Hinduism has failed Vishnu!

I was on a chat with my longtime friend Vishnu (Name changed) the other day. As a self-proclaimed communist, he was upset about one of my posts mocking the Kerala communist government.

The more I chat, I discovered that his communism is a reflection of his hatred towards Hinduism & Hindu Culture. Sadly he has a valid reason to be upset!

And believe me, he was a very religious guy when we first met!

Before explaining what happened, let me explain a bit about him. Vishnu is a very bright & hard working guy. He is an alumnus of a top Indian tech school and passed out of campus with a 7 digit salary. He even had a long-running relationship, and everything was perfect in his life.

His life became anything but perfect when he decided to take his relationship to the next level!

He belongs to the Ezhava community, she belongs to the Nair community and her parents were dead set against their marriage! It took them a couple of years to convince her parents.

And then the next blow struck, they have some major issue in their astrology match, and both their parents were against the marriage. His perfect life came down crashing just because of the religion that he believed in!

Slowly he drifted into ideologies that comforted him!

I believe he has valid reasons to hate Hinduism. Culture & society should be in place to make life easier. They should solve problems than create new ones.

I believe Hinduism has failed Vishnu! There could be many more Vishnu's among us who was failed by their own believes.

If I had the power and influence, cast & credulous beliefs are what I would fight against.

PS: Apparently what he believed to be communism turned out to be socialism!

There is no magic in this world!

The more I look around, the more I feel that THERE IS NO MAGIC in this world!

It's just logic - Logic that's known or unknown! 

You just need to keep doing your karma, and IF it's the right time for THAT karma, success will come to you.

Let's assume your definition of success is a sweet mango!

• If you throw a stone at the mango when it's ripe and if your aim is right, you get the sweet fruit - That's wisdom & skill.
• If you throw a stone at the mango when it's green and if your aim is right, you get a sour fruit - That's ignorance & skill.
• If you are not able to hit the mango - You need to sharpen your skills. Try again.
• If you just pray and expect to get mangoes year-round - That's religion.

Religions are not helping!

The more I look around... It feels like religions are on the decline. And PROBABLY, that's not because religions are bad. But because most of them are NOT actually HELPING the majority of their followers!!!
They just make you feel blessed on a sunny day!

As a Hindu, I would like to present my thoughts from the perspective of Hinduism.

As per Hindu teachings, there are 4 ashramas (Stages of life) - Brahmacharya, Grihastha, Vanaprastha & Sanyasa. I don't know about the past, but today how is Hinduism helping the first 3!? It feels like today's Hinduism was created by sanyasis for sanyasis!
On the brighter side,  probably that might be the reason yogis like Sri M & Gurudeva Robert Hansen are coming into Sanatana dharma. But what about the rest!? How is Hinduism helping the remaining in reaching their goals?

First, let's consider Brahmacharya (Till 24) - A bachelor, a student.
- How can a student succeed when he/she believes that pujas and prayers are the solutions to their problems
- How can he/she advance in life if he/she always tries to play safe and not take risks?
- How can they face bad phases of life, when they are taught that only good stuff happens to good people.
- How can they even take care of themselves when they are taught that God would take care of them, and things are going to be all good at the end!

Then, Grihastha (24 - 48) - Someone trying to get married, or someone who is married.
- When all our scriptures speak about love, why do we have a stigma against it!? Why do we ascertain that a complete stranger will be his/her perfect partner in life!?
- The pseudoscience of astrology is another evil, why is it even a thing? As if we aren't fed up with the hurdles in finding a partner!
- What is our religion doing to help people who have a troubled relationship? Or any personal trouble for that matter?
- What about sex education etc!? How did we even reach here when we had Kamasutra millenniums back!?

Vanaprastha (48 - 72) - Someone trying to retire
- What are we doing to support those who have failed in their life? People who have nowhere to go, or no way to survive!
- Why do the bride's parents have to take all expenses of a marriage? And why do they have to empty their life's earnings for it? And what are we doing to prevent the evil of dowry?

The helplessness extends till Vanaprastha, beyond which most are fed up with this materialistic world, and just yearn for shanti!
Yes being materialistic is the issue, but how many want to be a sadhu in life?

In a world where everybody wants to be young and adventurous, how can a way of life for the old and enlightened be helpful?
Yes, it teaches everyone to live a life of Dharma, a life of righteousness, morals & duties. But in a world where the corrupt & evil are more successful, how would dharma prevail!

PS: I am shocked to see the suicides and deaths in the news lately and I feel one of the issues is the belief system that's failing its own people.

How To : Uninstalling BlueStacks from Mac

Follow these steps from your terminal to uninstall BlueStacks:

• 1. Go to ~/Library/
• 2. Find Bluestack App Player folder
• 3a. From there cd to Uninstall.app/Contents/MacOS, and just execute sudo sh Uninstall
• 3b. if not found check in Uninstall/Clear BlueStacks User Data.app/Contents/MacOS, and execute 
  ./uHD-ClearUserData 
• 4. BlueStacks might show some confirmation boxes and un-install itself.
• 5. ~/Library/BlueStacks App Player folder must be empty, feel free to delete the same to complete.

Hello World

Brian Wilson Kernighan

My first post started with the line "Hello World"! That line is there for a reason, a reason based on an old tradition, a tradition started by the legendary Brian Wilson Kernighan. 

For those who don't know Brian Kernighan, he is a Canadian computer scientist who worked at Bell Laboratories and contributed to the development of Unix, AWK & AMPL. It is he who came up with the word Unix. He is also famous as co-author of the first book on C programming language. His contributions as an author to computer programming, surpasses every other computer legends!
He is our Guru!

So what is the tradition that am talking about?
Printing the string "Hello World", is the, first program written by almost every programmers. Nearly all programming books start with hello world, and its the same with almost all teachers! Like iPod for any mp3 player, now a days hello world denotes any introductory program or script!
Am sure that by now, few of you might be wondering, why Hello World. And how did Kerninghan start this tradition!!

Four decades back, in 1972, while writing A Tutorial Introduction to the Language B, he scripted the following statements to explain external variables.

main( ) {
 extrn a, b, c;
 putchar(a); putchar(b); putchar(c); putchar('!*n');
}
a 'hell';
b 'o, w';
c 'orld';

Later in 1974, while writing an internal memorandum at Bell Labs for C programming, he added the following C version.

main()
{
  printf("hello, world");
}

The tradition took birth by its inclusion in on of the most influential books in computer science, The C Programming Language. From then, till now, hello world is a programmer's starting point, the introductory program.
It feels awesome to realize that after decades, such a simple program can influence the way we start programming, and above all, a humble computer scientist can guide us in our first steps of a never-ending saga!

And last but never the least, I would like to thank Brian Kernighan for teaching us, how to program!

Why Auxiliary Memory

Hello World!
This is my first blog post!!!
Yaa I know, am a little bit more late to start blogging; but as they say, "Better late than never...".

Ok, how many of you know what an Auxiliary Memory is!!??...
Am not expecting the computer guys to raise hands!!, by default all of you are supposed to know what it is. The question is for others, people who use computer for googling, for mailing, for facebook, for music and for those viral videos and random blogs like this...

What do you think the Auxiliary Memory is?

Am surprised that I can't expect most of you to know what it is even after googling. Why? Because we don't have much references available over the internet!!!! Am like, how is that possible!!?
Its weird and at the same time cool to know that even today, 14th of Feb 2013, Wikipedia is not having a dedicated article on Auxiliary Memory!!... 

Its weird, because Wikipedia without auxiliary memory, is like a dictionary without the word, paper!!..
And it feels cool, because now, am gona do that!... Click here to link to my wiki article. Its small and kind of precise, please add to it if you can spare some time.

Yaa, so as I had told in the article, auxiliary memories are mediums like USB drives, Hard Disks or CD-ROMs in which you store data for ever. Most of them can be shared and are non-volatile and economic. 

Now coming back to the subject, why is this blog named Auxiliary Memory? Its because this is might be my auxiliary memory. The mear intention behind this blog is to record & share stuffs that went through me. It would contain posts about my passions and profession, that includes photography, cycling, movies, travel, game designing, programming and many other things...

You can also catch me at sreenaths.com.

Thanks for being on my blog.

-Sreenath