus in NUS before. The week before coming to Singapore, I went to speak with her about the dos and don'ts of Singapore in general and NUS in particular. Apparently, the most annoying thing for her in Singapore was the water tap (mosquitoes was number 2). Not the automatic ones but the push-button manual types that shut off after being open for about 5 seconds. She suggested I take a bucket with me and fill it up to use it whenever I had to!

It was annoying at the start to use those taps but you know humans adapt to all situations. But consider the other side of the equation. Using regular open-once-for-as-much-water-as-you-want taps back home in Karachi this year reminded me of the excessiveness inherent in different cultures (or countries if you may). Can you imagine how much water we waste? For brushing my teeth, I'd have the tap open for 5 minutes before I came to Singapore, now I'd wager that I manage the same in about a glass of water. So, based on my experiences, let's consider some of the instances of excessiveness that I've noticed in different places:

1. Gas in Pakistan: There's little doubt that Pakistan has huge reserves of gas. Unsurprisingly gas is cheap and now we find an increasing number of CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) cars on the road (remember, oil's still a lot more expensive). Once in India, I accidentally left the stove on for long after I'd finished making tea. Suffice it to say I was sufficiently chided for that since the common practice there (or atleast what I'm aware of) is of gas delivery via cylinders in the kitchen. At home in Karachi we have a direct line. Thinking back at this, I realize that knowing there's plenty of cheap gas available in Pakistan definitely has a huge impact on its usage/watage.
2. Food in Pakistan: Man the servings are big. And the ratio of meat to vegetables in the servings is just preposterous (guess which way it tilts). Pizza Express was shut down in Karachi in the late 90s. I suspect it was because their pure-style less-meat smaller-serving pizzas just couldn't cut it in the meat-loving market of the city. It was because of the wastage of food and the huge costs incurred in marriage ceremonies that the serving of dinner at weddings was banned during the late 90s.
3. Air conditioning in Singapore: This I just don't get at all. In a temparate climate, it's acceptable for us to ramp up the aircon just so that we can sit around wearing jackets! Back in NUS, LT7A (main engineering lecture theater) was notorious for its almost subzero temperature. I think the reasoning is that it's better for people to wear warm clothes in a freezing atmosphere than to run the risk of them sweating if the temperature is just about normal.
4. Fast food in Singapore: Burger King, KFC et al everywhere you look. I won't even talk of the one that's been featured in its own movie! It's either having food at proper restaurants, food courts for cheap good food or fast food. There are just too many of these places around and even on the best of days convenience trumps everything else for me and I break down to have a quick packaged meal. One or twice a month is ok but when you live here and you don't cook food (that's an entirely separate story) you want to have a lot more of the good options (small restaurants and food courts) than the bad ones. I don't know, I might be going out on a limb here for some but I do think that there are far too many fast food places here than should be around for a healthy nation. Ironically, obesity doesn't seem like a big problem here as it is in the U.S.

There're some huge caveats to this post. Remember, when I talk about my experiences in these places there's a hefty dose of generalizations and the possibility that I could've noted things in error is there (that's what the comments are for below). Also. when I talk about Pakistan in these general terms, I probably speak about the 1% of the population there that has a high standard of living. Excesses in food servings or gas that I speak of are relevant only to this select part of the society and they'd do better to note these for the sake of the other 99%.

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New Blog Template

Ya, so you notice I'm calling it a template. Time's really not on my side. I tried to hack together with the layouts in blogger but I couldn't customize this template to the new blogger layouts. So, I switched back to the old templates. This will stick around as default until I have enough time to make my own blogger "layout". What do you guys think? A lot of the things are still not working and unless it's critical to blog publishing, I won't be getting around to fixing it in time.

Let me know if you have any ideas on what might be more useful. I just wanted a decent enough template so I could get around to publishing more frequently. I've got a lot of things on my mind to talk about so keep an eye out on the blog in the next couple of weeks!

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Japanese prank

Awesome video:

Beware of what you say in Japanese :)

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Poetic code comments

In one of my previous projects someone pointed out certain code comments to me. Here's a choice excerpt:

/*
* Sweet are the uses of VS 2003 [1],
* Which, like the assembly code, ugly and venomous,
* Wears yet a precious script in his folder;
* And this our life, exempt from public access,
* Finds strings in hash trees, bugs in the running servers,
* Services in asmx senders, and good in everything
* - As You Like It, Act II, Scene 1
*
* [1] - I know this isn't VS 2003, and is VS 2005, but VS 2003 rhymes with adversity.
*/

Funny thing is, I know the author and there are other hilarious comments from him. Good to know that the maintenance team will actually look forward to digging through the codebase. His compiled work should definitely be posted to The Daily WTF.

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Reading on a dream

The type is becoming fairly common now but this is the first one that I ever saw:

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I love Farang

Good to know! I hope that applies to all foreigners and not exclusively the ones implied by the traditional definition of Farang.

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