To us, here and now, it appears thus

The phenomenal growth that has occurred in the last few years in India can be attributed to two major factors. One the outsourcing boom in India, which brings in a tremendous amount of foreign exchange to our country. And secondly the improved investor confidence in the stock market which has also led to FII investing in the Indian stock market. But looking a bit behind the second reason, the new economy which is primarily dependent on the outsourcing boom, is the reason why there is improved investor confidence. There is higher spending power, and the new day knowledge worker is more cognizant of other forms of investments like stocks and mutual funds.

Though, all this is a reason to rejoice and revel in the prosperity that our new economy has bought us, we must for a moment pause and think about whether is it really sustainable? And is it as good as it seems? As I see it, the answer sadly is no. Unfortunately "India shining" applies only to a small section of the Indian social diaspora. Which is mostly dependent on the powerful outsourcing boom. Bluntly put, the new Indian middle class, is fundamentally not dependent on Indian markets for its lively hood.

This is such a skewed situation. With a more than 16% of world population residing in India, Indian markets are huge. Mind bogglingly so, yet they are mostly untapped. Purchasing power for major parts of the society has not improved in spite of the considerable increase in the outsourcing boom (because, mostly they are not correlated). The Indian consumer still is less powerful than an average western consumer that most of the outsourcing boom caters too. Our local markets are weaker and hence does not have enough power to drive capital asset appreciation. The new information economy is dependent on a weak rupee to be profitable. The local market has been neglected by the government at the cost of promoting the "new economy". We haven't made more Indians richer, we have just made a few Indians more richer.

So, what's wrong with that you may ask? Well, sustaining the new economy means keeping the rupee weak, and decreasing the purchasing power for a majority of the Indians. This means, our markets (not the stock market) but local Indian markets are weaker than local western markets and hence keeping a lot of Indians poor. In the worst case it might lead to violent revolutions and sometimes duct-tape solutions which are promoted with revolution like whats happening with the people's war group in many parts of the country. And keeping a majority of Indians poor for the benifit of making a few indians richer is never a good idea.

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas

“I contend that we are both atheists. I simply believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

- Stephen Roberts

The thing that's been ringing in my mind recently is that garbage collection is an inherently random process. Its not just garbage collection - memory allocation and memory access patterns can also be modelled as random process. And I also have a very strong hunch they are all related. I wish I could test all this with some real data, but as such both my virtual machine and the compiler for my VM is still incomplete. And there are no real programs yet to actually test my theory on. But I am pretty much confident that garbage collection can be modelled as a Random Process and it would give us some real insights into improving them.

In fact I have the following theory. The lifetime of an object on a gc'd heap is not just a function of its past life time (as in generational gc) but also a function of the amount of information it contains (one rough measure of information it contains would be the size of the object itself). If I had an applicable and verifiable model, it would really do the world so much good with gc'd languages being in fashion (and not seeming to go out of fashion anytime soon).

Also I guess the design of a virtual machine would affect the way garbage collection takes place, but only in terms of the number of access (ie, quantitatively rather than qualitatively). What would really matter would be the memory allocation/garbage collection algorithm. Also, I am very interested in the role finalisation plays with garbage collection. (If you have ever tried doing a gc, finalisation is a big pain in the a**).

But unfortuantely,these are just theories, and every scientific theory should be tested on the solid ground of experimentation and good experimentation requires good data. Since my final year project was just a VM lacking any angle, I guess I've finally got my angle. So I've decided to post here regarding the status of whats happening whenever I've some results or atleast something interesting in this regard. So watch this space!.

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas.

When you have been regularly exposed to bad teaching its entirely
possible to miss something that deserves a big open mouthed “wow”, pass
without even something as small as an acknowledgment. This almost
happened to me.

I have been learning abstract algebra these days out of pure boredom
and I am fascinated doing every minute of it. Especially with basic
group theory. Anyone who has learned group theory under Anna University
would consider it extremely boring and a mind-numbing subject better
left to mathematicians (one good example of such a subject is measure
theory). Full of definitions and proofs of what seem to be utterly
useless concepts, completely devoid of any examples. In other words, dry.

There was absolutely no way one would even be able to concentrate
and sleep, let alone work your way through group theory. But that never
deterred me in trying to learn it then. That without doubt, was my most
boring and utterly confused learning excursion. I was exposed to
concepts out of the blue without any idea of where or how they come
about and where they would ever be used.

In particular was the concept of co-sets. The way I was introduced
to them, it seemed as if the only purpose of defining what a co-set
entirely was to prove that order of a subgroup divides the order of the
finite group (Lagrange’s theorem). And the proof was tedious and
equally mind numbing. But when I came across the second time, the proof
was the definition of elegance itself. When I realised that it was
actually the much feared Lagrange’s theorem it really blew me off! The
biggest mental ograsm that I’ve had in sometime! This definitely
deserves a big “WOW”.

And for the benefit of my more mathematically inclined readers, here is an abridged version of the proof.

Let G be a group and H any subgroup of G. Then, lets define the
relation “a is congruent to b mod H” for any two elements a and b in G
whenever ab’ (note : b’ is the inverse of b in G) is in H. It is
obvious for anyone to see that the above relation is an equivalence
relation, and hence would divide the the group G into k distinct
equivalence classes. Now consider the set Ha, which is the set of all
elements obtained by multiplying the elements of H with a, i.e Ha = { x
| x = ha, for all h in H }. We can use the definition of Ha to get to a very interesting fact.

x = ha is true for any x in Ha, multiplying by a’ on both sides we
see that xa’ is in H. Thus Ha contains only elements which are
congruent to a mod H. In fact, Ha contains all elements in G which are
congruent to a mod H, i.e, Ha = [a]. now n(Ha) + n(Hb) +…. = o(G) if
G is finite. Since for any a in G, n(Ha) = o(H) and there are totally k
equivalence classes k * o(H) = o(G). That is the much famed Lagrange’s
theorem. One small definition from basic set-theory and it simplifies
the whole proof of an amazing theorem! Does this deserve a wow or what!

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas.

If you think this is another filmy post denouncing the Oscars and why crash (trash??) shouldn’t have won, well, I am sorry to disappoint you. This is more about the sad state of Indian politics and its most favorite whore, the Indian main stream media. And this is how the story goes…

Once upon a time, not long ago, when the most brightest minds in bollywood decided that they had enough of just “acting” to help people in films and that they should take up posts in the parliament, so they can start to learn to act in real life as well. So, Mrs. Jaya Bachan was appointed to the Rajya Sabha. (If you are English, its something like the house of lords, and if you are American, you probably don’t care).

The congress party candidate Madan Mohan who lost the RS election to Jaya Bachan, moved a petition to the election commission regarding a completely mindless non-issue of her holding an office of profit of the Uttar Pradesh state film development corporation. (seriously how many films from UP have you ever seen?). And the election commission, duly playing its part of the bitch to those in power, eventually got her disqualified from the Rajya Sabha.

Smart, one would think, in fact, if it hadn’t blown up on his face, you could have commended him for being the Chanakya of modern times. But it turns out that this utterly non-important issue had taken gigantic proportions when it blew right back at his face, with more than what he expected. It turns out that not only is Mrs.Bachan guilty of holding an office of profit, but more than half of the parliament,cutting across party lines, both houses included, are guilty of the same charge. The rest are too busy juggling between criminal cases of murder, fraud, rape and taking bribes for discussing the intricate points of catch-22 in the parliament.

The NDA which is positively culpable for gerrymandering, wears the nun’s clothes to hide the whore that it really is and goes ahead targeting Mrs. Sonia Gandhi (don’t get mixed up with the name, she has nothing to do with Mahatma Gandhi, neither via family nor via principles). All this commotion leads to the parliament getting adjourned sine die. Why? the ruling congress government wants to protect “Madame Sonia-ji”, from disqualification. With NDA blowing the whistle and acting out their part eventually leads to “Madame Sonai-ji” resigning the post of both MP and that of the chairman of NAC (the alleged office of profit).

For the past four days, four fucking days, this crap is what that’s been filling up the air waves. Every one of the “news” channels is all over this complete non-issue, some touting “sonia-ji’s” sacrifice and others about NDA’s totally ass-faced attempt back firing. Lets give this whole incident some thought for a moment shall we?

For all those who call it taking the high moral ground, Since when is resigning to save an embarrassing disqualification, after an almost shameless attempt to promulgate an ordinance and adjourning the fundamental democratic institution of the country indefinitely, considered as taking the high moral ground?

Any man with an inch of sense would see into the fact that Sonia for what she really is, an excellent politician. And the congress after years of failing has got its PR act together. This is not about the people, this not about the country, this is not even about morality. Its simply an excellent PR exercise by the congress. Will do congress great good for it in the polls. (And to be even more critical, its is a costly and totally unnecessary re-election in Rae Bareli!).

And lets consider the opposition, whose members are pretty much guilty of the same charge, if not even more. A party which openly encourages communal politics and run by Mr.Advani, who preaches (praises?) secularism in Pakistan, while getting ready to go on “yatras” at home. They are not even worthy of being allowed into the parliament house. A classic case of “pot calling the kettle black!”.

Now, lets come the the third ingredient in this concoction, the media. All the news channels including DD news is all about “Sonia-ji” resigning, whats happening at the Gandhi residence, whats the NDA now spewing out? Every single minute, every god-damn news channel, all the time. Every other news story has been sidelined with journalists rushing to check out whats happening! Does all that our “main-stream” media really care about is scoop value?

Lets for heaven’s sake stop to think for a moment. None of the entire fiasco lasting the past week had anything do with important issues still plaguing our country. Things like an ailing education system, the Kashmir issue, corruption and illiteracy. An unnecessary re-election, a crime against democracy in adjourning the parliament sine die, a big uproar in every fucking news channel out there and yet none of it had anything to do with national interests or the country. It was all because of a bloody sore loser! It was all god-damned fucking politics! A clear recession for our country on various grounds and not one politician had the balls to come up and say “Screw this! I am more concerned about the people.”

Its a pitiful state that our nation today is in. For having a billion people, we are completely unable to find even a few good leaders. Its about time we all actually started reflecting about this.
Signing Off
Vishnu Vyas