17 Jun 2010
I stumbled upon this post a couple of days back, and it somehow resonated within me. It made me remember my school days in Singapore when I first started playing Cricket formally, i.e. using proper bat, ball and other equipment. Boy, did I suck. I was surrounded by other NRIs, who somehow seemed far more gifted than I was – at all forms of the game. But, I knew I really loved cricket. I was in Singapore then, and cricket matches were seldom shown on the TV. Even then, I used to read the ball-by-ball text commentary of almost all matches India played on Cricinfo religiously. I was determined to get better at the game, and eventually I did. By the end of my junior college life, I was a somewhat average batsman and an occasional spinner. Not bad for someone who started off being afraid to even face the cricket ball, and whose balls landed above the cricket nets when he attempted to bowl. I never became flamboyant or awe-inspiring, but by understanding my strengths and working on my limitations, I was able to become fairly okay at the game.
Years later, I now believe that such a pattern is true for almost any field. There are some who are actually naturally good at certain things, and then there are those who appear to be naturally talented. For the casual observer, this difference will all but go unnoticed. Yet, given a choice between talent and hard work, somehow I prefer hard work. It’s perhaps because I have seen a lot of people waste their talent, as they became carried away with what they could do, while, those who reached such a stature by hard work understood the process and what it takes to succeed at the highest level.
In the book “Outliers” by Malcom Gladwell, he mentions something similar – the 10,000 hour rule: claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practising a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours. Now, if you practised what you want 2 hours every day, that’s going to take you just about 14 years to become an expert at it. This is why it’s so important that you don’t let anyone tell you how bad you are at something. The only thing that matters is how much you love doing it, and how badly you want to make it up there. Talent can be substituted for hard work in lots of cases – especially if the process of ageing is not a factor for what you are trying to achieve.
26 Jan 2010
I am a proud Indian. Yet, sometimes when I look at the kind of innovation and creativity that’s happening in the US and the Europe (and lately, in China), I can’t help but wonder why India is lacking imagination – atleast in the technology field. Apart from getting frustrated, it makes me question our motivation, and whether we are just all too happy to be contended with what we have. Yes, we are one of the largest exporters of students to the USA, and our IT professionals are working for clients all over the world. But – the question I always ask is how innovative are we with regards to bringing breakthrough, cutting edge technology out to the masses? Now, I really have no idea how innovative our pioneering IT firms are within the corporate/enterprise world, but as far as the web or technology that directly affects the masses are concerned, we lag way behind the west – especially the USA.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – Arthur C Clarke once said. I’m not asking for magic, we need more mavericks – those who confront our apathy, and inspire imagination. We need more start ups – not yet another software consultancy firm – but start-ups which build actual products that change the way people work. They need not be altruistic in nature (of course that would be splendid) – just show me a different perspective. Show me what could be done better.
Many people would say that research is what will drive innovation. But, I can tell you that that’s not true. Research and lack of funding for it has become an all too easy excuse for those who are happy to live in the world they have been given. I am not trashing the importance of research – but many great ideas that have been driving the technology outside India are technology we already possess. It’s not a failure in research – it’s just a failure in applying what we already know imaginatively.
30 Oct 2009
I am really excited about my latest project with my friend, Jason – Pixza. It’s a browser-based multiplayer really realtime social game. Check our blog. You can also follow us on twitter.
I really have no idea when the launch will be, but it’s something quite different as a social game, so looking forward to having a go at it!
15 Apr 2009
My practical exams are on full swing, and the process by which we are allotted our fateful experiment really needs a mention here!
In a batch of some twenty students taking the exam, there would be around 20-22 question papers, lying face down and spread out on a table near the entrance of the lab. We queue up by our register number and wait patiently for our turn. Each person, when his turn arrives walks forward, looks at the pile of question sets, and chooses ONE.
The cruel thing about this process is that, in case the question happens to be the only question you had not studied for (one law states that the probability of getting a question is indirectly proportional to the amount of confidence you have with the answer for that question), you would end up feeling really mad at yourself for picking that paper!
This has led to numerous superstitions amongst the students, when it comes to picking a paper. A friend of mine once said he will always pick the right most paper. Another person said he would pick the one in the middle. Some try to keep a blank mind and pray that their fingers randomly touch a paper with an easy question. And, the last person in the batch almost always curses his fate for being the last guy in the queue, because he is left with only a few papers to choose from. Or, on an unlucky day, only one paper to pick up.
But, I ask myself, does it really matter which paper I choose? Deep down I know it doesn’t. My logical reasoning tells me that there cannot be any correlation between picking a paper from a particular position and the difficulty of the question. Yet, some things are just outside the control of your logical mind. You would rather be superstitious than “break” the habit and end up with a killer question. Especially when you are already depending on the stars to wade through an exam!
15 Mar 2009
It has become some kind of standard practice to have the phrase “Copyright [insert_current_year_here]” at the bottom of our blogs and websites, regardless of what it actually means to us or our users. Rippers and thieves know very well what copyright infringement is, so copyright statements are neither a warning or a deterrent in most cases.
Forgetting all that for a moment, what is still surprising is to see so many sites (including some well-known ones), having an outdated date on their site footers. You can see this especially around the turn of the new year. I have seen this in a few WP templates as well.
Ok, just a gentle reminder. Don’t embed the copyright year using plain html text. Use your server side scripting language (read as PHP or Ruby these days) to generate them.
In PHP, you can do it as simply as:
echo "Copyright " . date('Y');
Simple, but effective. Now, that’s one way to keep your old, unmaintained websites up-to-date!