Lovers are, Love isn’t

Different, that is.

Each person is unique in the world. Each has a life story to tell which, in hands of good writer, has potential to engage other humans emotionally. It is too bad that world doesn’t have enough storytellers to tell about experiences, feelings, fears and ambitions of every person on earth*. My belief is that however intellectual we may be, we, as humans, love to read about personal lives of others. Personal life in sense of personal triumphs and misfortunes, escapades and coincidences, and not just dirty laundry of others.

Two individuals in love are, however compatible, very distinct entities. Each love affair in the world has a unique story, driven by uniqueness of both of their characters and circumstances. Starting from the “how did they meet” to “till death do them apart”, each couple has potential to tell a mesmerizing tale. Yet, love that binds them is not all that different. Feelings of love are uncannily similar across the world. Actions based on those feelings may differ based on individual persona and means but desires and wants are surprisingly universal. Why else would otherwise every romantic poem seems to appear to a forlorn lover written exclusive for him? Hindi music, with it predominantly romantic musicals, has ample melodies to suit every occasion of lovers’ relationship, and it appeals to them at very personal level. It would be natural to expect something unique between them but they will probably find that hormones which run (or ruin?) their lives aren’t all that much different from other people.

We all are puppets of our genetics.

*Though, one can question that who will read trillions of books?

Of blogs and bloggers

What more do I say? I’ve run out of things to say. So here is a nice dump!

Accounting disposition

A set of roommates often find need for a system to keep accounts of their common expenses*. That much is no news. What, however, I’ve found interesting in my journey across different sets is that manners of doing that, and how much it relates to their mental disposition.

At MIT, a hard core technocrat institution, me and my roommates had developed a cross-platform programming language based tool residing on intranet which would read input from text files or command line and produce outputs on text file or screen. Any of us could use that independently.

At, Los Angeles, where my roommates were of eclectic background, a simple Excel based model would serve the purpose. On the other hand, my brother tells me that they — bunch of software and hardware engineers — use an web-based utility which supports multiple login to same account to collaborate their expenses online.

In my dormitory at IIM, partially because of recently undergone course of Excel and VBA, I introduced an Excel based binary matrix system, which would let one person collate and distribute expenses in transparent manner.

My current roommates, most from IIMs, most from engineering background, however, use a simple pen on paper system to keep account, largely driven by one economist’s resistance to move to more automated and transparent versions such as Google Docs.

It is surprising that, while in India student hardly ever choose their career because of real disposition to any particular field, their temperament is irreversibly altered after having gone through years of study in their field.

*For those unfamiliar with this: input of system is collection of expenses distributable across roommates and output is netted required transfer amount. For example, if A paid Rs.10 for supplies of common use between A and B but not C, then system should tell net transfer of Rs.5 from B to A.