Next Technological Wave - Is it going to be distributed computing?

The late eighties and early nineties were the revolution of Internet which paved way for so many people to communicate with each other. Internet greatly reduced the cost of communication and today there are so many ways of getting in touch with closed ones. Needless to say, Internet has build a platform on which many network application can be deployed - may it be related to business, education, social networking. Now the networks have become more intelligent and sophisticated. They are not mere networks but they are platforms to host services and solutions.

The later part of nineties led to developments of network security, voice and video. Now, the entire network space is innovated enough as far as technology is concerned. Now, from here they is going to be a lot of innovation in using network as platform, network as solutions. For example, Telepresence is not only elegance of network but also innovative solution. It has the capability to bring people closer to each other. Another example is using networking as platform, Web 2.0 have evolved. Because of Web 2.0, there are so many business opportunities like online advertising and affiliate programs today. Truly, we see a lot innovation in providing a solution where networks plays a very critical role.

Few years back, Virtualization as a technology existed but for people who are crazy about technology. Virtualization was not offered as solution of business people. A gradual shift happened due to green technology, cost optimization and advancement in virtualization industry. Slowly, by the end of 2014/2015, Virtualization technology might get saturated.

From my point of view, the next wave and possibly a much bigger way will be seen in distributed, grid computing. When network become a platform and if the cost on infrastructure and services are reduced, there will be more systems connected to Internet. If the more and more systems are connected and roughly 50% of the resources will be idle at any given time. If there are one billion computer users, there will 0.5 billion users idling their resources. But the idle time of systems can be monetized by lending to Micro Computing providers who sell CPU cycles to people who are in need of CPU cycles. Mirco computing providers will be the agents who buy CPU cycles from idle computer users and sell it enterprises. Thought is it a wild imagination, it won't take much time to make it a reality. It is right time to think about a business model around "Grid Computing" as there are lot of opportunities lying there.

So, the next generation technology will Mobile Technology, Distributed/Grid Computing but still Network Technologies will be there. No technology gains momentum until one put up a business plan around the technology and market it. The key to any technology is right business model and right marketing.

Mini Project #2 - Object Visualization

Mini-Project #2
Java Virtual Machine takes care of garbage collection. An implementation of garbage collector needs to have so many algorithms to reclaim the memory of unreferenced object. An important condition for garbage collection is reachability of objects and the objects have to be live. The objects that are reachable from root objects are said to be live and hence not eligible for garbage collection. The objects that are not reachable from root objects are said to be dead and thus can be garbage collected.

The idea is to implement a object visualization tool for JVM which gives a map of live objects, dead objects and various areas of JVM. One more requirement is to have a strong design that helps to build features at later point of time. If you already know Java, you can implement this tool in six months (and with two hours of work everyday) and if you need to learn Java, may be you need 7 months. But be ready for a strong learning curve. This project can be done group of 2-3 people.

If you are interested to do this mini-project, you can get the full details through email.

Launching Mini-Projects with Project Specification

Mini Project #1

The latest and past few versions of Java supports "Hot swap". The host swap is nothing but a term usually refers to changing the components of the system without stopping system. Java Virtual Machine also allows to hot swap the loaded classes and the developers can modify the class and request of reload. This is particularly useful for developers when they are working on code. In order to implement this simple tool, we need to use Java Debug Interface.

Now, this requirement is for writing a simple tool using which one can connect to JVM running in a remote machine and load classes from the local machine. If you want to know more details, please do email. (This is an academic project and person who is new to Java can implement this within 3-4 months timeframe. Also, this gives an excellent exposure to many aspects of JVM which will make your understanding of JVM better).

Is mediocre thinking sufficient in turbulent times?

This article is written by me, to me and for me. You find it useful, I am speechless. Your comments are welcome.

Recently, I happen to come across the website of Jim Collins and read his biography. I was very much impressed by the words "student and teacher". I found this striking similarity with all highly accomplished gurus. They always say "they are student" and their thoughts did not come from surface level. The thought of being a student is deep rooted into their subconscious, blood and cell. Once you want to be a determined and faithful student then nature (includes time) will give you strength to face the challenges and ultimately overcome the challenges like a cheetah. Every tough time has two sides. One side is real tough side and another side is opportunity. We get fear by seeing the single side of the coin and fail to appreciate the opportunity. Often, we tend to forget that the "tough side" is the gatekeeper. But this gatekeeper is honest, friendly, impartial and helpful. But for us, he seems to be a ugly, tough (really tough) and bad guy. He is there to give chances to deserving candidates who are patient, die hard fans of hard work, persistent and great attitude. But because of our very nature of neglecting the doors of opportunity, we tend to get away from the "tough side" as quickly as possible.

In fact I m not the first person to say this and I have read few books and all the great authors are expressing the same. So many of us are afraid of pain. If you ask an athlete he will tell you how good the pain is. The pain due to hard work has to be celebrated. The pain due to experience has to be rejoiced. The pain due to extra mile has to appreciated. Because, you are working, you are living and you are trying to leave a legacy when you depart from here. And leaving a legacy is a great thing and this world will celebrate thanking you.

Didn't Gandhi have tough time? Didn't Nelson Mandela have tough time? Didn't Martin Luther King have tough time? Every human being is engineered for success but success through failures. The man is not only-success machine and he is quite different from real machine, much more capable. The difference between an ordinary guy and great guy is fighting. Not giving an inch, not fearing about the failures, not worrying about the little pain. We are in tough time and may be toughest in our lifetime. I have few questions and probably some answers why I enjoy this tough time. These are only my point of view and as you know, the perspective vary. Having said that, I am ready change the stance if it sounds logical and reasonable. So your comments are valuable and welcome.

Why should I leave a legacy?
There is an interesting study where leadership gurus and management folks are learning insects those born, mature, spawn and die in single day. These insects were able to "do and die" in just one day. These insects are now leaving a legacy and we human beings are learning from them the management concepts. So we when leave, we should leave a legacy at least for our close ones. Leaving legacy is all about living fully and enjoying every bit of your life. By enjoying, I do not mean "Western type" enjoy. I am talking about spiritual joy of complete surrender and learn from the time with lot of faith. Then automatically, because of our innate nature we will get into cycles of living fully.

How can I make myself strong in human qualities, technically related to my work and leadership qualities?
The tough times, is a great master and he is a dictator. He never likes the word "No", and "Impossible". When you completely surrender and follow it faithfully, the great master will teach you human qualities, technical competency and leadership skills without any tuition fees. He will be your guru but a tough guru. He teaches giving you lot of pain. Over a period of time, the pain manifests itself as stamina and mingles with you and becomes your nature. So, it is complete surrender and faith gives us everything needed for the rest of your life (and also pays for your future generation). But he will not send you paycheck of million dollars ;-)

How can find a strategy to come out successfully?
The strategy is simple yet powerful. Complete surrender with faith.

What is in store for us?
This is one of the silly (probably most silly) questions. When you surrender, the expectations vanishes. When you expect, it becomes your goal not passion, it becomes part of your life not way of your life. This is something like seeing God in you rather than going to temple to visit God. Just rethink twice and convince yourself. But, my guru tells me out of his experience that the outcome cannot be quantified. He just used the word "abundance".

How can I increase my mileage?
BTW, you are not a machine like Honda City. But, you have to remember that you are going to work hard and try so many things. If you be obedient student, the nature will be loyal master and Mother Nature will teach you everything. Peace is assured. If you are looking for an improvement in your mileage, then be assured, you will have tremendous mileage.

Students Corner - Projects for You

My thought on improving knowledge is to learn and share. By learning one gets theoretical and practical knowledge. This is the first level of knowledge. But this knowledge might not give enough insights and deeper understanding of the subject. Only when we share and discuss with like minded people, my brain stretches itself for a deeper understanding. This is one of the reasons why I share write articles and speak at conferences. In that way, I am purely selfish.

I m so much excited to talk with students, work with them and help them to build their career. In this section, I am planning to roll out few mini-projects. These mini-projects are nothing big. They are pretty much easier to do and these projects will help you to understand a specific area such as Computer Networks, Operating Systems, Network Security, Java, Algorithms and etc. Since the tools/projects are simple, it can easily be done forming a small group with your friends (and of course I shall help you through email). Remember simple things leads to extraordinary things.

If you are interested in taking of any of the projects, please do write to me (My Email).

Virtualization - Cost effective and Environment friendly

In the last few years, the hardware industry and its technological advancements are on par with software technologies. To be precise and honest, the hardware industry in fact outperformed the software industry by introducing so many features. In the past, particularly the processor manufacturers were focussed on increasing the clock frequency of the processors. The clock frequency saturation forced the processor designer to focus on other aspects to increase the processing power. The processor vendors used variety of other techniques such as hyper-threading to improve upon the processing power.

The recent day computers/hardware devices have more processing power and the hard truth is that less than 50% percent of the hardware resources are used on an average basis. In a normal day, the hardware irrespective of whether it is a desktop system, servers or servers in data center, all the resources are under utilized.

The pace of hardware advancement also forces organizations to spend considerable money on upgradation. But the worst part in upgrading is it that it soon becomes outdated within few months after the upgrade. The organizations spend hefty sum on upgrades. Particularly, the hardware upgradation may not be considered as investment but as running cost to maintain the existing services. By and large, there is no ROI for the upgrade. Also, after the upgrade there is greater possibility of throwing the old and outdated hardware. Having a lot of physical resources directly affects the manageability such as security and regularly maintaining the resources.

The next problem and most important one is energy. There has been consistent appeal from the entire humanity of conserving power. Not only that it leads to depletion of energy but also increases the operating cost. The fuel and energy prices are increasing day by day and the organizations are looking out opportunities to reduce cost on energy. The conservation of energy has twin advantages. First it reduces the operating cost and secondly it leads to Green revolution. But the more the hardware, the more it consumes power directly affecting the operating cost. Secondly, because of the large number of physical hardware, a lot of heat is generated and which once again increases the energy demand (spend time and effort to improve infrastructure for quick heat dissipation). The over consumption of energy is recurrent problem. To summarize, there are three main issues - low resource utilization, higher maintenance cost and higher energy consumption.

Considering all the above facts, Virtualization as a technology offers a lot edge. Virtualization is software abstraction layer allowing us to run multiple virtual operating systems in parallel. With virtualization one can run multiple virtual machines simultaneously and thus improving the resource utilization of physical resources. Since these virtual machine run on single physical server, it leads to energy conservation. Also, it reduces the hardware upgradation cost to a larger extent.

Apart from the main advantages, being a software layer, virtualization offers lot of features which increases the productivity. The entire virtual machine is stored as single file leading to easy archival. An important feature that must be mentioned is "Isolation". Each virtual machine is isolated (sandbox) and even the virtual machines running on the same machine need to communication through virtual network. This particular feature boosts the security of the virtual machines.

Virtualization is used in many areas such as storage virtualization, server virtualization, virtualizing application and also in software development lifecycle. Based on the research by Gartner, the virtualization market is expected to grow exponentially and there will be lot of organization showing interest for adopting virtualization.

Hope this article would have given an overview about virtualization. In the upcoming articles, we will discuss more on various virtualization products.

Please do share your feedback/comments.

Design Pattern - Introduction

If you are a software developer, your responsibilities include design, implementation and unit testing the software. Once the software released, the whole bunch of new issues suddenly creeps into your code and then on you will be running after each bug and trying to chase it down to death. In most of the cases, the bug wins and the developers lose. Sometimes, I used to think that there is an egoistic clash between bugs and developers both of them willing to fight till the last breadth. Irrespective of the honest effort, the bugs manifest in multiple forms - usability, functionality, performance, scalability and so many jargons. With current time to market pressures, the software community is pro-actively by changing the software development models - Agile, Iterative, Test Driven Development. These software development models give a framework to tackle the changes in requirements. These days it has become unwritten law to change the requirements, quite often. Even though, we have software development models that offer flexibility, doing the fundamental right will give you a lot more flexibility. Design Pattern is one such tool that helps by providing conceptual solution to common problems and thus decreasing the software development time. 

Design patterns are solutions to common problems. It is not a software tool, framework or library. Design Patterns are simple and effective ideas for common/repeated problems.  Since it is a concept, it can be reused anywhere in software design. The concept of design pattern must have be adopted by software development community taking an inspiration from architecture of buildings or civil engineering. The fundamental concepts and theories of building various types of buildings such as houses, roads, flyovers, auditoriums, cinema halls, communities and etc are same. For example, there are blueprints available to make various types of buildings based on the land terrain, climatic conditions and so many factors. But given a set of requirements, any experienced architect or civil engineer will be able to give you the plan for the building and when followed with fundamental concepts, the building will be made. So, the developers in software community also thought in similar lines and came out with classical ways of solving design problems. Hence, Design Patterns are solutions of common problem.

Like a blueprint, Design Patterns are template for complex problems. Once again going back to the example, the architect or civil engineer will know how to build buildings and what needs to be done. In similar way, Design Patterns are just ideas/concepts. They are not specific to a platform, programming language or an operating system. Design Patterns might have been used atleast millions of times by software developers and the concepts, principles are time tested. Hence most of the Design Patterns states which problem that it is trying to solve and of course the solution. In order to make things clear, apart from the intent and associated text, the design patterns are explained with the help of UML class diagrams.

Design Pattern makes our life easier. Say for example, someone comes to you and asks for "Can you tell the place where people go from one city to another, purchasing tickets. They will also wait on a platform for the vehicle containing a series of boogies pulled by an engine powered by electricity or diesel?" Won't you run from him?. The job would be much easier the person asks for the way to railway station. In software development, without design patterns, the developers need to beat around the bush to express what is there in their mind and Design Patterns makes communication fast, crisp and clear. So, Design Patterns are communication tool.

Having discussed about the design patterns, the rest of the article discusses various types of design patterns. Based on the applicability, the design patterns can be categorized into three main types. They are

1. Creational Patterns which primarily deal with how the objects are created and how to create objects based on a specific situation. The examples of creational patterns are Singleton, Factory, Prototype.

2. Behavioral Patterns identifies common communication patterns between objects and offers flexibility in performing the communication. The examples are State, Strategy, Observer, Chain of Responsibility.

3. Structural Patterns deals with realization of relationships among objects. Decorator, Adapter and Flyweight patterns are examples of structural patterns.

In this blog, we saw the basics of design pattern and its types. In upcoming blogs we shall see about specific design pattern with real world examples, class diagrams and how to apply these concepts into software development.

Summary:
1. Design Patterns are solution to common and repeated problems
2. Design Patterns are not library, API or framework or source code
3. Design Patterns help developers to communicate fast and to the point.
4. Creational, Structural and Behavioral are three types of Design Patterns

Fail Faster, Succeed Sooner - Financial Crisis

The recent stardom of "Financial Crisis" made to see certain things which I never saw. I had to remind myself that I am a technical guy (but my natural interest in into business). In order to quench my thirst, I decided to read articles that are primarily focussed on business. The credits should go numerous business leaders who write passionately on a daily basis and the faults are mine. BTW, I just now started to think about "ABCD" of business and that is my exposure.
In this article, I am not going to analyze why there is financial crisis and who is responsible for that. I do not have the deep understanding on the financial crisis and without that deep understanding my views not worth to be shared. However, I hear people saying US recession is here round the corner. In case, if US go into a deeper recession, certainly it is going to affect the entire world. The concept of "Decoupling", "India growth story" are simply bluffs and often tactics used by Media for their revenues.

Being a software guy, I would like to bring out an analogy of this crisis to a catastrophic defect in the software. One needs to happier to identify the defect. Only if you find a defect, there are chances to fix. Looking at the financial crisis, many of the large banks are gone without traces and probably we can name the streets, localities and cities in memory of those great banks. I said, great banks but not perfect. Perfection is not possible, perfection is not reality. We need to understand it. These banks might not have understood the risk or taken the risk for granted thinking that it won't affect them. Interestingly and painfully, the situation took a "U" turn. It was like a man standing on a railway line when a train was speeding towards him at 400 MPH. Even if you want to move, you will be finished before you complete your thinking.

During 2000/2001, we had a dotcom burst and myself is a victim of that. It was certainly a slowdown but in dotcom. However, the current crisis is financial sector - includes banks who gives loans for individuals, venture capitalist who fund new projects and banks who give loan to start a business. Because of that, there will be no major new investment thus hindering growth. Growth is the elixir but one needs to have it on a continuously. When growth ceases, the businesses ceases. Once this crisis is over, all the entire world will be a equal playing ground for everyone. If you are a big organization and if you have not regarded small players, it is "OK" now. But after the financial crisis, it will not be "OK". This crisis is a crisis. It is one way of looking at it. Another perspective is to see this as tutor who asked you hefty fee. It must be learning of a century or two. If you just have few years of experience it does not really count. After the crisis, you will be having 120 years of experience and your competition which starts today will be having 100 years of experience. No great difference.

This is right time to be cautious and cautious of not stopping investing - may it be your stocks, your assets, your people, their competencies, looking out other businesses to expand your portfolio, talking to your customers to change business models, talking calculated risks, acquiring small and intelligent players who add values with you, bring in discipline in your strategy, acquiring new talent. We need to just do whatever is needed to grow in steady strides and not like a wild bull. The world now has to be faster in accepting the crisis. The CEOs, policy makers, business leaders and academia needs to jump in and say "The financial world is in Intensive Care Unit". We need to make sure that we "fail faster" so that we will succeed sooner.

Unless we stop telling that we are in slowdown and start telling the ground situation, it is going to be greater and longer pain for organizations, companies and people. It is natural law that good times are longer and bad times are shorter. Because of the theory of relativity (man waiting for a lady and man sitting on a frying pan), our perception visualizes this turmoil as recession of the century and it is going to take months to recover. When we had luxury for so many years, we need to be in tougher times too. When you swim against the tide, your stamina will increase. When you are in tougher times and when you commit serious mistakes, you think better, think like think tank.

So, the message from the crisis is quite clear. "Fail Faster and Succeed Sooner". See you at the other side of crisis - Harmony. If you read this blog by October 2009, this is outdated as you are in good and sweet times.

On a personal voyage - To Davos

Somewhere I read, "Keep trying, only way how one can fail is failing to try". This thought had sowed seeds for my learning. So far in my life, I had so many failures than successes. My successes was not always bring me good fortune and they brought me satisfaction. My failures gave me confidence to try things and it is ok to fail. I had so many big dreams since my childhood - playing cricket with my friends, building a cinema theater, running a cow farm business, doing agriculture, reading all Linux kernel books, one day becoming maintainer of Linux kernel, completing all the five CCIEs and what not. Even though I was able to achieve little, my dreams held me to achieve, made me capable of reaching to a place where I stand. So far, I saw myself as a one of the guys and doing little "Extra".

But, when I close my eyes and reflect, I got a feeling that I got complacent and gave a gentle pat on myself for every minute of my hardship. I m one of the guys as one of my friends pointed out "self-pity" guy. I feel that I need to change and my eyes now started to fall on business - learning it, understanding it and creating successful business. My intuition tells me, if I pursue this thought alone, I will end up as one of the great learners. The nature will provide my opportunities to test my learning and I am sure that it will be rewarding.

This particular attraction towards business came to me couple of years back and I was too late to spot that. May be, I should have left it thinking that it was too early. But now, I have a strong urge to understand business, learn business, acquire business leadership skills, creating strategy for my organization. But I m not too much focussed on the time I should be doing it. Because of the lesson learned from an ancient old story. When an intelligent boy asked his master how long would it take for him to learn the entire Veda, the master said "10" years. The boy then asked, if I put double the effort. Then the master said "20" years. Fixing the eyes on a distant object lead to blindness in carrying out the work needed to reach there. So, the point is, I will continue to dream impractically but think and do practically.

My view of climbing up is the experience while climbing. It is so thrilling, so much rewarding and equally good as at the top. When I have my experience fulfilling, there is a meaning in reaching at the top. Reaching at the top only to see that there are so many things under your view is totally waste. While you climb a Himalayas, you can be serene my looking at the nature, my looking at rivers and exquisite decoration by Mother Nature. It does not make sense to close all the senses while climbing a hill. So, for me enjoying the climb is worthier than climb. Then, the climb will a assured by-product as the climb is born out of happiness and not because of the churn.

Anyways, I have decided to continue to buy books and stack them in my bed room and those books will certainly have a different label which is "Business". So, one day I may meet you in Davos. My personal voyage to Davos has started. Catch you in Davos :-)

My Inspiration

Who is my inspiration?

Who shall I consider world class reference point?

Who leads life being an example to others and yet thinks he has more to contribute to the country/humanity?

Who has relentless passion towards his vision and that vision being a noble cause?

Considering a person as role model and getting inspired is not done in a day. If you do it in a day, then probably you need to happy to say that you are "FAN" and not "DISCIPLE". The concept of taking someone as role model happens not in conscious mind but rather in sub-conscious mind. I tried to ask questions to bring out how one can take someone as inspiration. Though these questions make some logical sense, a role model is beyond these questions and beyond brain. A sequence of incidents or inputs fed to the brain and then travels to sub-conscious mind. From the sub-conscious mind, the role model enters directly to the heart, to the blood and to the cell.

We are having an opportunity to live with an excellent human being, a highly accomplished scientist, a great visionary, a most humble person, a patriotic son of Mother India, a life long teacher and what not.

Having born and brought up in down south village, this person achieved his dream and created a vision for the entire nation and young generation. He is role model to millions and millions of kids and youths - Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam.

You can find his website dedicated to nation building here

Publications

I remember that I wrote something very long during my final semester and that was way back in 2001 and after that I literally did not write anything other than typing some Java code. My writing was poor (and even now it is) but I feel that I have improved marginally and the credit goes to Linux for You. I had an opportunity to write for Linux for You and as usual, this is one of the activities I used to do regularly. Please find the list of articles published in LFY.


1. Synchronising Threads (Dec 2004)
2. System Calls - Invocation and Implementation (Mar 2005)
3. Design Patterns (Jun 2005)
4. Object Creation and Garbage Collection in Java (Aug 2005)
5. Introduction to Linux Processes (Sep 2005)
6. Java Stack Frames (Sep 2005)
7. Logging Using Log4J (Oct 2005)
8. Loading, Linking and Initialisation in Java (Nov 2005)
9. Linux Processes - Part 2 (Dec 2005)
10. Security - Know the Lingo (Mar 2006)
11. SNORTing Out Network Intrusion (Jul 2006)
12. Linux Scheduling - Part 1 (Jul 2006)
13. Linux Scheduling - Part 2 (Aug 2006)
14. Linux Scheduling - Part 3 (Sep 2006)
15. XML Data Binding with Castor XML - Part 1 (Sep 2006)
16. XML Data Binding with Castor XML - Part 2 (Oct 2006)
17. JVMTI - Part 1 (Nov 2006)
19. JVMTI - Part 2 (Dec 2006)
20. Interrupts in Linux (Jan 2007)
21. Profiling with Netbeans - Part 1 (May 2007)

You can find PDF copies of all the above articles here. Hope you find it useful.

Contact

Of late, I find it satisfying and enriching experience to talk to the students. I feel that my learning is vast my interacting with the students. I strongly believe that knowledge was given to be shared and by doing that both the giver and receiver learn a lot.

If you feel that I can add value to your education, please feel free to contact me through my email. As Gandhiji said, the villages are backbones of India and I too feel the same. The great people who live in villages and small towns of Tamilnadu deserve more attention. My first preference is to add value to first generation learners. Having said that, I am also open to talk to students who are in cities. Soon, we will be rolling out this as an initiative across Tamilnadu.

On either case, please do drop an email.

About Me

Lifelong student and always want to "Work In Progress".

Ceasing to learn is to ceasing to breathe - Anonymous.

Want to be lifelong student and share my knowledge with others. When I find time, I scribble a lot in my blog to express my thoughts and get my views validated. I can easily get inspired and I feel that I learned a lot by interacting with others.

Help, Help and More Help (Wanted)
While i continuously learn, i feel that it is very important for a human being to share his knowledge with others and i am more inclined to help out students community. I have given lectures on Linux, Network security, programming and software engineering to students. In case, if you feel that i can be of help to you, please drop me an email at grabyourfreedom@gmail.com

I m also maintaining a simple homepage to archive the events of my life which can be accessed through the following link.

Freedom

In case, if you feel that we will create mutual value, kindly sign in to any of the following subscriptions (i ll be even (more) happier if you share this with your friends in case if you find it useful).

Subscribe to this blog

  

Your Friend,
Lakshmi Narayanan N
Life Long Student

Freedom always comes with a cost

I was hoping to write on what it takes to live in Freedom. We need to understand the word "Freedom" analyzing its meaning. Until I read the book "Freedom" by OSHO, my vision on the word was a blurred one. I knew "Freedom" as liberation from something. For example, India got the freedom from British. This is the only meaning of the word I knew until I read the book. But OSHO, in his book, is explaining another perspective. He makes the meaning complete. Few of us may also know "freedom" to speech, "freedom" to write, "freedom to choose our own lives" and so on. Once again, many of do not understand that the meaning of "Freedom" (first and second) is always interconnected. "Freedom" is not complete if we do not exercise the freedom in both forms. I feel "freedom from" is the basic form of freedom and "freedom for" is an elevated form. While the "freedom from" is basic, non-slave, human form. "Freedom for" is visionary and humanity form. When we say we want freedom, we need to understand the hidden and real meaning. Freedom is self centric. It starts as a self centric process but it has to conclude for a bigger cause.

For the past few days, I am following articles in Dinamalar by one and only Dr Kalam. He is one of the very people who understand "Freedom". In India, we have freedom to speak, write and do. This is the basic form. But leveraging the basic form, Dr. Kalam is trying to transform India. He is aware that he has freedom to do so many things. But he uses all those freedom for vision - transforming India. Dr. Kalam is living example for applying freedom and achieving vision. He uses his freedom in both ways "freedom from" and "freedom for". "Freedom from" is freeing oneself from something which is childish. But "freedom for" is something magnificient and responsible. The people who exercise freedom in both forms have become role models to the world.

I would like to explain how freedom is broken by human. Some years back, there was an article by Mr Narayanamurthy, then CEO of Infosys. He was pointing out how the freedom was exploited. We are fred from salvary but we are exploiting the "free from slavary". This freedom is like coconut given to dog. He doesn't know what to do with the coconut but just roll on the floor.

When the "freedom" is given or when you are liberated from something, we have to understand that there is no supervisior and our wellness is in our hands. Now we cannot go and complain the people who ruled us. We got freedom and it is our responsibility to shape up and elevate our lives. We need to take care our needs and fulfil our ambitions. When we understand freedom in both forms, we will take only ten days (or ten hours) to become a transformed country.

The cost of the freedom is to exercise "freedom for" and be responsible.

Freedom to express, act and elevate

I am very happy to be part of the wonderful world at the current time where there is a revolution in information technology. Web 2.0 as a technology has helped countless people to connect with their closed ones and friends. The collaborative applications like blogs, CMS and social networking sites have made this world a global village and anyone from a corner of this world can communicate with the other one in no time. There are so many human beings using these platforms to render the service to others by just expressing their thoughts. For expressing the thoughts, blogs are ultimate tool. It is like a personal diary and if you are open, there will be a growth in your very being. 

I strongly believe that the thoughts make human. The quality of thoughts decides the quality of the action and the action projects itself as habits and then as the character. If one can fine tune the thought process and think in a right way, the life will be more enriching and as OSHO says, each one will understand the death is like a your wardrobe. You move from one life to another life. If you are one of the gives who do not believe in rebirths, the way you think decides where you will be. The thoughts we quite often think becomes an obsession that go to subconscious mind and manifest itself as actions. When your thoughts are negative, you obsessed with it and you start loving to be a criminal and start doing crimes. If you want to be a bird, the same thought goes to your subconscious and eventually you become a bird. Simple logic, yet many people do not appreciate it.

Having read few books and trying to reflect the ideas, I sincerely feel that I can transform myself by following and experience my life. By experiencing, one will be able to appreciate the simple things in life and understand that these simple things are life. There are so many big concepts and they are big because of their simplicity. It is us who make life complicated by egos, thoughts and hatred. In the current scenario, the world needs peace. The world cannot be in peace unless each components have peace. By components, I mean countries, states, city, localities, streets, houses, family members, ourself, organs and thoughts. If you see, the source of violence is our mind and thoughts. By carefully reviewing the thoughts, we can change this place and transform. Planet Earth can be made God's Heaven.

Any transformation starts with fundamental things. The transformation is a sequence of action which is done passionately, gracefully and with full enthusiasm. For transformation, the man is the primary object however if one seeks transformation, the focus should not be on the transformation. The focus or rather thoughts should be on experiencing which sometimes called as awareness. If a flower has to blossom, each parts of the plant has a big role to play. The plant never focuses on blossoming neither the bud. Because, the plant plays it part and the the bud reaches to a point which it was never before. And this is the transformation. Similarly, in order for us to blossom our thoughts has a big role to play. If we do not fix the thoughts and fix everything surrounding the thoughts, it is like treating symtoms, it is like treating the disease. But preventing the disease is a great thing than treating the disease.

How one can fix the thoughts using blogs? First of all, you cannot fix the thoughts. You cannot command your mind to think this and think that. But if we have the awareness, the sixth sense and apply it correctly one can differentiate thoughts and give importance to the ones that deserves attention and deserves nurturing. Once the thoughts are nurturing the actions are corrected, habits will be health leading to a good character. Through blogs, one can express ones thoughts and get it reviewed by like minded folks. The blog or a group of blogs form a commune which forms a self guiding and self correcting platform leading to harmony.

If we use the platforms and collaborate, we will win friends and naturally this forms a basis for two streets, two states, two countries and the entire world to become a single big commune. That is when the peace will be ever lasting one. It may look simple on verbatim and hard to follow. But it is worth giving a try (or may be million tries until it succeeds). Come and join, I will be waiting for you.

Have a Great Day.